Grave Politics: Remembering the Freedman’s Village at Arlington National Cemetery

Contemporary visitors to Arlington National Cemetery confront a complex terrain of nationalism, memory, and mourning punctuated by the central presence of an antebellum plantation house reflecting the cemetery’s Civil War origins. Few realize that before the federal government began carving Union graves out of the land surrounding Robert E. Lee’s Arlington House in the summer of 1864, the War Department made the Confederate general’s Virginia plantation the site of its first “model” community for the formerly enslaved, called the Freedman’s Village. Established in May 1863 through the joint efforts of the federal government and the American Missionary Association, the camp was intended to provide free people, many of whom had been enslaved on the Custis-Lee plantation, with the structure, surveillance, and opportunities for agricultural labor that officials and the AMA believed necessary to engender industry, responsibility, and self-sufficiency. From the outset, residents of the community struggled with reformers, the Army, and later the Freedmen’s Bureau, over expectations for and definitions of black freedom.1868 witnessed the first of many official attempts to disband the settlement, which were resisted successfully by residents until the late nineteenth century. The Freedman’s Village was finally closed in 1900 and the land turned over for the expansion of the national cemetery. Positing Arlington as a unique site for considering Reconstruction in American popular memory, this paper examines the range of 20th and 21st century efforts to commemorate, celebrate, and silence the experiences of the black people who shaped, worked, and lived there in slavery and in freedom.