Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Peacemakers depicts a strategy session held on the morning of the 28th of March, 1865, aboard the steamer River Queen at City Point, Virginia. The four figures shown are President Abraham Lincoln, General Ulysses S. Grant, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, and Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter, meeting during the final days of the Civil War.
The Peacemakers has been part of the White House collection since 1947, when it was acquired during the Truman administration. In 2025, President Donald Trump placed it over the Cabinet Room mantelpiece. A copy of the painting is also kept at the Pentagon.
The large, life-size version of The Peacemakers was destroyed in the 1893 Calumet Club fire in Chicago. A smaller version, roughly eighteen by twenty-four inches, survived but lay unnoticed in a Chicago family storeroom for fifty years before being rediscovered in 1922.
Healy used a portrait of Lincoln he had painted himself in Springfield around five or six years before the end of the war, combined with existing photographs and the physical resemblance of a Chicago man named Leonard Swett. Sherman, who was present at the actual meeting, called Healy's Lincoln likeness the best he had ever seen.
In a letter dated the 28th of November, 1872, to Isaac Newton Arnold, Sherman confirmed that the four men sat "pretty much as represented" and that the meeting took place during the forenoon of the 28th of March 1865. He called the four portraits in the painting "the best extant" and credited the rainbow in the background entirely to Healy, describing it as "typical, of course, of the coming peace."
Bush wrote that before the September 11th attacks he saw the painting as "a fascinating moment in history," but afterward it "took a deeper meaning," reminding him of Lincoln's clarity of purpose in waging what he called a necessary and noble cause.