Images

John C. Calhoun, shortly before his death, photographed by Mathew Brady, 1849.

Henry Clay, toward the end of his long congressional career, photo by Julian Vannerson or Montgomery P. Simons, 1848.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, engraving based on an oil painting by Alonzo Chappel, published by Johnson Fry & Co, 1872. Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) became famous in 1852 with the publication of her...

Portrait of Sarah Hopkins Bradford (1818-1912), who wrote the first biography of Harriet Tubman, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (1869) and a follow-up volume, Harriet Tubman, Moses of her People...

Portrait of Henry Clay (1777-1852) as Speaker of the House, painting by Matthew Harris Jouett, 1818. Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky.

Representative James Tallmadge, Jr. (1778-1853) of New York, whose 'Tallmadge Amendment' sparked the controversy that led to the Missouri Compromise of 1820. By Jeremiah Nims, 1825. New York Public Library.

Harriet Tubman in failing health. Restored version of a photograph taken in 1911. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Former slave, abolitionist, and famous conductor on the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman, cropped from the original photograph by Horatio Seymour Squyer, 1885. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

This map illustrates the situation in the United States n 1850, as the country faced growing sectional tension over the expansion of slavery into new territories gained from the Mexican-American War...

Albert Sidney Johnston (1803-1862), a colonel in the US Army during the Utah War (1857-58). Photo by Samuel C. Mills. National Archives.