Editorial Method Speeches Volume One
Editorial Method
James M. Gregory, a Howard University professor of Latin, made the first serious attempt to publish Douglass's speeches when he included long extracts from a number of them in his 1893 work, . In subsequent years Douglass suffered the fate of most early black historical figures: rarely could money be found to collect or to publish their papers. Actually, Douglass fared somewhat worse than other major and minor black leaders. While E. Davidson Washington published a volume of Booker T. Washington's speeches in 1932 and Carter G. Woodson published four volumes of the papers of Francis J. Grimké ten years later, little appeared on Frederick Douglass. Benjamin Quarles's masterful 1948 biography of Douglass brought to light the rich subject scholars had been ignoring. Philip Foner, a Lincoln University historian, took up the challenge and included many speeches in his five-volume , published between 1950 and 1976. A dedicated, imaginative, and tireless researcher, Foner was the first scholar to try to apply the same critical editorial standards in collecting and editing the papers of blacks that are applied to the works of other Americans. In spite of severe limitations of time and money, and the refusal of most publishers to consider anything more than a small, highly selective collection, Foner published his volumes, and for twenty years they were the standard reference works on Douglass. Because new sources have since been located and new facts brought to light, we at times disagree with our predecessors, but we are the grateful beneficiaries of their pathbreaking ventures.1Frederic May Holland, (New York, 1891); Gregory, : Earnest Davidson Washington, ed., (Garden City, N.Y., 1932); Carter G. Woodson, ed., (Washington, D.C., 1942).
While Quarles, Foner, and Gregory furnished many leads to speeches, Douglass spoke so often in so many places it was difficult to reconstruct his itinerary. Rough approximations of his itinerary appeared intermittently in abolitionist journals during the early 1840s. Between 1847 and 1860 Douglass sometimes announced his future speaking engagements in his own journals and after the Civil War he continued the
practice in the pages of the . Several factors, however, limited the accuracy and usefulness of these announcements. Only rarely did newspapers note Douglass's failure to make a scheduled appearance. A still more serious flaw in published schedules was vagueness. Nebulous announcements that Douglass would deliver lectures "next month" in the "western part" of a state were all too common, and even the most conscientious journalists were unable to keep track of his many unscheduled addresses. The number of impromptu speeches grew dramatically after Douglass returned from Great Britain. From the 1850s until his death, the mere discovery of his presence at a meeting or on a public conveyance produced insistent cries of "Douglass! Douglass!" Seldom did he refuse the call. A survey of all of the available issues of reform, abolition, and black journals published between 1838 and 1895, as well as of manuscripts and secondary works, provided a preliminary speaking itinerary. Despite a systematic search of hundreds of local newspapers, however, it was impossible to confirm some dates in Douglass's published itineraries.
The Library of Congress collection of Douglass Papers is disappointing as a source of speeches, especially antebellum ones. Although there are fourteen boxes labelled "Speeches and Articles" in the collection, many of the antebellum orations are extracts. Most of the manuscript speeches were transcribed by hand from contemporary newspapers; they contain many errors, and are often condensations of longer addresses. Many of the speeches are undated, several complete orations are mislabelled as "fragments," and others are misdated.
The major sources for Douglass's speeches are the newspapers published in the areas where he spoke. The key to our search was the preliminary itinerary. With the specific dates it provided, we usually read the three issues of local newspapers published immediately before Douglass's scheduled appearance and the three issues published immediately after it. Frequently, however, the preliminary itinerary revealed only that Douglass was scheduled to speak in five or six towns, sometime during a thirty-day period. Generally in such cases all available issues of local newspapers in each of the areas were examined. On rare occasions a secondary work, a dissertation, an abolition journal, or a black newspaper indicated the exact issue of a local paper containing a Douglass speech. All available issues of local newspapers published during the time Douglass resided in New Bedford (1838-42) and Lynn (1842-47), Massachusetts, Rochester, New York (1847-72), and Washington, D.C. (1872-95), were searched.
The extent and success of our search depended largely on the availability of nineteenth-century journals. The British Library Newspaper Library at Colindale, London, and the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh hold about 80 percent of the nineteenth-century journals published in places where Douglass spoke in Great Britain. There are no comparable central repositories for American newspapers. Americans—less concerned with preserving such national treasures than the English, Irish, and Scots—carelessly discarded their issues of many nineteenthcentury journals. Most of the surviving issues are held by thousands of widely scattered university, college, and public libraries, or historical societies. Limited resources precluded a comprehensive search of the journals in all of these repositories and forced the editors to concentrate on institutions containing the largest number of local newspapers in each of the twenty-five states in which Douglass spoke. Approximately 2500 journals were searched for Douglass's speeches.
Since newspapers furnished most of Douglass's speeches, the editorial procedures adopted represent attempts to solve some of the problems caused by the special characteristics of nineteenth-century journalism. Struggling to capture the flavor of an event as well as to record the words spoken, nineteenth-century reporters often used an unpredictable combination of italics, capital letters, and quotation marks to indicate the words and phrases a speaker emphasized. Similarly, journalists' attempts to convey the rhythm of a speech frequently resulted in irregularly punctuated sentences. Usually reports included in parentheses notations of the speaker's gestures and audience reactions (cheers, hisses, interruptions). Long paragraphs often containing 2000 words were the rule. Journalists were inconsistent in capitalizing proper nouns and rarely included titles or date and place lines in their reports of speeches.
Nineteenth-century recording techniques were crude, especially in the United States, where editors had a limited number of trained stenographers upon whom they could rely.2Eugene L. Didier, "The Curiosities of Shorthand," , 3: 27-31 (February 1889); J. C. Moffett, "Longhand Reporting," ibid., 2: 101-03 (May 1888); Will M. Clemens, "Shorthand in Newspaper Work," ibid., 3: 83-84 (April 1889); A. E. Leon, "Shorthand in Journalism," ibid., 2: 25-27 (February 1888). Many editors—recognizing this, and trying to protect themselves from potential libel suits—began each published speech with a phrase such as "the substance of" or converted stenographically recorded speeches into third person narratives. Ham pered by limited space in even the largest papers, editors often published only brief mentions of, or short extracts from, speeches. Even in
largely stenographic reports, journalists frequently summarized lengthy resolutions, long quotations from books, poems, and the Bible, and other parts of a speech. Editors gave scant coverage to, and occasionally distorted reports of, attacks on established institutions and mores.
Although there were relatively few verbatim accounts of public meetings in nineteenth-century journals, there were many safeguards against deliberate distortions of speeches. First, editors especially wanted a faithful record of proceedings in which influential local dignitaries participated. Second, because a journal's reputation for probity often rested largely on its reporting of local events, it was embarrassing when readers who had attended wrote letters complaining about the distortions in a report of a meeting. Third, orators not only wrote letters to the editor, they also criticized the journal at subsequent meetings for its distortions. The most important safeguard, however, was competition in reporting speeches. Because reporters' jobs depended on faithful recording of events, they often compared notes, requested advance copies of written addresses, or asked orators to repeat portions of speeches they did not hear clearly. Similarly, because a journal's circulation depended partially on its accurate coverage of local events, most editors were loath to distort reports of speeches. This was especially the case in those localities served by more than one newspaper.3General observations on nineteenth-century journalism and recording techniques in Great Britain and the United States can be found in George Jacob Holyoake, , 2 vols. (London, 1892), 2: 156-59; Michael Macdonagh, (London, 1913), 31-55; Charles F. Wingate, ed., (New York, 1875), 99; Lucy M. Salmon, (New York, 1923), 158-79, 412-91; Frederick Hudson, (New York, 1873), 720-22; Alfred Kinnear, "The Trade in Great Men's Speeches," , 75: 439-44 (March 1899); James M. McBath, "Parliamentary Reporting in the Nineteenth Century," , 37: 25-35 (March 1970).
There were few safeguards against distortions, however, when one reporter conducted an interview with a public figure . Throughout the nineteenth century, interviews were distorted, manufactured, retracted, and repudiated. They were frequently patched together from disjointed sentences, based on the reporter's memory of a conversation, and highlighted only those comments the journalist considered most interesting.4Glimpses of the treacherous contours of nineteenth-century interviewing appear in Andrew Dunlop, (Dublin, 1911), 233-36; John Arthur, "Reporting, Practical and Theoretical," , 3: 36-37 (February 1889); Salmon, , 233-48; O. B. Frothingham, "The Interviewer," , 1: 183-90 (April 1886); "Interviews and Interviewing," , ser. 3, 8: 422-26 (29 October 1892); Wingate, Views; "Editor's Easy Chair," , 71: 150-51 (June 1855), and 74: 318-20 (January 1857).
Judged only by examining its worst practitioners, the interview had few, if any, redeeming qualities. Fortunately, there were many honest and skillful reporters who faithfully recorded their conversations with public figures. Journalists characteristically tried to add a human-interest touch to their reports by describing a subject's home, and noting his or her mannerisms and mood. While trying to present the essence of a conversation, the best journalists wanted to reproduce it accurately. Sometimes they read drafts of their stories to interviewees to insure accuracy. Both the reputation of the reporter and that of his newspaper suffered when someone accused him of distorting an interview.5Frank Banfield, "Interviewing in Practice," , 26: 367-78 (November 1895); James W. Clarke, "The Art of Interviewing," , 1: 3-5 (April 1887). As the English journalist Frank Banfield wrote, "What an editor wants is an interview that will be read with interest by those, who have perfect faith in the honesty and accuracy of the information conveyed in his journal. . . . For his own reputation, to say nothing of his livelihood, the interviewer is concerned that his work should be good."6Banfield, "Interviewing," 376-77. An anonymous journalist writing for a scrupulous editor might faithfully record conversations, but when a reporter signed his story or interviewed a public figure along with others, he was more likely to record it accurately. Even so, there were fewer checks on deliberate distortions of interviews than of speeches.
"The reporter," Frederick Hudson, the journalist-historian, wrote, "is the amanuensis of the public. Through him statesmen speak to the people; through him Congress is heard; through him orators become celebrated."7Hudson, , 720. Reporters brought Douglass's speeches to the attention of the public in five forms: mention, summary, narrative, extract, and stenographic; there was an increasing order of resolution in them. A mention gave a blurred image of a speech, noting little more than title and date. A summary represented a brief outline of one or two major generalizations. The narratives went into considerably more detail, condensing a speaker's remarks while highlighting the salient points and distinctive phraseology. Stenographically recorded accounts had the highest degree of resolution, reproducing the speeches as nearly as possible in the orator's own words.
An overwhelming majority of the newspaper accounts of Douglass's speeches are fragmentary news reports (mentions). They contain little information about the content of an oration. The
gave a typically terse report of two Douglass speeches on 5 March 1859:
Lectures by FREDERICK DOUGLASS.—This famous colored orator held forth on Saturday evening, at the City Hall, on the unity of the races, and Sunday afternoon at the same place, on slavery, the cause of its establishment, its effects, and abolition. Both lectures were very able and ingenious productions, and were listened to by a great many of our first citizens, and by, of course, a large number of colored persons.
Summaries varying in length from 500 to 1500 words form the second-largest category of press accounts of Douglass's speeches and are usually mere abstracts. Whatever the reporter's claims, such accounts often had little relationship to what was actually said. Writing in 1866, the journalist John R. Dennett explained why summaries appeared so frequently in newspapers and why they were generally valueless:
Very few public addresses are made of which the managers of newspapers care to furnish verbatim reports, partly because the columns of a metropolitan journal are always crowded, partly because printing-presses are like time and the tide, and partly because most speeches are of such quality that nobody can read them. . . . While the talk of the platforms is limitless, the area of the printed sheet is fixed, and only the great notables, upon great occasions, can hope for the honors of a broadside. The consequence is, that reporters give what it pleases them to call "abstracts" or "sketches." In the arrangement of an epitomized selection of the sublimities, the beauties, and the facts of a discourse, they are guided by their own notions, and these are not always either judicious or severe. Frequently they bring away only what they can readily remember, and what is not worth the pains of remembering at all.8John R. Dennett, "Eloquence at Second-Hand," , 2: 43 (11 January 1866).
The third-largest category of news reports of Douglass's speeches was narratives ranging in length from 2000 to about 4500 words. The best antebellum narrative reports appeared in newspapers published in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and were often virtual paraphrases of a speech. This process can best be seen by comparing the opening
passages in a narrative from the Belfast of 25 December 1845, with the beginning of the stenographic version of the same speech from the Belfast of 26 December 1845.
(Stenographic)
Mr. FREDERICK DOUGLASS then
presented himself, and was received
with loud plaudits. He spoke as fol-
lows.—Ladies and gentlemen, one of
the most painful duties I have been
called on to perform in the Abolition
of Slavery, has been to expose the
corruption and sinful position of the
American Churches with regard to
that question. That was almost the
only duty which, when I commenced
the advocacy of this cause, I felt in-
clined to shrink from. Really, any a-
tempt to expose the inconsistencies of
the religious organization of our land
is the most painful undertaking.
(Narrative)
Mr. DOUGLASS, in addressing the
meeting, said—One of the most pain-
ful duties he had been called on to
perform, in the way of his anti-
slavery advocacy, had been that of
expressing the corruption and sinful
position of the American Churches, in
regard to slavery. (Hear, hear.) It
was, indeed, when he first com-
menced that advocacy, one among the
only duties that he felt anything like
shrinking from. It was to him a most
painful undertaking.
The first half of Douglass's speech was a little more than ten typed pages long in the stenographic version while it was eight pages long in the narrative version. Obviously, long narrative accounts fairly accurately reflected what Douglass said.
Stenographically recorded Douglass speeches appeared in journals far less frequently than any of the other forms. Occasionally journals published different "stenographic" versions of the same speech. Two newspapers claiming to present stenographic copies might differ because of the inability of one reporter to hear portions of the speech. Depending on where he was sitting, a reporter might miss one or more sentences in a speech directly after each outburst of applause. Others came late to a meeting or left before Douglass concluded.9John Beatty, "Preparation for Speech-Making," , 2: 189-93 (August 1888); W. G. Thrall, "Sermon Reporting," ibid., 4: 265-67 (December 1890); "Speaker and Reporter," , ser. 4, 10: 193-95 (29 March 1873). Some editors silently deleted or summarized portions of a stenographically recorded speech. Because of space limitations, Douglass himself occasionally silently
deleted portions of his own stenographically recorded speeches reprinted from other journals.
On the other hand, a number of factors contributed to the accurate reporting of many of Douglass's speeches. Many of the best antebellum stenographers, such as J. M. Yerrington, William H. Burr, A. C. Hills, F. W. Leeds, and J. W. Towner, recorded the proceedings of antislavery societies.10Samuel May to Sidney H. Gay, 5 October 1847, in NASS, 14 October 1847; , 2 June 1856. And, with his bold, clear voice, and generally logically organized speeches, Douglass presented few problems for trained stenographers intent on recording his remarks.11Bates Torrey, "Automatic vs. Intelligent Shorthand Reporting," , 2: 109-11 (May 1888); James W. Clarke, "Shorthand Writing and its Advantages," ibid., 2: 135-39 (June 1888). 11Bates Torrey, "Automatic vs. Intelligent Shorthand Reporting," , 2: 109-11 (May 1888); James W. Clarke, "Shorthand Writing and its Advantages," ibid., 2: 135-39 (June 1888).Thomas Wentworth Higginson asserted that Douglass "gained such a command of speech and language that Mr. Yerrington, then the leading reporter of Boston, who always reported the anti-slavery meetings, told me of all the speakers in those meetings, there were but two who could be reported without verbal alteration precisely as they spoke, and those two were Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass."12Thomas W. Higginson, (Cleveland, 1901), 88. The and the New York agreed. The in 1853 canvassed journalists who had covered Douglass's addresses and informed its readers that "reporters of his speeches, who had also reported in Congress, had said that no public speaker whatever need revision so little as Douglass. . . . all were perfect little gems of art which could not have have been bettered."13, 22 July 1853. See also , 27 September 1850.
Speeches, William Brigance, the great critic of public address, contended in 1930, "exist, not on paper, but only in a three-dimensional situation where a man, having a purpose, faces an audience alive with human emotions, and follows through with that give-and-take which we call 'contact.' "14William Norwood Brigance, (New York, 1930), viii. See also Barnett Baskerville, "The Dramatic Criticism of Oratory," , 45: 39-45 (February 1959). Because a speech differs in many ways from a written document, the editorial procedures followed in Series One differ from those in subsequent series. A speech is an oral event; under the best of circumstances it is difficult to determine exactly what was said on a specific occasion. The use of tape recorders, films, and videotapes
in the twentieth century sometimes fails to reproduce a speech word for word as it was delivered. Perhaps the closest thing to an exact reproduction of words as spoken is the transcript of a trial. For an oration, historians usually treat a copy in the orator's handwriting as the most accurate of several versions. Students of public address, however, correctly point out that handwritten copies are actually "pretexts"; while representing what orators intend to say, they may have little or no relationship to what is actually said. Like many orators, Douglass made frequent asides not included in his written texts and often edited his written copy as he spoke. When people interrupted him to challenge a statement his answers were not included in the written text. On other occasions when Douglass found his prepared speech ill suited to his audience, he ignored it and spoke extemporaneously. Is the most accurate version of a speech what an orator intended to say or what the members of an audience heard? How does one choose the best of several conflicting versions from members of the same audience?
Completeness, accuracy, and historical significance were the major criteria used in selecting the speeches included in this edition. In an effort to obtain the most accurate copies of Douglass's orations, we attempted to locate all of the extant versions of each speech. We have not, however, published each version we discovered. Extracts and brief mentions, lacking detail and context, are generally excluded. Summaries of speeches are included only when, in the editors' judgment, their topics are of special historical significance. The few extant handwritten copies of Douglass's speeches have been treated as pretexts and compared to all pamphlet copies and newspaper reports of them to determine whether he said what he intended to say.
Variants of stenographically recorded speeches posed special problems. When considering variants the editors tried to determine the "best copy." Fortunately, Douglass and his friends were quick to praise journals reporting his speeches accurately and to castigate those printing garbled versions of them.15Washington (D.C.) , 9 May 1872; New York , 6 December 1890; Liverpool (Eng.) , 27 October 1846. It was possible, in many instances, to determine the most accurate of two or more variant stenographic copies by comparing each to long narrative accounts of the same speech. The final test for the best of several versions of a speech was close textual analysis. Intuition and familiarity with Douglass's life and work inevitably played a role in our selections.
The complete texts of most of our versions of Douglass's speeches have been taken from only one source. Occasionally, however, our text of a speech has been collated from two or more sources. In each instance, the most complete copy of a speech was chosen as the basic text. When another source contained significant additional material this has been added to the basic text and placed within angle brackets. The source of the additional material is indicated in a note. On those occasions when the second source included a greatly expanded version of remarks briefly summarized in the basic text the summary has been deleted (indicated by ellipses) and included in a note (indicated by a dagger †). For example, the Belfast and the Belfast both recorded a speech Douglass delivered on 23 December 1845. While we chose the stenographic report from the as our best copy, we added approximately 1000 words from the to the end of the stenographic version. We deleted a 53-word summary conclusion from the to avoid repetition and enhance the readability of the text. The excluded material is included in the following note:
† Here the reads: "Mr. Douglass continued to address the meeting, for nearly an hour further, on the subject of the Church of Scotland, in reference to American Slavery, but we are obliged to curtail our reporter's notes of the remainder of his address, in order to make room for the important political news which appears elsewhere."
For the most part Douglass's speeches have been taken from reports of the proceedings of mass meetings, conventions, or various organizations where there were several speakers. In cases where Douglass engaged in formal debate with one individual the remarks of both have been printed. On the other hand, when Douglass delivered two or more short addresses in a meeting where other people spoke, their remarks have been deleted and replaced by a brief summary written by the editors and placed in brackets. When, in the editors' judgment, Douglass's remarks made in extended debate with two or more people are incomprehensible standing alone, all of the proceedings are published.
All deleted sentences and paragraphs in our texts have been indicated by ellipses. Usually the deleted remarks were made by persons other than Douglass and are replaced by brief editorial summaries. In the case of collated speeches the ellipses indicate the deletion of repetitive
remarks in the basic text. When words or lines in speeches are illegible or the original documents were mutilated, this will be indicated in brackets. If the editors can determine what the probable missing or illegible words were, they will be inserted in the text in brackets (e.g., "Slavery is [an evil monster which seeks] the darkness.").
It has been our intention to present accurate readable texts of Douglass's speeches. Put simply, we have reproduced each speech as close to the form of the original as is feasible without confusing the reader. The speeches have been printed exactly as they appeared in the original sources with the following silent changes:
1. Obvious printer's errors have been corrected. The most common of these were the transposing of letters within a word, the repetition of words and punctuation marks, and transposition of numbers within dates. Misspelled names have been treated as printer's errors when it was apparently impossible for anyone to pronounce them as transcribed or when the correct spelling appeared elsewhere in the same document.
2. Where they did not exist, conventional paragraph indentations have been added.
3. Descriptive titles have been supplied for those speeches not having them.
4. Brackets in printed documents have been converted to parentheses.
5. The titles of books, pamphlets, and newspapers and the names of ships have been routinely italicized whenever they did not appear in quotation marks.
6. The capitalization and punctuation of notations of audience reactions have been standardized.
7. Periods have been added after all abbreviated words.
8. Footnote numbers in printed documents have been converted to asterisks in our version to distinguish them from our annotations.
9. Sacred texts (e.g. Bible, Koran), names of religious bodies (e.g. Methodists, Quakers), adherents (e.g. Christians, Hindus), services (Holy Communion, Lord's Supper), and adjectives (Islamic, Jewish) have been capitalized whenever they were lowercased in printed documents.
The speeches will be printed in chronological sequence according to the dates Douglass delivered them. When the sources do not indicate on
which day of the month Douglass gave a speech, it will be placed after the dated speeches delivered that month. Speeches for which the editors have only been able to determine a year will be placed after all dated speeches delivered that year.
The introductory note to each speech begins by listing the source(s) of the version we print. All other texts—usually shorter summaries, narratives, and extracts, or duplicates and slightly altered copies of the printed version—are listed chronologically in order of publication. Since some version of a Douglass speech might appear in as many as ten sources, virtually no effort has been made to show how the other texts differ from the version we print. However, indications are given when Douglass, previous editors, or the Library of Congress cataloguers misdated the other texts or gave the wrong occasion for a speech. For example, in his 1855 autobiography, , Douglass included excerpts from his Finsbury Chapel speech in London, citing the date as 12 May 1846. But according to four contemporary London newspapers and one pamphlet, Douglass delivered the speech on 22 May. Rather than an extended discussion about an obvious typographical error, in the introductory note to the 22 May speech we simply list the other text in the autobiography and state it was "misdated as 12 May 1846." Whenever the information was available, the introductory note includes the occasion for the speech, the size and reaction of the audience, and critical estimates of the address. Usually that data appeared in the sources containing texts of the speech. When additional sources were used they are listed at the end of the introductory note.
Data on participants in meetings where Douglass spoke was sparse. Usually newspaper reports listed them only by their initials and last names. We tried to identify participants more completely in the headnotes, listing their occupations and full names whenever we could obtain such data.
In selecting interviews the editors have exercised extreme caution. Always they were read in tandem with Douglass's contemporary correspondence. The interviews we selected met the same standards applied to speeches and are treated like them in annotation, placement, and reproduction.
The editors have tried in the annotation to identify those persons, places, events, and literary allusions in Douglass's speeches and interviews mandatory for comprehension of the documents. Identification is only provided for a person or event the first time the reference appears
and the notes are placed at the bottom of the page and numbered consecutively for each document. We have provided the least information about persons and events ordinarily covered in standard textbooks, encyclopedias, and biographical dictionaries, while devoting more space to the most obscure. Despite all our efforts, some casual references have been elusive or impossible to identify with precision. Because it has not been our intention to settle perennial historical debates or to write a biography of Douglass, we have tried to keep the notes as short as possible. Information on people, places, and events has often been drawn from a variety of sources. These we have included at the end of each note as a guide to future researchers.