The Statue of Freedom which tops the dome of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. has a bit of an identity crisis. This stems not only from her many names, more numerous than Elizabeth Taylors husbands (including Freedom Triumphant in War and Peace and Armed Freedom), but also in that, while the statue is supposed to represent the very spirit of freedom itself, a slave was integral in assembling it. If you like your women Amazonian, Lady Freedom is your woman. She stands almost 20 feet tall and weighs more than 15,000 pounds. She carries a sword, a shield, and a laurel wreath, and, ready for battle, sports a helmet atop her head. Early sketches for the statue show a female figure wearing or holding a liberty cap, a traditional symbol for freed slaves. However, Jefferson Davis, who oversaw its construction, objected to the inclusion of a symbol of freed slaves. To Davis, the symbol was wholly inappropriate for a people who were born free and should not be enslaved, and he ordered it changed. Lady Freedom was instead given an eagle-adorned Roman helmet, symbolic of being ready for war. Death waits for no man, and it didnt wait for Lady Freedoms sculptor, Thomas Crawford, who unexpectedly dropped dead in 1857 just after finishing the full size plaster model of Freedom. Crawford was in Rome, and it took 2 years for the statue to make her journey to America. On arrival, it was hastily stuck together by an unnamed Italian sculptor so that it could be admired before casting. A year later, in 1860, Clark Mills, a sculptor who also owned a foundry, was contracted to turn Freedom into a fully-fledged bronze statue. However, there was one small problem; no one knew where the joints in the statue were, as they were now concealed by a layer of plaster. Since Crawford was dead, any damage to the statue whatsoever was absolutely out of the question. When Mills approached the Italian sculptor who’d originally assembled and plastered Freedom, the sculptor said he’d happily tell Mills where the joints were, for a price. Mills decided to figure it out himself. Reid was a slave who belonged to Clark Mills, an industrious and talented man whose labor greatly benefited Mills. After looking at the statue for a few moments, Reid proposed a simple way of finding out where the joints were. The solution he came up with was to attach a rope to the statue’s head and very gently pull till the seams were revealed. This worked, and they were able to disassemble the statue without the Italian sculptor’s help. Reid was also instrumental in the first bronze statue ever cast in the whole of the United States, that of Andrew Jackson riding a horse. As a testament to their ingenuity, Reid and Mills accomplished this without any formal training in bronze casting. In fact, it was the success of this casting that secured Mills the Freedom commission in the first place. Though he was a slave for much of the time the statue was being designed and cast, when it was finally placed atop the Capitol Building on December 2, 1863, Reid was a free man thanks to Congress passing an act abolishing involuntary servitude in Washington D.C. Lincoln signed this act on April 16, 1862. When this happened, Mills attempted to get compensation for the loss of Reid from the government stating, Reid was “aged 42 years, mullatto [sic] color, short in statue, in good health, not prepossessing in appearance but smart in mind, a good workman in a foundry.” Mills asked for $1,500 (about $34,000 today), but only received $350.40. One of the last pieces of documentation concerning Reid comes from 1865, and it simply says, “Mr Reid, the former slave, is now in business for himself [as a plasterer], and highly esteemed by all who know him“. Thus is the story of how a slave played an integral role in the creation of the statue known as Lady Freedom, or Freedom Triumphant in War and Peace.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Nov 2014 17:36:12 +0000
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