|
The first Black person to serve a full term in the United States Senate, Blanche K. Bruce was born in slavery near Farmville, Virginia, on March 1, 1841. He was tutored by his master's son and worked as a field hand and printer's apprentice as his master moved him from Virginia to Mississippi and Missouri. Bruce escaped slavery at the opening of the Civil War and attempted to enlist in the Union Army. After the military refused his application, he taught school, briefly attended Oberlin College, and worked as a steamboat porter on the Mississippi River.
In 1864
he settled in Hannibal, Missouri, and organized the
state's first school for blacks. Five years later he
moved to Mississippi where he entered local politics and
established himself as a prosperous landowner. In quick
succession he was appointed registrar of voters in
Tallahatchie County, tax assessor of Bolivar County,
elected sheriff and tax collector of Bolivar where he
also served as supervisor of education.
On a trip to the
state capital of Jackson in 1870, Bruce gained the
attention of powerful white Republicans who dominated
Mississippi's Reconstruction government.
These men secured more
appointments for Bruce and made him the most recognized
black political leader in the state. In February 1874,
the Mississippi legislature elected Bruce to the United
States Senate.
Bruce formally entered the Senate on March
5, 1875, and was elected to three committees: Pensions;
Manufactures; and Education and Labor. During the
Forty-fifth Congress (1877-79) he served on the Select
Committee on the Levee System of the Mississippi River.
Although slighted by his Mississippi colleague, James L.
Alcorn, Bruce won the friendship and support of
Republican senators such as Roscoe Conkling (for whom
Bruce would name his only child), and enjoyed a more
amicable relationship with Alcorn's Democratic successor,
Lucius Q.C. Lamar.
Bruce made repeated
though futile attempts to convince his fellow senators to
seat Louisiana's former governor and black political
leader, P.B.S. Pinchback. He encouraged the government to
be more generous in issuing western land grants to black
emigrants and favored distribution of duty-free clothing
from England to needy blacks who had emigrated to Kansas
from the South. Bruce also appealed for the desegregation
of United States Army units and for a Senate inquiry into
the violent Mississippi elections of 1875.
As a member and
temporary chairman of the Committee on River
Improvements, he advocated the development of a channel
and levee system and construction of the Mississippi
Valley and Ship Island Railroad.
On February 14, 1879,
during debate on a Chinese exclusion bill that he
opposed, Bruce became the first black senator to preside
over a Senate session. In April he was appointed chairman
of the Select Committee to Investigate the Freedman's
Savings and Trust Company. Bruce's six-member committee
issued a report naming bank officials who were guilty of
fraud and incompetence. Eventually about 61,000
depositors victimized by the bank's 1874 failure received
a portion of their money.
In January 1880 the
Mississippi legislature, now controlled by Democrats,
chose James Z. George to succeed Bruce. Before his term
ended the following March, Bruce continued to be an
activist senator, calling for a more equitable and humane
Indian policy and demanding a War Department
investigation of the brutal harassment of a black West
Point cadet. At the 1880 Republican convention in
Chicago, Bruce served briefly as presiding officer and
received eight votes for vice president. Following the
close of his Senate service on March 3, 1881, Bruce
rejected an offer of the ministry to Brazil because
slavery was still practiced there.
All but one member of
the Mississippi congressional delegation endorsed Bruce
for a seat in President Garfield's cabinet, but he
instead received appointment as registrar of the treasury
and served until the Democrats regained power in 1885.
Bruce became a lecturer, an author of magazine articles,
and was superintendent of the exhibit on black
achievement at the World's Cotton Exposition in New
Orleans during 1884-1885.
In 1888 Bruce received
eleven votes for vice president at the convention that
nominated Benjamin Harrison. Harrison, as president,
appointed Bruce recorder of deeds for the District of
Columbia in 1889. After leaving this office in 1893 Bruce
was a trustee of public schools in Washington, D.C., and
again registrar of the treasury from 1897 until his death
in Washington on March 17, 1898.
|
