The Statue of Freedom on top of the Capitol didn’t start out as a Clark Mills project. The commission went to Thomas Crawford, an American sculptor living in Italy. 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 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. 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. Crawford designed a helmet festooned with feathers, which, while not actually resembling Native American headdresses, was meant as a nod to them.
Neither Crawford nor Davis would see the final statue unveiled. Crawford died suddenly in 1857, not long after finishing the plaster model of Freedom. 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. The model stood for more than a year in Statuary Hall, during which time Davis became president of the Confederacy.
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. 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.
How Reed saved the day became legendary. The most detailed account comes from the writer S.D. Wyeth, who heard the story from Mills’s son Fisk. The “highly intelligent” Reed had an idea, Wyeth wrote:
“His plan of working was this: a pulley and tackle was brought into use, and its hook inserted into an iron eye affixed to the head of the figure — the rope was then gently strained repeatedly until the uppermost joining of the top section of the model began to make a faint appearance. This gave some indication as to the whereabouts of its bolts inside, lead[ing] to their discovery; and thus, finally, one after another of the sections was discovered, their bolts unloosed, and the model, uninjured, made ready for the foundry.”