Frederick Douglass (as Minister to Haiti)

Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was born in February 1818 at the Holme Hill Farm at Talbot County, Maryland, the son of Harriet Bailey — an enslaved field hand of the Aaron Anthony plantation — and an unrecorded white father. He was raised by his maternal grandmother Betsy Bailey at the Anthony plantation and was placed at six at the household of Sophia and Hugh Auld at Baltimore, where Sophia Auld taught him to read and write — instruction Hugh Auld stopped when he learned of it.

He escaped from slavery at twenty in September 1838 on a borrowed seaman’s identification certificate, on a passenger train from Baltimore to Philadelphia via the Susquehanna railroad. He settled at New Bedford, Massachusetts at the close of the escape under the new surname Douglass — which he took from a Sir Walter Scott poem.

He published in 1845 his autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave at the Boston Anti-Slavery Office — at the time the principal antislavery autobiography of the antebellum period and the foundational document of his subsequent forty-eight-year career as an abolitionist and a statesman.

He was named in 1877 by President Rutherford B. Hayes the United States Marshal of the District of Columbia — the first African American to serve as a United States Marshal at any level of the federal-judiciary system. He held the position for four years until 1881, where he was responsible for the principal arrest-and-court-process operations of the federal courts of the District of Columbia.

He was named in 1881 by President James Garfield the Recorder of Deeds of the District of Columbia — the principal records-keeping office of the District government, with the responsibility for the title-and-deed registrations of the District. He held the position for five years until 1886.

He was nominated by President Benjamin Harrison on the second of July 1889 as United States Minister Resident and Consul-General to Haiti and the Charge d’Affaires to the Republic of Santo Domingo. He was confirmed by the Senate on the third of July 1889 and presented his credentials at Port-au-Prince on the tenth of October 1889.

He served the Port-au-Prince Legation across the principal United States effort to acquire the Môle-Saint-Nicolas naval base on the northwestern Haitian coast — for which the United States Navy and the Harrison administration mounted across the 1890 spring and summer the principal pressure campaign on the President of Haiti Florvil Hyppolite. Douglass conducted the negotiations under the direction of Secretary of State James G. Blaine but advised both Blaine and Harrison that the Hyppolite government would not concede the Môle.

The Harrison Môle-Saint-Nicolas campaign concluded in failure in February 1891 when Hyppolite refused the cession of the Môle. Douglass resigned the Port-au-Prince Legation on the thirtieth of July 1891 in disagreement with the Blaine departmental conduct of the negotiations.

He served from 1893 the United States Commissioner of the Republic of Haiti at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition.

He died at Anacostia, Washington, D.C. on the twentieth of February 1895 of complications of a heart attack, at seventy-six.

He is honored here as the first Black United States Marshal.