Hiram Rhodes Revels was the first African American to serve in the United States Congress and the first to sit in the United States Senate. A minister, educator, and Republican politician whose public life was shaped by the struggles of Black communities before, during, and after the Civil War, he entered the Senate in 1870 to fill a Mississippi vacancy during Reconstruction.
Revels’s admission was a landmark in American political history. On February 25, 1870, after a contentious debate, the Senate voted 48 to 8 to seat him. Opponents had invoked the constitutional requirement that senators possess nine years of citizenship, arguing that African Americans had acquired citizenship only with the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts rejected that reasoning: “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.” Revels then took the oath of office, becoming the first African American United States senator.
Born on September 27, 1827, in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Revels was born free to parents of African and Native American ancestry. His early life unfolded in a captivity state, yet he belonged to the small but significant free Black population whose churches, schools, trades, mutual-aid networks, and political aspirations helped sustain African American life before emancipation. As a young man, he trained as a barber under his brother Elias. After his brother’s death, Revels continued his education in Indiana and Ohio, including study at a Quaker seminary. He was ordained a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1845.
During the 1840s and 1850s, Revels traveled widely as a preacher and educator, working among Black communities in Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri. In 1853, he became pastor of an African Methodist Episcopal church in St. Louis, despite a Missouri law barring free Black people from residing in the state. He later recalled the restrictions under which he worked, explaining that he had been careful not to give slaveholders cause to accuse him of encouraging enslaved people to flee. Even so, he was imprisoned in 1854 for preaching to Black people.
After his release, Revels moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where he worked as a minister and teacher. He served as principal of a Black school and studied at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, from 1855 to 1857. At a time when access to higher education was profoundly restricted for African Americans, this experience distinguished him among the generation of Black religious, educational, and political leaders who would help shape Reconstruction. He married Phoebe A. Bass of Zanesville, Ohio, in the early 1850s; they had six children.
The Civil War widened Revels’s sphere of public service. He helped recruit and organize two Black Union regiments and served as a chaplain with Black troops during the Vicksburg campaign. His wartime work joined religious leadership to the larger struggle for emancipation, citizenship, education, and political rights. After the war, he continued work among formerly enslaved people, assisting in the establishment of schools and churches.
Revels settled in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1866, where he resumed his ministry and educational work. The political transformation of Reconstruction Mississippi made his leadership increasingly important. In 1868 he was elected an alderman in Natchez, and in 1869 he won election to the Mississippi state senate from Adams County. One of more than thirty African American legislators in the state’s 140-member legislature, he argued for a postwar order founded on “justice and political and legal equality.”
In January 1870, the Mississippi legislature elected Revels to fill the Senate seat that had been vacant since the Civil War, a seat formerly held by Jefferson Davis. The symbolism was unmistakable: an African American man born free in a slaveholding state was chosen to represent Mississippi in the chamber once occupied by the future president of the Confederacy. Following the Senate’s decision to admit him, Revels served from February 25, 1870, until March 4, 1871.
Although his Senate term was brief, Revels opposed racial segregation and supported the federal government’s responsibility to protect Black political rights in the South. He spoke against segregated schools and railroads, urged the admission of an African American cadet to the United States Military Academy at West Point, and supported measures to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment. His political manner was frequently described as conciliatory, but his record shows that conciliation did not mean indifference to civil rights or acceptance of racial discrimination.
After leaving the Senate in 1871, Revels returned to Mississippi and became president of Alcorn College, the state’s first college for Black students, later known as Alcorn State University. He was removed from the presidency in 1874 but returned two years later and remained associated with the institution until his retirement in 1882. He also served briefly as Mississippi’s secretary of state ad interim in 1873.
Revels’s later political choices were controversial. In 1875, he broke with Republican Governor Adelbert Ames and the Reconstruction leadership he regarded as corrupt, contributing to a political realignment that helped end Republican rule in Mississippi. That development must be understood within the wider destruction of Reconstruction, when white supremacist violence, intimidation, and voter suppression severely curtailed Black political power across the state and the former Confederacy.
Throughout his public career, Revels remained committed to religious work. He later edited the Southwestern Christian Advocate and continued preaching and participating in church affairs. Hiram Rhodes Revels died while attending a church conference in Aberdeen, Mississippi, on January 16, 1901. His career stands as a defining achievement of Reconstruction: the emergence of African American political leadership from a society built upon the Maafa, and the assertion—however fiercely contested—of Black citizenship, representation, and equal rights in the United States.
Sources:
http://ncpedia.org/biography/revels
http://www.blackpast.org/aah/revels-hiram-rhoades-1827-1901#sthash.CsnYImuH.dpuf
http://history.house.gov/People/Listing/R/REVELS,-Hiram-Rhodes-(R000166)/
https://www.senate.gov/senators/FeaturedBios/Featured_Bio_Revels.htm
https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/hiram-rhodes-revels/
