Mary Custis Lee

Mary Custis Lee inherited Arlington, married Robert E. Lee, and lost the estate to the United States government, which buried its war dead in her garden. She was the only surviving child of George Washington Parke Custis, Martha Washington's grandson, raised at Arlington House among Washington relics that her father collected and displayed as a kind of private museum. She married Lee, a distant cousin, in 1831. Her father's will freed the estate's enslaved people within five years of his death and left legacies charged on the property; Lee, as executor, kept them enslaved for the full five years and worked them hard enough to produce complaints and at least one escape attempt. Mary and her daughters had for years taught some of them to read, which was against Virginia law. When the war came the family left Arlington in May 1861 and Union troops occupied it the next day, because it looks down on Washington. The government then levied a property tax requiring payment in person by the owner, which she could not do, and sold the estate to itself in 1864; the quartermaster general Montgomery Meigs, who loathed Lee, began burying the dead beside the house specifically so that the family could never return to live there. She was crippled by arthritis for the last decades of her life and used a wheelchair. She visited Arlington once, in 1873, and did not get out of the carriage; she died two months later. Her son sued and won compensation in 1882.

• Lived: 1807 CE – 1873 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: other