Coming to the Parson was Rogers' most popular group by far, selling more than eight thousand copies, approximately one-tenth of his total output. In a decisive break from his earlier focus on the Civil War and Reconstruction, Rogers offered a reassuring image of hope, a new beginning, and, literally, of union, for which Americans hungered after a traumatic decade of war and its aftermath. Rogers depicted a rustic couple interrupting a minister to ask him to perform an impromptu ceremony. The young man with a flower in his buttonhole clutches his hat awkwardly, and his intended peeks shyly around him. She has dressed in her best, and she bites her makeshift veil in a childish gesture that points out her tender age. The parson, still in his dressing gown, looks up in surprise at the impatient couple. He is reading a newspaper that Rogers, adding a note of humor, entitled The Union. Rogers wryly hinted that the couple's future might hold less than harmonious moments by including a dog and cat that crouch at their feet, poised for a fight. Rogers struck a resonant chord with his new subject, which combined nostalgia for lost innocence and intimations of a brighter future. His figures were understood to be country folk, signaling a rural American past that was lamented as a purer, simpler era, now lost. However, the marriage offered hope for a new "Union," perhaps not only for the young lovers but also between the North and South. Contemporary writers relished telling the story of Rogers' sculpture, with its gently humorous nuances and flourishes, linking it to an earnest optimism about home and family. The New York Evening Mail assured its readers that "This is no runaway match-not a bit of it. There is honest, manly purpose in every inch of that young fellow and that she has her mother's blessing who can doubt that looks into her radiant face?" Another writer concurred, "One laughs first at the gaucherie of the lovers, but after a little study discovers that it is not a laughing matter at all. These young people are not on a frolic; the business that has brought them here is the most serious business they have ever undertaken." The public embraced Rogers' subject with delight. Importantly for its popularity, the year that Rogers released this group he began to offer free delivery to any express station in the United States, expanding his sales far beyond the East Coast, so that Coming to the Parson achieved tremendous nationwide popularity as a wedding gift. The subject became an icon of American culture; nearly eighty years later Norman Rockwell referenced the group in his "April Fool" cover for the Saturday Evening Post dated April 3, 1948. Titled Curiosity Shop, it illustrates an encounter between the elderly owner and a very young patron. Among the quirky items meant to test the viewer's alertness is a Rogers Group that conflates the solider from one of his Civil War groups with the young woman about to be married, in an unintended reminder of the links between this group and his Civil War subjects. Clearly, Coming to the Parson was still familiar enough to the public that Rockwell could expect his audience to understand the joke.

Rogers had taken childhood education as a theme in the past, including the intimate drama of the student under pressure in The School Examination of 1867 and the budding romance of The Favored Scholar, 1872. For this work, however, Rogers surprised viewers by referring to a period in one's life rather than to an actual school subject. The title suggests that School Days is not a commentary on contemporary life but a nostalgic glimpse of a fleeting period of innocence and enjoyment. The scene takes place on the street where two children (modeled after Rogers' daughter Katherine and his son Charles) have stopped on their way to school, fascinated by an organ grinder and his monkey. The man stands with his weight on his back foot cranking his instrument somewhat perfunctorily. Organ grinders were a common (and, for some, annoying) part of New York street life, and many were recent immigrants. Though Rogers did not specify his street musician's nationality, several commentators described him as Italian, perhaps based on the figure's bushy hair and mustache. The girl is entranced by the remarkably detailed figures dancing in the organ, and the boy is discovering that the monkey has stolen his hat. Rogers issued this group at approximately the same time as The Traveling Magician (1936.637, 1926.35). He may have intended the two views of street life to function as pendants. It has been said that monkeys were considered bad luck during this period, and, indeed, School Days seemed ill-fated. Rogers exhibited it at the National Academy of Design's 1877 annual exhibition, where it seems not to have attracted critical notice. The group sold poorly; perhaps a scene of urban street life was considered inappropriate for middle-class parlors.

The original of this bust is in the Senate Chamber in the State Capitol at Columbus, Ohio. Jones modeled the portrait in Springfield, Illinois, in December of 1860 and the early months of 1861, just before Lincoln departed for Washington to assume the presidency.

In September 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Rogers wrote that he was working on a new group that he expected to be his most popular yet. He had just begun using bronze master models to cast his sculptures, which allowed him to create larger and more complex compositions that approach paintings in their detail and narrative power. Here he depicted a triumphant returning soldier visiting the local blacksmith, whose tools he is using to recount a battle; he has made a fortification on the floor at right, and a horseshoe and nails at left represent the opposing battery. The soldier is every bit the conquering hero, handsome, fervent, and still in full uniform. However, he crouches at the right of the composition, and the blacksmith stands at the apex. His age is indicated by his baldness and glasses, but he is of brawny and classicized proportions; veins bulge in his arms, and he is physically larger than the soldier, particularly when the two men's hands are compared. He easily rests his hammer on his anvil and watches the soldier's tale being played out on the floor of his workshop. At left a little girl shyly raises her apron to her mouth in a childlike gesture while grasping one of the blacksmith's mammoth fingers in her hand. Rogers was known for celebrating the everyday honor and courage of rank-and-file soldiers. But in this sculpture it is unclear exactly who the hero is; Rogers gave equal prominence to the older man who presumably stayed at home plying his trade and caring for his family. Rogers himself did not volunteer to serve and may have had a personal stake in ennobling both the civilian and the soldier (his draft notice arrived in April 1865, just weeks before the war ended). Rogers conceived the group a few months after the New York draft riots. March 1, 1863, marked the passage of the Enrollment Act, instituting the first Union draft. It was meant to encourage volunteering, but it backfired tragically. The law allowed draftees to commute their service by paying a fee of three hundred dollars or by hiring a substitute, and many complained that the dispensation made the conflict "a rich man's war, but a poor man's fight." For four days in July, New York erupted in a rampage of looting and violence in protest, resulting in 105 dead. Perhaps in response, Rogers offered a reassuring example of a vital young man returned safely home after a Union triumph, while also affirming the importance of those who stayed behind. Ultimately, it proved one of his most popular groups and remained in his sales catalogue until 1889, long after he had stopped offering his other Civil War subjects for sale.

Rogers built his early fame on his Civil War subjects, and after the conflict ended, he produced a few final groups memorializing some of its most important figures. The Council of War (1952.334, 1925.42, 1936.657) depicts its highest military officials: General Ulysses S. Grant, Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, and President Abraham Lincoln. In The Fugitive's Story Rogers paid tribute to leaders of the abolitionist movement: the poet John Greenleaf Whittier, the editor William Lloyd Garrison, and the preacher Henry Ward Beecher. Rogers' biographer, David Wallace, called it a "civilian counterpart" to The Council of War. The artist's last Civil War subject, The Fugitive's Story offered a perfect bookend to his acclaimed series, returning as it did to his beginnings. Rogers' first Civil War-related subject was The Slave Auction of 1859 (1928.28), which condemned the evils of slavery in the days leading up to the war, and his last Civil War group memorialized the triumph of the abolitionist cause. The three men are gathered around a desk listening to the tale of a slave who has escaped to the North with her baby. A small bundle containing her worldly possessions lies at her feet, and she clasps her child to her shoulder. Her head is inclined toward Garrison, seated at his desk, and all three men gaze at her with expressions of deep interest and concern, likewise drawing the viewer's eye to her earnest face. Whittier (at left) and Garrison (at right) hold papers that suggest their role as writers in the fight against slavery; Rogers further emphasizes the point with the inkpot and papers on Garrison's desk. The artist often incorporated portraits into his narrative groups, but this is the only instance in which he inscribed the names of the sitters on the base to make his subject perfectly clear. The story reportedly had a powerful effect on the former slave Sojourner Truth: the abolitionist newspaper the Independent reported that when she saw the work, she burst into tears, remembering her own escape with her small child. Rogers' own convictions about abolition are evidenced in the time and care that he took preparing the group, and in his later memories of it. The artist wrote to Beecher and secured his enthusiastic approval for the idea. He interviewed each of his three sitters and took detailed measurements, secured photographs, and even took life masks of Beecher and Garrison. Both men wrote to Rogers with suggestions for the composition and for his portrayals of them. There were reports from all three that they were satisfied with the likenesses; Garrison called the sculpture "a marked success, both in regard to the likenesses and as a work of art." William Cullen Bryant wrote to Rogers in relation to The Fugitive's Story, "You have succeeded in a higher degree than almost any artist in making sculpture a narrative art." Public reaction was equally enthusiastic, and critics were quick to connect this valedictory work with Rogers' humble The Slave Auction of little more than a decade earlier, when he could not induce stores to carry the sculpture for fear of offending their Southern customers. The subject apparently had strong poetic resonances for his viewers. Rogers was compared to Whittier, the poet he portrayed, with one commentator declaring, "What Whittier is in verse Rogers is in sculpture." The Boston Advertiser called the group "a perfect poem of our history." Yet another writer connected it with efforts to establish a colony for former slaves in Liberia, in western Africa, writing a poem from the point of view of the fugitive as a wife looking forward to a reunion with her husband, who was preparing a home for them there. Rogers considered The Fugitive's Story an important landmark in his oeuvre. Nearly twenty years later, in an 1887 interview for the New York Herald, Rogers related tales of his time with Beecher and Garrison preparing for this work, and in an 1890 article that Rogers authored for the New York Times, he wrote at length about his process in developing the sculpture, quoting his correspondence with Whittier and Garrison. He may well have been indirectly promoting a more recent work, a figure of Beecher that he created from the life mask, photographs, and measurements that he used for The Fugitive's Story as a memorial when Beecher died in 1887 (1937.35).

Rogers contemplated the plays of Shakespeare as a potential subject from the earliest years of his professional career. In 1861 he wrote of his plans for a series, and he assayed a handful of such themes into 1862, including one titled The Merchant of Venice, which he showed at the National Academy of Design (to his dismay, it went unnoticed). No examples of these early groups survive. The Bard did not resurface in Rogers' work until almost twenty years later. The artist's skills and ambition had grown considerably, and "Ha! I Like Not That" was the third Shakespearean group of his mature career, after "Is It So Nominated in the Bond?" from The Merchant of Venice (1936.659, 1926.37) and The Wrestlers (1936.645, 1926.37) from As You Like It. Rogers' latest Shakespearean work was considered a companion to "Is It So Nominated in the Bond?" which was similar in size and format. The pair embraced two of the playwright's best-known works, one classified as a comedy and the other as a tragedy. Where the scene from The Merchant of Venice depicts the tense moments before the villainous Shylock is foiled and all is happily resolved, Rogers chose a scene from Othello that sets in motion events that lead to murder. Rogers capitalized on the play's success and heightened his sculpture's popular appeal by modeling the characters after actors famous for their performances in the play. The acclaimed American performer Edwin Booth posed for Iago, and the Italian Tommaso Salvini was said to have posed for Othello. Rogers ordinarily attempted to convey an entire narrative within each sculpture, but in these groups he presented a small slice of a much larger narrative, and his concern for intelligibility is evident in the extra aids that he provided. Though most middle-class late-nineteenth-century Americans were familiar with the story, Rogers took care to situate the viewer in the action of the play. As was the case with his other Shakespearean subjects, his sales catalogue included an unusually long and elaborate explanation of the moment depicted. The title is a key line from that scene, and the base of the group, normally reserved for the title alone, also bears the names of the characters. In this vignette from act 3, scene 3, Desdemona and Cassio are conferring in the garden. On Iago's advice, Cassio is entreating her to help restore him to her husband Othello's good graces. Othello and Iago are walking together in the garden, and, when Iago sees his commander's wife with his rival, he exclaims his titular line in an attempt to arouse Othello's suspicions about their relationship. The climactic moment when Othello kills his wife in a rage, thinking her unfaithful, would have made a grisly subject for middle-class parlors, so Rogers showed what a contemporary writer called the "keystone of the tragedy," knowing that his viewers were aware of the events that followed. The action takes place in a squared-off stagelike space. As in a theater production, the garden is suggested by a few minimal props: the grassy surface of the base and the vase placed on an elaborate pedestal that separates Iago and Othello from Desdemona and the departing Cassio. Rogers' mastery of costume and detail is on display, particularly in Othello's exotic cloak, sword, and cap and Desdemona's richly decorated dress. The artist created a dynamic composition by placing the figures at different heights and in a variety of poses: Othello harks to Iago's words as he gazes across at the others; Cassio is bowing in gratitude, but his posture might be misinterpreted for affection; and Desdemona is pulling away from him, moving toward her husband.