The Ground Beneath the Glory - June 15, 1865

On June 15, 1864, Montgomery Meigs, a general who despised Robert E. Lee as a traitor, signed the order creating Arlington National Cemetery on the Lee family’s seized estate. But hidden inside this founding act was a second story: Freedman’s Village, a community of three thousand freed Black Americans who built homes, churches, and schools on that same ground and were later bulldozed to make room for more graves. America’s most sacred national site began as a personal vendetta, on constitutionally contested land, over an erased community most visitors have never heard of. Every headstone at Arlington rests on a more complicated foundation than the official history admits.