March 1, 1841 – Birth of Blanche K. Bruce, First Elected Black Senator to Serve a Full Term

Blanche Bruce was born into slavery in Virginia on this date in history. His mother was a domestic slave and his father was her master, Pettis Perkinson. Perkinson educated Bruce along with his white half-brother. Later his father freed Bruce and arranged for him to get an apprenticeship.

Samuel Shapiro writes in “A Black Senator from Mississippi: Blanche K. Bruce,” The Review of Politics”, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Jan., 1982), pp. 83-109, that when Bruce’s master went South to join the Confederate Army, “Bruce characteristically decided to free himself.” He later reported: “I worked my way to Kansas, and became a free man before the emancipation proclamation was issued by President Lincoln.” (p. 85)

His life was not without adventure. He opened a school for Negro children in Lawrence, Kansas, and barely made it out alive when Quantrill’s raiders sacked and burned the town in 1863. [Quantrill’s Raiders were the best-known of the pro-Confederate partisan guerrillas (also known as “bushwhackers”) who fought in the American Civil War. Their leader was William Quantrill and they included Jesse James and his brother Frank.]

In 1864, he opened another school in Hannibal, Missouri. This too was risky, since in 1847, however, Missouri passed a law outlawing “the instruction of negroes or mulattoes, reading or writing, in this State.”

Blanche Bruce. Library of Congress description: “Hon. Blanche Kelso Bruce of Mississippi”, Mathew Brady Collection.

In 1866 he enrolled at Oberlin College, but his funds ran out. He worked his way down to Mississippi, where the governor was Adelbert Ames, a Northerner sympathetic to advancing the rights of freed blacks. Ames appointed Bruce, then 27, to his first government post, as supervisor of elections in Tallahatchie County. Shapiro reports that favorable conditions under Ames’ governorship allowed Bruce “to accumulate political influence, money, land, and political office.”

He went on to hold a number of important positions in the state, including tax collector, commissioner of the levees board, and Bolivar County Superintendent of Education. He became sergeant-at-arms for the Mississippi State Senate in 1870, and was elected sheriff of Bolivar County in 1871. In February 1874, Bruce was elected to the U. S. Senate, the second African American to serve in the upper house of Congress.

When he was sworn in as Senator in the first (special) session of the Forty-fourth Congress, Bruce faced prejudice from his first day.

The House of Representatives history site reports:

When Bruce arrived in the U.S. Senate Chamber on March 5, 1875, precedent called for his state’s senior Senator to escort him to the podium, but Senator Alcorn snubbed the junior Senator because of Bruce’s alliance with Governor Ames. Bruce walked up the aisle alone until Republican Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York offered to escort him. Thereafter Bruce had a powerful ally in Conkling, who coached him in Senate procedures and procured him assignments on influential committees, such as the Education and Labor, Manufactures, and Pensions committees.”

In gratitude, Bruce named his only son Roscoe Conkling Bruce.

Shapiro noted: “The three Congresses in which Bruce served saw a steady erosion in Republican strength and Negro membership. . . . Bruce never had a black colleague in the Senate.”

After President Ulysses S. Grant refused to protect black (and Republican) voters in the Mississippi elections of 1875, it became clear Bruce could not be elected. When his term ran out, however, he and his wife decided to stay in Washington, D.C., and he remained active in politics.

Bruce worked hard for the election of James Garfield, and in 1881, the new president named Bruce Register of the Treasury, making him the first black person to sign his name to U.S. currency. Bruce served in the lucrative post of the District of Columbia recorder of deeds from 1891 to 1893. Also in 1893, as Shapiro reports, “the ex-slave received an honorary L.L.D.” at Howard University, and the next year he was named to the board of trustees of Howard.

Bruce died in March 1898. An obituary published on March 26, 1898 in The Colored American observed in part (Shapiro, p. 108):

His strong point as a politician lay in the fact that he was a consummate strategist, one who had made politics the study of his life, and who applied all the arts known to practical politics to compass his ends. He believed in the doctrine that ‘all is fair in love and war and politics,’ and he never hesitated (in) constantly applying it in his political battles.”

Oil on canvas, Simmie Knox, 2001, Collection of the U.S. Senate