Thomas Morris Chester, Black Civil War Reporter
First African American to Report for a Major Newspaper
Aug 7, 2009
Thomas Morris Chester was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on May 11, 1834. His parents owned a restaurant, which was also a center of Abolitionist activities. Young Thomas grew up very independent minded, someone who refused to accept the second-class citizenship that blacks were forced to endure.
Liberia
Chester received a good education, since his parents were well off enough to send him to a good school. At sixteen he was enrolled at Allegheny Institute, not far from Pittsburgh. Originally a prep school, it was soon transformed into a “college for the education of colored Americans,” Apparently the two years he spent there had a profound influence on him, Later, he would refer to the school as a “fountain of learning.”
But Chester’s hopes and aspirations soon came into conflict with the racism that could be found even in the north. At 19, determined not to “submit to the insolent indignities” of a prejudiced America, Chester decided to immigrate to Liberia. Liberia, a nation on the west coast of Africa, had been founded by the American Colonization Society about thirty years earlier.
Liberia was actually a well-meaning failure, based upon the idea that a multiracial society is impossible in America. The idea was to free black slaves, then ship them “home.” To some Abolitionist whites, it sounded good, but it ignored the fact that blacks by the nineteenth century were literally African Americans. For all the racism and injustice, America was their home.
In any case Chester did go to Liberia in 1853. After about a year, he returned to the United States. Chester kept close ties with Liberia, and kept in touch by frequent visits. It’s recorded that he travelled to Liberia no less than a dozen times between 1853 and 1870.
Civil War Reporter for the Philadelphia Press
Chester became quite an accomplished and articulate writer. In fact, he had experience as a publisher and editor of a newspaper in Monrovia, capital of Liberia. But the capstone of his journalistic career was when he was hired as a war correspondent for the Philadelphia Press in August, 1864. He was the first African American to be hired as a writer by a major American daily.
Much of his time was devoted to the Petersburg-Richmond front, where the Union’s Army of the Potomac and the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia fought a bloody war of attrition in trenches. It was an eerie foretaste of what would happen in World War I. Chester was a good reporter, and he paid particular attention to how Union commanders treated black troops. The correspondent would always be quick to point out occasions when Union officers refused to treat “a Negro patriot as a man."
The Fall of Richmond, 1865
Thomas Morris Chester was on hand when the Confederate capital of Richmond finally fell on April 3, 1865. The reporter made his way into the abandoned Confederate House of Representatives, sat down at the Speaker’s desk, and started to write a dispatch. It was a poignant moment—an African American sitting down in the home of a government dedicated to racism and black slavery.
As he was writing, a paroled (freed POW) Confederate officer came in, demanding Chester leave at once. The reporter stood his ground, and the enraged southerner stormed off.
The First Black Barrister in England
After the war Chester’s career was a mixture of success and failure. He travelled to England, studied law, and became the country’s first Black barrister. Chester also served in Europe as a diplomat for Liberia. But when the Liberian politician that Chester backed failed to win the country’s presidency, the former reporter left his post.
Chester came back to America, where in the 1870s and 1880s he held two minor federal positions. He ended his career as the head of a black-owned construction company, but due to lack of capital and heavy competition, failed within a year.
Chester’s last years were not altogether happy ones. Reconstruction had ended, and by 1890s many of the gains won by blacks in the Civil War had been erased. “Jim Crow” racist laws ruled the south, lynching of black men was common, and segregation was entrenched. Chester went home to Harrisburg, by all accounts a “disillusioned man.” He died in his mother’s Harrisburg home on September 30, 1892. But his sad end cannot erase his trailblazing accomplishments.
Sources:
R.J.M. Blackett, Thomas Morris Chester, Black Civil War Correspondent: His Dispatches from the Front Louisiana State University Press, 1989)
Noah Andre Trudeau, Out of the Storm: The End of the Civil War, April-June 1865 (Little, Brown and Co., 1994)
 |
