Reconstruction's Black Lawmakers and the Backlash That Ended Their Era

On February 25, 1870, Hiram Revels walked down the aisle of the United States Senate chamber to take the oath of office as a senator from Mississippi. The galleries were packed. For three days, senators had argued over whether he could be seated at all. Opponents claimed that Revels had not been a citizen for the nine years the Constitution requires, because the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision of 1857 had declared that Black Americans could not be citizens; only the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, had overruled it. Supporters answered that Dred Scott was a dead letter and that the argument was simply a way of saying no Black man belonged in that room. The Senate voted to seat him. There was a detail that made the moment almost unbearably pointed for everyone watching: the seat Revels was filling had last been held, before the war, by Jefferson Davis, who had left it to become president of the Confederacy.

In short: During Reconstruction, Black Southerners, most of them formerly enslaved or the children of enslaved people, were elected to Congress, state legislatures and local offices by the hundreds, and they helped build the South's first public school systems and more democratic state constitutions. A campaign of violence, fraud and eventually law, combined with the federal government's withdrawal, removed nearly all of them from office by 1900, and it took most of the twentieth century to win that ground back.

Who they were

Revels was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, born free in North Carolina, who had organized Black regiments and taught school during the war. He served a little more than a year, finishing a short term, and then became the first president of Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College in Mississippi, the first land-grant college for Black students.

He was the first, but far from the only. In December 1870, Joseph Rainey of South Carolina took his seat as the first Black member of the House of Representatives. Blanche K. Bruce, who had been born enslaved in Virginia, was elected to the Senate from Mississippi and became the first Black senator to serve a full six-year term, from 1875 to 1881. In all, sixteen Black men served in Congress during the years usually counted as Reconstruction.

Robert Smalls of South Carolina had perhaps the most cinematic résumé. In 1862, while still enslaved, he took command of a Confederate supply ship, the Planter, sailed it out of Charleston harbor past Confederate forts with his family and other enslaved people aboard, and delivered it to the Union navy. After the war he served in the state legislature and then in Congress.

The congressional names are the famous ones, but most of the work was local. Historians who have gone through the records county by county have identified well over 1,500 Black officeholders during Reconstruction: state legislators, sheriffs, justices of the peace, county commissioners, school board members, tax collectors, postmasters. In South Carolina, Black members held a majority of the lower house of the legislature for several years. In Louisiana, P.B.S. Pinchback briefly served as governor in the winter of 1872 to 1873, after the elected governor was impeached. No Black American would be elected governor of any state until Douglas Wilder won in Virginia in 1989.

None of these men reached office alone. Behind them stood a wave of grassroots organizing that is easy to overlook. Freed people formed Union Leagues, political clubs that met in churches, schoolhouses and cabins to read newspapers aloud, discuss platforms and choose candidates. Black churches, many newly independent of white denominations, became meeting halls and training grounds for leaders. Men walked long distances to register and vote, often in groups for safety, and women, who could not vote, organized, raised money and kept watch. The officeholders were the visible tip of a political culture built almost from nothing in a few years, which helps explain why its opponents had to use so much force to tear it down.

What they did with power

The caricature that took hold after Reconstruction, and was taught in American schools and popularized by films like The Birth of a Nation in 1915, portrayed these lawmakers as ignorant, corrupt and controlled by white carpetbaggers. That picture was propaganda, and generations of historians have dismantled it.

Corruption existed in Reconstruction governments, as it did in the Northern cities and the federal government of the Gilded Age. It was not a distinctively Black phenomenon, and white Democrats who returned to power were often no better.

What the record shows is a burst of institution building. The new state constitutions written in the late 1860s, by conventions with substantial Black membership, created the first statewide public school systems in most of the South, open to Black and white children (in practice, usually in separate schools). They expanded the vote to men without property, abolished imprisonment for debt in some states, created hospitals, asylums and orphanages, and in several states reformed brutal penal codes. They also invested heavily in railroads, sometimes unwisely, which helped drive up the debts their opponents later complained about.

Many of these reforms benefited poor white Southerners as much as Black ones. Public schools for white children in much of the South trace their origins to constitutions written partly by formerly enslaved men. That is one of the great unacknowledged ironies of American history. Few of the white families whose children filled those classrooms in the decades that followed were ever told who had written the laws that opened them.

The violence

From the beginning, Black officeholding was met with organized terror. The Ku Klux Klan, founded in Tennessee in 1865 or 1866, spread through the South in the late 1860s, attacking Black voters, teachers, ministers and officeholders, along with white Republicans. Dozens of Black legislators and local officials were murdered or driven out by threats during Reconstruction.

At first the federal government fought back. Congress passed the Enforcement Acts in 1870 and 1871, including the Ku Klux Klan Act, which made it a federal crime to conspire to deprive people of their civil rights. President Ulysses S. Grant used them; in 1871 he suspended habeas corpus in several South Carolina counties, and federal prosecutors won hundreds of convictions. For a time the Klan was broken.

But terror took new forms. On Easter Sunday 1873, in Colfax, Louisiana, a white paramilitary force attacked Black men defending the county courthouse after a disputed election and killed dozens of them, many after they had surrendered. Federal prosecutors charged some of the attackers under the Enforcement Acts. In 1876, in United States v. Cruikshank, the Supreme Court threw out the convictions, holding that the federal rights the indictments relied on protected citizens only against actions by states, not by private individuals. The ruling gutted federal power to prosecute the people actually doing the killing.

After that, white Democrats in several states developed what came to be called the Mississippi Plan: open intimidation at the polls by armed "rifle clubs," economic threats against Black voters, and fraud in the counting. Mississippi's 1875 election was carried this way. South Carolina's 1876 campaign saw the Hamburg massacre and the rise of the Red Shirts. The strategy was not secret. Its organizers bragged about it.

The federal retreat

The decisive blow came from Washington. The presidential election of 1876 was disputed, with contested returns from three Southern states. In the resolution that followed, often called the Compromise of 1877, Republican Rutherford B. Hayes became president, and federal troops were withdrawn from guarding the remaining Republican state governments in South Carolina and Louisiana, which then collapsed.

Historians debate how formal any deal was. The result is not debated. The national government had decided that protecting Black political rights in the South was no longer worth the cost. Northern voters were tired of the issue, absorbed by an economic depression, and increasingly willing to accept white Southern rule in exchange for sectional peace.

It is worth stating fairly why some people at the time thought withdrawal was right. Many Northerners, including former abolitionists, had come to believe that military occupation could not create a lasting democracy, that Reconstruction governments depended on bayonets rather than consent, and that the South had to be allowed to govern itself. The problem with that argument was that "the South" in this sentence meant white Southerners only. Black Southerners, who were a majority in some states, had consented to their governments, by voting for them. Withdrawal did not restore self-government. It handed power to the people who had used violence to prevent it.

How the door was locked

Black officeholding did not end overnight in 1877. Black men continued to win some local and state offices, and a few were elected to Congress, through the 1880s and 1890s, especially in districts where they were a large majority. Alliances with white Populists produced a brief revival in some states, most notably North Carolina.

Then came the legal lockout. Beginning with Mississippi's constitution of 1890, Southern states rewrote their constitutions to disfranchise Black voters without naming race: poll taxes, literacy and "understanding" tests administered at the registrar's discretion, long residency rules, and lists of disqualifying crimes chosen because officials believed Black men were more likely to be convicted of them. In Williams v. Mississippi in 1898, the Supreme Court upheld Mississippi's scheme because it did not discriminate on its face. Other states followed. Within a decade, Black registration across much of the South had collapsed, and white voting fell sharply too, as poor whites were caught by the same rules.

The last Black congressman of the era left office in 1901. After that, no Black representative was elected from a Southern state until 1972, when Barbara Jordan of Texas and Andrew Young of Georgia won their races.

The second Reconstruction, and what is being decided now

The civil rights movement is sometimes called the Second Reconstruction for a reason. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 attacked exactly the devices that had ended the first: literacy tests, discriminatory registrars and, later, election rules and district maps that diluted Black votes. Black officeholding in the South rose dramatically in the decades that followed, including in state legislatures and Congress.

Many of those gains came from districts drawn under the Voting Rights Act so that Black voters could elect candidates of their choice. That makes the Supreme Court's April 2026 decision in Louisiana v. Callais a significant moment. The Court held that the Act did not require Louisiana's second majority-Black congressional district and that the map creating it was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. Supporters of the ruling argue that drawing districts by race is itself a form of discrimination the Constitution forbids, and that the country has changed. Critics argue that racially polarized voting in parts of the South means that without such districts, Black voters will again find it far harder to elect anyone they choose. Both sides are making claims about facts on the ground that future elections will test. Our voting rights and redistricting page follows the maps states draw next.

The history of the first Reconstruction does not settle that legal question. What it shows is how fast representation can disappear when the national commitment to protecting it weakens, and how long it takes to rebuild.

The people we were taught to forget

The deepest damage done by the backlash was not only political. It was to memory. For most of a century, American students learned that Reconstruction was a tragic mistake and that the men Black Southerners elected were unfit to serve. Historians, beginning with W.E.B. Du Bois in his 1935 book Black Reconstruction in America and continuing through later generations of scholars, restored the record, but popular memory has been slower.

Restoring it is not only about justice to the dead. These lawmakers were formerly enslaved men who, within a few years of freedom, wrote constitutions, built school systems, and debated tax policy and railroad bonds in legislatures that had been closed to them by law. They prove that democracy can expand fast when people are given a real chance to participate. They also prove that it can be taken away, by people willing to use violence and by institutions willing to look away. Our page on democracy and the rule of law gathers reporting on both halves of that lesson as they play out today.

What you can do

Reconstruction's officeholders were elected by people who had been voting for only a few years and took enormous risks to do it. Their example asks a lot less of us than it asked of them.

1. Vote in every election, including the small ones. Reconstruction's real power was in county offices and state legislatures. The voting guide lists every state's registration deadlines, voter ID rules, and mail and early voting options.
2. Find out who draws your maps. In most states the legislature redraws district lines. Find your representatives by entering your address to see your state legislators and members of Congress, with phone numbers, contact forms and their latest votes, and ask where they stand on fair maps.
3. Read the Court's own words. The 2026 Supreme Court decisions on redistricting and elections, with the Court's summaries, are on Court Watch.
4. Support the historians and the organizers. Groups that preserve Black history and those that register and protect voters are listed by state in the organizations directory. The two kinds of work turn out to be the same work.