Camp Douglas, Chicago, Ill. 1864 Size:36x24 signed in the ornamented hand

signed in the ornamented hand of a republic newly intoxicated by commerce

his verse in Black vernacular drawing the careful attention of a Gilded Age literary establishment still uncertain what to do with an American voice that sounded like America

James Edwin Campbell 1895 — a portrait of the Ohio dialect poet at the height of his brief career

The Danziger Cigarette Patent of 1865 is a drawing from the long American romance with tobacco — when a pipe

issued in the brittle year before Havana harbor turned the republic into an empire

Camp Douglas, Chicago, Ill. 1864 Size:36x24 signed in the ornamented handCamp Douglas, Chicago, Ill. 1864 a documentary view of the Union's vast prison stockade on the lakefront, where Confederate captives wintered behind plank walls and rumor of conspiracy. The image carries the cold ledger weight of 1864: barracks in rows, sentries at their posts, a war counted in men confined. About the Source Bella Frye sources artifacts from the great American historical archive the Library of Congress, the National Archives, regional