After the death of his father in 1848, his mother took Pinchback and siblings to the free state of Ohio to ensure their continued freedom.

There he raised several companies for the 1st Louisiana Native Guard, and became one of the few African-Americans commissioned as officers in the Union Army.

Pinchback served as a delegate to the 1879 Louisiana constitutional convention, where he helped gain support for the founding of Southern University.

[citation needed] To escape increasing racial oppression, he moved with his family to Washington, D.C., in 1892, where they were among the elite people of color.

His parents were Eliza Stewart, a former slave, and Major William Pinchback, a white planter and his mother's former master.

[3] Shortly after Pinckney's birth, his father William purchased a much larger plantation in Mississippi, and he moved there with both his white and mixed-race families.

[citation needed] Pinckney Benton Stewart and his siblings were considered the "natural" (or illegitimate) children of their father, but they were brought up in relatively affluent surroundings.

In 1846, Pinchback sent the nine-year-old Pinckney and his older brother Napoleon north for education at a private academy,[2] Gilmore High School in Cincinnati, Ohio.

[2] At 12, Pinckney left school and began to work as a cabin boy on river and canal boats to help his family.

Usually, in the summer, the whole family traveled to Saratoga Springs, New York, a resort town in upstate, where they would stay for several weeks.

[5] The Civil War began the following year, and Pinckney Stewart decided to fight on the side of the Union.

He raised several companies for the Union's all-black 1st Louisiana Native Guards Regiment, which was garrisoned in the city.

Most of them were drawn from the class of free people of color in New Orleans established before the war; unlike him, they were usually of colonial French and African descent.

In a letter of April 30, 1863, his married sister Adeline B. Saffold wrote to him from Sidney, Ohio, urging him to follow her example and enter the white world:If I were you, Pink, I would not let my ambition die.

The exact moment Pinchback decided to enter politics is described by George Devol in his book Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi.

[8] In 1867, Pinchback organized the Fourth Ward Republican Club in New Orleans soon after Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts.

(At the time, the populations of African Americans, including former free people of color, and whites in the state were nearly equal.

James T. Rapier, also of Alabama, submitted a motion that the convention condemn all Republicans who had opposed President Ulysses S. Grant in that year's election.

[citation needed] After his brief period in executive office, Pinchback remained active in politics and public service in Louisiana.

Historian George C. Rable described the White League, a paramilitary group started in 1874, as the "military arm of the Democratic Party.

[27] In his memoir of Reconstruction, former Louisiana governor Henry Clay Warmoth wrote that the federal government was reluctant to seat people representing the Kellogg-Pinchback faction.

[28] Overall, the mid-to-late 1870s marked an acceleration of the reversal of the political gains that African Americans in Louisiana had achieved since the end of the Civil War.

[citation needed] Pinchback served as a delegate to the 1879 state constitutional convention; he and two other Republican African-American delegates, Theophile T. Allain, and Henry Demas, were credited with gaining support to establish Southern University, a historically black college in New Orleans, which was chartered in 1880.

[29] At the 1876 Republican National Convention in Cincinnati, Pinchback gave a speech seconding the nomination of Oliver P. Morton for the presidency.

[16] In 1882, the national Republican administration appointed Pinchback as surveyor of customs in New Orleans, a politically significant position in which he served until 1885.

Wealthy from his positions and settlement on the Senate seat, he had a large mansion built off Fourteenth Street near the Chinese embassy.

[26] At the time, his oldest son, Pinckney Pinchback, was established as a pharmacist in Philadelphia; the younger three ranged in age from 22 to 26 and were still living at home.

[32] The Pinchback family was part of the mixed-race elite in Washington; people in the group had generally been free before the Civil War and often were educated and had acquired property.

[26] Their daughter Nina Pinchback Toomer returned to live with her parents after her husband abandoned her when Jean was an infant.