He was born on May 3, 1833, at Zion Settlement, near Columbia, Tennessee, in Maury County.
[3] During the Civil War, he supported the Union actively, suffering injury, threats to his life, and property damage from Confederate forces.
He served in the Tennessee House of Representatives in 1865 and 1866, where he authored a series of bills to expand voting rights to former slaves and that attempted unsuccessfully to strip the voting rights of former Confederate soldiers and officials for periods of 5 and 15 years, respectively;[2] however, the definitions used to expand rights to blacks are seen by some historians as also having established an early version of the "one-drop" rule in Tennessee law.
[5] Upon the readmission of Tennessee to representation, he was elected as an Unconditional Unionist to the Thirty-ninth Congress.
He was chairman of the United States House Committee on Education and Labor during the Forty-first Congress.