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Superstar
Jeremiah Haralson listened as the ex-Confederate accused him of forgery. It was Feb. 13, 1877, and Haralson, a congressman from Selma, had testified to a U.S. Senate subcommittee about the violence and fraud that cost him his re-election to Congress from Alabama's Black Belt.
Malcolm Graham, on hand to represent the state Democratic Party, dismissed Haralson's descriptions of racial terror with a cynical languor. Local Democratic leaders told him no such intimidation occurred, and these cursory denials satisfied the former Confederate congressman.
So Graham tried to make Haralson the criminal. During questioning, Graham asked Haralson about the testimony of another witness who claimed that Haralson had forged an election ticket to get votes in Lowndes County.
“He said there were 163 votes cast for you there, and that there would not have been one if the voters had not been imposed upon by a counterfeit ticket you had circulated there,” Graham said.
Haralson could recite precinct names and vote totals from memory. Lowndes County was not strong for him. That was true. But people there knew Haralson: The son of a prominent Lowndes County planter once held him in bondage.
“I have a few personal friends in the county, you know, old man,” the former slave told the former defender of slavery. “There are a good many there that know me, and they vote for me on personal grounds.”
This was Jeremiah Haralson: blunt, fearless and independent. A kinder country would have embraced him as everything America dreams of. A survivor of the physical and spiritual torture of the nation’s gravest sin, Haralson had the bravery to defy his former tormentors, teaching himself how to read and write and using his natural gifts to go from chattel slavery to the halls of Congress in a little over a decade. Haralson completed his term in Congress a month before his 31st birthday.
His confrontation with Malcolm Graham should have been an early moment of triumph in a long, courageous political career. But Haralson was a black man, and his success placed him in danger. It inspired the envy of venal men who resorted to corruption and violence to end a brief experiment with multiracial democracy and finish Haralson's public life, which would have thrived in a just nation. He was the last African-American elected to Congress from Alabama until 1992.
Nearly 20 years after his exchange with Graham on that February day, Haralson walked into a prison in upstate New York, and out of history.
He vanished from newspaper accounts and official records. His grave, if it exists, is unknown.
Haralson's official congressional biography says wild animals killed him in Colorado in 1916. But research by the Montgomery Advertiser raises questions about the story, and uncovered a trial that provides the last known evidence of Haralson on the face of the Earth.
Fierce independence and a blunt attitude helped Haralson achieve success
Sold at least once as a child, Haralson learned to read and write when he was 19 years old. An orator with a "ringing voice," he served five years in the Alabama Legislature, helping build and expand the state's public education system while fighting for civil rights. He crossed paths with presidents, senators and generals. Allies cheered his agility in debate; enemies who viciously attacked Haralson in crude and racist terms learned not to underestimate his intelligence.
Sold at least once as a child, Haralson taught himself to read and write when he was 19 years old.
But Haralson was no somber crusader for right. He coupled his serious aims with a well-developed sense of irony. Frederick Douglass, who heard Haralson speak in New Orleans in 1872, wrote shortly after that Haralson was “a man of real solid sense" who had “humor enough in him to supply a half dozen circus clowns.” During his 1877 Senate testimony, Graham asked the congressman whether a local activist was a Democrat. Haralson replied: “He is dead now. He is not anything.”
He could confront contemporary racism with exceptional bravery. In an 1876 campaign speech in Alabama, Haralson mocked white assumptions about black sexuality. He said he would never marry a white woman, because “no rich white woman would have him, and he would not marry a poor white woman.”
Haralson was also complicated. He happily attacked fellow Republicans in the short-sighted factional wars that destroyed the Alabama GOP in the 1870s. Hoping to hold the votes of white Republicans, Haralson opposed the integration of public schools, a stand that put him at odds with most African-Americans. Haralson also made an ill-advised political race in 1884 that may have ended up hurting a Republican incumbent.
Taken whole, Haralson’s life shows the opportunities available to talented African-American politicians after the Civil War; the difficult choices they faced, and the violent and fraudulent manner in which whites took power from them.
Twice a piece of merchandise to white slaveholders
Haralson's early life is not well documented, but he left a brief outline of it in an 1875 congressional biography. He was born in slavery in Muscogee County, Georgia, just outside Columbus, on April 1, 1846, and remained enslaved until he was 19 years old.
His parents were born in Georgia, but nothing else is known about them. In his 1875 biography, Haralson identified his first owner as John Walker, a person who cannot be identified with any certainty.
Muscogee was part of the Chattahoochee Valley, encompassing portions of western Georgia and eastern Alabama. Cotton dominated the local economy, and slave ownership was higher than normal in the region. Historian Anthony Gene Carey writes that 45 percent of the population was enslaved, and 45 percent of white families in the region owned slaves, compared to about 25 percent throughout the South. In many cases, the value of the human beings held against their will exceeded local land prices. Sales of enslaved people were lucrative; Columbus in the late 1850s supported three large slave-trading firms.
John Walker died sometime before Haralson was 12. The young child became merchandise. Haralson wrote in his 1875 biography that he was “sold on the auction block in the city of Columbus and bought by J.W. Thomson.” This was likely John W. Thompson, a planter who (according to the 1850 census) held 27 people in bondage, including 11 children aged 11 or younger.
It is impossible to say if Haralson's family was sold with him; if they were separated on the auction block, or if he had already been taken from them. In any circumstance, the experience would have been horrific. Jacob Stroyer, born a slave on a South Carolina plantation, saw his two sisters sold from the plantation to settle debts incurred by the deceased property owner.
“When the day came for them to leave, some, who seemed to have been willing to go at first, refused, and were handcuffed together and guarded on their way to the cars by white men,” Stroyer later wrote. “The women and children were driven to the depot in crowds, like so many cattle, and the sight of them caused great excitement among master’s negroes. Imagine a mass of uneducated people shedding tears and yelling at the tops of their voices in anguish and grief.”
Physical abuse accompanied the emotional trauma. Men, women, and children were pressed into the backbreaking work of cotton picking; Haralson was described as a field hand in an 1876 newspaper article, though he left no direct testimony on this point. When U.S. District Judge Richard Busteed nominated Haralson for Congress in 1874, he said that Haralson “bore on his person the marks of the whip and shackles.” An 1876 newspaper claimed that there were “scars on every square inch of the back of Jere Haralson.”
When Thompson died in 1858, Jeremiah passed into the hands of Jonathan Haralson, the college-educated son of a wealthy planter in Lowndes County. A lawyer in Selma, Haralson had married Thompson’s daughter Mattie. He later became an Alabama Supreme Court justice. Haralson appears to have inherited Jeremiah after Thompson’s death, and took him from Columbus to Selma.
The 1860 census lists Jonathan Haralson holding 13 people in bondage. One was a 14-year-old boy. This was likely Jeremiah Haralson. It is impossible to say if any of the teenager's loved ones made the journey with him.
In his 1877 testimony to the U.S. Senate subcommittee, Haralson hinted at the toll this abuse and dislocation had on those who survived slavery.
“The colored men ... especially in Alabama, where I have been a slave until 1865, are afraid of the white men,” Haralson said. “He has been raised to be afraid of them. He is right there with the men that he used to belong to, and he has been brought up to fear and dread the white men, and he dreads them yet.”
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