FROM THE VIRGINIA PLANTATION TO THE NATIONAL CAPITOL: OR THE FIRST AND ONLY NEGRO REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE OLD DOMINION (American Publishing Co., Hartford, CT:1894)

BY JOHN MERCER LANGSTON

Book Review by Rev. Dr. Larry Delano Coleman

Monday, August 06, 2012

John Mercer Langston’s historic autobiography fills in some huge crevices in American and in African American history, as only a broad, rich, deep and diverse-- indeed legendary-- life- narrative can do.

Born to a slave mother and a white, though benevolent, slave master-father in Louisa County, Virginia, on December 14, 1829, he was carried to Ohio as a young boy, where his father’s testamentary trust  provided for his rearing with friends. In Ohio, he lived with and was cared for by white families, and his older brothers, as a ward of the Ohio Chancery Court. He was educated in Chillicothe and Cincinnati. He attended newly founded Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, graduating in 1849 from this religious, abolitionist, socially-advanced institution, the first to admit blacks and women in the country. There he had been taught by other Oberlin legends: George B. Vashon (1844) and William C. Whitehorn (1845).

Unsuccessful in his attempt to enroll in an Eastern law school, due to race, he took the advice of an Oberlin professor, and pursued another degree from Oberlin in theology, preparatory to “reading for the law” under an Ohio circuit court judge, a customary manner of acquiring a legal education. He was “the first colored student who entered a theological school in the United States,” graduating in 1852.

At age 16, he was country teacher. At age 21, he was the first “colored” attorney, in Ohio, and in private practice, admitted to the bar September 13, 1854. He organized and became the first Howard University Law School Dean in 1869, serving 7 years.  Later positions included D.C. Public Health commissioner, Freedmen’s Savings Bank trustee, Freedmen’s Bureau Inspector, Republican operative, Diplomat to Haiti, President of Virginia State College. Finally, he became the U.S. Congressman, from Petersburg, Virginia, where he served one-term, after losing a fraud-filled election that was contested on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives which decided in his favor in 1890.  Significantly, despite his strong Republican bonafides—he was a founding member of the Republican Party in Ohio-- his election was vigorously opposed by the Republican State Chairman who engaged in the vilest electoral chicanery.

His life was a series of “firsts,” including first elected colored official in the country when he was nominated and elected township clerk in 1854.

His book, written in baroque and genteel 19^th century English, is 533 pages long. In great detail, it follows the chronology of his personal and professional career, containing illustrations, lithographs, newspaper clippings, letters of commendation, certificates of award. Its final chapter describes his family life, his children and grandchildren and their careers and achievements. His lovely wife, also Oberlin educated, is pictured in all her glory along with a chivalric account of her fidelity and utility.

What intrigued me most was the book’s elucidations of history at so many pivotal points, including his own family. He gives an insight into the self-ostracism of his father, Captain Ralph Quarles, “a man of large wealth…with many slaves” whose connubial-type relation with his slave, Lucy Langston, John’s mother, was forbidden by law. She was freed in 1806, along with their daughter, Maria, although she remained on the estate until her death in 1834.  Three other sons followed from this relation, all of whom were provided for in Quarles’ last will and testament, John being the youngest.  With the help of close white friends, his father, who also died in 1834, was able to provide means and freedom for his sons to evade Virginia’s draconian antebellum laws against coloreds and to move to Ohio, a free state.

The book also mentions little-known, independent Negro communities in Ohio, and blacks’ border tensions with Kentucky ruffians who in 1840 terrorized and burned large portions of Cincinnati, angered by blacks’ burgeoning education and prosperity. It describes the “Oberlin-Wellington Rescue of John Price,” a fugitive slave freed by irate Ohioans from federal marshals implementing the Fugitive Slave Act. He recounts his experiences as an abolitionist speaker, and his cases from his private practice, including relations with judges, other lawyers, black and white clients and neighbors.

Fascinatingly, he is the great-uncle of immortal poet, Langston Hughes. His brother, Charles Langston was Hughes’ grandfather. Hughes’ grandmother’s first husband was Lewis Sheridan Leary, a martyr of Harper’s Ferry with John Brown. She married Charles after Lewis S. Leary died at Harper’s Ferry.

The book is masterful. It is also indispensable to a deeper understanding of American and African American history.

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