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Hiram Rhodes Revels (September 27, 1827) January 16, 1901) was an American Republican politician, minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and a college administrator. Born free in North Carolina, he later lived and worked in Ohio, where he voted before the Civil War. Elected by the Mississippi legislature to the United States Senate as a Republican to represent Mississippi in 1870 and 1871 during the Reconstruction era, he was the first African American to serve in either house of the U.S. Congress. During the American Civil War, Revels had helped organize two regiments of the United States Colored Troops and served as a chaplain. After serving in the Senate, Revels was appointed as the first president of Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Alcorn State University), a historically black college. He served from 1871 to 1873. Later in his life, he served again as a minister.
Early Life and Education edit
Revels was born free in 1827 in Fayetteville, North Carolina, to free people of color, with ancestors who had been free since before the American Revolution. His parents were of African American, European, and Native American ancestry. His mother was also specifically known to be of Scots descent. His father was a Baptist preacher.[
Revels was a second cousin to Lewis Sheridan Leary, one of the men who were killed taking part in John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, and to North Carolina lawyer and politician John S. Leary.
During his childhood, Revels was taught by a local black woman for his early education. In 1838, at the age of 11, he went to live with his older brother, Elias B. Revels, in Lincolnton, North Carolina. He was apprenticed as a barber in his brother’s shop. Barbering was considered a respectable, steady trade for black Americans in this period. As men of all races used barbers, the trade provided black Americans an opportunity to establish networks with the white community. After Elias Revels died in 1841, his widow Mary transferred the shop to Hiram Revels before she remarried.
Revels attended the Beech Grove Quaker Seminary, a school in Union County, Indiana, founded by Quakers, and the Union Literary Institute, also known as the Darke County Seminary despite being in Randolph County, Indiana.
In 1845, Revels was ordained as a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME); he served as a preacher and religious teacher throughout the Midwest: in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Tennessee, Missouri, and Kansas. “At times, I met with a great deal of opposition,” he later recalled. “I was imprisoned in Missouri in 1854 for preaching the gospel to Negroes, though I was never subjected to violence.” During these years, he voted in Ohio.
He studied religion from 1855 to 1857 at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. He became a minister in a Methodist Episcopal Church in Baltimore, Maryland, where he also served as a principal of a black high school.
During the American Civil War, Revels served as a chaplain in the United States Army. After the Union authorized establishment of the United States Colored Troops, he helped recruit and organize two black Union regiments in Maryland and Missouri. He took part at the Battle of Vicksburg in Vicksburg, Mississippi. tangie
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U.S. Senator Hiram Rhodes Revels, the first African-American in the Congress. from Mississippi
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