Hiram Rhodes Revels was born free in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on September 27, 1827, to free people of color whose families had maintained their freedom since before the American Revolution. His parents were of African American and European descent, and his mother carried a strain of Scots ancestry. His father was a Baptist preacher. Revels died on January 16, 1901, having spent his life as a minister, educator, military organizer, and, most notably, as the first African American to serve in either house of the United States Congress — a distinction he earned in the turbulent years of Reconstruction.
His early education came from a local free Black woman, an act of quiet defiance in a society that placed severe restrictions on the schooling of Black children. When he was eleven years old, in 1838, he went to live with his older brother Elias in Lincolnton, North Carolina, where he was apprenticed as a barber. Barbering was more than a trade; it was one of the few occupations through which Black men in the antebellum South could build economic independence and cultivate relationships across racial lines, since men of every background visited a skilled barber.
After his brother Elias died in 1841, his widow Mary transferred the shop to Hiram before remarrying. Revels then pursued a formal education, attending the Beech Grove Quaker Seminary in Union County, Indiana, a school founded by Quakers who were among the more consistent advocates of education for Black Americans. He also attended the Union Literary Institute, sometimes called the Darke County Seminary despite being located in Randolph County, Indiana. In 1845 he was ordained as a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of the first independent Black denominations in the United States. He preached and taught throughout the Midwest over the following years — in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee, Missouri, and Kansas. In Missouri in 1854 he was imprisoned for the act of preaching the gospel to Black congregants, a reminder that even in states outside the Deep South, his ministry operated in the shadow of legal suppression.
During these years he voted in Ohio, exercising a right that was not available to Black men in every state. In the 1850s he married Phoebe Bass, a free Black woman. He studied religion from 1855 to 1857 at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, deepening his theological preparation. He served as principal of a Black high school in Baltimore and as a minister in the Methodist Episcopal Church there.
When the Civil War began, Revels threw himself into the Union cause. He helped recruit and organize two Black regiments in Maryland and Missouri after the federal government authorized the formation of United States Colored Troops. He served as a chaplain in the United States Army and took part in the fighting at Vicksburg, Mississippi. His combination of military service, ministerial authority, and community leadership made him one of the most prominent Black figures in the postwar South.
He settled in Natchez, Mississippi, in 1866, where he was called as permanent pastor of a local church and continued founding schools for Black children. During Reconstruction, when formerly enslaved people and free Black men gained political rights for the first time, Revels rose rapidly through the new political structures. He was elected alderman in Natchez in 1868, and in 1869 he was elected to represent Adams County in the Mississippi State Senate.
Then came the moment that placed him in history. In January 1870, the Mississippi legislature chose Revels to fill the United States Senate seat that had been vacated by Jefferson Davis when Davis had left to lead the Confederacy. The symbolic weight was extraordinary: a Black minister from North Carolina was being sent to Washington to occupy the chair once held by the president of the rebellion against the United States. He served in the Senate representing Mississippi for approximately one year, from 1870 to 1871, the first African American to serve in either house of Congress.
After his Senate term, Revels was appointed the first president of Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College in Mississippi, a newly established historically Black institution, and served from 1871 to 1873. He returned to ministry in later years, living until January 16, 1901. The arc of his life from a free Black boy in antebellum North Carolina to the floor of the United States Senate captured in one biography the full measure of what Reconstruction had briefly made possible.
