The Peacemakers

• 1. Introduction

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  The Peacemakers is an 1868 painting by George P.A. Healy, and it captures a moment that almost no one alive at the time knew had happened. On the morning of the 28th of March, 1865, four men gathered aboard a steamer called the River Queen, moored near City Point, Virginia. They were President Abraham Lincoln, General Ulysses S. Grant, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, and Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter. The Civil War had been grinding on for four years. Richmond had not yet fallen. And in that cabin, the men who held the war in their hands were deciding what came next.

  Healy was not there. He heard about it years later, pieced it together from letters and sittings and a single old portrait, and turned it into something that would eventually hang in the White House, disappear for decades, be rediscovered in a Chicago storeroom, and become the painting a president stared at the morning after September 11th. How a canvas traveled that far from a river boat to the walls of the most watched house on earth is the story this documentary tells.

• 2. The Meeting on the River Queen

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  Rear Admiral David Dixon Porter wrote about what happened aboard the River Queen in his journal, and his words carry a weight that still holds. He later recounted: "I shall never forget that council which met on board the River Queen. On the determinations adopted there depended peace, or a continuation of the war with its attendant horrors."

  Grant had invited Lincoln to visit his headquarters at City Point. Sherman happened to be there at the same time, passing through while campaigning in North Carolina. That coincidence made the gathering possible. It was the only three-way meeting of Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman during the entire war. Porter was there too, and he was the one who recorded it most fully.

  Sherman described what he told Healy years later in a letter dated the 28th of November, 1872, addressed to Isaac Newton Arnold. He recalled saying during that meeting that "if Lee would only remain in Richmond till I could reach Burkesville, we would have him between our thumb and fingers," and suiting the action to the word. That gesture, Sherman believed, was what Healy captured in the finished painting: Sherman talking, the others listening. Porter, in Healy's rendering, sits still. Grant leans in. Lincoln rests his chin on his hand, thinking.

• 3. How Healy Built the Picture

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  George P.A. Healy was not present at the meeting near Richmond, but he had already painted all four men individually before he attempted the group portrait. That prior access gave him sittings with Grant, Sherman, and Porter for the group painting. Lincoln was different. Lincoln had died by the time Healy undertook the work.

  For Lincoln's likeness, Healy drew on a portrait he had made himself at Springfield, around five or six years before the war ended. He also used existing photographs and, remarkably, the physical resemblance of a Chicago man named Leonard Swett to stand in for Lincoln's form. Sherman, who had been present at the actual meeting, reviewed the finished result and declared in his letter to Arnold that the four portraits were "the best extant" of all four men. He thought Lincoln's likeness "by far the best of the many I have seen elsewhere."

  Porter reportedly supplied Healy with a written description of where the men sat, along with the dimensions, shape, and furniture of the cabin. One detail, though, was entirely Healy's invention: the rainbow visible through the windows. Sherman noted it plainly. "The rainbow is Healy's," he wrote, "typical, of course, of the coming peace." Healy painted preparation studies for Lincoln, Grant, and Porter; those studies survive today in the collection of the Newberry Library in Chicago.

• 4. Fire, Storage, and Recovery

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  The large, life-size version of The Peacemakers was destroyed in the 1893 Calumet Club fire in Chicago. That loss erased the painting Healy had first made famous, the one Sherman said was, at the time of his 1872 letter, held by a Chicago collector named Ezra Butler McCagg.

  Healy had also painted at least ten smaller copies in Rome, each measuring roughly eighteen by twenty-four inches. One of those smaller versions survived, and then vanished. It sat unnoticed in a family storeroom in Chicago for fifty years before being rediscovered in 1922. The painting then made its way to the White House in 1947, when the Truman administration acquired it for the permanent collection. That moment carried its own weight: World War II had ended just two years before, and the image of four men deciding whether a war should end carried a meaning that reached beyond its original subject.

• 5. Life Inside the White House

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  From the Kennedy administration through the presidency of George W. Bush, The Peacemakers hung in the Treaty Room of the White House. Its presence there was not incidental. Bush wrote about the painting in his memoir Decision Points, describing a shift in how he experienced it. Before the September 11th attacks, he wrote, he saw it as "a fascinating moment in history." After, it "took a deeper meaning." He wrote that the painting "reminded me of Lincoln's clarity of purpose: he waged war for a necessary and noble cause."

  The painting was briefly loaned to the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library from the 11th of March, 2002, to the 31st of July, 2002, for an exhibit called "Fathers and Sons: Two Families, Four Presidents." It also appears behind the elder Bush in his official presidential portrait, painted by Herbert Abrams. The Obama administration moved it from the Treaty Room to the private Oval Office dining room in the West Wing. In 2025, President Donald Trump placed the painting over the Cabinet Room mantelpiece. A separate copy of the painting is kept at the Pentagon.

• 6. Lincoln's Likeness and Its Legacy

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  Robert Todd Lincoln, the president's son, looked at the image of his father in The Peacemakers and called it the "most excellent in existence." That judgment carried particular weight, given how many portraits and photographs of Lincoln existed by the time he made it.

  Healy returned to the Lincoln figure from this group painting when he made his 1869 solo portrait of the president, titled Abraham Lincoln, drawing on the same pose. The painting's reach extended further still when the U.S. Postal Service issued four first-class commemorative 42-cent stamps marking the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth. One of those stamps reproduced an image of The Peacemakers directly. Sherman had predicted something like this when he closed his 1872 letter to Arnold by noting that the four men, whatever Healy intended, "parted never to meet again" after the forenoon of the 28th of March 1865, and that the painting caught them at the last moment they were all in the same room.