Hiram Revels and the Brief Horizon of Reconstruction
Mississippi
On February twenty-fifth, eighteen seventy, Hiram Revels of Natchez walked onto the floor of the United States Senate and took the seat that Jefferson Davis had vacated a decade earlier to lead the Confederacy. He was the first African American to serve in either chamber of Congress, elected by the Mississippi state legislature under the reconstruction government that had extended the vote to Black men. A minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Revels had served as a chaplain and recruiter for the Union Army during the war. His presence in the Senate chamber was a statement that reordered the meaning of the rebellion Mississippi had launched.
Reconstruction in Mississippi was not a failure of ambition. Between eighteen sixty-seven and eighteen seventy-five, Black Mississippians served as lieutenant governor, secretary of state, superintendent of education, and in large numbers in the state legislature. They built public schools for the first time. They lobbied for and won funding for the state's first public university for Black students, Alcorn State, which opened in eighteen seventy-one on the site of the defunct Oakland College near Lorman.
The counterrevolution was violent and deliberate. The White League and the Red Shirts used armed terror to suppress Black voting. In the Reconstruction election of eighteen seventy-five, organized rifle clubs rode through counties across the state, breaking up political meetings and driving voters away from polls. Governor Adelbert Ames appealed to President Grant for federal troops; Grant, exhausted by the fight, declined. Ames resigned rather than face a fraudulent impeachment. By eighteen seventy-six, Reconstruction in Mississippi was finished.
Blanche Kelso Bruce of Bolivar County served out a full Senate term from eighteen seventy-five to eighteen eighty-one, the last Black senator from Mississippi for over a century. What was built in that brief window, in schools and institutions and constitutional possibility, was not entirely erased. But it was buried under ninety years of deliberate suppression.
