It was an hour or so before sunrise when I paid my first visit
to the Lincoln Memorial.
It was an hour or so before sunrise when I paid my first visit to the Lincoln Memorial.
Our nation’s capitol is full of many monuments, but the one dedicated to the leader who preserved the American union seems to have a mythical quality about it. It’s not so much a monument as a hallowed shrine to that great historical experiment we call American democracy.
Alone, I had walked up the steps facing the rectangular reflecting pool. I thought about the millions of Americans who had come to this sacred site which is filled with the power of a dignified emotion. They came to pay respect to a great man and the great values he stood for — liberty and justice for all.
Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous rousing speech on Civil Rights on the steps of the memorial. Like an American Moses watched from behind by Father Abraham, King had beckoned his people into the Promised Land of freedom. King’s speech at the Lincoln Memorial continues to inspire new generations of Americans, to drive this nation to improve itself as a people.
I strolled through the Doric columns into this Greek temple and beheld Daniel Chester-French’s great sculpture of Lincoln. Like a thoughtful Zeus on a throne, the tired old Abe gazes with reflective eyes on the reborn nation that had risen from the blood spilt during a long, brutal war.
Three African-American men quietly mopped the floor in front of Lincoln’s sculpture. I wondered if their ancestors had been slaves in “the land of the free.” How strange a concept it seems to my mind, that human beings can own other humans as if they were hogs or some other animal. And yet, millions of Americans at one time had thought it was their God-given right to own people as property.
The Lincoln Memorial was dedicated in 1922. President Harding presented the address to 100,000 people who had gathered for the ceremony. Another 2 million people had listened on their radios. His speech was followed by a poem given by Edwin Markham.
Although little known now, Markham was a literary meteor in the first half of the 20th century. He came to San Jose in 1872 to study as a teacher at San Jose Normal School (now San Jose State University) and lived in Santa Clara County for almost the rest of his life. Chief Justice Taft led a committee that chose his poem “Lincoln, Man of the People,” for the dedication ceremony.
Among Markham’s words giving tribute to Lincoln, are, “Here was a man to hold against the world, A man to match the mountains and the sea.”
Lincoln preserved the American union in at least one other significant way besides leading the Union Army to victory. His signing of the Pacific Railway Act on July 1, 1862, was the document that began the construction of the transcontinental railroad. This connected California with the rest of the American states. It significantly transformed the American political, economic and physical landscape.
The railroad was finished on May 10, 1869 when a gold spike — “the last spike” — was struck by Leland Stanford at Promontory Summit in Utah Territory. Lincoln had been assassinated four years earlier, but I’m sure he had been there in spirit.
The railroad made Leland Stanford an immensely rich man. After the death of his teenage son, Stanford and his wife endowed millions of dollars to build a university in Palo Alto. Stanford University would eventually become the hot-bed of high-tech development, altering the modern world with such innovations as computer technology, the Internet and genetic research. Lincoln’s signing of the Pacific Railway Act has, down the line of history, transformed the world in ways he could never have imagined.
Lincoln’s legacy also lives on in Santa Clara County at the site of a sleepy village south of San Jose. New Almaden lies in a narrow canyon between the Pueblo Hills and the Santa Cruz Mountains. It was once the base of a productive quicksilver mine.
Quicksilver — another name for the element mercury — was used by miners to attract gold in sluice boxes during the Gold Rush. Without New Almaden, California gold seekers might never have collected the vast amounts of the precious metals that they did.
In 1850, inspired by this sudden great need for mercury, Henry Wagner Halleck, a captain in the Army Corps of Engineers, hired on to mechanize the mine and manage its workers. He would later serve as Lincoln’s chief of staff.
The mines also played a significant role in helping the Union win the Civil War. Without New Almaden’s mercury, California would never have been able to supply enough gold to the Union forces to help finance the war. Quicksilver was also used in the production of Union Army material such as blasting caps.
In the last letter he ever wrote, Lincoln expressed a desire to travel to California. Unfortunately, he died shortly afterwards from the bullet fired by the assassin John Wilkes Booth.
Certainly, if he had lived, Lincoln would have traveled west on the newly built transcontinental railroad he had set in motion by the stroke of his pen in 1862. He would have paid a visit to Sacramento as well as the foggy city of San Francisco.
I also imagine he would have taken a short trip to Santa Clara County. He would have had a keen interest in visiting the New Almaden mines which had helped, in its own way, to preserve the Union and bring freedom to millions of American citizens.
Martin Cheek is the author of ‘The Silicon Valley Handbook.’
