3

TEXTUAL AFTERWORD

487

one-quarter of the nine (or 12) blank pages, and Betts learned on 7 or 8 October that
inclusion of the April 1876 speech would require more than the remaining blank pages
in the twenty-first gathering. The Freedmen's Monument speech, however, was too
short to take the reader to the end of a twenty-second gathering—to page 518. Once
again, blank pages distressed him. And so, on 8 October, Betts had asked for yet more
copy.

Douglass obliged with his August 1880 speech commemorating West Indian
Emancipation,⁵ and Betts almost realized his fond ambition. The first printing of the
first American edition ended on page 516. Only the final leaf was blank.

Before the Emancipation speech arrived, Betts suggested to Douglass in his 8
October letter a way to handle the two other orations so that they would appear as
congruent as they could with the chapters that preceded them: "I propose to have your
speech in regard to Garfield, follow directly after [chapter XVIII, already in type], and
then your speech on Abraham Lincoln, but before the speech appears in the book, it
is necessary that something preliminary should appear, to save the apparent
abruptness, that would naturally appear. What comes after the Garfield speech should
appear in the form of a supplementary chapter, which of course will include the
speech on Lincoln." How all of this might have read remains a mystery. Douglass did
not provide a "supplementary chapter," nor did Betts take on the task of fashioning
one. As a result, despite Betts's good intentions, "abruptness" characterizes the
"Conclusion" and the three addenda tacked on to the end of the autobiography.

As proposed by Betts, the Garfield piece, rather than the "Conclusion,"
immediately followed chapter XVIII of Life and Times's Second Part. Douglass or
Betts appropriately modified the beginning of the article being reprinted so that its
introduction to the text of the Garfield eulogy was in the first-person singular—in
Douglass's voice, like all the preceding chapters. But neither man did the same for
the paragraph following the transcription of Douglass's eulogy, which refers to the
eulogist in the third person—in the voice not of Douglass but of the journalist who
recorded Douglass's remarks: "Mr. Douglass then called upon Professor Greener,
who read a series of resolutions eloquently expressive of their sense of the great loss
that had been sustained, and their sympathy with the family of the late President.''
That neither Douglass nor Betts modified or deleted this paragraph suggests that
both acted in haste in their eagerness to get the book through the press.

This gaffe, however, pales in comparison with a greater mistake made by Betts.
His decision to achieve 518 pages resulted in the violation of the structure of Life
and Times as Douglass had originally fashioned it through page 482. Life and Times
offers a chronological account of experiences that ends in chapter XVI of the Second

512, FD Papers, DLC.
5. For the prior publication history of the Freedmen's Monument and West Indian Emancipation
speeches, see Douglass Papers, ser 1, 4:427, 562. Douglass delivered the Garfield eulogy in Washington,
D.C., on 26 September 1881, at the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church. The periodical in which the
article containing the eulogy appeared is unknown.