P. B. S. Pinchback bigraphy, stories - American politician
P. B. S. Pinchback : biography
May 10, 1837 - December 21, 1921
Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback (born Pinckney Benton Stewart; May 10, 1837 – December 21, 1921) was the first person of African-American descent to become governor of a U.S. state. A Republican, he served as the 24th Governor of Louisiana for 35 days, from December 9, 1872, to January 13, 1873.
Nicholas Lemann, in Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War, described Pinchback as "an outsized figure: newspaper publisher, gambler, orator, speculator, dandy, mountebank served for a few months as the state's Governor and claimed seats in both houses of Congress following disputed elections but could not persuade the members of either to seat him."Lemann, Nicholas, Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: September 5, 2006) pp. 196-198.
Legacy
Pinchback is the maternal grandfather of Jean Toomer, known as an author of the Harlem Renaissance.
It was not until 1990 that another African American served as governor of any U.S. state. In 1990, Douglas Wilder of Virginia became the second African-American state governor (and the first to be elected to office). Deval Patrick of Massachusetts was elected governor in 2006 and took office in January 2007. David Paterson of New York became the fourth African-American governor on March 17, 2008, when he succeeded to office following the resignation of Eliot Spitzer.
Early life
Born Pinckney Benton Stewart in May 1837 in Macon, Bibb County, Georgia, his parents were Eliza Stewart, a former slave, and William Pinchback, a planter and her former master. They lived together as husband and wife as interracial marriage was forbidden by state law. They had diverse ethnic origins; Eliza Stewart was classified as mulatto, of African, Cherokee, Welsh and German ancestry; and William Pinchback was of European-American descent: with Scots-Irish, Welsh and German ancestry.Toomer, Turner (1980), p. 22 The children had a majority of European ancestry. Shortly after Pinckney's birth, his father William purchased a much larger plantation in Mississippi, and moved his entire family there.
Pinckney Stewart, as he was then called, as a "natural" (or illegitimate) son of his father, was brought up in relatively affluent surroundings. He and his four siblings were raised as white, and his parents sent him north to Cincinnati, Ohio, to attend school. In 1848, Pinchback's father died. William Pinchback's relatives disinherited his mulatto common-law wife and children and claimed his property in Mississippi.
Fearful that the Pinchbacks might try to claim her five children as slaves, Eliza Stewart fled with her children to Cincinnati in the free state of Ohio. Pinckney at the age of 11 left school and worked on river and canal boats. For a while he resided in Terre Haute, Indiana, working as a hotel porter. During that time he was still known as Pinckney B. Stewart, as he had not yet adopted the surname Pinchback.
Notes
Later life
After his brief governorship, Pinchback remained active in politics and public service. In the elections of 1874 and 1876, Pinchback was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and then the U.S. Senate respectively; he was the state's first African-American representative to Congress. Both election results were contested by Democratic opponents, as the campaigns and elections were surrounded by violence and intimidation. Congress, then dominated by Democrats, finally seated his opponents. This period marked the beginning of a reversal of the political gains which African Americans had achieved since the war's end. The White League, a paramilitary group with chapters across the state beginning in 1874, openly disrupted Republican gatherings and intimidated blacks to repress their vote. A historian described the White League as the "military arm of the Democratic Party."
Pinchback served on the Louisiana State Board of Education and was instrumental in 1880 in establishing Southern University, a historically black college in New Orleans. It relocated to Baton Rouge in 1914.Southern University at New Orleans, which is under the same Board of Supervisors as Southern University, was a later development. He was a member of Southern University's Board of Trustees (later redesignated the Board of Supervisors).
