Pinchback, Pinckney Benton Stewart, 1837-1921

<p>Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback (born Pinckney Benton Stewart, May 10, 1837 – December 21, 1921) was an American publisher and politician, a Union Army officer, and the first African American to become governor of a U.S. state. A Republican, Pinchback served as the 24th Governor of Louisiana from December 9, 1872, to January 13, 1873. He was one of the most prominent African-American officeholders during the Reconstruction Era.</p>

<p>Pinchback was born free in Macon, Georgia to Eliza Stewart, a freed Negro woman, and William Pinchback, a white planter. His father raised the younger Pinchback and his siblings as his own children on his large plantation in Mississippi. After the death of his father in 1848, his mother took Pinchback and siblings to the free state of Ohio to ensure their continued freedom. After the start of the American Civil War, Pinchback traveled to Union-occupied New Orleans. There he raised several companies for the 1st Louisiana Native Guard, and became one of the few African Americans commissioned as officers in the Union Army.</p>

<p>Pinchback remained in New Orleans after the Civil War, becoming active in Republican politics. He won election to the Louisiana State Senate in 1868 and became the president pro tempore of the state senate. He became the acting Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana upon the death of Oscar Dunn in 1871 and briefly served as Governor of Louisiana after Henry C. Warmoth was suspended from office. He was the first African American to serve as a US governor. African Americans were increasingly disenfranchised in the South at the turn of the 20th century; Pinchback was the only African American to serve as governor of a U.S. state until Douglas Wilder became governor of Virginia in 1990. After the contested 1872 Louisiana gubernatorial election, Republican legislators elected Pinchback to the United States Senate. Due to the controversy over the 1872 elections in the state, which were challenged by white Democrats, Pinchback was never seated in Congress.</p>

<p>Pinchback served as a delegate to the 1879 Louisiana constitutional convention, where he helped gain support for the founding of Southern University. In a Republican federal appointment, he served as the surveyor of US customs of New Orleans from 1882 to 1885. Later he worked with other leading men of color to challenge the segregation of Louisiana's public transportation system, leading to the Supreme Court case of <i>Plessy v. Ferguson</i>. To escape increasing racial oppression, he moved with his family to Washington, D.C. in 1892, where they were among the elite people of color. He died there in 1921.</p>

P.B.S. PINCHBACK was born near Macon, Georgia on May 10, 1837. His father William, was a wealthy white planter, and his mother Elize, was his father’s former slave. Pinchback’s early education was attained in the public schools of Cincinnati, Ohio. He later studied law at Straight University in Louisiana, and in 1886, was admitted to the bar. During the Civil War, he served as captain of Company A, in the 2nd Regiment of the Louisiana Native Guards. Pinchback entered politics in 1867, serving as a delegate to the Louisiana Reconstruction Convention. He also served as a member of the Louisiana State Senate from 1868 to 1871. Upon the death of Lieutenant Governor Oscar Dunn in 1871, Pinchback, who was president of the senate at the time, assumed the duties of the lieutenant governor’s office. He served in this capacity until 1872. Due to impeachment charges, Governor Henry C. Warmoth was removed from office on December 8, 1872, and Pinchback, who was lieutenant governor, assumed the office of the governorship. He served for thirty-six days, becoming the first African-American to serve any U.S. state as governor. During his short tenure, several appointments were granted, and ten legislative bills were sanctioned. After leaving the governor’s office on January 13, 1873, Pinchback was elected to Congress, but was denied a seat. In 1879, he served as a delegate to the Louisiana Constitutional Convention. Four years later, he was appointed surveyor of customs for the port of New Orleans. He also was involved in the founding of Southern University, where he served for several years on the board of trustees. In his latter years, he moved to Washington, D.C. and practiced law. Governor P.B.S. Pinchback died on December 21, 1921, and was buried at the Metairie Ridge Cemetery in New Orleans.

<p>The son of a white Southern planter and a former slave, Pinckney Benton Stewart “P. B. S.” Pinchback became the first African-American to serve as governor of any American state, during a brief Reconstruction-era tenure as Louisiana’s chief executive. Prior to his political career, he served as one of the Union Army’s few commissioned officers of African descent during the Civil War, and in later years he helped establish Southern University in Baton Rouge. Lauded by his contemporaries for his efforts on behalf of civil rights while at the same time decried for his moral ambiguity, Pinchback was complex political figure who defied easy categorization.</p>

<p>Born in Macon, Georgia, Pinchback spent most of his boyhood in relative isolation on his father’s plantation in Holmes County, Mississippi. Desiring the boy to receive a formal education, his father sent him to school in Cincinnati, Ohio, the abolitionist hub of the Upper Midwest and home to a growing free black and runaway slave community. Pinchback came home to Mississippi after less than a year of school, but the unexpected death of his father put young Pinchback as well as his mother and siblings in jeopardy of reenslavement by white relatives who disinherited the mixed-race family. As a consequence, they fled around 1850 to Cincinnati, where they faced an uncertain future.</p>

<p>As a young man, Pinchback worked aboard vessels plying the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and he married Nina Hawthorn of Memphis, Tennessee, in 1860. He arrived in New Orleans near the onset of the Civil War and was jailed briefly in 1862 after stabbing another free man of color on a city street; the army provost court that had initially sentenced him to two years’ incarceration described his habits as “intemperate.”</p>

<p>It is unclear why he only served one month of his sentence, but by the time he left jail Pinchback decided to enlist as a private in a Union regiment, presumably as a white man. When Major General Benjamin F. Butler announced that he would raise regiments of “Native Guards” from the ranks of the city’s free black population, however, Pinchback quickly applied to recruit his own company. Despite being the only officer of color in the original Native Guards who was neither a native New Orleanian nor an Afro-Creole, he encountered little difficulty in attracting recruits. The unit entered service by the end of August, with Pinchback as its captain.</p>