Overcoming deep political divisions in the Florida
Republican Party, Josiah T. Walls became the state’s first
Black Member of Congress in 1871. During his career
in the U.S. House of Representatives, opponents often
challenged his election victories, and the House twice voted
to remove him from office based on disputed election
results. When he was not fiercely defending his seat in
Congress, Walls fought for internal improvements for
Florida and federal support for education. He also pushed
the federal government to take an active role protecting
individual rights to build a better future for all southerners,
particularly his Black constituents. “Yet we demand that our
lives, our liberties, and our property shall be protected by
the strong arm of our government,” Walls said, “that it gives
us the same citizenship that it gives to those who it seems
would, if it were possible, sink our every hope for peace,
prosperity, and happiness into the great sea of oblivion.”1
Josiah Thomas Walls was likely born enslaved near
Winchester, Virginia, on December 30, 1842. He may have
been the son of his enslaver, Dr. John Walls, and maintained
contact with him throughout his life. In July 1863, Josiah
Walls joined the Union Army as part of the 3rd Infantry
Regiment of United States Colored Troops (USCT) based
in Philadelphia. His regiment moved to Union-occupied
northern Florida in February 1864. The following June, he
transferred to the 35th Regiment USCT, where he served
as the first sergeant and artillery instructor. While living in
Picolata, Florida, Walls met and married Helen Fergueson,
with whom he had one daughter: Nettie. He was discharged
in October 1865 and decided to stay in Florida, working at a
sawmill on the Suwannee River and, later, as a teacher with
the Freedmen’s Bureau in Gainesville.2
Walls began his political career by representing northcentral
Florida’s Alachua County in the 1868 Florida
constitutional convention. That same year, Walls ran a
successful campaign for state assemblyman. The following
fall, he was elected to the state senate and took his
seat as one of five freedmen in the 24-man chamber in
January 1869. In 1871, Walls attended the Southern States
Convention of Colored Men in Columbia, South Carolina.3
The Republican Party nominating convention met
in August 1870 to consider candidates for federal and
statewide office. For the previous three years, a campaign
of violence and intimidation orchestrated by the ruthless
Jacksonville branches of the Ku Klux Klan had plagued
the state. As a result, Florida’s Black voters were widely expected to avoid the polls on Election Day. Republicans feared that Democrats would capture the election if Black
turnout was suppressed, so state Republican Party leaders
decided to bypass the incumbent, former Union soldier
Representative Charles Memorial Hamilton, and nominate
a Black candidate for the state’s lone At-Large seat in the
U.S. House of Representatives. Fierce competition between
the nominees and factional divisions within the party led to
intense debate at the convention; attempts to cast fraudulent
votes also almost led to violence. Walls’s reputation as an
independent politician outside the control of any one
faction gave him the edge, and the convention selected
him for the party’s nomination on the eleventh ballot.4
Walls faced former slaveholder and Confederate veteran
Silas Leslie Niblack in the general election. Niblack
attacked Walls relentlessly, telling voters that Walls’s former
enslavement meant he was not fit to serve in Congress.
Walls, meanwhile, held political rallies throughout northern
Florida—the most populous section of the state—and
challenged Niblack to a debate. The campaign was
tumultuous and often punctuated by violence, including
gunfire at a Walls rally in Gainesville. As one Clay County
observer noted, Florida had been “turned upside down with
politics and the election.” Walls emerged victorious, edging
out Niblack by 627 votes out of the more than 24,000 cast.
After presenting his credentials on March 4, 1871, Walls
was immediately sworn in to the 42nd Congress (1871–1873) and given a seat on the Committee on the Militia.5
Niblack contested the election. He provided what he
said was evidence showing that the canvassers who rejected
Democratic ballots in at least eight Florida counties were not
legally allowed to do so; their job, he said, had been limited
to counting votes. In his defense, Walls argued that he would
have had more votes due to voter intimidation and violence
at the polls in several counties. The committee granted Walls
29 additional votes in Gadsden County, after each individual
provided sworn testimony. But in other counties, Walls lost
votes based on evidence provided by Niblack, who disputed
Walls’s claims regarding voter suppression. Walls was in
office for nearly two years when the House Committee on
Elections ruled on his case on January 21, 1873, in the final
weeks of the 42nd Congress, recommending that Walls was
not entitled to his seat. The House Republican majority
declared Niblack the winner on January 29, 1873—a rare
case in which the committee majority decided in favor of
the candidate from the minority party.6
Despite his ouster, Walls’s congressional career was not
over. In November 1872, he had won one of Florida’s two
At-Large seats in the 43rd Congress (1873–1875). In the
four-way race, the top-two vote-getters won a seat. Walls
was just 34 votes shy of the top candidate, Republican
William Purman. Niblack, running as a Conservative,
placed third. Florida Democrats had been using the term
“Conservative” to describe themselves to lure formerly loyal
Republican voters who were uneasy about casting their
ballots for Democrats. Walls returned to Congress when
it convened in December 1873, receiving an additional
assignment on the Committee on Expenditures in the
Navy Department.7
Walls spent much of the 42nd and 43rd Congresses
advancing the political and economic interests of his Florida
constituents. He presented resolutions for statewide internal
improvements, including the construction of telegraph lines,
railroads, customhouses, courthouses, and post offices. He
sought funding to improve Florida’s harbors and rivers and
to create a land-grant state agricultural college. In an 1872
tariff bill, Walls also fought to protect Florida’s orchards
from foreign competition. Most of Walls’s measures failed to
make it out of committee, but he had more success passing
private bills. He managed to gain pensions for Seminole War
veterans who fought several battles against Native Americans
in Florida throughout the early nineteenth century.8
Amid fear that the cause of public education would
languish if it were left to the states, Walls enthusiastically
supported a measure to establish a national education
fund financed by the sale of public land during the 42nd
Congress. In his first major floor speech on February 3,
1872, Walls discussed the need for a more active federal
government in administering schools across the nation.
“Education tends to increase the dignity and self-respect
of a people, tends to increase their fitness for society
and important stations of trust, tends to elevate, and
consequently carries with it a great moral responsibility,”
Walls observed. “This is why the Democratic party in the
South so bitterly oppose the education of all classes. They
know that no educated people can be enslaved.”9
During Walls’s time in Congress, however, lawmakers
largely ignored calls to establish a national education
system, and Walls was left further frustrated when the
Civil Rights Act of 1875 passed without a clause opening
universal access to schools. As the 43rd Congress came to
a close, Walls assessed the future of the South in a speech he inserted into the appendix of the Congressional Record.
“I reluctantly confess, after so many years of concessions
that unless partisan and sectional feeling shall lose more of
its rancor in the future than has been experienced in the
past, fundamental law will be disregarded, overthrown,
and trampled underfoot, and a complete reign of terror
and anarchy will rule supreme.” He warned that as
southern Democrats amassed power in state governments
and in Congress they sought to achieve the goals of the
Confederacy through more subtle means than armed
rebellion. Walls cited the common refrain among White
southerners, that it was “their fixed purpose to ‘gain,’ as
they say, ‘by the ballot that which we lost by the bayonet.’”
Walls urged his colleagues to fully acknowledge what
southern reactionaries wanted to achieve. “I hear the answer
echoed, by the bayonet we lost our power and our human
property, and by the ballot we shall regain what we lost
by the bayonet.” For Walls, this movement threatened to
undermine the legacy of the Union victory in the Civil War
and the gains of Reconstruction.10
Walls also supported the efforts of Cuban people to
overthrow Spain’s colonial government, almost twenty-five
years before the U.S. military would intervene in the
Spanish-American War. He used remarks printed in the
Record to make a case for the United States to recognize the
Cuban revolutionaries as combatants and to open avenues
for military aid. Walls placed the Cuban effort in the great
tradition of Latin American republican movements resisting
colonial powers to achieve independence. He particularly
emphasized the Cuban revolutionaries’ anti-slavery position,
linking Spain’s continued control of the island to “the
perpetuation of African slavery in the western world.”
Instead, Walls insisted, the United States should remember
its own revolutionary roots and live up to its inspirational
past. “For every effort to achieve independence throughout
the world, in the century of the existence of this Republic,
the nation is measurably responsible by the proud example
of July 4, 1776.” He concluded with statements of support
for the cause of Cuban independence from the governor of
Florida and the state legislature.11
For the 1874 campaign, Florida was split into two
congressional districts, and Walls ran in a district covering
the eastern half of the peninsula with a population that was
more than 50 percent African American. Nearly the entire
population of the new district lived between Walls’s home
in north-central Florida and Jacksonville on the Atlantic
Coast. The state Republican Party remained fractured, and
a national economic depression further endangered its grip
on the state government. Walls took several steps starting
in 1873 to secure the Republican nomination for the 44th
Congress (1875–1877). Using his congressional salary,
Walls purchased a cotton plantation formerly owned by a
Confederate general. That same year, he was admitted to the
Florida bar and bought the Gainesville New Era newspaper.
Walls used the New Era to campaign for his renomination.
In his first editorial, Walls promised to focus on internal
improvements and to address the “wants and interests of
the people of color.” He also maneuvered to secure support
from Republican delegates in the weeks before the district
nominating convention in August 1874. He was nominated
on the first ballot.12
In the general election, Walls faced Conservative candidate
Jesse Johnson Finley—a Tennessee native and formerly a
member of the antebellum Whig Party. Walls topped Finley
by a slim margin of 371 votes out of nearly 17,000 cast,
taking 51 percent of the vote.13
When the 44th Congress convened in December 1875,
Walls was assigned to the Committee on Mileage. He
went to work introducing legislation to secure funding for
improving Florida waterways, construction of a lighthouse,
and purchasing the Jacksonville offices formerly occupied
by the Freedman’s Bank for federal office space. But,
once again, Walls faced a challenge to his seat. Finley
contested the election, claiming that ballots from several
precincts where Walls resided in Alachua County had been
miscounted. Finley supporters also claimed that other
Alachua County votes were illegal because the eligibility
oath required by Florida law was executed improperly.
Finley claimed that Walls’s Republican ally in one Columbia
County precinct had tampered with the ballot box and
accused another local Republican of impersonating a federal
marshal to protect and encourage Black voters at one of
the polling places. With Democrats in the majority in the
House, the Committee on Elections voted 8 to 3 against
Walls. As the debate moved to the House Floor, Democratic
Speaker Michael C. Kerr of Indiana allocated time to
Members during the two-day discussion, with Walls briefly
taking the floor in his own defense. On April 19, 1876, the
House adopted the committee report, 135 to 84, and seated
Finley. Walls returned to Florida a week later and, in August
1876, Republican Horatio Bisbee Jr. defeated his attempt
at renomination.14
In November 1876, Walls won a seat in the Florida state
senate, where he pushed for the committee on education
to assess the condition and effectiveness of public schools
in the state while also advocating for compulsory public
education. He left the senate in February 1879, two weeks
before the end of the session, citing an illness in the family.15
In 1884, Walls decided to once again pursue a U.S.
House seat in the 49th Congress (1885–1887). Walls met
with a large conference of African-American leaders in
Gainesville, Florida, in February to consider the future
role of Black politicians in the state. The consensus among
attendees was to mobilize an independent movement, free
from the influence of White Republicans seeking to secure
patronage positions instead of fighting for Black civil and
political rights. Black voters were “shamefully ignored by
the leaders of the Republican organization” in Florida, Walls
asserted, and the new movement aimed to steer the state in
a new direction—away from White supremacy and toward
democratic government.16
Walls challenged the incumbent Republican Bisbee,
who had held the seat since the 45th Congress (1877–1879). Despite early enthusiasm around his campaign,
Walls placed last in the 1884 general election as an
Independent candidate for his old House seat, recording
only 215 votes—less than one percent—as Democrat
Charles Dougherty won the seat. In 1890, Walls made an
unsuccessful bid for state senate.17
By the mid-1880s, Walls was a successful tomato farmer
in central Florida, owning 1,800 acres of land. In 1885, his
wife, Helen Fergueson Walls, died and Josiah Walls married
Ella Angeline Gass. Walls’s farm was devastated when his
crops froze in February 1895. He subsequently took charge
of the farm at Florida Normal College—now Florida A&M
University. Lobbying for a federal patronage position in 1897,
he visited the White House as a candidate for postmaster of
Gainesville, Florida. Walls died on May 15, 1905.18
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