John Oliver (d. 25 November 1899), civic leader, educator, and Republican Party leader, was born free in Dinwiddie County on an unrecorded date as early as about 1821 or as late as about 1833. He was the son of Thomas A. Oliver and a woman named Mary (surname unknown). Like many free African Americans, he made his way north and was in Boston by about 1848, where he worked as a carpenter, taught school, and studied for the ministry. An anti-slavery activist, he also provided shelter in his home for people escaping from slavery. Oliver married Louisa DeMortie, a Norfolk native and actress, in Washington, D.C., on 8 June 1852. She was probably a sister of Mark Renie (or Réné) DeMortie, also a native of Norfolk, who moved to Boston in the 1850s and returned to Virginia after the Civil War and also took part in Republican Party politics. Oliver and his wife probably had one son, Wendell Phillips Oliver, who died of measles in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in July 1854. They separated and he briefly traveled to California, and then spent the winter of 1856–1857 in Oberlin, Ohio, before he returned to Cambridge. She obtained a divorce in April 1862 on grounds of desertion and cruelty.

In 1862, after Oliver heard William Roscoe Davis, a leader among the freedpeople in Hampton, Virginia, who spoke about their plight while in Boston on a tour to raise money for a school, he went to Virginia to teach under the sponsorship of the American Missionary Association. Oliver taught in Hampton, Newport News, and Portsmouth. He wrote to the abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, to report on brutal treatment that United States Army officers and soldiers inflicted on some freedpeople and about corrupt army quartermasters. He spent about two years in Philadelphia helping run an employment agency for enslaved people who escaped north, and shortly after the Civil War Oliver moved to Richmond. Authorities briefly jailed him in a former slave trader's pen, probably because he was an African American from Boston. The Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (known generally as the Freedmen's Bureau) employed him as a clerk for nine months in 1865 and 1866.

With Peter Randolph, a clergyman and fellow Virginia émigré and longtime Boston resident, Oliver founded a black Masonic lodge in Richmond. In May 1867 Oliver was one of six African American men appointed by Judge John Curtis Underwood to the grand jury for the United States Circuit Court for the District of Virginia. Sworn in on 6 May, the members of what was likely the first interracial jury in Virginia sat during several sessions of the term that lasted until November and were present when Jefferson Davis appeared in court and was served the writ on his May 1866 indictment for treason. Oliver and the grand jury indicted several other Confederate officials for high treason and issued true bills in other cases, including the possession and passing of counterfeit currency. Also in May 1867 the governor appointed Oliver a notary public for Richmond and Henrico County, reportedly the first appointment of an African American to that office.

In May 1868 he succeeded a white man whose term had expired to become messenger for the common council, making him the highest ranking African American in Richmond's government. He had an office next to the mayor's in city hall. Oliver was a deputy United States marshal in 1870, when he assisted with taking that year's census. Concerned for the welfare of African American laborers, Oliver presided over a meeting of the Colored National Labor Union that met in Richmond in April 1870 and he served as president of the short-lived local chapter for about two years. That same month he chaired a committee that organized a parade celebrating the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment granting the right to vote to African American men.

Throughout his public career Oliver was politically moderate yet popular with the masses of freedmen. He gained the respect of many white men as an articulate speaker who often delivered long addresses without notes. In January 1872 he was one of the leaders from Virginia and Washington, D.C., who called on President Ulysses S. Grant at the White House to urge his support for a civil rights bill then before Congress. He praised Grant and subsequently helped lead his presidential campaign among African Americans. Oliver won election to Richmond's common council in May 1872, becoming one of the first five of the thirty-three African Americans elected to the council during the following twenty-five years. He resigned his seat in May 1873. Oliver saw earlier than some other men in politics that by the mid-1870s the political opportunities for his race were dwindling, yet he continued to be active in Republican politics, arguing for the inclusion of African American men on juries, the nomination of African American candidates for office, and for more African American teachers. By 1879 he warned against being "the willing subjects" of any political parties controlled by white men, but "to make use of every political advantage that will result in the fullest recognition of justice before the law."

In Richmond on 20 August 1872 Oliver married Fannie E. Troy, with whom he had five children. She was the daughter of a free African American minister who had left Virginia for Ohio before the Civil War and returned to Richmond as pastor of Second African Baptist Church and then Moore Street Baptist Church. In 1876 Oliver began raising money to establish the Moore Street Industrial Institution in the city's Jackson Ward. Operating in three buildings on an acre of land, the school opened about 1879 and provided elementary education as well as training in vocational subjects. Oliver was its superintendent for twenty years as hundreds of girls learned sewing and boys learned skills such as carpentry and printing. The school published the Industrial Herald, a newspaper Oliver edited during the 1880s. He traveled widely on fundraising trips, especially in the northern states, and spoke in Boston, Providence, New Haven, Hartford, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Oliver's school won endorsements and financial support from many prominent white Americans, including two presidents and a chief justice of the United States, Virginia superintendent of public instruction William Henry Ruffner, and Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry of the Peabody Education Fund, and was partially funded by the John F. Slater Fund. Controversy arose with the adjacent Moore Street Baptist Church about the validity of the deed on the land where the church and school stood. Several years after the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals ruled in 1895 that the church owned the land, the church gained sole possession of the property and the school closed after Oliver's death.

John Oliver died suddenly of gastritis on 25 November 1899 while passing through Boston, where he still owned a house. He had not lived or worked in the city since 1862 but was still well known. A death notice and an obituary appeared in the Boston Herald, and a local minister gave the sermon at his funeral. He was buried in a plot he owned in Woodlawn Cemetery in Everett, Massachusetts, just north of Boston.

Sources Consulted: Michael B. Chesson, "Richmond's Black Councilmen, 1871–96," in Southern Black Leaders of the Reconstruction Era, ed. Howard N. Rabinowitz (1982), 191–222; Robert Francis Engs, Freedom's First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861–1890 (1979); Peter J. Rachleff, Black Labor in the South: Richmond, Virginia, 1865–1890 (1984); correspondence in American Missionary Association Archives, Amistad Research Center, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, some printed in C. Peter Ripley et al, eds., The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 5, The United States, 1859–1865 (1992); first marriage in Alexandria Gazette, 10 June 1852; divorce in Boston Herald, 4 Feb. 1862, 17 Apr. 1862; second marriage (giving age forty-six, birthplace, and parents' names) in Marriage Register, Richmond City, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia (LVA); Oliver, "Brutal Treatment of Slaves by Gen. Corcoran," The Liberator, 26 Dec. 1862; Washington, D.C., New Era, 21 Apr. 1870, and New National Era, 3 Aug. 1871; Richmond Virginia Star, 27 Sept. 1879 (quotation); Oliver's testimony (giving his age as fifty on 10 March 1883) in Papers and Testimony in the Contested-Election Case of John E. Massey vs. John S. Wise, from the State of Virginia At Large (1884), 48th Cong., 1st Sess., Misc. Doc. 27, pt. 2, 1243–1245; Moore St. Industrial Institution (1888); records of Moore Street Industrial Institution interleaved in Moore Street Missionary Baptist Church Minute Book and Ministers' Aid Society Ledger, 1875–1882, Henrico Co. Court Records, LVA; Charles J. Clarke etc. v. John Oliver etc., Henrico Co. Chancery Cause, 1896-053, LVA; Clark and Others v. Oliver and Others printed in Virginia Law Register 1 (1895): 189–195; portrait in 1867 grand jury photograph (misidentified as the jury that indicted Jefferson Davis), Confederate Memorial Literary Society Image Collection at Virginia Historical Society, Richmond; Registration of Deaths (with age seventy-eight, place of birth, and parents' names), Massachusetts Division of Vital Statistics, Boston; death notice in Boston Sunday Herald, 26 Nov. 1899; obituary in Richmond Planet, 2 Dec. 1899 ("about 78 years of age"); account of funeral in Boston Herald, 28 Nov. 1899; memorial by John Wesley Cromwell, Richmond Planet, 30 Dec. 1899.

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Michael B. Chesson.

How to cite this page:
Michael B. Chesson, "John Oliver (d. 1899)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2021 (https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.php?b=Oliver_John, accessed [today's date]).

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