Ebenezer Bassett

Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett was born on the sixteenth of October 1833 at Litchfield, Connecticut, the son of Tobias Bassett — a free-Black hostler of the Litchfield horse-livery business — and Susan Gregory Bassett, a domestic of mixed Pequot-and-Black descent. He was raised in the small free-Black community of antebellum northwestern Connecticut.

He was placed at six at the Litchfield public schools — among the very few Connecticut public-school systems of the period that admitted Black students. He took the Connecticut State Normal School preparatory programme at New Britain in 1853 — among the first Black students at the institution — and the additional two years at the Yale College adult-education branch from 1855 to 1857.

He was hired in 1855 by the Whiting Street School at Holyoke, Massachusetts as the principal — the first Black principal of a Massachusetts public school. He moved to Philadelphia in 1857 at twenty-four on the recommendation of his Yale mentor President Theodore Dwight Woolsey to take the principalship of the Institute for Coloured Youth at Philadelphia — the principal Black secondary school of the antebellum North.

He held the Institute for Coloured Youth principalship for twelve years from 1857 to 1869, during which he developed the Institute into the principal Black secondary school of the antebellum North. He trained at the Institute the principal cohort of Black post-war Reconstruction educators of the period — among them Octavius V. Catto, Fanny Jackson Coppin, and Richard T. Greener.

He was nominated by President Ulysses S. Grant on the eighth of April 1869 as United States Minister Resident to the Republic of Haiti — the first African American chief of an American diplomatic mission and the first African American Senate-confirmed political appointment of the post-Reconstruction federal government. The Senate confirmed Bassett on the eleventh of April 1869 — three days after the nomination — by a vote of unanimous consent.

He presented his credentials to President Sylvain Salnave at Port-au-Prince on the second of June 1869 — the first African American chief-of-mission of any American legation.

He served the Port-au-Prince Legation across two presidential administrations and four Haitian presidents — Sylvain Salnave, Nissage Saget, Michel Domingue and Boisrond-Canal — for eight years from 1869 to 1877. He resigned the Legation at the close of the Grant administration on the fifth of March 1877 — having declined the offer of reappointment by President Rutherford B. Hayes.

He served the Republic of Haiti as the Haitian Consul-General at New York from 1879 to 1888 — the first African American to hold a foreign consular position at New York.

He published in 1879 the Handbook on Haiti at Boston — the principal English-language reference work on the Haitian Republic of the period.

He died at Philadelphia on the thirteenth of November 1908 of natural causes, at seventy-five.

He is honored here as the first Black chief of an American diplomatic mission.