![]() ![]() Wyeth, who heard the story from Mills’s son Fisk. The most detailed account comes from the writer S.D. Mills, though, immediately ran into a big problem: The Italian artist, betting that only he could find the delicate seams to cut it into pieces small enough for the foundry, refused to help without a major financial windfall. The government hired Mills to complete the job - casting the plaster model in bronze - paying him a huge sum of $400 (nearly $15,000 today) a month, plus expenses for materials and labor. The model stood for more than a year in Statuary Hall, during which time Davis became president of the Confederacy. His widow had the model cut into five pieces and shipped to the United States, where an Italian artist put it back together with interior bolts and new layers of plaster to cover the seams. Crawford died suddenly in 1857, not long after finishing the plaster model of Freedom. Neither Crawford nor Davis would see the final statue unveiled. Crawford designed a helmet festooned with feathers, which, while not actually resembling Native American headdresses, was meant as a nod to them. An ardent supporter of slavery, Davis objected to the cap and asked Crawford to come up with something a little less freedom-y and a little more warlike, according to the Architect of the Capitol. The liberty cap was a common symbol used in art during the American Revolution but lately had been taken up by abolitionists, and the plans for the sculpture caught the ire of Jefferson Davis, then the secretary of war, who was overseeing the expansion of the Capitol grounds. He drew plans for a classical-style goddess in flowing robes and wearing a “liberty cap,” a cap used in ancient Rome to denote enslaved people who had been freed. The commission went to Thomas Crawford, an American sculptor living in Italy. ![]() The Statue of Freedom on top of the Capitol didn’t start out as a Clark Mills project. ![]()
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