Hon. John Bell, Secretary of War, 1841 Virginia when Porter was still a

when Porter was still a young officer in a fleet learning to project American power across Mexican coastlines and Caribbean waters

Secretary of War 1841 — a Whig portrait of the Tennessean called to Harrison's cabinet in the spring of an ill-fated administration

his powdered profile rendered with the antiquarian reverence of an age busy curating its colonial ghosts long after the muskets had cooled

where the statehouse dome catches Carolina light and Main Street stretches in lithographed calm past Trinity's spires and the long colonnades of the university

knowing the shoal would test each rivet

Hon. John Bell, Secretary of War, 1841 Virginia when Porter was still aHon. John Bell, Secretary of War, 1841. A portrait of the Tennessee Whig at the moment William Henry Harrison's cabinet briefly seated him atop the War Department a tenure measured in weeks before Tyler's apostasy scattered the appointees, leaving Bell's brief command preserved here in the formal hand of antebellum political engraving. About the Source Bella Frye sources artifacts from the great American historical archive the Library of Congress, the