In the early 1870s, inspired by the abolition of slavery and the Union victory in the American Civil War, French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi seized upon an idea. He would build a monumental gift for the United States, a gesture of friendship from a country that had helped secure its independence.

When Bartholdi visited the United States to gather support for the project, he identified Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor as the ideal site. It was right at the mouth of a major port, and was federally owned “land common to all the states.”

The neoclassical statue was designed in the image of Libertas, the Roman goddess of freedom, raising a torch and bearing a tabula ansata, representing law. Bartholdi toyed with the idea of having the statue hold a broken chain, but feared such an explicit reference to slavery might be controversial. (The final statue does have a subtle chain at her feet.)

In 1875, the project was announced and fundraising began, led by French politician Édouard René de Laboulaye. Before the statue’s design had been finalized, Bartholdi built the head and torch-bearing right arm and put them on display at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and the Paris World’s Fair to drum up support for the project.