From the Plantation to the Senate

“From the Plantation to the Senate” (1884) highlighted the transformation of former slaves to citizens during the Civil War and Reconstruction. (The portraits include Benjamin Sterling Turner, Rev. Richard Allen, Hiram R. Revels, Frederick Douglass, Josiah T. Walls, Joseph H. Rainy, and William Wells Brown, not all of whom had been slaves or had served in the Senate.) Hiram Revels of Mississippi was the first African American man to serve in the United States Congress. Jefferson Davis had been Mississippi’s senator prior to the war when he resigned from the Senate when his state seceded from the Union. Mississippi’s seats had remained unoccupied through the war until Reconstruction when Revels was sworn into office. A black man occupying the seat once held by the president of the Confederacy was just one sign of the tremendous transformation inaugurated by Congressional Reconstruction.

Library of Congress, accessed February 14, 2017, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/97506777/.