Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback (May 10, 1837 – December 21, 1921) was an American publisher, politician, and Union Army officer. Pinchback was the second African American (after Oscar Dunn) to serve as governor and lieutenant governor of a U.S. state. A Republican, Pinchback served as acting governor of Louisiana from December 9, 1872, to January 13, 1873. He was one of the most prominent African-American officeholders during the Reconstruction Era.
Pinchback was born free in Macon, Georgia, to Eliza Stewart and her master, William Pinchback, a white planter. His father raised the younger Pinchback and his siblings as his own children on his large plantation in Mississippi. After the death of his father in 1848, his mother took Pinchback and siblings to the free state of Ohio to ensure their continued freedom. After the start of the American Civil War, Pinchback traveled to Union-occupied New Orleans. There he raised several companies for the 1st Louisiana Native Guard, and became one of the few African Americans commissioned as officers in the Union Army.
Pinchback remained in New Orleans after the Civil War, becoming active in Republican politics. He won election to the Louisiana State Senate in 1868 and became the president pro tempore of the state senate. He became the acting Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana following the death of Oscar Dunn in 1871 and briefly served as acting governor of Louisiana after Henry C. Warmoth was impeached. 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 never seated in Congress.
Pinchback served as a delegate to the 1879 Louisiana constitutional convention, where he helped gain support for the founding of Southern University. In a Republican federal appointment, he served as the surveyor of U.S. customs of New Orleans from 1882 to 1885. Later he worked with other leading men of color to challenge the segregation of Louisiana's public transportation system, leading to the Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson. To escape increasing racial oppression, he moved with his family to Washington, D.C. in 1892, where they were among the elite people of color. He died there in 1921.
Early life
Pinckney Benton Stewart was born free in May 1837 in Macon, Bibb County, Georgia. 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 children 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.
Pinckney Stewart's parents were of diverse ethnic origins. Eliza Stewart was classified as mulatto and had African, Cherokee, Welsh and German ancestry. William Pinchback was ethnic European-American, of Scots-Irish, Welsh and German American ancestry. Shortly after Pinckney's birth, his father William purchased a much larger plantation in Mississippi, and he moved there with both his white and mixed-race families.
Pinckney Benton Stewart and his siblings were considered the "natural" (or illegitimate) children of their father, but they were brought up in relatively affluent surroundings. He treated them as his own, with privileges similar to the white children on his plantation. In 1846, Pinchback sent the nine-year-old Pinckney and his older brother Napoleon north for education at a private academy, Gilmore High School in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1848, when Pinckney was eleven, his father died.
Fearful that the other Pinchback relatives might try to claim her children as slaves, Eliza Stewart fled with the children to Cincinnati in the free state of Ohio. Napoleon, at 18, helped to keep the family together, but he broke down under the responsibility. At 12, Pinckney left school and began to work as a cabin boy on river and canal boats to help his family. For a while, he lived in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he worked as a hotel porter. During that time, he still identified as Pinckney B. Stewart. He did not take his father's surname of Pinchback until after the end of the Civil War.