Richard Harvey Cain

Background

Richard Harvey Cain was born on April 12, 1825 of free parents in Greenbrier County, Virginia, United States and remained there throughout his boyhood. His parents then moved to Ohio, first to Portsmouth and later to Cincinnati.

Education

He attended Wilberforce University and attended divinity school in Hannibal, Missouri.

Career

By the late 1850s he was an active abolitionist and worked with famous activists such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Delaney. During the Civil War, Cain was pastor of a church in Brooklyn, New York. In May 1865, to his great delight, he was transferred to South Carolina as superintendent of AME missions for the state. Cain was responsible for building Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, which is considered the state’s most historic AME congregation. By 1866 its membership had grown to more than two thousand. Cain approached his responsibilities with considerable zeal, organizing churches throughout the countryside. Contemporaries credited him with much of the church’s success in the immediate post–Civil War era. Cain was also motivated by a deeply held black nationalist ideology and sought every opportunity to give black Carolinians greater control over their lives. In 1866 he bought the South Carolina Leader newspaper, becoming perhaps the first African American newspaper editor in South Carolina. After Cain changed its name to the Missionary Record, the paper covered religion, literature, and politics, becoming an important voice for black Carolinians. From his earliest days in South Carolina, Cain was involved in politics. He was an honorary delegate to the November 1865 Colored Peoples Convention in Charleston, which was one of the earliest forums where black Carolinians demanded equal civil and political rights. In 1867 he helped organize the state Republican Party, and he later served as party chairman for Charleston County. As a delegate to the 1868 constitutional convention, Cain was an outspoken advocate of universal male suffrage. He worked hard to promote landownership among the landless. He opposed the convention’s call for a debt moratorium, instead believing that planter indebtedness would force sales to the working class. Cain was an architect of the South Carolina Land Commission, designed to help small farmers purchase land, and later served on that commission. Cain also purchased land north of Charleston, which he resold to freedmen. The settlement evolved into the black town of Lincolnville. Cain served in the S. C. Senate from 1868 to 1870 and was twice elected to Congress, serving from 1873 to 1875 and from 1877 to 1879. In state politics he was considered a reformer who frequently railed against corruption within Republican ranks. While he was in Congress, his most public efforts were on behalf of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, the country’s first federal public accommodations law. The demise of Reconstruction in South Carolina took Cain’s career in new directions. In 1877 he encouraged some black Carolinians to seek their fortune in Africa and supported the Liberian Exodus movement. In 1880 he was among the first three men elected bishops in the AME Church from the South, and he was given responsibility for Louisiana and Texas. In Texas he served as founder and president of Paul Quinn College in Waco. Cain moved to Washington, D. C. , in 1884 and died there on January 18, 1887.

Achievements

• He is most remembered, however, for his support of a civil rights bill introduced into the House in 1870.

Religion

Cain was dissatisfied with the conditions then obtaining in the Methodist Episcopal Church, he joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Politics

As a member of the Congress, he not only manifested interest in those measures which peculiarly concerned the freedmen, but took an active part in all matters pertaining to the general welfare of the country.

He was elected as a Republican to the Forty-third United States Congress in a newly created at-large district. He was on the Committee on Agriculture, but focused more on the civil rights bill which eventually passed in diluted form in 1875. He gave noted speeches on the bill in January 1873. He did not run for re-election in 1874 after redistricting, but ran for the 2nd district in 1876. He was elected to the Forty-fifth United States Congress.

Membership

Cain was a member of the U. S. House of Representatives from South Carolina's At-large Congressional District, member of the U. S. House of Representatives from South Carolina's 2nd district, member of the South Carolina Senate from Charleston County.

In 1868, he was elected a member of the South Carolina State Constitutional Convention. Later in the year he was elected to the South Carolina State Senate, a post he held until 1870. Cain was editor and publisher of the South Carolina Leader which eventually became the Missionary Record.

Personality

Throughout his career, he made the impression of a man of clear vision, good judgment, strong resolution, and firm convictions.

References

• The Negro In South Carolina During Reconstruction