Arlington Cemetery Essay

Arlington National Cemetery is located in Arlington, Virginia. Arlington is a United States military cemetery. It’s the resting place of over 300,000 veterans from every American conflict. It dates back to the Revolutionary War all the way to Iraq and Afghanistan. The cemetery was founded in 1866, there is no official founder although,the cemetery was built on the property of George Washington Parke Custis’s’ mansion .Custis was the adopted son of the president George Washington. Custis was married to a woman named Mary Lee Fitzhugh.They had one child; her name was Mary Anna Randolph Custis. Mary Anna married Robert E. Lee. After Custis & his wife died, they passed the property onto Mary Anna. They lived there until Virginia seceded

In 1898, former confederates tried to find and mark which graves were confederacy. In 1900, the legislation devoted funds to rebury over 250 confederate soldiers who were already buried in Arlington and some from the National Soldiers Home Cemetery. The confederates acquired their own section of Arlington. The legislation mandated that the confederates have the proper headstones. The headstones that were picked were similar to the Union ones but they had a pointed top to differentiate the Union from the Confederacy. The pointed headstone became the, as you could say “regulation” for the confederate

It was the first memorial at Arlington dedicated to unknown soldiers. It was dedicated in 1866 and the sarcophagus sits on top the burial vault containing the remains of 2,111 unknown soldiers retrieved from Bull Run and the road to Rappahannock. The assumption is that the vault contains the remains of both Union and Confederate soldiers. Arlington is the resting place for more than 360 recipients of the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military decoration, given for “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of