Capitol Men (56 page)

Senator Blanche K. Bruce of Mississippi seemed to flourish as a living example of the doctrine of equal rights, despite how embattled this concept was in the legal sphere. With his "manners of a Chesterfield" and the remarkable trajectory of his life, from slavery to Capitol Hill, Bruce demonstrated beyond a doubt the potential of allowing equal access and opportunity to all Americans. Little remembered today, in part because his political agenda was modest and his methods conciliatory, Bruce was widely viewed in the late nineteenth century as both a consummate representative of his race and a symbol of the social mobility made possible by Reconstruction.

Bruce's rotund yet distinguished appearance and his political fame—he was the first black American to be elected to and serve a full six-year term in the Senate—ensured that the public would follow his private life with no little interest. Long one of Washington's most eligible bachelors, he became half of the capital's most elegant couple when, on June 24, 1878, he married Josephine B. Willson, a schoolteacher and the daughter of a prominent family from the crème de la crème of black Cleveland society. Josephine, gifted at languages and music, was almost Caucasian in appearance; as a Washington society page noted, she was "a slender, shapely woman [with] delicate, high-bred features, singularly full of repose."

The nuptials, held in the Willsons' home as a crowd of the curious assembled outside, represented for Bruce the reversal of a personal misfortune: only four years earlier he had been engaged to another Cleveland woman, Namee Vosburg, who died of an illness only weeks before their wedding date. This tragedy occurred just as Bruce was assuming his job in the Senate, and it encouraged gossip and curiosity. To fend off speculation about his private life, Bruce made a habit of attending social functions with John Roy Lynch, the black congressman from Mississippi, and a Washington schoolteacher named Emma Brown, with whom he appears to have enjoyed a brotherly friendship. Miss Brown later described Bruce as "a great big good natured lump of fat" who was "gentlemanly and very jolly ... just the kind of fellow to go around with."

After a respectable period of mourning, he courted Miss Willson, whom he had met in 1876. Her family in Cleveland belonged to the Social Circle, an organization founded in 1869 "to promote social intercourse and cultural activities among the better educated people of color." The Willsons were so integrated into the city's elite class that many of Dr. Willson's patients were white, and Josephine's brother, an attorney, practiced at a white law firm. Of course, for Bruce, the marriage signified an enormous leap across social boundaries. For a self-educated man who had been born a slave, who had narrowly survived Quantrill's Raiders, and who had come to political maturity in the rough-and-tumble of the postwar Mississippi Delta, winning a U.S. Senate seat as well as the hand of one of America's leading black society belles was a remarkable attainment.

Upon their marriage, Bruce and his bride sailed to Europe for a four-month honeymoon. The first black elected American official to ever visit abroad, Bruce was received as something of a phenomenon and made an immensely favorable impression on the Continent, abetted no doubt by his attractive new wife. While in Paris in December 1878, he encountered ex-president Grant and his family, who were also making the grand tour. "General Grant was less reserved in conversation than when he had been President of the United States," Bruce told a reporter. "In Paris he spoke freely and instructively, and seemed in a happier mood than I have ever known him to be at Washington." The normally taciturn Grant, perhaps a tad homesick and glad to see a familiar face, opened up to Bruce on a number of topics, including the future of black America. He informed Bruce that based on his military experience with black soldiers and his observation of the effective work of black elected representatives in Congress, he held high hopes for the race's eventual success. He also let Bruce know he was considering another run for the presidency, and Bruce, although he'd resented Grant for not aiding Pinchback during his fight in the Senate, came away from the European encounter an ardent fan of the general, predicting, a few months later in the
Louisianian,
that even moderate Republicans "will again march to battle under the banner of 'the Man on Horseback.' There is no denying that Grant is the coming man and [will] receive the Republican nomination."

Bruce's popularity within his own party led to his serving as temporary chair at the Republican National Convention in 1880. After the first ballot, Grant had the largest number of delegates' votes but not enough to clinch the prize. Over the course of twenty-seven more ballots, the former president deadlocked with the popular James Blaine, once the Speaker of the House but now a U.S. senator. Frustrated by the stalemate, Blaine's supporters rallied around the dark horse candidacy of the respected House Republican James A. Garfield, who became the nominee on the thirty-sixth ballot. Bruce backed Grant's candidacy as he had promised, but he wound up being a lucky catalyst for the convention's ultimate choice by recognizing Garfield from the podium during a chaotic moment when many delegates were simultaneously demanding the floor. Garfield, who went on to secure not only the nomination but the presidency, would not forget Bruce's helpful act.

Settling back home in Washington, the fashionable Bruces were much talked about and in demand; an invitation to one of Josephine's soirees denoted insider status, at least among Republicans, and the newspapers
made this clear. "The most
unreasonable disturbance
in Washington society at present is Mrs. Senator Bruce, who presides over her capital residence with true womanly grace, making it a fit rendezvous for the distinguished circle of friends with which she and her husband have been so closely identified." Such accounts left no doubt that "Mrs. Bruce is a lady of great personal beauty...[She] wore a magnificent black velvet dress, made for her by [the English couturier Charles] Worth during her recent visit to Paris, and handsome diamonds. As to her toilets, they are simply elegant, and can not be outshone by any in the wardrobes of the white ladies whose husbands are in the Senate."

When Josephine began receiving callers—Thursday was her "at home" day—the first person to visit was Lucy Hayes, wife of the president. Mrs. Hayes, known as "Lemonade Lucy" for her strict ban on alcohol in the White House, was so charmed by Mrs. Bruce that she soon came a second time. Upon hearing that Lucy Hayes had already called on Mrs. Bruce twice, the wives of cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, and various senators also beat a path to her door.

Conspicuous by their absence from Josephine's parlor were the wives of Democratic senators. When gossip circulated that Mrs. Allen G. Thurman, wife of the powerful Ohio Democrat and presidential aspirant, had also visited Mrs. Bruce, Thurman's office immediately issued a formal statement to set to rest so damaging a rumor. "I know it would be the political ruin of any Southern Democrat to recognize us socially or have his family do so," Senator Bruce told a reporter. "And I want it understood that while Mrs. Bruce and I are glad to see all our friends at any time at our house, we would feel very badly if any persons compromised themselves by paying us attention." He emphasized that when he had first arrived in Washington, "I made up my mind to let the society question adjust itself without any of my intervention. I have never attempted to force my way into society, and in letting things take their natural course I have never had a particle of trouble. I believe that it is only the one who seeks trouble from the 'color line' that finds it."

The backlash against the kind of nouveau black aristocracy that the Bruces represented came not only from Democratic politicians but also at times from other blacks. Bruce's counterpart from Mississippi, John Roy Lynch, was snickered at for his high-profile Washington wedding to Ella Somerville, a light-skinned woman from an affluent family in Mobile, Alabama. The bride was lampooned in the local black press for her delicate ways and her flawless French; it was even hinted that her snobbery would harm the political career of her husband, who was well regarded as a champion of civil rights. The
Washington Bee,
a black newspaper edited by V. Calvin Chase, created a stir by protesting that Ella's own sister was upset with Ella "because she married a nigger" and that the wedding had been segregated, with whites attending a fancy early supper and black friends invited to a more plebeian celebration later on, just before the newlyweds boarded a train for Niagara Falls. "Mr. Lynch has, we don't believe, elevated himself in the estimation of the colored people by his marriage to a young lady who is so prejudiced against color," the
Bee
complained.

Chase's candor in print piqued readers who felt insulted to attack him in the street on several occasions. He was most critical of those who, in his view, suffered from "white fever." He resented how their light skin gave them greater access to jobs and other opportunities, and he accused them of exhibiting "color phobia" toward darker blacks. Intraracial hostility was not an entirely new phenomenon in postwar America; it was as old as the antagonism between the house servant who interacted regularly with whites, and perhaps had kinship bonds with them, and the black field hand, who rarely encountered or spoke with white people. (In some instances, as in prewar Louisiana, affluent free blacks had themselves owned slaves.)

The worst criticism was reserved for the so-called bon tons, those who appeared to distance themselves most assertively from the black masses. In addition to Calvin Chase, another well-known critic of "blue veinism" was John E. Bruce (no relation to Blanche), a prolific writer whose column "Bruce Grit" ran in black newspapers for decades. Born of slave parents, John E. Bruce could be merciless in his editorial savaging of blacks who cultivated their "whiteness" and aristocratic backgrounds, such as black New Yorkers who chose to keep the Dutch prefix
Van
in their names. He complained bitterly of the black community's tendency to give its leadership roles to the light-skinned, those who, he reminded his readers, actually bore the blood of the slave masters. A man of similarly strong views on the "whitening" of black America was William Monroe Trotter, editor of the
Boston Guardian,
who refused to publish advertisements for any products, such as skin creams and "hair straighteners," designed to erase Negro features.

The real misfortune of the bon tons, of course, was not that they were subjected to the occasional maulings of Calvin Chase or "Bruce Grit," but that the powerful changes affecting race relations in the decades following the collapse of Reconstruction would soon render distinctions between black aristocrats and their less-benighted brethren largely
meaningless. By the turn of the century, the comprehensive assault on black rights in America would cripple the notion that fair-skinned blacks or those who achieved economic independence could escape the stigma of race.

This change was accompanied by a series of downward realignments reflecting blacks' diminished status as voters and citizens. In antebellum literature, the "tragic octoroon" had been a beautiful, accomplished young lady, raised by a caring white father, who comes to grief as an adult because, despite her near-white appearance, she cannot escape the insidious effects of slavery. By the late nineteenth century the tragic octoroon was a Louisiana man named Homer Plessy, who was prohibited from entering the whites-only car on a local railroad train. The Supreme Court's 1896 decision in
Plessy v. Ferguson
ruled that Plessy, despite being of fractional black ancestry, could be made to ride in a separate railroad car from whites, establishing once and for all the doctrine of "separate but equal" as the law of the land.

It was perhaps foreseeable that the U.S. Military Academy at West Point would become, in the late 1870s and early 1880s, a kind of proving ground for questions of equal treatment of the races, since it had been as soldiers that many ex-slaves initially sought inclusion in American society. As Frederick Douglass had predicted during the Civil War, "Once let a black man get upon his person the brass letters,
U.S.
, let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States."

While most Americans were probably only vaguely aware that the Civil Rights Act was being tested in court rulings around the country, the stories of efforts to integrate West Point often appeared as front-page news, serving up identifiable heroes and villains whose actions reflected the national conundrum. Surely it didn't hurt that the school was located on the Hudson River not far from New York City, making it accessible to big-city reporters.

Senator Bruce was among several leading officials drawn into one of the most racially charged West Point cases, an alleged assault on Cadet Johnson Whittaker by a gang of his fellow cadets in spring 1880. Appointed to the academy from South Carolina at age seventeen, Whittaker had been one of the most promising students at the University of South Carolina, which during Reconstruction served as a training school for freedmen. There, the young man's talents had been recognized and
nurtured by Richard Greener, who worked closely with Whittaker to prepare him for the academic rigors of the military school.

When he arrived in 1876, another black cadet, Henry Ossian Flipper, was in attendance and became a companion and help to Whittaker. Flipper successfully graduated from West Point in 1877, the first black man to do so. But without Flipper for company, the ostracism and "silent treatment" that Whittaker suffered grew more unbearable. After he filed a complaint about a cadet who had harassed and attacked him, Whittaker's classmates accused him of being a snitch, and even his officers let it be known that he should have shown more manliness by defending himself physically, rather than reporting the offender. Ultimately, Whittaker was given his own dorm room since no one else wished to share one with him.