Heading: (African American - 1887 Boston "Black Elite" patriarch)
Author: Trotter, James M[onroe], Recorder
Title: 1887 Deed document, signed by James Monroe Trotter - a patriarch of the Boston "Black Elite"
Place Published: Washington, D.C.
Publisher:
Date Published: May 11, 1887
Description:

Document signed as Recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia. 3 pp. printed and hand-written deed, signed by Trotter on docketing panel on verso.

Frederick Douglass was the first of six notable African-Americans who successively held the minor - though lucrative - presidential patronage appointment of D.C. Recorder of Deeds. When Douglass left that post in 1886, he was succeeded by Trotter (1842-1892), a man of many parts who has been called the "patriarch of an elite Boston family…at the center of a group of black upper-class Bostonians.” Born a slave in Mississippi, Trotter escaped to Ohio via the Underground Railroad, became a teacher in Cincinnati, and during the Civil War was the first Black man appointed to officer’s rank in the US Army as Lieutenant of a “Colored” Regiment. Settled in Boston and married to a descendant of Elizabeth Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s slave and paramour, he later wrote a classic history of American music which highlighted “remarkable musicians of the Colored Race”. Trotter’s son William would became a Harvard contemporary of W.E.B. DuBois, whom he joined in the Niagara Movement that led to creation of the NAACP.

A few tiny closed tears at center crease; very good.