Giles Cotton | |
|---|---|
 A photograph of Giles Cotton from c. 1870 | |
| Texas House of Representatives | |
| In office 1870–1873 | |
| Personal details | |
| Born | c. 1814 |
| Died | c. 1883 |
Giles Cotton, also known as Silas Cotton, (died 1883 or 1884) was an emancipated enslaved man, farmer, and state legislator in Texas. A Radical Republican, he served in the Texas House of Representatives during the Reconstruction era from 1870 to 1873. [1] [2] He married and had seven children. [3]
Cotton, the son of an enslaved woman and a white plantation overseer, [4] was born into slavery in South Carolina and was illiterate throughout his life. [2] [3] According to the Handbook of Texas , Cotton's enslaver was most likely Ethan Stroud at the time of his birth. Logan Shroud became Cotton's enslaver after Ethan Shroud died in 1847. [3] While enslaved by Logan Shroud, Cotton was permitted to own mules and a wagon, serving as a teamster for Shroud. [3] [5]
He was emancipated from slavery following the American Civil War and moved to Calvert, Texas. In 1869, he was elected to serve in the Twelfth Texas Legislature in the Texas House of Representatives, where he served from 1870 until 1873. [1] [3]
Cotton was a Radical Republican. [3] In 1871, Cotton voted to prohibit the public carrying of weapons, including pistols, knives, slingshots, and sword-canes. [6] At the time, he was one of twelve black legislators in the Texas House of Representatives. [6]
According to The Handbook of Texas, Cotton married a woman named "Miley" before 1840. [3] On September 5, 1870, Cotton married Rachel. That same year, the U.S. census reported that the newlywed couple had seven children living in their household. [3] Owing to his many children, he was "recognized as the father of all the Cottons in Limestone and Robertson counties." [7]
The Reconstruction era was a period in United States history and Southern United States history that followed the American Civil War and was dominated by the legal, social, and political challenges of the abolition of slavery and the reintegration of the eleven former Confederate States of America into the United States. During this period, three amendments were added to the United States Constitution to grant citizenship and equal civil rights to the newly freed slaves. To circumvent these legal achievements, the former Confederate states imposed poll taxes and literacy tests and engaged in terrorism to intimidate and control people of color and to discourage or prevent them from voting.
The Radical Republicans were a political faction within the Republican Party originating from the party's founding in 1854—some six years before the Civil War—until the Compromise of 1877, which effectively ended Reconstruction. They called themselves "Radicals" because of their goal of immediate, complete, and permanent eradication of slavery in the United States. The Radical faction also included, though, very strong currents of Nativism, anti-Catholicism, and in favor of the Prohibition of alcoholic beverages. These policy goals and the rhetoric in their favor often made it extremely difficult for the Republican Party as a whole to avoid alienating large numbers of American voters from Irish Catholic, German-, and other White ethnic backgrounds. In fact, even German-American Freethinkers and Forty-Eighters who, like Hermann Raster, otherwise sympathized with the Radical Republicans' aims, fought them tooth and nail over prohibition. They later became known as "Stalwarts".
Benjamin Franklin "Bluff" Wade was an American lawyer and politician who served as a United States Senator for Ohio from 1851 to 1869. He is known for his leading role among the Radical Republicans. Had the 1868 impeachment of U.S. President Andrew Johnson led to a conviction in the Senate, as president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate, Wade would have become acting president for the remaining nine months of Johnson's term.
Harrison Jackson Reed was an American editor and politician who had most of his political career in Florida. He was elected in 1868 as the ninth Governor of Florida, serving until 1873 during the Reconstruction era. Born in Littleton, Massachusetts, he moved as a youth with his family to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he had a grocery store and started farming. He also owned and edited the Milwaukee Sentinel for several years.
Oscar James Dunn served as Lieutenant Governor of Louisiana during the era of Reconstruction and was the first African American to act as governor of a U.S. state.
Lyman Trumbull was an American lawyer, judge, and politician who represented the state of Illinois in the United States Senate from 1855 to 1873. Trumbull was a leading abolitionist attorney and key political ally to Abraham Lincoln and authored several landmark pieces of reform as chair of the Judiciary Committee during the American Civil War and Reconstruction era, including the Confiscation Acts, which created the legal basis for the Emancipation Proclamation; the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which abolished chattel slavery; and the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which led to the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
James Thomas Rapier was an American politician from Alabama during the Reconstruction Era. He served as a United States representative from Alabama, for one term from 1873 until 1875. Born free in Alabama, he went to school in Canada and earned a law degree in Scotland before being admitted to the bar in Tennessee.
James Winright Flanagan was an American merchant, lawyer, and farmer from Henderson, Texas. Although never officially inaugurated, he briefly served as the Lieutenant Governor of Texas in 1870, before leaving the position to represent Texas in the United States Senate from 1870 to 1875.
Jefferson Franklin Long was a U.S. congressman from Georgia. He was the second African American sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives and the first African-American congressman from Georgia. Long was the first African-American Representative to speak on the floor of the U.S. House, opposing the Amnesty Bill that exempted former Confederates serving in the House from swearing allegiance to the Constitution. He remained the only African American to represent Georgia until Andrew Young was elected in 1972.
Joseph Barton Elam, Sr., was a two-term Democratic U.S. representative for Louisiana's 4th congressional district, whose service corresponded with the administration of U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes.
At the end of the American Civil War, the devastation and disruption in the state of Georgia were dramatic. Wartime damage, the inability to maintain a labor force without slavery, and miserable weather had a disastrous effect on agricultural production. The state's chief cash crop, cotton, fell from a high of more than 700,000 bales in 1860 to less than 50,000 in 1865, while harvests of corn and wheat were also meager. The state government subsidized construction of numerous new railroad lines. White farmers turned to cotton as a cash crop, often using commercial fertilizers to make up for the poor soils they owned. The coastal rice plantations never recovered from the war.
This is a selected bibliography of the main scholarly books and articles of Reconstruction, the period after the American Civil War, 1863–1877.
Richard Allen was a carpenter, contractor, businessman and, after the Civil War, a Republican politician in Texas. He was elected to two terms in the Texas House of Representatives. In 1878, he was the first African American in Texas to run for statewide office, but was unsuccessful in his campaign for lieutenant governor.
George Washington Albright was an American farmer, educator, and politician who was born enslaved in the U.S. state of Mississippi. A Republican, Albright represented the 25th District in the Mississippi State Senate from 1874 to 1879 during the end of the Reconstruction Era. In 1873, Albright won his Senate seat by defeating the Democrat E. H. Crump, a leader in the Ku Klux Klan. Albright served in the 1874-1875 session and the 1876-1877 session.
Robert Gleed Sr., was an American politician, merchant, and civic leader. He served as a Republican in the Mississippi State Senate during the Reconstruction era.
Shandy Wesley Jones was an American clergyman, photographer, barber, state legislator, and customs inspector in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Philip Minor Cuney Sr. was a soldier, plantation owner, enslaver and politician in Texas. He served in the House of Representatives of the Republic of Texas in 1843, and then in the Texas State Senate from 1846 as a member of the Democratic party. His surname was originally spelled Cuny with the 'e' being added around the time he joined the legislature and his white descendants tended to use the original Cuny while Cuney was used by his black descendants. He owned the large Sunnyside Plantation south-east of Hempstead and held over 100 people enslaved. By 1860 he held 115 people enslaved, among the most of any enslaver in Texas. He not only grew cotton like most plantations but also grew sweet potatoes and corn and later moving into dairy with 700 dairy cows.
Edmund Scarborough was an American minister, farmer and state legislator in Mississippi. He represented Holmes County, Mississippi in the Mississippi House of Representatives in 1870-1871.
William Harper was a state legislator who served in the Louisiana House of Representatives and Louisiana State Senate during the Reconstruction era.
Sheppard Mullins was a state legislator in Texas. He was African American.
