James B. Howell

James B. Howell, a newspaper editor, lawyer, and politician, is the subject of this glass-plate photographic portrait made in the mid-nineteenth century. Howell served briefly as a Republican U.S. senator from Iowa. In 1871 President Ulysses S. Grant appointed Howell one of three members of the Southern Claims Commission, an entity created to adjudicate claims made by southern Unionists demanding payment for property appropriated from them by the Union army during the Civil War.