Lincoln Memorial at the western part of the National Mall - a huge monument commemorates the sixteenth President of the United States.

One of the major American memorials dedicated to the man, to preserve the unity of the country, abolished slavery, and died at his post. Lincoln grew up in a poor family, became a self-taught lawyer. Having elected to Congress, he fought against slavery, sought to modernize the economy, opposed the US-Mexican War. In 1860, the voices mainly industrial northern states where slavery was not, Lincoln was elected president.

Southern states this resulted in a state of shock: their agrarian economy based on slave labor, there is fear that northerners Yankee liberate all blacks. South Carolina first decided to withdraw from the union of the states. It was followed by other 11 states formed their own breakaway Confederacy and declared that in their territory slavery will exist forever.

The president tried to avoid a collision, but it was inevitable. April 12, 1861 Southerners bombarded and captured Fort Sumter in South Carolina. The war in which the North at first failed, lasted four years and ended with the defeat of the South. Slavery was prohibited by the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, the country has received a powerful impetus to development. But the leader of the nation paid for this victory a terrible price: April 15, 1865 the actor, a supporter of Confederation, John Wilkes Booth shot the president at Ford's Theater in Washington.

The idea of ​​the memorial was born in the early XX century, its first stone was laid in 1914, opened in 1922. The project of the monument, the church designed by the architect Henry Bacon, a sculpture of a seated Abraham Lincoln carved Daniel Chester French. Initially we planned three-meter statue, but it does not match the scale of the building. The result was a huge figure height 5, 8 meters high and weighing 175 tons. Legend has it that Lincoln fingers in sign language shows the initials of the President - "A" and "L".

The building is designed as a classical Greek temple with thirty-six Doric columns - the number of states at the time of Lincoln's death. Memorial looks in the mirror surface a huge reflecting pool. From the water to the entrance steps are solemn. Inside the rooms are separated by rows of fifteen Ionic columns, carved on the walls of the main fragments of Lincoln's speeches. Murals painted by the artist Jules Guerin symbolically depict the life of the great principles of the President: freedom, justice, unity, mercy.

Memorial occupies a special place in the national pantheon of Americans. At the foot of the monument to the president abolished slavery, in 1963 delivered his famous speech "I Have a Dream" Martin Luther King. 300 thousand people listened to his impassioned plea for racial reconciliation. This event resembles the inscription carved on the stage. Like Lincoln, King paid for the life of persuasion - he too was killed by an assassin's bullet.

Every year at the memorial come about six million people. Visit can be free at any time of the day.