General Grant and His Family 1868 neutral christmas the regimental colors arranged with

the regimental colors arranged with the staged bravado of a republic discovering it could project force across two oceans at once

The Military and Historical Portrait Group

The date itself is the artifact's argument: America as a word older than its republic

Captain Wilkes 1862 — a portrait of the Union officer whose seizure of Confederate envoys from the British mail packet Trent the previous November had nearly dragged Lincoln's beleaguered republic into a second war

19th Century — a presidential portrait rendered in the gaunt

General Grant and His Family 1868 neutral christmas the regimental colors arranged withGeneral Grant and His Family 1868 a domestic portrait of the Union's foremost soldier in the year he traded the field for the ballot, posed beside Julia and the children as the country measured its scarred reconstruction against the steady, unshowy gaze of the man about to inherit it. About the Source Bella Frye sources artifacts from the great American historical archive the Library of Congress, the National Archives, regional historical societies,