Capitol to honor slaves who helped build it

The statue crowning the U.S. Capitol is called “Freedom.” Yet it was a black slave who figured out how to coax apart the 19 1/2-foot, 15,000-pound plaster statue so it could be cast in bronze and rejoined atop the dome.

Slaves, in fact, helped build much of the building and grounds of Congress, their owners earning $5 a month for their work. Ed Hotaling, a retired TV reporter in Washington, was among the first to widely publicize this in a report in 2000.

Following Hotaling’s lead, a task force is planning a permanent memorial to the hundreds of slaves who helped build the Capitol from the late 1700s until the mid-1800s. The group will make recommendations to House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, president pro tempore of the Senate.

The final cost and form of the memorial is still undetermined. It could be a site on the Capitol grounds or a living memorial such as an annual traditional African ceremony to honor the slaves.

“I don’t think the story of the Capitol would be fully told until we have something depicting the lives of the people who helped build it,” says Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a student leader during the civil rights movement. Lewis and J.C. Watts, a Republican former member of Congress from Oklahoma, set up the task force.

Currie Ballard, a historian at Langston University in Oklahoma and a task force member who favors a living memorial, says it is fitting that the effort also inform people about the country’s African American heritage.

“It’s so apropos that America says, ‘Yes, a wrong has been committed, and let’s educate people that black people have made a significant contribution to America,’ ” Ballard says.

Slavery in Washington was different from slavery in the rural South, says Walter Hill, senior archivist and African American history specialist with the National Archives. Washington households had smaller groups of slaves, eight or nine, and the men and women often were skilled artisans. Owners hired out their slaves to earn money.

In the late 1700s, when a federal commission began planning to build the Capitol, it hired slaves to work alongside free black and white workers. The idea was to keep free workers from complaining about their conditions by bringing in competition, says historian Bob Arnebeck, an expert on the construction of the Capitol.

Decades later, Congress decided it wanted a Statue of Freedom placed atop a new Capitol dome and commissioned Thomas Crawford, an American sculptor who lived in Rome, to create it.

Washington-area sculptor Clark Mills was hired to cast the statue – which arrived in five plaster parts from Italy – into bronze.

Mills’ foundry foreman first put the plaster pieces together for exhibition, according to the Architect of the Capitol, but demanded more money to take it apart for the final casting. Mills refused and instead put Philip Reid in charge of the casting.

Reid was about 42, small in stature and respected for his work, according to C.R. Gibbs, a Washington historian. While working on the statue from 1860 to 1862, he figured out that by hooking a rope into an iron eye on its crown and instructing men to gently pull on it, the statue would come apart in its original sections, according to records at the Capitol.

Reid and others then were able to cast the parts in bronze.

In 1863, a year after President Lincoln freed Washington’s slaves, the bronze parts were hoisted atop the Capitol and assembled.

Some records indicate Reid played a role in that operation, too, although he would have been free by then.

Hotaling discovered the history of the slaves while researching the 200th anniversary of the Capitol.