william chrisman was buried in may, 1864. arlington cemetery was not established until a month later, june of 1864. he was officially designated a national cemetery and began to fill up very, very quickly. this part of the cemetery we are in, seven, was called the lower cemetery. as you can seecomments at the edge of arlington. there's a road to just outside the cemetery here. you can see the lee mansion from this location and that's the way the officers who were living and working in the lee mansion during the war wanted it. they didn't want to see the burials coming in. they didn't want to be living in a graveyard, working in a graveyard. they wanted the screens out of sight and out of mind. the quartermaster general, brigadier general montgomery makes did not like that idea. as a matter of fact, he did not have much use for robert e. lee. is there together in the union army. meigs considerably a traitor and thought he should be hanged for his desertion of the union army and his leadership of the army of northern virginia.

the very first of those burials was a private, 67 pennsylvania infantry named william chrisman.as a farmer. he was from a poor family. and he came to serve in the union army. unfortunate he ended up in a hospital in washington. he got a case of german measles, which killed many, many service members on both sides of the war. he developed peritonitis from his measles infection. and he died in a washington hospital. was brought across the potomac river here to arlington as the first military burial. things were so desperate at that time in the civil war, there were so many people dying, that there wasn't much time for ceremony or ritual at arlington. they would bring people over for burial day after day after day. and they went into the ground as william christman did with no flags, flying, no bugles playing. all quite often not a chaplain to give him a sendoff. so basically we're just trying to keep up with the carnage from the civil war. when arlington began. during the war, things were so desperate that there wasn't any time for a tombstone. they had headboards. they were made