America 250 in Color: Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett (October 16, 1833 – November 13, 1908)
By Charles Ray and Dr. Carlton McLellan - May 1, 2026
Born on October 16, 1833, in Derby, Connecticut, Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett was part of a Black community with a strong tradition of owning property, operating businesses, and playing important leadership roles. The Bassett family was particularly prominent, and his father, Eben, and grandfather, Tobiah, had both been elected as ‘Black Governor’ of Connecticut, an unofficial, but honorable title in the Black community. Bassett’s great-grandfather, Pero, had been brought to America and enslaved, and his grandfather, Tobiah, won his freedom for his service in the American Revolution.
The middle child of three born to Eben Tobias and Susan Gregory Bassett (Bassett is a surname common to Black and whites who populated the lower Naugatuck Valley, and it’s assumed that Eben chose the surname for reasons of kinship), Ebenezer began his formal education in the late 1840s at the Birmingham Academy in Derby. While Connecticut had passed a gradual emancipation law in 1784, slavery was not abolished until 1848, but unlike other towns in the state, Derby didn’t exclude Blacks from an education. While at the academy, Bassett, because of his academic talent, came to the attention of one of Derby’s most prominent citizens, Dr. Ambrose Beardsley, who is believed to have been instrumental in getting him admitted to the Wesleyan Academy in Wilbraham, Massachusetts. Wesleyan Academy was one of the stops on the Underground Railroad, and it was here that Bassett saw the injustices of enslavement in antebellum America.
From Wesleyan, he went on to the State Normal School in New Britain, Connecticut, where he graduated in 1853, the first and only Black person in his class.
He began his career as a teacher at the Whiting School in New Haven, a school for children of color, and in 1855, after marrying Eliza Park, he was taking classes in mathematics and classics at Yale. It was here that he met Frederick Douglass for the first time, beginning a friendship that would last until Douglass’s death in 1895.
In 1855, Bassett also became principal of the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, America’s flagship institution of Black education at the time. He and his wife also became members of Philadelphia’s Black elite, and he worked closely with Frederick Douglass on abolitionist causes. During the Civil War, Bassett actively recruited Black soldiers to serve in the Union army and was nationally recognized as a pioneer Black educator. He was also active in Republican politics and became the first Black American to be appointed by President Ulysses S. Grant as minister resident to the newly recognized Black Republic of Haiti.
The Senate confirmed his appointment unanimously, and he took up his post in 1869, arriving on the island when Haiti was in the midst of another of its violent civil wars. For nine years of turmoil, Bassett served as minister resident, during which he granted political asylum and protected Haitian human rights, angering Secretary of State Hamilton Fish and creating tensions with official Washington because of its desire to annex Haiti’s neighbor, the Dominican Republic. While political asylum and human rights were not of great concern at the time, nor a common practice among other diplomats, it can be argued that the subsequent practice of both followed the example he set.
At the end of Grant’s administration, Bassett tendered his resignation, as was the practice, and the incoming Hayes administration appointed a replacement, leaving him unemployed at the age of 44. He moved his family back to New Haven, where he reengaged himself in public speaking, politics, and civil rights issues. While he might’ve been ignored by the American administration, he was well regarded in Haiti, and in 1879, Haitian President Lysius Solomon appointed him Haitian consul in New York City, a position he held until 1889, when he resigned to protest American merchant ships illegally providing arms to Haitian rebels.
In 1888, when President Benjamin Harrison appointed Frederick Douglass to the job as minister to Haiti, a post that Bassett desired, he supported the Douglass nomination and signed on as his secretary. The elderly Douglass, speaking no French and lacking any diplomatic experience, resigned in 1891, leaving Bassett unemployed yet again. He returned to Connecticut and to his campaign of speaking on civil rights and Republican politics. In 1898, when the Spanish-American War broke out, Haiti feared annexation by the US. The Haitian government again appointed him vice consul general in New York, and he held this position until his death in 1908.
Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett was largely forgotten in American diplomatic history, despite overcoming the obstacles of race and bigotry in the 19th century, serving as a pioneering Black educator, and becoming the first Black American to head a diplomatic mission.
Unheralded for over a century, he was the epitome of diplomatic courage and integrity and would inspire generations of diplomats and defenders of human rights around the globe.