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(1841 - 1898)
Senate Years of Service:1875-1881
Party:Republican
Library of Congress
Blanche Kelso Bruce, a Senator from Mississippi; born in slavery near Farmville, Prince Edward County, Va., March 1, 1841; was tutored by his masters son; left his master at the beginning of the Civil War; taught school in Hannibal, Mo., and later attended Oberlin College, Ohio; after the war became a planter in Mississippi; member of the Mississippi Levee Board; sheriff and tax collector of Bolivar County 1872-1875; elected as a Republican to the United States Senate and served from March 4, 1875, to March 3, 1881; was the first African American to serve a full term in the United States Senate; appointed Register of the Treasury by President James Garfield 1881; recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia 1891-1893; again Register of the Treasury from 1897 until his death in Washington, D.C., on March 17, 1898; interment in Woodlawn Cemetery.
Bibliography
American National Biography; Dictionary of American Biography; Mann, Kenneth Eugene. Blanche Kelso Bruce: United States Senator Without a Constituency. Journal of Mississippi History 38 (May 1976): 183-98; St. Clair, Sadie. The National Career of Blanche Kelso Bruce. Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1948.
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