Halifax County NcArchives Biographies.....O'Hara, James Edward  
February 26, 1844 - September 15, 1905
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File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by:
Taneya Koonce ncgenwebproject@gmail.com February 20, 2010, 8:24 pm

Source: Ragsdale, Bruce A., and Joel D. Treese. Black Americans in Congress, 1870-1989.
United States Congressional serial set, serial set number 13947. Washington, D.C.: U.S. 
G.P.O., 1990.
Author: U.S. Government Printing Office

The son of an Irish merchant and a West Indian woman, James Edward O'Hara was 
born in New York City on February 26, 1844, and attended public schools there. 
In 1862 O'Hara moved to North Carolina with a group of missionaries and began 
the study of law. He also attended law classes at Howard University but did not 
graduate. In June 1871 O'Hara was admitted to the North Carolina bar and 
subsequently commenced practice in Enfield in Halifax County.

In the years following the Civil War O'Hara often served as a secretary at 
freedmen's and Republican party meetings, composing reports of these gatherings 
for newspaper readers. He was a delegate to and engrossing clerk of the 1868 
North Carolina Constitutional Convention and served in the state house of 
representatives in 1868 and 1869. In 1873 he became chairman of the Halifax 
County board of commissioners. O'Hara was also a delegate from Halifax County to 
the state convention held in Raleigh during the fall of 1875 which drafted 
ordinances to amend the constitution of 1868. O'Hara made his first bid for 
Congress in 1874 but lost the Second Congressional District's Republican 
nomination to John A. Hyman. O'Hara received the party's endorsement in 1878 but
another Republican, James H. Harris, divided the party's vote, narrowly giving the
election to Democrat William H. Kitchin. O'Hara challenged the results, but his 
evidence was destroyed when his house burned down. He failed to persuade either 
the state courts or the Forty-sixth Congress to unseat Kitchin. In 1880 O'Hara 
again campaigned for the Republican nomination in the Second District and lost to 
Orlando Hubbs. In 1882 he finally won the nomination and the seat by a wide margin 
over token opposition. Democrats controlled the Forty-eighth Congress in which 
O'Hara took his seat on March 4, 1883. Until the arrival of Robert Smalls in March 
1884, O'Hara was the only black member of Congress. He served on the Committee on 
Mines and Mining and the Committee on Expenditures on Public Buildings. 

Shortly after the beginning of the first session on December 3, 1883, O'Hara 
proposed a civil rights constitutional amendment, but the House failed to consider 
it. He was unable to secure passage of legislation to reimburse depositors of the 
failed Freedmen's Savings and Trust Company for their losses. When the House 
considered a bill to regulate interstate commerce, O'Hara added an amendment 
requiring equal accommodations for all travelers on railroad passenger cars regardless 
of color. O'Hara maintained that Congress had authority over passenger as well as 
freight cars. If Congress could set standards for the treatment of animals 
transported by rail, it could also take steps to assure equal treatment of 
citizens who rode the railroads. The Interstate Commerce Act, however, finally 
passed by Congress in 1887, fell short of what O'Hara had envisaged, and 
permitted railroads to segregate passengers. O'Hara was reelected over Democrat 
Frederick A. Woodward in 1884 and moved from the Committee on Mines and Mining to the 
Committee on Invalid Pensions when the Forty-ninth Congress convened in December 
1885. In January 1886 he made an unsuccessful effort to reappraise the value of 
the legendary ship, the Planter, made famous by the exploits of Robert Smalls, 
and to extend the benefits received by Smalls and his crew. 

When, on March 17, a white mob surrounded and entered the Carrollton, 
Mississippi, courthouse, where seven whites were about to be tried for 
assaulting two blacks, and opened fire on all the blacks present, killing eleven 
and wounding nine, O'Hara introduced a resolution calling on Speaker John G. 
Carlisle to appoint a committee of five members to investigate the incident and 
issue a report. The proposal was referred to the Rules Committee but never emerged. 
The following year O'Hara expressed an interest in women's rights. In January 1887 
he amended a District of Columbia appropriations bill by inserting a proviso that no 
discrimination be made in the salaries of male and female teachers who held the 
same certificates and performed similar duties. Internal feuds among the Second 
District's Republicans ended O'Hara's congressional career. Another black Republican, 
Israel B. Abbott, entered the 1886 race, and Democrat Furnifold McL. Simmons 
took advantage of the G.O.P. breach, and won with forty-five percent of the 
vote. O'Hara never gain held public office. He returned to his law practice
in partnership with his son Raphael. He died in New Bern on September 15, 1905.

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