Katya Miller

The statue's history is riddled with ironies that define American democracy:

​

• She was designed under the eye of the Confederacy’s president. Jefferson Davis, then U.S. Secretary of War, objected to Thomas Crawford's original design — a liberty cap associated with freed slaves — and had it replaced. A monument called Freedom was reshaped, in part, by a man who would go on to lead a nation built on slavery.

• She was cast in bronze by an enslaved man. Philip Reid, enslaved at the time, played an essential role in solving the technical problem of casting and erecting the statue's sections atop the dome. His labor made "Freedom" physically possible — and his name is barely known even to people who work in the building she crowns. ·      

  • Her story reveals erased Indigenous contributions to the American story — a thread the book follows carefully, resisting easy or overstated claims, but insisting these connections belong in the historical record rather than out of it.

• She was sculpted at a time when female imagery was commonly used to depict classical ideals, putting women on pedestals while denying and suppressing their expression and fundamental rights.

 

A statue that is supposed to represent American liberty was shaped by the labor and decisions of people who were not free, and who were not considered at all. The Lady on the Dome tells the backstory of the political, social and existential tensions embedded in bronze.

 

This is a story for right now. As the country continues to argue about whose history gets remembered, whose labor gets credited, and who gets to stand for "freedom," this statue — hiding in plain sight above the Capitol —can help us have that conversation honestly.