Hiram Rhoades Revels

• Born: September 27, 1822
• Birthplace: Fayetteville, North Carolina
• Died: January 16, 1901
• Place of death: Aberdeen, Mississippi

Politician, religious leader, and educator

Revels was the first African American to serve in the U.S. Senate, but politics play only a small part in his legacy. Before and after the Civil War, Revels established schools and carried the gospel to black communities North and South. He also helped establish Alcorn University in 1872 and served as its president for eight years.

Areas of achievement: Education; Government and politics; Religion and theology

Early Life

Born a free black man in North Carolina, Hiram Rhoades Revels received a primary education in a private school for African Americans. He was later apprenticed to a barber. Little is known of his family, although Revels claimed that all his ancestors were free. In the aftermath of Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, restrictions on free African Americans increased. To secure further education, Revels entered the Quaker Beech Grove Seminary near Liberty, Indiana. The next year, he studied theology at a seminary for African Americans near Miami University of Ohio. He was ordained a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church in Baltimore, probably in 1845.

Revels’s church work required extensive travel. Before the Civil War, he taught the gospel to free black communities from Maryland to Kansas. He consistently emphasized the necessity of education. Regarding Revels as safe, slave owners in the upper South tolerated his visits to minister to slaves. Revels admitted that he did not encourage runaways, but in the free states, he helped fugitives as best he could. During the early 1850’s, Revels married Pheoba A. Bass of Zanesville, Ohio. They had six daughters. For several years during the late 1850’s, he left the active ministry to study at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. When the Civil War began, Revels was in Baltimore, working as the pastor of an AME church and the principal of a high school for free African Americans.

Life’s Work

During the Civil War, Revels was a man in constant motion as he served the Union, his church, and the cause of education. He is credited with forming the first two black regiments from Maryland and one in Missouri while establishing a freedmen’s school in St. Louis. Revels moved to Jackson, Mississippi, in 1864 to establish more schools and churches for freed slaves, and he probably served as a chaplain for black regiments in the area.

After the war, Revels presided over AME churches in Leavenworth, Kansas; Louisville, Kentucky; and New Orleans, Louisiana, before settling in Natchez, Mississippi, in June of 1868. There, Revels was elected to political office for the first time as a city alderman. In 1869, he entered the Mississippi state senate. Although little known, Revels impressed the Republican and black leadership with his eloquence and education. When African American leaders demanded at least one of the open U.S. Senate seats, the legislature selected Revels to complete a term that would end on March 3, 1871. On February 25, 1870, Revels became the first African American in the U.S. Congress. As abolitionistWendell Phillips observed, here was the “Fifteenth Amendment in flesh and blood.”

With only a year in the Senate, Revels had little opportunity for legislative accomplishments. His first speech, on March 16, 1870, condemned Georgia Democrats for excluding African Americans from the state legislature. Significantly, the next day, Revels gave a conciliatory address favoring amnesty for former Confederates who swore to their loyalty to the Union. As a member of the committee on education, Revels favored desegregated schools in the District of Columbia, but he did not make it a national goal. He used his prestige to get skilled African Americans hired in the U.S. Navy shipyards.

Upon Revels’s return to Mississippi, Governor James L. Alcorn put him in charge of establishing a university for African American men. Alcorn University, the first black land-grant public university in the nation, began operation in 1872 with Revels as its first president. He served until 1874, then again from 1876 to 1882. Many admirers were disappointed when he did not speak out against the depredations of the Ku Klux Klan in the state. Resuming his role as a minister in the AME church, Revels moved to Holly Springs, Mississippi, where he was also a professor of theology and trustee of Rust College until his death in 1901.

Significance

Educated and eloquent, Revels seemed a perfect choice for the first African American in the U.S. Senate. As a symbolic figure for African Americans struggling to secure a new status in American society, Revels did not disappoint. His brief service, informed by his religious beliefs, offered defeated white southerners a conciliatory approach that was not reciprocated. As conditions worsened for Mississippi African Americans, Revels did not offer a constructive plan of resistance. As an organizer of AME churches in free black communities and administrator of black schools at all levels, Revels’s contributions were much more significant.

Bibliography

Borome, Joseph H., ed. “The Autobiography of Hiram Rhoades Revels Together with Some Letters by and About Him.” Midwest Journal 5 (Winter, 1952): 79-92. Essential collection of primary source materials on Revels with invaluable annotations on the people and events.

Dray, Philip. Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008. Readable account of Revels’s rise to the U.S. Senate that also describes the larger context of Reconstruction politics.

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Foner comprehensively establishes the political, social, and economic context of the era in which Revels rose to prominence.

Thompson, Julius E. “Hiram Rhoades Revels, 1827-1901: A Reappraisal.” Journal of Negro History 79 (Summer, 1994): 297-303. Brief review of Revels’s life and accomplishments that emphasizes his failure to understand or challenge southern whites.