Capitol Men (37 page)

BLANCHE K. BRUCE

Born in 1841 in Farmville, Virginia, to a slave mother and her white master, Bruce, like South Carolina's Robert Smalls, enjoyed a relatively favorable upbringing for a child who was by birth a slave. He became the servant to one of his owner's "legitimate" sons and was educated alongside him. However, "the white boy gave little heed to lessons, while the colored boy seized and held every scrap of knowledge that came his way," according to one account. The family had relocated to Missouri by
the time war came in 1861, and Bruce's young master hastened to enlist in the Confederate army. Bruce, having different aspirations, headed to neighboring Kansas, a non-slave state. He took up residence in Lawrence, a hub of abolitionist sentiment, where he found work as a teacher. But the great conflict that had seized the nation found him even there. It was his misfortune to be present on the morning of August 21, 1863, when the notorious anti-Unionist bushwhacker William Clarke Quantrill, furious over the previous month's Confederate reversals at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, sacked the town. The populace, roused from sleep by the dawn raid, fled for their lives as Quantrill led his desperadoes on horseback through the streets, shouting, "Kill! Kill, and you will make no mistake!" The mounted raiders, needing little encouragement, smashed windows and storefronts, set fires, and shot or bludgeoned anyone in their path. As many as two hundred people were killed or maimed, and numerous buildings left in ruins.

"Quantrill's band certainly would not have spared a colored man," Bruce later recalled.

The night before the raid I had been watching and nursing a sick friend, and when the day broke I heard firing ... Looking out of the window I saw armed men riding by firing pistols, and immediately realized that the enemy was upon us. To remain with my sick friend would have been to invite certain death, so I bade him
adieu
and with no clothing on my person but shirt and drawers, watched for my opportunity, got out of the house and hid in the brushes behind a fence.

After watching from his hiding place for some time, Bruce, still in his underclothes, perceived a lull in the action and made a break toward the Kaw River. He was seen, however, by some of Quantrill's men, who charged him on horseback as he dove into the water. "Fortunately, keeping my head under water, I managed to hide beneath a hedge of vines and roots close to the shore. The troopers rode to the river and searched
everywhere without discovering my retreat, although they came within a few feet of me a dozen times. Finally they rode away, and I remained concealed in the river all day and did not venture to emerge ... until after nightfall."

After the war Bruce briefly attended Oberlin, the abolitionist-founded school in Ohio, although he soon left for lack of tuition money. He was working as a porter on a Mississippi River steamboat when he began to hear of the public role blacks were starting to play in the postwar South. He was especially curious about Oscar Dunn, Louisiana's black lieutenant governor, and the urbane state senator P.B.S. Pinchback, both of whom he'd read about and who had, like him, worked the riverboats. "In the midst of their vassalage," Bruce was convinced, "my race had still preserved in full force and vigor, their original love of liberty."

The man who had narrowly escaped Quantrill's raiders was savvy enough to know Reconstruction's idealism might not last long, and he was eager to make something of it, and of himself, while good prospects remained. Visiting Mississippi in 1868, Bruce heard a speech given by James Lusk Alcorn and was impressed by the extent to which the former Confederate general was reconciled to the dawning of a new era in the South. Alcorn termed the citizenship rights granted by the Civil Rights Bill of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment "the logical sequence to the freedom of the negro," and he characterized resistance to Reconstruction as "a childish display of spite," which would only weaken the "influence of our friends and of the moderate men in the Republican party." Bruce liked what he heard, was introduced to Alcorn, and on the spot decided to remain in the state. He settled in solidly Republican Bolivar County in the fertile plantation-rich Delta, with its 2,084 black and 590 white voters, and immediately befriended H. T. Florey, the white carpetbagger who held sway there. "[Florey] had a big drum at his office which could be heard for miles around," a memoirist of the period writes, "and when this drum beat, like the great war drum of the Aztecs, it summoned the faithful, and they came from far and near."

Bruce quickly won the attention of state Republicans. Even though his weight hovered somewhat below three hundred pounds, he was always neatly groomed and carried himself with a certain regal deportment. He had a large man's knack for taking the world in stride and was known for his sense of humor, even when the subject was his own physique. "He stands very straight and is very dignified," the
Washington Bee
noted, when Bruce later lived in the nation's capital. "His face is round
and very full about the jaws, which are clean shaven. His eyes are black, with a sparkle of fun in them ... A small dark mustache curls in at the corners of his full-lipped mouth ... He dresses quiet, always wears a high hat, and raises it French fashion to everyone when he bows."

Bruce's talent, honed perhaps by the dual nature of his upbringing, was an ability to interact confidently with both whites and blacks; thus began his political ascent in Boliva. In a debate during the election for sheriff, Bruce's white opponent allowed that Bruce was "a decent man" but unqualified as a leader of men because he had once been a slave and done menial labor. Bruce replied coolly that he had indeed once been a slave, but whereas he "had outgrown the degradation and ignorance of slavery and was a free man and a good citizen ... the difference between my adversary and myself [is that] had
he
been a slave...[he] would be performing menial offices even now."

The Delta's white planters grew satisfied with Bruce's basic decency and, more important, with the evidence that he was not a wild-eyed Radical. His success as superintendent of education bore that out. Many whites had rebelled against the idea of supporting black schools with their tax dollars, but Bruce assured them the schools were to be segregated and would not be forums for political resentment; furthermore, Northern white missionary teachers (often derided as potential agitators) would be phased out as qualified black instructors became available. Bruce also emphasized that educating blacks in basic reading and arithmetic would make them more adaptable laborers and perhaps less inclined to malingering or drunkenness. So effectively did he sell the need for education that some planters contributed to build schools in places where none had ever existed. By late 1872 Bruce had twenty-one schools up and running in Bolivar County, teaching a thousand pupils.

When exactly Bruce learned of Governor Ames's plan to make him lieutenant governor is unclear, but he had reason to regard the offer with caution. He had closely watched affairs in neighboring Louisiana and had corresponded with P.B.S. Pinchback, who had become Louisiana's lieutenant governor upon the death of Oscar Dunn. The incessant political infighting there was a very poor advertisement for engaging in politics at the state level in the postwar South. To Bruce, the U.S. Senate, with its Republican majority and its prestige as a federal legislature, seemed a far friendlier destination.

As Governor Ames had requested, Senator Bruce visited Attorney General Edwards Pierrepont in summer 1875 to encourage him to heed Mississippi's plea for federal intervention. Pierrepont held distinctly
negative views on Reconstruction, once characterizing it as a "false doctrine of despotic sovereignty," and had joined the administration in the wake of the public relations disaster caused by the federal intrusion into the Louisiana legislature. His skepticism was by now hardly unique. Bruce told Pierrepont that Ames's warnings about the present political turmoil in Mississippi were accurate and that without federal help, the growing crisis would mean the end of the Republican Party in the state, as well as the final snuffing out of the freedmen's voting and political rights. A show of commitment from President Grant, the black senator explained, in the form of federal troops and other technical assistance, might possibly stem the rise of White Liner outrages, which threatened to destabilize the outlying Mississippi counties.

Pierrepont received Bruce politely, heard him out, yet promised nothing, in part because at that very moment a number of Mississippi conservatives were paying him visits and writing him letters, offering exactly the opposite advice. They included Bruce's own senatorial colleague, James Lusk Alcorn. They criticized Governor Ames, suggesting he had not explored all possible options for controlling the situation, including the arming of white militias to be led by "the most responsible citizens in Mississippi." Even Hiram Revels, Mississippi's original black senator, whom Ames had removed from the presidency of Alcorn College after Revels defected to the Democratic Party, wrote Grant a public letter predicting that white Mississippians, if Washington would only leave them alone, would ultimately do right by the state's black citizens.

It did not help that considerable bad blood existed between Alcorn and Bruce. After inspiring Bruce's move to Mississippi, Alcorn had felt hurt when Bruce abandoned him in the gubernatorial race of 1873 to shift his allegiance to Adelbert Ames. So poor were their relations that on March 4, 1875, when Bruce was sworn in as U.S. senator, Alcorn showed him the ultimate disrespect by refusing to honor the Senate tradition of escorting his state's new member to the podium.

Of course, by late summer of 1875, convincing the Grant administration to authorize new military endeavors in the former Confederacy would have been a tall order for even the most persuasive legislator, black or white. Indicative of how greatly attitudes had changed, even in the North, the influential New York press largely concurred with Hiram Revels's apostate missive to the president; the
New York Tribune
suggested that Governor Ames suffered from an "excited imagination," and the
New York Times
proposed that if the Republicans indeed controlled Mississippi, now was the time to prove it, without anyone's help.

Pierrepont duly forwarded Governor Ames's telegrams, notes from his meeting with Senator Bruce and the other men he'd received, as well as some press clippings and his own recommendations to President Grant, who was vacationing at Long Branch. Relaxing at the edge of the serene Atlantic, the president began the chore of sifting through the information, weighing the hardship in the ever-troubled South against the duty of the national government, and pondering what, if anything, was to be made of the once-grand experiment of Reconstruction.

A
FTER PRESIDENT GRANT
had considered the plight of Mississippi and its stricken Republican government, and weighed the various testimonies and advice received from Mississippians of both races and political parties, it was Attorney General Pierrepont who informed Governor Ames that there would be no troops sent to Jackson. "The whole public are tired of these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South," read Pierrepont's telegram, "and the great majority are ready now to condemn any interference on the part of the Government."

"This flippant utterance," Ames would later remark, "was the way the executive branch of the National government announced that it had decided that the reconstruction acts of Congress were a failure." Pierrepont went on to gently scold Ames for his decision not to arm loyal men in his state. "I suggest that you take all lawful means and all needed measures to preserve the peace by the forces in your own state, and let the country see that the citizens of Mississippi, who are largely favorable to good order, and are largely Republican, have the courage and manhood to fight for their rights and to destroy the bloody ruffians who murder the innocent and unoffending freedmen."

The historian William Gillette has shown recently that Pierrepont had in fact edited Grant's thoughts on the Mississippi predicament. The president, while expressing frustration about "autumnal outbreaks," had conceded that federal assistance would likely be needed in the state because Ames's request, "if made strictly under the Constitution and Acts of Congress there under," could not be refused; but he also told Pierrepont that, in the short term, Ames would do well "to strengthen his position by exhausting his own resources in restoring order before he receives govt. aid."

"Taking advantage of Grant's fatal ambiguity," observes Gillette, "Pierrepont proceeded to impose his own will and to block federal intervention. Quoting from Grant's letter, but out of context, he eliminated the president's appraisal of the situation, narrowed his interpretation of the reach of federal authority, and related nothing but the idea of pressing the Ames government to take defensive action on its own." Still, it's difficult to blame the attorney general for the abandonment of Mississippi. The president knew that the fight there could not likely be won, certainly not on terms favorable to his administration or to the national Republican Party. Pierrepont certainly colored Grant's thoughts with his own bias, but he was delivering a message that the president fundamentally approved.

The governor in Jackson had few, if any, alternatives to pursue if Washington would not act. Black self-defense was a chimera; no one wanted to provoke another Vicksburg, and even black leaders warned Ames to avoid at all costs anything resembling a race war. Ames nonetheless felt he had no choice. He could not relinquish Mississippi to the enemy without a struggle. He arranged for two militia units to be pulled together in Jackson, and one at Edwards Station, a small junction near Clinton, informing Blanche, "I have taken steps to put all the arms I have or can possess into the hands of colored people and shall demand that they fight." No doubt with the humiliating rout at Vicksburg in mind, he ordered one hundred copies of a manual entitled
Uptons Infantry Tactics
from a publisher in New York for distribution to black militia leaders.