You know, I have told this story several times privately and it occurred to me that it was the perfect kind of thing for my blog, given my general legal and history geekery. I thought I would tell you about the first black man seated in the Senate, the Reverend Hiram Revels. This is him at the right.
One of my side projects when I was an undergraduate student was studying the history that surrounded the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. I was keenly interested in what the anti-discrimination principle meant to them. That is why, for instance, I learned so much about Thaddeus Stevens.
And one of the veins I studied was the story of the seating of Hiram Revels. For a day or two I sat in the library at my school reading the congressional record as they considered the issue and it actually is a fascinating story.
The year was 1870, and this was to be the first year that Mississippi was to be allowed to have representation since the Civil War. Back in that day, senators were chosen by the state legislature. That is, instead of choosing your Senator by direct election, the legislature voted for its choice to be your senator. So when you hear of Abraham Lincoln running against Stephen Douglas, what he actually was doing was he was campaigning for his party as a whole in the state, so that they would have enough power in the legislature to make him the Senator.
That is important because that meant that when Mississippi was let back into representation in Congress, they had two choices of seats to offer Mr. Revels, and it was up to the Mississippi legislature to choose which one they offered. And whose seat did they give him?
