Though his early work The Slave Auction is better known, the subject for The Checker Players marked Rogers' public debut. For many years he had modeled small sculpture groups in clay for family and friends. In 1859, while Rogers was working in Chicago for the city surveyor's office, he was asked to contribute a sculpture to a charity bazaar, and he created a clay model similar to this one, based on an engraving after The Card Players, a painting by the English artist David Wilkie. It was a rousing success, raising $75 and earning Rogers favorable notice in a Chicago newspaper. The Chicagoan Robert Collyer wrote to the sculptor Henry Kirke Brown noting Rogers' success with The Checker Players, praising his "wonderful talent for sculpture." Rogers was encouraged by his success to move to New York later that year, when he produced this more accomplished version of The Checker Players. He exhibited it in 1860 at the National Academy of Design and placed the group for sale at the fancy goods purveyor Williams & Stevens. Rogers wrote optimistically to his aunt, Mrs. Ephraim Peabody, "judging from those who have seen it I think it is going to take." The Checker Players was often mentioned in later years as his first work, and as a humorous scene of domestic life enacted by carefully articulated characters, it is one of his most characteristic. His sales catalogue described the game in progress between young and old players: "It is the old man's turn to move, but he cannot do so without being taken. His antagonist is laughing at his perplexity." Both figures appear to be rural workingmen. The younger has put a smock commonly worn by farmers over his vest and tie; he points out his victorious position on the game board to his bemused older competitor, who appears in work attire without a jacket. In this vignette, the younger man has overtaken the elder with wit and skill, and Rogers may well have identified with the subject in his hopes for triumphing in the New York art world, over his father's objections. Rogers is said to have been an inveterate checkers player, and he returned to the subject in later years with Checkers Up at the Farm of 1875 (1936.629). In the later version, he refined the players' roles and made a more pointed reference to the virtues of rural life. The younger man defeats his older opponent once again, and, while he is still portrayed as a farmer, balancing a hoe in one hand, the older man he defeats is a fashionably dressed urbanite.

In The Bushwhacker Rogers addressed a controversial Civil War subject with remarkable sensitivity, but the artist's sympathetic approach could not assuage the tensions that surrounded it. Bushwhackers were guerrilla fighters who were not affiliated with an army but carried out attacks against opposing individuals or families. Most of these attacks took place in rural areas in the border states between the opposing sides. They often degenerated into neighbor-on-neighbor fighting, and the violence escalated into atrocities that resulted in hundreds of deaths, such as the burning of Lawrence, Kansas, and the murder of two hundred men and boys in August 1863. In Rogers' sculpture a man with shaggy hair and beard and dressed in ragged clothing stands with a rifle in his hand and a knife tucked in his boot. His wife tries to pull away his gun with one hand and with the other places their child in his arms, begging him not to go. The man, who might otherwise look fierce and terrifying, inclines his head toward his baby with closed eyes, responding sweetly to his wife's plea. Historical accounts generally associate bushwhacking with Confederates. However, Rogers did not specify which cause his man supported. The sales catalogue description reads, "A bushwhacker is about to start out with his gun on his murderous business, but his wife has put his child in his arms, and is trying, by appealing to his home affections, to dissuade him from his purpose." Contemporary writers offered differing interpretations: in 1865 one writer admitted that he was not sure of the figure's affiliation but took him to be one of the "erring brethren." In 1866, after the war had ended, he was described as a Confederate "leaving his home for the murder and plunder, perhaps, of some Union family." But in 1870 another critic described him as "a dear brother of our own who for weary days and nights was kept skulking for dear life in the woods of Kentucky because he was a Union man." Rogers did not hesitate to identify his soldiers as Unionist in works such as Wounded Scout: A Friend in the Swamp (1936.655, 1928.31) and Wounded to the Rear: One More Shot (1929.92, 1940.844). However, in this case, he did not specifically condemn either side with the horrors that bushwhackers had perpetrated. Rather, Rogers portrayed his subject as a tenderhearted family man, and through his wife, the artist called for reconciliation and an end to vigilante attacks. Rogers faced a nearly impossible task in choosing subjects for his Civil War groups. He endeavored to gauge public response to very sensitive issues months in advance, as the tides of events and public opinion constantly shifted around him. He developed this subject very quickly in a few months leading up to his wedding in April 1865. Rogers was unhappy with the result, but he deserves credit for his boldness and his concern. The Bushwhacker can be seen as a form of advocacy, an attempt not just to reflect public opinion but also to shape it and effect a reconciliation between warring civilians. However, the public was apparently not yet ready to embrace such a traumatic situation. The group was completed the same month that the war ended, and though some of Rogers' other Civil War subjects continued to be popular decades later, this one may have represented a subject people were eager to forget. Sales of the group were very poor, and Rogers withdrew it from his catalogue after a few years. As a result, The Bushwhacker is now one of his rarest groups.

This cast was part of the Phrenological Museum of Fowler & Wells, which opened in New York City in 1842. Brothers Orson Squire Fowler (1809-1887) and Lorenzo Niles Fowler (1811-1896) and their business associate Samuel Roberts Wells (1820-1875) were noted phrenologists who read heads to understand the subject's "temperament." Their Phrenological Cabinet displaying casts, skulls, and charts became a popular fixture in the city.

This was a model for part of a marble font given by the subject's three children to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1924. It is an imaginary representation of Stuyvesant as a child.

The subject, a native of Poland, was a celebrated pianist known especially as an interpreter of Chopin, Liszt and Schumann.

The bronze is in the Cushing Medical Library, Yale University. Cushing was a noted brain surgeon and Professor of Neurology at Yale, and the head surgeon at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, Boston.

Copy of original marble executed in Berlin 1846.