Rogers earned his early fame from his Civil War subjects, and after the war ended he produced a few more sculptures that memorialized the Northern leaders of the conflict. As a monument to three key figures in the war, General Ulysses S. Grant, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, and the slain president Abraham Lincoln, The Council of War became one of Rogers' most resonant works. The idea for the group came from Stanton. Rogers asked for his advice through his wife's cousin, John H. Clifford of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Stanton wrote to Clifford describing one of the president's key councils of war in March 1864, immediately after Grant was given charge of all the Union armies. "Lieutenant General Grant[,] after returning from his first visit to the Army of the Potomac, laid before the President the plan of operations he proposed to adopt. This was at the War Department, and the group would embrace the three figures of the President, Secretary of War and General Grant. It would require no accessories but a roll or map in the hands of the General." Rogers' composition is very close to Stanton's suggestion except for the map, which, in the hands of the president rather than the secretary of war, makes Lincoln the central figure. The artist also added a scrolled paper, perhaps another map, curving behind Lincoln's feet, and he draped Lincoln's chair, perhaps to eliminate the distraction of its detailed surfaces. Rogers took great care in preparing to model the three likenesses, visiting Grant and Stanton and using photographs for reference. For the assassinated president he relied entirely on photographs. Rogers' oeuvre shows a mastery of portraiture that often goes unacknowledged, but here his talents were on full display and universally praised. Critical responses to the sculpture often noted with wonderment Rogers' great success in capturing likenesses of these three men, whose faces were as well known to the public as any man's was at the time. Some accounts noted the particular difficulty of rendering Lincoln, whose lanky, ungainly figure was a challenge for artists to realize in the heroic fashion appropriate to the man considered a martyr for the republic. Rogers was congratulated for not sacrificing accuracy for "elegance of form"; he was credited with giving the figure dignity but also an accurate sense of the man's physical presence through the awkward placement of his legs. The president's son Tad later wrote that his family considered The Council of War the most lifelike rendering of his father in sculpture. Stanton, too, congratulated the artist for surpassing any other likeness he had ever seen. In the years immediately following the Civil War, Americans struggled with the difficult psychological work of understanding the cataclysmic changes that had been wrought on the country and their own lives. Monument building was an important part of the public task of dealing with the conflict. Individuals could attempt the private work with the aid of more personal monuments. The Council of War functioned as a monument in miniature that could be placed in one's home. Even before the group was released to the public, the New York Evening Post was quick to distinguish it as a "higher flight" than Rogers' earlier Civil War subjects. Eight years later it was still considered "worthy of reproduction in marble as a historical subject." Viewers eagerly embraced these faithful portrayals as personal memorials that could take on their intense, private feelings about the war and the men depicted. These individual responses are reflected in the wide variation of critical interpretations of the three men's expressions. In the years after the group was released, writers called Lincoln's face by turns sad and anxious, lit up with hope, and cheerfully approving of Grant's plan. Comments on Stanton's expression ranged from "thoughtful attention," to reflective, to irritable. Even though Rogers marketed the group at the relatively high price of $25, it was one of his most popular works. He produced three versions that show slight variations in the position of Stanton's hands and the position of his head.

This bronze served as the master model for the plasters that Rogers sold to a broad audience of middle-class Americans. Rogers' catalogue describes the scene: "The boy has been sent in haste for the country doctor, who has ventured to return seated behind him on the horse. His medicine is in some danger of begin spilled as well as himself." The urgency of the errand is conveyed not only in the doctor's open bag with its bottles bouncing inside; he also literally holds on to his hat to keep it from flying off. Both man and boy have risen out of their seats, suggesting the horse's great speed as they gallop along, and even the horse seems to sense the peril of the loved one at home, as its eyes bulge in panic. Rogers had long been acclaimed for his mastery in depicting horses, and critics were quick to praise the skill he showed with this equine. It was identified as a Morgan, a distinctly American breed known for its compact build and companionable nature. Its large eyes and expressive face made it a perfect choice for this dramatic episode. Rogers carefully studied horses, taking detailed measurements and making anatomical casts from specimens at the New York College of Veterinary Medicine. He also studied Eadweard Muybridge's stop-action photographs of horses in motion. The Morgan's legs are positioned according to Muybridge's findings, not splayed with all four feet off the ground, as artists had previously rendered them, and as Rogers had done just a few years earlier in his 1879 sculpture Polo (1927.50, 1948.409). In 1877 Rogers built a house in rural New Canaan, Connecticut, and this subject was inspired by a Dr. Richards of that town who rode and carried medicines in his saddlebags. The boy was modeled after the artist's nine-year-old son Derby. Though twenty-first-century viewers might mistakenly see this as a nostalgic image, contemporary writers were quick to recognize that Rogers was contrasting city and country life of the present day and pointing out the new conveniences and technologies that were widening the gulf between them. A Baltimore newspaper explained, "Nothing can be more real to those who know the ways of our rural regions. In our cities, the boy who goes for the doctor is now the telephone, and our M.D. rides up in his two-horse carriage." However, the sculpture does suggest a sense of nostalgia with regard to the artist's own oeuvre. In the years just before creating this work, Rogers had been engaged with large-scale theatrical subjects taken from Shakespeare that were embellished with a wealth of surface detail. In Fetching the Doctor the artist returned to his earlier rural themes of boys with horses from nearly a decade before, such as We Boys (1929.96, 1936.661, 1936.711) and Going for the Cows (1929.98, 1936.650) of 1872. The current group shares their smaller size, relatively simple characterization, and unadorned surfaces, though here the sculptor introduced a note of drama, showing the effects of his recent immersion in theatrical scenes. Fetching the Doctor was priced at $10, half the cost of his recent groups. As his works grew larger, more elaborate, and more expensive, it may be that Rogers returned to his beloved small genre scenes to assure his clients that he would continue to offer sculpture that was truly affordable to a broad audience, in keeping with his early aspirations.

The centennial year can be said to mark the pinnacle of Rogers' success. He exhibited twenty-nine of his groups at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, and his popularity allowed him to open a new showroom on Broadway and Twenty-third Street. Rogers' crowning success of 1876 was Weighing the Baby, one of his best-loved sculptures. A young mother has taken her newborn to the local general store to have it weighed, and the proprietor leans over the scales, removing his glasses in a gesture of disbelief at the high number that the scales indicate. Unbeknownst to either of them, a roguish boy has grabbed the baby's blanket and is pulling the scale down to make it register the incredible weight. Rogers turned to his own growing family for models for this lighthearted domestic episode, namely, his wife, Hattie, their six-year-old son, Charlie, and their newborn son, David. He placed them on a square base that suggests a stage. Small objects such as cans and brushes serve as props to indicate the store setting. The artist cleverly placed his figures so that the mother and the merchant cannot see the mischievous boy's trickery, but the viewer can, as if he or she is an audience member seeing a bit of comic business downstage left. Critics relished retelling the joke in their descriptions of the sculpture, and the suggested narrative was so irresistible that one writer regretted that Rogers could not continue the action and show the boy being discovered and fleeing. However, these theatrical devices stop short of becoming a caricatured vaudeville skit, because Rogers' sincere and affectionate portrayals of his family soften the humor. Weighing the Baby was an immediate hit. Rogers introduced the sculpture for the 1876 holiday season, and his initial stock sold out before Christmas. Responses to the new group in contemporary periodicals show a shift in how the sculptor's works were perceived. Rogers purposely released new sculptures each year in time for the holiday season, and in 1876 they were discussed as much in terms of their suitability as gifts as for their artistic merits. One writer wished "everybody would consider how much better such an artistic work is for an investment than the multitude of trash sold at holiday time." The present-day scholar Melissa Dabakis called this group, "funny, lighthearted, and optimistic . . . emblematic of the imagery demanded by a reform-weary public in Gilded Age America." Reassuring domestic subjects like this one are often considered typical of Rogers' work. Their very popularity, though a mark of the wide-ranging esteem he enjoyed in his time, ultimately worked against Rogers' posthumous reputation by overshadowing the broad scope of his oeuvre.

This bronze served as the master model for the plasters that Rogers sold to a broad audience of middle-class Americans. From his earliest days as a sculptor, Rogers expressed an interest in literary and theatrical themes; his letters from the 1850s mention such subjects as Robinson Crusoe, Friar Tuck, and Pocahontas (though none is extant). Rogers also discussed such popular authors as John Greenleaf Whittier, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Charles Dickens. Though he did not specifically mention Washington Irving, this revered American writer was to play an important role in Rogers' oeuvre. Courtship in Sleepy Hollow is his first surviving literary subject and marks his professional debut as a sculptor of such themes. Rogers chose a scene from Irving's 1820 story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Irving's narrative, adapted from a German folktale, is a gothic mixture of humor and horror set in 1790 in Sleepy Hollow, a glen of the Dutch settlement of Tarrytown along the Hudson River. The superstitious Connecticut schoolteacher Ichabod Crane competes with the local man Abraham "Brom Bones" Van Brunt for the hand of Katrina Van Tassel, daughter of a wealthy farmer, Baltus Van Tassel. As Crane leaves a party at the Van Tassel home on an autumn night, he is pursued by the Headless Horseman, said to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper whose head was shot off by a stray cannonball during the American Revolutionary War, who "rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head." Ichabod mysteriously disappears from town, leaving Katrina to marry Brom Bones. Rogers had considered the subject in 1862, but since the artist F. O. C. Darley had already illustrated the story to great acclaim in 1849, he wrote, "I am afraid I can make nothing very original out of it." However, six years and numerous successes later, he had gained the confidence to attempt his own interpretation. He chose a comic moment when the awkward Crane attempts to woo Katrina Van Tassel. He depicted Crane's tall, lanky frame folded onto a Dutch settle (a period detail that Rogers pointed out in his description of the group). In contrast to Darley's depiction of the couple outdoors, with Ichabod leaning wistfully on a tree branch slightly behind Katrina, Rogers moved the scene indoors and placed the two side by side, with Ichabod engaging her directly. Contemporary newspapers enjoyed matching Roger's faithful rendering of Crane to Irving's description: "tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves. . . . His head was small, and flat at the top, with large ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weathercock, perched upon his spindle neck to tell which way the wind blew." Crane leans toward the plump and petite Katrina, who exudes what a contemporary writer described as "a mixture of coquettish shrewdness and real good nature." Rogers released Courtship in Sleepy Hollow for Christmas 1868, along with his monument to the Civil War leaders Ulysses S. Grant, Edwin M. Stanton, and Abraham Lincoln, titled The Council of War. As early as 1862 Rogers had anticipated the need for a new artistic direction after the war, and this pairing marked a transition from his final Civil War subjects toward literary and theatrical themes (as well as domestic genre scenes). In the 1870s and 1880s he developed other subjects from Irving, as well as from Shakespeare and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The public embraced Rogers' foray into the city's mythologized Knickerbocker past; it seems that the sculptor and his audience were only too glad to contemplate bygone times that, though full of strange terrors, offered an escape from the trauma of the Civil War and the trials of Reconstruction.

The bust possibly represents the father of Gen. James Bowen (1808-1886). It came from the library of his home at Hastings-on-Hudson.

This bronze served as the master model for the plasters that Rogers sold to a broad audience of middle-class Americans. In the 1870s and 1880s Rogers explored two different types of subject matter: genre themes taken from everyday life and scenes from popular plays. In a few groups he combined the two, depicting theatrical amusements in the home. Rogers was a fan of theater in both public and private settings, and he was inspired to model this scene after seeing an amateur play acted out in a friend's parlor. Such home theatricals were a common form of entertainment in the late nineteenth century. Rogers' playacting subject takes the form of a trial, and as he described it, "a young man is charged with committing some offense. The lady, who takes the part of prosecuting attorney, is delivering such a withering sarcastic argument to the judge against the prisoner, that he turns round for protection to the young lady policeman who has him in charge." The scene is set in a large rectangular space that suggests a stage, and all the actors play their parts earnestly, though the merriment at the heart of their production cannot be concealed. The artist created a pyramidal composition with the judge, appropriately enough, at the pinnacle. Viewing the sculpture from behind offers a "backstage" look at the makeshift theater, showing that his bench is composed of two chairs with a board between them, and a curtain rod has been placed across. The "judge" gazes down sternly on the accused kneeling below, whose expression of mock terror forms the focal point of the sculpture. As a prisoner, his hands are tied with a scarf, and the female police officer to whom he appeals at left holds a baton and looks at him compassionately. At right the female prosecutor (modeled after Rogers' sister Laura) delivers her impassioned case to the judge with her head thrown back and her mouth open, as if in mid-sentence. The interlocking gazes create a lively composition suggesting a climactic moment in their domestic drama. The Mock Trial, with its large size and complexity, heralds a period of increasing ambition in Rogers' work. During this time he attempted ever more complicated compositions and demonstrated his growing mastery of his medium with greater detail in textures, as can be seen in the embroidery on the prosecutor's costume, and with heightened emotions, evident in the intensity of the facial expressions. Works like this also show Rogers' self-awareness about the nature of his work. They inhabit a middle ground between his acclaimed theater scenes and his beloved genre groups. Where Rogers had previously offered numerous depictions of children at play, this is the first of many scenes of adults entertaining themselves, in this case by putting on their own "play," in both senses of the word. The subject of home amusements holds a mirror to both Rogers' work and his viewers. His genre scenes up to this point were generally set outside the home, but this new subject depicted an amusement that would take place in a parlor, the room where Rogers Groups were typically placed. The viewer of his earlier domestic and theater subjects is unquestionably that, a witness to a scene taking place outside his or her domain. But this tableau puts the viewer into the scene, since he or she would probably view the sculpture in a parlor where just such an entertainment might take place. As Rogers' abilities as a sculptor grew, he strove for increasing realism in his subjects and a closer connection with his viewers' lives, not appealing to earlier times or other places but engaging them in their homes and at their everyday amusements.