The Peacemakers

The meeting in this picture happened in late March 1865, on a steamer called the River Queen moored at City Point, Virginia. Lincoln had come down to Grant's headquarters, and by chance Sherman arrived from the Carolinas at the same moment, so the President sat with his two top generals and Admiral Porter to talk through the last weeks of the Civil War. It was the only time the four met together. Healy was not in the room. He painted it in 1868, three years after Lincoln had been shot, working from portraits he had already made and from Sherman's own account of what was said. Through the window he painted a rainbow, which he meant as a sign of the peace he knew was coming.