Capitol Men (12 page)

HIRAM REVELS

Even other men of color considered Revels a curious figure, for Mississippi had never had a large free black population. He was born in 1822 in North Carolina, where, even though his family were not slaves, their freedoms were sharply curtailed after the 1831 slave insurrection led by Nat Turner in neighboring Virginia. Determined to leave the South to receive an education, Revels enrolled at a Quaker seminary in Indiana and briefly attended Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois; he later went as a missionary to Kansas, where he tended to the spiritual needs of itinerant blacks and lectured against intemperance. He was arrested in 1854 "for preaching the gospel to Negroes" in neighboring Missouri, a slave state where abolitionists were making strong inroads. Returning east
during the war, he served as chaplain to Maryland's first black regiment and later went south to work for the Freedmen's Bureau, helping to organize schools. Peacetime found him back in Kansas, where an account from the town of Leavenworth commends him for "adding 191 to the church [and] killing off two whiskey shops kept by colored men." Within a few years Revels was living in Adams County, Mississippi, in the river-bluff town of Natchez, where blacks were beginning to take an active role in state politics.

Being something of a political cipher may have helped Revels rise to prominence. According to John Roy Lynch, a young but influential city politician (and future congressman), Revels "had never voted, had never attended a political meeting, and of course, had never made a political speech. But he was a colored man and presumed to be a Republican, and believed to be a man of ability and considerably above the average in point of intelligence." He was also a property owner and a solid family man, married to the former Phoeba Bass of Zanesville, Ohio, with a growing brood that would eventually include six children, all daughters. A dutiful letter-writer when away on his frequent travels, Revels could be counted on to enclose some small amount of money, along with the request that Phoeba "kiss the children for me" and admonitions to his girls to "love God [and] live close to Him."

Revels apparently overcame his initial fears about getting involved in politics, becoming a moderate but loyal member of the party of emancipation. "If ever influenced by the friendship of your Democratic neighbor, you desert the Republican flag, desert the Republican standard, desert the Republican Party that has freed you," he once told his constituents, "you will be voting away your last liberties." Would the Democrats rescind those rights if they were to return to power? "They will do it," Revels declared, "as certainly as the sun shines in the heavens." When in 1868 a Republican nominating convention in Adams County deadlocked while trying to pick a man to run for the state senate, Lynch put the kindly Revels forward as a compromise candidate.

That year saw a divisive presidential campaign between General Ulysses'S. Grant and the Democratic governor of New York, Horatio Seymour. Southern Democrats warned that Reconstruction as carried out by the Radical Republicans, who backed Grant, would "Africanize" America, while the Radicals pointed out that the treasonous rebels who refused to accept the consequences of the war needed Grant's stern authority. In February 1869, just after Grant's election, Congress approved the Fifteenth Amendment; in spring 1870 it became part of the Constitution. Attaining the vote for black men was greeted by many as the crowning glory of the long crusade for abolition and of the war itself, a means for black Americans to, in Frederick Douglass's words, "breathe a new atmosphere, have a new earth beneath, and a new sky above." Wendell Phillips heralded it as the nation's new beginning—the promise of equality enshrined in the Declaration of Independence at last made real.

"
THE RESULT OF THE FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT
"

Of course, the granting of black enfranchisement was not solely altruistic. It was a political necessity. Prior to the war, a black person was counted as % of one person in calculating Southern representation in Congress; now that blacks were citizens and stood to be counted as whole individuals, their aggregate would increase the number of Southern representatives in Congress, allowing Southern states to dominate that body even more than they had by counting % of their slave population. Only by enabling blacks to go to the polls, where they would, at least in the near term, be inclined to support the Party of Lincoln, could the Republicans hope to remain competitive.

This tug-of-war over representation had been a source of political tension throughout the nineteenth century. As western territories were added to the Union, each one's status as slave or free was hotly contested. Southerners pushed for an equal number of new states to be recognized as slave states; they feared that if nonslave states gained
a majority in Congress, the South's own slave economy might be marginalized and eventually overwhelmed.

In Mississippi it was said that Revels had clinched his appointment to the U.S. Senate with his eloquence and pastoral mien in the state legislature. His fellow legislators liked what they saw in the sturdy but unassuming clergyman. His reputation would withstand scrutiny, and his cool manner might deflect the harassment he was likely to encounter. Also, because the term he'd be appointed to was fractional, only a year's duration, the experiment, were it to prove unsatisfactory, would not cause serious harm.

Senator Revels, who had once lived in nearby Baltimore, would have noticed upon his arrival in Washington that, among many other dramatic changes, the city's population had grown considerably since the war. Northern entrepreneurs, Union soldiers, merchants, black refugees from the fighting in nearby Virginia—all had been drawn to the capital, and many had stayed. The prewar population of 75,000 had mushroomed by 1877 to 175,000, which included a black population of 55,000. Despite its new residents, the city retained much of its antebellum demeanor, "singularly placid [and] ... untouched by the intensely competitive spirit of the rest of the country," for, having no industry, it attracted relatively few European immigrants. Freedmen served as its labor force.

This burgeoning metropolis, however, had a dismaying appearance after the war. The few main cobblestone thoroughfares had been destroyed by supply wagons and heavy army guns. Now, on dry days, they formed broad ribbons of caked horse manure and dust; on damp days they turned quickly to mud so thick and deep, it pulled the boots off men's feet. The mall that extended from the Capitol and ran parallel to Pennsylvania Avenue had not seen a blade of grass in years because stables had been built on it for army mules and horses. The lowlands before the Capitol itself remained lined with railroad tracks. Herds of cattle were driven daily through the streets, pigs rooted through the garbage, and the city's waste all went into a canal that was supposed to feed into the Potomac but was often backed up, creating an environment conducive to typhoid fever and dysentery. The dubious symbol of growth amid stagnation was the half-completed Washington Monument. Its construction had ceased during the war, and it resembled, as Mark Twain suggested, "a factory chimney with the top broken off"

Also keeping an eye on the city was another rough-hewn literary character, the poet Walt Whitman, who had come to Washington during the war to help minister to wounded soldiers and then stayed to serve as a clerk in the office of the attorney general. Whitman, "tall ... portly ... swinging along like an athlete and looking like Santa Claus," was a regular sight on the town's boulevards, although many who had read
Leaves of Grass,
his magisterial, exotic book of verses, regarded him with a curiosity bordering on disdain. Andrew Johnson's secretary of the interior, the pious James Harlan, got his hands on a copy and promptly dismissed Whitman from a post in his department.

Yet, for all its disarray, Washington was becoming one of the powerful engines of the reunited Union. It was more frequently visited, observed, and commented upon than ever before, though foreign reporters made fun of its provincialism and some of the nation's editorial pages couldn't help but ask whether, since the country's geographic center had shifted westward, the federal capital should migrate as well—perhaps to St. Louis or Cincinnati.

It was President Grant who, in 1869, his first year in office, set out with his customary determination to refurbish the capital district. He found a no-nonsense counterpart in Alexander "Boss" Shepherd, a businessman and faithful Republican whom he appointed to lead the Board of Public Works. Over two busy years Shepherd's laborers planted sixty thousand trees, erected thousands of gas lamps, installed a drainage system, tore up railroad tracks, turned muddy intersections into fountains, and paved 365 miles of sidewalks and streets. Shepherd chose the noted landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted to design the Capitol grounds, spending three times his $6 million budget along the way. "The old repulsive sheds used in the old times as market-places ... have been swept away," wrote Frederick Douglass, "and their places taken by imposing and beautiful structures in harmony with the dawn of a higher civilization." Some accused Shepherd and his subordinates of carrying out their mission with too heavy a hand, trampling on bureaucratic niceties, but as Douglass commented, "I may say what all men in Washington are compelled to confess: They have done a great and needed work for the metropolis." Douglass took pride in the fact that although slaves had once toiled on public works projects, including the construction of the Capitol itself, now an army of
freedmen,
receiving pay for their labor, were transforming the city.

While free black men with shovels and picks built a new, glorious capital, others like Hiram Revels, in top hats and custom-tailored suits, took their seats in Congress. Meanwhile, on the site of a 150-acre farm just beyond the city limits, rose Howard University, a black college
named for General O. O. Howard, chief of the Freedmen's Bureau. In the city a proud new Freedman's Savings Bank opened its doors, while Frederick Douglass's newspaper, the
New National Era,
began publication. As Congress nailed the Reconstruction amendments into place, the local Washington city council also took giant steps; having ended segregation on the city's streetcars in 1864, it acted in May 1869 to create a civil rights law that prohibited racial discrimination in places of public entertainment, which would improve daily life for thousands of black Washingtonians. In January 1870 a more comprehensive civil rights ordinance was passed to safeguard equal access to hotels, bars, and restaurants. Another law in 1872 extended this policy to bathhouses, barbershops, and ice cream parlors, and it increased the penalties for noncompliance. Some establishments attempted to evade these regulations by ignoring black customers or offering to serve them at exorbitant prices, but an additional law in 1873 stipulated that all public accommodations offered customers be identical, and in several cases brought by black complainants, judges came down hard on uncooperative business owners. As a jurist lectured one offender: "Rights that have cost a revolution will not stand aside for a pretext."

Since early in the century, Washington had been home to some black families, mostly those of partial white ancestry, who had won manumission and certain privileges. During Reconstruction, and for much of the late nineteenth century, it became the capital of America's black aristocracy, a world of black and mulatto arrivistes from the South, such as Senator Blanche K. Bruce and his wife, Josephine; Robert and Mary Church Terrell; Congressman John Roy Lynch; prominent "race men" such as Frederick Douglass; Christian Fleetwood, the black Baltimorean who had won the Congressional Medal of Honor; and members of established local black society such as the Syphax family of Arlington, Virginia. Charles Syphax, a former slave who was related to both Martha Washington and Robert E. Lee, lived long enough to regale Union troops who camped on the family's grounds in Arlington with stories of George Washington, James Monroe, and Thomas Jefferson; his son William, born in 1825, was a longtime employee of the Department of the Interior and a leader in the opening of public colored schools in Washington. Six feet tall and a fine physical specimen, William Syphax submitted his head to be measured by phrenologists, and it was discussed as an example of innate nobility.