Existing comment:
A Military Asylum: 1851 - Civil War:
The Soldiers' Home came into being only after decades of frustrated urging by the military, countered by congressional reluctance to fund services for disabled veterans. It reflected the efforts -- remarkable in retrospect -- of three men.
Kentucky-born Robert Anderson, a veteran of the Black Hawk War, the son of a Revolutionary War veteran, and later commander of Fort Sumter at the outbreak of the Civil War, passionately called for a "soldiers' retreat" throughout the 1840s. General Winfield Scott, hero of the Mexican War of 1846-1848, challenged the War Department and Congress by depositing $100,000 of the tribute he had exacted from Mexico City into an account "to the credit of the Army Asylum." But it was the Democratic senator from Mississippi, Jefferson Davis -- later the president of the Confederacy -- who introduced the bill that established the long-awaited "Military Asylum" on March 3, 1851.
Originally intended as a final resting place for residents of the Soldiers' Home, the cemetery became a temporary graveyard for Civil War soldiers fallen in nearby battles. More than 5,000 men were interred between 1861 and 1864, when Robert E. Lee's Arlington farm was established as a new, larger national cemetery.
The earliest inmates, as residents were known until 1859, when the "asylum" officially became the Soldiers' Home, were required to wear uniforms and work for their keep -- which prompted some to drink or run away. Despite calls to close the home in 1864, it grew dramatically after the Civil War.
For $58,111, Congress purchased some 200 acres and a country cottage from the banker George W. Riggs Jr. A larger main hall, later known as the Scott Hall and now as the Sherman Building, was built to house 250 enlisted veterans, along with several other residences to house officers who ran the home. |