Printed and manuscript Document Signed. Receipt to Chief Clerk of US House of Representatives for $2.50 received for New National Era newspaper sent to Congressman C.H. Porter; and W.H.H. Terrell, Third Asst. Postmaster General.
The lot also includes: Autograph Letter Signed. Washington, D.C., Jan. 28, 1873. To Frederick Douglass, Jr., Business Manager of the newspaper, informing him that as the Department was “positively prohibited…from incurring any expense” not approved by congressional appropriation, “you are not authorized…to insert the Postal Card advertisement” in the newspaper “on any conditions”; and, printed form from the Clerk of the US House of Representatives. Sept. 23, 1874. Asking that a copy of the newspaper be furnished to a Congressman (probably Porter), who had requested it. With two original franked Government mailing envelopes. While the senior Frederick Douglass, most famous African-American of the Reconstruction era, was holding government positions, speaking at colleges around the country and even being nominated for Vice President of the United States by a liberal splinter party, in 1870, he launched the New National Era – the first national newspaper for Black Americans. Douglass himself was editor and publisher, but he left day-to-day business management to the second of his three sons, 30 year-old Frederick Jr., who had been a recruiter of “colored troops” during the War. The newspaper folded shortly after Frederick Jr. received the last of these papers, requesting a subscription for Congressman Charles Howell Porter, a New York “carpetbagger” who moved to Virginia after the War to rewrite that state’s slave-era Constitution and then to be elected to Congress on the Republican ticket.