Born into slavery, Joseph Rainey was the first African American to serve in the U.S House of representatives, the first African American to preside over the House, and the longest-serving African American during the tumultuous reconstruction period. He was born in Georgetown, South Carolina, a seaside town consisting mainly of rice plantations, on June 21, 1832. Not too much is known about Rainey's youth. His father Edward, was a barber by trade. In South Carolina, some enslaved people were allowed to practice a trade and his master permitted him to work independently if he shared some of his profits, as required by law. Rainey used his earnings to buy his family’s freedom in the early 1840s. The family then moved to Charleston, South Carolina. By 1860, Edward worked as a barber at the elite Mills House Hotel. Since teaching Black children reading and writing, was illegal, Joseph Rainey received a limited education
In September 1859, Rainey traveled to Philadelphia to marry Susan Elizabeth Cooper, the daughter of a free Black family from Charleston. On April 12, 1861, the newly formed Confederate Army opened fire on Fort Sumter, a Union outpost in Charleston Harbor—the beginning of the Civil War. Rainey continued to work as a barber, until 1862 when he was conscripted into service for the Confederacy. He was forced to work for the Confederate States of America building fortifications and serving as a steward on vessels called blockade-runnersk, making eight or more trips to and from Nassau, Bahamas. He later worked as a cook. In 1862, couple was able to escape from the Confederates on one of the ships to Bermuda. The self-governed British colony had abolished slavery in 1834, and proved a hospitable home for the Raineys. During the Civil War years, Bermuda, a British colony, was thriving. The Rainey's lived in St. George, Bermuda, and took advantage of the island’s economy. Joseph set up a successful barbershop and Susan Rainey opened a dress store.
After an 1865 outbreak of smallpox closed the port in St. George’s, where the Raineys were living, the couple relocated to the capital city, Hamilton. One account based on Bermuda records suggests that Joseph received informal tutelage there from a highly educated customer at his barber shop. His personal journal shows a growing command of conventional spelling during this time. Bermuda is also mostly likely where he read the great works of literature, from Plato to Shakespearean tragedies, that he would later quote on the House floor. The Rainey's were informed about the progress of the Civil War by passing sailors and, after the Union victory, returned to Charleston in 1866. When Rainey returned, he soon was involved in Republican politics in South Carolina.
The wealth Joseph Rainey acquired in Bermuda elevated his status in the community, and looked upon as a leader, he soon became active in the republican Party. In 1867, the Raineys returned to South Carolina, from Bermuda. Beginning on January 14, 1868, he was elected to represent Georgetown County as a delegate to the South Carolina Constitutional Convention of 1868, held in Charleston, along with White delegate, Henry W. Webb. For the first time, Black delegates were in the majority, 76-48. There he chaired the senate finance committee, and helped draft South Carolina's new constitution under Congressional Reconstruction. Numerous outsiders, such as sympathetic Republican politicians moved to the state to take part in the Reconstruction experiment.
Rainey was a political conservative who sometimes sided with White politicians and favored a degree of leniency toward ex-Confederates. He regularly demonstrated compassion for the mistreated—especially the newly freed Black population. As a representative to the South Carolina constitutional convention he supported amnesty for the Confederates and debt relief for those made destitute by the war. Rainey also backed creating a public school system and was willing to vote for an election poll tax to fund it. He also contended that freed people should purchase land confiscated from plantation owners. He was among the minority of delegates at the convention who believed that voters should be obligated to pay a poll tax, for educational purposes, and that those who did not meet property qualifications should have “no right to vote.” Rainey served in the South Carolina state militia and was an agent of the State Land Commission.
When he attended the state labor convention in 1869, he supported legislation to protect African American workers who were suffering at the hands of former masters who wanted to relegate them to near-slavery status. In February 1870, representative Benjamin F. Whittemore resigned his Northeastern South Carolina seat, having been charged with selling appointments to the U.S. Naval Academy. He resigned from the House rather than be expelled. The Republican Party nominated Rainey for the remainder of Whittemore’s term in the 41st Congress (1869–1871), he was 38 years old. In November of 1870, Rainey was elected to Congress from South Carolina's first congressional district to fill the seat for the remainder of the 41st congress. When Joseph Hayne Rainey was sworn in on December 12, 1870, he became the first Black American lawmaker to serve in the United States House of Representatives.
One month later he was joined by the second Black member, representative Jefferson Long of Georgia. On the House Floor, Rainey relished the opportunity for spirited debate. Rainey's work on the committee on freedmen’s affairs—created in 1865 to handle all legislation concerning newly freed slaves—earned him the most recognition. On April 1, 1871, he delivered his first major speech, arguing for the use of federal troops to protect southern Blacks from the recently organized Ku Klux Klan. As state and local governments in the South either ignored or proved incapable of preventing White vigilante violence against African Americans, Rainey called on the federal government to intervene to combat the Klan and other terror organizations. The 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, which called for federal forces to intervene against Klan activity and for federal district attorneys to prosecute the terrorists. Some members of Congress challenged the constitutionality of the act. The bill was approved and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on April 20, 1871.
The act expanded the reach of federal law enforcement in the South, giving the President the power to use federal troops to suppress violence and empowered federal district attorneys to aggressively prosecute the Klan. But the bill failed to stop Klan terrorism. After his speech, Rainey received a letter written in red ink instructing him and other advocates of Black civil rights to “prepare to meet your God.” White southerners virtually ignored the Ku Klux Klan act, and congressional opponents circumvented its provisions by eliminating funding. In March of 1872, Rainey found himself arguing for the federal appropriations needed to enforce the act. President Grant used the powers authorized by the legislation to decisively damage the Klan. In 1874, Rainey spoke out on behalf of other oppressed minorities, opposing a bill to ban Chinese workers from taking part in a federally funded construction project in San Francisco. As a member of the House Indian Affairs Act Committee, he oversaw the debate on an appropriations bill providing for the management of Indian reservations. He made history in April 1874 when he took the chair from speaker James G. Blaine, becoming the first Black American to preside over the House of Representatives.
Throughout his career, Rainey involved himself in the economic issues that affected his race. Established by congress in 1865, the Freedmen’s Savings and Trust Company (Freedmen’s Bank) was envisioned as a means to help newly emancipated African Americans build capital through secure savings. Two-thirds of the bank’s holdings were originally invested in United states treasury bonds. In 1870, an amendment to the bank’s charter allowing half of its deposits to be invested in real estate bonds came to the floor. Recognizing the instability of such an investment, Rainey opposed the amendment and stood behind congressional control over the institution. Rainey felt that no one man should handle the assets of the bank. His position on the select committee on the Freedmen’s Bank gave him a voice. He lambastes the leadership of the bank as having been determined to "deceive the inexperienced and credulous former bonds men and women." In spite of protests by Rainey and his colleagues, they were unable to prevent the bank’s failure in 1874.
Rainey also advocated radical republican senator Charles Sumner’s Civil Rights Bill of 1875, drafted with the help of John Mercer Langston, the attorney who founded the law school at Howard University. The bill in part would outlawed racial discrimination on juries, in schools, churches, on transportation, and in public accommodations. Sumner believed a law passed in 1872 granting amnesty to former confederates should be conditioned by the passage of his Civil Rights bill. Although Rainey favored the Amnesty Act, which allowed most former confederates to regain their political rights, he agreed with Sumner because of personal experience with discrimination in both Washington and South Carolina. Rainey made three speeches on the floor of Congress in support of the Civil Rights Act. Speaking for his African American constituents, he declared, “We are earnest in our support of the government. We were earnest in the house of the nation’s perils and dangers, and now, in our country’s comparative peace and tranquility, we are earnest for our rights".
Rainey focused on the bill’s provisions for desegregation in public schools, an issue that had bedeviled race relations for more than a century. Breaking from fellow republicans, he was among the minority favoring a $1 poll tax to support public education. other republicans successfully argued this would disfranchise most freed slaves. Nonetheless, Rainey continued to advocate education, later arguing that money from the sale of public land should be used to fund public education. Though the Civil Rights Bill passed the House on February 5, 1875, with the Senate quickly concurring, its diluted provisions failed to address desegregation or equality in public schools. On March 1, 1875, President Grant signed the Civil Rights Act. It was the final Reconstruction act.
Disgruntled Southern Democrats were already making plans to reverse the progress. Hamburg, South Carolina, lies along the Savannah River across from Augusta, Georgia. By 1876, newly freed Blacks had revitalized the declining town, making it a haven of business and property ownership, and electoral freedom. A town militia protected Hamburg from ex-Confederate vigilante raids. On July 4 of that year, 16 months after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, White travelers provoked a confrontation by attempting to drive a carriage through the African American militia’s Independence Day parade on Main Street. After trying to force the militia to disband and surrender its weapons in court, one of the White travelers returned on the day of the hearing with more than 200 men and a cannon. The vigilantes surrounded the militia in a warehouse, shot men as they tried to escape, captured the rest and tortured and executed six.
In Congress, Joseph Rainey and his House colleague Robert Smalls, said the assassination of Hamburg leaders was a “cold-blooded atrocity", and warned that continued violence would undermine the fragile democracy in the South. The massacre inspired a wave of open terror against African Americans across the state. Debate over the incident became bitter on the House floor during Rainey's final term in the 45th congress. Rainey condemned the murders and exchanged coarse remarks with Democratic representative Samuel Cox of New York, who believed the “Hamburg massacre” resulted from poor government by Black South Carolina leaders. Rainey called on the federal government to maintain troops in their state to prevent further violence against African Americans.
In the remaining months of his House career, Rainey continued his committee work and introduced a bill to impose federal oversight of state voting practices. The 1876 election was marked by widespread fraud in the state and threats of violence shaped Rainey’s re-election bid. In 1876, Rainey won re-election from the Charleston district against Democratic candidate John Smythe Richardson, a former Confederate officer, in a tight campaign. Richardson challenged the result as invalid on the grounds of intimidation of Rainey and the Republican party. Noting the presence of federal troops and Black militias guarding the polls were scaring voters at the polls during the election. Richardson's election had been certified by Democratic South Carolina governor Wade Hampton, and Rainey maintained that only the South Carolina secretary of state could certify elections. Rainey took his seat, but in May 1878 the committee on elections declared the seat vacant, citing irregularities. The House failed to act on the committee report, and Rainey kept his seat for the remainder of his term.
White Democrats used their dominance of the state legislature to pass laws for segregation, Jim Crow and making voter registration more difficult, effectively disenfranchising Black people. Bolstered by renewed Democratic control in South Carolina, Richardson challenged Rainey again and defeated him in the 1878 election for the 46th congress (1879–1881) by more than 8,000 votes. Rainey accused South Carolina Democrats of corruption and election fraud, but did not formally challenge the results in the House. Joseph Rainey retired from the House on March 3, 1879. As he prepared to leave office, Rainey told Congress he hoped “an impartial historian” would tell the truth about his era. In total, Rainey served four consecutive terms, 1870-1879. After Rainey left Congress he was appointed as an Internal Revenue agent in South Carolina on May 22, 1879, and served until July 15, 1881. Rainey, a businessman before he was a politician, maintained an active interest in investments during his career. He held stock in the Greenville and Enterprise Railroads and tried to manage an unproductive banking and brokerage business in Washington, D.C. When his health failed he left Washington, and returned to Georgetown where he died on August 1, 1887.