Is That a Phrygian Cap or Are You Just Glad to See Me?

One thing I learned last year and am still working through is that a Phrygian cap isn’t the same as a Liberty Cap, but became the same in the 1790s.

In classical Greek and Roman cultures, the Phrygian cap and Phrygian helmet were markers of someone from greater Anatolia, or in general east of the civilized world. The Phrygian cap was a soft cloth cap with a bulge at the top that flopped forward. Lots of statuary and other artwork from that ancient period used the floppy cap as a sign of exoticism.

The Romans had another type of cloth cap with symbolic meaning: the pileus. Made of felt, it was used in the ceremony of freeing a slave. This cap was conical and symmetric, without that bulge. The pileus thus came to symbolize liberty in general, especially when it was held up by a spear.

That’s how the pileus appears in many eighteenth-century pictures of Liberty, and in British (and British-American) pictures of Britannica, since of course the British constitution provided the most liberty.

William Hogarth caricatured John Wilkes in 1763 as holding a spear and domed cap helpfully labeled “LIBERTY.” Some analyses say contemporaries would have recognized that thing on the spear as a chamber pot, not a cap. I’m not sure, but it definitely doesn’t look like cloth.

The allegorical woman on the masthead ornament of Edes and Gill’s Boston Gazette held a spear and pileus, as did figures on the 1774 and 1781 cuts for Isaiah Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy.

Paul Revere engraved such figures many more times: on the picture of the Stamp Act repeal obelisk, in the frames around his portraits of Samuel Adams and John Hancock, and so on. When he adapted the London print “Britannia in Distress” into “America in Distress” and “A Certain Cabinet Junto,” he transferred the spear and pileus from Britannia’s arm to America’s.

In those years, the object was called the “Cap of Liberty.” The phrase “Liberty Cap” appeared in American newspapers only once before the Revolutionary War, in a 3 Feb 1774 New-York Journal article signed “An English Yeoman, with his Liberty Cap on.”

When you hold a cloth cap up on a spear, the top doesn’t naturally flop over. All those Liberty Caps are conical or in the shape we’d now call bulletheads. (Bullets were spherical then, remember.)

During the French Revolution, fashion and art merged the Cap of Liberty, the bonnets rouges of a 1675 anti-tax revolt in France, and the Phrygian cap. After a short while, iconographic Liberty Caps were mostly red, and they all had that little bulge flopping over. Even when they were on spears!

(Back when I wrote about rattlesnakes, I found an image of the Continental Congress’s Board of War and Ordnance seal. It showed that the flying snake originally had a rattle, though that detail has disappeared in later U.S. Army redesigns. Now I wonder if the Liberty Cap on that original seal had the bulge of the Phrygian cap, or if that was a later addition. Alas, the image from 1779 is no longer on the web.)