Cuba Station, Alabama on May 8, 1865 and paroled at Meridian, Mississippi on May 14, 1865. He was pardoned on September 25, 1866. Postbellum career Gibson returned to Louisiana after the war, working to help the state recover. It had suffered much damage to levees along the Mississippi, which threatened the large-scale plantations for cotton and sugar. Planters struggled to deal with free labor after the war. In 1874, Gibson was elected as a Democrat in the United States House of Representatives, being re-elected and serving from March 4, 1875, until March 3, 1883. He promoted the creation of the United States House Committee on the Mississippi Levees on December 10, 1875, to investigate the state of Mississippi levees and gain federal support for their building and repair, issues he persuaded his fellows were in the national interest because of the importance of the Mississippi, its trade, and the region's agriculture. The committee's name was changed to the Levees and Improvements of the Mississippi River on November 7, 1877. In 1882, Gibson was elected by the Louisiana state legislature (as was the procedure at the time) as United States Senator, serving from March 4, 1883, until his death on December 15, 1892. According to historian Daniel J. Sharfstein in The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey From Black to White (2011), during these years a political opponent challenged Gibson's status as a white man, based on records. Gibson investigated but learned only that his ancestors were property owners, which was "enough to satisfy most of Gibson's contemporaries." "Such status," Sharfstein explains, "could not mean anything but whiteness. ... As much as racial purity mattered to white Southerners, they had to circle the wagons around Randall Gibson. If someone of his position could not be secure in his race, then no one was safe." Sharfstein claims that Gibson's paternal line went back to freed African slaves in colonial Virginia. Randall Gibson died as a United States senator while in Hot Springs, Arkansas. His body was returned to Kentucky, where he was buried at Lexington Cemetery in Lexington, Kentucky. In memoriam Gibson Hall on the campus of Tulane University is named for Senator Gibson, who was instrumental after the war in helping fund and continue the public University of Louisiana as the private Tulane University of Louisiana. The town of Tigerville in Terrebonne Parish was renamed Gibson, Louisiana in