Civil War & Reconstruction

Stevens, whose abolitionism dated to the 1830s, returned to Congress in 1859 and became chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, ...

After one of the sharpest antislavery speeches of the decade, his Crime against Kansas address attacking slavery and its defenders...

Wade served Ohio in the Senate from 1851 to 1869, rising from antislavery lawyer to leader of the Radical Republicans. With Henry ...

Born free in North Carolina, Revels was a Methodist minister, educator of Black communities across the Midwest and South, and Unio...

Bruce escaped slavery in Virginia, taught school, and rose through Mississippi Reconstruction politics to the Senate, serving a co...

Born enslaved in Charleston, Rainey was drafted into Confederate service, escaped to Bermuda, and returned to win election to Cong...

A self-taught storekeeper, Morrill was elected to the House in 1854 and served there until 1867, then in the Senate until 1898. Th...

A Democrat turned Republican, Trumbull served in the Senate from 1855 to 1873, winning the seat in a famous 1855 legislative conte...

Garfield drove Ohio volunteers at Shiloh and Chickamauga before Lincoln urged him to Congress, where he served from 1863 to 1880. ...

Butler commanded the occupation of New Orleans, where his sheltering of escaped slaves as contraband of war coined a legal categor...

Fessenden served in the Senate from 1854 to 1864 and 1865 to 1869, and as Lincoln's Treasury Secretary in 1864 stabilized borrowin...

Born into slavery in Beaufort, South Carolina, Smalls was working as a pilot aboard the Confederate transport Planter when, in May...

Colfax, a newspaper editor from South Bend, entered the House in 1855 as an antislavery member and became Speaker in 1863. He pres...

Grow first won his House seat in 1850 and spent the following decade pressing for free homesteads on the public lands, a cause bit...