Isabel Wilkerson

Isabel Wilkerson Instagram – Few symbols of America are as iconic and instantly recognizable as the Statue of Liberty, and yet many Americans may not know of its origins and connection — like so much of American history — to slavery and the Civil War.
The statue was conceived by a French abolitionist who had been watching from across the Atlantic as the Union fought the Confederacy in the costliest war on American soil.
After the Union won and ended slavery in 1865, the president of the French Anti-Slavery Society, Edouard Laboulaye, proposed a colossal monument as a gift to the United States from the people of France to celebrate the U.S. centennial and the triumph of freedom that the Union victory represented.
The abolitionist enlisted sculptor Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi to design it. The sculptor, in turn, enlisted engineer Gustav Eiffel, years before he built the Eiffel Tower, to devise a framework that could withstand the winds of New York Harbor.
What is less known is that early models of the statue gave greater prominence to what the abolitionists intended the statue to represent.
Renderings from the 1870s show that Bartholdi envisioned the statue holding broken chains in her left hand.
The Frenchmen used those images to seek U.S support for the pedestal the statue needed— just as the country was moving away from the lessons of the Civil War and headed toward Jim Crow.
By the time the statue was dedicated in 1886, the broken chains and shackle that the sculptor originally intended had been replaced with a tablet inscribed “July IV MDCCLXXVI” (July 4, 1776), the date we commemorate today.
Bartholdi managed to keep this original element in a less visible location: He placed a shackle and two broken chains at the Statue of Liberty’s feet.
Thus the statue, humbling and magnificent, is a study in contradictions — a woman of classical European form conceived in the aftermath of the American Civil War, erected on a pedestal on the eve of Jim Crow, when women and Black citizens had few rights and with the very spark that led to her creation — the end of slavery — virtually hidden in the chains beneath the robes at her feet. How interwoven we are as a nation. | Posted on 05/Jul/2025 00:10:32