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INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME THREE xxxiii

ings 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

This critique ignored the essential theme of reconciliation that marks Life
and Times
's significant difference from his two antebellum narratives; how-
ever, 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.45

Life and Times does not appear to have been reviewed in any extant
black newspapers from the 1880s and 1890s.46 The only review in a black

4444 (London) Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art, 25 February 1882.

4545. London Anti-Slavery Reporter, March 1882.

4646. Examples 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.

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