• The model for the Statue of Liberty (i.e., the woman who posed for the sculptor, or whose portrait the sculptor used) was a black woman.
• The Statue of Liberty was intended to depict a woman with features representative of the "black race."
• The Statue of Liberty was created as a tribute to black Civil War soldiers.
• The Statue of Liberty was intended to symbolize the end of slavery in the USA.

• In a book called "The Journey of The Songhai People", according to Dr. Jim Haskins, a member of the National Education Advisory Committee of the Liberty-Ellis Island Committee, professor of English at the University of Florida, and prolific black author, points out that what stimulated the original idea for that 151 foot statue in the harbor. He says that the idea for the creation of the statue initially was the part that black soldiers played in the ending of black African bondage in the United States.
  On his web page, Dr. Haskins explains that he wrote no book with the title The Journey of the Songhai People, nor did he ever state that the statue was presented by the people of France to the people of the United States to honor the role of black soldiers in the Civil War.
• It was widely known then that it was black soldiers who played the pivotal role in winning the war, and this gift would be a tribute to their prowess.
  It is undeniable that blacks did indeed fight in the Civil War (on both sides), and that some of them were awarded high honors for their bravery in battle. However, black soldiers were not allowed to take part in combat until the final stages of the war, and estimates place their numbers in the Union Army at about 130,000 out of 2,100,000 men total (about 12% of the total). While this figure is hardly insignificant, claiming blacks played the "pivotal role in winning the war" is a bit of an exaggeration. And whatever blacks contributed to the war effort, even today, with our advantages of more than a hundred years' hindsight and access to tens of thousands of books and other sources that collectively chronicle the Civil War in almost minute-by-minute detail, the average American is little aware that blacks took active part in the conflict or is familiar with their specific contributions. (One scarcely glimpsed any black soldiers in film depictions of the Civil War until the story of the war's first all-black volunteer company was portrayed in 1989's Glory, for example.) The level of knowledge about this subject was far less in the era immediately following the war, when communications systems were rudimentary (telephone, radio, and recorded sound did not yet exist), comprehensive accounts of the war had not been prepared (even the participants knew little of what took place outside of their direct experience), and when the still-widespread prejudice against blacks meant that their role in the war was minimized or ignored (the war may have ended slavery, but it by no means resulted in the white population's acceptance of blacks as their social equals — the U.S. Army itself remained segregated until after World War II). The notion that over a century ago, in a country thousands of miles away, details of the Civil War unfamiliar to the people who actually fought it were "widely known" is too much to accept without substantial supporting documentation.
• http://www.snopes.com/history/american/statueofliberty.asp

Statue of Liberty History

In 1886, The Statue of Liberty Monument was a given to the United States from France to celebrate the friendship the two endured during the American Revolution. The Statue of Liberty has over the years has symbolized the freedom and the democracy of the United States.

Frederic Auguste Bartholdi was commissioned to design the Statue Sculpture with the completion date of 1876 to celebrate American’s centennial of the American Declaration of Independence. The Statue of Liberty was to be a joint effort between the United States and France. France would build and design the Statue part and United States would complete the pedestal that would hold Lady Liberty. Bartholdi needed an engineer to address the structural issues with designing the sculpture so Alexandre Gustave Eiffel (Eiffel Tower) provided assistance with getting the Statue to stand upright.

http://www.statueoflibertytickets.com/Statue-Of-Liberty/?show=history