# Blanche K. Bruce Blanche Kelso Bruce was the second Black person to serve in the United States Senate, the first to serve a full six-year term, and the first to preside over the chamber. He was born enslaved and died a federal officeholder in Washington, having spent his adult life inside a political opening that closed behind him. ## Why it matters Bruce's six years are the high-water mark of Black representation in the nineteenth-century Senate, and the manner of his exit is the point. He was not defeated at the polls; Mississippi Democrats took the legislature, and in January 1880 the legislature simply chose a Democrat to replace him. Senators were picked by state legislatures until 1913, so capturing a statehouse was enough to end a Senate career. A decade later the [[Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890]] made the arrangement permanent by writing Black voters out of the electorate altogether. ## From slavery to the Senate Bruce was born near Farmville, in Prince Edward County, Virginia, on 1 March 1841, the son of an enslaved woman named Polly Bruce and the man who enslaved her. He was given privileges unusual for an enslaved child, including access to education, and was hired out for a range of work in Missouri. He escaped to Lawrence, Kansas, early in the Civil War, taught school there, narrowly survived the 1863 raid that killed more than 140 residents, and organized Missouri's first school for Black students in Hannibal in 1864. He studied briefly at Oberlin College before running out of money. After hearing a Republican stump speech he moved to Mississippi during Reconstruction and rose quickly: registrar of voters in Tallahatchie County, sergeant at arms of the reconstituted state senate, then the joint office of sheriff and tax collector of Bolivar County, county superintendent of education, and a levee commissioner for a three-county district. He invested in Delta land and became a substantial planter. In January 1874 Governor Adelbert Ames resigned his Senate seat, and the legislature chose two men — one for the few months remaining on Ames's term and one for the full term beginning in 1875. Backed by Black Republicans, who were a majority of the party caucus, Bruce was elected nearly unanimously on 4 February 1874. He served from 4 March 1875 to 3 March 1881. ## In office He arrived at 34, the second-youngest senator in the chamber. Tradition called for the senior senator from his state to escort him to the podium to be sworn in; James Lusk Alcorn refused, and Bruce walked up the aisle alone until [[Roscoe Conkling]] of New York offered his arm. Conkling became his patron in the Senate and helped him to the committees he wanted. Bruce named his only son Roscoe Conkling Bruce. In 1879 Bruce became the first Black person to preside over the Senate, taking the chair during debate on a bill restricting Chinese immigration; the congressional record of the House's historians puts it on 14 February. He then spoke against the bill, asking colleagues to weigh his own position as the representative of "a people who but a few years ago were considered essentially disqualified from enjoying the privileges and immunities of American citizenship." His other work ran along three lines: - **Mississippi's economy.** He chaired the Select Committee on the Levees of the Mississippi River, becoming the first Black member of Congress to chair a committee, and pushed federal money toward levees, navigation and railroads. - **Black soldiers and veterans.** His first bill demanded immediate payment of sums owed to Black Civil War soldiers, many of whom had enlisted while still enslaved and never received the promised bounties. He pressed for an end to discrimination in enlistment and for an inquiry into the hazing of a Black West Point cadet. - **Election violence and the Freedman's Bank.** In 1876 he backed an investigation into the violence against Black voters in Mississippi's 1875 elections, describing it as "a violent method for political supremacy." In 1879 he created and chaired a select committee on the collapse of the Freedman's Savings and Trust Company, which had taken the savings of freedpeople and failed in 1874. He also argued, unsuccessfully, that the Senate should seat P.B.S. Pinchback, the Black senator-elect from Louisiana. ## After the Senate Bruce was appointed Register of the Treasury by President James Garfield in 1881, having declined the post of minister to Brazil on the grounds that "a colored man will not be well received" there. He ran the Black exhibit at the 1884–85 world's fair in New Orleans, lectured nationally, served as the District of Columbia's recorder of deeds, joined Howard University's trustees, and returned to the Treasury post in 1897. He died in Washington on 17 March 1898. ## Connections - [[Hiram Revels]] — his predecessor, and the first Black senator - [[Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890]] — the legal machinery that followed the Democratic recapture of the state - [[Mississippi Plan]] · [[Reconstruction and Its Overthrow]] · [[Compromise of 1877]] - [[MS-Sen-2026]] — the race that gave Mississippi its first popularly elected Black senator - [[Roscoe Conkling]] · [[United States Senate]] ## Sources - [U.S. House, History, Art & Archives — BRUCE, Blanche Kelso](https://history.house.gov/People/Listing/B/BRUCE,-Blanche-Kelso-(B000968)/) - [U.S. Senate Historical Office — Hiram Revels: First African American Senator](https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/senate-stories/First-African-American-Senator.htm)