Eminent Colored Men: Hon. Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi, 1884 Size:18x24 as if the printer himself

as if the printer himself ran short of foreground

and olive branch held together on paper while the country itself was held together by ledgers of recruits and the long arithmetic of war

when the country was still negotiating what to make of the man who had accepted Lee's sword and then stumbled through two terms in the White House

Lee 1865–1871 — the surrendered general in his postwar afterlife

The engraver understood what telescopes could not pierce: Venus reveals only what she chooses

Eminent Colored Men: Hon. Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi, 1884 Size:18x24 as if the printer himselfEminent Colored Men: Hon. Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi, 1884. Bruce sits in this commemorative lithograph as the first Black senator to serve a full term, his Mississippi delegation rendered in the dignified parlor portrait grammar Reconstruction reserved for men it did not yet know how to remember. About the Source Bella Frye sources artifacts from the great American historical archive the Library of Congress, the National Archives, regional