James G. Birney 1844 Size:18x24 ledgered in the ornamental confidence

ledgered in the ornamental confidence of late-century engraving

A portrait drawn from the years when Clay's voice still moved the Senate and the Union it strained to hold together

2379 captures the working geometry of the Victorian barber's trade — the angles

its prominences and sunspots cataloged with the feverish devotion of an age that watched Venus cross the solar disc and called it scripture

the same hands that hammered copper into a colossus for New York harbor first having shaped a beast from Vosges sandstone

James G. Birney 1844 Size:18x24 ledgered in the ornamental confidenceJames G. Birney 1844 the Liberty Party's standard bearer rendered in the sober campaign portrait register of a third party crusade, his abolitionist candidacy quietly siphoning votes from Henry Clay and tilting the White House toward Polk. A small print, an outsized consequence in the slow burning argument over slavery. About the Source Bella Frye sources artifacts from the great American historical archive the Library of Congress, the National