Frederick Douglass / A Biography

by Charles W. Chesnutt

With the full enfranchisement of his people, Douglass entered upon what may be called the third epoch of his career, that of fruition. Not every worthy life receives its reward in this world; but Douglass, having fought the good fight, was now singled out, by virtue of his prominence, for various honors and emoluments at the hands of the public. He was urged by many friends to take up his residence in some Southern district and run for Congress; but from modesty or some doubt of his fitness—which one would think he need not have felt—and the consideration that his people needed an advocate at the North to keep alive there the friendship and zeal for liberty that had accomplished so much for his race, he did not adopt the suggestion.

In 1860 [1870] Douglass moved to Washington, and began [took over] the publication of the New National Era, a weekly paper devoted to the interests of the colored race. The venture did not receive the support hoped for; and the paper was turned over to Douglass's two [oldest] sons, Lewis and Frederick, and was finally abandoned [in 1874], Douglass having sunk about ten thousand dollars in the enterprise. Later newspapers for circulation among the colored people have proved more successful; and it ought to be a matter of interest that the race which thirty years ago could not support one publication, edited by its most prominent man, now maintains several hundred newspapers which make their appearance regularly.

In 1871 Douglass was elected president of the Freedmans Bank. This ill-starred venture was then apparently in the full tide of prosperity, and promised to be a great lever in the uplifting of the submerged race. Douglass, soon after his election as president, discovered the insolvency of the institution, and insisted that it be closed up. The negro was in the hands of his friends, and was destined to suffer for their mistakes as well as his own.

Other honors that fell to Douglass were less empty than the presidency of a bankrupt bank. In 1870 he was appointed by President Grant a member of the Santo Domingo Commission, the object of which was to arrange terms for the annexation of the mulatto republic to the Union. Some of the best friends of the colored race, among them Senator Sumner, opposed this step; but Douglass maintained that to receive Santo Domingo as a State would add to its strength and importance. The scheme ultimately fell through, whether for the good or ill of Santo Domingo can best be judged when the results of more recent annexation schemes [1898: Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, Hawaii, and de facto Cuba] become apparent. Douglass went to Santo Domingo on an American man-of-war, in the company of three other commissioners. In his Life and Times he draws a pleasing contrast between some of his earlier experiences in travelling, and the terms of cordial intimacy upon which, as the representative of a nation which a few years before had denied him a passport, he was now received in the company of able and distinguished gentlemen.

On his return to the United States Douglass received from President Grant an appointment as member of the legislative council, or upper house of the legislature, of the District of Columbia, where he served for a short time, until other engagements demanded his resignation, [one of] his son being appointed to fill out his term. To this appointment Douglass owed the title of "Honorable," subsequently applied to him.

In 1872 Douglass presided over and addressed a convention of colored men at New Orleans, and urged them to support President Grant for renomination. He was elected a presidential elector for New York, and on the meeting of the electoral college in Albany, after Grant's triumphant re-election, received a further mark of confidence and esteem in the appointment at the hands of his fellow-electors to carry the sealed vote to Washington. Douglass sought no personal reward for his services in this campaign, but to his influence was due the appointment of several of his friends to higher positions than had ever theretofore been held in this country by colored men.

When R. B. Hayes was nominated for President, Douglass again took the stump, and received as a reward the honorable and lucrative office of Marshal of the United States for the District of Columbia. This appointment was not agreeable to the white people of the District, whose sympathies were largely pro-slavery; and an effort was made to have its confirmation defeated in the Senate. The appointment was confirmed, however; and Douglass served his term of four years, in spite of numerous efforts to bring about his removal.

In 1879 the hard conditions under which the negroes in the South were compelled to live led to a movement to promote an exodus of the colored people to the North and West, in the search for better opportunities. The white people of the South, alarmed at the prospect of losing their labor, were glad to welcome Douglass when he went among them to oppose this movement, which he at that time considered detrimental to the true interests of the colored population.

Under the Garfield administration Douglass was appointed in May, 1881, recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia. He held this very lucrative office through the terms of Presidents Garfìeld and Arthur and until removed by President Cleveland in 1886, having served nearly a year after Cleveland's inauguration. In 1889 he was appointed by President Harrison as minister resident and consul-general to the Republic of Hayti, in which capacity he acted until 1891, when he resigned and returned permanently to Washington. The writer has heard him speak with enthusiasm of the substantial progress made by the Haytians in the arts of government and civilization, and with indignation of what he considered slanders against the island, due to ignorance or prejudice. When it was suggested to Douglass that the Haytians were given to revolution as a mode of expressing disapproval of their rulers, he replied that a four years' rebellion had been fought and two Presidents assassinated in the United States during a comparatively peaceful political period in Hayti. His last official connection with the Black Republic was at the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893, where he acted as agent in charge of the Haytian Building and the very creditable exhibit therein contained. His stately figure, which age had not bowed, his strong dark face, and his head of thick white hair made him one of the conspicuous features of the Exposition; and many a visitor took advantage of the occasion to recall old acquaintance made in the stirring anti-slavery days.

In 1878 he revisited the Lloyd plantation in Maryland, where he had spent part of his youth, and an affecting meeting took place between him and Thomas Auld, whom he had once called master. Once in former years he had been sought out by the good lady who in his childhood had taught him to read. Nowhere more than in his own accounts of these meetings does the essentially affectionate and forgiving character of Douglass and his race become apparent, and one cannot refrain from thinking that a different state of affairs might prevail in the Southern States if other methods than those at present in vogue were used to regulate the relations between the two races and their various admixtures that make up the Southern population.