One Senate Seat, Two Arguments: Hiram Revels and Reconstruction

From Natchez to the Senate, 1865–1877

1When the Civil War ended in 1865, about 4 million people who had been enslaved were free. The 13th Amendment, ratified in December 1865, abolished slavery in the United States, except as punishment for a crime. Freedom raised new questions. Would freedpeople be citizens? Could they vote? Who would hold power in the Southern states?

2At first, Mississippi and other Southern states passed laws called Black Codes, which limited where freedpeople could work, travel and rent land. Congress answered with new amendments. The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, declared that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens and promised every person "the equal protection of the laws." The 15th Amendment, ratified in February 1870, barred states from denying the right to vote because of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

3Congress also required most former Confederate states to write new state constitutions that let Black men vote before their members could return to Congress. In 1869 Black and white voters in Mississippi elected a new legislature, and Black men won seats in it for the first time. The new government set up the state's first system of public schools open to all children, though Black and white students attended separate schools.

4In January 1870 the legislature chose Hiram Revels, a minister and teacher from Natchez, for the U.S. Senate. (Until 1913, state legislatures, not voters, chose U.S. senators.) Revels had been born free in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1827. During the war he had helped recruit Black soldiers for the Union army and served as a chaplain. When Revels arrived in Washington, some senators objected to swearing him in, and the Senate debated for three days.

5On February 25, 1870, the Senate voted 48 to 8 to seat him, and Revels became the first African American to serve in Congress. In 1871 he became the first president of Alcorn University, a new college for Black students. Another Natchez man, John R. Lynch, who had been born into slavery, became Speaker of the Mississippi House in 1872 and later served in Congress.

6These gains did not last. Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan used threats and violence to keep Black citizens from voting. Many Northern voters lost interest in Reconstruction, especially after an economic depression began in 1873. In 1875 Mississippi Democrats used intimidation at the polls to win back control of the state government. In 1877 President Rutherford B. Hayes ordered federal troops away from the last Southern statehouses they still guarded, and Reconstruction ended. Later Mississippi laws, such as poll taxes and reading tests, kept most Black citizens from voting for decades.

Account A: Adapted from arguments of senators who opposed seating Revels

The Constitution says that no person may be a senator who has not been a citizen of the United States for nine years. In the Dred Scott case of 1857, the Supreme Court ruled that Black Americans, whether free or enslaved, could not be citizens. Mr. Revels, then, could have become a citizen only when the Civil Rights Act of 1866 or the 14th Amendment of 1868 made him one. By that count he is a citizen now, but he has been one for four years at most, not nine. Besides, his papers were signed by an army general serving as Mississippi's governor, not by a governor the people elected. We must follow the Constitution, whatever our feelings about the man.

Account B: Adapted from arguments of senators who supported seating Revels, including Charles Sumner of Massachusetts

Mr. Revels was born on American soil and has lived here all his life. The Dred Scott decision was wrong when it was made, and the war and the 14th Amendment have swept it away. The amendment did not make Black Americans citizens starting in 1868; it declares that all persons born here are citizens, as they always should have been. By that measure Mr. Revels has been a citizen far longer than the nine years the Constitution requires. Mississippi has met every condition Congress set for its return, and its legislature has chosen him. The time for argument has passed.