23

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME THREE xxxv

izes 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 diffi-
cult 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other writings, both published and unpublished.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 ante-
bellum narratives constitute its unique historical value. Similarly, its inconsis-
tencies 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 antebel-
lum 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 autobiogra-
phies, reflect a broad trend in American print media after 1865. Other post-
bellum 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 rac-
ist violence that followed slavery's abolition. As Julie Roy Jeffrey docu-
ments 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.⁴⁹ During the final quarter of the nineteenth century,

^{4949. Jeffrey, Abolitionists Remember, 2.}