“I believe the press has become reconciled to my presence in the office except those that have a candidate for it,” he said, “and they give out that I am going to resign. At them I fling the old adage ‘Few die, and none resign.’ I am going back to Haiti.” Let us take Douglass’ own account of what happened the following winter. It appeared in the _North American Review_, September, 1891. On January 26, 1891, Rear Admiral Gherardi, having arrived at Port-au-Prince, sent one of his under-officers on shore to the United States Legation, to invite me on board his flagship, the _Philadelphia_.... I went on board as requested, and there for the first time I learned that I was to have some connection with negotiations for a United States coaling-station at the Môle St. Nicolas; and this information was imparted to me by Rear Admiral Gherardi. He told me in his peculiarly emphatic manner that he had been duly appointed a United Sates special commissioner; that his mission was to obtain a naval station at the Môle St. Nicolas; and that it was the wish of Mr. Blaine and Mr. Tracy, and also of the President of the United States, that I should earnestly co-operate with him in accomplishing this object. He further made me acquainted with the dignity of his position, and I was not slow in recognizing it. In reality, some time before the arrival of Admiral Gherardi on this diplomatic scene, I was made acquainted with the fact of his appointment. There was at Port-au-Prince an individual, acting as agent of a distinguished firm in New York, who appeared to be more fully initiated into the secrets of the State Department at Washington than I was, and who knew, or said he knew, all about the appointment of Admiral Gherardi, whose arrival he diligently heralded in advance, and carefully made public in all the political and business circles to which he had access. He stated that I was discredited at Washington, had, in fact, been suspended and recalled, and that Admiral Gherardi had been duly commissioned to take my place. It is unnecessary to say that it placed me in an unenviable position, both before the community of Port-au-Prince and before the government of Haiti. Anyone may read a carefully documented account of the negotiations which followed in Rayford Logan’s _Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti_. There can be no question that Douglass strove to carry out the wishes of his government while at the same time “maintaining the good character of the United States.” He clearly regretted certain features of the negotiations.