A vivid imagination can people this hall with ghosts. Here some of the fiercest forensic battles were fought in early days over protective tariffs, internal improvements, and, above all, negro slavery. Here it was that Randolph’s piping voice denounced the Northern “dough-faces,” and here Wilmot launched his historic proviso. Here Alexander H. Stephens made his last effort to resuscitate the moribund Whig party, while Abraham Lincoln listened to his argument from a seat on the same side of the chamber. Here John Quincy Adams drew upon himself the fire of an incensed opposition by championing the people’s right to petition Congress, and here he fell to the floor a dying paralytic. Here John Marshall, the greatest of our Chief Justices, administered the oath of office to two early Presidents. And here it was that Henry Clay, as Speaker, delivered his address of welcome to Lafayette as the guest of the nation, and listened with becoming gravity to the Marquis’s response--which, as it afterward appeared, owed its excellent English to the fact that Clay had composed it for the most part himself.
The conversion of the hall from its former to its present uses was at the instance of the late Senator Morrill of Vermont, who procured legislation permitting every State in the Union to contribute two statues of distinguished citizens to this temple of fame. No restriction having been placed on the sizes of the figures, one result of his well-meant effort is a grotesque array of pigmies and giants, some of the personages biggest in life being most diminutive in effigy, while others of comparatively insignificant stature are here given massive proportions. Most of the notables thus immortalized are persons with whose names we associate a story. Here stand, for example, Ethan Allen as he may have looked when demanding the surrender of Fort Ticonderoga “in the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress”; Charles Carroll, who wrote Carrollton after his name so that the servants of the King, when sent to hang him for signing the Declaration, would know where to find him; sturdy John Stark, who snapped his fingers at Congress and whipped the British at Bennington in his own fashion; Muhlenberg, the patriot parson, throwing back his gown at the close of his sermon and standing forth as a Continental soldier; and fiery Jim Shields, who once challenged Lincoln to a duel, but was laughed out of it when, arriving on the field, he found his adversary already there, mowing the tall grass with a cutlass to make the fighting easier!