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The First Colored Senator and Representatives, In the 41st and 42nd Congress of the United States.
New York: Currier and Ives, 1872. Lithograph, 13.75” x 11” (sheet size). CONDITION: Very good, light toning and soiling. One of the earliest representations of the first seven African Americans to gain seats in Congress. On the far left is Hiram Rhodes Revels (1827–1901), the first African American to serve as a U.S. Senator. He was born a Freeman in North Carolina and went on to study theology at Knox College in Illinois, preach in numerous states throughout the Midwest and South, and raise two African American regiments during the Civil War. Rhodes settled in Natchez, Mississippi, where he was first elected alderman and then state senator before being chosen to fill one of the federal Senate seats left vacant by Albert Brown and Jefferson Davis when Mississippi seceded from the Union. Revels took the oath of office on February 25th, 1870, and although his term expired just over a year later on March 3rd, 1871, he made the most of it, “championing education for black Americans, speaking out against racial segregation, and fighting efforts to undermine the civil and political rights of African Americans” (“Hiram Revels”). Seated alongside Revels are Representatives Benjamin Sterling Turner (1825–1894) of Alabama, Josiah Thomas Walls (1842–1905) of Florida, and Joseph Hayne Rainy (1832–1887) and Robert Brown Elliot (1842–1884), both of South Carolina. Behind them stand Representatives Robert Carlos DeLarge (1842–1874), also of South Carolina, and Jefferson Franklin Long (1836–1901, here with the middle initial “H”) of Georgia. All of the Representatives (except Elliot, who grew up in Liverpool, England, and settled in South Carolina in 1867) were born into slavery, but just a few (Rainy and Walls) served multiple terms in office. Long, like Revels, was elected to fill a vacancy: Georgia representatives had been dismissed after the state failed to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment in 1867, and had been without representation between March 1869 and December 1870. When simultaneous elections were held for the remainder of the 41st session and the upcoming 42nd session, the Republican party promoted Black candidates for the shorter term, while reserving the full term for white candidates. Some sixteen African American legislators served in Congress during the Reconstruction period, and over 600 were elected to state offices. Progress was severely curtailed as early as 1873, however, when the Supreme Court ruling in the Slaughterhouse Cases returned the protection of non-Constitutional rights to the states, and by 1878—in stark contrast to 1870—not a single Southern state was led by a majority-Republican government. OCLC records just five examples of this print, at the University of South Carolina, Library of Congress, Harvard, Library of Michigan, and Princeton. A dignified, formal portrait of this group of groundbreaking African American legislators. REFERENCES: “Hiram Revels: First African American Senator” at the United States Senate online; “Jefferson Franklin Long” at New Georgia Encyclopedia online.
Item #9524
Price: $7,500.00
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