"Hiram Rhodes Revels"

Was a minister in the African-Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), and a politician.He was the

first person of color to serve in the United States Senate,and in the U.S. Congress overall.He represented Mississippi in 1870 and 1871 during Reconstruction. During the American Civil War,he helped organize two regiments of the United States Colored Troops and served as chaplain Hiram was born free in Fayetteville,North Carolina of African and European ancestry.He was tutored by a black woman for his early education.In 1818 he went to live with his older brother,Elias B.Revels,in Lincolnton,North Carolina,and was apprenticed as a barber in his brother's shop.After Elias died in 1841,his widow Mary transferred the shop to Hiram before she remarried.Hiram attended Union County Quaker Seminary in Indiana,and studied at a black seminary in Ohio.In 1845,he 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.He did additional religious studies from 1856-1857 at Knox College in Galesburg,Illinois.Hiram became a minister in a Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore,Maryland,where he also served as a principal for a black high school.As a chaplain in the U.S. Army,Hiram helped recruit and organize two African-American Union regiments during the Civil War in Maryland and Missouri.He took part at the battle of Vicksburg in Mississippi.In 1865,Hiram left the AME Church and joined the Methodist Episcopal Church.Hiram was assigned briefly to churches in Leavenworth Kansas,and New Orleans,Louisiana.In 1866,he was given a permanent pastorshipin Natchez,Mississippi, where he settled with his wife and five daughters,became and elder in the Mississippi District,continued his ministerial work,and founded schools for African-American children.During Hiram was elected alderman in Natchez in 1868.In 1869 he was elected to represent Adams County in the Mississippi State Senate.As the Congressman John R.Lynch later wrote in his book on Reconstruction."So far as known he [Hiram] had never voted,had never attended a political meeting,and a 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."[John] in January 1870,Hiram presented a remarkable opening prayer in the state legislature.John said,
"That prayer-one of the most impressive and eloquent prayers that had ever been delivered in the [Mississippi[ Senate Chamber-made Hiram a U.S. 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."At the time the state legislature elected U.S. senators from Mississippi.In 1870 Hiram was elected by a vote of 81-15 in the Mississippi State Senate 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 Gallatin Brown,who withdrew from the U.S. Senate in 1861 when Mississippi seceded.When Hiram arrived in Washington, D.C.,Southern Democrats 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 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,thus Hiram could not satisfy the requirements for nine years prior citizenship.Supporters of Hiram made a number of arguments,from the relatively narrow technical to fundamental arguments about the meaning of the Civil War.Among the narrower arguments was that Hiram was of mixed black and white ancestry (an "octoroon") and that the Dred Scott Decision argued that Hiram had long been a citizen (and indeed had voted in Ohio) and that he had met the nine-year requirements before the dred Scott decision changed the rules and held that African-Americans  could not be citizens.The more fundamental arguments Hiram supporters made boiled down to this idea:that the Civil War,and the Reconstruction Amendments,had overturned Dred Scott.The meaning of the war,and also of the Amendments,was that the subordination of the African-American race was no longer part of the American constitutional regime,and that therefore,it would be unconstitutional to bar Hiram on the basis of the pre-Civil War Constitution's racist citizenship rules.One Republican Senator supporting Hiram mocked opponents as still fighting the "last battle-field"of the war.On February 25,1870,Hiram,on a strict party-line vote of 48 to 8,with only Republicans voting in favor and only Democrats voting against,became the first African-American to be seated in the U.S. Senate.Everyone in the galleries stood to see him sworn in.Hiram advocated compromise and moderation.He vigorously supported racial equality and worked to reassure 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 African-American 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 punishments of ex-Confederates,Hiram argued for amnesty and a restoration of full citizenship,provided they swore an oath of loyalty to the U.S.Hiram's term lasted one year,February 1870 to March 3,1871 he quietly,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.He nominated a young African-American man to the U.S. Military Academy;the young was subsequently denied admission.Hiram successfully championed the cause of African-American workers who had been barred by their color from working at the Washington Navy Yard.The northern press praised Hiram for his oratorical abilities.His conduct in the Senate,along with that of the other African-Americans who had been seated in the House of Representatives, prompted  a white congressman James Gillespie Blaine, to write in his memoir,"The colored man who took their seats in both senate and and House were rule studious,earnest,ambitious men,whose public conduct would be honorable to any race.Hiram 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.) and levees on the Mississippi river (41st 3rd Sessions).He argued for integration of schools in the District of Columbia.Hiram resigned two months before his term expired to accept appointment as the first president of Alcorn Agricultural Mechanical College(Now Alcorn State University),a historically black college located in Claiborne County Mississippi.He taught philosophy as well.In `In 1873, Hiram 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 campaign 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.On November 6,1875,Hiram,as a Republican,wrote a letter to Republican President Ulysses S.Grant that was widely reprinted.Hiram denounced Adelbert and the carpetbaggers for manipulating the black vote for personal benefit,and keeping alive wartime hatred:
Since Reconstruction,the masses of my people have been,as it were,enslaved in mind by unprincipled adventures,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 most 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.
Hiram active as a Methodist Episcopal minister in Holly Springs,Mississippi and became and elder in the Upper Mississippi District.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 Rush College), a historically black college founded in 1866 in Holly Springs.Hiram died while attending a church conference in Aberdeen,Mississippi.