Post by sudan on Apr 18, 2007 21:05:35 GMT -5
The first Person of Color to serve as governer of a state was not Douglas Wilder, but P.B.S. Pinchback. His tenure as governor, however, was much shorter than Wilder's. Pinchback had been elected president pro tempore of the Louisiana senate in 1871 and promoted to lieutenant governor upon the death of Oscar J. Dunn. Pinchback was governor of Louisiana for just forty-six days, from December 9, 1872, to January 13, 1873, after the elected governor, Henry Clay Warmouth, was impeached.
Pinchback was never able to reach the governor's mansion by election, but he retired to Washington, D.C., where, along with Blanche Bruce, he became a celebrity in Washington social circles. Governer P.B.S Pinchback, was a former cabin boy, shrewd, capable, vain, a gambling type, a man who would put everything on an ace and, losing, walk away with a smile. Elliott was a dark-skinned free person of color with a somewhat mysterious background.
* Pinchback was fair-skinned, the son of a Mississippi planter and a colored woman who bore him ten children.
Pinchback was of like mind: he was what he was. A congressional investigating committee asked him if the governor acknowledged his strength. Pinchback was frank. "Oh, yes; he always acknowledged he couldn't get along without me. I have to tell you the truth." Bold, elegantly turned out, daring, Pinchback made his mark in reconstructed Louisiana. By turns a senator, lieutenant governor and governor, he held more major offices than any other person of color in American history.
In the fall of 1872 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. In January, 1873, he was elected to the Senate. He went to Washington, therefore, with the extraordinary distinction of being both a congressman-elect. (There were also disquieting rumors that Pinchback intended to make himself vice-president elect.) Pinchback did not go as a beggar. "Sir," he told the Senate, "I demand simple justice. I am not here as a beggar. I do not care as far as I am personally concerned whether you give me my seat or not. I will go back to my people and come here but I tell you to preserve your own consistency. Do not make fish of me while you make flesh of everybody else."
For three years the Senate grappled with Pinchback's case. Almost the whole of an extra session of Congress was devoted to the senator-elect from Louisiana. Finally, after hours of debate, he was rejected. The real reason, some authorities insist, was that the senators' wives told them that they did not intend to associate with Mrs. Pinchback. During the controversy "Pinch," as he was called, became a national figure. Washington women, charmed by his "Brazilian" good looks, went out of their way to meet him and Pichback stories made the rounds. The Washington correspondent of the New York Commercial Advertiser was impressed by the senator-elect.
"Aside from the political view of the question (two factions in Louisiana were competing for national recognition),'' he wrote, "Pinchback's presence in the United States Senate is not open to the smallest objection, except the old Bourbon war-whoops of color. He is about thirty-seven years of age, not darker than an Arab. . . . His features are regular, just perceptibly African, his eyes intensely black and brilliant, with a keen, restless glance.
His most repellent point is a sardonic smile which, hovering continuously over his lips, gives him an evil look, undeniably handsome as the man is. It seems as though the scorn which must rage within him, at sight of the dirty ignorant men from the South who affect to look down upon him on account of his color, finds play imperceptibly about his lips. . . Mr. Pinchback is the best dressed Southern man we have had in Congress from the South since the days when gentlemen were Democrats."