# Hiram Revels Hiram Rhodes Revels was the first Black person to serve in the United States Congress. He took the oath as a U.S. senator from Mississippi on 25 February 1870, twenty-two days after the [[Fifteenth Amendment]] was ratified, and served barely a year — a term that had already almost run out when he got it. ## Why it matters Revels is the proof that Black political power in the Deep South was not a modern invention but a restoration. In 1870 Mississippi's legislature, about a quarter of whose members were Black, sent a Black minister to the Senate. Twenty years later the same state wrote a constitution designed to make that impossible, and it held for most of a century. The arc from Revels to [[Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890]] to the [[Voting Rights Act of 1965]] is the single clearest demonstration that the franchise can be taken back as deliberately as it is won. One detail is almost always told wrong: Revels did not take Jefferson Davis's old seat. Both of Mississippi's Senate seats had stood empty since January 1861, when Albert Brown and [[Jefferson Davis]] withdrew as the state seceded, and the Senate formally declared them vacant that March. In 1870 the legislature gave Revels the shorter of the two unexpired terms — Brown's, due to end in March 1871 — and sent Adelbert Ames to the seat Davis had held. ## Life before the Senate Born free in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on 27 September 1827, Revels said of his family that "as far back as my knowledge extends, were free." He attended a school run by a free Black woman, worked as a barber, then went north to study at Quaker and Methodist seminaries in Indiana and Ohio and later at Knox College in Illinois. Ordained in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1845, he preached across at least nine states, was briefly jailed in Missouri for preaching to Black congregations, and helped recruit two Black regiments in Maryland after the war began. He served as an army chaplain in Mississippi, founded a school for freedpeople in St. Louis, and settled in Natchez in 1866. He was made a Natchez alderman in 1868 and won a state senate seat in 1869, one of thirty-five Black men elected to the Mississippi legislature that year. ## Election and the fight over his seat Black legislators held roughly a quarter of the seats and insisted that one of the two Senate vacancies go to one of their own, reasoning, as Revels recalled it, that this "would in their judgement be a weakening blow against color line prejudice." After three days and seven ballots, on 20 January 1870 the legislature elected him 85 to 15. He could not be seated until Mississippi was readmitted to representation, which happened on 23 February 1870. His credentials were presented the same day, and three senators immediately challenged them: citing [[Dred Scott v. Sandford]], they argued that Revels had not been a citizen for the nine years the Constitution requires of a senator. Republicans answered that the [[Fourteenth Amendment]] had undone *Dred Scott* and that Revels had voted in Ohio well before 1866. > [!quote] Charles Sumner, closing the debate, February 1870 > "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." The Senate voted 48 to 8 to seat him. He took the oath on the afternoon of 25 February 1870, to applause from packed galleries. The congressional record of his service runs from 23 February 1870, the day his credentials were presented, to 3 March 1871. ## In office Revels was assigned to the Committees on Education and Labor and on the District of Columbia. Three weeks after being seated he became the first Black person to speak in the Senate, arguing against a provision of the Georgia readmission bill that could be used to bar Black officeholders — Georgia's Democrats had expelled Black legislators in 1868, and those men had petitioned Congress for help. Congress restored them, though their terms were not extended and Democrats soon took the state back. He pressed for federal money for Mississippi levees, opposed segregated schools in the District of Columbia, and argued for lifting the political disabilities of former Confederates who accepted the postwar settlement — a position he framed as the price of reconciliation in his state. After leaving the Senate he became the first president of Alcorn University, the country's first land-grant college for Black students, served briefly as Mississippi's secretary of state in 1873, and returned to the ministry and to teaching theology. Following the violent Mississippi elections of 1875 he wrote President [[Ulysses S. Grant]] a letter attacking white Republicans in the state for neglecting Black citizens; Democrats seized on it as evidence that their victory had been fair, and critics called him an apostate. Testifying before a Senate committee investigating that election, he said he knew of no widespread violence — against overwhelming evidence to the contrary. He died in Aberdeen, Mississippi, on 16 January 1901. Seventeen Black men served in Congress during Reconstruction, fifteen in the House and two in the Senate. After [[Blanche K. Bruce]] left in 1881, eighty-six years passed before another Black senator took office. ## Connections - [[Blanche K. Bruce]] — the second Black senator from Mississippi, and the first to serve a full term - [[Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890]] — the state's deliberate reversal of what Revels's election represented - [[Reconstruction and Its Overthrow]] — the larger arc - [[Mississippi Plan]] — force first, then the statute - [[MS-Sen-2026]] — the 2026 race that produced Mississippi's first popularly elected Black senator - [[United States Senate]] · [[Fifteenth Amendment]] · [[1870 Midterm Elections]] ## Sources - [U.S. House, History, Art & Archives — REVELS, Hiram Rhodes](https://history.house.gov/People/Listing/R/REVELS,-Hiram-Rhodes-(R000166)/) - [U.S. Senate Historical Office — Hiram Revels: First African American Senator](https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/senate-stories/First-African-American-Senator.htm)