Richard Harvey Cain

(1825 - 1887)

Richard Harvey Cain went to college in Ohio, where his parents had moved from Virginia in search of better opportunities for free African Americans. Cain became a pastor in Charleston after the Civil War and was elected to South Carolina’s state senate in 1868. The following year he introduced a resolution to ask Congress to purchase land to be sold or redistributed to landless citizens. Congress refused, and two years later Cain carried out the project himself on a two-thousand-acre plot he purchased near Charleston. He later served two terms in the U.S. House of Representatives.