On
February 25, 1870 Hiram Revels was seated as a United States Senator from Mississippi.
Two things made the event unusual.
First, Revels was Black. Second, he was elected by the Reconstruction
legislature of the state to finish the term that Jefferson
Davis had vacated to take up the
Presidency of the Confederacy.
Seating him was anything but routine. Democrats rose
to argue that because the Dred
Scott Decision held that no Black man could be a citizen, that there were no Black citizens prior to the adoption of the 14th Amendment in 1860. The Constitution
required a Senator be a citizen for six
years and they argued that Revels had only been one for two.
The Republican
majority said that would apply only to those of pure Negro blood. Revels, who was born a free man in North Carolina in
1827 to a mixed race father and Scottish mother was ruled a citizen and
seated.
Revels
had apprenticed as a barber to his brother and was gifted his estate by his widow when
he died. He used the money to
attend Union County Quaker Seminary in Indiana, Knox College
in Illinois, and a Black seminary
in Ohio. He was ordained
a minister of the African
Methodist Episcopal Church and preached
in several states, including Missouri where he was briefly jailed for gathering Blacks to worship, before settling into a Baltimore
parish in 1845 and opening a private school.
He became perhaps the leading free black citizen of Maryland. When the Civil
War broke out he helped raise
two regiments of Black soldiers
in Maryland and Missouri and served as a Chaplain. He saw action
at Vicksburg.
In 1866 he took up a new pastorate in Natchez and put his efforts into establishing
schools for Black children. He was elected Alderman in 1868 then
to the Mississippi Senate in 1869. He was selected to give the opening prayer at the 1870 session of
the legislature and so impressed the
members with his eloquence and grace that he was quickly elected to fill the unfinished U.S.
Senate term.
In the Senate Revels impressed his colleagues by both his
work ethic and his oratory. He served on the Committee
for Education and Labor and on the District of Columbia Committee.
Although he rose on the Senate floor
to defend the black Georgia
state legislators who had just been illegally
ousted by White representatives, he
did not advocate the continuance of
a harsh or vengeful Reconstruction policy. He argued that
Confederates who swore a loyalty oath should have their citizenship
rights restored.
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Revels served only a little more than a year. He resigned in March 1871, two months
before his term ended to take up the Presidency of Alcorn Agricultural and
Mechanical College (now Alcorn State University.) He served
there with distinction with two interruptions until his
retirement in 1882.
Those two interruptions were instructive. First, he temporarily
assumed the duties of Mississippi
Secretary of State in 1883. He witnessed the corruption of the administration
of Republican Governor Aldebert Ames and wrote a public letter to President Grant accusing him and his Carpetbagger
administration of corrupting the Black vote for their own private profit. Needless to say,
he was fired as college president. But when Democrats returned to power in the state in 1876 they reappointed him to his post despite the
fact he remained an avowed Republican.
After his college service Revel returned to the ministry
and then taught theology at Shaw College (now Rust College) in Holly
Springs, Mississippi. He died
in 1901.
Despite his accomplishments
and illustrious career Revel is now nearly a forgotten figure, a victim
of the successful seizure in the
early Twentieth Century of American
history texts for public schools
by Confederate sympathizers and apologists
who painted Reconstruction as a bloody
oppression and Black political leaders like Revel as ignorant apes and puppets of evil Carpetbaggers.
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