22

xxxiv INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME THREE

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 1893.⁴⁷ The black
critics' relative silence on Douglass's book may be explained by the fre-
quency with which editors published news of Douglass. African American
newspapers actively solicited, reprinted, and summarized Douglass's pro-
nouncements 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 pub-
lisher. 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 apo-
gee 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."⁴⁸ 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 character-

^{4747. See, for example, the issue of 24 March 1893.}

^{4848. Coffeyville (Kans.) Afro-American Advocate, 13 January 1893.}