Let Us Have Peace

This is a rare and haunting document: a Congressional speech delivered in the immediate aftermath of political murder, bearing witness to the bloodiest chapter of American Reconstruction. Logan H. Roots rose on the House floor to eulogize Congressman James Hinds, killed by the Ku Klux Klan in Arkansas in 1868, one of the first U.S. Representatives assassinated in the line of duty. The speech is both funeral oration and polemic, an impassioned argument for federal protection in a South drowning in insurgent violence. What makes this document extraordinary is its raw, unreconstructed grief. Roots does not perform statesmanlike detachment. He names the terror, the complicity of local authorities, the federal government's failure to protect its own emissaries in the South. Here is the political reality of Reconstruction: not abstract constitutional debate, but men with rifles waiting in the dark. The speech failed to bring justice, but it remains an indelible record of what it cost to stand for justice in an America that had not yet decided whether it wanted peace or revenge.