num_pages: 368
description:  An intimate behind-the-scenes chronicle of Americas most sacred ground. Along Eisenhower Drive as far as the eye could see the grave markers formed into bone-white brigades climbed from the flats of the Potomac River and scattered over the green Virginia hills in perfect order. They reached Arlingtons highest point where they encircled an old cream-colored mansion with thick columns and a commanding view of the cemetery the river and the city beyond. The mansions flag just lowered to half-staff signaled that it was time to start another day of funerals which would add more than twenty new conscripts to Arlingtons army of the dead. So does Robert Poole describe a day like so many others in the long and storied history of Arlington National Cemetery. Created towards the end of our greatest national crucible the Civil War its storyas revealed in On Hallowed Groundreflects much of Americas own over the past century and a half. The mansion at its heart and the rolling land on which it sits had been the family plantation of Robert E. Lee before he joined the Confederacy; strategic to the defense of Washington it became a Union headquarters a haven for freedmen and a burial ground for indigent soldiers before Secretary of War Edwin Stanton made it the latest in the newly established national cemetery system. It would become our nations most honored resting place. No other country makes the effort the United States does to recover and pay tribute to its war deadan effort Poole reveals in poignant details from the aftermaths of the Civil War Spanish-American War World Wars I and II Korea Vietnam and the conflicts in the Gulf and Afghanistan today. Every tombstone at Arlington tells a story: from Private William Christman the first soldier buried at Arlington on May 13 1864 to Union General Montgomery Meigs whose idea Arlington was; from Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge the first casualty of powered flight to Audie Murphy Americas most decorated soldier; from the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier so lovingly tended today to John F. Kennedys eternal flame; from scientists and slaves to jurists and generals and tens of thousands of ordinary citizen-warriors among the more than 300000 interred on Arlingtons 624 acres. Their sagas and the rites and rituals that have evolved at Arlingtonthe horse-drawn caissons marble headstones playing of taps and rifle salutesspeak to us all. 
language: English
title: On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery
publisher: Walker Books