Hiram R Revels

Hiram Rhodes Revels (September 27, 1827 – January 16, 1901) was an
American Republican politician, minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church,
and a college administrator. Born free in North Carolina, he later lived and worked in
Ohio, where he voted before the Civil War. Elected by the Mississippi legislature to
the United States Senate as a Republican to represent Mississippi in 1870 and
1871 during the Reconstruction era, he was the first African American to serve in
either house of the U.S. Congress.
During the American Civil War, Revels had helped organize two regiments of
the United States Colored Troops and served as a chaplain. After serving in the
Senate, Revels was appointed as the first president of Alcorn Agricultural and
Mechanical College (now Alcorn State University), a historically black college. He
served from 1871 to 1873. Later in his life, he served again as a minister.

Early life and education

Revels was born free in 1827 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to free people of color,
with ancestors who had been free since before the American Revolution. His parents
were of African American, European, and Native American ancestry. His mother was
also specifically known to be of Scots descent. His father was a Baptist preacher.

Revels was a second cousin to Lewis Sheridan Leary, one of the men who were
killed taking part in John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, and to North
Carolina lawyer and politician John S. Leary.

During his childhood, Revels was taught by a local black woman for his early
education. In 1838, at the age of 11, he went to live with his older brother, Elias B.
Revels, in Lincolnton, North Carolina. He was apprenticed as a barber in his
brother's shop. Barbering was considered a respectable, steady trade for black
Americans in this period. As men of all races used barbers, the trade provided black
Americans an opportunity to establish networks with the white community. After Elias
Revels died in 1841, his widow Mary transferred the shop to Hiram Revels before
she remarried.

Revels attended the Beech Grove Quaker Seminary, a school in Union County,
Indiana, founded by Quakers, and the Union Literary Institute, also known as the
Darke County Seminary despite being in Randolph County, Indiana.

In 1845, Revels was ordained as a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal

Church (AME); he served as a preacher and religious teacher throughout the
Midwest: in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee, Missouri, and Kansas. "At times, I met
with a great deal of opposition," he later recalled. "I was imprisoned in Missouri in
1854 for preaching the gospel to Negroes, though I was never subjected to
violence." During these years, he voted in Ohio.

He studied religion from 1855 to 1857 at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. He

became a minister in a Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore, Maryland, where
he also served as a principal of a black high school.
During the American Civil War, Revels served as a chaplain in the United States
Army. After the Union authorized establishment of the United States Colored Troops,
he helped recruit and organize two black Union regiments in Maryland and Missouri.
He took part at the Battle of Vicksburg in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

Political career
In 1865, Revels left the AME Church, the first independent black denomination in the
US, and joined the Methodist Episcopal Church. He was assigned briefly to churches
in Leavenworth, Kansas, and New Orleans, Louisiana. In 1866, he was called as a
permanent pastor at a church in Natchez, Mississippi, where he settled with his wife
and five daughters. He became an elder in the Mississippi District of the Methodist
Church, continued his ministerial work, and founded schools for black children.

During Reconstruction, Revels was elected alderman in Natchez in 1868. In 1869 he

was elected to represent Adams County in the Mississippi State Senate.

Congressman John R. Lynch later wrote of him in his book on Reconstruction:

Revels was comparatively a new man in the community. He had recently been
stationed at Natchez as pastor in charge of the A.M.E. Church, and so far as known
he had never voted, had never attended a political meeting, and of course, had
never made a political speech. But he was a colored man, and presumed to be a
Republican, and believed to be a man of ability and considerably above the average
in point of intelligence; just the man, it was thought, the Rev. Noah Buchanan would
be willing to vote for.
In January 1870, Revels presented the opening prayer in the state legislature. Lynch
wrote of that occasion,

That prayer—one of the most impressive and eloquent prayers that had ever been
delivered in the [Mississippi] Senate Chamber—made Revels a United States
Senator. He made a profound impression upon all who heard him. It impressed
those who heard it that Revels was not only a man of great natural ability but that he
was also a man of superior attainments.

Election to Senate
Letter dated January 25, 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.
At the time, as in every state, the Mississippi legislature elected U.S. senators; they
were not elected by popular vote until after ratification of the 17th Amendment in
1913.

In 1870, Revels was elected by a vote of 81 to 15 in the Mississippi legislature to

finish the term of one of the state's two seats in the U.S. Senate, which had been left
vacant since the Civil War. Previously, it had been held by Albert G. Brown, who
withdrew from the U.S. Senate in 1861 when Mississippi seceded.

When Revels arrived in Washington, D.C., Southern Democrats in office opposed

seating him in the Senate. For the two days of debate, the Senate galleries were
packed with spectators at this historic event. The Democrats based their opposition
on the 1857 Dred Scott Decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that people
of African ancestry were not and could not be citizens. They argued that no black
man was a citizen before the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, and thus Revels
could not satisfy the requirement of the Senate for nine years' prior citizenship.

Supporters of Revels made arguments ranging from relatively narrow and technical
issues, to fundamental arguments about the meaning of the Civil War. Among the
narrower arguments was that Revels was of primarily European ancestry (an
"octoroon") and that the Dred Scott decision should be interpreted as applying only
to those blacks who were of totally African ancestry. Supporters said that Revels had
long been a citizen (as shown by his voting in Ohio) and that he had met the nine-
year requirement before the Dred Scott decision changed the rules and held that
blacks could not be citizens.

The more fundamental argument by Revels' supporters was that the Civil War, and
the Reconstruction amendments, had overturned Dred Scott. Because of the war
and the Amendments, they argued, the subordination of the black race was no
longer part of the American constitutional regime and, therefore, it would be
unconstitutional to bar Revels on the basis of the pre-Civil War Constitution's
citizenship rules. One Republican Senator supporting Revels mocked opponents as
still fighting the "last battle-field" of that war.

Senator Charles Sumner (R-Massachusetts) said, "The time has passed for
argument. Nothing more need be said. For a long time, it has been clear that colored
persons must be senators. "Sumner, a Republican, later said,

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 February 25, 1870, Revels, on a party-line vote of 48 to 8, with Republicans
voting in favor and Democrats voting against, became the first African American to
be seated in the United States Senate. Everyone in the galleries stood to see him
sworn in.

Sumner's Massachusetts colleague, Henry Wilson, defended Revels' election and

presented as evidence of its validity signatures from the clerks of the Mississippi
House of Representatives and Mississippi State Senate, as well as that of Adelbert
Ames, the military Governor of Mississippi. Wilson argued that Revels' skin color was
not a bar to Senate service, and connected the role of the Senate to
Christianity's Golden Rule of doing to others as one would have done to oneself.

U.S. senator
Revels was both the first black American and the first person of avowed Native
American ancestry to serve in the United States Senate.
Revels advocated compromise and moderation. He vigorously supported racial
equality and worked to reassure his fellow senators about the capability of African
Americans. In his maiden speech to the Senate on March 16, 1870, he argued for
the reinstatement of the black legislators of the Georgia General Assembly, who had
been illegally ousted by white Democratic Party representatives. He said, "I maintain
that the past record of my race is a true index of the feelings which today animate
them. They aim not to elevate themselves by sacrificing one single interest of their
white fellow citizens."

He served on both the Committee of Education and Labor and the Committee on the
District of Columbia. (At the time, the Congress administered the district.) Much of
the Senate's attention focused on Reconstruction issues. While Radical
Republicans called for continued punishment of ex-Confederates, Revels argued for
amnesty and a restoration of full citizenship, provided they swore an oath of loyalty
to the United States. Political cartoon: Revels (seated) replaces Jefferson Davis (left;
dressed as Iago from William Shakespeare's Othello) in US Senate. Harper's
Weekly February 19, 1870. Davis had been a senator from Mississippi until 1861.

Revels' Senate term lasted a little over one year, from February 25, 1870, to March
3, 1871. He quietly and persistently, although for the most part unsuccessfully,
worked for equality. He spoke against an amendment proposed by Senator Allen G.
Thurman (D-Ohio) to keep the schools of Washington, D.C., segregated and argued
for their integration. He nominated a young black man to the United States Military
Academy; the youth was subsequently denied admission. Revels successfully
championed the cause of black workers who had been barred by their color from
working at the Washington Navy Yard.

The Northern press praised Revels for his oratorical abilities. His conduct in the
Senate, along with that of the other black Americans who had been seated in the
House of Representatives, prompted a white Congressman, James G. Blaine (R-
Maine), to write in his memoir, "The colored men who took their seats in both Senate
and House were as a rule studious, earnest, ambitious men, whose public conduct
would be honorable to any race." Revels supported bills to invest in developing
infrastructure in Mississippi: to grant lands and right of way to aid the construction of
the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad (41st Congress 2nd Session S. 712),
and levees on the Mississippi River (41st Congress 3rd Session S. 1136).

College president
Revels accepted in 1871, after his term as U.S. Senator expired, appointment as the
first president of Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Alcorn State
University), a historically black college located in Claiborne County, Mississippi. He
taught philosophy as well. In 1873, Revels took a leave of absence from Alcorn to
serve as Mississippi's secretary of state ad interim. He was dismissed from Alcorn in
1874 when he campaigned against the reelection of Governor of Mississippi Adelbert
Ames. He was reappointed in 1876 by the new Democratic administration and
served until his retirement in 1882.[3]

On November 6, 1875, Revels wrote a letter to fellow Republican

and President Ulysses S. Grant that was widely reprinted. Revels denounced Ames
and the carpetbaggers for manipulating the black vote for personal benefit, and for
keeping alive wartime hatreds:[21]

Since reconstruction, the masses of my people have been, as it were, enslaved in

mind by unprincipled adventurers, who, caring nothing for country, were willing to
stoop to anything no matter how infamous, to secure power to themselves, and
perpetuate it. My people have been told by these schemers, when men have been
placed on the ticket who were notoriously corrupt and dishonest, that they must vote
for them; that the salvation of the party depended upon it; that the man who
scratched a ticket was not a Republican. This is only one of the many means these
unprincipled demagogues have devised to perpetuate the intellectual bondage of my
people. The bitterness and hate created by the late civil strife has, in my opinion,
been obliterated in this state, except perhaps in some localities, and would have long
since been entirely obliterated, were it not for some unprincipled men who would
keep alive the bitterness of the past, and inculcate a hatred between the races, in
order that they may aggrandize themselves by office, and its emoluments, to control
my people, the effect of which is to degrade them.
Revels remained active as a Methodist Episcopal minister in Holly Springs,
Mississippi and became an elder in the Upper Mississippi District.[8] For a time, he
served as editor of the Southwestern Christian Advocate, the newspaper of the
Methodist Church. He taught theology at Shaw College (now Rust College),
a historically black college founded in 1866 in Holly Springs. Hiram Revels died on
January 16, 1901, while attending a church conference in Aberdeen, Mississippi. He
was buried at the Hillcrest Cemetery in Holly Springs, Mississippi.

Legacy
Revels' daughter, Susie Revels Cayton, edited The Seattle Republican in Seattle,
Washington. Among his grandsons were Horace R. Cayton Jr., co-author of Black
Metropolis, and Revels Cayton, a labor leader. In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete
Asante listed Hiram Rhodes Revels as one of the 100 Greatest African Americans