Willis Augustus Hodges

Willis Augustus Hodges (February 12, 1815 – September 24, 1890) was an African American abolitionist, journalist, and statesman. Though born to free parents, Hodges became an outspoken advocate for enslaved African Americans during the Antebellum period, giving aid to the Underground Railroad, collaborating with such notable figures as William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown and Frederick Douglass, and publishing an antislavery newspaper, The Ram’s Horn. Following the Civil War, Hodges was active in Reconstruction politics, attending the State Constitutional Convention of Virginia as a delegate from 1867 to 1868.

Hodges was born in Princess Anne County, Virginia on February 12, 1815 to Charles Augustus Hodges, a free African American, and Julia Nelson Willis, a free woman of mixed-race descent. Charles was a landowner and a successful farmer, owning 200 acres of property and one slave by the time of 1840. While he would later come to be a forceful opponent of slavery, Willis's origins led to a lifelong concern for the free blacks in the South, and he dedicated his autobiography to their plight.

When Willis was fourteen, his brother William was arrested for antislavery agitation and thrown into jail. He escaped and fled to Canada, but the incident marked the Hodges family as pariahs in Princess Anne County, and young Willis found himself the victim of mob violence on more than one occasion during this time. Further discriminatory measures taken by whites in the aftermath of the Nat Turner rebellion caused Willis to leave Virginia for New York in 1836. At the instigation of his sister, Willis devoted himself to study, and he soon began attending antislavery meetings. Hodges quickly grew impatient with Northerners he viewed as being "more men of words than deeds," and became an impassioned advocate for the immediate abolition of slavery by any means necessary. He started a newspaper, The Ram's Horn, in the 1840s, which soon drew him into collaboration with John Brown, the antislavery zealot who would famously go on to raid Harpers Ferry, Virginia in 1859.

During the Civil War, Hodges served as a scout for the Union Army and used his knowledge of Princess Anne County and the surrounding area to assist Federal forces in its occupation. At the conclusion of the war, Hodges returned to his boyhood home and was chosen to represent Virginia at the constitutional convention of 1867-1868. The conventions of this period, mandated by the United States Congress, marked the "first time [blacks] sat alongside whites as lawmakers," both in Virginia and throughout the occupied south. Hodges' leading role at the convention singled him out for ridicule in the southern press, which was often bitterly hostile to the role of African Americans in Reconstruction. Aligning himself with the Radical Republicans, Hodges supported the enfranchisement of blacks, demanded the disenfranchisement of former Confederates, and sought the racial integration of schools. When Democrats returned to power in Virginia, Hodges again went to New York in 1881, though he would revisit Virginia in later years.

Hodges died on September 24, 1890, in Norfolk, Virginia. He was seventy-five.

Foner, Eric. "Blueprints for a Republican South: The Constitutional Conventions." In Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 316-33. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2014.

Hodges, Willis Augustus, and Willard B. Gatewood. Free Man of Color: The Autobiography of Willis Augustus Hodges. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982.

Kirk, Ian. "Hodges, Willis Augustus (1815-1890)." The Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed. Accessed November 17, 2018. https://blackpast.org/aah/hodges-willis-augustus-1815-1890.

Lowe, Richard. "William Augustus Hodges: "We Are Now Coming to New Things"." Edited by Steven Woodworth. In The Human Tradition in the Civil War and Reconstruction, 213-24. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 2000.