Perhaps the most accurate method whereby one's capacity for the
performance of any service may be measured is that which seeks, first,
to establish the experience of the individual in the performance of
the identical or similar services, and second, to evaluate the degree
of skill with which the individual, at a given time, performs the
particular service. Regarded in this light, therefore, we subject the
Negro Congressmen to this test: As measured by their experience in
public positions of trust and confidence and by their grasp of the
great public questions at that time current, to what extent did they
show capacity for public service?
The first part of our query lends itself to solution without
difficulty. Indeed, one may with great ease establish the fact that,
with but few exceptions, these men, prior to their election to
Congress, had held public offices of honor and trust. A case in point
is that of John Mercer Langston[23] of Virginia. While never a member
of a State legislature, Langston was, nevertheless, brought often into
other public service. Indeed he early attracted attention in Ohio by
his service as a member of the Council of Oberlin and by his record in
other township offices. Langston served as dean of the Law Department
of Howard University, and in 1872 became Vice-President and Acting
President of that institution. In 1885 he became President of the
Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute. He served, moreover, as
Inspector-General of the Bureau of Freedmen, a member of the Board of
Health of the District of Columbia, Minister resident and
Consul-General to Haiti, and Charge d'Affaires to Santo Domingo. His
election to Congress, therefore, was the crowning achievement of a
lifelong public career.
Hyman,[24] O'Hara,[25] Cheatham,[26] and White,[27] all of North
Carolina, had held public office prior to their election to Congress.
Hyman and White had each been members of the State Senate, the former
for six years, from 1868 to 1874, while O'Hara and White had each
served in the lower house of the legislature. Hyman had been a
delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1868, moreover, while
O'Hara, who had also served as chairman of the Board of Commissioners
of the County of Halifax, had been a delegate to the Constitutional
Convention of 1875. For the eight years from 1886 to 1894, White
served as prosecuting attorney for the second judicial district of the
State, while Cheatham, the fourth member of the North Carolina
delegation, had held but one office, that of Register of Deeds for
Vance County.
It is especially significant that each one of the Negro Reconstruction
Congressmen from South Carolina, namely Cain,[28] De Large,[29]
Elliott,[30] Rainey,[31] Ransier,[32] and Smalls[33] were members of
the State Constitutional Convention of 1868. Two of them, Cain and
Rainey, had been formerly State Senators; Smalls had served two terms
in the Senate and four in the House; while each of the others had been
members for one term or more in the lower branch of the legislature.
Ransier, moreover, had held, prior to his election to Congress, the
high office of lieutenant-governor of the State; Elliott had served as
adjutant-general, and Smalls had held successively the offices of
lieutenant-colonel, brigadier-general and major-general in the State
militia.
Of the two South Carolinians who served in Congress after the
Reconstruction, Thomas E. Miller[34] was for four terms a member of
the lower chamber of the State legislature and for one term a member
of the Senate. Furthermore, he was for one term a school commissioner
of his county, and received also his party's nomination for the office
of lieutenant-governor of the State. Indeed, of the entire South
Carolina group, Murray, alone, seems to have been elected to Congress
without previously having held public office.[35] Jefferson F.
Long,[36] of Georgia, was not unlike Mr. Murray in that the former had
never held public office. In this, his experience differed from that
of Walls, of Florida, who had been a member of the Florida State
Senate.
Alabama sent to Congress three Negroes, Turner,[37] Rapier,[38] and
Haralson.[39] Of these men Haralson alone had had experience in the
legislature prior to his election to Congress, having served in both
branches of that body. Turner was elected in 1868 to the city council
of Selma. Later he became tax collector of Dallas County, but because
of his inability to secure honest men as assistants, resigned the
office. The third member of this group, James T. Rapier, served as an
assessor and later as a collector of internal revenue in his State.
The two Negro United States Senators, Hiram R. Revels[40] and B. K.
Bruce,[41] both of Mississippi, and Representative John R. Lynch[42]
of the same State, had all served in public office before they were
sent to Congress. Senator Revels had held several local offices in
Vicksburg, while Senator Bruce, before he came to the Senate, had been
sheriff, a member of the Mississippi levee board, and for three years
the tax collector of Bolivar County. John R. Lynch, on the other hand,
had served not only as justice of the peace, but also two terms in the
lower house of the legislature, during the latter one of which he was
the Speaker of that body. Unlike the Congressmen from Mississippi,
Nash[43] of Louisiana held office for the first time when his state
elected him a representative to Congress.
Accessible records and impartial and unbiased historians support the
contention that with a few exceptions the record of these Negro
functionaries was honorable. Corrupt government was not always the
work of the Negro. In the chapter on reconstruction in his _The Negro
in Our History_, C. G. Woodson states that local, state, and federal
administrative offices, which offered the most frequent opportunity
for corruption, were seldom held by Negroes, but rather by the local
white men and by those from the North who had come South to seek their
fortunes. In many respects selfish and sometimes lacking in
principle, these men became corrupt in several States, administering
the government for their own personal ends. "Most Negroes who have
served in the South," says he, "came out of office with honorable
records. Such service these Negroes rendered in spite of the fact that
this was not the rule in that day." New York, according to the same
authority, was dominated by the Tweed ring, and the same white men who
complained of Negro domination robbed the governments of the Southern
States of thousands of dollars after the rule of the master class was
reestablished.