Daily Kennebec journal. [microfilm reel] (Augusta, Me.) 1870-1975, 1874-02-13
REMARKABLE CHANGE.


Among the striking changes occasloned
bv the downfall of slavery and the eieva-
ton of the colored people of the South to
the rights of citizenship. no individual
case will draw more attention than that IN
which a negro and former slave is elected
TO the United States Senate to fill the seat
once occupied by Jefferson Davis. Mr..
B. X. Bruce, who has recently been elect
ed United States Senator by the Mlsslss-
ippi legislature, was formerly a slave IN
Brunswick, Missouri, owned by Mr. Peiiis
Parkinson of that place. Released by the
war, he obtained, after the fighting was
over. a situation as porter on steamer
in which he remained several years ana
until the steamer sunk. He then went to
school at Oberlin, Ohio, and finally worked
his way to Mississippi, where he secured
an election as Sergeant-at-Arms OF the
House of Representatives. After this he
was appointed sheriff by Governor Acorn
and served two terms. and now he goes to
the Senate TO represent Mississippi In that
body.
The change in the conditions of these
two men, the rebel chief and the former
slave. marks most strikingly the great
social and political revolution which has
occurred in the South. 'What lesson for
history" says the Chronicle. 1.-The lead
er of the rebellion in foreign lands, broken
in health, and with his bright expectations
all gone, and in the place from which he
first hurled his defiance at the Government
and announced his traitorous intentions is
man, who at that time was despised
slave, without any rights that white men
were bound to respect.
The man who would have said at the
opening of the war that within ten years
colored man and slave would occupy a
seat in the Senate of the United States
would have been regarded as insane. But
to-day that race are pushing their way in
to the professions, into public life and of
fetal position, and one of the humblest OF
them is elected from the great State OF
Mississippi as the successor of the rebel
President in the Senate of the United
States. History, it is said, repeats itself,
and this fact is potent and significant as
any of the startling revolutions in public
sentiment recorded of that time in the
worlds history when the mighty contests
between the oppressed and the Govern
ment inspired the songs of the poet and
the pen of the patriotic historian.
The historic events in our own country,
which mark so distinctly the rapid change
in our political condition, may for the
present pass unnoticed, but they will be
most graphic and interesting to the future
statesman as he reviews the changing
scenes of these eventful times. From the
slave-pen to the Senatc-from the human
auction-block to the legislative hall-from
the toiling fields of unpaid labor to the
dignity of law-maker for forty millions
of free peoples a change, the public
importance of which we who stand amid
such rapid and astonishing results can
scarcely realize. 1t will require the calm
retrospect of the future citizen of the
country, who will look back upon it with
all its startling novelty, to duly appre-
cate how great revolution has been
thus quietly accomplished.'