Authors: Philip Dray
The Republicans were quick to respond. John Scott of Pennsylvania said that all black persons in the United States had instantly become citizens by the enactment of the Civil Rights Act and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, and he mentioned that most Republicans had never accepted the notion that
Dred Scott
addressed the status of free blacks like Hiram Revels. Missouri's Charles D. Drake suggested that since Revels was technically neither a Negro nor a mulatto but an octoroon, a person who was one-eighth Negro, Saulsbury's anxiety at having to spend time alongside him in the Senate might be somewhat alleviated. Pivoting on Drake's comment, Saulsbury insisted his conscience was troubled only by disobedience to the law and that Reconstruction itselfâits hasty amendments and its elevation of blacks like Revelsâwas little more than a dictatorial coup, a "great and damning outrage."
Saulsbury's opposition to Revels came off as spiteful, but some newspapers also criticized the new senator. A Baltimore periodical dredged up a story that Revels had once stolen money from a church in Kansas and had taken part in a drunken brawl, subdued only when a whiskey bottle was smashed over his head. A former nemesis from Kansas, J. H. Morris, hostile to Revels because the minister had once halted his use of a church for political meetings, distributed among Democratic senators a pamphlet he had written detailing Revels's "offenses," although Revels himself proudly noted that Morris's rantings went directly into most senators' wastebaskets. As for the issue of Revels's eligibility, a writer for
The Nation
pointed out that the residents of Texas had all been granted instant national citizenship when that territory was annexed in 1845 and wondered why residents of Mississippi wouldn't enjoy the same privilege when their state was readmitted. Sumner, the veteran senator, took the floor to remind those who would derail Revels that
Dred Scott
had been "born a putrid corpse" and had become "at once a stench in the nostrils and a scandal to the court itself, which made haste to turn away from its offensive offspring." He asserted that Revels's taking his seat in the Senate would be a milestone in America's realization of the promise of the Declaration of Independence. "'All men are created equal,' says the great Declaration, and now a great act attests this verity."
No sooner had Sumner completed his remarks than a vote was taken and, Saulsbury's fulminations notwithstanding, Mississippi's new senator was approved by a comfortable margin. "Revels, who had been sitting all day on a sofa in the rear of Mr. Sumner's seat, advanced toward the clerk's desk with a modest yet firm step," according to one account.
He was in no way embarrassed...[but] swallowed the iron-clad oath without wincing, and bowed his head quite reverently when the
words "so help you God" were rendered ... Judging from the anxiety pictured on their countenances, and the uneasiness manifested to get a good look at the operation of swearing Revels in, the people in the galleries must have expected something terrible to follow.
Comical suggestions had been made about just such a possibilityâthat the walls and ceiling of the chamber might collapse spontaneously or the chandeliers might fall and shatter in response to the dramatic transition that Revels's confirmation symbolized.
"The colored United States Senator from Mississippi has been awarded his seat," concluded the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, "and we have not had an earthquake, our free institutions have not been shaken to their foundations, nor have the streets of our large cities been converted to blood." It was 4:40
P.M.
on Friday, February 25, 1870, and a black American was now a member of the U.S. Congress.
The rebellious spirit of Jefferson Davis may have been exorcised from the Senate chamber, but in the far-off reaches of the former Confederacy it appeared to be enjoying a vibrant second lifeâin New Orleans, Memphis, and now also Georgia, and the plight of blacks in that state became the subject of Hiram Revels's first speech from the Senate floor on March 16.
Revels challenged the readmission of Georgia to the Union on the grounds that the state had denied blacks the right to serve in its legislature, and had indeed a year and a half earlier expelled those already serving. As in other Southern states, many whites in Georgia deliberately sat out the elections held in 1867 to name delegates to write a new state constitution, a phenomenon known as "masterly inactivity," and they did the same for the state election in April 1868, through which a new biracial legislature was chosen. Then, in September 1868, thirty-two duly elected black members of the Georgia legislature were thrown out (although four of fractional Negro ancestry were readmitted); their white peers claimed that the new state constitution gave blacks the right to vote but not to hold office. Henry M. Turner, a black chaplain in the Union army and a Georgia representative, was the hero of the doomed fight in the legislature. He warned the whites, "You will make us your foes, you will make our constituency your foes. I'll do all I can to poison my race against Democracy ... This thing means revolution," and then he led the other black legislators out of the hall. That same month political violence erupted at a Republican campaign event in the town of
Camilla, Georgia, at which one of the expelled legislators was to speak, and several blacks lost their lives.
Led by Turner, a delegation of some of the black legislators from Georgia came to Washington in fall 1869 to press the issue and testify before a congressional committee. Calling the state of Georgia "a wayward sister," Frederick Douglass extended support to the visiting representatives. "Every one of them has a moving tale to tell of personal danger and outrage," he wrote, adding, "Upon every side in [Georgia] the indications are clear, that the snake, Rebellion, has been only scotched there, and not killed." The legislator Abram Colby reported that one night in October 1869 thirty disguised men had come to his home. "They broke my door open, took me out of bed, took me to the woods and whipped me three hours or more and left me for dead. They said to me, 'Do you think you will ever vote another damned Radical ticket?' I said, 'I will not tell you a lie.' I supposed they would kill me anyhow. I said, 'If there was an election tomorrow, I would vote the Radical ticket.' They set in and whipped me a thousand licks more, with sticks and straps that had buckles on the ends of them."
A national outcry over these events returned Georgia to federal control; its military governor, General Alfred H. Terry, forcibly reinstated blacks in the legislature while banning an equal number of whites in an action known to aggrieved Georgians as "Terry's Purge," thus setting the stage for the legislature to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment and be readmitted to the Union in 1870. But at the time of Revels's appearance in the Senate, questions remained about how and when new legislative elections would be held in Georgia, and, among national Republicans, how the state could be held in the Republican column with the party's members there so badly disheartened by persistent harassment. (Georgia would rejoin the Union on July 15, 1870; elections there that fall would yield a largely Democratic legislature.)
Just as they did with Revels's swearing-in, the Republicans were eager to show him off as he made his maiden address in the Senate, and a large and quite unprecedented biracial crowd gathered, with hundreds of blacks filling the gallery overhead to gaze down at the white senators. "Never since the birth of the republic has such an audience been assembled under one single roof," recalled a witness. Revels took the floor to a hushed room; he began to speak a bit hesitantly but quickly gained confidence. He attacked the rationale of the Georgia Democrats, who justified the exclusion of blacks from the legislature because of severe antagonism between the races, which would likely cause the blacks to lord
their authority over the whites. "As the recognized representative of my downtrodden people, I deny the charge, and hurl it back into the teeth of those who make it, and who, I believe, have not a true and conscientious desire to further the interests of the whole South," he said.
Certainly no one possessing any personal knowledge of the colored population of my own or other states need be reminded of the noble conduct of that people ... in the history of the late war ... While the Confederate army pressed into its ranks every white male capable of bearing arms, the mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters of the Southern soldiers were left defenseless and in the power of the blacks ... And now, sir, I ask, how did that race act? Did they ... evince the malignity of which we hear so much? They waited, and they waited patiently. In the absence of their masters they protected the virtue and chastity of defenseless women ... Mr. President, I maintain that the past record of my race is a true index of the feelings which today animate them.
Revels's speech was loudly applauded, and his measured performance came as a significant relief to his Republican allies. Oliver Morton of Indiana observed that "in receiving him in exchange for Jefferson Davis, the Senate had lost nothing in intelligence."
On May 17 Revels spoke again, this time on an issue far more controversial, the lifting of remaining political disabilities against former Confederates. Amnesty was of particular significance for black politicians, for it was widely believed that the disenfranchisement and political neutering of secessionist leaders had made possible their own political ascendance. Politically, it behooved them to appear conciliatory and to avoid the charge that they meant to "Africanize" the South. "I do not know of one state that is altogether as well reconstructed as Mississippi is," Revels told the Senate. "We have reports from a great many other states of lawlessness and of violence ... but ... do you hear one report of any more lawlessness or violence in the State of Mississippi? No; the people now I believe are getting along as quietly, pleasantly, harmoniously, and prosperously as the people are in any of the formerly free states ... I am in favor of amnesty in Mississippi ... the state is fit for it." This appeal for harmony reached the Mississippi state legislature then convening in Jackson and brought Revels so much praise that there was talk of naming a county for him.
His celebrity carried him through a summer speaking tour in the Northeast states. In a talk he titled "The Tendency of the Age," Revels located his own success on a vast timeline of human history, positioning himself as a transitional figure in a centuries-old struggle between "aristocracy" and "democracy," which extended from Europe of the Middle Ages to Reconstruction Mississippi. When he was denied a podium at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia, local blacks were outraged; one letter-writer to the
Philadelphia Post
noted that the Academy's "respectable board has the negrophobia so bad it cannot bear the idea of hearing eloquence from anyone who is not lucky enough to be white. It has repeatedly refused Frederick Douglass the privilege of lecturing ... although he has alone more brains than almost any six members of the board together." Revels was compensated by a triumphant welcome at Boston's Tremont Temple, where, introduced by Wendell Phillips and speaking before an audience of former abolitionists, he received a warm ovation.
Revels's optimism, however, would soon come to seem premature, even to him, and when he left Congress and returned to experience firsthand the tribulations of his rural constituents as they fought to retain the gains of Reconstruction, he would be far from the adoring clutches of sympathetic Boston and the cheers of the Senate gallery. How he handled that challenge would anger many of his own people, and diminish his star.
M
EMBERS OF
the U.S. Congress in 1870 might have paused to congratulate themselves on the advances made during the half-decade since the war. Their program of Reconstruction had overcome President Andrew Johnson's obstructions, and the Black Codes had been challenged; a new ideal of national citizenship, as well as expanded rights of suffrage, had been set forth; and the former Confederate states had been welcomed to rejoin the Union, but only after holding constitutional conventions and ratifying the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. With the seating of Hiram Revels in the U.S. Senate and, later that year, South Carolina's Joseph Rainey in the U.S. House of Representatives, black political representation had become a reality at the highest national levels.
These were impressive achievements. But far from the committee rooms of Washington, in the modest African American farm settlements and small courthouse towns of the South, a new, very menacing problem had appeared. Founded by Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866, a white vigilante organization called the Ku Klux Klan had been rapidly emulated in numerous states under names such as the Knights of the White Camellia, the '76 Association, the Pale Faces, and the Council of Safety. Reports of these groups' deadly assaults on freedmen and white Republicans had become increasingly hard to ignore.
Having conquered the rebellious South once before, General Ulysses'S. Grant, who had become president in early 1869, seemed the ideal choice to confront this new form of insurrection. The issue of using federal force to smite the Klan, however, quickly became controversial, and the Grant administration, wishing at all costs to avoid reigniting passions related to the war, proved sensitive to criticism that it might be capable of offering only a military solution. As the Klan's activities prompted sharp concern in the North, the president would move cautiously, working with Congress on coordinated legislative and enforcement initiatives.
One of his more dedicated collaborators was Attorney General Amos T. Akerman, a man of Northern birth and education whose résumé uniquely qualified him for the role. A Dartmouth graduate who had relocated in the 1840s to Georgia, where he'd become a successful attorney and started a family, Akerman was faithful to both sections of the country. Having stood with the Confederacy, he now accepted the tenets of Reconstruction and encouraged his fellow Southerners to do likewise. He was thus an inspired choice to head the Grant administration's newly created Justice Department and take on the worst law enforcement crisis in the nation's history. Also important in battling this Southern scourge were the efforts of Joseph Rainey and Robert Brown Elliott, two black congressmen from South Carolina, for it was in upcountry South Carolina that Klan violence was possibly at its worst and where the United States ultimately chose to face down the group.