1993 photograph of Freedom removed from the dome for restoration. Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

By DCist contributor Julia Langley

When President Obama takes his second oath of office on Monday, he will stand in the shadow of Freedom, Thomas Crawford’s colossal sculpture set atop the dome of the U. S. Capitol Building.

Inaugurated in 1863, Freedom features a woman wearing a feathered helmet and ancient Greek-style dress. In her left hand she holds a wreath and shield. Her right hand rests on a sword. A mash-up between an Indian princess and a classical war goddess, Freedom is a muddle of symbolism that reveals the complexities of American history.

In the mid-1850s Crawford was commissioned to create a sculpture for the new cast iron dome of the U.S. Capitol. Designed by Thomas U. Walter in 1858 and based on the designs of three European cathedral domes—St. Peter’s in Rome, St. Paul’s in London and St. Isaac’s in St. Petersburg—the new dome replaced the original, disproportionate wooden structure.

Crawford’s original concept focused on a figure representing Liberty. In an early design, Crawford presented a statue of a woman wearing a Phrygian cap, the type of soft, brimless hat worn in ancient Rome by freed slaves to indicate their liberated status. Upon seeing Crawford’s model, then Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, objected to the image of the cap. According to art historian Vivian Fryd, Davis felt it was an inappropriate symbol for Americans who had been born free and who would never be enslaved. Davis, a slave-owner who resigned from the Senate in 1861 to become the leader of the Confederacy suggested that the figure wear a helmet, instead. According to Fryd, Davis referred to his idea of the sculpture as “armed Liberty.”

“Armed Liberty,” or Freedom, wears a Roman-style helmet crowned with feathers like an Indian headdress. Since the 16th century, British and American artists used images of Native American women, identified by their feathered headdresses, as allegories for the United States. By the mid-19th century, however, U.S.-Native American relations had been strained by conflict and the policy of Manifest Destiny. Native Americans were removed from their ancestral lands to provide land for American settlers.

Crawford’s completed sculpture—a combination Indian princess/classical goddess/female warrior, reveals the 19th century American conflict between the fantasy of liberation and the reality of subjugation. Perhaps the greatest irony is that the Capitol’s Freedom was cast in bronze—by slaves.

Freedom—the image at the apex of the Capitol building created to represent liberty but clothed in symbols of war and completed by enslaved workers—is an important indicator of the many guises of the U.S. government and the country’s history. As the nation’s first African-American president takes his second oath of office on Monday, it’s worth a look up to see from whence Freedom comes.