Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi 1871, not finishing the massive sandstone statue until 1880. In 1871, he made his first trip to the United States, where he pitched the idea of a massive statue gifted from the French to the Americans in honor of the centennial of American independence. The idea, which had first been broached to him in 1865 by his friend Édouard René de Laboulaye, resulted in the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor. After years of work and fundraising, the statue was inaugurated in 1886. During this period, Bartholdi also sculpted a number of monuments for American cities, such as a
Statue of Freedom the new cast-iron dome, which was authorized in 1855. Walter's drawing showed the outline of a statue representing the Goddess of Liberty; Crawford proposed instead an allegorical figure of "Freedom Triumphant in War and Peace". Crawford was commissioned to design "Freedom" in 1854 and executed the plaster model for the statue in his studio in Rome. Mississippian U.S. Senator and U.S. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis (who would later become President of the Confederacy) was in charge of the Capitol construction and its decorations. According to David Hackett Fischer in his book "Liberty and Freedom", Crawford's statue was... Davis sent