A Former Confederate Officer Broke Ground on the Lincoln Memorial. Here's the Full Story.

It took 57 years after Abraham Lincoln's assassination for the country to finally build him a proper national memorial in Washington. The man who broke ground on it had fought against the Union as a Confederate army officer.

On This Day

On this day in 1826, both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died, just hours apart, exactly fifty years after the Declaration of Independence was adopted, a coincidence so striking that contemporaries struggled to describe it as anything but providence.

Decades of False Starts

Calls for a national Lincoln memorial began almost immediately after his 1865 assassination, but the effort stalled repeatedly. Congress authorized an early monument for the Capitol grounds in 1867, a tiered, cake-like design crowded with statues that never secured enough funding during the difficult Reconstruction years. The project quietly died. It wasn't until 1911, nearly half a century later, that Congress finally approved $2 million to build a proper national memorial, after five earlier funding bills had failed.

A Site Picked Over a Swamp

The location itself caused real controversy. House Speaker Joseph Cannon favored a more prominent site and reportedly said he'd never let a memorial to Lincoln be built in what he called that "god-damned swamp," referring to the reclaimed marshland along the Potomac that planners had chosen instead. That swampy ground required 122 massive concrete pillars and a foundation sunk as deep as 65 feet in places just to anchor the memorial to bedrock, engineering that the public touring the finished building above would never see.

A Former Confederate Turned Lincoln Champion

Construction broke ground on February 12, 1914, Lincoln's 105th birthday, with former Senator Joseph Blackburn of Kentucky turning the first spadeful of earth. Blackburn had served as a lieutenant colonel in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. At the ceremony, he told the crowd the memorial would prove that "Lincoln is now regarded as the greatest of all Americans, and that he is so held by the South as well as the North," a remarkable statement from a man who had once fought to preserve the very institution Lincoln's presidency helped end.

A Statue That Outgrew Its Own Blueprint

Sculptor Daniel Chester French originally designed the seated Lincoln statue to stand just 10 feet tall. Once early models were tested inside the massive chamber, the figure looked lost and undersized against the building's scale. French nearly doubled it, to 19 feet, assembled on-site from 28 blocks of Georgia white marble by six Italian immigrant brothers known as the Piccirilli Brothers. Had the finished Lincoln stood up from his chair, the figure would tower 27 feet tall.

Hands That May Spell a Secret Message

A persistent legend holds that French shaped Lincoln's hands to spell the letters "A" and "L" in American Sign Language, a tribute possibly connected to French's earlier sculpture of a deaf education pioneer and the fact that French had a deaf son of his own. The National Park Service has never officially confirmed the theory, but historians note French's well-documented familiarity with sign language makes the claim more plausible than most monument legends.

A Segregated Dedication for a President Who Ended Slavery

The memorial's 1922 dedication ceremony carried a bitter irony. Black attendees were directed to a segregated seating area behind a rope, separate from the mostly white crowd, the standard practice in 1920s Washington. Robert Russa Moton, principal of the historically Black Tuskegee Institute and the ceremony's keynote speaker, was pressured beforehand to cut and soften his planned remarks. Twenty-one Black guests walked out in protest that day, a stark contrast to what the building would eventually come to represent.

The Speech That Redefined the Memorial's Meaning

That contradiction makes what happened on the same steps four decades later even more significant. On August 28, 1963, roughly 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech in front of the very statue dedicated under segregated conditions. The spot where King stood is marked today with an inscription, and the memorial's meaning shifted permanently that day from a monument built with exclusion baked into its dedication to one forever associated with the fight to end exclusion altogether.

Hunting Camps Within Reach of History

Plenty of hunting camps and rural retreats sit within a few hours' drive of Washington, scattered across the Shenandoah Valley, the Blue Ridge foothills, and rural stretches of Maryland and Virginia. Families who hunt those areas each fall sometimes pair a weekend at camp with a day trip into the city to walk the Mall and see the Lincoln Memorial in person, a contrast between quiet rural land and dense monumental history that few other regions of the country offer so close together.

Staying Connected Between Camp and the Capital

Camps in that rural Virginia and Maryland corridor often face the same connectivity gap found everywhere else far from cities, while Washington itself offers strong, reliable cellular coverage. A no-contract cellular internet setup gives hunting camp families a workable connection back at camp, useful for checking weather before a hunt or staying in touch during a Capital day trip, without requiring a long-term commitment for a property that may only see heavy use a few months a year.

A Quick Voice-Search Answer: Why Did the Lincoln Memorial Take So Long to Build?

Ask a voice assistant and you'll typically hear about funding delays. The fuller answer includes decades of political gridlock, since the parties of Lincoln's era held nearly opposite positions from today's, meaning support for honoring him split along lines that don't map neatly onto modern politics, alongside genuine disagreement over where and how grand a monument the country was willing to fund.

A Verse Carved Into the Same City

Isaiah 1:17 calls believers to seek justice and defend the oppressed, words that echo both Lincoln's own stated purpose in the Civil War and the unfinished work King addressed from those same marble steps a century later.

The Pyramid That Almost Got Built Instead

Before Henry Bacon's Greek temple design won approval, architect John Russell Pope, who would later design the Jefferson Memorial, submitted an entire alternate portfolio for the Lincoln Memorial. His proposals included a structure modeled after a Mayan temple, a Mesopotamian ziggurat, and an Egyptian-style pyramid. Any of those choices would have given Washington an entirely different monumental skyline than the one that exists today, a reminder that even the most familiar landmarks were once just one option among several seriously considered.

A Building That's Nearly Half Hidden

What visitors see standing on the Mall represents only about 60 percent of the actual structure. Below the marble floor sits a three-story underground chamber known as the undercroft, originally built purely for engineering support, that still contains construction-era graffiti scrawled by the workers who built it in the 1910s. The National Park Service now refers to these markings as "historic graffiti," and tours of the space were offered to the public during the 1970s and 1980s before being discontinued.

Worth Remembering on the Steps

Standing on the spot marked for King's speech, looking out over the Reflecting Pool toward the Washington Monument, it's worth remembering that the ground itself was reclaimed swampland nobody wanted, the building was delayed for half a century, and its grand opening excluded the very people whose freedom Lincoln's presidency had helped secure. That a single location could hold all of that history, and still end up as the backdrop for one of the most hopeful speeches in American history, says something true about the country's capacity to grow past its own worst instincts, slowly and imperfectly, but for real.

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One More Fact Worth Knowing

A stonecutter etching Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address into the memorial's north wall mistakenly carved "EUTURE" instead of "FUTURE," apparently grabbing the wrong stencil. The bottom of the "E" was filled in to correct the error before dedication, but careful visitors today can still spot the faint trace of the original mistake.

A Closing Thought for the Mall

A monument built with a segregated dedication ceremony became, within a single generation, the backdrop for the most famous speech of the Civil Rights Movement. Few buildings in the country carry that complete an arc, from broken promise to redeemed purpose, standing on the same patch of reclaimed swamp the whole time.