“Can you please forward me at your earliest opportunity a copy of President Cleveland Message to Congress wherein he recommends the payment of the Freedmen’s Bank Depositors… sent sometime in Dec….86. I am a Colored man and as I am going to stump the State in interest of Democracy I would like to have it as it would enable me in my argument.”

Jacobs was a British “Mulatto”, possibly born in Sierra Leone, Africa in the 1840s, who had immigrated to the US as a young man, in the 1870s. He had worked as a janitor at Los Angeles City Hall – where he probably acquired a taste for politics – before moving to northern California to become agent of an Oakland insurance company. Most African-Americans were Republicans in the post-Civil War era, so Jacobs undoubtedly saw an opportunity to advance his career by “stumping” California for the Democrats, who decried the “lawful robbery” of freed slaves, after the War, their deposits in a “Freedman’s Bank” squandered by “Republican thieves”.  The Bank had collapsed in 1875, forcing depositors to wait a decade to recover their money until President Cleveland declared that the hapless “colored” should be reimbursed for their losses by Government funds.