Toomer, Nathan, 1839-1906

The senior Nathan, was born into slavery in Chatham County, North Carolina, and sold when young to Col. Henry Toomer. Nathan worked for Henry Toomer as a personal valet and assistant before and after the Civil War, learning the ways of the white upper class. He later took his former master's surname after emancipation. Nathan Toomer married and became a farmer in Georgia; he and his wife had four daughters.

After the death of his first wife, Nathan married Amanda America Dickson, a mixed-race woman whose inheritance from her white planter father resulted in great wealth. She was called the "wealthiest colored woman in America." She died intestate in 1893 after about a year of marriage. After a legal struggle with her children, which did not end until years after his third marriage, Nathan received almost no inheritance.

Later in 1893, the widower Nathan at age 54 married 28-year-old Nina Elizabeth Pinchback, a wealthy young woman of color. She was born in New Orleans as the third child of people of color who had been free before the Civil War. Her father, P. B. S. Pinchback, was of majority European heritage, from several nationalities, and also of African and Cherokee descent. Born free in Mississippi, he was raised by his white planter father. After his father's death in 1848, he and his mother moved to the free state of Ohio. Pinchback served as an officer in the Union Army in Louisiana.

After the war Pinchback stayed in Louisiana, where he became a Republican politician during the Reconstruction era. He served briefly as governor of Louisiana, the first African American to serve as governor of any U.S. state. He was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate in 1872 and 1873, respectively, but lost challenges to his seats by Democrats in Congress. In 1891-1892, white Democrats had regained control of the Louisiana legislature and were imposing Jim Crow laws; the Pinchbacks left the state and moved to Washington, D.C., where they easily became part of the elite class of people of color. P. B. S. Pinchback was suspicious of Nathan Toomer and strongly opposed his daughter's choice for marriage, but ultimately acquiesced in her choice.

After frequent travels, the senior Nathan Toomer abandoned his wife and son, and returned to Georgia. Unable to pay alimony, he was seeking to gain some of his late second wife's estate. Nina divorced him and took back her name of Pinchback; she and her son returned to live with her parents. At that time, angered by her husband's abandonment, her father insisted they use another name for her son and started calling him Eugene, after the boy's godfather. The boy also was given a variety of nicknames by various family members. He saw his father once in 1897 in Washington, DC after he had gone to Georgia; the father died in 1906.