Lincoln Memorial Cornerstone Laid: Honoring a President

Congress spent forty-seven years arguing about how to honor Abraham Lincoln before anyone laid a single stone. The cornerstone of the Lincoln Memorial was set on February 12, 1914 — Lincoln’s 105th birthday — beginning construction of what would become the most symbolically powerful building in American civic life, a temple to democracy that the man it honored would have found deeply uncomfortable. The debate over a Lincoln memorial began almost immediately after his assassination in 1865. Proposals ranged from a highway connecting Washington to Gettysburg to a giant pyramid. Congress authorized a memorial commission in 1867 but couldn’t agree on a design, a location, or a budget. The project stalled for decades. Speaker of the House Joe Cannon famously declared he would "never let a memorial to Abraham Lincoln be erected in that god damned swamp" — referring to the marshy Potomac flats where the memorial was eventually built. The logjam broke in 1911 when Congress established a new Lincoln Memorial Commission. Architect Henry Bacon designed a Greek temple with thirty-six Doric columns, one for each state in the Union at the time of Lincoln’s death. Daniel Chester French was commissioned to create the seated statue. The cornerstone ceremony on February 12, 1914, drew dignitaries but little public excitement — the building would not be completed and dedicated until May 30, 1922. The finished memorial transformed the western end of the National Mall. French’s nineteen-foot marble Lincoln, gazing across the Reflecting Pool toward the Washington Monument and the Capitol, became an icon reproduced billions of times. But the memorial’s greatest significance was unplanned: it became the stage for American protest, most powerfully when Marian Anderson sang there in 1939 after being barred from Constitution Hall, and when Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963. A building designed to honor a dead president became the place where living Americans demanded their country fulfill his promises.