Introduction to Volume III by Robin L. Condon and Peter P. Hinks

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ing recapitulation of timeworn tales and self-gratulatory enumerations of the accolades and comforts of Douglass's later years. Life and Times is indeed that, however, it is not merely that. It is rather a mature and cogent reevaluation of his life that anticipates "the grand possibilities of a glorious future." While Douglass does punctuate his postbellum narrative with catalogues of the many luminaries known and awards accrued over the course of a long public life, Life and Times should be read as the author seems to have intended it to be as a more fully developed and complete reconfiguration in the dynamic process of self-narrating that spanned more than two-thirds of his life. Writing in 1881 Douglass employed the rhetoric of a "sense of completeness" in his life; by 1892 he had lost that sense, having experienced a number of failures as well as a considerable amount of criticism from other black leaders. Still, his rhetoric reached toward the "glorious future" that he had long envisioned. In January 1894 the elderly orator stood before the public to denounce the savage lynching of black men in the South as well as the growing legal codification of disenfranchisement and racial segregation. A year before his death, Douglass reminded the citizens of his country one last time of the abiding principles of its Declaration of Independence. He urged Americans: "Put away your race prejudice. Banish the idea that one class must rule over another. Recognize the fact that the rights of the humblest citizen are as worthy of protection as are those of the highest, and your problem will be solved."⁶⁵ Amid the unfulfilled hopes and daunting struggles for African Americans in the late nineteenth century, Douglass echoed the optimism of the young abolitionist who first wrote about his life in slavery in 1844 and 1845.⁶⁶

Life and Times, more than any other work in Douglass's extensive corpus, illuminates for modern readers just how much the slave, the abolitionist, and the cider statesman shared across seven decades of slavery and freedom. Ultimately, Douglass's third autobiography staged reconciliation not between North and South or black and white, but among the several literary incarnations of himself in slavery and freedom. Though gratified by emancipation, Douglass, as his own critic, conscientiously avoided what Sundquist has characterized as scholars' sometimes necessary but "problematic historiographical choice" among his various identities. Instead, Douglass chose to suture his "several lives in one" within a final autobiography that preserved the integrity of each separate identity he inhabited. Douglass, in building Life

^{6565. "Lessons of the Hour," 9 January 1894," in Douglass Papers, ser. 1, 5:607.}

^{6666. See McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 114–15, for a discussion of the period during which Douglass wrote his Narrative.}

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and Times, demonstrated throughout the work each subsequent narrating self's acceptance of, and even reverence for, his earlier narrating selves. Douglass's last autobiography preserved and accommodated each of his former identities even as it enunciated new ones. This phenomenon is particularly evident at the multiple sites in this text that reveal contradiction and inconsistency—characteristics nearly inevitable because Douglass assembled his final autobiography from his many printed works of diverse genres and epochs—among Douglass's various "selves."

One representative example of the conciliatory work of Life and Times appears early in the text as Douglass iterates for the third time his lament about his elderly grandmother's mistreatment at the hands of Aaron Anthony's heirs. In his Narrative, Douglass had implied that Thomas Auld was responsible for the inhuman neglect of the faithful and, throughout most of her life, enormously productive Betsey Bailey; in Life and Times he exposed the complexity surrounding this implication by recalling to his readers the early passage in his depiction of the 1877 reunion with Auld:

I told him that I had made a mistake in my narrative, a copy of which I had sent him, in attributing to him ungrateful and cruel treatment of my grandmother; that I had done so on the supposition that in the division of the property of my old master, Mr. Aaron Anthony, my grandmother had fallen to him, and that he had left her in her old age, when she could be no longer of service to him, to pick up her living in solitude with none to help her, or in other words had turned her out to die like an old horse. "Ah!" he said, "that was a mistake. I never owned your grandmother; she in the division of the slaves was awarded to my brother-in-law, Andrew Anthony; but, "he added quickly, "I brought her down here and took care of her as long as she lived." The fact is, that after writing my narrative descrihing the condition of my grandmother, Capt. Auld's attention being thus called to it, he rescued her from her destitution. I told him that this mistake of mine was corrected as soon as I discovered it, and that I had at no time any wish to do him injustice; that I regarded both of us as victims of a system. (346–47)

Douglass presented the passage about his grandmother that appears in chapter 13 of Life and Times as a quotation taken from Narrative. The Life and Times passage follows closely the passage in the first autobiography, but it has been revised or "corrected." The revision Douglass adopted, however, falls short of its purported aim—that of exonerating Auld. Instead, the nar-

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rator of the third autobiography blames Betsey's "present owner—his [Aaron Anthony's] grandson"⁶⁷ for her sad fate following Anthony's death:

Now all the property of my old master, slaves included, was in the hands of strangers—strangers who had nothing to do in accumulating it. Not a slave was left free. All remained slaves, from the youngest to the oldest. If any one thing in my experience, more than another, has served to deepen my conviction of the infernal character of slavery, and to fill me with unutterable loathing of slaveholders, it was their base ingratitude to my poor old grandmother. She had served my old master faithfully from youth to old age. She had been the source of all his wealth; she had peopled his plantation with slaves; she had become a great-grandmother in his service. She had rocked him in his infancy, attended him in his childhood, served him through life, and at his death wiped from his icy brow the cold death-sweat and closed his eyes forever. She was nevertheless a slave—a slave for life—a slave in the hands of strangers; and in their hands she saw her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren, divided like so many sheep, without being gratified with the small privilege of a single word as to their or her own destiny. And to cap the climax of their base ingratitude, my grandmother, who was now very old, having outlived my old master and all his children, having seen the beginning and end of them, and her present owner—his grandson—finding she was of but little value her frame already racked with the pains of old age, and complete helplessness fast stealing over her once active limbs— took her to the woods, built her a little hut with a mud chimney, and then gave her the bounteous privilege of supporting herself there in utter loneliness; thus virtually turning her out to die. If my poor, dear old grandmother now lives, she lives to remember and mourn over the loss of children, the loss of grandchildren, and the loss of greatgrandchildren....

The hearth is desolate. The unconscious children who once sang and danced in her presence are gone. She gropes her way, in the darkness of age, for a drink of water. Instead of the voices of her children, she hears by day the moans of the dove, and by night the

^{6767. The grandson to whom Douglass refers is John Planner Anthony, son of Andrew Anthony, who inherited Betsey Bailey when his father died in 1832, and did indeed leave the elderly Betsey, her vision fading, alone in her cabin to fend for herself. In 1840, however, Thomas Auld, John Planner Anthony's uncle, learned of Betsey's situation and removed her to his home, where she was cared for until her death. Preston, Young Frederick Douglass, 17–20, 224n.}

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screams of the hideous owl. All is gloom. The grave is at the door; and now, weighed down by the pains and aches of old age, when the head inclines to the feet, when the beginning and ending of human existence meet, and helpless infancy, and painful old age combine together, at this time,—this most needed time for the exercise of that tenderness and affection which children only can bestow on a declining parent,— my poor old grandmother, the devoted mother of twelve children, is left all alone, in yonder little hut, before a few dim cinders. (77–78)

Douglass, revisiting this passage in his third autobiography, deployed a revision that may be understood only by readers approaching Life and Times with prior knowledge of the Anthony and Auld families. His rhetorically subversive "correction" simultaneously granted and withheld Auld's vindication. Douglass, however, knew that Arianna Amanda Auld, a daughter, was the only child of Thomas and Lucretia Anthony Auld. Therefore, the grandson of Aaron Anthony to whom Douglass refers could not have been the child or direct heir of Thomas Auld.⁶⁸ By "correcting" himself in this complicated and subversive manner, Douglass retained the sentimental impact of one of his earliest, most moving, and most personal indictments of slavery without destroying the sincerity or the integrity of his reconciliation with Auld. Douglass's brilliant rhetorical maneuver, weaving together the beginning and the end of his story, demonstrates how thoroughly the former slave had become master of his text and his life.

The text of Life and Times itself, both despite and because of its length, its inconsistencies, and its catalogues constitutes the strongest argument for its own importance. For Douglass, the slave child named Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey by his mother in 1818 remained, at every moment of his life history, as crucial to the construction of his identity as did the accomplished self-made man who began to author his life in 1844. The elder statesman's text continually returns to his degraded beginnings as the slave child named Bailey, to the young man who became a fugitive and to the increasingly well-known abolitionist lecturer he became after 1841. Douglass carried his "several lives" with him, in his thought, in his work, and in his texts. Life and Times emphasized not only the importance of Bailey, but also the importance of the fugitive slave who, in the earliest days of his freedom during the autumn of 1838, chose to make himself Frederick Douglass, a work in progress that continued over the majority of his life.

^{6868. Aaron Anthony died on 14 November 1826, Richard Anthony on 18 May 1828, and Andrew Anthony in June 1832. lbid., 87–88, 110, 224n.}

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The editors of the present volume share Douglass's goal in Life and Times of preserving his "several lives in one." This last autobiographical work, criticized and neglected by contemporary readers and often ignored by modern scholars, in fact, is an encyclopedic proliferation of vivid details that chronicles nearly a century of political and social turbulence. Ironically, these very details have been, in part, responsible for Life and Times's neglect by scholars and teachers—its lengthy catalogues of associates, events, and organizations may indeed seem tedious. So it is crucial to recognize that each person, each idea, each event, each organization, each theory, and each political and religious position provides depth of context and significance. Some readers consider Life and Times a patchwork of confusing extracts from Douglass's other writings—primarily correspondence and speeches— that he revised and sometimes conflated. Although in many ways Life and Times is indeed a patchwork, that quality cannot justify dismissing the entire work as a tiresome repetition. In fact, the complexities of Life and Times provide the most compelling clues to Douglass's agenda during his later years; in these new combinations and rewritings, he revealed the ways in which he wanted to be remembered in his many roles: as a fugitive slave, an abolitionist, a statesman, and, most importantly, a self-made man. The length and density of Life and Times may have provided sufficient reason for scholars and students to choose to read, teach, and analyze earlier versions of "Douglass" in order to assess his contribution to American history. This Douglass Papers volume devotes half of its bulk to comprehensive annotation of the author's many references—some familiar, some obscure, and many requiring considerable explanation to a modem reader. The historical notes, supported by primary sources as well as a host of secondary sources, afford unprecedented access to the context—rich, deep, and complex—of the nineteenth-century America in which and about which Douglass wrote. The Douglass Papers edition of Life and Times of Frederick Douglass will, it is hoped, enable and motivate new generations of scholars to contribute to the further study of this singular epoch that produced an individual who would be considered extraordinary in any century.