REMARKS AT THE LAUNCH OF THE 2009 ABRAHAM LINCOLN ONE-CENT COIN

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12, 2009

BY DONALD R. KENNON

VICE PRESIDENT, U.S. CAPITOL HISTORICAL SOCIETY

It is altogether fitting and proper that the reverse of this new Lincoln penny features the image of the United States Capitol as it appeared on March 4, 1861 when Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office as the Nation’s 16^th President on its East Front steps.

As Lincoln’s inaugural speech invoked the “better angels of our nature” in a futile attempt to avert civil war, the unfinished Capitol stood mute testimony to the pending crisis.

The Capitol was still a work in progress; just as the Union it symbolized was still an experiment in representative self-government, “the last best hope of earth,” as Lincoln would so eloquently state.¹

The coin’s design reminds me of how the Capitol appeared to Union soldiers in the early days of the war.  In April of 1861 as some of the initial Union soldiers approached Capitol Hill, one recorded: "We marched up the hill, and when the dust opened there was our Big Tent ready pitched.  … The Capitol was to be our quarters and I was pleased to notice that the top of the Dome had been left off for ventilation."²

The Capitol would house as many as 3,000 soldiers during the early months of the war.  Bakeries in its basement and west front terrace would bake bread for soldiers throughout the city.  And the Rotunda would become a hospital for the wounded after two bloody battles in 1862.

The Capitol appeared to have its “top left off” because the previous inverted teacup-shaped copper clad wooden dome had been removed in 1856, but construction of its new cast-iron dome designed by Architect of the Capitol Thomas U. Walter would not be completed until the end of 1863 when it was crowned by the Statue of Freedom.

Fittingly, construction of the Dome was a collaborative effort involving the commercial iron foundries that contracted to supply the cast iron materials; the hundreds of laborers, craftsmen, and iron workers who conducted the work; and civilian Architect Walter and Supervising Engineer Captain Montgomery C. Meigs of the Army Corps of Engineers, who devised an ingenious system to hoist the nearly nine million pounds of cast iron brackets, girders, and plates into place.

A marvel of both architectural design and engineering ingenuity, the Dome rose to its 288-foot height during the Civil War as a testament to national unity and resolve.

The Dome’s symbolic power was well-understood, especially by President Lincoln.   When he was questioned about the wisdom of expending so much money and material on construction of the Capitol when it was needed for the war effort, Lincoln’s response, the questioner later reported, was “If people see the Capitol going on, it is a sign we intend the Union shall go on.”³

A quarter past noon on December 2, 1863, the United States Flag was unfurled atop the final section of the Statue of Freedom, marking the completion of the Dome’s exterior.   When sculptor Thomas Crawford designed the statue in 1856 he could not have foreseen that it would be installed in the middle of a conflict that enlarged the boundaries of human freedom and abolished the legal right of one human being to own another.

Nor could Crawford have known that one of the principal workmen who would cast his statue in bronze would be a District of Columbia enslaved man, Philip Reid; or that Reid would be a free man by the time the statue was installed on the Dome.

It is not known if Reid was present when the Statue of Freedom was installed, nor what his thoughts might have been about the Dome and its symbolism.  I think they might have been somewhat similar to those of another American, the poet Walt Whitman who tended the war’s wounded.

Just a few days before Lincoln’s second inaugural in March 1865, Whitman wrote: “To-night I have been wandering awhile in the capitol, which is all lit up. The illuminated rotunda looks fine. I like to stand aside and look a long, long while, up at the dome; it comforts me somehow.”⁴

The design of this Lincoln penny reminds us that the Capitol of Philip Reid, Walt Whitman, and Abraham Lincoln is OUR Capitol; and that their struggle to extend human freedom and preserve government of the people, by the people, and for the people is OUR duty as well.  And, we too, can look up at the Capitol Dome and somehow be comforted by its symbolic reaffirmation of national unity, purpose, and resolve.

NOTES

1. (Annual Message to Congress, Dec. 1, 1862).

2. Theodore Winthrop, "Washington as a Camp," Atlantic Monthly (July 1861).

3. John Eaton, Grant, Lincoln, and the Freemen: Reminiscences of the Civil War with Special Reference to the Work for the Contrabands and Freedom of the Mississippi Valley (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), p. 89.

4. Walt Whitman, “76. The Capitol by Gas-Light,” Specimen Days.

(The Mint also unveiled the new reverse design for the Lincoln Penny that will be used in 2010 and beyond.  The design features the union shield as painted by Constantino Brumidi in the Brumidi corridors of the United States Capitol.  For more information, click here.)