The National Statuary Hall Collection was born not with the Capitol but in the midst of the Civil War. In 1864, as the conflict entered its final year, Representative Justin S. Morrill of Vermont, a founder of the Republican Party, sponsored a bill authorizing the president to invite each state to commission and send the federal government statues of up to two heroes born in the state. The House had moved out of its first chamber, known for terrible, echoing acoustics, and into the current one. The former chamber, abandoned and in disrepair, was to be fixed up for displaying the statues. President Abraham Lincoln signed the bill into law on July 2.
Given the intensity of war, the statuary project couldn’t have looked very urgent. That same month, the Senate also approved the radical Republicans’ Wade-Davis Reconstruction Bill, with exacting conditions for readmitting the Confederate states to the Union. The war had suspenseful moments ahead, but Congress and the president were already considering how to deal with a defeated white South. Lincoln would soon veto the Wade-Davis bill. To him, it was retributive, not restorative. In the 1864 election, a group of radical Republicans split from Lincoln and ran the Civil War hero John Fremont against him; Morrill, author of the statuary bill, ran on the Lincoln side. A deep division was opening in the national government over proper relations between a victorious United States and the former slave states. What went on in the National Statuary Hall dramatized the resolution of that conflict.
No statue was installed in the hall until 1870. The war was over, Lincoln was dead, Ulysses S. Grant was president, and radical Reconstruction, if not yet a dead letter, was starting to topple when the collection received its first entry: Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island.
Greene was an easy choice. A Continental Army general born in Rhode Island, he oversaw famous battles in the southern theater that brought about U.S. victory in the War of Independence. He was remembered then, and is remembered now, as a great founding-era New Englander, product of the region that, upon winning independence from Britain, began a process of abolishing slavery and becoming the free-state North, in opposition to the slave power of the South.