The Orator

Meet the Obama of the 1870s

(Getty Images) Robert Brown Elliott, at right, was one of a group of talented black politicians swept into office by Reconstruction in the 1870s. Also pictured, from left: Senator Hiram Revels, and congressmen Benjamin Turner, Robert De Large, Josiah Walls, Jefferson Long, and Joseph Rainey.

WITH BARACK OBAMA stepping into history this week as the first African-American nominated for president by a major party, much has been made of the arrival of a new generation of black leadership. Obama, Governor Deval Patrick, Newark Mayor Corey Booker - all have broken new ground as mainstream politicians who speak across racial lines, capable of garnering votes from black and white constituencies alike.

As a cohort, they are often weighed against an earlier generation of black leaders, those who came up in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. But a more revealing comparison might be to a more distant precursor: the black politicians voted into office in the 1860s and '70s, during Reconstruction.

In the wake of the Civil War, a wave of idealism offered its own "audacity of hope" to a nation weary of conflict. Then, as now, America was seeking to move beyond a prolonged period of acrimonious partisanship; today's arguments over affirmative action, racial bias in the justice system, financial scandals, and the influence of special interests wouldn't feel unfamiliar to voters of the time.

With state reforms and the granting of the vote to black citizens, an estimated 1,800 black Americans were elected to office, from state legislators and judges to ambassadors and members of the US Senate. No fewer than 16 were elected to Congress.

Today, when they are remembered at all, these officials are sometimes dismissed as puppets of the white Republican establishment. But many were gifted politicians who inspired black and white Americans with a unifying vision of the nation's racial experience and destiny. In Washington, aware of the intense scrutiny that followed them, they dressed in immaculate suits, with watch chains or gold-headed canes. Their speeches in Congress were frequently well attended, observers struck by the authenticity of their voices and the cadences of their words.

The group had its own Obama-like figure, a politically savvy lawyer named Robert Brown Elliott, of South Carolina. Like Obama, he had a reputation for judicious reasoning matched by a piercing intellect, and an air of both privilege and mystery. He claimed to have been born in Boston, to have then lived in Jamaica and in England, where he had attended Eton and studied law. Though his background was later questioned, what was never in dispute was his skill as a maker of speeches. "I thundered, and by golly they cheered," he reported to friends after one Charleston rally, surprised himself at the crowd's ovation.

Elliott's high point on the national stage came on Jan. 6, 1874, when he rose on the House floor to defend a sweeping, controversial civil rights bill known as Sumner's Law after its sponsor, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner. The bill was a landmark effort to integrate America, calling for equal access to public accommodations - at hotels, restaurants, theaters, on juries, in cemeteries, schools, trains, and horse cars - for all Americans, regardless of race.

In the debate, Elliott was to duel with Alexander Stephens, a staunch defender of slavery and former vice president of the Confederacy. But if the House expected vitriol from Elliott, it was stunned by his beautifully crafted address, in which he invoked the nation's Founders and held up the Biblical tale of Ruth as a parable for America, where black and white had long lived and worked side by side. With optimistic flourish, he called the new civil rights law "a building the grandest which the world has ever seen, realizing the most sanguine expectations and the highest hopes of those who, in the name of equal, impartial, and universal liberty, laid the foundation stones."

The nation was captivated by Elliott's remarks, a breakthrough of candor and common sense, linking America's two races in a bond so enduring it bore analogy to scripture. To honor the event a lithograph was immediately struck entitled "The Shackle Broken - By the Genius of Freedom," showing cameos of Sumner and President Lincoln, scenes of black men under arms, and tableaux depicting the ideals of racial progress suggested by Elliott. In the center frame stood Elliott himself, arm outstretched in emphasis.

The phenomenon would be recognizable today to anyone who listened to Obama's speech on race in America in March - the invocation of the Founders, the biblical allusions, the far-reaching thoughts on the legacy of race relations and his attempt to place them in a context of both past and future. And like his counterpart in 1874, Obama has become a visual icon, too, in an age in which popular lithographs have been replaced by T-shirts and videos.

Robert Brown Elliott never reached a higher office. The civil rights law he championed was gutted by the Supreme Court in 1883, and Reconstruction, overwhelmed at last by Southern resistance and the nation's disillusion with unattainable ideals of racial progress, collapsed into Jim Crow segregation and widespread black disenfranchisement. Elliott's own destiny proved as tragic. Having left Congress to return to South Carolina as state attorney general, he lost his job when the Democrats swept back into power. He struggled to earn a living, and took a Republican patronage post as a customs inspector. While performing his duties in coastal Florida he contacted malaria, and in 1884 died an unknown pauper, aged 42.

While it may be a marker of how little has changed that an African-American politician can still become famous for eloquently speaking across racial lines, and a generation of black leaders can gain fame for appealing to more than just black voters, Obama's story is also a marker of how different today's America has become. Thanks in part to the efforts of Elliott and his contemporaries - and the civil rights leaders of the 20th century who revived their struggle and built on the laws they helped pass - a young man like Barack Obama could put down sound roots in the American establishment. As much as he may share Elliott's rhetorical legacy, it is impossible to imagine - no matter what happens in November - that he could share Elliott's fate.

Philip Dray is the author of "Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction Through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen."