Dunn, Oscar James, c. 1826-1871

<p>Oscar James Dunn (1826 – November 22, 1871) was one of three African Americans who served as a Republican Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana during the era of Reconstruction.</p>

<p>In 1868, Dunn became the first elected black lieutenant governor of a U.S. state. He ran on the ticket headed by Henry Clay Warmoth, formerly of Illinois. After Dunn died in office, then-state Senator P. B. S. Pinchback, another black Republican, became lieutenant governor and thereafter governor for a 34-day interim period.</p>

<p>He was born into slavery in 1826 in New Orleans. As his mother, Maria Dunn, was enslaved, he took her status under the law of the time. His father, James Dunn, had been freed in 1819 by his master. James was born into slavery in Petersburg, Virginia and had been transported to the Deep South in the forced migration of more than one million African Americans from the Upper South.</p>

<p>He was bought by James H. Caldwell of New Orleans, who founded the St. Charles Theatre and New Orleans Gas Light Company. Dunn worked for Caldwell as a skilled carpenter for decades, including after his emancipation by Caldwell in 1819.</p>

<p>Oscar James Dunn was Louisiana’s first black lieutenant governor, serving from 1868 to 1871, and one of three who held that post in the state during the Reconstruction era. Dunn was born enslaved in New Orleans in 1826 to Maria Dunn who was also enslaved and James Dunn who was born enslaved in Petersburg, Virginia but who was later emancipated by his owner, James H. Caldwell who had earlier brought him to New Orleans. After his emancipation, James Dunn married Maria and the couple had two children. Despite the father’s status as a free person, Louisiana law mandated that the children follow the status of the mother meaning they remained enslaved.</p>

<p>By 1832, however, James Dunn had earned enough money as a carpenter to buy freedom for his wife and children including Oscar who was seven at the time. James Dunn continued to work as a carpenter but Maria Dunn ran a boarding house for actors who performed in the St. Charles Theater founded by Caldwell. The family was prosperous enough for young Dunn to have private lessons which allowed him to become an accomplished musician and later a violin instructor. He also learned the art of public speaking from actors who stayed at his mother’s lodging establishment. Nonetheless Dunn also apprenticed as a plasterer and house painter.</p>

<p>Dunn’s career as a public official unofficially began in December 1864. At mass meetings in New Orleans, he emerged as one of a handful of powerful radical voices demanding complete black legal equality and male suffrage in Louisiana’s post-Confederate state government. Dunn joined the Republican Party where he pushed for tax-payer-funded education for all black children, and urged black land ownership. He opposed President Andrew Johnson’s pardoning former Confederate rebels without enforcement of a loyalty oath; returning their lands (often seized by former slaves during the Union occupation of Louisiana in the Civil War); and forcing African Americans back to their former slave owners’ plantations as sharecroppers and “convict” labor.</p>

<p>Oscar James Dunn became one of the first black men to serve in an executive political position in the United States when he was elected lieutenant governor of Louisiana in 1868. It was at this time—a short period during Reconstruction—that many African Americans ascended to power in the state’s highest offices. In an era when Dunn’s race alone would have drawn derision, even his political opponents reported that he was incorruptible and a man of integrity. No political scandals were ever brought against him, which was rare for a politician in the chaotic post-Civil War environment of the defeated Confederacy. His early death at age 45 perhaps prevented him from being a United States senator or potential vice-presidential candidate.</p>

<p>Dunn was born in 1826; his father, James, had been emancipated in 1819 by James H. Caldwell, founder of the St. Charles Theatre and the New Orleans Gas Light Company. James subsequently purchased the freedom of his wife, Maria, and their two children, Oscar and Jane, in 1832. James was a carpenter and Maria operated a boarding house for actors in New Orleans. Oscar apprenticed as a plasterer. He also became a respected violinist and taught private lessons.</p>

<p>During the Civil War, Dunn did not serve in an active capacity. Near the end of the four-year conflict, he opened an employment agency where freedmen described as “good servants and field hands” were hired out to residents of New Orleans and surrounding parishes. Working in collaboration with the newly freed laboring class of African Americans, Dunn championed their struggle for freedom and became a strong advocate of land ownership for blacks, education for all black children, and equal protection laws under the Fourteenth Amendment. He became secretary of the Advisory Committee of the Freedmen’s Saving and Trust Company of New Orleans, a branch of the national agency. In 1866, he organized the People’s Bakery, an enterprise owned and operated by the Louisiana Association of Workingmen.</p>