“This monument owes its existence, not to publick gratitude in our national government, nor to patriotick feelings of the citizens at large; but to the private friendship & admiration of the officers of the navy, who, of their own accord, assigned a portion of their pay to the erection of a memorial of actions as heroick as any that were ever achieved in naval warfare; from which, although they shared in the glory, their country alone derived the benefit.”
– Benjamin H. Latrobe, 1813
Did You Know?
The Tripoli Monument, located on the grounds of the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD is the oldest military memorial in the United States. The monument is a memorial to six U.S. Naval Officers who made the ultimate sacrifice during the first of the Barbary Wars at the dawn of the 19th century.
The memorial was the vision of future Navy Commodore David Porter, then a Lieutenant, who wanted to honor his former shipmates that had been killed-in-action during a series of attacks on Tripoli in 1804: Captain Richard Somers, Lieutenants James Caldwell, James Decatur, Henry Wadsworth, Joseph Israel, and John Dorsey.
It would ultimately be commissioned by officers of the US Navy’s Mediterranean fleet.
In early 1806, Capt. Porter engaged the Bishop of Florence who introduced him to the famous Italian sculptor, Giovanni Charles Micali. For half his usual fee, about three-thousand dollars, he agreed to design and construct the memorial. There are many schools of thought and opinion regarding the design, but history generally records that it was left to Micali’s vision with some input from Capt. Porter.
The white Carrara* marble sculpture consists of a thirty-foot-high column topped by an eagle and mounted on an elaborate base adorned with allegorical figures representing Glory, Fame, History, and Commerce. History, on the northwest corner, is represented by a seated female figure holding a book in her proper left hand and a pen made of bronze gilt in her proper right hand. She looks up and begins to record the event that she sees. Commerce, on the northeast corner, is represented by a male figure pointing to the column with his proper right hand and holding a caduceus in his proper left hand. Winged Victory stands beside the column, her proper right hand holding a laurel wreath over a sarcophagus and her proper left hand holding a bronze gilt palm branch. The column is adorned with two rows of antique “beaks of galleys” and two rows of antique anchors carved in relief. The sculpture rests on a square base constructed with blocks of stone and adorned with an urn on each corner.
Completed in late 1807, the monument would be transported, as ballast, onboard the USS Constitution to Newport, RI, where it would then be transported to Washington by another ship. Unfortunately, the monument would sit in storage until such a time as further subscriptions, investments in funding, could be made to pay the import fees and for its assembly and installation at the new capitol building. When congress passed an act to remit the importation fees in March 1808 and adequate funding had been secured for its placement, that plan had to be abandoned in part because of the unfinished state of the building. Finally, agreement was reached to place it in the Navy Yard, where according to Benjamin Latrobe, architect of the United States Capitol and the official charged with installing the monument, it was “. . . the principal object of view to all those who enter the yard, either by land or water, and to an extensive portion of the city and of the port.”
Damaged during the burning of Washington by the British in 1814, it was restored in 1831 and moved to the west front terrace of the United States Capitol, where it would remain until its move to the Naval Academy in 1860. It was the first monument, and for the next thirty-five years after its installation, the only monument in the emerging “District of Columbia.”
It is also known as the “Navy Monument” or “Peace Monument.”
*White Carrara marble comes from Carrara, Italy – an area that is widely recognized for producing some of the finest marble in the world.
