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Autograph Letter Signed on US House of Representatives stationery. Neil House, Columbus, Ohio. Aug. 24, 1884. 3pp. To Hon. Samuel Fessenden, Secty. (Republican National Committee), New York

Reports on his progress as a Republican operative sent from North Carolina to Ohio, where he saw “every prospect for victory in our favor”, provided that Party leaders could overcome the distrust of Black voters. 

The party leaders needed to overcome the distrust of black voters as the “German saloon element” had already turned against the Republicans. However, the “temperance element” was making “some inroads on the colored vote” but if the Party could be infused with “life and enthusiasm," that too could be overcome.  Born free in New York before the Civil War, O’Hara was a Black “carpetbagger” who had moved to North Carolina during the Reconstruction era to become the second African-American elected to the US Congress from that state - one of the last of the Frederick Douglass generation of Black politicians to serve in post-war Washington before Jim Crow segregation descended on the South.