ELLIOTT, Robert Brown, a Representative from South Carolina; born in England., August 11, 1842; attended public school in England; journalist; studied law; admitted to the bar and practiced in Columbia, S.C.; member of the South Carolina state constitutional convention in 1868; member of the South Carolina state house of representatives from July 6, 1868, to October 23, 1870; assistant adjutant general of South Carolina 1869-1871; elected as a Republican to the Forty-second and Forty-third Congresses and served from March 4, 1871, until his resignation, effective November 1, 1874; again a member of the South Carolina state house of representatives 1874-1876, and served as speaker; unsuccessful candidate for election as attorney general of South Carolina in 1876; moved to New Orleans, La., in 1881 and practiced law until his death there on August 9, 1884; interment in St. Louis Cemetery No. 2.
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A renowned lawyer, activist, and public speaker, Robert Brown Elliott was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from South Carolina in 1870. During his three years on Capitol Hill, Elliott pressed Congress to protect the political gains Black Americans had won after the Civil War and to stem rising rates of violence back home that threatened to undermine the democratic reforms of the Reconstruction Era. Described by a colleague as “a man of character, ability, and marvelous energy,” Elliott had a leading role during debate on the bill that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1875. He ultimately resigned from the House midway through the 43rd Congress (1873–1875) to return to South Carolina and serve in the state legislature in Columbia.1
The details of Elliott’s early life have been clouded by contradictory sources, rumors, conflicting statements by people who knew him, and different interpretations by historians. According to the Congressional Directory for the 42nd Congress (1871–1873), Robert Brown Elliott was born on August 11, 1842, in Boston, Massachusetts. While some sources claim Elliott was born in Liverpool, England, contemporary sources, the U.S. Census, and the Directory from his time in office cite Boston as his birthplace. In the 1880 Census, Elliott declared he was born in Massachusetts. He also listed Massachusetts as the birthplace of his mother and Jamaica as the birthplace of his father. When his congressional career commenced, several references were made to his origins in the North. The New York Times called him “a Massachusetts man,” and an 1871 Charleston Daily News article referred to him as a “carpet-bagger,” a derogatory moniker applied to people from the North who moved to the South after the Civil War.2
Another point of contention in Elliott’s personal biography was his education. In the Congressional Directory, Elliott asserted that he had been educated in England at High Holborn Academy and Eton College, but no sources can be located to verify he attended these institutions. He also claimed he had studied the law with a famous London barrister, which, again, cannot be verified. Some contemporary sources referenced his service in the British Navy and others cited his time the U.S. Navy, though no records exist to confirm either.3
By late 1867, Elliott was living in Charleston, South Carolina, where he was an associate editor for the South Carolina Leader, a Black newspaper owned by future South Carolina Representative Richard Harvey Cain. Elliott married Georgia-born Grace Lee, sometime before 1870. They had no children.4
Elliott quickly dove into Reconstruction-era Republican politics in his new South Carolina home, emerging as a leading figure at the January 1868 state constitutional convention. One of 78 Black delegates at the convention, he advocated for compulsory public education and helped defeat the imposition of a poll tax and a literacy test for voters. At the state Republican convention that year, he was nominated for lieutenant governor but dropped out of the race after finishing third on the first ballot. In 1868, while serving as the only Black member of the Barnwell County board of commissioners, Elliott was elected to the state house of representatives, where he remained until 1870. He was almost elected speaker—placing second in the balloting—but went on to chair both the committee on railroads and the committee on privileges and elections. Elliott was admitted to the South Carolina bar in September 1868. In 1869, Republican Governor Robert K. Scott appointed Elliott the assistant adjutant general of the South Carolina militia. He also served on the South Carolina Republican executive committee from 1872 to 1879. “He knew the political condition of every nook and corner throughout the state,” Elliott’s law partner Daniel Augustus Straker recalled.5
In October 1870, Republicans in a west-central South Carolina congressional district nominated Robert Elliott over incumbent Solomon Lafayette Hoge to run for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. The district included the capital, Columbia, and had a slight Black majority. Representative Preston Smith Brooks, notorious for his caning assault on Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts in 1856, once held the seat. Elliott faced John E. Bacon, a lawyer from a prominent Edgefield County family, who campaigned under the banner of the Union Reform Party—a short-lived party mainly consisting of Democrats running on an anti-corruption platform against the Republican-controlled government of South Carolina. Although the New York Times predicted Bacon’s victory based on the number of votes the Democratic candidate received in the 1868 election, Elliott soundly defeated him with 60 percent of the vote. Elliott was sworn in to the 42nd Congress on March 4, 1871, and assigned to the Committee on Education and Labor, on which he served during both of his terms in the House.6
On Capitol Hill, Elliott gave his maiden speech just 10 days after his swearing-in. In an era when new Members of Congress participated in debate sparingly, Elliott did not hesitate to take to the floor. On March 14, he questioned the merits of a proposed measure to re-establish the political rights of nearly all former Confederates, who, after the Union’s victory, had lost the right to vote and hold office. Elliott told his colleagues that “to relieve those men of their disabilities at this time would be regarded by the loyal men of the South as an evidence of weakness of this great Government, and of an intention on the part of this Congress to foster the men who today are outraging the good and loyal people of the South.”7
Only two weeks later, on April 1, Elliott spoke in favor of a bill designed to grant extraordinary powers to the federal government to respond to increasing incidents of violence across the South. In particular, the bill sought to curb the terrorist activities of the Ku Klux Klan. Democrats had made the case that the bill crossed constitutional lines separating the powers of the federal government and state governments. Elliott addressed the argument of Democratic Representative—and future Speaker of the House—Michael C. Kerr of Indiana, who claimed that the federal government should intervene in the affairs of a state only at the request of the state in question.8
Elliott, however, argued that Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution gave the federal government the power to “guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government” and to protect states from invasion and “domestic Violence.” The Constitution, he said, “vests in the federal government the right to act” whenever any state was confronted with internal or external threats. Those engaged in the violent attacks on African-American citizens in the South, Elliott said, sought “to defeat the ballot with the bullet and other coercive means,” and were engaged in “acts of organized lawlessness.”9
To inform his colleagues of the severity of the threat, Elliott included in his remarks excerpted correspondence from his home state describing the Klan’s activities as well as public threats the terrorist organization made against local officeholders. One of the Klan letters, posted at the courthouse in the town of Union, South Carolina, demanded the resignation of town officials, and Elliott cited acts of Klan violence committed throughout his district and the state. Elliott also referenced Democratic newspapers that described Black Americans as “being in a semi-barbarous condition,” before turning to his colleagues in the House and asking simply “Who is the barbarian here, the murderer or the victim?”10
The bill was the third in a series of Enforcement Acts designed to protect Black civil and political rights in the South. Also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, the measure was signed into law three weeks later. The following October, President Ulysses S. Grant used the powers granted him by the bill to suspend habeas corpus in nine southern states, facilitating the prosecution of Klan members and effectively destroying the organization in South Carolina.11
Elliott thrived as an orator and in debate on the House Floor. During his remarks, he often included historical references and allusions to works of literature and poetry. In his April 1 speech, he included several lines from American poet John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem, “Toussaint,” about the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture, to frame the struggle of Black Americans in historical perspective. “History has been to me the delight and study of my life,” Elliott told a crowd in 1874. History also informed how Elliott understood the law and the Constitution, lessons that he often imparted during his remarks on civil rights legislation before the House. His law partner, Straker, noted that he was “a man capable of giving to the profession a book on constitutional law, for in this branch he excelled.” Away from the House Floor, he was just as powerful a speaker. His eulogy for Senator Sumner in Boston, Massachusetts, in April 1874, was hailed by the Boston Globe as “a magnificent production, particular portions of it being worthy of a place by the side of the best efforts of America’s great orators.”12
In addition to his oratory, Elliott also tried to use House procedure to further his legislative agenda. During debate in May 1872, Elliott urged his colleagues to pair the Confederate amnesty bill with a robust civil rights bill, and to pass them together. Elliott wanted to “test the sincerity” of those who backed amnesty, and who claimed to be concerned about limitations imposed upon former Confederates. How could they support the rights of White southerners while dismissing the need for new protections for African Americans? For Elliott, the “magnanimous” act of passing an amnesty bill for former Confederates must be followed with a reciprocal vote on the civil rights act. Following the voice vote that passed the amnesty bill in the House, Elliott introduced a resolution directing the Judiciary Committee to immediately report a civil rights bill for debate, but the House voted against his measure.13
Much of the legislation Elliott introduced in the House were private bills related to claims individual people made against the U.S. government. In May 1872, Elliott also defended the South Carolina government amid Democratic criticism that Republicans had mismanaged the state’s finances. Elliott provided a detailed breakdown of the state’s spending history and outlined the many factors involved in creating and perpetuating the debt.14
In October 1872, Elliott easily won re-election to the House, garnering 93 percent of the vote against two Democrats, W.H. McCaw and Samuel McGowan. But a month later, in November, Elliott attempted to become the first African-American lawmaker to win a full term in the U.S. Senate. Until 1913, all Senators were elected by the individual state legislatures. And when the South Carolina general assembly voted in the fall of 1872, it chose the Pennsylvania-born banker and former newspaper owner John J. Patterson over Elliott. Patterson, a wealthy Republican, had settled in South Carolina after the Civil War, and Elliott claimed “it was Patterson’s money that elected him. His strength was in his purse.” Elliott accused many of the state legislators who backed Patterson—including Black Republican lawmakers—of accepting bribes in exchange for their votes. “If this senatorial election had been before the people I would have beaten Patterson ten votes to one,” he said. In this era, a new Congress typically did not convene for more than a year after House elections, and Elliott’s Senate candidacy did not prevent him from retaking his seat in the House. When Elliott arrived back on Capitol Hill in December 1873 for the opening of the 43rd Congress, he received an additional assignment on the Committee on the Militia.15
During his second term, Elliott was one of five Black Representatives who seized the opportunity to advocate for Senator Sumner’s civil rights bill to eliminate discrimination from public transportation, public accommodations, and schools. Elliott gained national attention for a January 6, 1874, speech that made the case for federal civil rights legislation while eviscerating the argument of Representative Alexander Hamilton Stephens, who had returned to the House after a 14-year absence to represent a Georgia district. Stephens had lectured the House a day earlier about what he said was the unconstitutional basis of the civil rights bill. The former Confederate vice president argued that “the germinal and seminal principle of American constitutional liberty is the absolute unrestricted right of State self-government in all purely internal municipal affairs.” He claimed that federal intervention in any form “would be against the very genius and entire spirit of our whole system.”16
Elliott rejected Stephens’s assertion that Congress lacked the power to pass legislation that pertained to individual rights in the states. In fact, Elliott argued the opposite: that it was the right and the duty of Congress to legislate against discrimination. “The constitution of a free government ought always be construed in favor of human rights,” Elliott said, and it was the role of the federal government to defend these rights. He also rejected the claim by opponents of the bill that there were distinctions between the rights protected by the Constitution and the laws of an individual state. This was irrelevant, Elliott said, as “all discrimination, all denial of equality before the law, all denial of the equal protection of the laws, whether State or national laws, is forbidden” by the Fourteenth Amendment, which broadly defined citizenship and guaranteed equal protection of the law.17
Elliott identified the many venues where society discriminated against Black Americans, and argued that the civil rights bill would outlaw “our exclusion from the public inn, from the saloon and table of the steamboat, from the sleeping-coach on the railway, from the right of sepulture in the public burial-ground.” To those on the Democratic side who framed the bill as an unconstitutional exercise of the “police power of the State,” Elliott asserted that a civil rights bill was the government rightly exercising its regulatory power.18
In 1874, Elliott turned his attention away from Capitol Hill and toward South Carolina. In April, he told a reporter that the many accusations of financial mismanagement against the Republican-controlled state government were largely false and rebutted claims that the state government was poorly run because of the presence of Black lawmakers. He acknowledged that some Republicans had engaged in corrupt dealings in Columbia, but emphasized that these critiques were part of a larger effort by the Democratic Party to regain control of the state government. For Elliott, maintaining Republican control of the South Carolina state government was a vital part of protecting Black civil and political rights and preserving the gains of Reconstruction. He contemplated pursuing the position of lieutenant governor, but instead ran for and won a seat in the state house of representatives. He resigned his seat in Congress on November 1, 1874.19
In November, the South Carolina state house elected Elliott speaker—he succeeded South Carolina’s first Black speaker, Samuel Lee. Elliott served as speaker for two years, and he was elected state attorney general in 1876. Across the state that year, the election cycle was marred by widespread violence that brought to power a new Democratic government led by Governor Wade Hampton. In May 1877, Elliott was forced out of office along with other state officers by the Democratic administration, which used court proceedings to throw out votes from certain counties from the 1876 election, thereby undermining the claim to office held by Elliott and his Republican colleagues.20
Afterward, Elliott founded a law practice with two partners, but it closed in 1879. Later that year, he accepted an appointment as a special customs inspector for the U.S. Department of Treasury in Charleston. On a trip to Florida, he contracted malaria, which severely undermined his health for the remainder of his life. Elliott remained active in politics, however, working on Treasury Secretary John Sherman’s campaign for President in 1880, seconding his nomination and mobilizing support from Black delegates at the Republican National Convention. In January 1881, Elliott was part of a Black delegation that met with President-elect James A. Garfield to protest the lack of civil and political rights in the South. In May of that year, the Treasury Department transferred him to New Orleans. Elliott was dismissed as a Treasury inspector in 1882—a decision attributed in the press to his affiliation with the Republican faction opposed to Louisiana Senator William Pitt Kellogg. He started another law practice in New Orleans.21
Robert Elliott died on August 9, 1884, in New Orleans, at the age of 42. Contemporary press accounts cited malarial fever as the cause. Newspapers from across the nation printed notices of his death—large and small publications from states including Illinois, New York, Ohio, and Vermont. Upon learning of Elliott’s death, Frederick Douglass was compelled to write a letter to the editor of the New York Globe, mourning the loss of the former Representative “in the midst of his years.” Douglass recalled that “Elliott was to me a most grateful surprise, and, in fact a marvel.” Elliott’s words and actions, Douglass said, contradicted every prejudicial remark directed at Black Americans, for “under his dark brow there blazed an intellect worthy of a place in the highest Legislative hall of the nation.” Douglass added that he had hoped Elliott would someday return to a seat in Congress. “But alas! He is gone, and we can only hope that the same power that gave us one Elliott, will give us another in the near future.”22
1“Gen. R.B. Elliott,” 16 August 1884, New York Globe: 1; “Washington,” 2 April 1871, Chicago Tribune: 2.
2Congressional Directory, 42nd Cong., 1st sess., 1st ed. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1871): 46–47; 1880 United States Federal Census, Columbia, Richland, South Carolina, T9, roll 1238, enumeration district 164, page 284A, National Archives and Records Administration, https://www.ancestrylibrary.com/; “Political,” 18 October 1870, New York Times: 5; “About a Carpet-Bagger,” 6 April 1871, Charleston Daily News: 2.
31880 United States Federal Census, Columbia, Richland, South Carolina, page 284A; Peggy Lamson, The Glorious Failure: Black Representative Robert Brown Elliott and the Reconstruction in South Carolina (New York: Norton, 1973): 22–33; Peggy Lamson “Elliott, Robert Brown,” Dictionary of American Negro Biography (New York: Norton, 1982): 210–211; Stephen Middleton ed., Black Congressmen During Reconstruction: A Documentary Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002): 85–86.
41880 United States Federal Census, Columbia, Richland, South Carolina, page 284A; Lamson, The Glorious Failure: 31–33.
5Lamson, The Glorious Failure: 56–60, 69, 75; Howard N. Rabinowitz, “Elliott, Robert Brown,” American National Biography 7 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 434–436; “State Legislature,” 25 March 1869, Charleston Daily Courier: 4; “The Close of the Session,” 8 April 1869, Camden Journal (SC): 2; quotation from Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders During Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993): 70.
6“The Reform Mass Meeting,” 4 August 1870, Anderson Intelligencer: 3; “Election Results,” 28 November 1870, Cincinnati Daily Enquirer: 4; “Political,” 18 October 1870, New York Times: 5; Michael J. Dubin, United States Congressional Elections, 1788–1997 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 1998): 220.
7Congressional Globe, House, 42nd Cong., 1st sess. (14 March 1871): 102–103.
8Congressional Globe, Appendix, 42nd Cong., 1st sess. (28 March 1871): 46–50.
9Congressional Globe, House, 42nd Cong., 1st sess. (1 April 1871): 391–392.
10Congressional Globe, House, 42nd Cong., 1st sess. (1 April 1871): 392.
11An Act to amend an Act approved May thirty-one, eighteen hundred and seventy, entitled, “An Act to enforce the Right of Citizens of the United States to vote in the several States of this Union, and for other Purposes,” 16 Stat. 433 (1871); Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.: 2019): 117–120.
12Congressional Globe, House, 42nd Cong., 1st sess. (1 April 1871): 391; “Oration by the Hon. Robert B. Elliott,” 15 April 1874, Boston Globe: 2; Congressional Record, House, 43rd Cong., 1st sess. (6 January 1874): 407–410; “R.B. Elliott as Lawyer”; M. Sammy Miller, “Elliott of South Carolina: Lawyer and Legislator,” Negro History Bulletin 36, no. 5 (May 1973): 114; “Great Mass Meeting in Faneuil Hall,” 15 April 1874, Boston Globe: 2.
13House Journal, 42nd Cong., 2nd sess. (13 May 1872): 850; Congressional Globe, 42nd Cong., 2nd sess. (13 May 1872): 3383.
14Congressional Globe, Appendix, 42nd Cong., 2nd sess. (30 May 1872): 490–492.
15Dubin, United States Congressional Elections, 1788–1997: 226; Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: 70; “Tricks That Are In Vain!,” 11 December 1872, Charleston Daily News: 2; “Elliott on Patterson,” 9 January 1873, Edgefield Advertiser (SC): 5.
16Congressional Record, House, 43rd Cong., 1st sess. (5 January 1874): 380–381.
17Congressional Record, House, 43rd Cong., 1st sess. (6 January 1874): 409.
18Congressional Record, House, 43rd Cong., 1st sess. (6 January 1874): 408.
19“The Other Side,” 15 April 1874, Boston Globe: 1–2; “Poor Moses!,” 15 August 1874, Orangeburg News (SC): 6; “The Columbia Correspondent,” 22 April 1874, Abbeville Press and Banner (SC): 3; “Elliott’s Programme,” 28 March 1874, Daily Phoenix (Columbia, SC): 2; “Congressman R.B. Elliott,” 5 November 1874, Edgefield Advertiser: 3; Congressional Record, House, 43rd Cong., 2nd sess. (9 December 1874): 31.
20“South Carolina Legislature,” 25 November 1874, New York Herald: 8; “Under a Consent Decree,” 4 May 1877, Union Times (SC): 2; Lamson, The Glorious Failure: 267–270.
21J.R. Oldfield, “A High and Honorable Calling: Black Lawyers in South Carolina, 1868–1915,” Journal of American Studies 23, no. 3 (Dec. 1989): 399; Lamson, The Glorious Failure: 274, 282, 275–279, 287–288; “Garfield’s Visitors,” 15 January 1881, Detroit Free Press: 8; “A Colored Lawyer’s Death,” 11 August 1884, New York Times: 5.
22“A Colored Lawyer’s Death”; “R.B. Elliott,” 11 August 1884, New-York Tribune: 5; “Robert B. Elliott, a Talented Colored Man,” 11 August 1884, Chicago Daily Tribune: 5; “Obituary,” 13 August 1884, St. Albans Daily Messenger (VT): 1; “Death of a Noted Negro Orator,” 12 August 1884, Plain Dealer (Cleveland, OH): 1; “Mr. Douglass on Elliott,” 6 September 1884, New York Globe: 2.
Lamson, Peggy. The Glorious Failure: Black Congressman Robert Brown Elliott and the Reconstruction in South Carolina. New York: Norton, 1973.
Miller, M. Sammey. "Elliott of South Carolina: Lawyer and Legislator." Negro History Bulletin 36 (May 1973): 112-14.
"Robert Brown Elliott" in Black Americans in Congress, 1870-2007. Prepared under the direction of the Committee on House Administration by the Office of History & Preservation, U.S. House of Representatives. Washington: Government Printing Office, 2008.
| Committee Name & Date | Congresses | Congresses |
|---|---|---|
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Education and Labor
[1867–1883; 1947–1995; 2007–2011; 2019–2023]
40 through 47th Congresses; 80th through 103rd Congresses; 110th through 111th Congresses; 116th through 117th Congresses
(See also the following standing committees: Education; Labor; Economic and Educational Opportunities; Education and the Workforce)
|
42nd (1871–1873) – 43rd (1873–1875)
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42nd (1871–1873) –
43rd (1873–1875)
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Militia
[1815-1911]
14th through 62nd Congresses
(Jurisdiction reassigned to the following standing committee: Military Affairs, which later became Armed Services)
|
43rd (1873–1875)
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43rd (1873–1875)
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