Throughout Reconstruction, white Northern carpetbaggers vied with Southern scalawags for the elephant’s share of Republican Party spoils, but the most ambitious black men in the country were also determined to cash in. The two who almost joined each other in the Senate on March 5, 1875, were no exception. This is their story and that of the glass ceiling (actually a cast-iron dome) they would have smashed by serving together 138 years before Tim Scott (R-S.C.) and William “Mo” Cowan (D-Mass.) pulled off the feat this year, followed by Cory Booker (D-N.J.).

The first was Blanche Kelso Bruce, a 34-year-old former slave born in Virginia to a black enslaved mother and a white plantation owner. Educated alongside the master’s son, Bruce left home (which by then was Missouri) when the Civil War began and his former study-mate joined the Confederate Army. At the midpoint of the war, Bruce narrowly escaped Quantrill’s Raiders, who, in the course of terrorizing Lawrence, Kansas in August 1863, “shot and hung over 150 defenseless people, as well as every black military man … stationed” there, writes Bruce biographer Lawrence Otis Graham, in his 2006 book, The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America’s First Black Dynasty. Fleeing for safety in Missouri, Bruce eventually opened the state’s first black school in Hannibal. After a year of study at Oberlin College, he worked as a steamship porter in St. Louis before catching wind of the opportunities Reconstruction was about to bring black men with prospects willing to relocate to black-majority states in the Deep South.

Bruce soon established his base of power in Bolivar County, Miss., Graham writes. At one time he served in three roles simultaneously: as tax assessor, sheriff and county superintendent of education. They were positions that earned him white men’s trust and, in the process, generated handsome fees in support of a lifestyle that included purchasing a white man’s sprawling cotton plantation. Bruce’s early sponsor in the Magnolia state was a former Confederate-brigadier-turned-Republican, James Alcorn, who would go on to become governor and U.S. senator. Despite the fact that Alcorn dangled promises of higher office, in the election of 1874 Bruce backed Alcorn’s rival for governor, Adelbert Ames, a Northern carpetbagger, who had offered Bruce something more specific: a ticket to the U.S. Senate. (No wonder Alcorn, then in the Senate himself, refused to escort Bruce to his swearing-in). White Republicans like Alcorn and Ames knew how to count votes, and in black-majority states like Mississippi, it was vital to cut deals with powerbrokers like Bruce who could deliver them.

P.B.S. Pinchback (R-La.)

The other black man walking up the Capitol steps at the start of the 43rd Congress was Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback, a member of New Orleans’ black social elite. Like Bruce, Pinchback was the son of a white plantation owner and black slave mother, though apparently his father had emancipated his mother before she gave birth to him in Georgia in 1837. (Let’s just say Pinchback wasn’t their first.) Pinchback moved to Cincinnati with his brother, Napoleon, in 1847. By the time he was 12, he was supporting his family as a cabin boy after his father had died and the white side of the family left the black side penniless and in fear of being re-enslaved.