Burns

Laura Lynn Burns

Professor Fred Wilson
History 1700
9 November 2015
Bruce, Blanche. "Blanche K. Bruce Speech in the Senate March 31 1876." 1994. Accessed
November 4, 2015. http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/documents/1876-1900/blanche-k-brucespeech-in-the-senate-march-31-1876.php.
Bruce, Blanche. "(1876) Senator Blanche K. Bruce, ...Appointing a Committee to Investigate
Election Practices in Mississippi" The Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed. 2007.
Accessed November 4, 2015. http://www.blackpast.org/1876-senator-blanche-k-bruceappointing-committee-investigate-election-practices-mississippi.
Budiansky, Stephen. 2008. How a War of Terror Kept Blacks Oppressed Long After the Civil
War Ended. American History 43, no. 1:30-36. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost
(accessed November 4, 2015)
Phillips, Jason Ph.D. "Reconstruction in Mississippi, 1865-1876." Mississippi History Now An
online publication of the Mississippi Historical Society. May, 2006. Accessed November
4, 2015. http://mshistorynow.mdah.state.ms.us/index.php?id=204.
"BRUCE, Blanche Kelso. US House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives." BRUCE,
Blanche Kelso. History, Art & Archives United States House of Representatives, Accesed
04 Nov. 2015. http://history.house.gov/People/Listing/B/BRUCE,-Blanche-Kelso(B000968)/
Blanche K. Bruce Speech in the Senate March 31, 1876
Blanche K. Bruce (1841-1898) is the author of the primary source speech I am
evaluating. The title is, Blanche K. Bruce Speech in the Senate March 31, 1876. This speech is
now part of our national Congressional Record, Vol. 1, part 1, 44th Congress, 1st Session
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1876), pp. 2100-2105.
Bruce was the first African American to serve a full term as a United States Senator. Born
into slavery in 1841 the son of a black slave woman and her master, Blanche K. Bruce spent his
childhood years in Virginia and Missouri where he received his earliest education from the tutor

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hired to teach his master's son. At the dawn of the Civil War, Bruce fled to freedom in Kansas.
After emancipation, he returned to Missouri and then Mississippi to pursue a career in education
and politics. Elected to the Senate in 1874 by the Mississippi state legislature, he served from
1875 to 1881.
Bruce focused on a number of state and national issues however, he may be best known
for his addresses in Congress on March 31, 1876 when he called for a Senate investigation of the
racial and political violence that marked the Mississippi gubernatorial election of 1875.
From 1865 to 1877, more than 3,000 freedmen and their white Republican allies would
be murdered across the South. The truth would be buried for decades in myths and cover stories
that blamed the victims, hid the political purpose of the violence and wildly exaggerated the
supposed wrongs committed against the white Southerners by the "carpetbag" governments. But
the simple fact was that this was a war of terror, led by ex-Confederates who were determined to
reverse the verdict of Appomattox.
States with the longest and most divisive Reconstruction were states where most of the
population was black and whose white leaders had established the Confederacy, such as South
Carolina, the first state to secede from the Union, and Mississippi, the second to secede.
Reconstruction, which went through two phases, lasted for eleven years in Mississippi. After
emancipation and Confederate defeat, many white Mississippians still thought they had been
right to own slaves and secede from the Union. This position, within a state where the population
was 55 percent black, foreshadowed a difficult Reconstruction.
Colonel Samuel Thomas, the assistant commissioner of the Freedmens Bureau, noticed
white Mississippians defiant posture when he traveled through the state months after the war.
Wherever I gothe street, the shop, the house, or the steamboatI hear the people talk in such

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a way as to indicate that they are yet unable to conceive of the Negro as possessing any rights at
all. Thomas worried that whites who are honorable in their dealings with their white neighbors
will cheat a Negro without feeling a single twinge of their honor. To kill a Negro they do not
deem murder.
Testimony from officials like Thomas and the oppressive Black Codes convinced
Congress that Mississippi and other states needed a more thorough Reconstruction.
Congressional, or Radical, Reconstruction ensued. But Radical Reconstruction infuriated
southerners committed to white supremacy. As Republicans implemented political equality,
terrorist groups used intimidation and violence to halt progress. The foremost of these
organizations was the Ku Klux Klan.
When Bruce arrived in the U.S. Senate Chamber on March 5, 1875, precedent called for
his states senior Senator to escort him to the podium, but Senator Alcorn snubbed the junior
Senator. Bruce walked up the aisle alone until Republican Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York
offered to escort him. Thereafter Bruce had a powerful ally in Conkling, who coached him in
Senate procedures and procured him assignments on influential committees.
Bruce remained quiet during the special session of the Senate in 1876. Concerned white
Republicans doubted Bruce would stand up for freedmen, who faced terrible violence from white
supremacists. Bruce knew his audience in the Senate Chamber. He knew they might be hostile to
his plea for investigation and intervention. He may have been following the timehonored
tradition that a freshman remains studious and silent during his first few months in the Senate
Chamber. Bruce finally broke his silence on March 3, 1876, in defense of southern blacks,
petitioning his colleagues for an inquiry into the violent 1875 Mississippi gubernatorial election.

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The Senate passed a bill to investigate the political conditions in Mississippi during the previous
election; however, the Democratic House did not act on the legislation.
Bruce argued for the protection in all their purity and significance of the political rights of
the people and the free institutions of the country to apply to ALL (which at the time meant all
male) people. He asserted that differences of religion nationality, or race can neither with safety
nor propriety be permitted for a moment to enter into the party contests of the day. Blanche K.
Bruce delivered a powerful speech attesting to the proven courage, love of liberty and amity of
his race and asked that they be given equality without the violence and humiliation involved in
the enforced abandonment of their political convictions.
In his speech Bruce offers evidence both in hand and accessible of the violence and
threats his people suffered during the gubernatorial elections in Mississippi. He also provides as
evidence of colored peoples courage and love of liberty the fact that they have attested in blood
on more than one historic battlefield since 1776. While I fully believe both of these statements, I
find his next statement more difficult to accept given the climate of hatred and fear that existed in
the deep south during this period of Reconstruction.
In his speech Bruce asks senators to believe That no consideration of fear or personal
danger has kept us quiet and forbearing under the provocations and wrongs that have so sorely
tried our souls. But feeling kindly toward our white fellow-citizens, appreciating the good
purposes and politics of the better classes. I understand why he said this, but find it hard to
believe good will toward white fellow-citizens rather than fear was the motivating factor in
forbearing provocations and wrongs.

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Blanche K. Bruce may have been a giant among men, and I think that he probably was,
but he is speaking on behalf of an entire race that had known generations of inhuman cruelty,
abuse and oppression at the hands of whites. His own mother had been a slave and so had he,
working as a personal servant to his half-brother before fleeing to freedom in Kansas. How can a
soul endure such injustice and feel nothing but kindly toward their tormentors? How could an
entire race feel that way as theyre actively being persecuted?
Certainly, Bruce couldnt go before his fellow senators and demand justice at this point in
history. If anything, history teaches us that the Civil War and Radical Reconstruction had served
to harden the resolve of white supremacists in the formerly Confederate States. His only hope
was to gain a measure of their acceptance slowly, and then to present his people as possessing
dignity and courage in the face of overwhelming adversity. He needed to show that they too had
sacrificed in blood, sweat and tears to contribute and build up the prosperity of the land and had
the same instincts for freedom and love of country that white citizens possessed.
When the federal government refused to address the crimes committed during the
Reconstruction, John R. Lynch, Mississippis Republican congressman, warned that the war
was fought in vain. If all men were not equal before the law, America had not advanced very far
since the Civil War. One hundred years later, the civil rights movement achieved the freedom that
thousands of other Mississippians first won and then lost during Reconstruction. One hundred
and fifty years after the Civil War the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police
officers has raised the question once again of whether all men are truly equal before the law yet.

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