Designers and laborers built the magnificent Capitol dome over the span of eleven years, using nine million pounds of iron. Overall supervision of the project fell to the nation's secretary of War, who, from 1853 to 1857, was Jefferson Davis, the Mississippi war hero and politician. He served the administration of Democrat Franklin Pierce.
Davis paid particular attention to the plans for a monumental statue that would crown the new dome. There must be, it was agreed, symbols of liberty and democracy and freedom personified in an ancient goddess or heroine. That she would stand atop a globe with the motto E Pluribus Unum inscribed was also decided.
The American artist (then living in Rome) Thomas Crawford won the job. The men saw eye-to-eye on most every detail, save one: when Davis saw in one of the early models the female figure wearing a Phrygian liberty cap, he objected. The liberty cap traditionally signified emancipated slaves. Davis, a slave owner from the Deep South, told Crawford to give her instead a military helmet with an eagle's head and an array of feathers. So it was.
Crawford's Statue of Freedom is 19 1/2 feet high and weighs 15,000 pounds. Originally cast in plaster in five sections, it is today made of bronze. She faces east, towards the rising sun. A Native American-inspired blanket is draped on one shoulder. She holds a sword in one hand and in the other a shield and laurel wreath. The Statue of Freedom cost a total of $23,796.82.
By the time the statue was finished (1863) and set atop the Capitol, 288 feet off the ground, the United States was reeling in a nasty internal war where liberty and democracy and freedom were called to question and violently defended in blood by both sides. Franklin Pierce was not the president, but Lincoln. All of the southern senators were long gone. The town of Washington was being transformed into an overcrowded hub of contractors, soldiers, medics, builders, and businessmen.
And Jefferson Davis, the point man for Lady Freedom? He languished in Fort Monroe prison in shackles for two years after his capture. Historian Guy Gugliotta writes, 'He never returned to Washington, and never saw the completed Capitol; the living symbol of the national vision he had abandoned.'
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