Charles R. Douglass to Frederick Douglass, March 21, 1869

CHARLES R. DOUGLASS TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Washington, D.C. 21 March [1869.]

DEAR FATHER,

Yours of the 11th inst. came duly, and found all of us well. Libbie’s sister Liny^{1Malinda “Liny” Murphy (c. 1842) was the eldest child of Joseph and Sarah Ann Freeman Murphy, and the elder sister of Charles R. Douglass’s first wife, Libbie. In 1865 she was employed as a servant in the Rochester home of the Reverend Charles P. Bush. 1860 U.S. Census, New York, Monroe County, 20; 1865 New York State Census, Monroe County, 5.} is here. she came to be with and help Libbie during her sickness.^{2This is probably a reference to her pregnancy. Charles and Libbie’s son Joseph Henry Douglass was born on 3 July 1869. Bernier and Taylor, If I Survive, 36; Fought, Women, 310.}

Since writing to you concerning my being discharged from the Bureau I have learned that it was done through the influence of John M. Langston.^{3There is no confirmation for Charles Douglass’s accusation that John Mercer Langston had been responsible for particular clerks being discharged from the Freedmen’s Bureau and those enrolled in the Howard Department of Law being retained. Langston had been appointed a professor of law by the Howard trustees but retained his position at the bureau until September 1869. Howard had warned Charles the preceding year that the bureau was in the process of closing down, but promised to retain him as a clerk for as long as possible. Charles R. Douglass to Douglass, 14 July 1868, reel 2, frames 388–90L, FD Papers, DLC; Langston, Virginia Plantation to the Capitol, 297–98.} He has a law class in the Howard University,^{4John M. Langston was appointed professor of law at Howard University and dean of the law department in 1870. Six students were enrolled in the law department when it held its first class, on 6 January 1869, but twenty-two had enrolled by the end of the session on 30 June 1869. Ten of those students graduated from Howard’s two-year law program in February 1871. Rayford W. Logan, Howard University: The First Hundred Years, 1867–1967 (New York, 1969), 48–49.} and in order to obtain pupils he has got Genl. Howard^{5O. O. Howard.} to turn a number of clerks out of the Bureau in order that students of his may fill our places, and he knowing that I was among the number that he wished to have discharged he was mean enough to laugh and talk with me every day, without giving me any warning of my fate. Had I have joined Langstons class I would have been retained; but he is feeling sore over something and has injured me for spite.

I have applied for a clerkship in the Postmaster Generals Office,^{6A month after losing his job at the Freedmen’s Bureau, Charles R. Douglass began working as a clerk in the Treasury Department on 21 April 1869. Bernier and Taylor, If I Survive, 36.} and have been highly recommended by Senator Pomeroy,^{7Samuel Clarke Pomeroy (1816–91) was born in Southampton, Massachusetts, and educated at Amherst College. He became active in the Free Soil party and moved to Kansas in 1854 to fight the establishment of slavery there. Kansas Republicans elected him to two terms in the U.S. Senate (1861–73), where he was best known as an advocate of subsidies for western development. Unsubstantiated charges of bribing state legislators caused his defeat for reelection. Pomeroy then settled in Washington, D.C., where he and Douglass remained friends. Douglass to Samuel C. Pomeroy, 12 November 1874, Samuel C. Pomeroy to Douglass, 14 June 1883, General Correspondence File, reel 2, frames 761–62, reel 3, frames 731–32, FD Papers, DLC; Daniel W. Wilder, The Annals of Kansas (Topeka, Kan., 1875), 241, 457, 521, 570; ACAB, 5: 60; NCAB, 12: 69–70; DAB, 15: 54–55.} Judge Kelley,^{8William Darrah Kelly.} Genl. Howard, <and> Mr. Alvord^{9The supervisor of the education department of the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1869 was the Congregational minister John Watson Alvord (1807–80), a former abolitionist. Born in East Hampton, Connecticut, Alvord was in 1836 a member of the first graduating class of Oberlin College. Ill health forced him to give up plans to do missionary work in Africa. Before the Civil War, he was secretary of the American Tract Society in Boston; during the war, he worked with both the Christian and the Sanitary commissions. In 1865, Alvord helped organize freedmen’s schools in Savannah, Georgia, and then returned north to lobby for the creation of a bank to help black soldiers handle their enlistment bounties and military pay. In 1866, Howard made him one of his chief assistants in the Freedmen’s Bureau. One of the original trustees of the Freedman’s Bank, Alvord was its president from 1868 until his replacement by Douglass in March 1874. Alvord publicly defended the bank’s soundness, although he protested to the trustees about some dubious transactions. He may have profited from compromised transactions—most suspiciously, from those with the Seneca Stone Company, of which he became president after he left the bank. Samuel Morgan Alvord, comp., A Genealogy of the Descendants of Alexander Alvord, an Early Settler of Windsor, Conn. and Northampton, Mass. (Webster, N.Y., 1908), 285–87; Carl R. Osthaus, Freedmen, Philanthropy, and Fraud: A History of the Freedman’s Savings Bank (Urbana, Ill., 1976), 1–5, 12–14, 165; Howard, Autobiography, 2: 271.} whom I served under.

The General gave me 30 days leave of absence with pay, & told me he would do all in his power for me, and intimated that if he should keep me he would dissatisfy a large number of white clerks that were discharged at the same time.

I am now busily engaged in making garden.

Fred and Lewis^{10Frederick Douglass, Jr., and Lewis H. Douglass.} have applied for positions, and I think will be successful in getting something to do.

Mr. Basset^{11Born in Litchfield, Connecticut, Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett (1833–1908) studied at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale and became a schoolteacher in New Haven, Connecticut, and Philadelphia. A fervent campaigner for Republican candidates, Bassett was appointed by Ulysses S. Grant in 1869 as minister resident and consul general to Haiti and chargé d’affaires to the Dominican Republic—the first African American to formally represent the United States abroad. Bassett’s term of duty spanned the administration of four Haitian presidents during a volatile political climate. After Rutherford B. Hayes replaced Grant, Bassett resigned his post on 27 November 1877 and returned to New York City, where he acted as Haitian consul from 1879 to 1888. When Frederick Douglass received the Haitian post in 1889, Bassett, a longtime friend of Douglass, agreed to accompany him to Haiti and act as Douglass’s secretary, for $825 per year. Bassett returned to the United States after Douglass’s term and settled in Philadelphia. Robert Debs Heinl, Jr., and Nancy Gordon Heinl, Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492–1971 (Boston, 1978), 246, 248, 266, 311; EAAH, 1: 120–21.} is here seeking the position of Minister to Hayti. Your name is also mentioned, and it is said here that should a colored man be selected at all, it will be you. Mr. Downing^{12George T. Downing.} says that Senator Sumner^{13Best remembered as the victim of a vicious attack by a congressional colleague, Charles Sumner (1811–74), a U.S. senator from 1851 to 1874, was dedicated to the cause of emancipation. Born in Boston, Sumner attended and then taught at Harvard College. He engaged in a fairly successful law practice, but was thrust into politics by his outspoken opposition to the U.S. war against Mexico. He was a founder of the Free Soil party in Massachusetts, and a coalition of Free Soilers and Democrats elected him to the Senate in 1850. Immediately embroiling himself in the heated topic of slavery, Sumner became an outspoken advocate of emancipation and repeatedly refuted compromises proposed by Henry Clay and others. After one particularly scathing speech in the Senate against slavery, Sumner was brutally beaten with a cane by a southern congressman; he endured years of recovery before reentering the Senate. Sumner’s lasting legacy was to turn popular sentiment in the North toward emancipation, and after the Civil War, he continued to fight for the individual freedoms of blacks until his sudden death in 1874. Frederick J. Blue, Charles Sumner and the Conscience of the North (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1994); David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1960); DAB, 18: 208–14.} is using his influence for your nomination.

The position calls for $7,500 in gold besides the honor.^{14Bassett’s annual salary as minister plenipotentiary to the Republic of Haiti and U.S. consul to Port-au-Prince was $7,500. He did not serve the entire year in those posts in 1869; although appointed in April, he did not arrive in Haiti until at least September. Consequently, Bassett’s salary for 1869 was a mere $618.13. In subsequent years, however, he received the full amount of $7,500. Washington Evening Star, 11 September 1869; Annual Report of the Secretary of the Treasury on the State of the Finances for the Year 1870 (Washington, D.C., 1870), 134; Annual Report of the Secretary of the Treasury on the State of the Finances for the Year 1872 (Washington, D.C., 1872), 198; Mary J. Mycek, Marian K. O’Keefe, and Carolyn B. Ivanoff, Ebenezer D. Bassett (Derby, Conn., 2008), 4, 10.}

All join in sending love.

Aff. Your Son,

CHARLES R. DOUG LASS

ALS: General Correspondence File, reel 2, frames 441–42, FD Papers, DC.

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