Introduction to Volume Three

Robin L. Condon and Peter P. Hinks

Introduction to Volume Three

Robin L. Condon and Peter P. Hinks

By the time Frederick Douglass penned the first two parts of Life and Times that constituted its 1881 first edition, he had already published two successful autobiographies, served as editor of four newspapers, published thousands of editorials and articles in his own papers as well as in others, and advised several United States presidents--most notably Abraham Lincoln. Douglass entered civic life three years after his 1838 escape from slavery when he spoke before a predominantly white abolitionist audience in Nantucket, Massachusetts. This extemporaneous speech of 12 August 1841 led to Douglass 's seven years as a paid itinerant lecturer for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, and later the American Anti-Slavery Society. His final autobiography integrates Douglass 's life as a slave with his later public career.

Born into slavery at Tuckahoe on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in February 1818, Douglass dedicated over two-thirds of his long life to human rights activism. On the morning of 20 February 1895 at the age of seventy-seven, he attended a meeting of the Women's National Council in Washington, D.C. He returned to his home in Anacostia for a brief respite before a speech he was scheduled to deliver that evening at the Hillsdale African Church. As he waited for the carriage that was to convey him to the church, he collapsed and died.¹New York Times, 21 February 1895. The third part added to his postbellum autobiography in 1892 was his final written construction of his identity, but Frederick Douglass's lifetime "labor of self-culture" did not end until the moment of his physical death.²James McCune Smith, "Introduction," in The Frederick Douglass Papers Series Two: Autobiographical Writings, ed. John W. Blassinggame et al., 3 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1999-2011), 2:11 (hereafter cited as Douglass Papers).

The present edition of Life and Times contains Douglass's third and fourth returns to the story of his life. All of Douglass·s autobiographical writings departed from the same point—his birth into slavery—and all concluded with the experiences immediately anterior to the date of each book's completion. Each publication, Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), My Bondage and Freedom (1855), and Life and Times (1881; 1882; 1892) should therefore he considered an independent

and complete work; the stories they relate, though similar, are not identical. The differences among the autobiographies reveal the development of Douglass's character, intellect, and thought during the forty-eight years he engaged in self-narrative. Douglass occasionally revised his earlier interpretations of certain life incidents in later books. For example, the young Douglass of the Narrative interpreted his abilities and unusual opportunities as evidence that he had been selected by Providence to transcend the circumstances of his birth. In his later life writings, Douglass attributed his successes to causes more mundane: the opportunities afforded him by members of his masters' families, his friendships with white boys during his sojourn in Baltimore, and the frequent unaccountable strokes of luck that allowed him the time and privacy to educate himself.³Waldo E. Martin, Jr., points out, "His [Douglass's] ascension to the role [of race leader] betrayed the necessary conjunction of ability, ambition, and fortuitous circumstance." Waldo E. Martin, Jr., The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984), 55. In Life and Times, Douglass revealed for the first time the details of his harrowing escape from slavery in September 1838.

All of Douglass's autobiographical writings concluded with expressions of hope for future full freedom and racial equality for African Americans. None of the conclusions promised a sequel, although apparently Douglass could not resist adding a third part when he expanded and revised the 1882 second edition in 1892, explaining to his readers, "When the first part of this book was written, I was, as before intimated, already looking towards the sunset of human life and thinking that my children would probably finish the recital of my life, or that possibly some other persons outside of family ties to whom I am known might think it worth while to tell what he or she mightknow of the remainder of my story. I considered, as I have said, that my work was done. But friends and publishers concur in the opinion that the unity and completeness of the work require that it shall be finished by the hand by which it was begun" (377). Likely the former slave, who began authoring his own life a mere seven years after attaining freedom and who chose the name under which he published his autobiographies, felt considerable ambivalence about ceding the self he had created to other writers, even to his children or trusted friends. To the end, he embodied his oft-invoked character, the self-made man he so deeply respected.

Douglass wrote his first full autobiography at the age of twenty-seven. Published under the aegis of William Lloyd Garrison'sGarrison, William Lloyd

William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79) was the foremost white abolitionist of the nineteenth century and was credited with the discovery of Douglass as a speaker at an antislavery meeting in Nantucket in 1841. He began his career as an apprentice printer on the Newburyport (Mass.) Herald at the age of thirteen. Garrison became editor of the Newburyport Free Press in 1826, but the paper closed within a year. He was then associated with a series of periodicals in Boston that advocated reform before Benjamin Lundy offered the young journalist the opportunity to write for his antislavery newspaper. Garrison joined Lundy in editing the Genius of Universal Emancipation in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1829, during the last year of the paper's 1821-1830 run. In 1830 a libel suit against the editors forced the paper to close and landed Garrison in jail. After his release, he courted the wealthy merchants of New York and Boston in order to start the Liberator (1831-65), a weekly journal based in Boston in which he advocated an immediate end to slavery. Garrison's brand of abolition condemned any institution that would tolerate the existence of slavery, including churches, political parties. and even the United States itself and any scheme aimed at removing black people from the country. Instead, Garrison hoped to raise the public's awareness that slavery was morally wrong and thereby force its end in an almost millennial moment of emancipation. His approach appealed to both white and black antislavery advocates but earned him many enemies among those only moderately opposed to slavery and slaveholders alike. Seeing the need for greater action and organization beyond the pages of the Liberator; Garrison joined with other abolitionists to form the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1831. Two years later he helped found the larger American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1833 he established ties with English abolitionists after a trip to Great Britain, and he later brought the noted and notorious speaker George Thompson to the United States for a tour. Garrison also dedicated himself to women's rights, encouraging women to enter the public sphere by inviting them, via the Liberator, to form female antislavery societies. In addition to the thirty-three women's antislavery societies that flourished by 1838, Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society welcomed women as well as blacks into its ranks. However, female delegates were excluded from the World's Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 in London. The issue of women's participation in the antislavery movement and Garrison's absolute refusal to turn to politics to end slavery caused a division in the American Anti-Slavery Society. Brothers Lewis and Arthur Tappan, who opposed women's acting as speakers and who hoped to use politics toward abolition, broke with Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society, forming the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, or the "New Organization" in 1841. Garrison's ideas were so closely associated with the "Old Organization" that the American Anti-Slavery Society became known simply as the "Garrisonians." With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Garrison believed that he had accomplished his life's work and that of the antislavery movement. He then resigned from the presidency of the American Anti-Slavery Society and closed the Liberator. Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children, 4 vols. (New York, 188589); Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998); James Brewer Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1992); John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (Boston, 1963); Dictionary of American Biography, 20 vols. (New York, 1928-36), 7:168-72. American Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass's Narrative authenticated his status as a fugitive slave for white audiences who doubted that the eloquent orator spent his first

twenty years in bondage. Douglass's Narrative enjoyed unprecedented success among slave narratives published prior to 1846. Appearing in May 1845, by September of that year it had sold over 4,500 copies, and by 1848 it had been translated into French, German, and Dutch. During its first two years in print, six new editions were published: two Irish and four English. A grand total of twenty-one editions had appeared in print a scant six years after Narrative's first publication. By 1853 approximately 30,000 copies of the book had been sold.

Garrison arranged for Douglass to tour the British Isles after the publication of his Narrative. There, the book sold well and provided Douglass with an oratorical platform from which to denounce the institution of slavery in the United States. The tour was also timed to protect Douglass from his former masters, whose identities (as well as his own slave identity) Douglass had revealed in the book. Experiencing widespread celebrity and presenting well-reasoned, persuasive, and eloquent arguments against the institution, Douglass converted a great many of his transatlantic readers and listeners to the belief that immediate uncompensated emancipation would be the best course for the United States. While Douglass was exhorting the British to support abolition in the United States, American southerners, and particularly those who had known Douglass as Frederick Bailey the slave, attacked the book's veracity. One of Douglass's most vitriolic critics was A. C. C. Thompson,⁴Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:86n. whose father, a physician and slaveholder at St. Michaels, owned a farm not far from that of Edward Covey during the time of Douglass's work there. Denouncing Douglass's Narrative as a collection of lies, Thompson defended the character and actions of Thomas Auld in a public letter to the Delaware Republican calling Douglass "a recreant slave" and accusing him of perpetrating falsehoods about slaveholders in general.⁵John W. Blassingame, "Introduction to Volume One," in Douglass Papers, ser. 2, l:xli; Douglass to William Lloyd Garrison, in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series 3: Correspondence, ed. John R. McKivigan (New Haven, Conn., 2009), 1:81–88. Thompson's public exchange of letters with Douglass confirmed the authenticity of events reported in the book and increased rather than diminished the book's popularity.

Although Douglass's British sojourn from 1845 to 1847 was in most ways a great success, it compromised his relationship with his Garrisonian mentors. Irish abolitionist Richard WebbWebb, Richard Davis

Richard D. Webb was a Garrisonian abolitionist from Dublin, Ireland, whom Douglass met on his first trip to the British Isles in 1845. Originally a Quaker, he turned toward Unitarianism as his antislavery passions became more radical. A successful printer, Webb guided the small, but intensely active, Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society in Dublin, of which James Haughton and his family were also members. Webb printed the organ of the British Garrisonian abolitionist movement, the Anti-Slavery Advocate, out of his Dublin-based office. The British Garrisonians were active pamphleteers, and Webb's own The National AntiSlavery Societies of England and the United States (1852) was one of the most confident and able statements of the Garrisonian cause to appear on either side of the Atlantic. Temperley, British Antislavery, 210, 212-13, 227, 237, 239, 244, 252-54, 256, 259; Taylor, British and American Abolitionists, 241-44, 248, 258-59, 293-94. , who published an edition of the Narrative, shared with Douglass a letter from Garrisonian Maria Weston Chapman, in which she warned Webb to watch Douglass for signs of defection

to "The London Committee," namely the anti-Garrisonian British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Insulted by the tone of the letter, an angry Douglass replied to Chapman in March 1846, "I never gave you any just cause to distrust me, and if I am to be watched over for evel rather than for good, by my professed freinds I can say with propriety save me from my friends, and I will take care of my enemies!"⁶Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:100. Chapman's warning to Webb further soured Douglass's view of the manner in which the white leadership of the American Anti-Slavery Society treated him. Nonetheless, Douglass continued his work for the society while abroad, joining British Garrisonian George Thompson at public meetings across the British Isles to condemn the Free Church of Scotland's acceptance of donations from American slaveholders.⁷Ibid., 101nn.

By 1847 Douglass felt bound by duty to return to America, where his family remained, and where he could work for freedom alongside others of his race. His Narrative had increased his danger of rendition to his old masters once he landed in the United States, a reality that alarmed his British friends and motivated them to raise the capital to purchase Douglass's freedom. On 5 December 1846 the fugitive became a legally free man as a result of a financial transaction between his transatlantic supporters, led by British abolitionist Mrs. Henry Richardson, and the Auld family. The purchase of Douglass's freedom sparked controversy among some American abolitionists, who felt that Douglass's mode of obtaining his freedom condoned the trafficking in human beings and constituted "a violation of anti-slavery principles."⁸Ibid., ser. 2, 2:216. Douglass answered his critics by comparing the exchange to "money extorted from a robber" or a "ransom" rather than an affirmation of any man's right of ownership of another.⁹Ibid.

After securing his freedom and returning to the United States, Douglass announced his plan to start a newspaper dedicated to abolition and racial advancement. Garrison opposed the idea, arguing that Douglass was better suited as an orator and could contribute more to abolition in that role. The objections that Garrison voiced to Douglass did not reveal the scope of the former's opposition. Douglass had been the Garrisonians' most powerful orator, winning many to the abolitionist cause. In addition, Garrison was almost certainly concerned about the competition between Douglass's newspaper and his own, the Liberator. Douglass regretted losing the support of

the Boston abolitionists, but he persevered in his intention, relocating to Rochester, New York. There he established the North Star, a newspaper initially funded with testimonials given him for that purpose while he was still in Britain. Its first issue appeared on 3 December 1847. As Garrison had predicted, Douglass's newspaper faced financial difficulties from the start, having a small list of subscribers and considerable weekly costs. Douglass mortgaged his house and accepted donations from the Garrisonians' Western New York Anti-Slavery Society. British abolitionist Julia Griffiths moved to Rochester temporarily in 1849 to organize the financial operations of the North Star. Initially Douglass's new paper espoused Garrisonian tenets: it condemned colonization schemes, proclaimed churches and the U.S. Constitution to be proslavery in nature, and advocated disunion. However, the North Star also included contributions by well-known blacks like Samuel R. Ward, Amos G. Beman, William J. Wilson, Henry Bibb, and James McCune Smith. While the paper's articles began to focus on the problem of northern racism and self-help, it also became more political as Douglass himself became more involved in the free black community in New York State.¹⁰For a full discussion of the North Star's early operations, see John R. McKivigan, "The Frederick Douglass Gerrit Smith Friendship," in Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Political Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (1990; New York, 1993), 205–32. After meeting and corresponding with wealthy landowner and philanthropist Gerrit Smith, Douglass revised his abolitionist ideology in clearer distinction to that of the Garrisonians. In letters dating from 1849 published in the North Star, Smith and Douglass discussed the nature of the U.S. Constitution regarding slavery, concluding that one's method of interpreting the document was crucial. If the Constitution was read strictly by the letter, independently of the intentions of its framers, it could be read as an antislavery document, and one that conferred upon the federal government the power to end slavery in all its forms. If intent originating outside the letter or the document dictated its interpretation, then the Constitution was, as the Garrisonians held, proslavery, and disunion, rather than political abolition, would be the best agenda for abolition societies to recommend.¹¹Douglass Papers, ser. 3, 1:374–78, 417–19, 438–54. AlthoughDouglass did not openly declare his opposition to the Garrisonian interpretation of the Constitution until the spring of 1851, he had ceased to view it as a proslavery document by early 1849.¹² Ibid., 448n.The North Star would publish until June 1851, when, merging with the Syracuse Liberty Party Paper; it was renamed Frederick Douglass' Paper. Ideology, political visibility, and an

active journalistic career separated the thirty-seven-year-old writer of My Bondage and My Freedom from the young fugitive who wrote the Narrative. Douglass in 1855 advocated political abolition and held that solidarity among American blacks was indispensable to the abolition of slavery and the pursuit of racial equality. He had begun to argue that moral suasion alone could not end the "peculiar institution" of slavery; such an overwhelming ambition, he foresaw, might be realized only through political action and, if necessary, violent resistance.

Douglass's first autobiography had, by necessity, followed the Garrisonian program of nonresistance and moral suasion. Garrison's florid introduction to the book, along with a letter by patrician orator Wendell Phillips, validated the fugitive slave's credibility for a skeptical white readership. But by 1855 Douglass was free, and he was sufficiently well known that he no longer needed white sponsors to mediate his relationship with the reading public. Douglass's second, more self-critical and detailed autobiography opened with the eloquent and concise prose of James McCune Smith, a free black physician and political abolitionist who had been educated in Edinburgh, Scotland. Recognized abroad for his academic achievements, Smith had returned to America, where he practiced internal medicine for twenty-five years. Douglass may have seen in Smith a figure capable of challenging the condescending letters from Garrison and Phillips that had lent Douglass's Narrative its authority. Not only did the physician's attainments refute the widespread notion of African Americans' inferior intellectual ability, but his introduction exhorted his race to resist both slavery and the white abolitionists who failed to view blacks as true equals. The choice of Smith was a brilliant one, the introduction urging what the second autobiography emphasized—resistance to the notion of white superiority.¹³Ibid., ser. 2, 2:7–19. Openly subversive, the introduction accused the American Anti-Slavery Society of perpetuating white supremacy on the grounds that the organization had insisted that Douglass's lectures focus on the sordid details of slavery rather than presenting a reasoned argument against it, as Douglass was by then able and eager to do. In addition to alienating the Garrisonians, Smith's introduction was the first text to identify Douglass as a "representative man," a designation that would be accepted and celebrated by a great many black and white Americans in the years that followed. He described Douglass as "a burning and shining light, on which the aged may look with gladness. the young with hope, and the down-trodden, as a representative of what they

may themselves become."¹⁴Ibid., 7. With the publication of his second autobiography, then, Douglass sealed his breach with the abolitionists who had first introduced him to the public, while opening new possibilities for political action to end slavery.

As early as the mid-1840s Douglass was nearly as well prepared to write his life story and political opinions as he was to speak about them. A voracious reader since achieving literacy, he had become by 1881 an experienced and skilled writer, familiar with contemporary critical expectations for the popular nineteenth-century literary form of autobiography. In fact, Douglass himself had applied the accepted evaluative standards in the numerous reviews of autobiographies he had written as editor of his newspapers. The guidelines governing the autobiographical form had shifted since the mid-1800s, when Douglass modeled his Narrative on earlier published slave narratives. Douglass's first self-narrative employed literary critic John Foster's recommendations about autobiography—recommendations that had influenced the practice of autobiographers in the British Isles and America since the previous century.¹⁵John Foster, Essays in a Series of Letters (New York, 1853), 69, 71-78. Critics following Foster, writing during the first four decades of the nineteenth century, recommended that authors illuminate the development of their moral characters and their methods of acquiringself-knowledge. Autobiographies should avoid exhibitions of self-love, displaying instead the attributes of credibility, minute detail, descriptions of youthful inspiration and of appropriate deportment, and, above all, simple style.¹⁶16. Ibid. Foster advocated moderation in personal expression of emotion within a narration of conversion to a more productive way of life from a degraded position. Worthy writers of autobiography were required to provide examples that readers might emulate as they strove to improve their own morality and social decorum. These structural elements governing successful life narratives persisted throughout the nineteenth century, although critics writing after 1845 expressed more interest in what such works revealed about the past rather than what behaviors they recommended as most likely to produce happiness and lives well lived. After 1845 many critics wrote that autobiography should furnish readers with a view into earlier societies, illustrating past events in order to provide readers with accurate information about the lives and motivations of historic personages—autobiography should provide readers with the tools to separate truth from legend. Accordingly, mid-to-late-nineteenth-century critics insisted that the historical

value of self-narrative depended on the authors' opportunities for participating in and observing the dramas of their times.¹⁷"Autobiography—Chateaubriand's Memoirs," Blackwood's Magazine, 6:292–304 (September 1849); "Literary Notices," Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 9:276 (July 1854). The midcentury advent of the camera inspired critics of autobiography to consider the daguerreotype an apt metaphor for the most effective autobiographical prose. Eminent British literary critic Thomas McNicoll prescribed photographic realism in his 1861 guide for writers, offering Thomas De Quincey's 1853 Autobiographic Sketches as an example of the literal and detailed presentation of nature necessary to an effective self-narrative.¹⁸Thomas McNicoll, Essays on English Literature (London, 1861), 60-61. Critics writing at midcentury struggled over the degree to which an author should reveal his or her personal life; the degree of modesty necessary in the self-narrative remained a subject of debate during the latter half of the century. But, for the most part, McNicoll's aesthetic would influence the practice of autobiographical writing for the rest of the century.

Just as Life and Times must be analyzed in the context of other autobiographies, it must also be viewed in the context of the postwar slave narrative, despite the fact that several scholars have argued that it has little in common with the numerous other black autobiographies written after 1865, most of them by former slaves. According to Russell Brignano's Black Americans in Autobiography, African Americans published no fewer than forty-eight autobiographies between 1865 and 1900.^*Russell C. Brignano, Black Americans in Autobiography: An Annotated Bibliography of Autobiographies and Autobiographical Books Written since the Civil War (Durham, N.C., 1974). Although the extent to which these may have influenced the older Douglass's approach to writing autobiography is unknown, they necessarily enriched and complicated the sociopolitical impact of his emblematic narrative of slavery and freedom.

The events and vicissitudes of the lives of postbellum black authors varied enormously. Although most had been slaves, several grew up free. Some had escaped to the antebellum North to secure their freedom, but many others were not emancipated until or after the advent of the Civil War. The majority who had been slaves had attempted escape more than once. Several black autobiographers remained in the South after the war. Participation in political, social, and self-improvement organizations alter the Civil War was common among these writers. Their narratives typically explored the significance of the war's social transformations for their individuals and the race. While postbellum autobiographies were rarely celebratory, most characterized the meaning of April 1865 as did the Reverend Elijah P. Marrs, a former

slave in Kentucky who had fought with Union forces in Tennessee, "The day of the surrender of Lee was a grand one with Company Land all the troops in Bowling Green. The war was now over, and the thoughts of going home and being free men filled all hearts with joy. Men were shouting, some crying, and others praying, "'O Freedom! How I love thee! Long have I prayed for thee, and at last thou hast come! May I enter into thy joy and rest.'"²⁰Elijah P. Marrs, Life and History of the Rev. Elijah P. Marrs (Louisville, Ky., 1885), 68-69.

Reverend Marrs's depiction of widespread elation about the advent of freedom and its opportunities was prevalent among black authors writing after 1865, but few freed people discovered much of the "joy and rest" they had anticipated in the reality of freedom. Unlike Douglass in his first two narratives and the numerous other antebellum black chroniclers, postbellum black autobiographers recounted their struggles in the experience of freedom, explored what that freedom meant for them, and compared it to their enslavement. Several authors who first experienced freedom as a result of the Civil War voiced disappointment with the constraints of black freedom, with the persistence of white prejudice, and with the nation's ingratitude to African Americans for their extraordinary service to the Union cause.Several expressed bitterness over what they perceived as America's near-total failure to support the freed blacks materially and ideologically. For example, Henry Clay Bruce, brother of Blanche K. Bruce, U.S. senator from Mississippi from 1875 to 1881, offered this pointed criticism: "It does seem to me, that a Christian Nation, which had received such wealth from the labor of a subjugated people, upon setting them free would, at least, have given them a square meal. Justice seems to demand one year's support, forty acres of land and a mule each. Did they get that or any portion of it? Not a cent. Four million people turned loose without a dollar and told to "'Root, hog, or die!'"²¹H[enry] C[lay] Bruce, The New Man: Twenty-nine Years a Slave. Twenty-nine Years a Free Man (1895, New York, 1969), 117. James Lindley Smith of Norwich, Connecticut, stated a similar conviction more simply; "We cannot save ourselves without aid and sympathy from others; without the protection of just laws and righteous judgement."²²James L[indley] Smith, Autobiograpy of James L. Smith (1881: New York, 1969). 111.

Although authors writing after emancipation discussed their experiences as slaves, fugitives, and free blacks during the antebellum years, developments in the years following 1865 dominated the majority of black self-narratives written after that year. For American blacks, significant civil rights struggles continued after 1865, and postbellum works reflected the social,

political, educational, and economic challenges they confronted. Freedmen often responded to these challenges with collective activism. Marrs, for example, organized churches, schools, and protection societies in Kentucky and participated in Republican and black political organizations locally and nationally.²³Marrs formed a self-protection society for African American citizens in Henry County, Kentucky, to prevent their often violent intimidation and abuse by members of the Ku Klux Klan. He served as secretary of the society, called the Loyal League. The society provided blacks with weapons that they could defend themselves in the event of attack. Marrs, Life and History, 89-90. James Lindley Smith was politically active in Norwich and made annual trips to his former home in Virginia to assist impoverished freedmen there. George Henry of Providence, Rhode Island, labored to defeat laws prohibiting racial intermarriage, helped form various black benevolent societies, fought for black access to the jury box, and supported the establishment of schools for African American youths.²⁴George Henry, Life of George Henry, Together with a Brief History of the Colored People in America (1894; Freeport, N.Y., 1971). John Malvin strove to promote the Republican party in Ohio²⁵John Malvin, North into Freedom: The Autobiography of John Malvin, Free Negro, 1795-1880, ed. Allan Peskin (1879; Cleveland, 1966). while Henry Clay Bruce worked to cultivate black political and economic organizations. Because visible efforts among blacks to organize for any purpose frequently sparked violent confrontations with whites, the goals of black organizations often remained unfulfilled. James Lindley Smith, reflecting on his disillusionment in 1882, wrote, "The more I contemplate the condition of my people, the more I am convinced that this is only the beginning of the end."²⁶Smith, Autobiography, 150.

For the majority of black autobiographers writing after 1865, then, the events of the years following emancipation eclipsed the experience of slavery in terms of both urgency and drama-- their narratives were written as part of the struggle to secure civil rights for the freedmen. Douglass agreed that the struggle for racial elevation and civil rights remained crucial in the years after the Civil War; by that time, he had spent twenty-five years constructing his public and private identity in relation to his abolitionism. With emancipation realized, however, he tempered his joy with anxiety: "l felt I had reached the end of the noblest and best part of my life; my school was broken up, my church disbanded, and the beloved congregation dispersed, never to come together again. The anti-slavery platform had performed its work, and my voice was no longer needed" (292).

Although emancipation temporarily obscured Douglass's former clarity

of action and purpose, in the months following April 1865 he rededicated himself to working toward racial elevation and equality:

Though slavery was abolished, the wrongs of my people were not ended. Though they were not slaves they were not yet quite free.... And yet the government... felt that it had done enough for [the freedman]. It had made him free, and henceforth he must make his own way in the world, or as the slang phrase has it, "Root, pig, or die"; yet he had none of the conditions for self-preservation or self-protection. He was free from the individual master, but the slave of society. He had neither property, money, nor friends. He was free from the old plantation, but he had nothing but the dusty road under his feet. He was free from the old quarter that once gave him shelter, but a slave to the rains of summer and the frosts of winter. He was in a word literally turned loose naked, hungry, and destitute to the open sky.... I, therefore, soon found that the negro had still a cause, and that he needed my voice and pen with others to plead for it. (295–96)

Like James Lindley Smith, Douglass recognized that emancipation was "only the beginning of the end"—that many grave and enduring wrongs must be redressed before African Americans could feel secure in their freedom. In contrast to the clear and triumphant struggle against slavery, however, the battles now confronting Douglass and all American blacks were multiple and complicated, involving struggles for enfranchisement, education, and economic justice. Although they had gained nominal freedom, former slaves were still forced to fight for the benefits of American citizenship against an opposition supported by the vastly superior economic power of whites as well as the white southerners' entrenched and often violent racial prejudice against them. Freedmen found little support from the North, where racism, complacency, and sheer fatigue had replaced the abolitionist fervor of the antebellum years.

Although Douglass's aims as editor and lecturer altered to address various issues of racial equality, his postbellum autobiography did not emphasize his later struggles at the expense of his early ones. Douglass's first autobiography recounted less than one-third of his life span; his second rernunted less than half. By 1881 neither the life stories of former slaves nor the chronicles of former abolitionists engaged the American reading public's moral and sensational imaginations as they had done before the Civil War. It was not, then, the publishing industry's demand for memoirs of abolitionists that inspired Douglass's complex project of addressing the myriad needs and

problems of his race in yet a third autobiography.²⁷Former abolitionists did write and publish memoirs, but these typically enjoyed less success than Life and Times did, and far less than the "plantation school" of nostalgic fiction. For a full discussion of this trend in American print culture following the Civil War, see Julie Roy Jeffrey, Abolitionists Remember: Antislavery Autobiographies and the Unfinished Work of Emancipation (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2008), 1–25, 61–96, 155–202, 217–54. Exhilarated but at a loss after emancipation, he realized that a new chronicle of his life must mount an argument for removing the obstacles to productivity for men and women of color who confronted increasingly virulent racial discrimination and violence in the North as well as in the South. Douglass's statements in his introduction and two conclusions to the book indicate that he meant Life and Times to function as an exemplary tale of a man who achieved renown and effected widespread change despite his lowly origins. The lessons offered in his life story, he hoped, would assure freed slaves and free blacks facing the ceaseless prejudice of their fellow citizens that through literacy, temperance, hard work, and economy, they might lead virtuous, satisfying, and peaceful lives. Douglass, considered worthy by a majority of his contemporaries, white and black, to stand among Ralph Waldo Emerson's "great men," harbored relatively modest aspirations for his race.²⁸Ralph Waldo Emerson. "Uses of Great Men" in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson ed. Douglas Emory Wilson. 6 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1971 2003). 4:1 20. For a full analysis of Douglass's role as a "representative man," see Robert S. I.evine, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity (Chapel Hill. N.C. 1997). He did not expect all freed people to rise, as he had done, to national prominence through assiduous effort, unwavering aspiration, and personal sagacity. Douglass, who in his final autobiography acknowledged his atypical experience in slavery and his timely help from others, instead expected emancipation to afford former slaves opportunities to gain respectability, to exercise their citizenship, and to lead self-sufficient lives as farmers, laborers, and mechanics. He hoped that the progeny of the recently freed might gradually acquire the social equality he believed would follow from the legal equality that the projects of Reconstruction, especially black male suffrage, appeared to promise.

More than either of Douglass's earlier autobiographies, Life and Times became by necessity a history of nineteenth-century America written by an extraordinary individual whose continuing visibility, undiminished rhetorical power, and singularity of position enabled him to reflect the vicissitudes of nearly an entire century—vicissitudes that transcended those several significant burdens he himself had experienced. Douglass, best known for his early roles as a fugitive slave and antislavery orator, was sixty-three years of age when the first edition of Life and Times was published. He remained a

key figure in the public imagination, never ceasing to strive for achievement in his personal life and on behalf of his race. He was in an ideal position from which to report on the recent turbulent past and to acquaint readers with famous personages as well as lesser-known men and women who had, along with him, attempted to transform the American sociopolitical landscape. At this stage of his life, Douglass knew a great deal, at least in terms of his own accomplishments, about, as he often liked to say, "the end from the beginning."²⁹Several of Douglass's speeches contain "end from the beginning" rhetoric to express his idea the absence of foresight was necessary for human progress to occur. These include "The War and How to End It," 25 March 1863; "Mission of War," 13 January 1864; "What the Black Man Wants," 26January 1865; "The Freedman's Monument to Abraham Lincoln," 14 April 1876; "The Race Problem," 21 October 1890; John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan, eds., The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series 1: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, 5 vols (New Haven, Conn., 1979–92). 3:570–84, 4:3–24, 59–69, 427–44, 5:436–56. As he began his third autobiography, the aging author benefited from hindsight, discussing postbellum America and evaluating the ways in which the Civil War and emancipation affected the lives of American blacks during the remainder of the nineteenth century. Yet although his stance in Life and Times had changed to a retrospective rather than a projective one, he employed a narrative strategy similar to that of his antebellum autobiographies. This postbellum narrative, more than half of which relates events occurring after 1855, nonetheless begins with his birth; in other words, like his other self-narratives, the beginning of his third and final autobiography focuses on slavery. Douglass realized that his identity and public career "naturally" depended on his origins. As he mused in Life and Times, "When one has advanced far in the journey of life... when long distances of time and space have come between him and his point of departure, it is natural that his thoughts should return to the place of his beginning" (348).

When he returned to self-narrative for the third time, Douglass retained many of the previously recounted life events in a chronological trajectory that nearly duplicated the plot of his antebellum autobiographies. Having by then accrued an impressive record of accomplishments, he chose not to elide the important story of the beginning of his life; this final autobiography, like the first two, assessed his identity and achievements in terms of their distance from the experience of his first twenty years in slavery. Douglass's point of departure was the identity he sought to leave behind: Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, born a slave. Like his mother, Harriet Bailey, and his grandmother Betsey Bailey, the illiterate child who would become a prominent humanitarian was born the human property of others; every

aspect of his person was subject to the decisions, whims, and desires of slaveholder Aaron Anthony and his heirs. The import of the whole of Douglass 's life—his intellectual and social growth via his attentive engagement with persons and events, the development of Bailey the slave into Douglass the free man who would author both his own self and his "times"—required this beginning in order to confer an appropriately weighty significance to his end. Edward Said's meditation on beginnings provides critical insight on the necessity of Douglass's third return to Bailey. Said explains: "It is my present urgency, the here and now, that will enable me to establish the sequence of beginning, middle, end, and to transform it from a distant object—located 'there'—into the subject of my reasoning. So conceived and fashioned, time and space yield a sequence authorized by a wish for either immanent or surface significance."³⁰Edward Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York, 1975), 42.

Douglass's "present urgencies"—his moments in 1881 and 1892, when he strove for the third and fourth times to wrest generalized and instructive significance from his eventful life—seem to have summoned Frederick Bailey back to his grandmother's cabin in Tuckahoe. Without inhabiting again the slave child in his last autobiographical text, the U.S. marshal of the District of Columbia could not have staged Life and Times's climactic scene of personal reconciliation with his former master—a scene of reconciliation that for Douglass held the place of equality between races he had long desired and which remained unfulfilled during his lifetime. The continuing presence of Bailey endowed Life and Times with an authority that extended beyond the recital of familiar events to Douglass 's return in 1877 to Maryland's Eastern Shore and the narrated moments thereafter. That Frederick Bailey provided Frederick Douglass the scaffold that supported the structure of yet a third self-assessment is evident in his reflection on the last decade he discusses in Life and Times: "This decade, from 1871 to 1881,has been crowded, if time is capable of being thus described. With incidents and events which may well enough be accounted remarkable. To me they certainly appear strange, if not wonderful. My early lite not only gave no visible promise, but no hint of such experience. On the contrary, that life seemed to render it, in part at least, impossible" (318). As he closed Life and Times in 1881 Douglass emphasized that it was his beginning in slavery, a beginning repeated in each autobiography, which verified his "remarkable" displacement; Frederick Bailey's impossibilities rendered Frederick Douglass's life exceptional. However, read within the larger context of

Douglass's idiosyncratic experience of slavery, as Dickson J. Preston points out, Bailey's impossibilities were merely improbabilities, and Douglass's rise to fame, while exceptional, was also understandable.³¹Dickson J. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass: The Maryland Years (Baltimore, 1980), 6. Preston notes that even Douglass's ancestry rendered his success lass shocking, noting that the Bailey clan was proud of its "long and intimate contact with an aristocratic white society that placed supreme emphasis on 'breeding' and pride of family.... the Bailey's were a strong and, in their own way, prideful family, with deep roots in their Eastern Shore soil and a long tradition of courage and endurance. That makes it less surprising that they produced, out of the sordidness and poverty of slavery, the flowering genius of a Frederick Douglass."

While Douglass's Narrative confirmed his slave status, this first autobiography, according to Preston's comprehensive research, exaggerated his suffering and deprivations while in the "peculiar institution."³²Ibid., 167 In order to argue for abolition, Douglass transformed his masters, particularly Thomas Auld, into caricatures of themselves. More significantly, he avoided acknowledging the several privileges granted to him during his childhood. By age eight, Frederick Bailey, as he was then known, had passed a mere eighteen months on the Lloyd plantation between leaving his grandmother's care and being moved to Baltimore. During that period he performed light work suited to his age and was chosen from among many other slave children to be the companion of Daniel Lloyd, a son of the plantation's owner, Colonel Edward Lloyd V, employer of Douglass 's first master, Captain Aaron Anthony. His relationship with Daniel Lloyd would prove the first of Douglass's many friendships with whites during his lifetime; the young slave spent a great deal of time with Lloyd and, as a result, mastered standard spoken English despite living as a plantation slave. A favorite of his master's daughter, Lucretia Anthony Auld, Douglass again was chosen, at age eight, to leave the plantation for the Baltimore household of her brother-in-law and his wife, Hugh and Sophia Keithley Auld. The only slave in that Fells Point home, his primary duty was to provide companionship to the young son of his new masters. His Baltimore mistress had never before owned slaves and was unaware of the common wisdom regarding the relationship of master to slave. By Douglass's account, Sophia Auld was warm and maternal, often reading the Bible aloud to the young slave and her son as she taught the child who would become Frederick Douglass the rudiments of reading.

It was in Baltimore, in Hugh Auld's household, that Douglass first questioned slavery seriously and recognized that literacy would afford him a path to freedom. In the more relaxed atmosphere of the home on Aliceanna Street, isolated from any slave community, he learned the meaning of abolition.

When a conflict between Thomas Auld and his brother resulted in Douglass's return to the former's home in Talbot County, he returned a literate and independent teenager whose formative experiences differed greatly from those of his fellow slaves who had remained at the Lloyd plantation, among whom numbered his own brother and sisters. Douglass, summoned back to Thomas Auld and his second wife Rowena Hambleton Auld—the beloved "Mrs. Lucretia" having died while he lived in Baltimore³³Lucretia Anthony Auld died in 1827. Ibid., 87–88.—was unaccustomed to the hard physical labor of a field hand and the typical deprivations of slavery. He grew angry and depressed as he adjusted to life at St. Michaels, and his attitude motivated Auld to hire him out to a neighboring farmer for a term of one year. Douglass wrote that he was worked to exhaustion and was beaten severely during his tenure on the farm of Edward Covey. Barely removed from poverty himself, Covey, a reputed "slave breaker," would become famous for his pivotal role in Douglass's struggle to assert his humanity and manhood. Douglass's crafting of his triumphant physical resistance to Covey's brutality in all of his autobiographies allowed him to emblematize the moment of seizing his selfhood; it also lent him public legitimacy within what must have been to whites a familiar typology of slave experience while downplaying the unusual privilege he had, in reality, enjoyed.

Douglass, in his third autobiography, could not honestly elide the privileges that were at least somewhat responsible for his achievements. Indeed, the author, as elder statesman, no longer had desire or reason to do so. Life and Times detailed his editorial work on his four newspapers, his relationship with John Brown and his dangerous flirtation with the Harpers Ferry insurrection, his discussions with Abraham Lincoln and other political leaders, his valiant but failed attempt to save the mismanaged Freedman's Savings Bank, and his political appointments. Proud of favor received, Douglass remained a stalwart Republican despite discouraging shifts in the party's priorities, particularly on issues of racial equality. In his later years Douglass stumped for the party's presidential candidates although he felt betrayed by Republicans' increasingly frequent compromises with unrepentant southern whites. A combination of self-interest and the pragmatism pervasive among postbellum blacks of all classes moved Douglass to iterate his belief that a continuing political alliance between Republicans and African Americans would ultimately benefit his race more than would alliances with the Democrats or less established parties. His party loyalty was rewarded, though never as handsomely as he had hoped; Douglass held

several appointed offices: United States marshal for the District of Columbia, recorder of deeds for the District of Columbia, and minister resident and consul general to Haiti, as well as assistant secretary of the Santo Domingo Commission, president of the Freedman's Savings and Trust Bank, and District of Columbia commissioner. All these appointments engendered controversy along with the honor they bestowed. Much of the third part of Life and Times consists of defensive responses to many who denounced Douglass's actions during his official appointments, while the other sections justify Douglass's second marriage, eighteen months after the death of his first wife, Anna Murray Douglass, to the forty-seven-year-old Helen Pitts, an educated white woman from an old New England family. Pitts, twenty years her husband's junior, had served as Douglass 's secretary during his tenure as recorder of deeds. The "Third Part" also details Douglass's travels abroad with Helen. Still other portions of the final section lament the deaths of British and Irish abolitionists whom Douglass had met during his first tour of the British Isles following the 1845 publication of Narrative.

Life and Times's new material, added in 1892 as the "Third Part," discussed at length what was perhaps the most momentous episode in Douglass's life between 1881 and 1892. In July 1889 he was appointed minister resident and consul general to Haiti. He served until August 1891 in a position that constituted his second experience with the diplomatic corps. Douglass assumed the office when the expanding U.S. Navy sought a secure coaling station in the Caribbean. The United States also wanted to limit stations available to European nations as Atlantic powers competed for the right to dig a canal through Central America. Since the Civil War and the U.S. government's formal recognition of Haiti in 1862, relations with the island nation had steadily improved. A series of eminent African Americans, of whom Douglass was the fourth, had been appointed to represent the United States in the black republic.³⁴Preceding Douglass in the political appointment of minister resident and consul to Haiti were African Americans Ebenezer D. Bassett (1869–77); John Mercer Langston (1877–85); George W. Williams, appointed in 1885 but never assumed the office; and John E. W. Thompson (1885–89). Rayford Whittingham Logan, The Diplomatic Relations of the United States with Haiti, 1776–1891 (1941; New York, 1969). 341, 370–80, 390, 392, 398, 423, 429. He arrived at Port-au-Prince as one of the frequent internecine conflicts on the island concluded. Florvil Hyppolite had emerged as the victor, largely because American warships had intervened to break a blockade against Hyppolite's forces in Môle Saint Nicolas, in the northwestern corner of the island. The Mole offered an excellent harbor, and the presiding naval commander, Admiral Bancroft Gherardi, led U.S. intervention

in an attempt to leverage a long-term concession of the harbor for use by the United States. In addition, associates of Secretary of State James G. Blaine pressed for further concessions for their business interests in Haiti. Douglass was expected to be a key agent in securing these privileges. Although he did play a prominent role in the negotiations, his conflicts with Gherardi and others resulted in failure to secure any of the concessions. The American press covered these talks extensively and frequently blamed Douglass for their failure. This public attention on Douglass, however unfavorable, may have seemed to him an opportunity to address at length what he considered to be unjust criticisms leveled against him with an expanded edition of the 1881 autobiography.³⁵Ibid.; William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York, 1991), 334–58.

Although Douglass devoted much of Part Three to defending his actions and decisions in later life, Life and Times in its expanded second edition never relinquishes Douglass's prime mission of promoting African American elevation. However, long before 1881, Douglass had become a phenomenon and a celebrity—considered by a majority of his contemporaries to be the preeminent voice representing the interests of American blacks among powerful whites. Although Douglass's continued political and personal prestige did not derail his dedication to social justice, it did isolate him from the majority of his race. His national renown and elite status, which in the years after the publication of Narrative had blinded him to the racism of Europeans and led him to exhort Americans to emulate their white exemplars abroad, later alienated him from many other black leaders in the nation. Douglass, living and working in the District of Columbia during Reconstruction and the period following its demise, expressed opinions that especially angered the southern black leaders who actively decried and fought the brutalities perpetrated against African Americans on state and local levels.

Douglass's apparent distance from the disturbing realities of bulldozing and nightriding occurring in the southern states allowed him to remain sanguine about the elevation of his race. His optimism ultimately rested on two abstract and interdependent beliefs: first, that the principles of the Declaration of Independence, broadly understood, were indisputably true and right; and, second, that the protean Constitution of the United States was capable of enforcing the spirit of the Declaration's contents.³⁶David W. Alight, Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge, La., 1989), 33–58. Douglass believed that the federal government would protect the people it had emancipated. His confidence in the power of federal legislation laid the foundation for his

unpopular positions about the plight of southern blacks. His distance—geographical, social, and intellectual—from the majority of his race seemed to have impaired his ability to form an accurate picture of the truly brutal conditions that the freed people of the South endured during and after the periodsometimes referred to as southern Redemption. His contention that violent opposition to black suffrage and advancement in the South would eventuallyabate sparked criticism from other African American intellectuals. Douglass doubted that mass migrations to Liberia and Kansas would result in improved conditions for former slaves. Southern blacks who embraced the Exoduster movement, as the Kansas migration movement was known, sought peace, safety, and an opportunity to own land free of the debt structure that shackled their efforts to achieve economic self-sufficiency. Although the promise of prosperity in Kansas would prove to be largely illusory, many freed people at the South viewed migration as the only way to escape the violence they routinely faced, especially as they tried to exercise their newly granted franchise.³⁷For extended discussions of postbellum black exodus from southern states and from the entire United States, see Robert G. Athearn, In Search of Canaan: Black Migration to Kansas, 1879–80 (Lawrence, Kans., 1978); Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after Reconstruction (New York, 1971); J. Gus Liebenow, Liberia: The Quest for Democracy (Bloomington, Ind., 1987), 1–152. Douglass, meanwhile, delivered speeches urging southern blacks to stay at home and published excerpts from one of these in the third part of Life and Times.³⁸Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:510–33. He argued that blacks were best suited to the climate of the South and to working its land; the best way black citizens could contribute to the nation was to continue the work so crucial to the growth of the country's economy during slavery. Migration, for Douglass, constituted no less than an admission of defeat, and a refutation of the argument that blacks had returned the right of American citizenship by means of their previous uncompensated labor.

The issue of abolition had lent Douglass's antebellum narratives focus, clarity, and energy. That focus remained in the twice and thrice told portions of Life and Times and underscored the importance that the established African American statesman accorded to his origins in slavery. Nonetheless, this familiar foundation weakened the appeal of the third autobiography for contemporary readers, many of whom considered the memoir repetitive and self-indulgent. Not only did the author's rehearsal of earlier material render his final self-narrative lengthy to the point of unwieldiness, but, by choosing slavery as his starting point, Douglass unwittingly engendered distorted

reviews of the fullest and most mature statement of his life. Some reviewers who introduced the book to the public may have believed a thorough reading of its content unnecessary; in the public imagination, Douglass had long occupied a solid position. Several reviews praised points that appeared in Douglass's antebellum narratives or repeated what most Americans already knew about his singular life. Few reviews indicated more than minimal familiarity with material added after the publication of My Bondage and My Freedom in 1855—material that reflected more than half of Douglass's public activity. Two reviews compared Life and Times to Harriet Beecher Stowe's sentimental novel Uncle Tom's Cabin: one deemed Douglass's literary efforts equivalent to Stowe's as a weapon against slavery,³⁹ Philadelphia Press, 26 December 1881, reprinted in Washington (D.C.) National Republican, 31 December 1881. while another complimented the third autobiography as "hardly less interesting" than Stowe's sentimental portrayal of slavery.⁴⁰Cleveland Leader, [n.d.], reprinted in Trenton Sentinel, 21 January 1882, Washington (D.C.) People's Advocate, 25 February 1882. Some reviews and announcements simply pronounced the autobiography "excellent" and correctly assumed readers' widespread familiarity with Douglass's illustrious career.⁴¹Trenton Sentinel, 29 October 1881, 21 January 1882; Washington (D.C.) People's Advocate, 25 February 1882.

Far fewer reviews indicated a more thorough reading of Life and Times. Heman Lincoln Wayland's positive account, though short, mentioned each of Douglass's political appointments and related a personal anecdote about the author.⁴²Philadelphia National Baptist, [n.d.]. Subject File, reel 10, 421, FD Papers, DLC. Another mostly positive review refuted the statement, made by George Ruffin in the introduction to the book, that Douglass had "surmounted the disadvantage of not having an university education" (7). The unidentified reviewer opined, "This disadvantage can be surmounted, if at all, only by men of genius belonging to an order far higher than that to which Mr. Douglass will aspire." This point notwithstanding, the review praised the content of the book for addressing "a most important period in the history of the Republic, and revealing in a peculiarly clear light some or those deeply hidden causes from which has sprung the present transition state of the nation."⁴³Catholic World 35:285–87 (May 1882). Other reviews lauded the simplicity of Life and Times's style, although this tome, of all his autobiographical writings, is in form the most overwrought, replete with temporal digressions, frequent lengthy lists of persons and objects, and extracts from speeches and correspondence.

Two reviews in London publications offered more comprehensive readings

of Life and Times. The first, appearing in the February 1882 Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art, criticized the book as an impediment to postwar reconciliation:

Republished with all its misrepresentations uncorrected, with all its vulgar abuse unmitigated, and directed now against the conquered and the unfortunate, it is simply an offensive libel. Those who are too young to remember the feelings with which the elder among us watched the American Civil War may hardly share the disgust with which we read the language applied to the countrymen of Lee and Stonewall Jackson.For Mr. Douglass every excuse is to be made. He is not more bitter,more vulgar, more reckless than Mrs. Stowe, or Sumner, or Thaddeus Stevens, or any of the Republican leaders of the last twenty years. He learnt his style in the school of Abolitionist fanaticism, and naturally he has not unlearned it. But that such a work should have a prospect of popularity at the present day, that it should be possible to ascribe to the Southern people generally, as Mr. Douglass does, the cruelties and vices which even in the case of a few he grossly exaggerates, and that it should pay to sell such a work at a low price, is not creditable either to the good sense or good feeling of the Northern people, and does not augur well for the future of the Union.⁴⁴(London) Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art, 25 February 1882.

This critique ignored the essential theme of reconciliation that marks Life and Times's significant difference from his two antebellum narratives; however, this reviewer identified inconsistencies internal to its text and predicted the book's enduring unpopularity with almost prophetic accuracy. Another London paper touted Douglass's life as a "great drama" and mentioned Douglass's government offices, his relationships with John Brown and Ahraham Lincoln, the Civil War, emancipation, and Douglass's manner of escape from slavery, which is revealed for the first time in Life and Times.⁴⁵London Anti-Slavery Reporter, March 1882.

Life and Times does not appear to have been reviewed in any extant black newspapers from the 1880s and 1890s.⁴⁶Examples include Coffeyville (Kans.) Afro-American Advocate, September 1892–February 1893; Cleveland Gazette, September 1892–February 1893; Huntsville (Ala,) Gazette, August 1881–March 1882, August 1892–March 1893; Indianapolis Freeman, August–December 1892; New York Age, 19 November 1892; Detroit Plaindealer, August 1892-May 1893; Savannah Tribune, January–June 1893; Washington (D.C.) Bee, August 1892–April 1893; The Weekly Topeka (Kans.) Call, January–May 1893. The only newspaper on microfilm for the years 1881–82 was the Huntsville (Ala.) Gazette. Several possiby relevant numbers of the newspapers mentioned have not been located. The only review in a black

newspaper was one in the Detroit Plaindealer, reprinted from the Republican Chicago newspaper Inter Ocean. The review did not disclose much about the book, beginning, "the Inter Ocean has the following to say of the greatest of Afro-Americans" and closing with the claim that "[t]he Autobiography of Honorable Frederick Douglass should be in the home of every Afro-American in this country." The Plainedealer did, however, offer a special discounted sale of Life and Times during the first half of 1893.⁴⁷See, for example, the issue of 24 March 1893. The black critics' relative silence on Douglass's book may be explained by the frequency with which editors published news of Douglass. African American newspapers actively solicited, reprinted, and summarized Douglass's pronouncements on disenfranchisement and racial terror in the South, on upcoming elections, candidates, and parties, and on political courses he recommended for the sake of his race. Black newspapers noted Douglass's travel itineraries and provided comprehensive coverage of his representation of Haiti at the Chicago Columbian Exposition in October 1892. Most of these newspapers were not well known and did not circulate widely; they may not have been supplied with review copies of the autobiography—only one displayed an advertisement for the book which was paid for by the publisher. The post-1865 activism and dedication to the Republican party that constituted much of the new material of Douglass's final autobiography may have been more easily accessible to readers in newspaper columns than in the book itself. Although Douglass's life was commonly considered the apogee of nineteenth-century black achievement, the newspapers of 1881 and 1892 were preoccupied, understandably, with the host of new problems and dangers facing free African Americans. The Afro-American Advocate quoted Douglass's conclusion under the headline "'A Word to Colored Men'": "I hope to die, as I have lived, true to my race, and am determined that the beginning of my life shall oppose no contradiction to its end."⁴⁸Coffeyville (Kans.) Afro-American Advocate, 13 January 1893. Even George L. Ruffin, the first African American graduate of Harvard Law School, did not read the autobiography in its entirety before he wrote the introduction that should have served as a guide to the elder statesman's eventful life. Had Ruffin studied carefully the life of the author, he would have been aware that, contrary to his own assertion, Douglass was never part of a gang during his time in slavery. Perhaps Ruffin's opening remarks, more akin to eulogy than to any other literary form, would have been less effusive if based more broadly and accurately on the author's career, a career the judge characterizes

as having reached its triumphant conclusion in the Emancipation Proclamation. For a new generation of African American activists, Douglass's moment had passed even as his example continued to be revered.

Negative reviews aside, the length of Life and Times—more than 500 pages in 1881—prohibited the type of dramatic reading experience afforded by Douglass's concise Narrative. A reading of Life and Times from start to finish reveals a pastiche of inconsistencies and interpolations—puzzles difficult for a casual reader of the autobiography to unravel without access to the many primary sources Douglass imported, improved, and combined from his other writings, both published and unpublished. Ironically, the multiple foci of the third autobiography relative to the clear agenda driving Douglass's antebellum narratives constitute its unique historical value. Similarly, its inconsistencies and apparent errors reveal the internal life and thought processes of the author in ways that the earlier, more carefully written autobiographies cannot.Narrative and, to a lesser extent, My Bondage and My Freedom were and continue to be considered the most powerful, moving examples of the antebellum slave narrative. In contrast, Life and Times has since its first appearance in print proven cumbersome and difficult for the most knowledgeable students of Douglass and of nineteenth-century America to characterize or categorize.

The relative paucity of reviews for Life and Times and its sales figures, disappointing when compared to those of Douglass's earlier autobiographies, reflect a broad trend in American print media after 1865. Other postbellum autobiographies and memoirs—those by former slaves, free blacks, as well as former abolitionists, black and white—were unable to spark the interest of a readership that was exhausted by a devastating war, the failed attempt at Reconstruction, upheavals in party politics, and the escalating racist violence that followed slavery's abolition. As Julie Roy Jeffrey documents in her 2008 study of postbellum abolitionist memoirs, the giddy sense of accomplishment that emancipation provided opponents of slavery was short-lived. The leading monthlies of the period, widely circulated, well funded, and powerful in their ability to shape public sentiment, advocated and published conciliatory viewpoints in their editorials, serializations, poetry, and short stories. In 1874, for example, Josiah Holland, editor of Scribner's, recommended that the U.S. government endeavor to placate the southern whites in order to "reclaim their affectionate loyalty" rather than wounding former Confederates further by imposing an unduly harsh Reconstruction program.⁴⁹Jeffrey, Abolitionists Remember, 2. During the final quarter of the nineteenth century,

American readers turned away from autobiography and embraced fiction. Readers of this period sought entertainment in the sentimental novels and stories of Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page; in the squalid Civil War prison narratives of John Ransom and T. H. Mann; and even in the grisly realism of Union veteran Ambrose Bierce's relentlessly graphic battlefield tales. The public's desire for sentiment and horror was gratified by stories and serialized novels published in the successful monthly magazines, Scribner's, Lippincott's, Century, and Harper's Weekly.⁵⁰David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 216.Considering the literary climate in which Life and Times was published, Douglass's third autobiography may reasonably be viewed as relatively successful compared to the contemporaneous writings of other well-known former abolitionists, both black and white.

A disappointment to its author during his lifetime, Life and Times garnered an even worse reception in the twentieth century. A number of modern historians and literary scholars dismissed the third autobiography, comparing it unfavorably with Douglass's antebellum narratives. According to Eric Sundquist,

The preference that a number of recent literary critics have shown for the 1845 Narrative, over My Bondage and My Freedom and especially the more self-indulgent Life and Times, indicates not just a distrust of the patriotic rhetoric, the gothic and sentimental Iiterary conventions, and the myth of self-made success that are more characteristic of the later volumes. It also suggests a problematic historiographical choice to be made between the Douglass closest to, and thus presumably best able to articulate, the experience of slavery and the Douglass who purposely constructed for himself a linguistically more sophisticated "American" identity, with figures such as the framers of the Constitution or Benjamin Franklin as his models.⁵¹Sundquist, Frederick Douglass, 4.

Some scholars view Life and Times as the embodiment of a disturbing shift in the character of postbellum black autobiographies and or African American literature as a whole. Some have argued that after emancipation, black autobiographers relinquished their oppositional voice and their focus on asserting black identity against a slaveholding nation, only to replace opposition with accommodation of the values and goals of the white middle class into which they attempted to assimilate. For these critics, the exemplary

black autobiography of the era was Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery (1901). Washington argued the utility of including American blacks thoroughly in the nation's fabric and saw little value for black Americans in the search for and assertion of some distinctive African American identity. Some scholars assert that African Americans would not really resume the quest to define their identity until the establishment of Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association and the rise of the New Negro artistic movement in the 1920s. As Sundquist points out in a review of Dickson Bruce's Black American Writing from the Nadir: Evolution of a Literary Tradition, 1877–1915, "the central issue for African-American writers of the era was the discovery of a voice and a vocabulary for articulating black identity within, not outside of, the mainstream of genteel culture."⁵²Review by Eric J. Sundquist in Nineteenth-Century Literature, 45:106 (June 1990). In this context, Wilson J. Moses contends that, "[w]ith slavery dead, [Douglass] was unable to construct a public role that spoke adequately to the problems of Reconstruction.... The enduring popularity of Frederick Douglass derives far more from the brilliance of his anti-slavery career than from the clarity of his postbellum vision."⁵³Review by Wilson J. Moses in African American Review, 30:302 (Summer 1996). Henry Louis Gates and Charles Davis write that the confrontational, resolute black voice was suppressed or altogether abandoned in the face of the daunting problems and confusions of postemancipation freedom: "With the end of slavery... the black seems to have lost his great, unique theme until Jim Crow racism and segregation recreated it. The stilling of the black "voice" assumed myriad forms, not the least distressing of which was the effective destruction of black arts and letters existing before 1865.... Essentially, the slave narrative proper could no longer exist after slavery was abolished."⁵⁴Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Slave's Narrative (New York, 1985), xviii. While Gates is undoubtedly aware of the large number of black autobiographies produced between 1865 and 1900, the generic expectations of these autobiographies altered drastically, as did, accordingly, the black autobiographical form itself.⁵⁵Ibid., xxii–xxiii.> For these scholars, Douglass's narratives and black autobiography in general had lost their noble social missions after 1865.

There can be no question that the thrust of these autobiographies shifted after the Civil War as authors abandoned the theme of the broad pursuit of freedom as an absolute good and focused instead on a complex interrogation of the character and limits of the recently secured freedom. William Andrews

challenges Gates's and Davis's assessment of the postbellum black voice and slave narrative, arguing instead that both remained strong after 1865, revealing a deepened understanding of the experience of enslavement, enriched by the context of emancipation. For the many postbellum black authors who realized their freedom as a result of the Civil War, the slave narrative genre remained a fresh and dramatic instrument for writing about and grappling with the contradictions with which their bondage, liberation, and its aftermath were fraught. Their narratives were no longer in service to abolition per se, but postbellum black authors routinely asserted their loathing of slavery, detailing their struggles against it at length. For example, John Lindley Smith wrote, "From a child I had always felt that I wanted to be free. I could not bear the thought of belonging to anyone."⁵⁶Smith, Autobiography, 29. Although writing in 1894, George Henry dedicated many pages to describing his days in slavery and the patient, deliberate steps he took to free himself. John Malvin stated bluntly, "so great was my abhorrence of slavery that I was willing to run any risk to accomplish the liberation of a slave."⁵⁷Malvin, North into Freedom, 44. Assertions by African Americans in the late nineteenth century about their desire for freedom and their determination in seeking it during slavery carried considerable force and political value at the moment when a host of racist theories contended that they could not thrive in freedom. After emancipation black Americans still needed to prove they wanted freedom, and it was within the enduring slave narrative tradition that they continued to make their case.

Andrews argues that the slave narrative enjoyed undiminished relevance after 1865 because the authors grounded their narratives in their slave past while exploring their new opportunities in the circumstances of emerging freedom. Postbellum authors sought repeatedly to determine "what, if anything, the slave past had to give to a self-respecting, forward-looking black man or woman in the late nineteenth century."⁵⁸William L. Andrews, "Reunion in the Postbellum Slave Narrative: Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Keckley." Black American Literature Forum, 23:7 (Spring 1989). Even in writing of slavery, many narrators asserted their dignity and high ambitions. George Henry testified, "I was determined to do none of their mean, low, occupations around houses, I aspired to something higher.... My body was fettered but my mind was always free and aspiring."⁵⁹Henry, Life, 8- 9. In freedom, Henry became an overseer on a plantation with thirty hands and, later, a ship captain on the Chesapeake. His life story demonstrated that slavery did not attenuate his

desire and capacity for freedom; perhaps more significantly, it attested to his constructive participation, as a free man, in middle-class society. Henry Clay Bruce's narrative addressed this reality yet more comprehensively:

These slaves knew their own helpless condition. They also knew that they had no rights under the laws of the land, and that they were, by those same laws, the chattels of their masters, and that they owed them their services during their natural lives, and that the masters alone could make their lives pleasant or miserable. But having superior blood in their veins, they did not give up in abject servility, but held up their heads and proceeded to do the next best thing under the circumstances, which was, to so live and act as to win the confidence of their masters, which could only be done by faithful service and an upright life.... Such slaves were to be found wherever the institution of slavery existed, and when they were freed by the war, these traits which they had exhibited for generations to such good effect, were brought into greater activity, and have been largely instrumental in making the record of which we feel so proud to-day.⁶⁰Bruce, New Man, 39.

The experience of enslavement determined, to a great extent, the experience and course of post-emancipation freedom; indeed, that freedom could not have been properly understood without a full examination of enslavement. The slave narrative remained the essential discursive vehicle for promoting an understanding of freedom because it alone could emphasize the fact that dignity and utility were often acquired within the institution of slavery. Antebellum narratives rarely admitted this possibility, inimical to their agenda of immediate abolition. In freedom, black authors could reevaluate the experience of slavery, adjusting the lens of the traditional slave narrative. Freed authors exploited the irony of their slavery as an argument for black freedom, citing their bondage as the source of "the record of which we feel so proud to-day." As Andrews writes, "the agenda of the postbellum slave narrative thus emphasizes unabashedly the tangible contribution that blacks made to the South, in and after slavery, in order to rehabilitate the image of the freedman, not the idea of slavery, in the eyes of business America."⁶¹Andrews, "Reunion in the Postbellum Slave Narrative," 14. See also William L. Andrews, "The Representation of Slavery and the Rise of Afro-American Literary Realism, 1865–1920," in Slavery and the Literary Imagination ed. Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad (Baltimore, 1989), 62–80.

Douglass's time in slavery, especially his later childhood in Baltimore,

Ienabled him to acquire skills such as literacy, proper speech, and etiquette that would allow him to function effectively in freedom, but his circumstances in slavery were hardly typical. Admitting his advantages would have dulled the impact of his first narrative, but even his postbellum adjustments to the antebellum descriptions of his slave years seem minor compared to the dramatic reappraisals authored by Bruce and others. Along with most postbellum narrators, Douglass argued for the primacy of black activism after 1865 and refused to allow the memory of slavery to be sentimentalized or suppressed in order to bind North and South together again. By the 1880s the nation's long fatigue with the struggles and violence of Reconstruction merged with mounting northern doubts about the propriety of having freed a
people commonly portrayed as ill equipped to manage that freedom. This doubt engendered a popular enthusiasm for a reconciliation of North and South founded on acceptance of the post-Reconstruction political status quo and erasure of the antebellum ideological conflicts. Oppression of African Americans, at the core of the Civil War's bloody battles, became the first mnemonic casualty of reconciliation. Suppression of his race's claims to full citizenship was precisely what Douglass feared when, on 5 July 1875, he asked his Washington, D.C., audience, "If war among the whites brought peace and liberty to the blacks, what will peace among the whites bring?"⁶² "The Color Question," 5 July 1875, in Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 4:417. In Life and Times he presents an argument against the national amnesia he anticipated as the postbellum years unfolded:

I have written out my experience here, not to exhibit my wounds and bruises to awaken and attract sympathy to myself personally, but as a part of the history of a profoundly interesting period in American life and progress. l have meant it to be a small individual contribution to the sum of knowledge of this special period.... The time is at hand when the last American slave, and the last American slaveholder will disappearbehind the curtain which separates the living from the dead, and when neither master nor slave will be left to tell the story of their respective relations.... My part has been to tell the story of the slave. The story of the master never wanted for narrators. They have had all the talent and genius that wealth and influence could command to tell their story.... If I have pushed my example too prominently for the good taste of my Caucasian readers I beg them to remember that I have written in part for the encouragement of a class whose aspirations need the stimulus of success. (372- 73)

As David Blight points out, prominent blacks and several of their passionate white advocates collaborated in the national call for a suppression of the slave past. Postbellum leaders such as Alexander Crummell, Benjamin Tanner, and Albion Tourgee all feared blacks' dwelling on their slave past kept them from pursuing educational, economic, political, and social equality.⁶³Blight, Race and Reunion, 311–19. Douglass, however, denied that collective remembrance of injustice suffered hindered the progress of African Americans. Life and Times, like all the other postbellum slave narratives, was a deliberate effort to link black freedom indissolubly with black slavery by enshrining the memory of slavery at the moment when that memory was most vulnerable. For Douglass, reconciliation did not neccssitate a disavowal of the slavery that preceded it; indeed such disavowal might render all that blacks had contributed to the realizing of their freedom and the Union victory less meaningful. Douglass pointed to an alternative rcconciliation, one that accomplished not only the reuniting of white southerner and northerner but, more importantly, the full inclusion of African Americans in a nation newly dedicated to racial equality and justice.

Life and Times allowed Douglass to initiate the practice of reconciliation and inclusivity on a personal level. One of the most celebrated scenes in the autobiography is Douglass's reunion in the summer of 1877 with his former master, Thomas Auld, at St. Michaels. In his Narrative, Douglass had rendered Auld villainous by intentionally exaggerating his malice so that readers might see in him the epitome of the antebellum slave narrative's brutal and hypocritical slaveholder. However, one of the most evocative scenes is Douglass's emotional return to Maryland's Eastern Shore to visit the dying Auld. Despite Douglass's compassion for his former master, his description of the reunion included an unsparing characterization of the injustices he had endured under Auld: "He had struck down my personality, had subjected me to his will, made property of my body and soul, reduced me to a chattel, hired me out to a noted slave breaker to be worked like a beast and flogged into submission; he had taken my hard earnings, sent me to prison, offered me for sale, broken up my Sunday-school, forbidden me to teach my fellow slaves to read on pain of nine and thirty lashes on my bare back; he had sold my body to his brother Hugh, and pocketed the price of my flesh and blood without any apparent disturbance of his conscience." (345) Countering the irenic imperatives of the reunion, Douglass in no way disavowed or softened this recollection of his adolescence in his third autobiography. Recounting

painful memories dictated the terms of his engagement with a different Auld who now lay "on his bed, aged and tremulous, drawing near the sunset of life" (345). Douglass, however, did not approach Auld as a weakened opponent. Instead, demonstrating charity and forgiveness incompatible with the abolitionist agenda of his two antebellum autobiographies, Douglass wrote, "He was to me no longer a slaveholder either in fact or in spirit, and I regarded him as I did myself, a victim of the circumstances of birth, education, law, and custom" (345). In the wake of slavery's destruction new possibilities emerged; after years of struggle "the slave and the master stood upon equal ground" (345). Douglass, intimately acquainted with the deficiencies of black freedom compared to that enjoyed by the poorest of whites, also recognized, as perhaps only a former slave could, the depth of the revolution that had actually occurred for Auld and himself. He could now confront and embrace his former master on relatively "'equal ground." Amid his explicit testimony about the crimes of slavery, Douglass nevertheless continued: 'The conditions were favorable for remembrance of all his good deeds, and generous extenuation of all his evil ones" (345). With the relation of slave and master abolished, Douglass and Auld might acknowledge the past and forgive its wrongs while embracing future possibilities of greater equality, justice, and fellowship. Douglass intended, through his reunion with Auld and his narration of it, to promote a vision of constructive reconciliation between the races, rather than the reactionary disavowal of the past his detractors saw in this meeting.⁶⁴See Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 187-97, for a full discussion of the treatment by the press of Douglass's visit to Auld.

The national reunion that Douglass had hoped for, of course, never occurred. He was more acutely aware of the unlikelihood of broad reconciliation between races in 1892, when he revised and expanded Life and Times, than he could have been in 1881, before the hopeful enactments of the first years of Reconstruction had been dismantled. In recounting another reunion with various descendants of Governor Edward Lloyd V in 1880, Douglass proclaimed, "It told me many things, and among them that a new dispensation of justice, kindness, and human brotherhood was dawning not only in the North, but in the South; that the war and the slavery that caused the war were things of the past, and that the rising generation are turning their eyes from the sunset of decayed institutions to the grand possibilities of a glorious future" (352).

Life and Times has been critiqued, not without justification, as a wandering

recapitulation of timeworn tales and self-gratulatory enumerations of the accolades and comforts of Douglass's later years. Life and Times is indeed that, however, it is not merely that. It is rather a mature and cogent reevaluation of his life that anticipates "the grand possibilities of a glorious future." While Douglass does punctuate his postbellum narrative with catalogues of the many luminaries known and awards accrued over the course of a long public life, Life and Times should be read as the author seems to have intended it to be as a more fully developed and complete reconfiguration in the dynamic process of self-narrating that spanned more than two-thirds of his life. Writing in 1881 Douglass employed the rhetoric of a "sense of completeness" in his life; by 1892 he had lost that sense, having experienced a number of failures as well as a considerable amount of criticism from other black leaders. Still, his rhetoric reached toward the "glorious future" that he had long envisioned. In January 1894 the elderly orator stood before the public to denounce the savage lynching of black men in the South as well as the growing legal codification of disenfranchisement and racial segregation. A year before his death, Douglass reminded the citizens of his country one last time of the abiding principles of its Declaration of Independence. He urged Americans: "Put away your race prejudice. Banish the idea that one class must rule over another. Recognize the fact that the rights of the humblest citizen are as worthy of protection as are those of the highest, and your problem will be solved."⁶⁵ "Lessons of the Hour," 9 January 1894," in Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 5:607. Amid the unfulfilled hopes and daunting struggles for African Americans in the late nineteenth century, Douglass echoed the optimism of the young abolitionist who first wrote about his life in slavery in 1844 and 1845.⁶⁶See McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 114–15, for a discussion of the period during which Douglass wrote his Narrative.

Life and Times, more than any other work in Douglass's extensive corpus, illuminates for modern readers just how much the slave, the abolitionist, and the cider statesman shared across seven decades of slavery and freedom. Ultimately, Douglass's third autobiography staged reconciliation not between North and South or black and white, but among the several literary incarnations of himself in slavery and freedom. Though gratified by emancipation, Douglass, as his own critic, conscientiously avoided what Sundquist has characterized as scholars' sometimes necessary but "problematic historiographical choice" among his various identities. Instead, Douglass chose to suture his "several lives in one" within a final autobiography that preserved the integrity of each separate identity he inhabited. Douglass, in building Life

and Times, demonstrated throughout the work each subsequent narrating self's acceptance of, and even reverence for, his earlier narrating selves. Douglass's last autobiography preserved and accommodated each of his former identities even as it enunciated new ones. This phenomenon is particularly evident at the multiple sites in this text that reveal contradiction and inconsistency—characteristics nearly inevitable because Douglass assembled his final autobiography from his many printed works of diverse genres and epochs—among Douglass's various "selves."

One representative example of the conciliatory work of Life and Times appears early in the text as Douglass iterates for the third time his lament about his elderly grandmother's mistreatment at the hands of Aaron Anthony's heirs. In his Narrative, Douglass had implied that Thomas Auld was responsible for the inhuman neglect of the faithful and, throughout most of her life, enormously productive Betsey Bailey; in Life and Times he exposed the complexity surrounding this implication by recalling to his readers the early passage in his depiction of the 1877 reunion with Auld:

I told him that I had made a mistake in my narrative, a copy of which I had sent him, in attributing to him ungrateful and cruel treatment of my grandmother; that I had done so on the supposition that in the division of the property of my old master, Mr. Aaron Anthony, my grandmother had fallen to him, and that he had left her in her old age, when she could be no longer of service to him, to pick up her living in solitude with none to help her, or in other words had turned her out to die like an old horse. "Ah!" he said, "that was a mistake. I never owned your grandmother; she in the division of the slaves was awarded to my brother-in-law, Andrew Anthony; but, "he added quickly, "I brought her down here and took care of her as long as she lived." The fact is, that after writing my narrative describing the condition of my grandmother, Capt. Auld's attention being thus called to it, he rescued her from her destitution. I told him that this mistake of mine was corrected as soon as I discovered it, and that I had at no time any wish to do him injustice; that I regarded both of us as victims of a system. (346–47)

Douglass presented the passage about his grandmother that appears in chapter 13 of Life and Times as a quotation taken from Narrative. The Life and Times passage follows closely the passage in the first autobiography, but it has been revised or "corrected." The revision Douglass adopted, however, falls short of its purported aim—that of exonerating Auld. Instead, the

narrator of the third autobiography blames Betsey's "present owner—his [Aaron Anthony's] grandson"⁶⁷The grandson to whom Douglass refers is John Planner Anthony, son of Andrew Anthony, who inherited Betsey Bailey when his father died in 1832, and did indeed leave the elderly Betsey, her vision fading, alone in her cabin to fend for herself. In 1840, however, Thomas Auld, John Planner Anthony's uncle, learned of Betsey's situation and removed her to his home, where she was cared for until her death. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 17–20, 224n. for her sad fate following Anthony's death:

Now all the property of my old master, slaves included, was in the hands of strangers—strangers who had nothing to do in accumulating it. Not a slave was left free. All remained slaves, from the youngest to the oldest. If any one thing in my experience, more than another, has served to deepen my conviction of the infernal character of slavery, and to fill me with unutterable loathing of slaveholders, it was their base ingratitude to my poor old grandmother. She had served my old master faithfully from youth to old age. She had been the source of all his wealth; she had peopled his plantation with slaves; she had become a great-grandmother in his service. She had rocked him in his infancy, attended him in his childhood, served him through life, and at his death wiped from his icy brow the cold death-sweat and closed his eyes forever. She was nevertheless a slave—a slave for life—a slave in the hands of strangers; and in their hands she saw her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren, divided like so many sheep, without being gratified with the small privilege of a single word as to their or her own destiny. And to cap the climax of their base ingratitude, my grandmother, who was now very old, having outlived my old master and all his children, having seen the beginning and end of them, and her present owner—his grandson—finding she was of but little value her frame already racked with the pains of old age, and complete helplessness fast stealing over her once active limbs—took her to the woods, built her a little hut with a mud chimney, and then gave her the bounteous privilege of supporting herself there in utter loneliness; thus virtually turning her out to die. If my poor, dear old grandmother now lives, she lives to remember and mourn over the loss of children, the loss of grandchildren, and the loss of great-grandchildren....

The hearth is desolate. The unconscious children who once sang and danced in her presence are gone. She gropes her way, in the darkness of age, for a drink of water. Instead of the voices of her children, she hears by day the moans of the dove, and by night the

screams of the hideous owl. All is gloom. The grave is at the door; and now, weighed down by the pains and aches of old age, when the head inclines to the feet, when the beginning and ending of human existence meet, and helpless infancy, and painful old age combine together, at this time,—this most needed time for the exercise of that tenderness and affection which children only can bestow on a declining parent,—my poor old grandmother, the devoted mother of twelve children, is left all alone, in yonder little hut, before a few dim cinders. (77–78)

Douglass, revisiting this passage in his third autobiography, deployed a revision that may be understood only by readers approaching Life and Times with prior knowledge of the Anthony and Auld families. His rhetorically subversive "correction" simultaneously granted and withheld Auld's vindication. Douglass, however, knew that Arianna Amanda Auld, a daughter, was the only child of Thomas and Lucretia Anthony Auld. Therefore, the grandson of Aaron Anthony to whom Douglass refers could not have been the child or direct heir of Thomas Auld.⁶⁸Aaron Anthony died on 14 November 1826, Richard Anthony on 18 May 1828, and Andrew Anthony in June 1832. lbid., 87–88, 110, 224n By "correcting" himself in this complicated and subversive manner, Douglass retained the sentimental impact of one of his earliest, most moving, and most personal indictments of slavery without destroying the sincerity or the integrity of his reconciliation with Auld. Douglass's brilliant rhetorical maneuver, weaving together the beginning and the end of his story, demonstrates how thoroughly the former slave had become master of his text and his life.

The text of Life and Times itself, both despite and because of its length, its inconsistencies, and its catalogues constitutes the strongest argument for its own importance. For Douglass, the slave child named Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey by his mother in 1818 remained, at every moment of his life history, as crucial to the construction of his identity as did the accomplished self-made man who began to author his life in 1844. The elder statesman's text continually returns to his degraded beginnings as the slave child named Bailey, to the young man who became a fugitive and to the increasingly well-known abolitionist lecturer he became after 1841. Douglass carried his "several lives" with him, in his thought, in his work, and in his texts. Life and Times emphasized not only the importance of Bailey, but also the importance of the fugitive slave who, in the earliest days of his freedom during the autumn of 1838, chose to make himself Frederick Douglass, a work in progress that continued over the majority of his life.

The editors of the present volume share Douglass's goal in Life and Times of preserving his "several lives in one." This last autobiographical work, criticized and neglected by contemporary readers and often ignored by modern scholars, in fact, is an encyclopedic proliferation of vivid details that chronicles nearly a century of political and social turbulence. Ironically, these very details have been, in part, responsible for Life and Times's neglect by scholars and teachers—its lengthy catalogues of associates, events, and organizations may indeed seem tedious. So it is crucial to recognize that each person, each idea, each event, each organization, each theory, and each political and religious position provides depth of context and significance. Some readers consider Life and Times a patchwork of confusing extracts from Douglass's other writings—primarily correspondence and speeches—that he revised and sometimes conflated. Although in many ways Life and Times is indeed a patchwork, that quality cannot justify dismissing the entire work as a tiresome repetition. In fact, the complexities of Life and Times provide the most compelling clues to Douglass's agenda during his later years; in these new combinations and rewritings, he revealed the ways in which he wanted to be remembered in his many roles: as a fugitive slave, an abolitionist, a statesman, and, most importantly, a self-made man. The length and density of Life and Times may have provided sufficient reason for scholars and students to choose to read, teach, and analyze earlier versions of "Douglass" in order to assess his contribution to American history. This Douglass Papers volume devotes half of its bulk to comprehensive annotation of the author's many references—some familiar, some obscure, and many requiring considerable explanation to a modem reader. The historical notes, supported by primary sources as well as a host of secondary sources, afford unprecedented access to the context—rich, deep, and complex—of the nineteenth-century America in which and about which Douglass wrote. The Douglass Papers edition of Life and Times of Frederick Douglass will, it is hoped, enable and motivate new generations of scholars to contribute to the further study of this singular epoch that produced an individual who would be considered extraordinary in any century.

William Lloyd GarrisonGarrison, William Lloyd

William Lloyd Garrison (1805-79) was the foremost white abolitionist of the nineteenth century and was credited with the discovery of Douglass as a speaker at an antislavery meeting in Nantucket in 1841. He began his career as an apprentice printer on the Newburyport (Mass.) Herald at the age of thirteen. Garrison became editor of the Newburyport Free Press in 1826, but the paper closed within a year. He was then associated with a series of periodicals in Boston that advocated reform before Benjamin Lundy offered the young journalist the opportunity to write for his antislavery newspaper. Garrison joined Lundy in editing the Genius of Universal Emancipation in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1829, during the last year of the paper's 1821-1830 run. In 1830 a libel suit against the editors forced the paper to close and landed Garrison in jail. After his release, he courted the wealthy merchants of New York and Boston in order to start the Liberator (1831-65), a weekly journal based in Boston in which he advocated an immediate end to slavery. Garrison's brand of abolition condemned any institution that would tolerate the existence of slavery, including churches, political parties. and even the United States itself and any scheme aimed at removing black people from the country. Instead, Garrison hoped to raise the public's awareness that slavery was morally wrong and thereby force its end in an almost millennial moment of emancipation. His approach appealed to both white and black antislavery advocates but earned him many enemies among those only moderately opposed to slavery and slaveholders alike. Seeing the need for greater action and organization beyond the pages of the Liberator; Garrison joined with other abolitionists to form the New England Anti-Slavery Society in 1831. Two years later he helped found the larger American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1833 he established ties with English abolitionists after a trip to Great Britain, and he later brought the noted and notorious speaker George Thompson to the United States for a tour. Garrison also dedicated himself to women's rights, encouraging women to enter the public sphere by inviting them, via the Liberator, to form female antislavery societies. In addition to the thirty-three women's antislavery societies that flourished by 1838, Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society welcomed women as well as blacks into its ranks. However, female delegates were excluded from the World's Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 in London. The issue of women's participation in the antislavery movement and Garrison's absolute refusal to turn to politics to end slavery caused a division in the American Anti-Slavery Society. Brothers Lewis and Arthur Tappan, who opposed women's acting as speakers and who hoped to use politics toward abolition, broke with Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society, forming the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, or the "New Organization" in 1841. Garrison's ideas were so closely associated with the "Old Organization" that the American Anti-Slavery Society became known simply as the "Garrisonians." With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, Garrison believed that he had accomplished his life's work and that of the antislavery movement. He then resigned from the presidency of the American Anti-Slavery Society and closed the Liberator. Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children, 4 vols. (New York, 188589); Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York, 1998); James Brewer Stewart, William Lloyd Garrison and the Challenge of Emancipation (Arlington Heights, Ill., 1992); John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison (Boston, 1963); Dictionary of American Biography, 20 vols. (New York, 1928-36), 7:168-72. .
National Portrait Gallery,
Smithsonian Institution.

Wendell Phillips.
National Portrait Gallery,
Smithsonian Institution.

John Brown. Artist: Augustus
Washington. National Portrait
Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Freedman's Savings
Bank. Courtesy of the
Library of Congress.

Helen Pitts Douglass. Courtesy of
the National Park Service, Museum
Management Program.

Florvil Hyppolite.
Courtesy of the National
Park Service, Museum
Management Program.