][citation needed] As an expert shorthand writer, Hitt served as a note-taker for Lincoln during the famous Lincoln–Douglas debates of 1858.

In December 1874, President Ulysses S. Grant appointed Hitt as First Secretary of the American Legation in Paris.

[3] When the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 came up for renewal in 1892, he argued against the alien documentation provisions of the bill: "Never before in a free country was there such a system of tagging a man, like a dog to be caught by the police and examined, and if his tag or collar is not all right, taken to the pound or drowned and shot.

Never before was it applied by a free people to a human being, with the exception (which we can never refer to with pride) of the sad days of slavery.

…"[4] He was appointed in July 1898, by President William McKinley, as a member of the commission created by the Newlands Resolution to establish government in the Territory of Hawaii.