Capitol Men (19 page)

Klan night riding had been the defeated Confederacy's most sensational reply to the nation's efforts on behalf of the freedmen, but there was another harmful, more "gentlemanly" response—character assassination, racist demagoguery, and bitter factionalism wielded in the newspapers, legislatures, and political backrooms of the reconstituted Southern states. Reconstruction politics at the state and local levels was often a vicious blood sport, and Louisiana politics, with its endlessly contested election results, dual governments, rumors of poisonings, and murder conspiracies, was easily the most dysfunctional of them all. Just as the term "New Orleans"—meaning the Mechanics Hall riot of summer 1866—had become a code for the failures of President Johnson's Reconstruction policies, the name "Louisiana" would signify the era's
longest-running political soap opera—civic chaos as spectacle, with an ever-changing cast of characters, few of whom would remain unsullied.

"Are you a white man, or what are you?" a policeman once demanded, stopping Pinchback as he strolled along a New Orleans street. Frederick Douglass, who encountered Pinchback during a visit to the city in 1872, thought him "only colored enough to be thus classed by the most skillful discerners of proscribed blood," while a Northern reporter saw "a bronze Mephistopheles ... his most repellent point a sardonic smile, which, hovering continuously over his lips, gives him an evil look, undeniably handsome as the man is."

He was born in 1837 to a white father, Major William Pinchback of Virginia, and his slave, Eliza Stewart, whom Major Pinchback had married and manumitted. At the time of his birth the family was on its way to Mississippi, then a frontier of vast fertile land tracts, where the major had purchased a plantation in Holmes County, northeast of Yazoo City. For a decade the Pinchbacks flourished in their new life, but when P.B.S. was age ten, his father died. The major had attempted to provide for Eliza and the children in his will, but she had no legal standing in Mississippi, despite having been his lawful wife, and his family back east, who had never approved of the marriage, promptly seized the inheritance, leaving mother and children to fend for themselves. Afraid that her late husband's kin might attempt to reenslave her and her children, Eliza moved the family to Cincinnati, where Pinchback and his older brother, Napoleon, had been attending boarding school at the time of their father's death.

Napoleon eventually suffered psychological problems and left school, and with the family in economic straits Pinchback at age twelve also abandoned his education, finding work on the canal boats operating between Cincinnati and Fort Wayne, Indiana. By 1854 he was a cabin boy on riverboats plying the Ohio River, where he fell in with a gambler named George Devol, who seems to have become a second father. Devol and his companions—"Canada" Bill Jones, Holly Chappell, and Tom Brown—were skilled card sharks. Working as a team on the crowded boats, they fleeced passengers by pretending to be country bumpkins who'd never previously met. They would "foolishly" raise the stakes of a poker game until there was a formidable pot, then swoop in for the kill. From these men, Pinchback, or "Pinch," as he was invariably known, learned numerous games of chance and sleight of hand, including how to throw a wicked game of three-card monte.

A life so colorful was not without risk. Once, aboard the steamboat
Homer,
a group of black deck hands accused Pinchback of cheating at cards. Pinchback drew a pistol to effect a swift exit, then employed a trick he had learned from Devol, hiding under the pilothouse and passing a bribe up to the pilot so he would bring the vessel near shore, allowing Pinchback to leap into shallow water. Spotted by his pursuers as he made his escape, Pinchback managed to scurry to shore as bullets pinged in the water around him.

He eventually worked his way up from cabin boy to steward but bridled at the fact that, although legally free, he was in almost every way a slave "to the unwritten law that the cleverest colored man could rise no higher than steward on a steamboat... that the colored man, no matter how intelligent or clever, was lower than the lowest white man." The outbreak of the Civil War, however, heralded great change. In spring 1862 Pinchback was a steward on the
Alonzo Childs
when he jumped ship in Yazoo City and headed for New Orleans, which the Union had just occupied, with the idea of enlisting with the federal forces. That same year he married sixteen-year-old Nina Emily Hethorn of Memphis. A family memoir describes Nina as "a white woman, of English-French stock" and recalls that, physically, the newlyweds dramatically differed: Pinchback at twenty-three looked intense, a man of action, his face "suggesting physical courage and a sort of picturesque recklessness," while Nina, in contrast, seemed delicate, reticent, potentially "a wife and mother, the maker of a home."

Pinchback and Nina struggled at first, since money was tight. "I ate cakes to fill my stomach, and apples to empty it," he recalled." He would later be a partner in both a newspaper and a mercantile business, and dabble, not always scrupulously, in local real estate. But his start in his adopted city was almost brutally cut short on May 16, 1862, when he got into a street brawl with his brother-in-law, his sister's husband, John Keppard. The fight, according to witnesses, was dead serious—Keppard, armed with a knife, appeared intent on taking Pinchback's life—and only through fierce effort (Keppard had jumped Pinchback by surprise) did Pinchback fend off his would-be assassin. Brought before an unsympathetic judge, Pinchback was outraged to hear himself charged with "assault with attempt to kill." On his lawyer's advice, he pled guilty in the hope of leniency; the judge, however, sentenced him to two years in the workhouse. "When it was announced I nearly fainted in court," he later said. "The object of this was blackmail, and before incarceration I was applied to and refused to pay up. I remained there
about a month before I effected my release." Pinchback had enough money to ensure that his prison stay was comfortable. "I had my own food, bed, and other comforts which I procured out of my means."

His discharge, in July 1862, came only a week after General Benjamin Butler, the Union commandant of New Orleans, received permission from Washington to begin enlisting blacks for limited duty with the army. Pinchback applied to Butler to recruit a company of black men and by October was a captain in the Louisiana Native Guards. His enchantment with military life was of short duration, however, for despite the uniform that he and his black comrades wore, white Union soldiers regularly abused them; soon, because of complaints from whites, it was decreed that no black man could serve as an officer. Although Pinchback was allowed, nominally at least, to retain his rank, he found "nearly all the officers inimical to me" and wrote to Butler, resigning his appointment, explaining, "I can foresee nothing but dissatisfaction and discontent, which will make my position very disagreeable, indeed."

P.B.S. PINCHBACK

Pinchback thus abandoned the idea of military service, although he soldiered on in his own way—acting on the belief that emancipation should mean equal treatment for black people in the public sphere. The war years saw the advent of the "star car" system in New Orleans; the streetcars thus marked were set aside for black riders (the term
STAR,
a precursor to the
COLORED ONLY
label of the Jim Crow era, was used to designate other segregated facilities as well). As early as 1863 Pinchback refused to board the cars set aside for black people but instead used those meant for whites. On account of his light complexion, his military uniform, or his aristocratic mien, conductors generally did not make him leave, although in some instances they placed objects on the seats around him to create a buffer between him and any objecting white passengers. Other black soldiers and citizens emulated Pinchback's example, and the
New Orleans Tribune
took up the cause of desegregating the vehicles. Ultimately the star cars were eliminated and both races were technically free to board any car, although whites' adjustment to the new arrangement was eased by the blacks' tendency to segregate themselves by occupying the seats at the rear.

Pinchback was often frustrated during "Johnsonian" Reconstruction, as he watched the Black Codes imposed and former Confederates assume public office. This was supposed to be the hour of liberation, the moment of black advancement, "the time when every thinking man must come forward and give his best views to the people," as he told a gathering in Alabama during a family hiatus from New Orleans. "No nation ever born has, or ever can, obtain the respect and confidence of the other nations of the earth until it has made some effort in its own behalf."

He warned against a false sense of entitlement created by the Civil War. "There is a sense of security displayed by our people that is really alarming," he said in June 1867, before a Republican meeting in New Orleans that would choose delegates to the upcoming state constitutional convention. "They seem to think that all is done, the Great Battle has been fought and the victory won. Gentlemen, this is a fallacy. The Great Contest has just begun." Having helped determine that the convention's makeup would be half black delegates and half white, Pinchback took the lead in authoring a civil rights article for the new constitution, advocating that all Louisianians should "enjoy equal rights and privileges upon any conveyances of a public character; and all places of business, or of public resort ... without distinction or discrimination on account of race or color." It was Pinchback's unyielding demand for basic fairness in blacks' daily lives that most endeared him to his followers.

Before the convention ended, the Republicans added Pinchback to the list of men who might be nominated as the party's candidate for governor. He asked that his name be removed, however, saying he didn't think it wise at so volatile a political moment for the state to have a black man in the statehouse. Instead, he backed the white carpetbagger Henry Clay Warmoth, a precocious young attorney from Illinois who had been Louisiana's "territorial delegate" to Congress after the war. So enamored were Louisianians with Warmoth, who was twenty-six years old, that the convention officially lowered the age required to occupy the statehouse from thirty to twenty-five so that he could run for the office. Another key Warmoth backer was Oscar Dunn, a skilled, local black politician who had built a network of support through his work for the Freedmen's Bureau. In April 1868, Warmoth was elected governor and
Oscar Dunn lieutenant governor, making Dunn "the first colored man in America to hold a political position of an executive nature."

Pinchback ran for state senator but lost the election to his white Democratic opponent, E. I. Jewell, by a margin of 899 to 819. Or so it appeared. Pinchback claimed election fraud, and after Warmoth and Dunn came to power, a state committee on elections reviewed the balloting and, finding fraud had been committed on Jewell's behalf, gave the election to Pinchback. But Democrats and even a few Republicans grumbled that Warmoth had made a backroom deal to obtain that result, and some New Orleans newspapers accused Pinchback and his allies of trickery.

No one was more sincere or eloquent than Pinchback in his lifelong crusade for equal rights, but there was substantial basis for the scandalous gossip that shadowed him. He tried to distance himself from his past as a steamboat hustler, particularly as he raised his family; he found it difficult, however, to not see life, and particularly his life in politics, as a game to be cleverly played, and success as a series of "tricks" to be taken, like so many hands of cards. And as he'd done in many a riverboat poker game, he sometimes did not hesitate to improve his chances.

A humiliating incident, which occurred shortly after he had won his election case against E. I. Jewell, did not diminish this characterization. Strolling down Canal Street in the first week of September 1868, Pinchback heard the unmistakable sound of a pistol being cocked. He whirled around in time to see a mulatto named'S. C. Morgan, an opponent of Governor Warmoth, take aim at him. Pinchback immediately drew his own gun and returned fire. Both men were shooting through a crowd of pedestrians, who screamed and ducked for cover as bullets ricocheted off a passing streetcar. A policeman, hearing the shots, came running up the block and arrested both men; they offered no resistance. An infuriated Pinchback accused Morgan, who had been grazed by a bullet, of attempted assassination; Morgan claimed his assault was retaliation for a slander that Pinchback had made against him for opposing Warmoth's election. Both were briefly held and released, but the local newspapers were highly critical, chiefly of Pinchback, wondering if black men reckless enough to engage in a gunfight on a crowded street were qualified to fill high positions in the state government. The
Daily Picayune
termed the incident "a shooting affray ... with intent to kill and murder" and poked fun at the fact that "much sympathy was manifested for 'brudder' Pinchback, [who] endured a season of condolence
in the Chief's office before his weeping friends could consent to give him up to the iron shelter of the cell."