Hiram Revels — People — Black-History.com

On 25 February 1870, after two days of debate over whether a Black man could be a citizen long enough to qualify, the U.S. Senate voted 48 to 8 to seat Hiram Rhodes Revels of Mississippi. The first African American to serve in either house of Congress, Revels was a freeborn minister and educator whose brief term symbolized the reach of Reconstruction, and who went on to lead Mississippi’s first public college for Black students.

At a Glance

Born: 27 September 1827, Fayetteville, North Carolina
Died: 16 January 1901, Aberdeen, Mississippi
Birth name: Hiram Rhodes Revels
Known for: First African American U.S. senator (seated 25 February 1870); first president of Alcorn University; AME ministry and freedmen’s schools
HBCU ties: Alcorn State University (First president of Alcorn University, 1871–1874 and 1876–1882); Rust College (Taught theology at Shaw University (now Rust College), Holly Springs, after 1882)
Fields: Politics · Religion · Education
Era: 19th Century

Early Life

Revels was born free on 27 September 1827 in Fayetteville, North Carolina. North Carolina law increasingly restricted the education of Black children, and after some early schooling he worked for several years as a barber and schoolteacher. In 1844 he left the state to continue his education in the free states of the Midwest, studying at the Beech Grove Quaker Seminary in Liberty, Indiana, and at the Darke County Seminary in Ohio.

In 1845 he was ordained a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore. Over the next decade he preached and taught in Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri, sometimes at personal risk in slave states where free Black preachers were watched and restricted. He married Phoebe A. Bass, a free Black woman from Ohio, in the early 1850s; the couple had six daughters. From 1855 to 1857 he studied at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and in the late 1850s he ministered in Baltimore, where he also served as principal of a school for Black students.

Life and Work

When the Civil War began, Revels helped recruit two Black regiments in Maryland. In 1863 he established a school for freedpeople in St. Louis, and he then served as chaplain to a Black regiment in Mississippi, working in Vicksburg and Jackson among the newly emancipated.

In 1866 Revels settled in Natchez, Mississippi, where he became a presiding elder and a respected figure in the town’s large Black community. In 1868 the military governor appointed him an alderman, and in 1869 he was elected to the Mississippi state senate. On 20 January 1870 the legislature elected him to the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by Albert Gallatin Brown, for the term ending 3 March 1871; the state’s other seat, once held by Jefferson Davis, went to Adelbert Ames, the white military governor.

Revels arrived in Washington as Mississippi was readmitted to the Union, but Senate Democrats challenged his credentials. They argued that he had not been a U.S. citizen for the nine years the Constitution requires, contending that Black Americans had not been citizens before the Dred Scott decision was overturned by the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. Republicans answered that the war and the Reconstruction amendments had settled the question. On 25 February 1870 the Senate voted 48 to 8, along party lines, to seat him, and he was sworn in that afternoon as the first African American member of Congress.

Revels served on the Committee on Education and Labor and the Committee on the District of Columbia. In his first formal speech, on 16 March 1870, he argued for the reinstatement of Black legislators who had been expelled from the Georgia legislature, describing himself as rising to plead for protection for a defenseless race. In May 1870 he nominated a Black candidate, Michael Howard, to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point; Howard was not admitted. Revels favored a conciliatory approach to former Confederates, supporting the removal of political disabilities from those who showed loyalty to the Union, while defending the civil and educational rights of freedpeople.

When his term ended on 3 March 1871, Revels returned to Mississippi and became the first president of Alcorn University, a new state institution for Black students near Lorman. He led it from 1871 to 1874 and again from 1876 to 1882, and served briefly as Mississippi’s interim secretary of state in 1873. Increasingly at odds with the state’s Republican leadership, in 1875 he wrote a public letter to President Ulysses S. Grant criticizing white Republicans for using Black voters without serving their interests — a letter that angered many Black Republicans as Democrats were retaking the state by violence and fraud.

Legacy

After leaving Alcorn in 1882, Revels edited the Southwestern Christian Advocate, taught theology at Shaw University (later Rust College) in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and continued his ministry. He died of a stroke on 16 January 1901 while attending a church conference in Aberdeen, Mississippi, and is buried in Hillcrest Cemetery in Holly Springs.

His election was a landmark of Reconstruction: nine years after Jefferson Davis resigned from the Senate to lead the Confederacy, Mississippi sent a Black man to the same chamber. The vote to seat him also rejected, in practice, the argument his opponents raised: that Black Americans born in the United States had not been citizens before 1868 and so could not meet the Constitution’s nine-year requirement. His term lasted barely a year, and his later break with Mississippi’s Republican leadership has made him a contested figure among historians, some of whom see his conciliatory politics as a realistic response to white violence and others as a retreat from the freedpeople’s cause. After Blanche K. Bruce, also of Mississippi, completed his term in 1881, no other Black American served in the Senate until Edward Brooke of Massachusetts took office in 1967. Alcorn State University, the nation’s oldest public historically Black land-grant institution, traces its leadership to Revels, and his seating remains a reference point in debates about who counts as a full citizen under the Constitution.

For Educators

The fight over seating Hiram Revels in 1870 was a fight over whether Black Americans were citizens, and his election showed how far Reconstruction reached before it was rolled back. Open the classroom lesson →

Key Dates

27 September 1827 Born free in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
1845 Ordained in the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore.
1855 – 1857 Studies at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.
1863 Founds a school for freedpeople in St. Louis; serves as chaplain to a Black regiment in Mississippi.
1866 Settles in Natchez, Mississippi.
20 January 1870 Elected to the U.S. Senate by the Mississippi legislature.
25 February 1870 Seated by a Senate vote of 48 to 8; becomes the first African American member of Congress.
16 March 1870 Delivers his first Senate speech, on the expulsion of Black legislators in Georgia.
1871 Becomes the first president of Alcorn University.
16 January 1901 Dies in Aberdeen, Mississippi.

Sources and Further Reading

U.S. House of Representatives, History, Art & Archives, “REVELS, Hiram Rhodes.” Link
National Park Service, “Hiram Rhodes Revels.” Link
NCpedia, “Revels, Hiram Rhoades.” Link
Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).

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By the Black-History.com editors. Last reviewed 30 September 2026. To suggest a primary source or a correction, write to editors@black-history.com or use our corrections form.