Why Do Early American Coins Show Liberty's Cap on a Stick?

[Jim_B]

I guess you could call me an amateur coin collector. I don’t collect coins regularly, but if I happen to see something interesting, I may pick it up. My mother may have been the one who got me interested. She had a small coin collection.

Anyways, there is something I could never figure out. Before presidents were put on our coins, there was a law that stated there must always be an image of Lady Liberty on it. Lady Liberty is often represented in various ways. Sometimes she is shown wearing a “liberty cap”. I understand that part. I once called a local library and they told me it was derived from the normal dress of some slaves in classical times or something.

But one thing has always perplexed me. Why Liberty sometime shown with her liberty cap on a thin pole? Shouldn’t she be wearing it?

If you want to see what I am talking about, some examples follow: here, here, and here you see a larger image of it. And in this one she seems to be holding the pole at a different angle.

Does anyone know why she is depicted doing this?

[Nametag]

Liberty props

Liberty Pole and Cap
The liberty cap is a soft, felt cap, sometimes hung on a pole and accompanying its (usually female) owner, sometimes capping the owner’s head. The meaning behind the cap derives from its use before the Roman Empire, when similar felt caps were worn by liberated slaves of Troy and Asia Minor to cover their shorn heads; the cap therefore once “symbolized emancipation from personal servitude rather than constitutional political liberty” (Fryd, 109). The caps are sometimes referred to by their Latin name, pilleus liberatis, and they became a significant accessory for the French in depictions of the French Revolution. As for the pole, “the cap was joined to the pole as a symbol of freedom when Salturnius conquered Rome in 263 B.C. where, in a burst of inspiration, he raised the cap on a pikestaff to show that the slaves who joined his fight would be freed” (Fox, 4.)

[tomndebb]

In the period just prior to the War for Independence, one of the rallying ikons of the Sons of Liberty and related groups was a Liberty Cap set atop a flagpole. My guess would be that the images on the coins were meant to connect Lady Liberty directly to the movement for independence by recalling those flag poles, rather than relying on the more generalized image of “Liberty,” herself.

There is a discussion of Liberty Caps on this Flags of the World page.

[Cillasi]

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/LIBERTY/origins.html

Another site with some interesting information.

[Johanna]

The Great Seal of Virginia (where I live) has a remarkable depiction of Lady Liberty, Phrygian cap and all. Take a look at her, standing triumphal with bared breast, foot planted atop the supine figure of a man lying on the ground:
http://www.vacomrev.com/images/Seal%20of%20Virginia%20Side%201.gif

And compare with the Tantric Yoga image of Goddess Kali, who agrees with Virginia’s Liberty in all the above respects (except for the Phrygian cap):

Kali standing on top of her husband’s corpse represents the esoteric supremacy of divine female power (Shakti), without which the god is a corpse (“Without Shakti, Shiva is shava [a corpse]”). Shakti is the energy of the god, the power of all existence. The Tantric union of the two of them together engenders the universe.