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HISTORICAL ANNOTATION 1037

Orphaned at an early age but possessed of a substantial inheritance, Langston grew up
in Ohio, graduated from Oberlin College (1849), and, in 1854, gained admission to
the Ohio bar under a precedent allowing certain rights to "a colored man who is nearer
white than mulatto or half-breed." A year later he won the office of town clerk in
Brownhelm and with it the distinction of being one of the first blacks to hold public
office in the United States. He later held elective posts in Oberlin. During the late
1840s and the 1850s he and his older brother Charles were active in the black conven-tion movement in Ohio. At first a colonizationist, Langston shifted his emphasis to
campaigning for black education and suffrage. He also spoke at temperance and
antislavery functions and helped to found and finance the black Ohio State Anti-
Slavery Society, of which he was president from 1858 to 1861. Long sympathetic to
the strategy of direct resistance advocated by David Walker and Henry Highland
Garnet,Langston supported rescues of captured fugitive slaves and recruited volun-
teers for John Brown's raid at Harpers Ferry. During the Civil War he recruited black
troops, opposed discrimination in the army, headed the National Equal Rights League,
and successfully defended Edmonia Lewis, later a noted black sculptor, in a cele-
brated poisoning case at Oberlin College. Langston was inspector general of the
Freedmen's Bureau in 1868 and a leading proponent of loyalty to the Republican
party at conventions of the Colored National Labor Union in 1869 and 1871. From
1869 until 1876 he was a professor of law and dean at Howard University. Appointed
minister to Haiti in 1877, Langston held diplomatic posts until 1885, when he returned
to Virginia as president of Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute in Petersburg. In
1888 he won a disputed congressional election in Virginia's Fourth District, defeating
a white Democrat and a white Republican in a race that was ultimately decided by the
House of Representatives. Douglass opposed Langston's candidacy as tending to split
the Republican ranks. John Mercer Langston. From the Virginia Plantation to the
National Capital (Hartford, Conn., 1894); Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 176; Geoffrey
Blodgett, "John Mercer Langston and the Case of Edmonia Lewis: Oberlin, 1862,"
JNH, 53:201-18 (July 1968); William Cheek, "A Negro Runs for Congress: John
Mercer Langston and the Virginia Campaign of 1888," JNH, 52:14-34 (January
1967); ibid., "John Mercer Langston: Black Protest Leader and Abolitionist," CWH,
16:101-20 (June 1970); DANB, 382-84; DAB, 10:597-98.

483.2 Port au Prince] The capital of Haiti and its chief seaport, Port-au-Prince is
located in the southwestern part of the country, at the end of the Gulf of Gonaives. It
was founded in 1749 by French sugar planters in the area originally called Saint
Dominique, renamed Haiti in 1804. Cohen, Columbia Gazetteer, 2:2489-90.

483.3 Liberia] Assisted by the American Colonization Society, free black
American settlers arrived in 1822 in what would be called the Republic of Liberia.
Over the next twenty-five years, new settlements were established along the coast; the
most prominent was Moesurado, founded in 1822, which became Monrovia, the new
nation's capital. The settlers, who became known as "Americo-Liberians," declared
the national independence of Liberia in 1847. Indigenous people in the territory were

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