By Scott A. Grant
mail@floridanewsline.com
In 1870, Josiah T. Walls became the first African American to be elected to the United States House of Representatives from the State of Florida. Walls, a Republican, would remain the only Black person elected to congress from our state until 1992.
At that time, Florida had only one seat in Congress. Walls won in a statewide election over a former plantation owner, Silas Niblack. Niblack contested the results of the election and eventually won a lawsuit to replace Walls late in the term. By the time Niblack won his suit before the House Committee on Elections, Walls had already won his “re-election” campaign in 1872.
Two months after being unseated, Walls was back in Congress. He served out that second term and ran and won again in 1874, this time for a seat in Florida’s newly formed Second Congressional District. Following the census of 1870, Florida was awarded a second seat in Congress. Walls’ 1874 election was again contested by his opponent, Jesse Johnson Finley, a former Confederate General. And in April 1876, the US House of Representatives, finding election irregularities, unseated Walls in favor of Finley.
By many accounts, Walls, who referred to Florida as “my own sunny state,” was an effective congressman. He was praised by Jacksonville’s Democratic Florida Union newspaper and engaged in an extremely eloquent debate with a congressman from Georgia who opposed a national education bill on the grounds of “states’ rights.” “We know what the cry about states’ rights means,” he argued, “especially when we hear it produced as an argument against … the education of the people.”
All of this took place during a period known as “Military Reconstruction.” It is not a particularly popular period of history. We do not talk about it much. US troops occupied much of the South. Florida was part of the third Military District, along with Alabama and Georgia, governed by General George Gordon Meade. Meade had commanded the Union Army at Gettysburg. Voter turnout was scant. Many whites were either prohibited from voting or refused to vote because of their allegiance to the defeated Confederacy. Out of more than 270,000 residents, 43 percent of whom were Black, only just more than 24,000 men actually voted in 1870.
Prior to his election in 1870, Walls had served in the Florida Senate in 1869 and in the Florida House of Representatives in 1868. That 1868 class was substantially made up of African-American Republicans, mostly recently freed slaves, a fact that troubled Florida’s first lieutenant governor, William H. Gleason. He saw the newly elected “negroes” as “incompetent” and “ignorant;” and ominously prophesied that “[t]he time must soon come when the race question will overpower every other subject in the south…”
During this period, the South saw a proliferation of Black freedmen serving in public office. The South Carolina Legislature of 1868 featured 50 African Americans out of a total body of 63. That legislature was later ridiculed in the infamous 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation.”
Walls lost the Republican nomination in 1876 to a “carpetbagger” named Horatio Bisbee. He then went back home to Alachua County and won a seat in the Florida Senate, where he served until 1881. He retired, became a farmer, and mayor of Gainesville for a time. He also became a lawyer and a newspaper publisher. His farm flourished until the “big freeze” of 1894 – 95. After that, he took a position as an instructor of farming at the State Normal & Industrial College for Colored Students, which we now call Florida A&M.
Josiah Walls was born a slave in Virginia in 1842 to unknown parents. He was drafted into the Confederate Army as an unpaid laborer or servant until his unit was captured in 1862. He then enlisted in the United States Colored Troops where he rose to the rank of Sergeant Major. After the war, he settled in Alachua County and became a teacher before pursuing politics.
Walls died in Tallahassee in 1905 and is believed to be buried somewhere in the city. No one knows for sure. His grave is unmarked.
Scott A. Grant is a local historian and author. He welcomes your comments at scottg@standfastic.com.
