On December 2, 1863, at the height of the bloodiest conflict in American history, a bronze figure of a woman was lifted in pieces to the top of the new iron dome rising over Washington and bolted into place nearly three hundred feet above the ground. Cannons fired a salute across the city, and the guns of the forts ringing the capital answered one by one. The dome she crowned was made of close to nine million pounds of cast iron, raised into the sky by men working ropes and hand-cranked derricks through four years of civil war. What almost no one remembers is that a great deal of that dome, and the very statue crowning it, owed its existence to a man who had himself been born a slave.
For its first sixty years, the United States Capitol wore a low, modest dome of wood covered in copper. By the 1850s, the building had grown too small for the country it served. State after state had joined the Union, and the old Capitol could no longer hold all the senators and representatives a growing nation kept sending to Washington. A great enlargement was underway, adding vast marble wings at either end to house a larger Senate and a larger House.
Once those grand new wings were built, the old wooden dome in the middle looked suddenly shabby and wrong. It was also a fire hazard. The Capitol had already burned once, when British troops marched into Washington in the summer of 1814 and put the public buildings to the torch. The interior was gutted, saved from total ruin only by a sudden thunderstorm that drowned the flames.
The memory of that fire never left Washington, and no one wanted a great dome of dry timber sitting over the restored halls of Congress. When Thomas Ustick Walter, the fourth Architect of the Capitol, argued for iron, he was arguing for a building that could never be made to burn again. Walter proposed to tear down the little wooden dome and replace it with one more than twice its height, a dome to rival St. Peter’s in Rome and St.
Paul’s in London, but built of cast iron. He designed not one dome but two, a dome within a dome. An inner shell visible from the rotunda floor and a taller outer shell rising above it, braced together by a hidden framework of iron ribs. When finished, the structure would weigh nearly nine million pounds and rise some 288 feet from the ground to the top of the statue above it.
The work was overseen in its early years by Montgomery Meigs, an officer of the Army Corps of Engineers, who answered to the Secretary of War. In the mid-1850s, that secretary was a senator from Mississippi named Jefferson Davis. The construction of the great temple of the Union passed for a time through the hands of the man who would soon resign from the Senate, leave the Union, and become president of the Confederate States of America. The iron was cast at a foundry in New York.
Thousands of individual castings, many of them unique, were matched to their exact place in the design and shipped down to Washington to be lifted and fitted like pieces of the largest puzzle ever assembled in America. The raising of the iron began in 1856. Through the center of the growing dome, the builders erected a great mast, a central derrick. From its top, long arms reached out over the ring of iron below.
Heavy castings were hoisted from the ground by ropes wound on drums, turned by the hand and muscle of workmen or by horses walking in a circle far below. Piece by piece, the iron was lifted up the inside of the dome, swung out over the edge, and bolted into place by men standing on scaffolds hundreds of feet in the air. Ring by ring, the dome grew upward and inward. It was slow, dangerous, and brutally exposed.
Castings heavy and awkward could crush a man against the iron in an instant or carry him off the scaffold entirely. The work went on through Washington summers, when the sun turned the iron into a griddle, and through winters, when ice made every plank treacherous. There were no safety lines, no harnesses, no hard hats. A man’s own footing was all that stood between him and the long fall to the marble floor far below.
In 1861, the country broke apart. The southern states walked out of the Union, and Washington became an armed camp almost overnight. Soldiers poured into the city, and the Capitol itself was pressed into the service of the war. Its grand new halls became a barracks where soldiers slept in rows.
The basement became a bakery turning out thousands of loaves of bread a day for the army. Parts of it became a hospital for the wounded. A wounded soldier lying on his back in the rotunda could look straight up through the open iron and watch the workmen setting the next ring of the dome against the sky. There is a popular story that President Lincoln, in the darkest days of the war, personally ordered the work to continue as a deliberate symbol that the Union would go on.
It is a beautiful story, and it is not what happened. When the war broke out, the natural thing would have been to stop. But the contract to supply and erect the iron work had already been let in 1860 to a New York foundry called James Fowler Kirtland and Company, at a fixed price of seven cents a pound complete and put up. The foundry had already cast and shipped more than a million pounds of iron to Washington.
When government funds grew uncertain, the contractor faced a choice: stop and let the delivered iron sit exposed to the weather and rust into ruin, or keep building. To protect its own investment, the firm pressed on with the work for a time even without being paid. Congress later restored the money, and the work went on properly to its end. Lincoln did not order the dome to rise, but he understood what it had come to mean.
In 1863, he is said to have remarked that if the people saw the capital going on, it would be a sign that the Union meant to go on as well. He did not command the symbol into being. He recognized the symbol that the workmen and the foundry had almost by accident already created. Then came the statue on top, and the most remarkable man in the whole story.
Walter’s design called for a great bronze figure, a woman representing freedom, nearly twenty feet tall and weighing some fifteen thousand pounds. The statue was designed by an American sculptor named Thomas Crawford, working in Rome, and it came to America as a plaster model in several enormous sections. There is a bitter piece of history hidden in that statue. When Crawford first designed the figure, he crowned her head with a soft liberty cap, the ancient symbol reaching back to Rome of a slave who has been granted his freedom.
The man overseeing the Capitol’s construction was still Jefferson Davis, a slaveholder, and he objected. A cap that stood for freed slaves was not something he would permit to crown the capital of a country half of whose wealth was built on slavery. At his insistence, the liberty cap was struck from the design and replaced with a crested military helmet ringed with stars and topped by an eagle, which the Statue of Freedom wears to this day. The future president of the Confederacy personally had the symbol of emancipation removed from the Statue of Freedom.
A few years later, that same statue was cast in bronze by the hands of an enslaved craftsman named Philip Reed. The casting was done at a foundry outside Washington run by a self-taught sculptor named Clark Mills, who owned slaves. Mills had bought Reed years before in Charleston, South Carolina for $1,200, and Reed had become an extraordinarily skilled foundry worker. When the time came to take the plaster model apart so it could be cast, the story handed down is that an Italian workman who claimed to know how refused to reveal his method unless paid a great deal more money.
It was Philip Reed who studied the problem and solved it, devised the way to separate the sections cleanly, and then supervised the long, hot, dangerous work of casting the Statue of Freedom in bronze, section by section, in the fires of the foundry. On April 16, 1862, Lincoln signed the act that ended slavery in the District of Columbia. Philip Reed became a free man. He lived on in Washington, working as a skilled plasterer and craftsman in the city he had helped to adorn.
For a long time, his name was almost entirely forgotten, left out of the histories that remembered the architects and the presidents. Only in recent years has the country begun to set down in the official record that the Statue of Freedom was cast by the hand of a man who had been enslaved. When the last bronze section of the Statue of Freedom was lifted to the top of the dome on December 2, 1863, the man who had cast her was no longer a slave. Freedom went up over the capital, and the enslaved craftsman who had made her possible had by then been given his own.
That day, the cannons fired their salute, and the forts ringing Washington answered gun for gun, a circle of thunder around the rising dome. The rest of the great dome was finished in the years just after the war. By 1866, the whole vast double shell was closed, crowned, and painted. On March 4, 1865, with the Statue of Freedom standing new at the summit, Abraham Lincoln stood on the east front of the Capitol and gave his second inaugural address, the short and aching speech ending with the words about malice toward none and charity for all.
Behind him and above him rose the finished dome, standing whole at last over a Union that had, against every expectation, gone on. Six weeks later, Lincoln was dead, and his body lay in state in the rotunda, directly beneath the new iron dome. Inside that dome, near the end of the war, an Italian immigrant painter named Constantino Brumidi lay on his back on a scaffold and painted an enormous fresco across the concave iron, a swirling vision of the first president rising into the heavens. Brumidi had come to America from Italy as a political refugee, a trained fresco painter who had once worked inside the Vatican.
He gave the rest of his life to the Capitol, and years later, still high on a scaffold along the rotunda wall, he lost his grip and nearly fell to his death, never fully recovering. The dome has stood ever since, scraped, mended, and repainted many times. Not many years ago it was taken down to bare metal and restored crack by crack so it might stand for another century. But it has never come down and it has never been replaced.
The iron you see today is in its bones the very iron those wartime workmen hung. The single most recognizable image of the American Republic was built with none of the machines we would now think the job required, with a single mast and rope and horses walking in a circle below, with the hands of the enslaved and the immigrant and the unnamed, all working together on the same iron. And the Statue of Freedom that Philip Reed cast still stands at the very top, looking east toward the rising sun, so that the first light of every morning strikes her bronze face before it touches anything else in the city.
