P.B.S Pinchback
Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback (P.B.S Pinchback), was a freeborn Black who was a Union officer in the American Civil War and a leader in Louisiana politics during Reconstruction (1865–77). He became the first Black governor of the United States. His parents were Eliza Stewart, a former slave, and Major William Pinchback, a White planter and his mother’s former master. William Pinchback, who also had a legal White family, freed Eliza and her two surviving children in 1836. She had borne six by that point and two had survived.
She had four more children with Pinchback, all born into freedom under Georgia law because she was free. During the Civil War, Pinchback became a captain in the Union army and ended up in Union-occupied New Orleans. Despite being able to pass as White, Pinchback did not hide his Black ancestry. He ran the Confederate blockade on the Mississippi to reach Federal-held New Orleans. There he raised a company of Black volunteers for the North, called the Corps d’Afrique. They were better known as the Louisiana Native Guard.
When he encountered racial discrimination in the service, however, he resigned his captain’s commission. Returning to New Orleans after the war, Pinchback organized the Fourth Ward Republican Club and served as a delegate to the convention that established a new constitution for Louisiana. He was elected to the state senate in 1868 and then was named its president pro tempore. He became lieutenant governor upon the death of the incumbent governor Oscar Dunn in 1871.
While impeachment proceedings were in progress against Henry Clay Warmoth, he served as acting governor, thus becoming the first Black governor of the United States. He held office for only 35 days, but ten acts of the Legislature became law during that time. After the contested 1872 Louisiana gubernatorial election, Republican legislators elected Pinchback to the United States Senate. Due to the controversy over the 1872 elections in the state, which were challenged by White Democrats, Pinchback was never seated in Congress.
Overall, the mid- to late 1870s marked an acceleration of the reversal of the political gains that Blacks in Louisiana had achieved since the end of the Civil War. In 1877, Democrats fully regained control of the state legislature after the withdrawal of federal troops, as a result of a national Democratic compromise marking the end of Reconstruction. Republican Blacks continued to be elected to state and local offices, but elections were accompanied by violence and fraud. Most Blacks were totally disfranchised by a new state constitution in 1898 and were effectively excluded from politics for decades.