The hallowed ground known today as Arlington National Cemetery bears witness to those who paid the ultimate sacrifice to protect the nation’s ideals of freedom and justice for all. But another history lies beneath the landscape—an African American freedom struggle that has been erased from the landscape. Before the Civil War, enslaved African Americans labored, escaped, raised families, and died at Arlington on a plantation founded by George Washington Parke Custis and inherited by the wife of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. After the Union army confiscated the Lee estate, Freedman’s Village was established on the site, offering refuge to a vibrant community of thousands of newly emancipated African Americans. In creating a neighborhood with homes, schools, businesses, and networks with free Blacks in the nation’s capital and beyond, Arlington’s freedpeople played a consequential—if largely forgotten—role in advancing African American liberty and equality through the rest of the nineteenth century. 

This deeply researched and accessibly written story brings Arlington’s African American past to vivid life. Drawing on extensive historical research conducted at Arlington House and on the national cemetery grounds, William A. Blair offers a definitive account of individuals and families on an inspiring journey from slavery to freedom.

William A. Blair is Walter L. and Helen P. Ferree professor emeritus of history at Penn State University.