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. There were two from South Carolina, his brother-in-law George Henry White who followed him from North Carolina, and one from Virginia. After them, no African Americans would be elected from the South until 1972, after federal civil rights legislation enforcing constitutional rights for citizens, and no African American would be elected to Congress from North Carolina until 1992.