Pinchback, P. B. S.

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Pinchback, P. B. S.

May 10, 1837
December 21, 1921

Born free in Macon, Georgia, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, a politician, was the son of William Pinchback, a white planter, and Eliza Steward, his emancipated slave, who was of mixed blood. Along with his brothers and sisters, Pinchback was taken to Cincinnati to escape enslavement by his white relatives at his father's death. Denied any share of his father's estate, Pinchback went to work as a steward on a Mississippi riverboat. In 1862, during the early stages of the Civil War, he volunteered for the Union army in New Orleans and was assigned to recruit for the Corps d'Afrique and a cavalry company, where he protested the unequal treatment of African-American troops.

Pinchback played an important role in establishing the Republican Party in Louisiana following the war and was elected to the state's 1867 Constitutional Convention. He was president of the state senate in 1871 and served as lieutenant governor at the death of Oscar J. Dunn. He became acting governor during the impeachment of Governor Henry Clay Warmoth. Pinchback was an advocate of universal suffrage, civil rights, the legal suppression of discrimination, and tax-supported education. He moved away from the Radical Republicans in 1871 and supported the reelection of Ulysses S. Grant.

There was backing for Pinchback's own nomination for governor in 1872, but he withdrew in favor of W. P. Kellogg. Elected congressman-at-large, he also served as governor again and was then elected to the U.S. Senate. He was unseated when the election was contested, however. Under Governor F. T. Nicholls, Pinchback was appointed to the State Board of Education, where he was instrumental in founding Southern University. He became surveyor of customs at the port of New Orleans. Pinchback was a keen businessman, dealing in cotton, and a founder of the Mississippi River Packet Company. He was admitted to the bar in 1886.

Pinchback moved to New York City, then to Washington, D.C., in 1897, where he resumed his political career, supporting Booker T. Washington, and became a leader of the city's light-skinned social elite. He married Nina Hawthorne; they were the parents of six children. One grandson was Jean Toomer, the Harlem Renaissance novelist. Pinchback died in 1921 and was buried in New Orleans.

See also Politics in the United States