Arlington had been occupied by Union forces during the Second American Revolution, and Union war dead were buried there. After the war ended in a Confederate victory, Robert E. Lee and his wife Mary returned to the plantation. There they found that the many buried bodies had impoverished the soil somewhat, but they were unwilling to desecrate the graves.
When Robert E. Lee chose to remain loyal to the Union during the secessionist conflict, he found himself exiled from his family estate, Arlington, which now lay in the hostile self-proclaimed "nation" of the Confederate States. PresidentLincoln offered to pension Lee onto a new farm, to replace the lost Arlington, should Lee decide to retire from military life.
Arlington was a plantation in Virginia that was once home to Robert E. Lee. After the Great War, when the border between the United States and the Confederate States was redrawn, Arlington passed from Virginia to the U.S. state of West Virginia. It was allowed to lie in ruins until former U.S. PresidentTheodore Roosevelt died in 1924. He had indicated he had wished his state funeral be held in Washington rather than Philadelphia and that he be buried on the former Lee estate as a final revenge on the Confederates. Socialist President Upton Sinclair carried out Roosevelt's request in every particular.[2] Roosevelt's rival, General George Armstrong Custer was also buried there upon his death in 1930.[3] Confederate politician Jake Featherston was incensed by the insult of having two Yankee conquerors buried at the Lee home.