Before it became the National Cemetery, Arlington had been the private plantation of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. On our first visit, my mother explained that Lee’s estate had become the National Cemetery after the Battle of Bull Run, when Stonewall Jackson had whipped an overconfident Union Army just south of Hickory Hill. When General McClellan’s brigadier asked Lincoln where to bury the Union dead, the angry president answered, “Bury them at Lee’s feet.” Exactly two weeks before his death, Jack had visited the site for Veterans Day and remarked, as he stood at Lee’s mansion
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