Abstract
As Congress did its share to tear the country apart during the 1850s, a bisectional coalition pushed for the addition of ornate House and Senate wings to the Capitol. By December 1863, when Thomas Crawford's Statue of Freedom was hoisted atop the new cast-iron dome—innovative for both the architect Thomas U. Walter's design and the army engineer Montgomery Meigs's construction methods—the project's main patron, Jefferson Davis, was leading a rebellion against the government headquartered in the building he nurtured. Davis never returned to see that Crawford had indeed crowned the Statue of Freedom with an odd eagle's head cap, devised after Davis resisted a liberty cap, a symbol of freed slaves. Guy Gugliotta applies his skills as a political journalist to the “puzzle” of Davis and Robert Toombs cooperating with William Seward and Stephen Douglas to transform the cramped, ill-functioning Capitol into the embodiment of republican majesty (p. 37). Even as he emerged as a dangerous sectionalist, Mississippi senator Davis worked with Virginia senator R. M. T. Hunter, later the Confederate secretary of state, and with the Whig presidents Zachary Taylor (Davis's former father-in-law) and Millard Fillmore to defeat mundane renovation schemes. While Franklin Pierce's secretary of war, Davis found a like-minded protégé in Meigs, a fellow West Pointer assigned as supervisor when Walter had difficulty coping with Congress's meddling. Meigs, whose egotism matched his inventiveness and rectitude, ran up costs on the Capitol and the Washington Aqueduct, which the engineer simultaneously oversaw. Determined to have first-rate craftsmen, Meigs recruited immigrant artisans such as the fresco painter Constantino Brumidi and protected them amid Know-Nothing party insistence that real Americans work on the Capitol.
Published Version
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