he accepted the presidency of the latter
institution after nearly all the thieves had got through with it, and
was its official head when the crash and ruin came.

Mr. Douglass's home[126] life has been pure and elevated. He has done
well by his boys; and has aided many young men to places of usefulness
and profit. He strangely and violently opposed the exodus of his race
from the South, and thereby incurred the opposition of the Northern
press and the anathemas of the Colored people. It was not just the
thing, men said--white and black,--for a man who had been a slave in
the South, and had come North to find a market for his labor, to
oppose his brethren in their flight from economic slavery and the
shot-gun policy of the South. His efforts to state and justify his
position before the Colored people of New York were received with an
impatient air and tolerated even for the time with ill grace. Before
the Social Science Congress at Saratoga, New York, he met Richard T.
Greener, a young Colored man, in a discussion of this subject. But Mr.
Greener, a son of Harvard College, with a keen and merciless logic,
cut right through the sophistries of Mr. Douglass; and although the
latter gentleman threw bouquets at the audience, and indulged in the
most exquisite word-painting, he was compelled to leave the field a
vanquished disputant.

President Hayes appointed Mr. Douglass United States Marshall for the
District of Columbia, an office which he held until President Garfield
made him Recorder of Deeds for the same district. He has accumulated a
comfortable little fortune, has published three books, edited two
newspapers, passed through a checkered and busy life; and to-day, full
of honors and years, he stands confessedly as the first man of his
race in North America. Not that he is the greatest in every sense; but
considering "the depths from whence he came," the work he has
accomplished, the character untarnished,--his memory and character,
like the granite shaft, will have an enduring and undying place in the
gratitude of humanity throughout the world.

Among the representative young men of color in the United States--and
now, happily in the process of time, their name is legion--Richard
Theodore Greener has undisputed standing. He was born in Pennsylvania
in 1844, but spent most of his life in Massachusetts. His father and
grandfather were men of unusual intelligence, social energy, and
public spirit. Richard T. early man