by Philip Dray
Although there was much talk of how Revels "replaced" Jefferson Davis, technically Davis's seat had expired in the nine years since his departure. But the prospect of the traitorous Davis being upstaged by a loyal black man was too rich an irony to ignore. In a devastating cartoon by Thomas Nast, Davis—as Shakespeare's Iago—peers in from behind a curtain as Revels takes the secessionist's former place. "For that I do suspect the lusty Moor hath leap'd into my seat," muses Nast's Davis, "the thought whereof doth like a poisonous mineral gnaw my innards." Nast was merciless toward the former Confederate president. Another cartoon, titled "Why He Cannot Sleep," depicts Davis in bed as Columbia reveals to him the ghosts of numerous rebels, one of whom has crawled next to Davis and points to a bullet hole in the center of his skull.
Humiliating Davis had been an irresistible Northern pastime since his capture in May 1865. President Johnson had accused Davis of complicity in Lincoln's assassination, and a $100,000 bounty was placed on his head. Davis was not involved in Lincoln's murder and in fact disapproved of it, but this was not immediately known in the confusing weeks following the war. Davis, his family, and his entourage were at that time in desperate flight through rural Georgia in an effort to reach the Florida coast and secure passage by boat, possibly to Cuba, when on May 10, outside Irwinville, Union troops overtook them. Davis, attempting to escape (or give fight, depending on which account one accepts), either accidentally grabbed his wife's raincoat or slipped her shawl over his head, the origin of the durable tale that the chief rebel tried to flee disguised as a woman.
JEFFERSON DAVIS AS IAGO
Davis was kept under lock and key at Fortress Monroe for two years while the government debated what to do with him. Was he a captured enemy leader deserving of official respect or a base traitor ripe for the gallows? (Only one prominent Confederate—Henry Wirz, commandant of the prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia, where 13,000 federal soldiers died—was hanged because of his actions during the war.) The government's indecision and delay favored Davis's cause, thanks in part to the dedicated public relations efforts of his wife, Varina, and their friends. The height of his rehabilitation was the 1866 publication of The Prison Life of Jefferson Davis by John J. Craven, Davis's physician, which portrayed Davis as an ill-treated martyr who read the Bible, prayed daily, and saved crumbs of food for a mouse that lived in his cell. His imprisonment ultimately became a political liability for President Johnson, as petitions bearing thousands of signatures demanded Davis's release. (One midwestern businessman offered $30,000 for the right to exhibit the captive, promising to return him in good health.) The predicament worsened when Davis, insisting he was not guilty of anything, refused Johnson's offer of a pardon.
In May 1867, two years after his capture, Davis, looking gaunt and unwell, was released on bail provided by the publisher Horace Greeley, the railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, and the reformer Gerrit Smith. There was still talk of putting the ex-Confederate president on trial for treason, a course Davis himself was said to welcome, since it would give him a chance to clear his name and defend the Southern cause, but public sentiment, various legal technicalities, and then the impeachment of Johnson himself kept it from ever taking place.
While Republicans took pride in the arrival of Hiram Revels, the Democrats were not about to allow him a free pass. As soon as President Grant signed Mississippi's readmission into the Union (on February 23, 1870) and Senate Republicans moved to have Revels sworn in, the opposition began to forcefully resist seating him, just as the House had done successfully the year before in the case of Louisiana's J. Willis Menard. The apparent winner of a special election held in Louisiana to fill a seat vacated by the death of a sitting congressman, Menard was certified as the new representative by Louisiana's legislature and its youthful Reconstruction governor, Henry Clay Warmoth. But a white candidate, Caleb'S. Hunt, disputed the election results, and in the end neither Menard nor Hunt was seated. Before this rejection, Menard made history by defending his claim on the floor of the House for a quarter of an hour on February 27, 1869—the first time a black American ever addressed Congress.
The debate over Revels opened when Southerners argued unsuccessfully that the white military governor of Mississippi, the carpetbagger Adelbert Ames, did not possess the authority to certify Revels's election. But the chief obstacle was constitutional. Democratic critics pointed out that even if Revels (like other blacks) had been made a citizen by the Civil Rights Act of 1866, he had not been a citizen for nine years, a requirement for senators, according to the first article of the Constitution. The Democrats also questioned whether the Founding Fathers had ever intended black people to be citizens, reminding the Senate that in the Dred Scott decision of 1857, the Supreme Court had clearly asserted that although free blacks might be citizens of individual states, they (and certainly slaves) were not citizens of the United States. Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote, in his majority opinion, that black people were "so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."
Republican senators cried foul at such a tactic; James W. Nye of Nevada insisted that "[Dred Scott] has been repealed by the mightiest uprising which the world has ever witnessed." Indeed, much of the Republicans' legislative program since the war had aimed to undo the harm of Dred Scott; the Civil Rights Act and the Reconstruction amendments struck at the very themes that Taney had handled so poorly. But the Democrats were relentless. Senator Willard Saulsbury of Delaware characterized the Taney court as "giants!—great, intellectual, mighty giants, in comparison to whom the dwarfed intellects of the present hour are but pygmies perched on the Alps" and declared the Fourteenth Amendment to be "no more part of the Constitution than anything which you ... might write upon a piece of paper and fling upon the floor." He cleverly asserted that despite the insult rendered by Charles Sumner (who had said "the name of Taney is to be hooted down the page of history") the Republicans obviously did accept Dred Scott, since they had gone to great lengths to produce the 1866 Civil Rights Bill and pass it over Johnson's veto—an explicit effort to undo Taney's handiwork. Such determination, said Saulsbury, implied the Republicans' recognition of the legitimacy of Taney ruling and provided "evidence that in your own judgment at the time of [the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866]...negroes and mulattoes were not citizens." Since only four years, not nine, had passed since 1866, Saulsbury concluded, Hiram Revels could not now be considered an American citizen. "Addressing you not as Republicans, but as revolutionists, there is one extent to which your revolutionary movement has not carried you yet, and that is to make a negro or mulatto eligible to a seat in the Senate of the United States."
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 itself—its hasty amendments and its elevation of blacks like Revels—was 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 Rev
els 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 possibility—that 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 life—in 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 M
ississippi? 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.
