Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Although born a slave and held in bondage until past his twenty-first birthday, Blanche K. Bruce escaped the worst cruelties of the Peculiar Institutions. He was born in a slave cabin near Farmville, the county seat of Prince Edward County, Virginia, on 1 March 1841. Youngest of eleven children born to his slave mother Polly, Bruce was an octoroon or quadroon, with light skin and Caucasian features; his father's name and race, however, are apparently unknown.
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8 Ibid., pp. 99–100.
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64 Quoted by Oliver P. Morton, Congressional Record, 44 Cong., 1 sess., 889.
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98 Washington Bee, 20 May 1893.
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100 Ibid., pp. 215–18.
101 Ibid., p. 219.
102 New York Daily Tribune, 30 April 1896, quoted in St. Clair, , “Bruce,” p. 223Google Scholar.
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113 John A. Porter to BKB, 29 July 1897; John R. Lynch and others to BKB, 17 January 1898; BKB to William McKinley, 10 February 1898; John R. Lynch to McKinley, 15 April 1898, McKinley Papers.
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116 BKB to McKinley, 10 February 1898, McKinley Papers.
117 The phrase is from the famous farewell speech of Congressman George H. White of North Carolina on 29 January 1901, quoted in Smith, , Negro in Congress, p. 128Google Scholar.
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119 Green, J. P. “The Last Public Act,” The Freeman, 26 03 1898Google Scholar, quoted in St. Clair, , “Bruce,” p. 238Google Scholar.
120 Quoted in St. Clair, , “Bruce,” p. 253Google Scholar.
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