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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 auto-
biography 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 writ-
ings departed from the same point—his birth into slavery—and all con-
cluded 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 indepen-