Liberty Leads the Line

The figure of Liberty is older than the flag. In the 1770s American printmakers and pamphleteers borrowed her from the Roman goddess Libertas, gave her a liberty cap on a pole, and set her beside Columbia as the face of the cause. Here she is placed at the front of a Continental line in 1777, the year the army lost Philadelphia, won Saratoga and marched into Valley Forge, and the year Congress first resolved that the flag would carry thirteen stripes and thirteen stars.

Delacroix painted Liberty Leading the People in 1830, within months of the July Revolution, and it hangs in the Louvre. A woman in a Phrygian cap strides over a barricade with the tricolor in one hand and a musket in the other, a boy with pistols at her side, the dead under her feet, and Notre-Dame in the smoke behind. The picture is a pyramid, and the flag is its point.

Liberty takes the apex in a white gown and red cap with a blue sash, the striped flag streaming above her and a musket in her other hand. A drummer boy crouches at her feet where Delacroix's boy stood. A Continental in a blue coat faced with red shouts at the left, and a frontiersman in a fringed hunting shirt kneels at the right with his rifle. Two dead redcoats lie across the foreground, one in a grenadier's bearskin, and a steeple burns on the horizon under a sky the color of gunsmoke.

The dead are in the front row and the light is the color of smoke. What leads the line is not a person but an idea, which is how the war was won.