The Washington Monument

Theodor Horydczak on top of Washington Monument, between 1920 and 1950.
Washington as It Was, 1923-1959

On December 6, 1884, workers placed the 3,300 pound marble capstone on the Washington Monument, and topped it with a nine-inch pyramid of cast aluminum, completing construction of the 555-foot Egyptian obelisk. Nearly fifty years earlier, the Washington National Monument Society choose Robert Mills's design to honor first American president and founding father George Washington. The privately-funded organization laid the monument's cornerstone on Independence Day, 1848, in Washington, D.C.

For 20 years, lack of funds and loss of support for the Washington National Monument Society left the obelisk incomplete at a height of about 156 feet. Finally, in 1876, President Ulysses Grant authorized the federal government to finish construction. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers took over the project two years later.

Washington Monument at Sunset, between 1920 and 1950.
Theodor Horydczak, photographer
Washington as It Was, 1923-1959

Day and night, spring through winter, the Washington Monument is a focal point of the National Mall and a center of celebrations including concerts and the annual Independence Day fireworks display. The observation deck affords spectacular panoramic views of the nation's capital.

When fully constructed, the Washington Monument was the world's tallest structure. Today, the approximately 36,000 stacked blocks of granite and marble compose the world's tallest freestanding masonry structure. In a city of monuments, locals refer to the obelisk as "The Monument." By mandate, it will remain the tallest structure in Washington, D.C., dominating the skyline and accenting Pierre-Charles L'Enfant's plan for the city.

• There are many images of Washington, D.C. in American Memory. Search across the pictorial collections on Washington Monument to locate photographs taken from every vantage point.
• 192 commemorative stones line the interior walls of the Washington Monument. Read President Calvin Coolidge's speech at the Dedication of the New Mexico Stone in the Washington Monument on December 2, 1927—one of many Coolidge addresses available in Prosperity and Thrift: The Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy, 1921-1929.
• Take a spin to the strains of the "Washington Monument Waltz," published in Washington D.C. in 1885. Search the collection Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, 1870-1885 on Washington Monument.

Salmon P. Chase

Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, between 1860 and 1865.
Civil War Photographs, 1861-1865

On December 6, 1864, Abraham Lincoln appointed Salmon P. Chase chief justice of the United States. A graduate of Dartmouth College, Chase studied law under Attorney General William Wirt. Championing Sunday Schools and temperance in the 1830s, by the 1840s he was an active member of the abolitionist movement. Chase defended fugitive slaves in Ohio and played a key role in creating the Free Soil Party, which opposed the expansion of slavery into the territories.

With Free Soil support, Chase was elected to the Senate in 1848. He founded the Ohio Republican party and served as the state's first Republican governor from 1855 to 1859. In office, he vigorously opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act and defended the rights of African Americans. At the 1860 Republican convention, Chase permitted delegates pledged to support him to cast decisive votes for Abraham Lincoln. As a reward, in 1861, just two days after beginning his second term as senator, Chase left the Senate to serve as Lincoln's secretary of the treasury.

In 1864, Lincoln named Chase the sixth chief justice. During his time on the bench, Chase presided over the Senate's impeachment trial and acquittal of President Andrew Johnson. Chase continued to support African Americans. He drafted the first two clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment. Signed into law in 1868, the amendment extended citizenship rights to all people born or naturalized in the United States.

In a letter to the Colored People's Educational Monument Association, Chase asserted:

Our national experience has demonstrated that public order reposes most securely on the broad basis of universal suffrage. It has proved, also, that universal suffrage is the surest broad basis of universal guarantee and most powerful stimulus of individual, social, and political progress. May it not prove, moreover, in that work of re-organization which now engages the thoughts of all patriotic men, that universal suffrage is the best reconciler of the most comprehensive lenity with the most perfect public security and the most speedy and certain revival of general prosperity?

Hon. Salmon P. Chase, Chief Justice of the United States to Wm. Syphax and John F. Cook, Committee
Celebration by the Colored People's Educational Monument Association in Memory of Abraham Lincoln…, 1865.
African American Perspectives, 1818-1907

Chase suffered a stroke and died on May 7, 1873. He was honored with a formal state funeral and is buried in Washington, D.C.

Learn more:

• Read "Address and Reply on the Presentation of A Testimonial to S. P. Chase." This 1845 document from African American Perspectives records a ceremony honoring Chase for his defense of escaped slave Samuel Watson.
• For a less-than-flattering review of Chase's performance on the campaign trail read page 92 of H. P. Hall's Observations. A prominent Minnesota journalist, Harlan Page Hall's memoir is available through the collection Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, ca. 1820-1910.
• Today in History features on Plessy V. Ferguson, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, The Selma March, and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. place the Civil Rights Movement in context.