P. B. S. Pinchback

Pinckney Benton Stewart was born free in May 1837 in Macon, Bibb County, Georgia. His parents were Eliza Stewart, a former slave, and Major William Pinchback, a white planter and his mother's former master. William Pinchback, who also had a legal white family, freed Eliza and her two surviving children in 1836; she had borne six children by that point and two had survived.[2] She had four more children with Pinchback, all born into freedom under Georgia law because she was free.

Pinckney Stewart's parents were of diverse ethnic origins. Eliza Stewart was classified as mulatto and had African, Cherokee, Welsh and German ancestry. William Pinchback was ethnic European-American, of Scots-Irish, Welsh and German American ancestry.[3] Shortly after Pinckney's birth, his father William purchased a much larger plantation in Mississippi, and he moved there with both his white and mixed-race families.

Pinckney Benton Stewart and his siblings were considered the "natural" (or illegitimate) children of their father, but they were brought up in relatively affluent surroundings. He treated them as his own, with privileges similar to the white children on his plantation. In 1846, Pinchback sent the nine-year-old Pinckney and his older brother Napoleon north for education at a private academy,[2] Gilmore High School in Cincinnati, Ohio.[4] In 1848, when Pinckney was eleven, his father died.[2]

Fearful that the other Pinchback relatives might try to claim her children as slaves, Eliza Stewart fled with the children to Cincinnati in the free state of Ohio. Napoleon, at 18, helped to keep the family together, but he broke down under the responsibility.[2] At 12, Pinckney left school and began to work as a cabin boy on river and canal boats to help his family. For a while, he lived in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he worked as a hotel porter. During that time, he still identified as Pinckney B. Stewart. He did not take his father's surname of Pinchback until after the end of the Civil War.

In 1860, at the age of 23, Pinckney married Emily Hawthorne, a free woman of color.[2] Like Stewart, she was "practically white" in appearance, meaning that she had a high proportion of European ancestors.[2] They had six children: Pinckney Napoleon in 1862, Bismarck in 1864, Nina in 1866, and Walter Alexander in 1868. Two others died young. Pinckney named one son Bismarck because of his admiration for statesman Otto von Bismarck of Germany, whom he considered to be one of the world's greatest men. Pinckney's mother, Eliza Stewart, lived with Pinckney and his family from 1867 until her death in 1884.[5]

They had a fine house in New Orleans. Usually, in the summer, the whole family traveled to Saratoga Springs, New York, a resort town in upstate, where they would stay for several weeks. Pinchback liked to gamble on the horse racing held there during the summer season.[5]

The Civil War began the following year, and Pinckney Stewart decided to fight on the side of the Union. In 1862, he made his way to New Orleans, which had just been captured by the Union Army. He raised several companies for the Union's all-black 1st Louisiana Native Guards Regiment, which was garrisoned in the city. A minority of the men were Louisiana free men of color, part of the educated class before the war who had participated in the state militia. Most of the Guards were former slaves, who had escaped to join the Union forces and gain freedom.[6]

Commissioned a captain, Stewart was one of the Union Army's few commissioned officers of African-American ancestry. Like Stewart, the officers were mostly of mixed race. Most of them were drawn from the class of free people of color in New Orleans established before the war; unlike him, they were usually of colonial French and African descent. He became Company Commander of Company A, 2nd Louisiana Regiment Native Guard Infantry, made up mostly of refugee slaves. (It was later reformed as the 74th U.S. Colored Infantry Regiment, of the United States Colored Troops.)[7]

Passed over twice for promotion and tired of the prejudice he encountered from white officers, Stewart resigned his commission in 1863. In a letter of April 30, 1863, his married sister Adeline B. Saffold wrote to him from Sidney, Ohio, urging him to follow her example and enter the white world:

If I were you, Pink, I would not let my ambition die. I would seek to rise and not in that class either but I would take my position in the world as a white man as you are and let the other go for be assured of this as the other you will never get your rights. ...[2]

After the war, Stewart and his wife moved to Alabama.

After the war in New Orleans, Stewart took his father's surname of Pinchback. He became active in the Republican Party. The exact moment Pinchback decided to enter politics is described by George Devol in his book Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi.[8] In 1867, Pinchback organized the Fourth Ward Republican Club in New Orleans soon after Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts. That year, he was elected as a delegate to the constitutional convention.

In 1868 Pinchback was elected as a State Senator. He was elected as senate president pro tempore; seven of 36 seats in the Senate were held by men of color. The House had 42 representatives of African-American descent, comprising half the seats. (At the time, the populations of African Americans, including former free people of color, and whites in the state were nearly equal.)

As Senate president pro tempore, in 1871, Pinchback succeeded to the position of acting lieutenant governor upon the death of Oscar Dunn,[9][10] the first elected African-American lieutenant governor of a US state.[11]

Pinchback contributed further to the political discussion with the founding of the bi-weekly newspaper, the Louisianian in 1870. He worked as an editor there until 1872. Later, in 1874, he returned to be editor and in 1878 he became editor-in-chief, though he allowed students from Straight University (later part of Dillard University). The paper's motto was "Republican at all times, and under all circumstances." Publication of the paper ended in 1882.[12][13]

He was appointed as director of the New Orleans public schools. Statewide public schools were established for the first time by the new state legislature during Reconstruction.[14] Pinchback had a long-standing interest in education of blacks and was appointed to the Louisiana State Board of Education, where he served from March 18, 1871, until March, 1877.[15]

In 1885, Pinchback studied law in New Orleans at Straight University, a historically black college later known as Dillard University. He was admitted to the Louisiana bar in 1886, but he never practiced.[28]

Pinchback moved with his family to Washington, D.C., in 1892. Wealthy from his positions and settlement on the Senate seat, he had a large mansion built off Fourteenth Street near the Chinese embassy.[23] At the time, his oldest son, Pinckney Pinchback, was established as a pharmacist in Philadelphia; the younger three ranged in age from 22 to 26 and were still living at home.[29] The Pinchback family was part of the mixed-race elite in Washington; people in the group had generally been free before the Civil War and often were educated and had acquired property. The Washington Post covered Pinchback's housewarming reception and his many high-ranking guests.[23]

Later, Pinchback worked for a time in New York as a U.S. Marshal.[28]

By his death in 1921 in Washington, D.C., Pinchback was little known politically.[28] His body was returned to New Orleans, where he was interred in Metairie Cemetery.

Pinchback and his wife Nina were the maternal grandparents of Jean Toomer.[23] Their daughter Nina Pinchback Toomer returned to live with her parents after her husband abandoned her when Jean was an infant. They helped raise him, and he started school in Washington, D.C.. After his mother remarried, they moved to New Rochelle, New York. He returned to his grandparents after his mother died in 1909, and went to high school at the academic M Street School. As an adult, Toomer became a poet and writer who was prominent as a modernist in New York during the Harlem Renaissance.

• List of African-American officeholders during Reconstruction
• List of African-American United States representatives
• List of African-American United States senators
• List of minority governors and lieutenant governors in the United States
• Military history of African Americans in the American Civil War
• David Paterson
• Deval Patrick
• Douglas Wilder

• Dray, Philip. Capitol men: the epic story of Reconstruction through the lives of the first Black congressmen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).
• Grosz, Agnes Smith, "The Political Career of Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback," Louisiana Historical Quarterly, XXVII (1944)
• Haskins, James. Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback(New York: Macmillan, 1973)
• Hollandsworth, James G. (1998). The Louisiana Native Guards: The Black Military Experience During the Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 0-8071-2336-6.
• Patler, Nicholas (2012). "The Startling Career of P.B.S. Pinchback: A Whirlwind Crusade to Bring Equality to Reconstructed Louisiana," pp 211-233, in Matthew Lynch, ed., Before Obama: A Reappraisal of Black Reconstruction Era Politicians. Santa Barbara, CA: Praegar Publishing. ISBN 978-0-313-39791-2.
• Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback Papers, Manuscript Department, Moorland-Spingarm Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C., 3 includes "Here under the protecting care" speech quoted by Nicholas Lemann in Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War
• Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising, by Rev. William J. Simmons, D. D., President of the State University, Louisville, Kentucky (1887)
• Paterson, David "Black, Blind, & In Charge: A Story of Visionary Leadership and Overcoming Adversity."Skyhorse Publishing. New York, New York, 2020
• Toomer, Jean; Turner, Darwin T. (1980). The Wayward and the Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer. Baton Rouge: Howard University Press. ISBN 0-88258-014-0.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to P. B. S. Pinchback.

• State of Louisiana – Biography
• Cemetery Memorial by La-Cemeteries
• "Pinckney Benton Stewart "P.B.S." Pinchback". Civil War Union Officer & Louisiana Governor. Find a Grave. January 23, 2002. Retrieved December 9, 2012.