The Leader and His Battles: Ulysses S. Grant, Lieutenant General USA, 1866 canvas_Washington_DC when secession was named usurpation

when secession was named usurpation and every farm boy who answered the call was inscribed into the ledger of a republic suddenly arguing with itself in rifle-fire

a portrait freighted with the weariness of Reconstruction's unfinished arithmetic

The Underground Passage at City Hall — a subterranean tableau from the IRT's earliest years

and rose gardens spilling across Washington Park — a city of lumber barons and rain-slick streetcars cataloged in linen and real-photo postcards from the rail-and-roses era

reached back for the founder's likeness as both compass and alibi

The Leader and His Battles: Ulysses S. Grant, Lieutenant General USA, 1866 canvas_Washington_DC when secession was named usurpationThe Leader and His Battles: Ulysses S. Grant, Lieutenant General USA, 1866 a commemorative lithograph issued in the first uneasy summer after Appomattox, cataloguing the campaigns of the man whose stubborn arithmetic ground the rebellion to dust and who now stood, three stars on his shoulder, as the Republic's quiet inheritor. About the Source Bella Frye sources artifacts from the great American historical archive the Library of Congress, the National