Josiah Walls and the Contested Congress

Josiah Thomas Walls was born into slavery in Virginia in eighteen forty-two. During the Civil War, Confederate forces pressed him into labor. When Union troops captured him at Yorktown in eighteen sixty-two, he joined the United States Colored Troops as a volunteer, eventually rising to first sergeant.

After the war, Walls came to Alachua County, educated himself, and entered politics. He served as a delegate to Florida's eighteen sixty-eight constitutional convention, then won election to the state legislature, then to Congress. In eighteen seventy-one, Josiah Walls became the first African American ever elected to Congress from Florida.

He served Gainesville in between congressional terms, becoming mayor of the city, a Black man running a Southern municipal government during Reconstruction. He also formed a law partnership in Gainesville with Henry Harmon, the first African American admitted to the Florida bar.

But his congressional career was held under siege. Twice, his election to the United States House of Representatives was overturned by the House Committee on Elections, which seated his white Democratic opponent after each challenge. He won, lost the seat, won again, lost it again. He served portions of three terms between eighteen seventy-one and eighteen seventy-six, never allowed to complete a full one.

The pattern here is documented in the congressional record. The full human weight of that decade of contested democracy is something the records can only gesture at. Walls bought a Gainesville newspaper and used it to keep organizing. By the late eighteen seventies, the political space for Black officeholders in Florida had nearly closed.

He died in Tallahassee in nineteen oh-five, having spent his final years teaching agriculture to students who would form the core of what later became Florida A and M University. His name is less remembered in Gainesville than it should be.