Replies

[woodpusher] This was not a case of making reparations, compensating the owner for a loss... A few months after obtaining clear title, sale of the property was made to the United States government.
[BroJoeK] Sounds like reparations to me.

In the Circuit Court, the case was captioned, "George W. P. C. Lee v. Frederick Kaufman, R.P. Strong, and Others, In ejectment."

"GEORGE W. P. C. LEE
v.
FREDERICK KAUFMAN, R. P. STRONG, AND OTHERS.
"And now comes the Attorney-General of the United States and suggests to the court and gives it to understand and be informed (appearing only for the purpose of this motion) that the property in controversy in this suit has been for more than ten years and now is held, occupied, and possessed by the United States, through its officers and agents, charged in behalf of the government of the United States with the control of the property, and who are in the actual possession thereof, as public property of the United States, for public uses, in the exercise of their sovereign and constitutional powers, as a military station, and as a national cemetery established for the burial of deceased soldiers and sailors, and known and designated as the 'Arlington Cemetery,' and for the uses and purposes set forth in the certificate of sale, a copy of which as stated and prepared by the plaintiff, and which is a true copy thereof, is annexed hereto and filed herewith, under claim of title as appears by the said certificate of sale, and which was executed, delivered, and recorded as therein appears.
"Wherefore, without submitting the rights of the government of the United States to the jurisdiction of the court, but respectfully insisting that the court has no jurisdiction of the subject in controversy, he moves that the declaration in said suit be set aside, and all the proceedings be stayed and dismissed, and for such other order as may be proper in the premises.
"CHAS. DEVENS,
"Att'y-Gen'l U S,."

Had you availed yourself of the opportunity to read the Supreme Court opinion in United States v. George Washington Custis Lee, you would know that you are arguing that the United States Government, in the interest of making war restitution, surrendered to the son of Robert E. Lee, the title to what was then, and is now, Arlington National Cemetery.

United States v. Lee, 106 U.S. 196, 198 (1882)

The action was originally commenced in the Circuit Court for the county of Alexandria, in the State of Virginia, by George W. P. C. Lee, against Kaufman and Strong and a great number of others, to recover possession of a parcel of land of about eleven hundred acres, known as the Arlington estate. It was in the form prescribed by the statutes of Virginia, under which the pleadings are in the names of the real parties, plaintiff and defendant.
As soon as the declaration was filed the case was, by writ of certiorari, removed into the Circuit Court of the United States, where all the subsequent proceedings took place. It was tried by a jury, and during its progress an order was made at the request of the plaintiff dismissing the suit as to all of the defendants except Kaufman and Strong. Against each of these a judgment was rendered for separate parcels of the land in controversy; namely, against Kaufman for about two hundred acres of it, constituting the National Cemetery and included within its walls, and against Strong for the remainder of the tract, except seventeen acres in the possession of Maria Syphax.

[BroJoeK] Sounds like reparations to me.

Sounds like you had not a clue what you were talking about. The alternative is only worse. Arlington National Cemetary was, and remains, the final resting place of our nation's bravest and most heroic. It is not something to be given up as a war reparation.

[BroJoeK] The US Civil War made graveyards for fallen soldiers a military necessity.

https://www.history.com/news/arlington-national-cemetery-8-surprising-facts

1. Arlington National Cemetery is located on Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s confiscated estate. ...
To ensure the house would forever be uninhabitable for the Lees, Meigs directed graves to be placed as close to the mansion as possible, and in 1866 he ordered the remains of 2,111 unknown Civil War soldiers killed on battlefields near Washington, D.C., to be placed inside a vault in the Lees’ rose garden.
2. A Supreme Court ruling in 1882 could have resulted in the exhumation of 17,000 graves.
More than a decade after Lee’s death, the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. government had seized his estate without due process and ordered it returned to his family in the same condition as when it was illegally confiscated. If followed, the ruling could have required the exhumation of all of Arlington’s dead, but instead Lee’s son officially sold the property to Congress for $150,000 in 1883.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-arlington-national-cemetery-came-to-be-145147007/

Touring the new national cemetery on the day that Stanton signed his order, Meigs was incensed to see where the graves were being dug. "It was my intention to have begun the interments nearer the mansion," he fumed, "but opposition on the part of officers stationed at Arlington, some of whom...did not like to have the dead buried near them, caused the interments to be begun" in the Lower Cemetery, where Christman and others were buried.
To enforce his orders—and to make Arlington uninhabitable for the Lees—Meigs evicted officers from the mansion, installed a military chaplain and a loyal lieutenant to oversee cemetery operations, and proceeded with new burials, encircling Mrs. Lee's garden with the tombstones of prominent Union officers. The first of these was Capt. Albert H. Packard of the 31st Maine Infantry. Shot in the head during the Battle of the Second Wilderness, Packard had miraculously survived his journey from the Virginia front to Washington's Columbian College Hospital, only to die there. On May 17, 1864, he was laid to rest where Mary Lee had enjoyed reading in warm weather, surrounded by the scent of honeysuckle and jasmine. By the end of 1864, some 40 officers' graves had joined his.
Meigs added others as soon as conditions allowed. He dispatched crews to scour battlefields for unknown soldiers near Washington. Then he excavated a huge pit at the end of Mrs. Lee's garden, filled it with the remains of 2,111 nameless soldiers and raised a sarcophagus in their honor. He understood that by seeding the garden with prominent Union officers and unknown patriots, he would make it politically difficult to disinter these heroes of the Republic at a later date.

For such purpose, the burials were not performed as a military necessity, but rather constituted a war crime. That the acts regarding the Lee estate were held to be unlawful by the U.S. Supreme Court is documented fact.