Statuette, "The Fugitive's Story" by John Rogers, 1869

The John Rogers sculpture, "The Fugitive's Story," depicts well-known abolitionists -- John Greenleaf Whittier, William Lloyd Garrison, and Henry Ward Beecher -- listening to the pleas of a slave mother. Though fictionalized and composed well after the end of the Civil War (in 1869), the work was enthusiastically received by those who had admired these men and had worked to free the slaves.