Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

At the 1881 inauguration of President James Garfield, Douglass, serving as United States Marshal of the District of Columbia, escorts both Garfield and outgoing President Rutherford B. Hayes from the Senate chamber. Nothing unusual occurs that day. Douglass mentions it because he was “treading the high places of the land” while still “identified with a proscribed class whose perfect and practical equality with other American citizens was yet far down the steps of time” (440).

Little more than six months after his inauguration, Garfield died from wounds inflicted in early July by a would-be (and now successful) assassin named Charles Guiteau. Civil-service reform, already a national issue, assumes greater urgency following the president’s murder by a man professing to be a disappointed office-seeker. Guiteau was mentally ill—“hopelessly insane,” as Douglass puts it—and yet, when it came to the scramble for government offices, the “madness of Guiteau was but the exaggerated madness of other men” (441). Either way, Garfield’s death leaves Douglass crushed. In a meeting at the White House only a few weeks before Guiteau inflicted the fatal wound, the president revealed to Douglass that he planned to appoint a Black man as US minister to a predominantly white nation. The assassination, therefore, strikes “a killing blow to my newly awakened hopes for my struggling people” (442), as no such gesture likely will come from Garfield’s successor, Chester A. Arthur.

Expanding on the topic of President Garfield’s decision to appoint a Black man US minister to a predominantly white nation, Douglass admits to once harboring concerns about the president’s temperament. In 1880, Douglass had hoped the Republicans would nominate Ulysses S. Grant to what in essence would have been a third term. Douglass knew that Grant was a fighter. Was President Garfield a fighter?

The times most certainly called for one. Republicans under President Hayes were swiftly abandoning the Freedmen. Meanwhile, “the rebels had come back to Congress more with the pride of conquerors than with the repentant humility of defeated traitors” (444). To make matters worse, the 14th and 15th Amendments “were beginning to be despised,” and “the ship of state seemed fast returning to her ancient moorings” (445). For all his virtues, President Garfield at first seemed too eager to win approval and too willing to shrink from a serious challenge. In the end, however, Douglass came to regard the president as high-minded and resolute, his murder depriving the Freedmen of “a great benefactor” (446).

Instead of reappointment as U.S. Marshal, Douglass receives the office of Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia, the duties of which he finds much more palatable than those associated with law enforcement. More important to Douglass than its associated tasks is the fact that from 1881 to the time of Douglass’s writing, only Black men have occupied the office. Furthermore, in light of DC’s surge in population, and given that the Recorder of Deeds received a fee for every real-estate transaction recorded, the appointment became fantastically lucrative for Douglass’s successors.

As the nation’s most prominent Black man, Douglass receives requests for every manner of service and charity:

Numerous pressing and pathetic appeals for assistance, written under the delusion of my great wealth, have come to me from colored people from all parts of the country, with heart-rending tales of destitution and misery, such as I would gladly relieve did my circumstances admit of it (449).