Books and Manuscripts

Washington, D.C., Oct(ober) 29, 1885. One sheet, 10 1/2 x 8 in. (267 x 203 mm). Partially-printed real estate document on R.D. Ruffin. Attorney at Law, Real Estate, Loans and Insurance stationery, between Hannah and John Harris and D.K. Apple, executed in a secretarial hand, and signed on verso by Frederick Douglass as the Recorder of Deeds for Washington, D.C. ("Fredk. Douglass"); signed on verso by notary public, G.W. Balloch, and with his embossed stamp; docketing to same. Creasing from contemporary folds; scattered minor edge-wear. In mat and in frame, with a printed photo of Douglass; 24 1/2 x 15 1/2 in. (622 x 394 mm).

A real estate deed signed by the great orator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass during his time as the Recorder of Deeds for Washington, D.C. (1881-86). Following the Civil War, Douglass received numerous political appointments from Republican presidents due to his activism during the war, including positions as United States Marshal of Washington, D.C. (1877-81), and later ambassador to the Republic of Haiti (1889-91). He was nominated for Recorder by President James Garfield, and was confirmed by the Senate on May 7, 1881 in a vote of 47-8. He resigned in 1886 to resume public speaking full time.

Douglass wrote about his time as Recorder in his third memoir, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881): "The duties of Recorder, though specific, exacting, and imperative, are easily performed. The office is one that imposes no social duties whatever, and therefore neither fettered my pen nor silenced my voice in the cause of my people. I wrote much and spoke often, and perhaps because of this activity gave to envious tongues a pretext against me. I think that I was not, while in this office or in that of Marshal, less outspoken against what I considered the errors of rulers, than while outside of the office. My cause first, midst, last, and always, whether in office or out of office, was and is that of the black man; not because he is black, but because he is a man, and a man subjected in this country to peculiar wrongs and hardships. As in the case of United States Marshal, so in that of Recorder of Deeds, I was the first colored man who held the office, and like all innovations on established usage, my appointment did not meet with the approval of the conservatives and old-time rulers of the country, but, on the contrary, met with resistance from both these and the press as well as from the street corners... I held the office of Recorder of Deeds of the District of Columbia for nearly five years. Having, so to speak, broken the ice by giving to the country the example of a colored man at the head of that office, it has become the one special office to which, since that time, colored men have aspired." (pp. 638-639).