Benjamin Sterling Turner was the first African-American
lawmaker elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from
Alabama. Born enslaved, he was a self-made businessman
and philanthropist who opened a school for formerly
enslaved people after the Civil War. During his one term
in office, Turner tirelessly defended the ambitions and
industriousness of his Black constituents and sought to
restore peace and repair the lingering economic damage in
the war-ravaged South. “These people have struggled longer
and labored harder, and have made more of the raw material
than any people in the world,” he noted on the House
Floor. “Since they have been free they have not slackened in
their industry, but materially improved their economy.”1
Benjamin Sterling Turner was born enslaved on March 17,
1825, in Halifax County, North Carolina. When Elizabeth
Turner, his widowed enslaver, moved to Selma, Alabama,
in 1830, she brought five-year-old Turner with her. As a
child, Benjamin Turner secretly learned to read. Turner
was sold at age 20 to Major W.H. Gee, the husband of
Elizabeth Turner’s stepdaughter. Gee owned a hotel that
Turner managed. After Gee’s death, his brother, James,
became Turner’s enslaver. Turner married Independence, an
enslaved Black woman on January 8, 1857, but their union
was severed when Gee sold her. The 1870 Census indicates
that Turner cared for a nine-year-old boy named Osceola.
In 1872, Turner married Ella Todd.2
By the start of the Civil War, Turner had accumulated
enough money to purchase property. When James Gee left to
serve in the Confederate army, he permitted Turner to operate
another of the family’s hotels and to run and profit from a
livery stable. Selma became a hub for weapons manufacturing
and was captured by Union cavalry in the spring of 1865.
U.S. troops burned two-thirds of the city and Turner suffered
great financial loss as a result. He later sought compensation
from the Southern Claims Commission, but it is unclear if
he received it. Turner continued to work as a merchant and
a farmer after the war, recouping many of his losses. Eager to
provide freed people with educational opportunities that they
had long been denied, he founded a school in Selma in 1865.
In 1867, he attended the Republican state convention and
attracted the attention of local Republican officials. In 1869,
Turner was elected a Selma councilman, but he resigned
in protest nine months later after the council voted to take
monthly compensation from the city. He believed public
officials should decline payment when the city was in dire
financial straits.3
In 1870, Turner made a bid for a southwestern Alabama
seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He received a
chilly reception among White Republicans and was largely
forced to finance his own campaign—even selling a horse.
Turner worked to position himself as candidate who could
appeal to all southerners, regardless of race. “I emphatically
say that my platform is universal pardon, universal suffrage,
and universal repudiation of the war debt,” he told a crowd
at a speech in Jackson, Alabama. “Let the war debt go to
the devil, the father of the war.” He also made specific
promises to his Black constituents, pledging to weed out
federal officials who refused to hire Black employees. Turner
was able to earn strong support from the Black population,
which at nearly 52 percent of the district constituted the
second-largest Black voting bloc in Alabama. Despite a
prominent Democrat’s prediction that Turner’s nomination
“will seal the doom of the Republican Party in Northern
Alabama” and that “the party will be killed so dead that the
hand of resurrection will never reach it,” Turner defeated
Democrat Samuel J. Cummings with 58 percent of the vote
in the November 8 election.4
In the 42nd Congress (1871–1873), Turner took a
generous approach to those who had taken up arms against
the government, introducing a bill to eliminate legal and
political disabilities imposed on former Confederates.
Though his bill was never voted on, the amnesty bill that
passed in 1872 cleared the restrictions limiting the political
activities of most participants in the rebellion.5
Having witnessed firsthand the devastation of the Civil
War in the South, Turner spent much of his congressional
career seeking financial aid for his state. Turner sought to
repair his battle-scarred hometown by sponsoring a bill
to appropriate $200,000 for the construction of a federal
building in Selma and the reconstruction of Selma’s St.
Paul’s Episcopal Church. Vowing “to not relinquish one
foot of ground until I shall have succeeded in my efforts,”
he argued that an infusion of federal money would help
heal wounds from the war. Turner included a plea for
federal funding in the appendix of the Congressional Globe.
“The Government made a display in that unfortunate city
of its mighty power,” Turner wrote of Selma’s experience
during the war. “They may have sinned wonderfully, but
they suffered terribly.” With eyes firmly on the future,
Turner continued magnanimously: “I have no coals of fiery
reproach to heap upon them now. Rather would I extend
the olive branch of peace, and say to them, let the past be
forgotten and let us all, from every hue and shade, go to
work peacefully to build up the shattered temples of this
great and glorious Republic.” Although the appropriation
for Selma failed to pass, Turner was able to help individual
Alabamians from his position on the Committee on Invalid
Pensions. Turner passed two private pension bills, one of
which put a Black Civil War veteran, Daniel Wooden, on
the pension roll at $8 per month.6
In Congress, Turner advocated for the region’s organized
farm interests as well as its aspiring smallholders. On
February 21, 1872, he presented a petition from the board
of trade in Mobile, Alabama, requesting a refund of the
cotton taxes collected from the southern states from 1866 to
1868. On May 31, he submitted a speech to be printed in
the Congressional Globe, declaring the tax unconstitutional
and decrying what he called its impoverishing effect on
cotton workers—a disproportionate number of whom were
freed people. He pleaded “on behalf of the poor people
of the South, regardless of caste or color, because this tax
had its blighting influence. It cut the jugular vein of our
financial system, bled it near unto death. . . . It so crippled
every trade and industry that our suffering has been greater
under its influence than under that of the war.” In the same
speech, Turner called for the government to purchase private
land, divide it into tracts of no more than 160 acres, and
sell it to new landowners, especially freedmen. This reprised
a call he had made in a bill he had submitted more than
a month earlier, authorizing the government to buy land
sold at public auction and facilitating sales to the “landless
citizens of the United States.”7
Turner also introduced legislation that protected new
Black landowners. His proposal was to enable the transfer
of land disputes exceeding $500 from state courts to federal
ones. The bill allowed a claimant to appeal to federal
authorities if “he has reason to believe, and does believe,
he will not be able to obtain justice in such State courts.”
The House, however, took no action on his proposal, nor
did lawmakers consider a refund for the cotton tax.8
Although Republicans renominated Turner in 1872,
he faced an uphill battle to remain in Congress. His
economic revitalization bills had failed to pass, and he
had been the target of derision from some prominent
African-American leaders. One noted condescendingly that
during his industrious but modest past Turner had been a
“barroom owner, livery stable keeper, and a man destitute
of education.” In the Republican primary, Turner defeated Philip Joseph, a Mobile newspaper editor, who then ran against Turner as an Independent Republican, trying
to attract voters aligned with the party’s philosophy but
opposed to the state party’s leadership. Joseph’s entry into
the race effectively split the Black vote. White candidate
Frederick George Bromberg, running on the Democratic
and Liberal Republican ticket, benefited from the split,
winning the general election with a 44 percent plurality.
Turner took 37 percent, and Joseph garnered 19 percent.9
After his congressional career, Turner curtailed his
political activities for several years before emerging in
1880 to serve as a delegate to the Republican National
Convention in Chicago, Illinois. He also served as chair of
the Republican executive committee in the Fourth District
in 1882.10
In 1886, Turner campaigned for the House seat
representing Alabama’s Fourth District. Seeking a return
to Capitol Hill for the 50th Congress (1887–1889), Turner
promised “a bold and aggressive campaign against the
hydraheaded Democracy that has ever struggled to keep
us in ignorance and darkness.” One of two Republicans
to compete in the three-way race, Turner placed last,
garnering just 12 percent of the vote.11
Turner eventually bought a 640-acre farm in Dallas
County, Alabama, but his businesses suffered during a
national economic downturn at the end of the 1870s.
Though he may have regained his fortune by 1890, he hit
financial trouble again amid another economic recession.
Turner suffered a stroke in the early 1890s, and as both his
health and investments failed, he sold the remainder of his
farm to pay off debts a few months before his death near
Selma on March 21, 1894.12
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
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