On Hallowed Ground by Robert M Poole

food and supplies, he risked an offensive into Pennsylvania that summer, when both armies squared off near the village of Gettysburg in July. As many as 50,000 Union and Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured in three days of fighting, with Rebels suffering almost 60 percent of the losses. Lee barely escaped across the Potomac River with his reduced and mangled army. 54 After the bloodbath of Gettysburg, the Union would gain the upper hand. Robert E. Lee, who had begun to feel the twinges of a heart condition that would eventually kill him, no longer seemed invincible. On his long retreat from Gettysburg, he got the news that his son Rooney, a Confederate cavalry officer, had been captured and jailed by Union forces. And Lee would soon be facing a new Union commander—Gen. Ulysses S. Grant—who was not afraid of him.
    Meanwhile, blacks continued streaming into Washington, where about a thousand had been settled in a squalid freedmen’s camp within sight of the Capitol. The congested neighborhood
of shacks and tiny row houses became a breeding ground for disease and disappointment, hardly the paradise the refugees had
dreamed of finding along the Potomac. Although military officials and the newly formed Freedman’s Relief Association provided
food, shelter, clothing—and even schooling—for some of the former slaves, no agency could keep pace with the torrent of new
arrivals.
    Poor sanitation and crowded conditions led to an outbreak of typhoid fever in Duff Green’s Row, a squalid street situated
near the site of today’s Supreme Court building. Infected refugees were placed in quarantine there, while those who showed
no sign of sickness were removed to an army camp at Twelfth and O streets, on the northern edge of the city, which became
a new freedmen’s camp. It was described as a mud hole, with one end of the site situated in a former brickyard, the other
in an old cemetery. With barracks crowded, some of the refugees had to make do with tents. The camp’s water, drawn from wells
that were drying up, triggered a massive outbreak of dysentery. 55
    The refugee population reached an estimated ten thousand by the spring of 1863. Freedmen improvised as best they could. Some
moved into the former slave pens in Alexandria. Others built shanties from scrap lumber and tarpaper on Capitol Hill. A rickety
line of huts, which came to be known as Murder Bay, appeared along the fetid Washington Canal. Outsiders were shocked by what they found in such neighborhoods.
    “I have just visited the freemen in their cabins,” said one visitor. “Their sufferings are most heart rending. The weather
is cold; they have little or no wood. Snow covers the ground; and they have a scanty supply of rags called clothes … Government
gives them very, Very small allowance of soup. Many will die.” 56
    Many did. Most of the black refugees had little resistance to scarlet fever, smallpox, and whooping cough. Infants and children
were especially susceptible. Illness claimed at least five lives each day among Washington’s black refugees—probably many more. 57 “Exactly how many, no record ever told,” wrote historian Constance McLaughlin Green. 58
    After medical authorities expressed concern over conditions in refugee camps, Lt. Col. Elias M. Greene, chief of the quartermaster’s
    Washington Department, was called to investigate. In May 1863, he proposed a fix that would bolster the war effort, improve living conditions
for former slaves, and enlarge the Union presence at Arlington, already a bustling Federal encampment.
    Without mentioning Robert E. Lee by name, Greene urged the War Department to establish a new freedmen’s camp on those lands
south of the Potomac that had “been abandoned by rebel owners and are now lying idle.” He meant Arlington, of course, and
its rich bottomlands. The unused outbuildings and slave quarters on the Lee property, Greene wrote, could easily accommodate
new residents