Models of this piece were crafted in Florence against the backdrop of the recent Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire, and embodied neoclassical "archetypes of whiteness," in the words of Kirk Savage (Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America, 1997), as American race theorists imagined the ideal human form. On the one hand, proslavery polemicists like the Virginian George Fitzhugh regularly invoked the glories of slave societies of the greater Mediterranean World-"the ruins of Thebes, of Nineveh, and of Balbec, the obelisks and pyramids of Egypt, the lovely and time-defying relics of Roman and Grecian art, the Doric column and the Gothic spire," to buttress the chattel principle's alleged connection with high civilization (Sociology for the South, or the Failure of Free Society, 1854). ...as the historian Margaret Malamud has argued, African Americans in the nineteenth century drew upon the western classics to debunk the myriad myths of Black inferiority (African Americans and The Classics: Antiquity, Abolition and Activism, 2016). The politics of transatlantic abolition imbued Story's art, and conceivably helped shape his deviation from what the abolitionist novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe called "the cold elegance of Greek lines" ("Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl," 1863).