Pinchback, Pinckney

Pinchback, Pinckney (Benton Stewart)

(born May 10, 1837, Macon, Ga., U.S.—died Dec. 21, 1921, Washington, D.C.) U.S. politician. Born to a former slave and a white planter, he became a steward on river steamboats. At the outbreak of the American Civil War, he reached Union-held New Orleans, where he raised and led a company of black Union volunteers called the Corps d'Afrique (1862–63). After the war he was elected to the Louisiana senate (1868) and served as lieutenant governor (1871). Elected to the U.S. House of Representatives (1872) and Senate (1873), he was denied his seat in each body on unproved charges of election fraud. He subsequently became a lawyer and moved to Washington, D.C.

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Pinchback, Pinckney (Benton Stewart) (1837–1929) governor; born in Macon, Ga. Son of a free black mother and white father, he was educated in Ohio. He organized a Union company of black volunteers in New Orleans in 1862. As a Republican, he became president of the Louisiana Senate (1869–71), then America's first African-American governor (1872–73). He lost contested elections to the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, later earning a law degree.