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Blanche Bruce
6th and 9th Register of the Treasury
In office December 3, 1897 – March 17, 1898
President	William McKinley
Preceded by	Fount Tillman
Succeeded by	Judson Lyons
In office May 21, 1881 – June 5, 1885
President	James A. Garfield Chester A. Arthur Grover Cleveland
Preceded by	Glenni Scofield
Succeeded by	William Rosecrans
United States Senator from Mississippi
In office March 4, 1875 – March 4, 1881
Preceded by	Henry R. Pease
Succeeded by	James Z. George
Personal details
Born	Blanche Kelso Bruce (1841-03-01)March 1, 1841 Farmville, Virginia, U.S.
Died	March 17, 1898(1898-03-17) (aged 57) Washington, D.C., U.S.
Resting place	Woodlawn Cemetery
Political party	Republican
Spouse	Josephine Willson
Children	Roscoe
Education	Oberlin College
Signature

Blanche Kelso Bruce (March 1, 1841 – March 17, 1898) was an American politician who represented Mississippi as a Republican in the United States Senate from 1875 to 1881. Born into slavery in Prince Edward County, Virginia, he went on to become the first elected African-American senator to serve a full term (Hiram R. Revels, also of Mississippi, was the first African American to serve in the U.S. Senate but did not complete a full term).

He was appointed as Recorder of Deeds in Washington D.C. during Benjamin Harrison's presidency. His home, the Blanche K. Bruce House, is a National Historic Landmark.

Early life and education

Bruce was born into slavery in 1841 in Prince Edward County, Virginia, near Farmville to Polly Bruce, an African-American woman who served as a domestic slave. His father was his master, Pettis Perkinson, a white Virginia planter. Bruce was treated comparatively well by his father, who educated him together with a legitimate half-brother. When Bruce was young, he played with his half-brother. One source claims that his father legally freed Blanche and arranged for an apprenticeship so he could learn a trade. In an 1886 newspaper interview, however, Bruce says that he gained his freedom by moving to Kansas as soon as hostilities broke out in the Civil War.

Career

Bruce attended Oberlin College for two years in Oberlin, Ohio. He next worked as a steamboat porter on the Mississippi River. In 1864, he moved to Hannibal, Missouri, where he established a school for black children.

In 1868, during Reconstruction, Bruce relocated to Bolivar near Cleveland in northwestern Mississippi, at which he purchased a Mississippi Delta plantation. He became a wealthy landowner of several thousand acres in the Mississippi Delta. He was appointed to the positions of Tallahatchie County registrar of voters and tax assessor before he won an election for sheriff in Bolivar County. He later was elected to other county positions, including tax collector and supervisor of education, while he also edited a local newspaper. He became sergeant-at-arms for the Mississippi State Senate in 1870.

In February 1874, Bruce was elected to the U.S. Senate, the second African American to serve in the upper house of Congress. On February 14, 1879, Bruce presided over the U.S. Senate, becoming the first African American (and the only former slave) to have done so. In 1880, James Z. George, a Confederate Army veteran and member of the Democratic Party, was elected to succeed Bruce. After his Senate term expired, Bruce remained in Washington, D.C., secured a succession of Republican patronage jobs and stumped for Republican candidates across the country. He acquired a large townhouse and summer home, and presided over black high society.

At the 1880 Republican National Convention in Chicago, Bruce became the first African American to win any votes for national office at a major party's nominating convention, with eight votes for vice president. The presidential nominee that year was Ohio's James A. Garfield, who narrowly won election over the Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock.

In early 1889, politically connected blacks lobbied for Bruce to receive a Cabinet appointment in the Harrison Administration. Said one newspaper: "Bruce is a man of respectable ability, and has, perhaps, more than any other man of his race who has sat in Congress, the respect of those with whom he served.

Bruce served by appointment as the District of Columbia recorder of deeds from 1890 to 1893. A Philadelphia newspaper reported his appointment in 1890, but persistent claims that his salary was $30,000 a year are not substantiated by any primary records. He also served on the District of Columbia Board of Trustees of Public Schools from 1892 to 1895. He was a participant in the March 5, 1897 meeting to celebrate the memory of Frederick Douglass and the American Negro Academy led by Alexander Crummell. He was appointed as Register of the Treasury a second time in 1897 by President William McKinley and served until his death from diabetes complications in 1898.

Personal life

On June 24, 1878, Bruce married Josephine Beall Willson (1853–1923), a fair-skinned socialite of Cleveland, Ohio, amid great publicity; the couple traveled to Europe for a four-month honeymoon. Their only child, Roscoe Conkling Bruce, was born in 1879. He was named for U.S. Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York, Bruce's mentor in the Senate.

One newspaper wrote that Bruce did not approve of the designation "colored men." He often said, "I am a Negro and proud of it."

Honors and legacy

In July 1898, the District of Columbia public school trustees ordered that a then-new public school building on Marshall Street in Park View be named the Bruce School in his honor.

In 1975, the Washington, D.C. residence of Bruce, was declared a National Historic Landmark and formally named The Blanche K. Bruce House.

In October 1999, the U.S. Senate commissioned a portrait of Bruce. African-American Washington D.C. artist Simmie Knox was selected in 2000 to paint the portrait, which was unveiled in the Capitol in 2001.

In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante listed Blanche Bruce on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

A historical highway marker marking Bruce's birthplace at the intersection of highway 360 and 623 near Green Bay, Prince Edward County, Virginia, was unveiled by the African American Heritage Preservation Foundation on March 1, 2006.

In June 2006, a historical book about Bruce was authored by Lawrence Otis Graham, titled The True Story of America's First Black Dynasty: The Senator and the Socialite.

See also

• List of African-American United States senators
• List of African-American United States Senate candidates

• Biography
• Virginia
• Ohio
• United States
• American Civil War
• Mississippi
• Politics

References

1. Wilson, J. G.; Fiske, J., eds. (1900). "Bruce, Blanche Kelso" . Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. New York: D. Appleton.
2. ^ Glass, Andrew (February 14, 2011). "Freed slave presides over Senate: February 14, 1879". The Politico.
3. "Reminiscences of the Kansas Life of Ex-Senator B. K. Bruce".
4. ^ Wright, John Aaron (2002). Discovering African American St. Louis: A Guide to Historic Sites. St. Louis, Missouri: Missouri History Museum.
5. Rev. William J. Simmons, Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive, and Rising, 1887. pp. 699–703. Geo. M. Rewell& Co., 1887
6. Eric Foner (July 2, 2006). "Rise and Fall of the House of Bruce". The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.
7. Turkel, Stanley (2005). Heroes of the American Reconstruction: Profiles of Sixteen Educators, Politicians and Activists. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. p. 6. ISBN 0786419431. Senator Bruce was also the first African-American to preside over the Senate and the first African-American whose signature appeared on all the nation's paper currency (as Register of the Treasury starting on May 18, 1881)
8. "Color in the Cabinet". Big Sandy News (Louisa, KY). January 3, 1889. Retrieved December 2, 2023.
9. "Blanche K. Bruce's New Office". The Philadelphia Inquirer. January 30, 1890. p. 1. Retrieved May 23, 2023 – via Newspapers.com.
10. The Executive Documents of the House of Representatives for the third session of the fifty-third Congress 1894–1895. Government Printing Office. 1895. p. 819. Retrieved September 16, 2016.
11. Seraile, William. Bruce Grit: The Black Nationalist Writings of John Edward Bruce. Univ. of Tennessee Press, 2003. pp. 110–111.
12. "Blanche K. Bruce". Biography. Archived from the original on October 13, 2018. Retrieved October 12, 2018.
13. Gardner, Eric (January 2006). Bruce, Josephine Beall Willson : African American National Biography. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195301731. Archived from the original on February 25, 2019. Retrieved February 25, 2019.
14. Annual Report of the Commissioners of the District of Columbia for the year ended June 30, 1899. Government Printing Office. 1899. p. 36.
15. "Blanche K. Bruce House - Blanche K. Bruce, the only formerly enslaved man to serve in the Senate and the first Black man to serve a full term, lived in this house while a Senator". DC Historic Sites. Retrieved August 27, 2023.
16. Asante, Molefi Kete (2002). 100 Greatest African Americans: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books. ISBN 1573929638.
17. African American Heritage Preservation Foundation, Inc. (February 13, 2006). "Dedication Ceremony honoring ex-slave Blanche Kelso Bruce, 1st Black senator to serve a full term". History News Network.
18. "The Senator and the Socialite - Lawrence Otis Graham - Paperback". HarperCollins Canada. Retrieved August 27, 2023.

Bibliography

• Graham, Lawrence Otis (2006). The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America's First Black Dynasty. New York: Harper Collins. ISBN 978-0060985134.
• Patler, Nicholas (2012). "The Black 'Consummate Strategist': Blanche Kelso Bruce and the Skillful Use of Power in the Reconstruction and Post-Reconstruction Eras," pp. 23–46, in Matthew Lynch, ed., Before Obama: A Reappraisal of the Black Reconstruction Era Politicians. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger Publishing. ISBN 978-0313397929.
• Patler, Nicholas. "A Black Vice President in the Gilded Age? Blanche Kelso Bruce and the National Republican Convention of 1880," in Journal of Mississippi History (Summer 2009), pp. 105–138.
• Rabinowitz, Howard N., ed. Southern Black Leaders of the Reconstruction Era (1982), pp. 1–38.

External links

• United States Congress. "Blanche Bruce (id: B000968)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress. Retrieved on 2009-03-26
• Blanche Bruce at Find a Grave
• Biography and Joe Kelso.Tripod
• Review of The Senator and the Socialite
• The story of his life is retold in the 1949 radio drama "The Saga of Senator Blanche K Bruce", a presentation from Destination Freedom, written by Richard Durham

v t e United States senators from Mississippi
Class 1	Leake Holmes Ellis Reed Ellis Black Trotter T. Hickman Williams Henderson Speight Davis McRae S. Adams Davis Ames Pease Bruce George Money J. Williams Stephens Bilbo Stennis Lott Wicker
Class 2	T. Hill Williams Reed R. Adams Poindexter Walker Chalmers Foote Brooke Brown Revels Alcorn Lamar Walthall McLaurin Walthall Sullivan McLaurin Gordon Percy Vardaman Harrison Eastland Doxey Eastland Cochran Hyde-Smith

• 1841 births
• 1898 deaths
• African-American farmers
• 19th-century American farmers
• 19th-century American slaves
• African-American politicians during the Reconstruction Era
• African-American sheriffs
• African-American United States senators
• African-American candidates for Vice President of the United States
• Burials at Woodlawn Cemetery (Washington, D.C.)
• District of Columbia Recorders of Deeds
• Farmers from Mississippi
• Mississippi Republicans
• Mississippi sheriffs
• Oberlin College alumni
• People from Hannibal, Missouri
• People from Farmville, Virginia
• People of the Reconstruction Era
• People of Missouri in the American Civil War
• Republican Party United States senators from Mississippi
• Washington, D.C., Republicans
• People from Prince Edward County, Virginia
• African-American candidates for the United States Senate
• People enslaved in Virginia
• 19th-century United States senators