On this day in 1870, two days after Congress readmitted Mississippi to the Union and nine years after the state had seceded to join the Confederacy, Hiram Revels, a Republican from Natchez, was sworn into office as a U.S. senator, becoming the first African-American to sit in Congress.
During the Civil War, Revels, a college-educated minister, helped form African-American army regiments for the Union, started a school for freed men and served asa chaplain for the Union Army. Posted to Mississippi, Revels remained there after the war and entered Reconstruction-era Southern politics. On Jan. 20, 1870, the Mississippi state Senate voted 81 to 15 to elect Revels to finish the term of one of Mississippi’s long vacant Senate seats.
Southern Democrats opposed seating Revels. They based their opposition on the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision, which had held in 1857 that blacks could not be citizens. They argued that since no black man was a citizen before the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, Revels couldn’t satisfy the requirement for nine years’ prior citizenship.
But Revels’s GOP supporters argued that the Civil War, and subsequent constitutional amendments, had effectively overturned Dred Scott. So, they said, it would be unconstitutional to bar Revels on the basis of the pre-war racist rulings.
The Senate seated Revels on a party-line vote of 48 to 8, with all Republicans voting in favor and all Democrats voting against.
During his yearlong Senate service, Revels advocated compromise and moderation in race relations. He opposed efforts to keep Washington, D.C., schools segregated. He nominated a black man to the U.S. Military Academy, but the youth was denied admission. Revels also championed the cause of black workers who had been barred from working at the Washington Navy Yard.