A slave who became a successful plantation owner, Blanche Kelso Bruce was the second African American to serve in the United States Senate and the first to be elected to a full term. Though Bruce focused on protecting the rights of freedmen and other minorities, his life of social privilege in the nation’s capital insulated him from the deprivations suffered by many of his black constituents. Bruce moved among elite circles of wealthy white politicians, including his close friends Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York and Senator Lucius Q. C. Lamar of Mississippi. “Mr. Bruce’s conduct in the senate has been such as not to alienate himself from the Southern people,” noted Lamar, who had drafted the Mississippi ordinance of secession, served as a Confederate diplomat, and returned to the U.S. Congress as an unabashed opponent of Reconstruction. “[Bruce] has not joined in the abusive warfare on the South that many of his Republican colleagues in the Senate Chamber have constantly pursued,” Lamar added. “He is an intelligent man, and the best representative of his race in public life.”1
Blanche Bruce was born near Farmville, Virginia, on March 1, 1841. His mother, Polly Bruce, was a slave, and his father, Pettus Perkinson, was his mother’s owner and the son–in–law of her deceased former owner, Lemuel Bruce. Bruce’s first name was originally “Branch,” but he changed it to “Blanche” as a teenager. For unexplained reasons, he later adopted the middle name “Kelso.”2 One of 11 children, Blanche Bruce was a personal servant to his half brother William Perkinson.3 Even though he was a slave, Bruce was accorded a status nearly equal to the Perkinson children’s. Described by contemporaries as an eager learner, he studied with William’s private tutor. But despite such benign treatment, Bruce escaped to Kansas during the Civil War and attempted to enlist in the Union Army. His application was refused, and he settled in Lawrence to teach school. Returning to Hannibal, Missouri, near the war’s end, he organized the state’s first school for black children in 1864. Though he planned to attend Ohio’s Oberlin College to study for his divinity degree, he could not afford the tuition.4 He spent the remainder of the 1860s working as a steamboat porter out of St. Louis on the Mississippi River, moving to Mississippi in 1869 to find more–lucrative opportunities.
