393

HISTORICAL ANNOTATION 1021

in 1887, Harrison decided to try for the presidency. Despite divisions within the party,
Harrison won the nomination on the eighth ballot. Douglass and other prominent
African Americans campaigned widely for Harrison, who received 233 electoral votes
to the incumbent Grover Cleveland's 168. Harrison was nominated again in 1892, but
lost to Cleveland. He returned to practice law in Indianapolis, where he died in 1901.
Homer E. Socolofsky and Allan B. Spetter, The Presidency of Benjamin Harrison
(Lawrence, Kans., 1987), 7-16, 127, 185-86; ANB, 10:198-201.

439.12-13 Minister Resident and Consul General to the Republic of Haiti]
Douglass campaigned heavily for Benjamin Harrison in 1888. Seeking a reward,
Douglass applied twice in 1889 for his old position as recorder of deeds in the District
of Columbia. Instead President Harrison gave Douglass the post of minister resident
and consul general to Haiti. In this capacity Douglass was given the diplomatic task
of acquiring the Mole, a task that proved to be difficult on account of the political and
diplomatic corruption he encountered. Myra Himelhoch, "Frederick Douglass and
Haiti's Mole St. Nicolas." JNH, 56:161-80 (July 1971); Merline Pitre, "Frederick
Douglass and American Diplomacy in the Caribbean," Journal of Black Studies,
13:457-75 (June 1983); Louis Manin Sears, "Frederick Douglass and the Mission to
Haiti, 1889-1891," Hispanic American Historical Review, 21:222-38 (May 1941).

439.23-24 Neither my character ... New York Press] Douglass's appointment as
minister to Haiti was not well received in the American press. Supporting editors in
the black press protested that the position was beneath a man of Douglass's stature.
Black editors who disapproved of Douglass's personal life or political choices argued
that a younger man should have been selected for the post. The mainstream northern
press also criticized his mission to Haiti, claiming that the Haitian people would prefer
to deal with a white man. Especially unkind to Douglass and his mission in Haiti was
the African American newspaperman T. Thomas Fortune editor of the New York Age,
who criticized the minister for supporting an interventionist agenda in Haiti . The
mainstream press, such as the New York Times, blamed Douglass for the failure to
acquire a naval station at Mole St. Nicholas. During his tenure as minister, the press
often criticized Douglass for appearing too sympathetic to the people of Haiti. His
assertion that the U.S. Navy supplied negative information about him to American
newspapers may not have been unfounded. In an especially scathing attack on his
ministry the Times noted: "It is the general belief about the Navy Department that the
diplomatic career of Frederick Douglass at Port au Prince is rapidly drawing to a
close." New York Times, 25 March, 4 June 1891; Himelhoch, "Frederick Douglass
and Haiti's Mole St. Nicolas," 164-65, 169-70.

440.13 President Hyppolite] Louis Mondestin Florvil Hyppolite (1827- 96), son
of a former Haitian minister, served in the Haitian military under two administrations
before participating in a successful insurrection against President Etienne Felicite
(Lysius) Salomon in 1888. After the assassination of the leading rebel, Seide
Telemaque, a bloody civil war erupted in which Hyppolite commanded the forces of
the nation's north against Francois-Denis Legitime, who held the loyalty of the south