Background
Bruce was born on March 7, 1856, in the Staunton Hill plantation, Charlotte County, Virginia, United States.
Charlottesville, VA, USA
Philip studied literature and history at the University of Virginia, graduating in 1876.
Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
Philip got a Bachelor of Laws from Harvard University in 1879.
Philip Alexander Bruce in Colonial Garb.
A page from a personal scrapbook compiled by Sarah Alexander Seddon Bruce of Staunton Hill includes newspaper clippings about her son, Philip Alexander Bruce, after he published his first book, The Plantation Negro as a Freeman: Observations on His Character, Condition, and Prospects in Virginia (1889).
Bruce was born on March 7, 1856, in the Staunton Hill plantation, Charlotte County, Virginia, United States.
Philip studied literature and history at the University of Virginia, graduating in 1876; he went on to get a Bachelor of Laws from Harvard University in 1879.
He was awarded honorary doctorates by both The College of William and Mary and Washington and Lee University.
Although trained for a career in law, Bruce abandoned a legal career to research the role of the free black person in the Southern economy. He then became the secretary-treasurer for Vulcan Iron Works, the firm owned by his brother in Richmond, Virginia. Like the law, this career failed to hold Bruce’s interest. Bruce penned a series of articles on the impact of the end of slavery on the Southern economy for the New York Evening Post in 1884. He used these articles and his previous research on the free black to write the 1889 book The Plantation Negro as a Freeman; Observations on His Character, Condition, and Prospects in Virginia. Bruce joined the staff of the Richmond Times in 1890. He left the Richmond Times in 1892.
In 1893 he was a co-founder of Virginia Magazine of History and Biography and its editor from 1893. After his marriage, he traveled through Europe from 1898 to 1907 so could conduct archival research on the American colonies. During this time, he wrote a textbook, A School History of the United States (1893). Two years later, Bruce’s The Rise of the New South was published.
Bruce and his family returned to the United States in 1907, settling in Norfolk, Virginia. The historian’s next work, Robert E. Lee (1907), chronicles the life of the famed American Civil War general. After the completion of his historical project on Virginia, Bruce relumed to Europe, living with his family in England from 1913 to 1916. In 1916 the Bruces relocated to Charlottesville, Virginia. Bruce accepted a position as the centennial historian at the University of Virginia, and began to research the university’s history.
He was a contributor to books, including Library of Southern Literature, seventeen volumes, edited by E. A. Aiderman and others and The South in the Building of the Nation, edited by J. A. C. Chandler. Besides, he worked with the periodicals, including the Contemporary Review, New York Evening Post, Richmond Times, and the South Atlantic Quarterly.
In the last decade of his life, Bruce authored a five-volume history of the University of Virginia. Bruce died at home in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 16, 1933.
Bruce initially took an isolationist stance on the war, but later believed that the United States should enter the war. Yet this realization did not prevent Bruce from becoming a vocal critic of Woodrow Wilson’s efforts to establish the League of Nations.
Believing that antebellum Southern society had its earliest roots in its colonial heritage, Bruce envisioned a sweeping history of the colonial enterprise in the region, beginning with the economic underpinnings and eventually covering all aspects of social, economic, and political life in the region.
Philip was a member of Virginia Historical Society (corresponding secretary, 1892-98).
Bruce married Elizabeth Tumstall Taylor Newton in 1896, and the couple later had a daughter, Philippa Alexander.