25th February 1870 – Hiram Rhodes Revels, a Republican from Mississippi, is sworn in in the United States Senate, becoming the first African American ever to sit in Congress
Hiram Rhodes Revels
Born in North Carolina in 1827 to a family of free black Americans, who had been free since before the American revolution, Hiram Rhodes Revels would go on to become a chaplain in the Union Army, the first president of Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College and the first black person to sit in the US Congress.
Originally trained as a barber, Revels would eventually follow in his father’s footsteps and become ordained as a minister in 1845 – but in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, unlike his father who was a Baptist. For the next ten years he travelled around the American Midwest preaching and giving religious instruction.
Between 1855 and 1857 Revels studied religion at Knox College in Illinois. He became a minister in Baltimore and the principal of a black high school.
When the Southern States seceded and the American civil war broke out, Revels joined the conflict by recruiting two black regiments to fight on the side of the Union. He served as the chaplain of the regiments.
After the war in 1866, during the period of reconstruction in the Southern States, Revels settled down in the Southern state of Mississippi with his wife and five daughters and served the Methodist church there.
Letter dated 25 January 1870 from the Governor of the State of Mississippi and the Secretary of State of Mississippi that certified the election of Hiram Revels to the United States Senate.
In 1870, the Mississippi state Senate (who chose senators until 1913) elected by a vote of 81 to 15 to have Revels finish the term of one of the state’s two senate seats which had been left empty by the resignation of their former holders to join the Confederacy.
When he arrived in Washinton, Democrats from the Southern States refused to seat him in Senate.
They claimed that because of the 1857 Dred Scott Decision by the US Supreme Court – which ruled that people of African ancestry were not and could not be citizens – no black man had been a citizen until the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 and therefore Revels could not be a Senator, since, to hold a Senate seat, one must have been a US citizen for nine years prior.
Revels’ party argued that the civil war had made pre-war citizenship laws invalid, that Revels was partly of European heritage and thus Dred Scott did not apply to him anyway.
A political cartoon published in Harper’s Weekly of February 1870, shows Revels (seated) replacing Jefferson Davis (dressed as Iago from William Shakespeare’s Othello) in US Senate
Republican Senator Charles Sumner would later say:
‘All men are created equal, says the great Declaration, and now a great act attests this verity. Today we make the Declaration a reality. … The Declaration was only half established by Independence. The greatest duty remained behind. In assuring the equal rights of all we complete the work.”
On 25 February 1870, Revels was sworn in as a Senator by a vote of 48 to 8.
Hiram Rhodes, in a photograph in the Library of Congress
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