The Liberty Cap: Symbol of American Freedom

This soft cap evolved as a combination of two earlier symbolic head coverings. The peaked red Phrygian cap was worn in present-day Turkey as early as 800 B.C. and was seen as a mark of free men in classical Greece.

The American symbolism was derived from the Roman Empire, where the Roman goddess Libertas, or Liberty, was depicted carrying a Roman conical cap called a pileus, often on the tip of a spear. Romans would also place a pileus on the head of an emancipated person during the ceremony of manumission, when enslaved people were formally freed.

How was the liberty cap used in early America?

The cap appeared frequently before and during the American Revolution after being introduced as a symbol of the struggle for freedom by Paul Revere. He first depicted the cap on a carved stone obelisk that briefly appeared on the Boston Common for the celebration of the repeal of the Stamp Act. The carvings depict Libertas twice, both times holding a liberty cap. Revere also engraved it twice on his famous silver 1768 Sons of Liberty Bowl that honored 92 members of the Massachusetts House of Representatives who refused to rescind a letter protesting the Townshend Acts (1767), which was a major step leading to the American Revolution.

In a bit of wry wit, Revere also converted Britannia, the personification of Great Britain, into a goddess of liberty in the masthead of the Boston Gazette, where he depicted her holding a liberty cap on a staff as she opens a bird cage.

Another early depiction of the liberty cap in the American British colonies was on the flag of the Philadelphia Light Horse Guards, a company of militia organized prior to the Revolution. While based in Pennsylvania, this company traveled widely to fight in battles including Trenton, Princeton, Brandywine and Germantown.¹

Throughout the colonies, the designs of flags and seals included liberty caps, and the caps were placed atop liberty trees and liberty poles in towns and villages. It was so closely associated with the American Revolution and the new country that emerged from it that the cap was the standard designation for America on French maps.²

The conical cap became more popular later, during the French Revolution, when it was called the "bonnet rouge" and was worn by revolutionaries and widely depicted.

Where does the liberty cap appear in U.S. Capitol art?

One of the places that the liberty cap surprisingly does not appear is on the head of the Statue of Freedom atop the U.S. Capitol Dome. Architect Thomas U. Walter's first drawing for the Dome included Freedom holding a pole with a liberty cap, and Thomas Crawford, the American sculptor commissioned to create the statue, did propose a female figure wearing a liberty cap in his second design. However, the completed statue includes no symbols traditionally associated with freedom or liberty because Captain Montgomery Meigs, who was in charge of the construction of the Capitol extension and new Dome, rightly feared that his superior, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, would not like it.

Davis had previously objected to the liberty cap that Crawford had placed on the head of the central figure in the Senate pediment on the East Front of the Capitol. In a letter dated April 20, 1854, Meigs wrote to Crawford describing Davis's thoughts on the cap, "He says it is the sign of a freedman and that we were always free, not freemen, not slaves just released." At this time when debates over slavery were heated, Secretary Davis, a slave owner himself and future president of the Confederacy, was well informed about the history of the symbol. Despite Davis's objection, Crawford's design was not changed, and the liberty cap can be seen over the Senate entrance today.

Almost two years after seeing the pediment sculpture design, Secretary Davis was shown the photograph of Crawford's second maquette (small preliminary model) for the Dome statue. He again objected to the liberty cap in a letter to Meigs, expressing concern that the cap did not appropriately represent "people who were born free and would not be enslaved." He went on to suggest that a helmet would be an appropriate figure of Armed Freedom but ended his letter by leaving "the matter to the judgment" of Crawford. The sculptor diplomatically created a helmet with a crest of an eagle’s head and feathers, noting that it was "suggested by the costume of our Indian tribes" to replace the traditional liberty cap.

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The cap can be seen in Crawford's "Progress of Civilization" pediment, and in Brumidi’s "relief portrait of Thomas Jefferson with allegorical figures" in H-144.

While Davis expressed reservations about the use of the liberty cap in exterior works of art, he had no objection to artist Constantino Brumidi's use of a figure with a red cap in several locations of the Capitol Building's interior including room H-144.

After Davis's term as secretary of war ended in March 1857, Brumidi continued to paint figures with the cap in his murals throughout the Capitol:

• "Bellona, Roman Goddess of War" lunette in the Brumidi Corridors
• "Telegraph" lunette in room S-211, the Lyndon B. Johnson Room
• "Liberty" in a groin vault of room S-213, the Senate Reception Room
• "Liberty" tondo in the ceiling of room S-216, the President's Room
• "The Apotheosis of George Washington" in the Capitol Rotunda; once in the central group of the fresco (the cover image at top) and once in the "Agriculture" group
• "America and History" in the Rotunda’s Frieze of American History

The cap is found in other places throughout the Capitol as well, including Emanuel Leutze's "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," early marble mantel pieces, Minton tiles, the House bronze doors designed by Crawford and the "Naval Architecture and Commerce" panel of the Amateis Doors.

^1. Lossing, B. J. (1906). Harper's Encyclopædia of United States History from 458 A.D. to 1906. United Kingdom: Harper & brothers.
^2. Korshak, Y. (1987). The Liberty Cap as a Revolutionary Symbol in America and France. Smithsonian Studies in American Art, 1(2), 53–69. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3108944