How Hiram and Blanche did their bit for the President

For it was not until the 1860s, with the exhausted, slave-holding Southern states beaten and occupied by Union troops, that the first great wave of black politicians swept into Washington. Liberated from slavery by Abraham Lincoln, Southern blacks enthusiastically chose other blacks to represent them, sending a total of 17 black senators and representatives to Congress during the "Reconstruction" years of the late 1860s and 1870s.

The two most successful black politicians, Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce, were both elected to the Senate from Mississippi. Revels was a free-born clergyman of mixed race who had preached across the Midwest during the 1850s and then raised black regiments during the Civil War. In 1869 he was elected to the Mississippi legislature and a year later he became the first black senator in American history. White racists were furious, yet many fellow senators were deeply impressed by Revels's talent and dignity. He was "a man of great natural ability", wrote one observer, and "superior attainments".

Blanche Bruce's story was even more striking. Born on a Virginia plantation, he was the son of a slave mother and her white owner, who freed him when he was in his teens. Initially Bruce worked as a printer's apprentice and steamboat porter; after the Civil War, he slowly clambered up the political ladder, joining the US Senate in 1875. And in 1880 he became the first black man to attract support at a major party convention, attracting eight votes in a bid for the Republicans' vice-presidential slot.

Tragically, Reconstruction was a false dawn. When Northern troops pulled out of the South after 1876, the old white landowners reasserted their power. Blacks were steadily stripped of the vote, and the last black US congressman finished his term in 1901.

It took the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s to restore the vote to millions of Southern blacks. But although civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson dominated the headlines, few were elected to Congress. They preferred to work on the streets than in Washington - and so, even today, Obama is only the fifth black senator in history.

With his triumph last night, history has turned a corner. As president, unlike so many black politicians before him, he will be judged on his achievements - not his skin colour.