Frederick Douglass Signed Property Deed.

DOUGLASS, Frederick.

$5,500.00

Item Number: 141500

Washington, D.C:, March 23, 1885.

Rare real estate document signed by famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass as Recorder of Deeds for Washington, D.C. One page, partially printed, the property deed agreement is signed by Douglass, “Fredk. Douglass” as Recorder of Deeds, certifying a deed transferring a plot of land in Washington, DC, from Joseph C.G. Kennedy to Thomas D. Bond. Following the Civil War, Douglass received numerous political appointments from Republican presidents 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 Recorder of Deeds for Washington, D.C. by President James Garfield and confirmed by the Senate on May 7, 1881. He held the position until 1886 when he resigned to resume public speaking full time. In very good condition.

Douglass wrote of his position as Recorder of Deeds in his third memoir, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: "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."