Lynch, John Roy

Source:

 African American National Biography

Lynch, John Roy

(10 Sept. 1847–2 Nov. 1939),

U.S. congressman, historian, and attorney, was born on Tacony plantation near Vidalia, Louisiana, the son of Patrick Lynch, the manager of the plantation, and Catherine White, a slave. Patrick Lynch, an Irish immigrant, purchased his wife and two children, but in order to free them, existing state law required they leave Louisiana. Before Patrick Lynch died, he transferred the titles to his wife and children to a friend, William Deal, who promised to treat them as free persons. However, when Patrick Lynch died, Deal sold the family to a planter, Alfred W. Davis, in Natchez, Mississippi. When Davis learned of the conditions of the transfer to Deal, he agreed to allow Catherine Lynch to hire her own time while he honeymooned with his new wife in Europe. Under this arrangement, Catherine Lynch lived in Natchez, worked for various employers, and paid $3.50 a week to an agent of Davis, keeping whatever else she earned.

On Davis's return, he and Catherine Lynch reached an agreement that her elder son would work as a dining room servant and the younger, John Roy, would be Davis's valet. Catherine accepted these conditions, recognizing that she had no alternative. Under this arrangement, John Roy Lynch studied for confirmation and baptism in the Episcopal Church, but the Civil War intervened. Lynch attended black Baptist and Methodist churches during and after the war. Because of a falling-out with Davis's wife, Lynch briefly worked on a plantation until he became ill.

When Union forces reached Natchez in 1863, they freed Lynch, who was sixteen years old. He was visiting relatives at Tacony when Confederate troops overran the plantation and began seizing the former slaves as captives. Lynch convinced the troops that the workers had smallpox, which was a ruse, and the military released them.

Lynch worked at several jobs from 1865 to 1866, including dining room waiter at a boardinghouse, cook with the Forty-ninth Illinois Volunteers Regiment, and pantryman aboard a troop transport ship moored at Natchez. Eventually he became a messenger in a photography shop, where he learned the photographic developing process as a “printer.” He continued that line of work with another shop, and in 1866 he took over the full management of a photography shop in Natchez. Briefly attending a grammar school operated by northern teachers, he learned to read by studying newspapers, reading books, and listening to classes given in a white school near his shop. One of the books he studied was on parliamentary law, which fascinated him.

In 1868 Lynch gave a number of speeches in Natchez before the local Republican club in support of the new Mississippi state constitution. The constitution legitimized all slave marriages, including that of his mother and father. In his autobiography Lynch noted that the later constitution, passed by Democrats in 1890, did away with the feature that had legitimized marriages between whites and African Americans but not retroactively.

In 1869 the Natchez Republican club sent Lynch to discuss local political appointments with the state's military governor, Adelbert Ames. Impressed with Lynch's presentation, Ames appointed him justice of the peace, a position Lynch had not sought. Later that year Lynch was elected to the Mississippi house of representatives, where he served through 1873. In his first term he sat on the Judiciary Committee and the Committee on Elections and Education. In his last term he served as Speaker of the house and earned recognition and praise from Republican and Democratic legislators and the local press. During this period he formed an alliance with Governor James L. Alcorn, a white Republican who urged his party to make common cause with black voters. Lynch worked closely with other African Americans in the Mississippi Republican Party, especially Blanche K. Bruce and James Hill. Later he fell into disagreement with Hill, who opposed Lynch's influence in the party.

Lynch was elected to Congress in 1872 and was reelected in 1874. In Congress, he impressed his colleagues with his knowledge of parliamentary procedure, unusual among the small contingent of southern African American Republican members of Congress. Arguing forcefully for the Civil Rights Act of 1875, he called it “an act of simple justice” that “will be instrumental in placing the colored people in a more independent position.” He anticipated that, given more civil rights, blacks would vote in both parties and not depend entirely on the Republican Party.

Defeated in the 1876 congressional election, Lynch charged his opponent with fraud. In the election in 1880, through a series of dishonest practices, including lost ballot boxes, miscounts, and stuffed boxes, at least five thousand votes for Lynch were wrongfully thrown out. General James R. Chalmers, a Democrat, claimed victory, but Lynch contested the election. Finally seated late in the term, Lynch served in 1882–1883. Although he was defeated for reelection in 1882 by Henry S. Van Eaton, Lynch was regarded as a political hero by the Republican Party. He was the keynote speaker and temporary chairman of the 1884 national convention. Lynch was the last black keynote speaker at a national political convention until 1968.

In 1884 Lynch married Ella W. Somerville. They had one child before divorcing in 1900. From 1869 through 1905 he was successful in buying and selling real estate, including plantations, in the Natchez region. In 1889 President Benjamin Harrison appointed Lynch fourth auditor of the Treasury for the Navy Department, and he served to 1893.

In 1890 Lynch protested strongly against the “George” scheme, which, under the new Mississippi state constitution, required a literacy test for voting. An “understanding” clause also allowed registrars to pass whites and deny registration to African Americans who could not satisfactorily demonstrate an understanding of the state constitution.

In 1896 Lynch and Hill led competing delegations to the Republican National Convention. Both factions were committed to William McKinley, and through a compromise, delegates from both groups were seated at the convention. One of Hill's delegates bolted the McKinley slate, reducing the influence of the Hill “machine.” After the election, McKinley gave Lynch partial control over the distribution of political patronage in the state.

Lynch began to study law in the 1890s and was admitted to the Mississippi bar in 1896. He subsequently obtained a license to practice law in Washington, D.C., where he opened an office with Robert H. Terrell, who had worked with him in the Treasury Department. He continued with this practice into 1898.

With the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, McKinley selected Lynch as an additional paymaster of volunteers with the rank of major in the army. In 1900 Lynch was again a delegate to the Republican National Convention, serving on the Committee on Platform and Resolutions and as chair of the subcommittee that drafted the national platform.

After the war Lynch remained with the army and received a regular commission in 1901. For three years he was assigned to Cuba, where he learned Spanish; then he was stationed for three and a half years in Omaha, Nebraska, and for sixteen months in San Francisco. In 1907 he sailed for Hawaii and the Philippines. In the Philippines a medical examiner claimed that Lynch had a serious heart condition and was therefore unfit for service with only a few months to live. Suspecting racial discrimination, Lynch protested directly to Washington and was reassigned to California.

Lynch retired from the army in 1911 and moved to Chicago. In 1912 he married Cora Williamson, who was twenty-seven years younger than he. They had no children. Admitted to the Chicago bar by reciprocity in 1915, he practiced law for more than twenty-five years. During these years he began writing about the Reconstruction period. An early revisionist, he anticipated the later writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and the post–World War II historians, who looked at the achievements of African American politicians in the 1860s and 1870s with more objectivity than prior historians. Lynch published several well-documented works, beginning with The Facts of Reconstruction (1914). Initially rejected by several presses, his critique of James Ford Rhodes's history was published in 1917 and 1918 as two articles in the Journal of Negro History and was republished in 1922 under the title Some Historical Errors of James Ford Rhodes. He also criticized as full of errors Claude G. Bowers's work The Tragic Era (1920). He later incorporated a large section of his 1913 history of Reconstruction in his autobiography, Reminiscences of an Active Life, completed shortly before his death in Chicago but not published until 1970, edited by John Hope Franklin.

An accomplished African American author and politician, Lynch was representative of a small group who worked with some success within the existing political and patronage structure to create opportunities for themselves and to fight for civil rights. Considering his childhood as a slave and his lack of formal education, his achievements as a politician, statesman, and historian are notable.

This entry is taken from the American National Biography and is published here with the permission of the American Council of Learned Societies.

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