Interesting fact I didn’t know but should have: Robert E Lee (and all Confederate soldiers) lost his rights to a US citizenship. He appealed for a pardon, but it was rejected. President Ford offered a presidential pardon years after Lee’s death.
Info: Arlington House, constructed between 1808 and 1818, was the nation’s first memorial to George Washington. In 1778, John Parke Custis, the son of Martha Washington and her first husband Daniel Parke Custis, purchased 1,100 acres of land in northern Virginia, on rolling hills overlooking Washington, D.C. In 1802, their son George Washington Parke Custis (the first president’s step-grandson) inherited the property, then known as Mount Washington. He lived there with his wife.
The Custis’s only child, Mary Anna Randolph Custis, married her childhood friend and distant cousin, Robert E. Lee, in June 1831. A West Point graduate and the son of a three-term Virginia governor, Robert E. Lee commanded the Confederate Army during the Civil War. The Lees inherited the Custis estate in 1857 — including 196 enslaved persons, who lived and worked on the plantation.
After Virginia seceded from the United States on May 24, 1861, the Lees left Arlington House, never to return.
