 During the campaign, Cheatham was reported by North Carolina papers to have allegedly told black voters that Simmons and President Grover Cleveland would re-enslave them.Other press outlets of the time dismissed these allegations by the press as hyperbole or having misrepresented Cheatham's words.In a period of disfranchisement of blacks in the South, Cheatham was one of five African Americans elected to Congress during the Jim Crow era of the late nineteenth century.