Hiram Rhodes Revels

Hiram Rhodes Revels was born on September 27, 1827, in Fayetteville, North Carolina. His family was of mixed African and Croatan ancestry and had been free for multiple generations. The 1830 federal census lists the family as free persons of color in Cumberland County, North Carolina. Free Black people in the antebellum South lived under statutes that limited where they could live, whom they could marry, what work they could do, and whether they could be taught to read. Hiram and his brothers were apprenticed young to the barber trade, one of the few skilled occupations open to them.

He left North Carolina as a young man because the state had made it illegal to educate Black children, free or enslaved. He studied at the Beech Grove Quaker Seminary in Liberty, Indiana, and then at a school in Darke County, Ohio, that admitted Black students. He completed his education at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, the abolitionist institution whose campus Lincoln and Douglas would debate on a decade later.

He was ordained an African Methodist Episcopal minister in 1845 and spent the next sixteen years traveling a preaching circuit that ran from Indiana and Illinois through Kansas, Missouri, Tennessee, and Kentucky. He taught school wherever he stayed long enough to hold classes, and in Missouri in 1854 he was jailed briefly for preaching the gospel to an enslaved congregation. He married Phoebe Bass, an Ohio-born teacher, in 1845. They would have five daughters. In 1857 he transferred to the Methodist Episcopal Church and accepted a pulpit in Baltimore.

When the Civil War began, he helped organize the first two regiments of Black soldiers raised in Maryland. When General Ulysses Grant's army moved south, Revels followed. In 1863 he served as chaplain to the 1st Regiment Mississippi Heavy Artillery, African Descent, one of the Black units garrisoning Vicksburg after its fall. He established freedmen's schools in camps along the Mississippi River. He moved to Natchez, Mississippi in 1866 and built a church and a school there.

Under the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, Mississippi drafted a new state constitution and elected a new legislature that included Black members for the first time. Natchez voters sent Revels to the Mississippi State Senate in 1869. In January 1870, the state legislature met to fill the two U.S. Senate seats Mississippi had forfeited when it seceded. One of those seats had been held from 1857 to 1861 by Jefferson Davis, who had left it to become president of the Confederacy. The Mississippi legislature elected Revels to that seat on the third ballot.

The seating debate in the U.S. Senate lasted three days. Senator Garrett Davis of Kentucky and Senator Willard Saulsbury of Delaware argued that Revels was ineligible because the Constitution required nine years of U.S. citizenship and, in their theory, no Black man had been a citizen until the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts answered on the floor that the Dred Scott decision had been a judicial misreading of the Constitution and that Revels had been a citizen his entire life. The Senate voted 48 to 8 to seat him. On February 25, 1870, he was sworn in by Vice President Schuyler Colfax.

His first speech, delivered on March 16, 1870, addressed the case of the Georgia legislature, which had expelled its Black members a year earlier. Revels argued on the Senate floor that Congress should refuse to seat Georgia's senators until the state reseated its Black legislators. Within forty-eight hours, Georgia was required to do so as a condition of readmission to Congress. He spoke on the Senate floor thirteen times during his thirteen months in office. He served on the Committee on Education and Labor and on the Committee on the District of Columbia. He opposed a bill that would have imposed racial segregation on the D.C. public schools and defeated it.

His term ended on March 3, 1871. Mississippi Democrats blocked any effort to return him. He left Washington and took up the presidency of Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College in Claiborne County, Mississippi, a new institution chartered under the Morrill Land-Grant Act to educate Black students. He was its first president. He ran it from 1871 to 1873. When he declined to support the Republican gubernatorial candidate in 1875, the Republican legislature removed him. When Democrats returned to power in Mississippi the following year, they reinstated him, and he served a second Alcorn presidency from 1876 to 1882.

He was forced out of the Alcorn presidency a second time when Mississippi Democrats, having completed the armed overthrow of the state's Reconstruction government, reorganized the school's governance and pressed him out. He returned to the pulpit. He pastored in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and taught at Shaw College, now Rust College, an AME-founded institution in the same town. He remained active as a Methodist presiding elder until his death.

He died on January 16, 1901, at age seventy-three, while attending a church conference in Aberdeen, Mississippi. He was buried at Hillcrest Cemetery in Holly Springs. He had lived through slavery without being enslaved, through the Civil War as a chaplain, through Reconstruction as a senator, and through Redemption as a college president. Every part of the federal Black political record that followed is continuous with his.

Blanche Bruce took Revels's precedent to a full Senate term in 1875. No Black senator served after Bruce's 1881 retirement until Edward Brooke of Massachusetts in 1967, a gap of eighty-six years. Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois became the first Black woman senator in 1993. Barack Obama was seated in 2005 and became the forty-fourth president in 2009. Tim Scott of South Carolina, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kamala Harris of California, and Raphael Warnock of Georgia have since served. Each of them was seated under the rule the Senate set down when it voted 48 to 8 to admit Hiram Rhodes Revels to the seat Jefferson Davis had held.