The foundry yard sits east of the city, and a man moves among the plaster sections of a colossal figure. Steam rises from the casting pit. His hands know the clay before his eyes finish reading it.
It is 1860.
He does not just labor in a bronze foundry. He solves the problem that stops the work, reading the seams of a plaster model that no one else on the site can separate, and finding where the sections must part.
He does not just find the seam. He keeps the entire casting on schedule while enslaved, doing skilled foundry work under the direction of a sculptor who, by the record, had left the crucial method unexplained.
He does not just serve one project. He helps raise, section by section, the bronze that will crown the dome of the United States Capitol, a nineteen-foot Statue of Freedom, cast in the years the country moved toward breaking apart over the question of whether men like him could be owned.
He does not just build the figure of Freedom. He lives, during the casting, as a man legally held as property, so that the emblem of liberty rose on the labor of one who did not yet possess it himself.
His Spark of Liberty was a hand that shaped freedom before it held it.
The record here is documentary, not sentimental. Payroll accounts for the Capitol work show wages paid for foundry labor, and where the worker was enslaved, those wages went to the man who claimed ownership. The federal government paid for the days worked, including Sundays, when the plaster model had to be separated to allow the bronze to be cast in parts. There is a specific irony in the ledger, plainly stated by the surviving accounts: the labor on a Statue of Freedom was performed, in part, by a man who was not free, and payment for his hands passed to another.
Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”
He was born around 1820 in South Carolina, according to the accounts that survive, and was held as an enslaved man by Clark Mills, a self-taught sculptor known for equestrian bronze work. Mills operated a foundry outside Washington, D.C., and it was there that the sections of Thomas Crawford’s Statue of Freedom were cast for the Capitol. Crawford had designed the figure; the plaster model was shipped from Italy and arrived in pieces.
By the account recorded in government documents and later histories, the plaster model of Freedom needed to be taken apart so molds could be made and the bronze poured in sections. An Italian workman who understood the model reportedly refused to reveal how the pieces should be separated, holding out for higher pay. The problem fell to the foundry. According to those accounts, the enslaved man in Mills’s shop solved it, determining where the plaster should be parted by using a pulley and studying the joints. This detail is repeated in reputable histories drawn from the payroll evidence, though the fuller drama around it rests on secondhand telling and should be read with that caution.
The Statue of Freedom was hoisted onto the Capitol dome in stages, with the final section set in December 1863. By then the man whose hands had helped cast it had reason to be free: the District of Columbia Emancipation Act of April 1862 ended slavery in the capital, compensating slaveholders rather than the enslaved. He was among those the act reached. He remained in the Washington area afterward, working, by the surviving records, as a plasterer, and he is documented in later census and directory listings as a free man of that trade.
Much of what is known about him comes from the Capitol payrolls and from the research of later historians who traced those entries. The bare facts are firm: he was enslaved, he was paid nothing directly, his skilled labor helped raise the bronze Freedom that still stands above the Capitol. The stirring particulars owe something to retelling, and honesty requires marking that line. What does not require hedging is the shape of the thing itself, a Statue of Freedom completed with the hands of a man who was owned while he made it.
His name was Philip Reid.
Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon
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