He sat at the Confederate Speaker’s desk in the Virginia State House the day Richmond fell and filed his dispatch from there. Thomas Morris Chester needs to be remembered.
The Chair
He sat down in the Speaker’s chair in the Virginia State House on the day after Richmond fell and began to write. 
The chair had belonged to the Confederacy.
He was a Black man, the son of a woman who had run from slavery, and he put his paper on the desk and started his dispatch as if the desk had been waiting for him all along.
A paroled Rebel officer came to the door and saw him there. “Come out of there, you black cuss,” the officer said. Chester did not look up. He kept writing. The officer told him he would knock his brains out. Chester kept writing. Then the officer crossed the room to drag him from the chair, and Chester stood and hit him once, hard, and the man went down on the floor of his own Congress.
That is the moment people remember. It is worth remembering. But the courage was not in the punch. The courage was in the year that came before it, and in the choice he made to be in that chair at all.
The Man and Where He Came From
Thomas Morris Chester was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on May 11, 1834. His mother, Jane, had escaped slavery at nineteen. His father sold oysters and ran a restaurant where a man could buy a steak and read Garrison’s Liberator at the same table. The boy grew up free in a country that did not mean it.
He did not believe at first that the country could be fixed. The economic and social bars on free Black men in the North were lighter than the chains of the South, but the political bars were heavy enough — in Pennsylvania, his own state, a free Black man could not vote. So he looked elsewhere.
He went to Liberia twice, taught school there to the children of former American slaves, started a newspaper in Monrovia, came home, went back, got into Liberian politics and backed a man who lost. For a time he thought the only answer for a Black man was to leave the country that would not have him. He spoke at meetings and tried to persuade other free Black men to go with him. They would not. America, they told him, was their home too.
The Fugitive Slave Law had made even free men into prey. His own mother, twenty-five years gone from bondage, could still be hauled south on a stranger’s word. A federal agent could seize any Black man on a trumped-up charge, and the man would have no right to speak in his own defense.
The Decision
Then came the war, and the Emancipation Proclamation, and the call for Black soldiers. Chester helped recruit them. He had seen what they were and what they faced. So when the Philadelphia Press offered him a job in August 1864 — to go to the Virginia front and cover the colored troops — he took it without hesitation.
He was the only one. Hundreds of correspondents covered that war. Every other one was white. Chester wrote under the name “Rollin,” and from August 1864 to the end he was embedded with the Army of the James, with the men of the United States Colored Troops who would become the Twenty-fifth Corps.
His career opened with a bang. On August 9, 1864, he stood about a mile from the wharves at City Point on the James River and watched a Confederate charge planted on an ammunition barge tear the Union supply depot apart — smoke and fire into the noon sky, men and timber thrown across the water. He wrote it down. It was the first of the series, and it told his editors what kind of correspondent they had hired. He went toward the thing and described it plainly.
The danger was not the danger other reporters carried. A white correspondent who was captured became a prisoner. Chester knew that if the Confederates took him, they would shoot him where he stood or sell him into slavery. He had written the truth of it himself. Between the colored troops and the enemy, he reported, it was a war to the death, and the men around him did not expect to live if they fell into Rebel hands.
He wrote it all down. He wrote the bravery, the men who stood and did not waver. He wrote the names of the dead and the wounded so their families would know. And he wrote the things no one wanted printed — a Rebel officer who put a pistol to the heads of five wounded Black men and shot them one by one. He did not soften it. He had a large white audience and one chance to tell them the truth about what these men were and what was being done to them, and he was not going to let it pass.
The Aftermath
On April 3, 1865, Richmond fell. The Black regiments of the Twenty-fifth Corps were among the first into the city. Chester went in with them. He was the first correspondent inside the limits of the fallen capital, and the men he had followed for eight months walked the streets of the city that had been built to keep them in chains.
He went to the State House, to the hall where the Confederate Congress had sat, and he took the Speaker’s chair. He dated his dispatch from there. The chair so long given to treason, he wrote, would now be given to loyalty. Then the officer came to the door, and the thing happened that the other reporters wrote down.
Charles Carleton Coffin of the Boston Journal watched it and set it on paper. The officer’s threats, the silence, the punch that dropped him. When the Rebel got up he asked a passing Union captain for the loan of his sword so he could cut the Black man’s heart out. The captain looked at the size of Chester and declined. If you want to fight, he told the Confederate, I’ll clear a space and see you get fair play — and let me tell you, you’ll get a tremendous thrashing. The Rebel thought better of it and left. Chester finished his dispatch and sent it north.
After the war he did not stop. He sailed to England and studied law at the Middle Temple in London, and on April 30, 1870, he was called to the bar — the first African American barrister in England. He came home and practiced law in Louisiana, the first Black man to do so in that state, and defended the rights of his people in the years when the country was busy taking them back.
What It Means
He died in Harrisburg on September 30, 1892, at fifty-eight, disappointed. The country he had fought to make was still steeped in the injustice he had spent his life against. He had punched a Confederate out of his own chair and it had not been enough. It is never enough in one life.
But the dispatches survived. R.J.M. Blackett gathered them and they were published, and they remain the most sustained first-hand account of Black soldiers in that war — written by the one man who could see those soldiers as men, because he was one, and because he had chosen to stand where they stood.
He never picked up a rifle.
He carried a pencil into a place where his skin could get him killed or sold, and he wrote.
Thomas Morris Chester needs to be remembered.
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About the Author
Charles C. Jett is a civic educator, author, and Professional Certified Coach. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and Harvard Business School, he served as a Cold War submarine officer and spent his career in executive search. He writes the Courage and Consequence series at criticalskillsblog.com and civicsage.com.
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