Textual Afterword
A Critical Edition of Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Textual Afterword
A Critical Edition of Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

JOSEPH R. MCELRATH, JR.
JESSE S. CRISLER

JOSEPH R. MCELRATH, JR.
JESSE S. CRISLER

The editors of this volume assume that the reader of Life and Times of Frederick Douglass is interested in its author's own account of his experiences and their significance in American social and cultural history—as free as possible of modifications made by others as they several times processed this autobiography for publication during his lifetime. The editors also assume that this internationally famous orator's "voice" —his word choices, phrasing, punctuation, and the like—is preferable to those of contemporaries in the publishing industry whose diction and stylistic traits displaced Douglas's in the multiple typesettings and printings recorded in the "Descriptive Bibliography" section of this volume. Accordingly, this critical edition proffers a reconstructed version of the work, the purpose of which is to make available a text that represents both the content and form for which Douglass himself was responsible as individual author.

As of Douglass's death on 20 February 1895, five major developments in the work's history of textual transmission had occurred since 1881, when he firstprepared it for publication. The editors have taken into account each of these when honoring his discernible intentions as to how the work ought to read.

1. Prepublication Alterations

On 7 April 1881 Douglass entered into an agreement with Thomas Belknap and Sylvester M. Betts to write a "history of his life." Their trade and subscription sales firm, the Park Publishing Company of Hartford, Connecticut, would publish it as a book of "480 to 500 pages, 12 mo, each page to contain on an average of about four hundred words."¹Letter of Agreement, 7 April 1881, Financial Papers File, reel 28, frame 421, FD Papers, DLC. This was the two-part version of Life and Times: not until 1892 did Douglass compose the third. The paucity of surviving correspondence having to do with what transpired after April 1881 precludes determination of the date by which the manuscript was in Betts's hands. But it is certain that well before 8 October, Douglass had delivered one that exceeded the minimum length specified in the contract, for Betts wrote that day that the compositors had completed the typesetting through the end of what became the penultimate chapter—the eighteenth of the Second Part: "I enclose copy of the last part of the book, thus far set up, which is the conclusion of the 482^d page."²Sylvester M. Betts to Douglass, 8 October 1881, General Correspondence File, reel 3, frame 521, FD Papers, DLC.

The compositors might have ended their work that very day had not Betts changed his mind about the number of pages to be printed. For the already typeset summary of the eighteenth chapter in the table of contents ended with a reference to "Concluding thoughts," suggesting not only that Douglass may have originally intended chapter XVIII as the final one—less a discrete conclusion—but that Betts had previously seen no reason to alter the description of the chapter as the one in which Douglass formally brought the second part of his narrative to a close. Or the compositors might have finished their task within an hour if Betts already had in hand the manuscript for the brief "Conclusion" that Douglass did send him, which would fill an additional two and three-quarters pages in the nineteenth chapter of the published volume. But whether Betts then had the manuscript for the "Conclusion" made no immediate difference. He had already decided that a delay in the completion of typesetting would be necessary.

The first letter concerning Betts's decision is dated 5 October 1881. He wrote to Douglass that he was "anxious to get your book finished as soon as possible"; that he was also anxious "to secure more manuscript" is the reason for uncertainty now as to whether he had yet received the "Conclusion." But in fact the addition of three pages was far short of the goal that he announced on 8 October. Neither 482 nor 485 pages derived from manuscript would do: "l desire," Betts declared, "to bring the book up to 518 pages."³Sylvester M. Betts to Douglass, 5 October 1881, General Correspondence File, reel 3, frame 511, FD Papers, DLC.

Less clear is his motivation for adding either 33 or 36 pages of text to a narrative that had indisputably reached its end in the eighteenth chapter—until one notes the physical makeup of the 12mo book that appeared in late November. Bound into it were 22 printed sheets, each of which was folded so that, when its edges were trimmed, it comprised a gathering of 12 leaves (12mo) and thus 24 consecutively numbered pages. What Betts appears to have considered a serious problem, foreseeable by 5 October, was that following page 482 there would be at least nine blank pages in the twenty-first gathering (pp. 471–94). Without the "Conclusion," there would be 12. There were conventional ways to solve this problem in the print shop and bindery. He needed only to abandon the 12mo format for the twenty-first gathering. But he chose not to do so, instead asking Douglass for "more manuscript." Quantity, rather than quality, was Betts's concern.

Douglass had on hand, at this late stage in his career, no end of copy that could serve as filler, and he quickly responded to Betts's 5 October request, possibly sending him on 7 October the "Conclusion" and definitely making available then both his April 1876 speech commemorating the unveiling of the Freedmen's Monument honoring Abraham Lincoln and a newspaper article containing his 26 September 1881 eulogy of the late President James A. Garfield.⁴ In his letter of 8 October 1881, Betts acknowledged receipt of Douglass's 7 October response to his request. Sylvester M. Betts to Douglass, 8 October 1881. General Correspondence File, reef 3, frame Unfortunately, the latter would fill only three and

one-quarter of the nine (or 12) blank pages, and Betts learned on 7 or 8 October that inclusion of the April 1876 speech would require more than the remaining blank pages in the twenty-first gathering. The Freedmen's Monument speech, however, was too short to take the reader to the end of a twenty-second gathering—to page 518. Once again, blank pages distressed him. And so, on 8 October, Betts had asked for yet more copy.

Douglass obliged with his August 1880 speech commemorating West Indian Emancipation,⁵For the prior publication history of the Freedmen's Monument and West Indian Emancipation speeches, see Douglass Papers, ser 1, 4:427, 562. Douglass delivered the Garfield eulogy in Washington, D.C., on 26 September 1881, at the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church. The periodical in which the article containing the eulogy appeared is unknown. and Betts almost realized his fond ambition. The first printing of the first American edition ended on page 516. Only the final leaf was blank.

Before the Emancipation speech arrived, Betts suggested to Douglass in his 8 October letter a way to handle the two other orations so that they would appear as congruent as they could with the chapters that preceded them: "I propose to have your speech in regard to Garfield, follow directly after [chapter XVIII, already in type], and then your speech on Abraham Lincoln, but before the speech appears in the book, it is necessary that something preliminary should appear, to save the apparent abruptness, that would naturally appear. What comes after the Garfield speech should appear in the form of a supplementary chapter, which of course will include the speech on Lincoln." How all of this might have read remains a mystery. Douglass did not provide a "supplementary chapter," nor did Betts take on the task of fashioning one. As a result, despite Betts's good intentions, "abruptness" characterizes the "Conclusion" and the three addenda tacked on to the end of the autobiography.

As proposed by Betts, the Garfield piece, rather than the "Conclusion," immediately followed chapter XVIII of Life and Times's Second Part. Douglass or Betts appropriately modified the beginning of the article being reprinted so that its introduction to the text of the Garfield eulogy was in the first-person singular—in Douglass's voice, like all the preceding chapters. But neither man did the same for the paragraph following the transcription of Douglass's eulogy, which refers to the eulogist in the third person—in the voice not of Douglass but of the journalist who recorded Douglass's remarks: "Mr. Douglass then called upon Professor Greener, who read a series of resolutions eloquently expressive of their sense of the great loss that had been sustained, and their sympathy with the family of the late President.'' That neither Douglass nor Betts modified or deleted this paragraph suggests that both acted in haste in their eagerness to get the book through the press.

This gaffe, however, pales in comparison with a greater mistake made by Betts. His decision to achieve 518 pages resulted in the violation of the structure of Life and Times as Douglass had originally fashioned it through page 482. Life and Times offers a chronological account of experiences that ends in chapter XVI of the Second

Part, complemented in chapters XVII and XVIII by two retrospectives. The first consists of anecdotes in which Douglass tempers his criticisms of the southern states by recalling his experiences over the years with "colorphobia" in the North. With his relative freedom from regional bias made clear, in chapter XVIII, titled "Honor to Whom Honor," he salutes by name his fellow abolitionists of yore, male and then female, and closes with an approving nod to the extension of suffrage to womankind. His "Concluding thoughts" in this chapter bring African Americans to the fore once more: he explains that he advocates full civil rights for women on the same grounds that he has long done for the racial minority he represents as spokesperson. His acknowledgments made and his uneasy relationship with suffragists mended as well as could be, the logical sequel to chapter XVIII in 1881 was the brief "Conclusion," which began: "As far as this volume can reach that point I have now brought my readers to the end of my story."

Instead the first bit of filler used by Betts, the Garfield piece, anticlimactically opens chapter XIX by resuming the chronological exposition that Douglass had formally ended in chapter XVI. Compounding the ungainly alteration of the original design is the placement of the "Conclusion." Rather than affording it proper chapter status, Betts appended it midpage to the end of the Garfield filler. Thus, in chapter XIX one first encounters the anachronic reinitiation of Douglass's narrative, which terminates in little more than three pages. With such a rush do Douglass's parting words next appear that they read as the second non sequitor of this strangely configured chapter. Finally comes an "Appendix" containing the previously published orations of 1876 and 1880, where Betts might more appropriately have placed the Garfield piece.

That Betts requested these addenda for the sole purpose of bringing the page count from 482 or 485 to 518 does not mean that they have no legitimate place in Life and Times. By providing them to him Douglass himself incorporated them into the work just as he did the introduction that he asked George L. Ruffin to write.⁶Douglass to George L. Ruffin, 23 May 1881. Ruffin Family Manuscripts, DHW-MS. Nor does the "Conclusion" warrant dismissal because of the possibility that Douglass originally planned to end the book with "Concluding thoughts" in the eighteenth chapter of the Second Part or that he may have written a new conclusion only because Betts had called for "more manuscript." After all, Douglass is obviously the author of the "Conclusion," and he did not hesitate to provide copy for the addenda. Given the original chronological structure of the work, however, the ideal placement of the contents of the addenda was in chapters previous to the chapter XVIII coda and the "Conclusion." For example, Douglass might have integrated the Freedmen's Monument speech into chapter XV of the Second Part, where he briefly describes the unveiling event. More careful revision along these lines with all three pieces would of course have entailed a delay in the publication of the book, and Betts would have had to absorb the cost of resetting type.

Neither development occurred by 11 November, when Betts acknowledged receipt from Douglass of what may have been a last batch of proof or the manuscript for eight paragraphs that would be added to the West Indian Emancipation section in the second printing;⁷Park Publishing Company to Douglass, 11 November 1881, General Correspondence File, reel 3, frame 525, FD Papers, DLC. This letter also acknowledged "copy you sent" but gave no indication of its nature. thus the way in which Douglass had ended Life and Times in his original manuscript differed dramatically from pages 483–516 in the volume that emerged from the bindery for copyright deposit at the Library of Congress on 23 November 1881.⁸Park Publishing Company registered the title for copyright on 3 September 1881 and made its deposit of two copies of Life and Times at the Library of Congress on 23 November 1881; Legal File, reel 30, frame 291, FD Papers, DLC. Copyright Registration Record No. 13.325-M, Copyright Office, DLC

At least once before publication, in a single extant letter, Douglass revealed that he was not always so cooperative when dealing with the man in whose professionalism he had placed his trust only to rue the day that he had done so. Almost a month before its formal publication, upon receipt of some form of an advance copy of the book, Douglass was not pleased. He would not directly address what he thought of how the text of his narrative had been handled until he wrote Betts on 28 January 1882 and complained about what he termed typographical errors. Douglass may have had in mind such flaws when, on 30 October 1881, he charged Betts with having "marred and spoiled my work entirely."⁹Douglass to Sylvester M. Betts, 30 October 1881. General Correspondence File, reel 3, frame 520, FD Papers, DLC. But the focus of this letter was the illustrations, for which Betts had had plates made without his approval. Apparently this was not the first occasion of disagreement on the subject, for Douglass declared that he was "no more reconciled than ever to the publication of my life with illustrations, and I ask and insist, as I have a right to do, that an edition of the book shall be published without illustrations, for Northern circulation." He testily reminded Betts that their contract ohliged the Park Publishing Company only to print on "good white paper" and to include a steel engraving of the author. It did not grant license "to load the book with all manner of coarse and shocking wood cuts, such as may be found in [the] news papers of the day." Douglass closed his 30 October letter by threatening Betts with "an injunction against your publishing the book in its present shape."¹⁰Ibid.

Published it was, but this broadside had a measurable effect. Since the illustration leaves tipped into copies of the first two printings of the first American edition did not count in the pagination, the publisher could easily omit them. It seems that even some copies of these printings did not contain them, for a representative of the firm informed Douglass on 3 April 1882 that there were "four copies left of the edition without illustrations" and asked him whether he could "see fit to take them off our hands."¹¹Park Publishing Company to Douglass, 3 April 1882, General Correspondence File, reel 3, frame 584, FD Papers, DLC.

Douglass may have complimented Sylvester M. Betts for his services in letters yet to be discovered. But there is no record of his ever having expressed his appreciation of how the Park Publishing Company prepared for publication the first American edition of Life and Times.

II. Alterations of the First American Edition Text (1881–82)
In late 1881 or early 1882, as a second printing of the first American edition was prepared, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass underwent an augmentation. Douglass again accommodated Betts's wishes about the number of pages with eight newly composed paragraphs at the end of the 1880 speech on West Indian Emancipation in the "Appendix," at last bringing the page count to 518. Less inferable as authorial were revisions in the table of contents for the Second Part: the summary for chapter XVIII no longer referred to "Concluding thoughts"; chapter XIX, previously lacking a title and a summary of its contents, now had both (also added to the opening of the chapter itself); and the "Appendix" too gained a summary (likewise added to that section). There were three other alterations: the addition of a one-page list of illustrations; the deletion of several lines of George L. Ruffin's introduction to accommodate that addition; and the correction of one of two pagination problems in the first gathering (the page numbering had skipped from xii to xv in the initial printing).

In the third printing, Arabic page numbering replaced the Roman-and-then-Arabic sequence, thus eliminating the second pagination problem in the previous printings (page 13 had followed page [xxiv]) and bringing the page count to 564. Less positive a development for Douglass, the pagination now included the illustration leaves, and thenceforth during his lifetime they would be present in all American publications of Life and Times. There were two noteworthy alterations in the text of the third printing. The first was an unnecessary change of "disproval" (a legitimate but archaic spelling) to the modern form, of "disapproval." The second, the addition of a nine-line footnote to the end of chapter XII in the Second Part, is more clearly authorial in origin; and indeed Douglass's name appeared at its end, although the compositor misspelled it "DOUGLAS." In the footnote Douglass explained that he had erred when criticizing one of his contemporaries, former Massachusetts Congressman Robert C. Winthrop, for not having adequately supported the Union cause during the Civil War.¹²Robert C. Winthrop, Jr., informed Douglass of the degree to which he had misrepresented the historical situation, directing Douglass to the speeches his father had made in support of the Union cause. In his reply, Douglass assurced him how "very much obliged" he was for the information, explaining that the mistake he had made would not "have happened . . . had I not been in the West when these speeches were made and published in the Boston papers and thus escaped my notice." Douglass to Robert C. Winthrop, Jr., letter tipped into a copy of the first printing of the first American edition of Life and Times, 3 March 1882, MHiS. The final change in the third

printing was the addition of an engraving to the plate used to print the last page of chapter XIX in the First Part: appearing on page 199 was the emblem of the "3rd UNITED STATES COLORED TROOPS"—a peculiar development insofar as the image relates to nothing in that chapter or the next.¹³The emblem reappeared in subsequent printings of the first American edition but not in the second edition.

With the third printing, Betts and Douglass had done all that they would to improve the edition; there were no other alterations made in 1882 in the fourth and fifth printings. Moreover, plate wear was already advanced by the third printing; the pages of the next two were even uglier. There would be no sixth printing.

III. The Second American Edition (1882–84)

More than anything else in the first edition, Douglass detested the illustrations. But it was the overall shoddy workmanship about which Douglass complained on 28 January 1882, demanding that Life and Times be made "what it should be as to quality and finish." The Park Publishing Company had proposed a reduction of his royalties to offset the cost of making improvements. Douglass counteroffered with two nonmonetary concessions: "I have given up all opposition to the illustrations and am silent about the typographical errors." On 19 July 1882 the Park Publishing Company announced that it would attempt to placate him.¹⁴Douglass to Park Publishing Company, 28 January 1882; Park Publishing Company to Douglass, l9 July 1882, General Correspondence File, reel 3, frames 533–34, 600–601, FD Papers, DLC. Indeed, it not only manufactured a better-looking volume but did something rarely seen in the publishing industry: barely one year after investing in the book, it paid for a complete resetting of the type and the production of new plates.

As Douglass told another publisher a decade later, he was pleased by the quality of this second edition,¹⁵That he was pleased by the appearance of Park's new edition is here inferred from his criticism in late 1892 of the volume produced by his next American publisher: "It is not equal to what the editor in Hartford did." Douglass to DeWolfe, Fiske and Company, 18 November 1892, General Correspondence File, reel 6, frame 735–36, FD Papers. DLC of which there were two printings in 1882, another in 1883, and one more in l884. The satisfaction that Douglass felt at having prevailed may account for the fact that no additional textual alterations appeared in the second through fourth printings. Although textual infelicities that he may never have noticed were carried over verbatim from the first American edition, many did not reappear in the second. The new version of the text differed in hundreds of instances in its 618 pages; and, despite the reappearance of some flagrantly problematic readings, it appears clear that Douglass's corrective hand had been at work. For example, in chapter V of the Second Part, the earlier reference to his presence in "Chester county, Ohio" had changed to "Clinton county, Ohio," suggesting a correction made on the basis of the author's personal experience there in 1843 rather than the geographical expertise of an editor or typesetter in Hartford, Connecticut.

Less easily inferred as authorial, however, are the large majority of such changes. There is no documentation of which textual revisions were Douglass's and which were those made by another hand or hands at the Park Publishing Company.

IV. The English Edition (1882–87)

In the meantime in England, the editor of Christian Age magazine, John Lobb, had taken Life and Times into another phase of its nineteenth-century textual-bibliographical history. Correspondence reveals that in December 1881 he had obtained a copy of the autobiography and informed Douglass of his interest in publishing it. Douglass approved his proposal. Then, without the author's personal involvement, Lobb proceeded to edit it and have it typeset for a British readership. On 15 March 1882 he explained to Douglass that he had taken these liberties and by the same mail sent him a copy of the published volume.¹⁶Lobb cabled Douglass on 20 February 1882, asking permission to "republish your life," adding "l will compensate you." Douglass's reply is not extant; but he apparently accepted the propsal, since, in his testimonial dated 24 February that appeared in the English edition of Life and Times, the Reverend David Thomas related that permission to publish it had been given by Douglass. Lobb's 8 March letter to Douglass also seems to confirm that Douglass had given his approval: "Shall be glad to receive the promised lines in reply to my wire at your earliest convenience." These "lines" appear to refer to textual corrections that Douglass informed Lobb he would be sending him, for on 15 March Lobb related that he had received Douglass's "list of needed corrections in the Americanan Edition" but that they had arrived too late for use. Lobb then proffered a consolation, as nebulous as it was unreassuring: "I have anticipated a considerable number" of the corrections "when corrcecting my proofs." John Lobb to Douglass, 20 February, 8, 15 March 1882, General Correspondence File, reel 3, frames 544, 566, 575–76, FD Papers, DLC. It included not only the unabbreviated introduction by George L. Ruffin appearing in the first printing of the first American edition but newly composed testimonials by the Right Honorable John Bright, M.P., and the Reverend David Thomas, D.D.¹⁷If Douglass was disappointed to learn that his corrections did not guide Lobb's work, the Park Publishing Company had at least equal cause for discontent with the publication of the English edition. In his 15 March 1882 letter to Douglass, Lobb declared that he had not known in February when he cabled him that the American edition was available for sale in England. But, in view of the "advanced stage" of his preparation of Life and Times, begun in December, he decided to continue without informing or making an agreement with the Park Publishing Company. Apparently never told by Douglass about the Lobb edition that "has just made its appearance," Park complained on 24 March that it had made arrangements with wholesale houses in Great Britain for the sale of its own edition and had sent them seventy-five copies. Now it must either ask for the return of the books or sell them at a discount. It asked Douglass for his view of the situation. The surviving correspondence does not include Douglass's reply. Park Publishing Company to Douglass, 24 March 1882, General Correspondence File, reel 3, frame 580, FD Papers, DLC. In this thoroughly Anglicized version of Life and Times, Lobb's alterations of the text involved much more than the imposition throughout of British spellings and his own punctuation preferences. He deleted references to numerous individuals whom his British readers would undoubtedly not recognize. He included the Garfield piece inserted by Betts, complete with the still-uncorrected final paragraph written in the third-person singular; but he was wide awake enough to treat Douglass's "Conclusion" appropriately. Although

Lobb did not take the opportunity to move the Garfield piece to the "Appendix," he did separate it from the "Conclusion," assigning the latter a chapter of its own. In fact, rather than expanding the "Appendix," he removed the Freedmen's Monument speech; in the English edition it appears in chapter XV of the Second Part, where it immediately follows Douglass's 1881 description of the District of Columbia ceremony honoring Abraham Lincoln in 1876.

Especially noteworthy among the hundreds of differences between the first American edition and the one published by the Christian Age Office is Lobb's censorship of a 345-word passage in chapter X of the Second Part. He deleted the two paragraphs in which Douglass angrily pilloried an Englishman, Colonel Hugh Forbes, who had exposed and thus thwarted one of John Brown's schemes for triggering a slave insurrection. New printings in 1883, 1884, and 1887 yielded another noteworthy alteration in the same part of the 1881 text—this one reflecting not editorial tampering by Lobb but self-censorship by Douglass. As has been noted, in the initial two printings of the first American edition Douglass tartly criticized Robert C. Winthrop for not having displayed sufficient dedication to the Union war effort in 1861—65. Informed that he had erred grievously in his assessment, Douglass recanted in 1882 in a footnote added to the third printing, and the footnote reappeared in chapter XII of all subsequent American publications of Life and Times. In the English edition there was no such footnote. Instead, beginning with its second printing, the paragraph-length passage was rewritten, energetically lauding Winthrop as an exemplary Union loyalist. Douglass's responsibility for this change in the text in 1883 is as clear as an inference from evidence internal to the work's textual history can be. But this stands as the only instance in which Douglass's revising hand manifests itself. As to which of Lobb's changes in the first American edition's text Douglass may have privately welcomed in correspondence, there is no more documentation than there is for the authority of the revisions that appeared in the second American edition. That is, there is none.

V. The Expanded Second American Edition (1892–95)

Deposited for copyright in December 1892 but declaring itself an 1893 publication on its title page is the most dramatic American transformation of the autobiography that occurred during Douglass's lifetime.¹⁸In July 1889 the Park Publishing Company assured Douglass that it continued to market his autobiography energetically. "We have rushed and re-rushed the book connstantly." In December 1891, however, it announced that the "old edition is exhausted" and made no mention of the possibility of a new printing, in part because it had been informed "some months since" by DeWolfe, Fiske and Company that that firm planned to publish a "new edition." But this would not mark an end to Park's involvement, for it entered into an arrangement with the new publisher: its subscription sales agents were "anxious to resume work on this book"; and in January 1892 Park wrote to DeWolfe, Fiske, asking when copies would be available. Park Publishing Company to Douglass, 14 July 1889; Park Publishing Company to DeWolfe, Fiske and Company, 1 December 1891, 12 January 1892, General Correspondence File, reel 5, frames 482–83; reel 6, frames 340, 380, FD Papers, DLC. DeWolfe, Fiske and

Company of Boston, Massachusetts, purchased from the Park Publishing Company for its own use the second edition plates—thus assuring that the illustrations included in the pagination would remain in place, as would the problematic filler added by Betts.¹⁹DeWolfe, Fiske addressed the matter of the illustrations, its correspondent relating that upon "looking though the copy or your life which you returned to us, we notice that you have taken out a number of the full page illustrations. Did you wish to omit them in printing the book?" He then informed Douglass that it would not be possible to do so. DeWolfe, Fiske and Company to Douglass, 15 July 1892, General Correspondence File, reel 6, frame 585, FD Papers, DLC. Worse, as Betts had clumsily tacked the addenda provided by Douglass to the end of Life and Times in 1881, so did the never-identified representative of DeWolfe, Fiske who corresponded with Douglass attach yet more text, a "Third Part" volunteered by Douglass, with little regard for making it congruent with what preceded it. This clutch of 13 chapters followed the "Conclusion" of the decade-old version of Life and Times in which Douglass announced that he had brought the story of his life to an end and that someone else would have to give an account of what would happen in the time left to him. Indeed, nothing in the First and Second Parts was modified to accommodate the addition of a third. Further, in the new publication, the "Appendix" would not appear where one normally does, at the end of the book, but between the conclusion of the Second Part and the beginning of the Third Part, over 100 pages before the volume's end. In short, in the 1892, 1895, and one subsequent, undated printing by DeWolfe, Fiske and Company, Life and Times remained a two-part work with appendix, to which the publisher merely attached an extension.

On 26 March 1895, a month after Douglass's death. the same DeWolfe, Fiske editor who had corresponded with him explained to his widow how these developments, and another equally consequential, occurred.²⁰DeWolfe, Fiske and Company to Helen Pitts Douglass, 26 March 1895, General Correspondence File, reel 8, frames 309–11, FD Papers, DLC.

Douglass, aware that DeWolfe, Fiske had already purchased the plates for Life and Times, asked in the summer of 1891 whether the firm had yet done anything with them. Informed that it planned to go to press early the next year, Douglass, then in his seventies, said that he wanted to update the story of his long, eventful life. As of 13 January 1892, when his new publisher asked if he still intended to do so, he had not yet submitted a manuscript for the Third Part.²¹In January 1892 DeWolfe, Fiske asked whether Douglass wanted to expand Life and Times. "Please let us know whether you want to send us any new matter. If we do not hear from you we shall go to press with the book at once." This was in fact a reminder that Douglass had not yet provided the copy promised; for Park Publishing Company, the previous month, had related to Douglass that "some time since," DeWolfe, Fiske had mentioned that he was "preparing additional matter." Douglass apparently, did not confirm that since, the next month, Park wrote to DeWolfe, Fiske, asking whether Douglass was "bringing the work to date or has . . . abandoned the idea." DeWolfe, Fiske and Company to Douglass, 13 January 1892; Park Publishing Company to Douglass, 1 December 1891; Park Publishing Company to DeWolfe, Fiske and Company, 12 January 1892, General Corresrondence File, reel 6, frames 340, 380, FD Papers, DLC. At some time before that

summer, however, DeWolfe, Fiske received it—a 121-page typescript with handwritten corrections and revisions made by Douglass and a very few that may have been made by the typist and by Douglass's wife, Helen Pitts Douglass. DeWolfe, Fiske proceeded to have the Third Part typeset and then plated at the cost of "over $200."

This is not to say that the plates for the other two parts went to the press unrevised. Indeed, while Douglass and his publisher did not address what most needed a corrective—the placements of the "Appendix" and of the original, now-outdated "Conclusion"—they certainly did give attention to the texts of both, as well as to those of all the other sections of the second American edition. The same 26 March 1895 letter addressed to Mrs. Douglass made clear why: although there is no record that Douglass had been dissatisfied with the second edition, the correspondent explained that Douglass insisted on corrections, forwarding a copy of the volume "with a great many changes made in it," some of which "were as we thought very trivial and we demurred on account of the expense." Were the corrections made, he informed Douglass on 28 July 1892, the cost would be $400, and Douglass would have to be responsible for half of that amount. Douglass replied on 10 August, "I desire you to make those corrections in the new edition." As it turned out, the cost was instead $300, and DeWolfe, Fiske billed him for $150.

The charge to which Douglass agreed would amount to more than $3,000 a century later. But that was in fact a reasonable figure, given the extent to which the plates for the First and Second Parts and "Appendix" were revised. The present editors have recorded well over 1,000 alterations of punctuation, individual words, and word groups—most requiring the replacement of both portions of lines and entire ones in the plates, and many involving the substitution of paragraph-length sections.

What transpired, then, amounted to much more than the making of the "corrections" to which Douglass referred. The text of the revised second has a radically more formal punctuation scheme, one extravagantly different from the decidedly casual and idiosyncratic pointing in pre-1893 American publications. As striking are the relentlessly executed reconfigurations of Douglass's typical sentence structures in chapter after chapter by means of the transposition of phrases and clauses, to the end of achieving a more elegant tonality. As well, too homely or vulgar expressions surrendered their places to their betters. Archaic word choices gave way to their modern equivalents. Sentences ending with prepositions diminished in number; split infinitives became whole, their adverbs dutifully trailing; dependent clauses not preceded by "that" or "which" obtained them; independent clauses linked by commas but without coordinating conjunctions went their separate ways as discrete sentences; "sentence fragments" gained the subjects of the verb or predicates they required to pass muster as "complete sentences"; and run-on sentences, cobbling together multiple independent clauses by means of repeated uses of "and," rarely escaped rehabilitation. The revision of the plates was so extensive that the time

required for their preparation accounted for the delay in their going to the printer.²²The DeWolfe, Fiske correspondent wrote to Douglass on 22 October: "We regret the delay in bringing out the new edition of your life. The corrections on the plates took a much longer time than we anticipated." He informed him that the printed sheets were at the bindery and that copies would be made available in a few days. On 21 November 1892, DeWolfe, Fiske registered for copyright the title of the "New Revised Edition" to be published in "1893"; and on December 5 it made its copyright deposit at the Library of Congress. DeWolfe, Fiske to Douglass, 22 October 1892, General Correspondence File, reel 6, frame 715, FD Papers, DLC; Copyright Registration Record No. 46128X, Copyright Office, DLC. Not even the English edition, so rigorously adapted for a British readership, had modulated Douglass's voice to such a degree. So far as was possible, the revised text transformed autodidact Douglass into a Boston Brahmin whose diction and stylistic preferences suggested graduation from the Latin School and Harvard College.

There is, of course, no reason to doubt that Douglass was personally responsible for a number of changes inscribed in the copy of Life and Times that he sent to DeWolfe, Fiske and which, unfortunately, the editors have not located. For example, although it is impossible to be certain about whose hand was responsible for the autograph lines and loops effecting transpositions of phrases and clauses in the typesetting copy for the Third Part, it appears that Douglass himself made at least some of them; and one cannot, therefore, dismiss the possibility that he revised in the same way when making corrections in the First and Second Parts. But hallenging credibility is the notion that the 1881 writer had metamorphosed by 1892 to a finicky systematist who, at 74 years of age, applied a wide range of newly acquired precepts concerning what was proper in "fine writing" or displayed the finely honed skills of a professional copyeditor. What Douglass gave DeWolfe, Fiske instead appears to have been more than an authorially corrected copy of the second American edition—one in which another, remarkably fussy hand had been at work. It is also possible that, despite the DeWolfe, Fiske correspondent's comment about the "very trivial" revisions made in the marked copy of Life and Times, a stylistic maven in Boston made additional changes; for the pages printed from the revised plates manifest all the obvious characteristics of a "house-styled" production.

As with the previously published versions of Life and Times's First and Second Parts and the "Appendix," the question is, which were Douglass's corrections, and which were the enhancements made by another or others? Once again, no answer to this question is available. Documentation of who did what is likewise lacking for the Third Part. The punctuation and, less often, the phrasing of the printed text differ in minor ways from those of the typescript submitted by Douglass. More dramatic is the fact that chapters I and II in the typescript became chapter I in the book, and III in the former became II and III in the latter. Douglass may have been responsible for all, many, or few such changes, but there is no means of determining in each instance whose revising or stylizing hand is revealed.²³Fourteen leaves of galley proof for the Third Part have survived (FDP), but they tell one little if anything about authorial correction and revision. The text is that of the final two paragraphs of chapter X through all but the last two paragraphs of chapter XIII. Douglass made only one correction on these leaves, changing "Minister" to "minister," the reading that appears in the published text. Whether Douglass actually returned this batch of proof to DeWolfe, Fiske is, however, moot. The need for the correction was self-evident, since "minister" used in the same way is the reading in the previous line and may very well have been recognized as an inconsistency and acted upon in Boston. That the chapters are misnumbered in galley proof and that Douglass did not make the corrections that appear in the published text is also noteworthy. Whether Douglass corrected and revised other batches of proof that he may have received cannot be determined.

Choice of Copy-Text

Choice of Copy-Text

What Douglass thought of the DeWolfe, Fiske publication is a matter of record. He made it clear on 18 November 1892 that the advance copy sent him was a disappointment: "[I] am sorry to have to say that I have looked into it with less satisfaction than I had hoped. It is not such work as I had looked for from a Boston Publishing House." While the typography was up to par, the paper used was "inferior" and the binding "slovenly, imperfect and unattractive." That is, he was no more happy with its physical appearance than he had been when, a decade earlier, he complained to the Park Publishing Company about the shabbiness of the first American edition. As to the enhancements of his prose made in the second edition plates and like changes in the text of the Third Part, Douglass offered no commendation of a task well executed. He made no known comment at all, and one has good reason to wonder whether, once they were in print, he was even aware of the refinements of the text.²⁴Douglass to DeWolfe, Fiske and Company, November 18, 1892, General Correspondence File, reel 6, frames 735–36, FD Papers. DLC.

There was, perhaps, another way in which Douglass withheld appreciation. The forgetfulness of a septuagenarian may be a legitimate explanation, but Douglass may instead have deliberately registered his discontent when he failed to live up to his financial agreement with DeWolfe, Fiske. His widow learned from the same 26 March 1895 letter from the publisher's correspondent that Douglass had gone to his grave without paying the $150 for the revision of the Park Publishing Company plates nor had he sent a check for 24 copies of the book he ordered.

Yet, the DeWolfe, Fiske Life and Times may today be assumed by many to be the most authoritative, or authorial, version of all—not only because it is the sole contemporaneous one that contains the Third Part, but because it is also the last published during the author's lifetime. The speculation regarding its authority would be that, since Douglass had over a decade in which to ensure that the first two parts read the way he intended, and he had two years in which to do the same with the third, surely his de facto "deathbed edition" was the one on which he had sedulously worked to perfect his testimony to a life well lived and worthy of trumpeting to the world. Surely it was he who again and again eliminated his decidedly vernacular word choices and otherwise toned up his sometimes too-homespun prose to make his book conform as much as possible to the expectations of the arbiters of belletristic taste in the 1890s. For example, that this form of the work is indeed the

most authoritative is the editorial assumption in the Library of America's 1994 edition of his three autobiographies; its editor selected for inclusion the 1893 version of Life and Times, limiting his emendations to the correction of 37 typographical errors.²⁵Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., Frederick Douglass: Autobigraphies (New York, 1994), 108–81. In this volume's "Note on the Texts," the editor assigns to Douglass responsibility for all the textual changes (less typographical errors) appearing in the expanded version of the second American edition in 1893.

As has been noted, however, there is little empirical evidence as to what, exactly, Douglass did to perfect his autobiography in its various manifestations from 1881 to 1892. Also unclear is how much time and energy he devoted to such a process, given that, as of the time of his death, there still remained in the text problematic readings of 1881 that neither he nor his publishers had noted and that remain unrecognized as problematic in the Library of America edition. Pertinent, too, is the fact that, in his scanty surviving correspondence with his publishers, Douglass focused much less on the content of the book than on its appearance: the quality of the typography, paper, binding, and—of course—the illustrations.

True, as his 1994 editor asserted when explaining why he chose to offer the reader a near-verbatim reproduction of the DeWolfe, Fiske Version of Life and Times, Douglass was not reluctant to revise his writings. Even the most cursory review of the collection of his papers at the Library of Congress makes clear his penchant for revising his manuscripts. Even more remarkable is the number of multiple drafts of essays and speeches processed by his typists. Nor can one conclude that he was unconcerned about how his texts read once published. He had the recantation note regarding Robert C. Winthrop added to the first American edition plates, and not a note but a dramatically revised description of Winthrop appeared in the 1883 printing of the English edition. The correspondence reveals that in the previous year he asked John Lobb to make textual corrections for the first printing of the English edition, but the book had already gone to press before the no longer extant list of alterations he requested reached London. As well, he gave attention to more than the disappointing physical characteristics of the volumes manufactured by the Park Publishing Company. Finally, he informed DeWolfe, Fiske of the corrections he wanted made. Douglass was not oblivious to or untroubled by flaws in the text of his autobiography. But this fact does not minimize the problem addressed here. As with the Park Publishing Company and the Christian Age Office, so with DeWolfe, Fiske and Company: in none of the surviving correspondence with and of his three publishers and in no other available document does Douglass even ask for a specific textual revision.

Because of the radical degree to which the text of the 1893 version of the work differs from its predecessors in terms of the salient characteristics of Douglass's prose style and because of the unavailability of any specifics regarding who did what to "correct" as well as stylize it, the only means of assuming that it is the most

authoritative one—beyond a guess grounded in the fact that Douglass was capable of revision—is to conceive of authorship in a way that has enjoyed some popularity in the scholarly editing community since the 1970s. This "social text" orientation involves seeing Douglass not as the sole or individual author. Rather, given what transpired in the nineteenth century as multiple hands prepared a work for publication, Douglass is instead a participant in a process of collaborative authorship whereby authorship has a social definition, the work to be marketed is the product of a group, and—barring obvious error on someone's part—the contributions of the members of that team are of equal authority.²⁶ See Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford, Eng., 1972) and From Writer to Reader: Studies in Editorial Method (Oxford, Eng., 1978), as well as Jerome McGann, A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism (Chicago, 1983). As will be seen below, the points of view of both scholars and their adherents represent a departure from that of Sir Walter Greg, which informs this critical edition of Life and Times. In fact, Life and Times was inarguably like other works that had left the sole control of the individual author and, without the author's immediate oversight, underwent modification by others. That it had by 1895 become a product of several collaborations there can be no doubt. Thus, for those who acknowledge the fact of the matter and accept the definition of the work as necessarily such a social product, the 1893 and the two textually identical later printings by DeWolfe, Fiske may represent the most authoritative form of Life and
Times; or, those of the same mindset may elect to accept as authoritative the reproduction of the DeWolfe, Fiske text in the Library of America volume.

There is, however, another and more traditional way to define the work to be critically edited and annotated. Without denying the fact that its publication inevitably involved action taken by others that resulted in modification of what Douglass had provided his American publishers, one may reasonably propose that Life and Times was ultimately the creation of an individual's hand and that the product of that hand is the essential worthy of recovery so far as that is made possible by documentary evidence and analysis of all the textual variants appearing in the different versions of the work through early 1895—that is, during the years that Douglass was able to originate corrections and revisions or to sanction alterations made by others. To that end, one need not assume that the most authoritative form of the work is necessarily that of the last version produced during the author's lifetime or that it is—willy-nilly—the "social text" emerging from a nexus of author's study, typist's office, editorial rooms, typesetting shop, press plant, and bindery. Instead, one may adopt a different orientation toward the work and an editorial methodology that has become the dominant one since the mid-twentieth-century publication of Sir Walter Greg's "The Rationale of Copy-Text."²⁷Sir Walter Greg, "The Rationale of Copy-Text," Studies in Bibliography, 3:19–36 (1950–51). As Greg argues, there is another choice possible when one selects the most authoritative form, the copy-text, to be critically edited—or, in the case of Life and Times, the copy-texts.

The Copy-Texts

The Copy-Texts

The editorial principles and methodology proposed by Greg in "The Rationale of Copy-Text" are here deemed most appropriate for the preparation of a critical edition of Frederick Douglass's Life and Times. In his seminal essay Greg addresses precisely the kind of problematic textual situation represented by Life and Times: one for which there is meager documentation of what occurred in its history of composition and textual transmission. As well, the primary purposes of the editors are the same as those Greg articulates.

The first is the preservation of the distinctive formal features of the work that Douglass intended to make available to the public. What Greg terms "accidentals" are punctuation, spelling, capitalization, paragraphing, and similar usages that are easily and often altered by others with their own preferences—such as amanuenses, typists, editors, and compositors. As Greg advises, the copy-text to be chosen to ensure maximal retention of such signature authorial traits is the earliest state of the work classifiable as substantively complete in the form intended by the author for publication. Ideally, in the case of a nineteenth-century author, the copy-text of choice is the author's "fair copy" holograph submitted to a publisher, embedded in the handwriting of which are the author's own practices, whether consistent or inconsistent in regard to accidental usages.

The Copy-Text of the Third Part

The Copy-Text of the Third Part

As often happens, the ideal is not attainable. Such a holograph for none of the three parts and appendix of Life and Times survives, though there is extant, as has been noted, a typescript of the Third Part that Douglass submitted for publication in 1892 and that DeWolfe, Fiske used for typesetting. Because five of the 121 pages of this fair copy in the Frederick Douglass Papers collection at the Library of Congress are now lacking, such a copy-text choice is even less ideal—for that reason as well as the involvement of at least one typist and the possibility that Douglass's wife Helen also assisted him in some capacity. But Greg also addresses situations of this kind, again taking into account the predictahle proliferation of nonauthorial alterations of accidentals in a text's transmission as it becomes further and further removed from the state of the author's holograph through succcessive manipulations by an increasing number of others. To preserve so far as is possible the author's accidentals and to minimize nonauthorial alterations, he proposes that the copy-text be the form of the text most proximate posterior to the author's holograph. This is, of course, the typescript in which Douglass, in 1892, incorporated as chapters XII and XIII his revision of the anterior publication of his 1891 North American Review article "Haiti and the United States."²⁸Frederick Douglass, "Haiti and the United States: Inside Histoy of the Negotiations for the Môle St. Nicholas," NAR, 153:337–45, 450–59 (Septemner 1891; October 1891). As to the passages on the five pages of the typescript that are no longer extant, the copy-text for each would be those same

sections in authorially corrected galley- or page-proof because most proximate to the readings in the once-complete typescript—were either form of proof available for this use.²⁹As has been noted (n.22), the fourteen leaves of galley-proof that are available do not qualify for use as copy-text. But neither is. For those passages, there is only one recourse: the next most proximate forms are those in the DeWolfe, Fiske publication of 1893.

Thus the copy-text for the Third Part is, perforce, an eclectic one, comprising all of the surviving typescript pages, complemented by the missing passages in DeWolfe, Fiske's expanded second American edition—the three printings of which are textually identical.

Copy-text of the "Introduction," First Part, Second Part, and "Appendix"

Copy-text of the "Introduction," First Part, Second Part, and "Appendix"

The sections of Life and Times published together as a discrete work over a decade before Douglass composed the Third Part present a less desirable but simpler situation with regard to copy-text choice. No fair copy of any kind survived the production of the first American edition of 1881. Nor did proof. Extant only are holograph drafts of sections of the Second Part that were not used for typesetting. The available leaves of the drafted sections are, of course, of historical value in that they do document Douglass's development of portions of that part toward the end of producing fair copy. They also present evidence of Douglass's revisions of those drafts. But these sections cannot be used for the construction of an eclectic copy-text such as that for the Third Part, given that they, like the North American Review article dealing with Douglass's Haitian experiences, represent a pre-fair copy stage of composition; comparison of them with the same sections of the text derived in 1881 from the copy used for typesetting makes clear their status as drafts or—as traditionally defined in contrast to "fair copy"—"foul papers" inappropriate for use as copy-text.

Whatever the exact character of the copy submitted for publication, it is manifest that Douglass reworked the surviving drafted sections as manuscript to be included in the fair copy for the Second Part. Not represented in drafts but also included was additional new copy. For example, in this part's first chapter Douglass told the story that he had previously declined to relate, providing a detailed account of how he escaped from slavery, the route he took and the individuals who had assisted him.³⁰Douglass published an abbreviated and house-styled version of the account titled "My Escape from Slavery," Century Illustrated Magazine, 23:125–31 (November 1881). The book published in the same month contained the fuller version that Douglass had provided to the Park Publishing Company. In fact, no longer extant, newly written copy—presumably interpolated with tear sheets of previously printed speeches, articles, and letters that Douglass chose to quote—accounts for the bulk of the Second Part (chapters I, IV–V, and VIII–XIX) as Douglass takes his reader beyond the events that he had treated in his 1885 autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom.

hat was not so new was the content of the whole of the First Part and of chapters II–III and VI–VII in the Second Part, as is immediately apparent when one compares those portions of Life and Times with the whole of My Bondage and My Freedom. Just how closely they are related may be seen initially at the head of the first chapter in the two-part My Bondage: there the first part is not identified as a "Part"; it is instead titled "LIFE AS A SLAVE." One finds the same in Life and Times, despite the fact that the 1881 volume's Second Part (like the Third Part in 1893) does declare itself as such on its first page. What follows the misnaming of the First Part of Life and Times is more of the same, page by page. The 1881 state of a sentence that appears in chapter XIII of the first part of My Bondage is representative. In 1855 it read, "I must now ask the reader to go with me a little back in point of time, in my humble story, and to notice another circumstance that entered into my slavery experience, and which, doubtless, has had a share in deepening my horror of slavery, and increasing my hostility toward those men and measures that practically uphold the slave system." In Life and Times this sentence illustrating Douglass's remarkable fondness for commas is a verbatim transcription save for three minor changes: in 1881 Douglass asks one to "go back with me a little" instead of "go with me a little back"; "and to notice" now reads "and notice": and "and increasing my" has become "and my."

The degree to which the First Part and four chapters of the Second Part of Life and Times are reconstitutions of the earlier narrative is even more manifest in passages containing 1855 statements that no longer made sense in 1881 and which Douglass never updated. In the same sentence in both publications, for example, he describes himself as hostile to those who "uphold" the slave system—a choice of tense that made sense in 1855 but not in the postbellum period. Douglass is twice again so inattentive in chapter XX of the First Part of Life and Times. He still refers to some would-be runaway slaves as he did in 1855, describing them as now returned to their owners. Then he continues to classify his readers as either in the nonslaveholding class or in the decades-long defunct one of slaveholders.

When preparing typesetting copy for the First Part and four chapters in the Second, Douglass possibly produced a holograph for all of the 25 chapters derived from My Bondage. But, more likely because it would have heen the most economical way to proceed in the spring of 1881, the copy comprised pages of My Bondage upon which Douglass made interlinear and marginal revisions, with intercalations of newly composed manuscript leaves when necessary.

As has already been observed, the typesetting copy for all but four chapters in the Second Part was holograph, most likely intercalated with tear sheets of previously printed texts like those from which the eulogy for President Garfield and the two speeches placed in the "Appendix" were typeset.

Whatever the composition of the copy submitted to the Park Publishing Company, and however eclectic its character, nothing of the kind is available for consideration as copy-text. Since there also survive no forms of the text intermediate

between the copy used for typesetting and the first printing of the first American edition, this printing is most proximate to the fair copy and its accidentals, and it is thus the copy-text of choice.

Emendation of the Copy-Texts

Emendation of the Copy-Texts

Greg also enunciates the second purpose of a critical edition of a work such as Life and Times: that its editors provide therein the text as the author intended it to read—so far as that is determinable—by means of emendation of the copy-text or copy-texts.

Although one chooses copy-text for the sake of maximizing fidelity to the formal characteristics of the work fashioned by the author, Greg is not advising uncritical adherence to all of a copy-text's accidentals, including obvious blunders by the author, typists, editors, and compositors. For example, one would be hard pressed to justify in a critical edition the preservation of misspellings, as distinguished from British spellings such as "criticise," and from legitimate but archaic ones such as "ecstacy." "Nevetheless" and "Fort Sumpter" may have been Douglass's pronunciations, and "èlite" rather than "élite" what he wrote, but each misspelling elicits an editorial emendation as immediately as do erroneously rendered names of individuals, organizations, events, and places. So, too, when a period and not a question mark appears at the end of an interrogative sentence or when there is no terminal punctuation at all.

At the same time, emendation of all irregularities need not occur, especially when their repetition marks them as signature traits of the author. Douglass's extravagant use of commas in many of his lengthier and elaborately qualified sentences often produces a halting effect but rarely complicates one's reading experience to the point that it warrants an editorial intervention. One may also note in this edition of Life and Times that, as in its nineteenth-century manifestations, first letters of the same words repeatedly appear in both their upper- and lowercase forms—accurately reflecting, in fact, the lack of clear distinctions between the two in Douglass's holograph drafts. This irregularity, the editors have concluded, formally presents no problem for readers when, for example, Douglass refers to the "republican," rather than "Republican," political party or the context clearly indicates that "north" denotes the U.S. region rather than a compass point.

There is another category of copy-text readings that Greg also takes into consideration vis-à-vis editorial emendation. While not overlooking the fact that accidentals can sometimes profoundly affect the meaning of a word or word group, he dubs this second class of readings "substantives," using the term to denote those textual elements that most fully and obviously embody the ideational content of a work. Once more he abjures unquestioning loyalty to the copy-text, advocates the exercise of critical judgment when dealing with substantives, and calls for corrective action when deemed necessary by the editor.

As with some accidental usages, so with substantives. Intelligibility may not be threatened by an idiosyncratic departure from convention, as when Douglass repeatedly resorts to his own peculiar way of reporting his own statements or those of his contemporaries. Technically, he errs when writing "I told him 'that the last time I was there I could obtain no shelter at any hotel, and that I feared I should meet a similar exclusion to-night.'" That is, in this instance and several others, he does not honor the distinction between the use of direct discourse (a verbatim quotation of his or another's statement) and of indirect discourse (the author 's paraphrase or description of a statement). The editors have elected to view this method of handling quotation as one that does not in fact threaten meaning. They take a different view and do emend, however, in instances in which a much more irregular departure from convention occurs, assuming that Douglass could not have intended to pair singular nouns with plural predicates or pronouns, or vice-versa.

In the vast majority of his sentences in the copy-texts one does not find such a disagreement as is typified by this sentence: "Until I heard this man, I had thought that the story of his oratory and power were greatly exaggerated." (It is the "story" that Douglass once thought was exaggerated; and, given the image of himself that he fashioned in this autobiography, Douglass could not have intended to state before his nineteenth-century readership that the "story . . . were greatly exaggerated.") There is, of course, an exception to the version of the rule in question. Douglass was aware of that, too, as seen when he employs the British usage in which a collective noun such as "family" is legitimately paired with a plural pronoun ("'they" rather than "it") and plural predicate. That British usage—for example, "The family gather"—is not herein Americanized by means of emendation; but all patent noun-verb and noun-pronoun disagreements are.

Much less a possible matter for debate, however, are substantive situations such as the one found in the copy-text for the Second Part wherein Douglass refers to the "William street depot" in Philadelphia as where he entrained for Manhattan during his flight from slavery in Maryland. William Street is instead in the city to which he fled. The Philadelphia depot in question that Douglass meant to cite (and did originally name in his "foul papers" draft of the passage) was on Willow Street, and thus the editorial emendation to that reading.

Many of the editors' emendations of the copy-texts' accidentals and substantives in the present edition are not unprecedented but appeared first in the editions and their printings published by 1895. For example, problematic readings such as "Nevetheless," "Sumpter," "èlite," and "William street" first saw correction prior to the publication of the second American edition in 1882. Either Douglass originated them, or he approved those corrections made by another or others. Or, the editors herein view such corrections as having the status of authorially sanctioned because it begs reason to conclude that in each instance Douglass intended to preserve self-evident error on his or someone else's part. The editors, that is, have analyzed all the variant readings appearing in the post-copy-text forms of Life and Times published

through 1895; and they have both adopted those previously made emendations that qualify thus as authoritative and recorded such adoptions as well as the emendations they have made independently in the list of editorial emendations included in the "Editorial Apparatus" section of this volume.³¹Not listed, though, are four classes of editorial emendations viewed by the editors as of minor significance. These "silent" emendations include, first, the omission of the ornamental typography used for the initial words of each chapter in copy-text for the First and Second Parts, as well as in the copy-text for the Third Part wherein an editor marked the initial words for the same treatment. Second, the editors omit the running titles in the copy-text for the First and Second Parts; the typescript copy-text for the Third Part does not include running titles, and the editors have not adopted those added in the DeWolfe, Fiske publication. Third, the editors follow the precedent set in the copy-text for the First and Second Parts by adding double quotation marks when the titles of books and the names of ships lack them; they do the same when Douglass is quoting and it is obvious that quotation marks were inadvertently omitted. Finally, the precedent for periodical titles is that they are italicized; and the editors emend accordingly.

Neither Douglass nor his contemporaries, however, addressed a large number of readings that merited attention but never received it, for example, "Later on, in 1854, we had the Missouri compromise, which removed the only grand legal barrier against the spread of slavery over all the territory of the United States." Indeed, that Douglass himself did not recognize the need to correct such an obvious faux pas is one of the more compelling reasons that the editors have viewed askance the notion that the last version of the text published in the author's lifetime was the authoritative product of his progressive close readings and meticulous authorial revision. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 is not, of course, what Douglass meant or probably stated in the fair copy; nor was it the Compromise of 1850. It is clear in the context (and in the "foul papers" draft of the passage as well) that Douglass was instead commenting on the 1854 repeal of the Missouri Compromise's provisions, that is, the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Another never-corrected misstatement of the kind finds Douglass referring to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1 January 1863, and relating in the same paragraph that at the time of its formal declaration "the war against the rebellion had been waged during more than two years." That the reading should be "almost two years" appears as necessary an editorial decision as the emendation of "Missouri compromise" to "Kansas-Nebraska Act."

Yet another has to do with one of the several corrupt readings resulting from the omission of a key word or phrase (as distinguished from a deliberate and wholly intelligible authorial elision). As Douglass excoriates 1850s proslavery journalists who were sympathetic to the American Colonization Society's program for expatriating African Americans, he declares that the actual "cherished object" of those journalists was not to help African Americans but "to get rid of the negro, who is presumed to be a standing menace to slavery." The statement makes no sense, of course: Douglass is not referring to "the negro" per se but to the "free colored inhabitants of the country," upon whom he focused three times in the immediately preceding lines.

As with a reference to the Union's "army of Virginia" when Douglass meant to

cite the Confederacy's Army of Northern Virginia, the context determines the emendation. It was "the free negro" who menaced slavery and whom the journalists wished to expatriate.

Also never addressed by the American editions was a glaringly self-evident misstatement of fact to which John Lobb did respond when preparing the English edition. This involved two readings in chapter XII of the Second Part, the first of which is traceable to the holograph draft on which Douglass was working in the summer of 1881. (The leaf on which the second appeared does not survive.) On the extant leaf Douglass initially keened over the fatal attack on President Lincoln in 1865 and the "recent assassination" of President Garfield. But he later revised the wording to "recently attempted assassination." One assumes that he did the same on the missing leaf, again adding "attempted" to the sentence originally reading, "I write this in the deep gloom flung over my spirit by the cruel, wanton, and cold-blooded assassination of Abraham Garfield, as well as that of Abraham Lincoln."

That is, Douglass knew that Charles J. Guiteau shot Garfield on 2 July 1881, and assumed that Guiteau had succeeded in killing him. Thus the original readings. Garfield, however, did not die until 19 September. In the meantime Douglass thought that Guiteau had failed, and he revised the two sentences accordingly. However, by November, when the publication of Life and Times occurred and it twice referred to an "attempted assassination," the text included as many misstatements of fact. Shortly thereafter, John Lobb acted to set matters right by deleting both appearances of the word "attempted"; Lobb thereby applied the same editorial emendation policy employed in the present edition. Again, self-evident factual error is a warrant for emendation of the copy-text's readings, and only two matters are of historical interest: the circumstances accounting for Douglass's having described in his fair copy manuscript an unsuccessful attempt at assassination, and for his not having noticed, twice, this "howler" nor asked his American publishers for its correction.

In sum, editorial emendations of the copy-texts comprise the correction of obvious punctuation gaffes, misspellings, and misnamings of individuals, organizations, events, and places, whether authorial or nonauthorial in orign. They include as well the correction of factually erroneous statements; of omissions of words judged not to be deliberate authorial elisions but the result of authorial or compositorial oversight; and of noun-verb and noun-pronoun disagreements. Recorded as well in the list of editorial emendations are the large-scale revisions of Life and Times deemed indisputably Douglass's own: the addition of eight paragraphs to the end of the West Indian Emancipation speech in the "Appendix"; and the revised paragraph concerning Hon. Robert C. Winthrop that appeared in the 1883 and subsequent printings of the English edition but never in the American typesettings until now.

John Lobb anticipated the most radical emendation of the Life and Times copy-texts made in the present edition when he decided to give independent chapter status

to the "Conclusion" of the two-part version of the autobiography, rather than have it appear in chapter XIX with the Garfield eulogy. That "Conclusion" also gains chapter status herein, but by a different means: the eulogy of Garfield appended in chapter XIX by Sylvester Betts is moved to what was in 1881, and is now, the appropriate location: the chronologically arranged "Appendix." Further, the "Appendix" itself no longer follows the Second Part but the Third—the proper placement at the end of a work such as Life and Times, as it was for the eight addenda appearing in the "Appendix" that in 1855 closed My Bondage and My Freedom.

An as radical editorial intervention considered was whether to do what would be necessary to enable the "Conclusion" that became anachronistic in 1892 to make better sense in light of the Third Part that follows it. The Third Part does lend itself at its beginning to an enhancement of the coherence of the expanded version of the autobiography, referring as it does to "the preceding chapters" having been composed ten years earlier. Would that Douglass had revised the "Conclusion" to the same effect. But it remains irrefutably and irremediably what it is, in no way modified in 1892–95 to be anything other than the section in which Douglass ended with a flourish the story of his life into 1881. The only discernible means of eliminating the anachronism are either a large-scale emendation of the whole that would prove more authorial than editorial in nature, or—even more a- or anti-historical an exercise of license—the excision of the entire "Conclusion" from the work. The editors have opted for neither action. The fact of the matter is that the expanded version of Life and Times is, indeed, a two-part work to which a third was attached without any modifications of the former being made to accommodate the addition of the latter. Thus no emendations of the kind that might effect a reconciliation between what precedes and follows the "Conclusion" appear in this edition's "List of Emendations," and the "Conclusion" here remains the historical oddity that it became in 1892.

Not recorded in the same list is the treatment of the illustrations that Douglass succeeded in having omitted from a limited number of copies of the first American edition. Honoring his repeated requests for their excision but acknowledging their historical significance, this critical edition relegates them to the section in the "Editorial Apparatus" titled "The Park Publishing Company Illustrations." The only plate in the first American edition that retains its status as a part of the work intended by its author—as stipulated in the publishing agreement with Sylvester M. Betts and Thomas Belknap—is the 1881 steel-engraving portrait of Douglass that serves as frontispiece.