The Barber Who Changed America: Joseph Hayne Rainey and the Making of History in Georgetown, SC

There is a house on Prince Street in Georgetown, South Carolina, that does not announce itself. It sits on its lot the way old houses sit in old towns — quietly, without ceremony, the way things that have already proven their worth can afford to do. Built around 1760, it is a two-and-a-half-story frame structure with beaded clapboards and a hipped roof, the kind of house a man of modest means might have built to last, and it has. In the years when the rice planters of the Waccamaw Neck were erecting their great columned houses with the labor of enslaved people, this house on Prince Street held a different kind of story — one that would prove, in the long run, to be the one that mattered more.

On June 21, 1832, a child was born in that house into slavery. His name was Joseph Hayne Rainey. He would die in that same house fifty-five years later, on August 2, 1887. In between those two facts — birth and death in a frame house on a Georgetown side street — he became the first African American ever elected to the United States House of Representatives, served longer in that body than any other Black man in the nineteenth century, stood on the House floor and argued for the rights of every American regardless of race, and sat in the Speaker’s chair on April 29, 1874, as the first Black man ever to preside over a session of Congress. The distance between where he started and where he arrived is one of the great American distances. It is not a metaphor. It is a fact, and it happened here, on the Grand Strand coast, forty miles from the beach.

America turns 250 years old in 2026. The country has spent that time in an argument with itself about what it actually is — what its promises mean, who they include, how far the distance is between the words and the reality. Joseph Rainey’s life is a chapter in that argument, and it is one of the best ones. He did not wait for the argument to be settled. He made himself part of it. He picked up a razor and a briefcase and a seat in the United States Congress and he made it personal. His story begins the way all the best American stories begin — with someone who had every reason to give up and didn’t.

The Town That Made Him

Georgetown in 1832 was a town built on rice and silence. It sat at the confluence of five rivers — the Sampit, the Waccamaw, the Black, the Great Pee Dee, and the Winyah — and it processed and exported more rice than almost anywhere else on earth. The rice did not grow itself. In 1860, 85 percent of Georgetown County’s total population of 21,305 people were enslaved, one of the highest concentrations in the entire South. The county’s wealth — its columned houses, its silver, its reputation for Lowcountry refinement — rested entirely on the forced labor of people the law classified as property.

Into this world, on a summer morning in 1832, Joseph Hayne Rainey arrived. His mother, Gracia, was a woman of African and French descent, her bloodline likely running back through the Haitian revolution and the refugees who fled Saint-Domingue for Carolina shores. His father, Edward L. Rainey, was an enslaved man who had been permitted by his enslaver to work independently as a barber — a common enough arrangement in the antebellum South, where skilled enslaved men were sometimes leased to operate small businesses, provided they returned a portion of their earnings to the master. Edward kept his scissors sharp and his books sharper. He worked. He saved. He understood that money, in a system that reduced human beings to a monetary value, was the only tool he had.

The house on Prince Street where Joseph was born stood in the part of Georgetown where free people of color and skilled tradesmen lived — not the plantation quarter, not the merchant district, but that in-between zone where the town’s complexity revealed itself. Georgetown had always had that complexity. It was a town that had hosted pirates in its early years, that had launched privateers and rice barons and Revolutionary War heroes. It was a town that held enormous human suffering and enormous human resilience simultaneously, the way the tidal rivers around it held both salt and fresh water at the same time, mixing, never quite one thing or the other. Joseph Rainey grew up in all of that.

A Man Who Bought His World

The act Edward Rainey performed in the early 1840s — purchasing the freedom of himself, his wife Gracia, and his sons Joseph and Edward Jr. — was not a small thing dressed up to look large. It was a large thing, and it took years. Under South Carolina law, an enslaved person was permitted to work independently only if a portion of every dollar earned went back to the master. Edward paid that cut. He paid it faithfully and he kept what was left and he kept going. The accumulation of those small kept sums, over years of early mornings and late evenings with a barber’s chair and a sharp blade, added up to something the law said could not belong to him — his family’s liberty.

When freedom came to the family around 1843 or 1844, they did not linger. They moved to Charleston, about 60 miles south, where Edward built a prosperous barbershop business. By 1860 he was successful enough that census records show him owning two enslaved people himself — a disquieting detail that the historical record preserves without apology and which tells you something true and complicated about how people navigated a monstrous system to survive inside it. The elder Rainey was not a villain. He was a man in an impossible world who did what he could to protect and advance his family, and who did it well enough that his son would one day stand in the United States Congress.

South Carolina barred African Americans from attending public school, and Joseph Rainey never received a formal education in any conventional sense. What he received instead was the education of a man determined to fill the gaps himself — some private tutoring in his Charleston years, books borrowed and read by whatever light was available, the deep schooling of a barber who spent his days in close conversation with the powerful and the prosperous. By the 1850s he was cutting hair at the Mills House hotel in Charleston, which was among the most fashionable establishments in the city. He learned to read people. He learned what the men in his chair thought about, what they feared, what they wanted. A barber’s education is not a credential. It is something better — it is an understanding of the world as it actually is, acquired one conversation at a time.

In 1859, Rainey traveled to Philadelphia — that northern city where free Black life had a different texture, where the abolitionists printed their pamphlets and the underground railroad had its conductors — and there he married Susan, a free woman of color from the West Indies of African and French descent, like his mother. They returned to Charleston. They were building a life. Then South Carolina seceded, and the world they were building cracked open at the foundation.

The War and the Escape

The Confederate government did not care that Joseph Rainey was a free man. In 1861, the army pressed him into labor on the fortifications being built around Charleston Harbor — the same earthworks and gun emplacements that would be shelled by the Union Navy for the next four years. A free Black man with a barber’s license meant nothing to a government built on the premise that Black men were tools. Rainey dug and hauled alongside enslaved men, doing the Confederacy’s work because refusal meant something worse than labor.

Later he served as a steward aboard a Confederate blockade runner, one of the fast, shallow-draft ships that slipped through the Union Navy’s cordon to trade in Nassau and Bermuda. The blockade runners operated out of Charleston and Georgetown, carrying cotton and turpentine south and returning with medicine and military supplies. Rainey was aboard one of those ships — serving the cause that had enslaved his parents and that would have re-enslaved him if it could. He watched the coast of South Carolina recede behind him and he watched the islands of Bermuda approach, and in 1862 he and Susan did not come back.

The escape to Bermuda was not heroic in the cinematic sense. There was no dramatic midnight run, no chasing hounds, no safe-house network. It was a man and his wife, on a ship between ports, who simply chose not to return. The island was 600 miles offshore in the Atlantic, a British colony that had abolished slavery in 1834, and it was far enough from South Carolina that the Confederacy could not reach them. That was enough. They went ashore at St. George’s and began again.

The Bermuda Years

There are two ways to survive exile. You can spend it mourning what you left, or you can spend it building. The Raineys built. In St. George’s, Joseph set up a barbershop — the trade he knew, the trade his father had used to buy the family’s freedom — and Susan opened a dressmaker’s shop. They were good at what they did. The island’s economy was booming on blockade-running money, and the Raineys prospered in it. They became respected members of a community where a man’s standing was measured by what he did rather than what he was, which was a novelty that four years in Bermuda would have burned into Joseph Rainey like a brand.

In 1865, yellow fever swept through St. George’s — not the first time disease had moved through those narrow streets, and not the last — and the Raineys relocated to Hamilton, Bermuda’s capital, where Joseph found work at the Hamilton Hotel as a barber and bartender. His customers were mostly white. He cut their hair and he mixed their drinks and he listened, the way he had always listened, and he read the books that neighbors and customers lent him, educating himself in the systematic way that a man who has never been allowed into a school does — deliberately, hungrily, without apology for the gaps. He borrowed. He learned. He got ready for something he could not yet name.

The war news reached Bermuda through sailors and ship captains, piece by piece, the way news traveled in 1865. Word of Lee’s surrender came in the spring. When it did, Rainey published a notice of gratitude in a Bermuda newspaper, thanking the residents of St. George’s for their patronage during his years there. It was a gracious act, the act of a man who understood that debts — of courtesy, of friendship, of community — were real. Then he and Susan packed and sailed for South Carolina. He returned to the house on Prince Street in Georgetown in 1867, thirty-five years old, educated by experience in ways no institution had managed, and ready.

Reconstruction and the Rise

Reconstruction South Carolina was a world turned, for a brief and violent moment, upside down. The Thirteenth Amendment had abolished slavery. The Fourteenth had granted citizenship to formerly enslaved people. The Fifteenth, ratified in February 1870, prohibited the denial of voting rights based on race. For the first time in South Carolina’s history — for the first time in American history — Black men could vote, hold office, and shape the government of the state where they had been the overwhelming majority of the population and the foundation of the entire economy. The Republican Party, which had fought and won the war, organized the new electorate. Rainey joined immediately.

He helped found the South Carolina Republican Party and sat on its central committee. In July 1867 he was elected to represent Georgetown County at the state’s constitutional convention — the gathering that would rewrite South Carolina’s law to accommodate the new America. In 1868 he was elected to the state senate, where he became chairman of the Finance Committee. He was, by all accounts, a moderate and effective legislator — someone who understood that the work of government was not rhetoric but persuasion, not gesture but consequence. He was also, in the eyes of every white Democrat in South Carolina, a man who needed to be stopped.

In 1870, South Carolina’s congressional seat came open when Representative Benjamin Whittemore, a white New England Republican who had moved to South Carolina after the war, resigned under pressure after being censured for selling an appointment to the Naval Academy. The Republican Party looked to Rainey. He ran for the remainder of the term in a special election and won with 86 percent of the vote. He ran simultaneously for the full next term and won that too, with 63 percent. The people of Georgetown County and the surrounding congressional district — most of them Black, most of them people who had been enslaved a few years before — sent their man to Washington. He was thirty-eight years old. He had never held a national office. He had been born in bondage on a side street in a rice town on the South Carolina coast. He was going to the United States Congress.

Joseph Hayne Rainey: A Life in Dates

December 12, 1870

The date deserves its own section, its own paragraph, its own moment to sit in. On Monday, December 12, 1870, Joseph Hayne Rainey approached the rostrum of the United States House of Representatives, escorted by Representative Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, and took the oath of office. Newspapers across the country noted it the next morning. Ten months earlier, Hiram Revels of Mississippi had been seated in the Senate — the first Black man to serve in Congress — but the Senate seat had been an appointment by the Mississippi state legislature, and Revels’s term was brief. Rainey had been elected by voters. He had run, won, and arrived. The gallery was crowded. The chamber watched.

The Washington Republican recorded the moment with journalistic plainness: “Mr. Rainey, the first colored member in the House of Representatives, came forward and was sworn in.” Journalistic plainness cannot contain what that sentence actually means. This was a man born in a house on Prince Street in Georgetown, South Carolina, in a year when the same town’s rice planters owned more than a thousand enslaved people each. This was a man who had dug Confederate fortifications with his hands. This was a man who had cut hair for white men in a Bermuda hotel and read borrowed books by lamplight and figured out, one piece at a time, what the country he was returning to needed from him. He raised his right hand and took the oath and sat down in a carved wooden desk in the United States House of Representatives, and the world was different from what it had been the day before.

On the Floor of Congress

Rainey was not a man who went to Congress to be ornamental. He went to work, and the work was urgent, because outside the Capitol’s marble walls the Ku Klux Klan was burning, murdering, and terrorizing Black communities across the South with a systematic violence that state governments either could not or would not stop. On April 1, 1871, less than four months after taking his seat, Rainey delivered his first major address to the House, calling for the passage of what would become the Ku Klux Klan Act — federal legislation empowering the president to use military force to suppress the Klan and prosecute its members in federal court.

He spoke from experience that no white colleague in that chamber possessed. He told them what it was like to travel between South Carolina and Washington — the hotel clerk who grabbed him by the collar and threw him out of a whites-only dining room, the dining hall that refused to serve him, the pub that charged him more than it charged white men for the same glass of beer. He told them what his constituents faced: the Klan riders who came at night, the bodies left in the roads, the terror that was not random but organized, not passionate but cold, not a mob but an army. After his speech, Rainey received a death threat written in red ink, instructing him and other advocates of Black civil rights to prepare to meet their God. He kept going.

President Ulysses S. Grant signed the Ku Klux Klan Act into law on April 20, 1871. For a period it worked — Grant used the law’s powers to prosecute and break Klan operations across South Carolina, and the organized terror subsided. But it was not finished, not by far, and Rainey knew it. He stayed in Congress, won re-election without opposition in 1872, and kept pushing.

His vision of who deserved protection was larger than most of his contemporaries’. In 1874, when Congress debated a bill that would bar Chinese workers from taking part in federally funded construction, Rainey stood and opposed it on principle. He said that the Chinaman, the Indian, the Negro, and the white man should all occupy equal footing under the government, should all have equal right to make their livelihood and establish their manhood. This from a congressman in 1874. A man born enslaved on the South Carolina coast, arguing for the rights of Chinese immigrant laborers in San Francisco, on the floor of the United States Congress. The distance between Georgetown and that moment is not only geographical.

He also fought for Indigenous sovereignty and argued that the federal government was bound to honor its existing treaties with Native American tribes. He fought for the Civil Rights Act of 1875, making three separate speeches in its support — a bill that would guarantee equal treatment in public accommodations regardless of race. The bill passed, though Congress stripped out its provisions on integrated schools before it did. The Supreme Court struck it down eight years later. The full reach of what Rainey was trying to build would have to wait for another generation, and another, and another still.

The Gavel, the Twilight, and the End

On April 29, 1874, the House of Representatives gathered as a Committee of the Whole to debate the Indian Affairs Bill. The Speaker stepped down from the chair and invited members to take the gavel in rotation. When Joseph Rainey’s name was called and he walked to the rostrum and sat in the Speaker’s chair, it was the first time a Black man had ever presided over a session of the United States Congress. Newspapers called it historic, meaningful, an indication that the world moves. The Baltimore Sun said it. The Boston Globe said it. The Herald called it a scene that would make the history of the session memorable in American annals. Rainey brought the gavel down and called the session to order and directed debate, the way a man who has been preparing for something his entire life does it when the moment finally comes — with a calm that looks, from the outside, almost like it was inevitable.

He was worried enough about Klan violence that he bought a summer house in Windsor, Connecticut — a safe house, in practical terms, where his wife and children could live through the hot months when returning to South Carolina made them targets. This was what it cost to be a Black congressman in Reconstruction America: you had to maintain two residences, one for governing and one for surviving. He kept going anyway.

The end came the way ends come when the politics change and the ground shifts and the people who had your back are no longer in power. Democrats took control of the House in the 1874 election. Reconstruction began its long retreat. In 1876, the presidential election was decided by a commission, and the deal that followed — the Compromise of 1877, which put Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House — effectively ended Reconstruction in the South. Federal troops withdrew. White supremacist paramilitary groups called the Red Shirts terrorized Black voters across South Carolina with an efficiency the Klan had never achieved. Rainey won re-election in 1876, barely, with 52 percent of the vote. He lost his fifth re-election bid in 1878 and left Congress in March 1879 after nine years of service.

The rest of his life was hard in the way that lives after great things are sometimes hard. He served as an Internal Revenue agent in South Carolina until 1881, then tried banking and brokerage in Washington, which failed. He managed a coal and wood yard. He came home to Georgetown, ill and poor, in 1886 and died in the house on Prince Street on August 2, 1887 — the same house where he had been born fifty-five years before. He left a widow, three children, and a legacy that the country he served would spend the next century and a half slowly learning to fully acknowledge.

What Remains in Georgetown

Georgetown has not forgotten him, though the country took a long time getting around to remembering. The house at 909 Prince Street — built around 1760, the place where Joseph Rainey was born and died and launched a political career that changed American history — was designated a National Historic Landmark on April 20, 1984. It is a featured stop on Georgetown’s historic walking tour, and it stands today much as it stood in 1832, its beaded clapboards and hipped roof unchanged by the passage of events that would have been beyond the imagining of anyone standing on that street in the year Rainey was born. It is a private residence, but its exterior is part of the walking tour available through the Georgetown County Chamber of Commerce, whose visitors center sits at 531 Front Street.

Joseph Rainey Park sits on Front Street, Georgetown’s old commercial waterfront, named for the congressman and positioned in the heart of the historic district. The Gullah Museum of Georgetown, at 123 King Street, tells the broader story of the Gullah Geechee people whose culture and labor built the rice empire Rainey was born into. The Georgetown County Museum and the Rice Museum on Front Street place his story in its full historical context. Georgetown’s African-American Heritage Tour — brochures available at the Chamber visitors center and at the Litchfield/Pawleys Island location — connects Rainey’s house to the broader network of Black history sites in the county.

The portrait of Joseph Hayne Rainey painted by Simmie Knox in 2004 — the same artist who painted the first portrait of an African American president, Bill Clinton, to hang in the White House — is part of the collection of the United States House of Representatives and hangs in the Capitol. The man in that portrait grew up in a house on a side street in a small South Carolina rice town. He had no formal education. He learned his trade with a razor and his politics from the ground up. He walked onto the floor of the United States Congress and demanded that it be what it claimed to be. In America’s 250th anniversary year, that story belongs at the center of what we’re celebrating — not at the margins, not as a footnote, but as the thing itself. The full promise of the country.

Georgetown is about 35 miles south of Ocean Drive in North Myrtle Beach via Highway 17 — a straight shot down the coast that passes through the long flat beauty of the Grand Strand, past the salt marshes and the live oaks and the towns that have been sitting on this water since before the country had a name. The drive itself is worth it. Crescent Beach and Cherry Grove are right there when you come back, the Atlantic doing what it does, the same water it was when Rainey was a boy in Georgetown looking out at the world he was going to change.

Frequently Asked Questions

From Windy Hill Beach at the northern end of the Grand Strand to the quiet streets of Georgetown at the south, this coast carries more American history per mile than almost anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard. Joseph Rainey walked it, knew it, and left it better than he found it.

Sources: U.S. House of Representatives History, Art & Archives — RAINEY, Joseph Hayne biography; Smithsonian Magazine, “Meet Joseph Rainey, the First Black Congressman” (2021); SC Encyclopedia — “Rainey, Joseph Hayne”; Britannica — Joseph Hayne Rainey; BlackPast.org — Joseph Hayne Rainey (1832–1887); Joseph H. Rainey House, National Historic Landmark, SC Dept. of Archives and History; Wikipedia — Joseph Rainey, Joseph H. Rainey House; U.S. House of Representatives Blog, “Joseph Rainey and Reconstruction’s Promise” (Dec. 2020); U.S. House of Representatives Blog, “Rediscovering Rainey’s Reign” (April 2016); Library of America — “Joseph H. Rainey: The Destruction of a Free Ballot”; Zinn Education Project — Joseph H. Rainey; Alchetron — Joseph Rainey; Amsterdam News, “Rep. Joseph H. Rainey, a Prominent Reconstruction Leader”; GUOOF — “South Carolina’s Bermuda Connection”; Hammock Coast SC — “U.S. House Honors Georgetown History-Making African American”; Georgetown County official history — gtcounty.org; Gullah Museum of Georgetown — gullahmuseumsc.com; U.S. Senate Historical Office — Hiram Revels.