While armed conflict in the Civil War ended in 1865, the fight over the war's legacy continues to this day.

One flashpoint--public art.

It took over 50 years from President Lincoln's assassination to dedicate a national monument in his honor.

To us, the Lincoln Memorial may seem uncontroversial, but how it looks and that it exists were not foregone conclusions.

Even though the Lincoln Memorial might be the most famous commemoration of the 16th president, it wasn't the first by far.

The first memorial to Lincoln is this statue by Irish American sculptor Lot Flannery, and you can find it in Judiciary Square.

It was erected in 1868, just 3 years after Lincoln's assassination.

In 1867, Congress incorporated the Lincoln Monument Association to raise funds for a national memorial by sculptor Clark Mills.

Mills' proposed tribute to Lincoln was a 70-foot-high granite and bronze installation near the Capitol.

It would feature 35 statues, and the apex would show Lincoln signing the Emancipation Proclamation, but donations didn't add up to enough to build the colossus.

After that, the Congressional Record is silent on Lincoln Memorial efforts until 1901, when Illinois Senator Shelby Cullom began introducing bills to incorporate a new Lincoln Memorial Commission.

After several tries, one of his bills became law on June 28, 1902.

[Fanfare plays] ♪ Between Lincoln's death and Senator Cullom's successful bill, the fashion and architecture had turned to the Beaux-Arts style named for the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where many American architects in the 19th century learned their craft.

Students practiced drawing ancient Greek and Roman buildings, and they were taught to value grand halls and formal spaces.

♪ The emerging fashion in urban planning was the City Beautiful movement, promoting, among other things, monumental grandeur in public spaces.

When Beaux-Arts architect Daniel Burnham and City Beautiful landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Sr. designed the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, their aesthetics and philosophies became popular nationwide.

The 1902 McMillan Plan, named for Michigan senator James McMillan, aimed to marry the ideals of the City Beautiful movement with DC's original city plan by Pierre L'Enfant, who had been appointed by President George Washington to design the city layout.

The heart of the McMillan plan was the creation of the National Mall, featuring the Capitol at one end and at the other, the proposed Lincoln Memorial in a then-recently-filled-in swath of marshland known as Potomac Park.

♪ Political infighting for and against the site lasted over a decade.

Chief among its opponents was Illinois representative Joe Cannon, chair of the Appropriations Committee and Speaker of the House from 1903-1911.

He had many objections, from cost to aesthetics, and he could not imagine the former silt- and sewage-strewn mudflats becoming a site worthy of a tribute to Lincoln.

♪ In an end run around Cannon and Congress, in 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt issued an executive order establishing the Council of Fine Arts to make recommendations to the cabinet on city planning.

Council members were to be selected by the American Institute of Architects, whose leadership were stalwarts of the Beaux-Arts style and the City Beautiful movement.

The Council met only once, during which it approved the McMillan Plan.

When President Taft succeeded Roosevelt, he created with Congress a new commission.

This potentially undid the decision to place the memorial in Potomac Park, especially because he included Speaker Cannon on the committee.

In theory, Taft's commission evaluated many sites, including near the Capitol, Meridian Hill, Fort Stevens, the Soldiers' Home, and Potomac Park.

In practice, the Potomac Park decision was predetermined because Taft's group assigned the site evaluation to advisors led by Daniel Burnham, whose work helped the Beaux-Arts style and the City Beautiful movement take hold nationwide.

Speaker Cannon continued to fight against the Potomac Park location, including getting architect John Russell Pope to propose designs for other locations.

One design for the Meridian Hill site was a Parthenon-type structure 250 feet high with marble stairs 100 feet wide.

♪ One for the Soldiers' Home site was a Greco-Roman-based design.

♪ Yet another rendering resembled an Egyptian pyramid except with portico entrances.

♪ Cannon was outvoted.

The commission chose the Potomac Park location and architect Henry Bacon's design.

It was a Parthenon-type structure supported by 36 enormous fluted Doric columns representing the 36 states in the Union at the time of Lincoln's death.

It would be made of materials from many states to represent national unity.

Above the colonnade, the names of the 36 states would be inscribed on the frieze, and the chamber would contain a statue of Lincoln.

The memorial took 8 years to complete, from 1914-1922.

To support a massive structure on drained and filled land, the subfoundation was made of 122 solid poured concrete piers with steel reinforcing rods anchored in bedrock.

Workers had to dig 40 feet before building could begin.

Graffiti left by the construction workers is still visible today.

Bacon selected Daniel Chester French to create the statue.

It was originally supposed to be 10 feet high.

However, upon seeing the size of the space, French increased the statue to 19 feet high on top of a 10-foot-tall base.

Beneath the Tennessee marble floor, Massachusetts granite steps, and Indiana limestone walls is a cavernous, damp space full of stalactites and stalagmites, stone deposits created by the moisture that continues to seep through the stone temple built on a former wetland, and from that former wetland, Lincoln gazes east toward the Capitol, whose dome was crowned with the Statue of Freedom in 1863, between them, two miles and 100 years of history.

The Lincoln Memorial is open 24 hours a day every day of the week.

For more information, go to nps.gov/linc.