Under the Garfield administration Douglass was appointed in May, 1881, recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia.  He held this very lucrative office through the terms of Presidents Garfield and Arthur and until removed by President Cleveland in 1886, having served nearly a year after Cleveland’s inauguration.  In 1889 he was appointed by President Harrison as minister resident and consul-general to the Republic of Hayti, in which capacity he acted until 1891, when he resigned and returned permanently to Washington.  The writer has heard him speak with enthusiasm of the substantial progress made by the Haytians in the arts of government and civilization, and with indignation of what he considered slanders against the island, due to ignorance or prejudice.  When it was suggested to Douglass that the Haytians were given to revolution as a mode of expressing disapproval of their rulers, he replied that a four years’ rebellion had been fought and two Presidents assassinated in the United States during a comparatively peaceful political period in Hayti.  His last official connection with the Black Republic was at the World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893, where he acted as agent in charge of the Haytian Building and the very creditable exhibit therein contained.  His stately figure, which age had not bowed, his strong dark face, and his head of thick white hair made him one of the conspicuous features of the Exposition; and many a visitor took advantage of the occasion to recall old acquaintance made in the stirring anti-slavery days.

In 1878 he revisited the Lloyd plantation in Maryland, where he had spent part of his youth, and an affecting meeting took place between him and Thomas Auld, whom he had once called master.  Once in former years he had been sought out by the good lady who in his childhood had taught him to read.  Nowhere more than in his own accounts of these meetings does the essentially affectionate and forgiving character of Douglass and his race become apparent, and one cannot refrain from thinking that a different state of affairs might prevail in the Southern States if other methods than those at present in vogue were used to regulate the relations between the two races and their various admixtures that make up the Southern population.

In June, 1879, a bronze bust of Douglass was erected in Sibley Hall of Rochester University as a tribute to one who had shed lustre on the city.  In 1882 occurred the death of Douglass’s first wife, whom he had married in New York immediately after his escape from slavery, and who had been his faithful companion through so many years of stress and struggle.  In the same year his Life and Times was published.  In 1884 he married Miss Helen Pitts, a white woman of culture and refinement.  There was some criticism of this step by white people who did not approve of the admixture of the races, and by colored persons who thought their leader had slighted his own people