Transcript
Noon
December 2, 1863
The U.S. Capitol December 2, 1863
Noon, December 2, 1863. Atop the new Capitol dome, workmen haul up the last piece of a bronze statue. Her name is Freedom. This is her head.
A battery below fired thirty-five guns, one for each state. That count included eleven states at war with Washington. Then the forts around the city answered.
Her sculptor first gave her a liberty cap, the kind freed slaves wore in ancient Rome. The Secretary of War objected.
Jefferson Davis …its history renders it inappropriate to a people who were born free and would not be enslaved.
She got a helmet instead. By the day she rose, Davis was president of the Confederacy.
She was cast at Clark Mills's foundry, outside the city. One of the men who helped cast her was a man Mills owned: Philip Reid.
In April 1862 Congress freed about three thousand enslaved people in the capital. Reid was one. Mills filed a claim for him. Fifteen hundred dollars.
When Freedom rose, the man who had her cap taken off was leading a rebellion. The man who helped cast her was free.
Between 1844 and 1877 the country changed in a hundred ways. Which changes mattered most?
A Wooden Dome
1844–1866
In 1844 the Capitol wore a low wooden dome under copper. Samuel Morse had just tapped "What hath God wrought" to Baltimore.
The flag had twenty-six stars. Thirteen of those states allowed slavery. Thirteen did not.
In 1855 and 1856 the wooden dome came down. Its replacement: cast iron, nearly nine million pounds of it.
When Lincoln took the oath in 1861, the new dome was a stump with a crane on top.
That spring, up to four thousand soldiers bunked in the Capitol. Ovens in the basement could bake sixteen thousand loaves a day.
In May 1861 Washington stopped paying for the dome. The contractor kept building anyway.
Legend gives Lincoln the credit. The records say the company had 1.3 million pounds of iron sitting on the grounds.
By Lincoln's second inauguration, the outside was finished.
That April, his coffin lay in the Rotunda beneath it.
Same building, 1844 and 1877. In between, a war. The exam asks our question in its own words.
COMPARE · WEIGH
Put two moments side by side. See what changed and what didn't. Then decide which change was biggest, and say why.
The Climb
May 1865
May 1865. The war is all but over. A hundred and eighty feet up, a painter named Constantino Brumidi is still at work on the sky.
Between the domes, 365 steps climb through the iron. Four landings, and on each, one plate with two faces. It's 1865, but the plates can see ahead to 1877.
Swing each plate. See what changed, and what stayed. At the top, you'll choose the change that mattered most.
Two Standards
1863–1877
Whatever you chose, a strong answer does two things. It makes a claim. Then it admits what the claim leaves out.
The war settled two questions. A state could not leave the Union. A person could not be property.
It left two open. How far federal power should reach. And who counted as a full citizen.
Thirteen days before Freedom rose, Lincoln had said what the war was for.
Abraham Lincoln that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—
Americans kept arguing about what that meant. Eleven years to the day after Lincoln was shot, Frederick Douglass spoke a mile east of the dome.
Freed people raised $16,242 for the statue behind him. The first five dollars came from Charlotte Scott, her first earnings in freedom.
Frederick Douglass Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent;
Frederick Douglass but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult,
Frederick Douglass he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.
Two standards, and he tells you which one he's using. That's complexity, done by a master.
Not everyone remembered the war the same way. In 1861 Alexander Stephens called slavery the Confederacy's cornerstone.
In 1868 he published a book arguing the war had been about the Constitution and the rights of states.
In April 1877, federal troops stopped guarding the last Republican governments in the South. The amendments stayed in the Constitution.
In the 1950s and 1960s, a new generation used them to win civil rights in court and in Congress. Historians call it the Second Reconstruction.
Freedom Faces East
1863 → 1877
Back to noon, December 2, 1863.
One reporter noticed the date: four years earlier, to the day, Virginia had hanged John Brown. …the coincidence is worthy of remark.
A writer at the New York Tribune thought of the man who helped cast her. Was there a prophecy in that moment when the slave became the artist, and with rare poetic justice, reconstructed the beautiful symbol of freedom for America?
Freedom faces east, over the Capitol's front door. The country was about to turn west.
In 1877 the Washington Monument was still a stump.
Mark Twain It has the aspect of a factory chimney with the top broken off.
Their novel gave the next era its name: the Gilded Age. Railroads, wars on the Plains, factories and cities. That's Period 6.
Philip Reid spent the rest of his life in Washington: he married, had a son, and worked as a plasterer. He died in 1892. In 1844 the law called him property. By 1877 it called him a citizen.