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TEXTUAL AHERWORD

cite the Confederacy's Army of Northern Virginia, the context determines the
emendation. It was "the free negro" who menaced slavery and whom the journalists
wished to expatriate.

Also never addressed by the American editions was a glaringly self-evident
misstatement of fact to which John Lobb did respond when preparing the English
edition. This involved two readings in chapter XII of the Second Part, the first of
which is traceable to the holograph draft on which Douglass was working in the
summer of 1881. (The leaf on which the second appeared does not survive.) On the
extant leaf Douglass initially keened over the fatal attack on President Lincoln in
1865 and the "recent assassination" of President Garfield. But he later revised the
wording to "recently attempted assassination." One assumes that he did the same on
the missing leaf, again adding "attempted" to the sentence originally reading, "I
write this in the deep gloom flung over my spirit by the cruel, wanton, and cold-
blooded assassination of Abraham Garfield, as well as that of Abraham Lincoln."

That is, Douglass knew that Charles J. Guiteau shot Garfield on 2 July 1881, and
assumed that Guiteau had succeeded in killing him. Thus the original readings.
Garfield, however, did not die until 19 September. In the meantime Douglass
thought that Guiteau had failed, and he revised the two sentences accordingly.
However, by November, when the publication of Life and Times occurred and it
twice referred to an "attempted assassination," the text included as many
misstatements of fact. Shortly thereafter, John Lobb acted to set matters right by
deleting both appearances of the word "attempted"; Lobb thereby applied the same
editorial emendation policy employed in the present edition. Again, self-evident
factual error is a warrant for emendation of the copy-text's readings, and only two
matters are of historical interest: the circumstances accounting for Douglass's
having described in his fair copy manuscript an unsuccessful attempt at assassination,
and for his not having noticed, twice, this "howler" nor asked his American
publishers for its correction.

In sum, editorial emendations of the copy-texts comprise the correction of
obvious punctuation gaffes, misspellings, and misnamings of individuals,
organizations, events, and places, whether authorial or nonauthorial in orign. They
include as well the correction of factually erroneous statements; of omissions of
words judged not to be deliberate authorial elisions but the result of authorial or
compositorial oversight; and of noun-verb and noun-pronoun disagreements.
Recorded as well in the list of editorial emendations are the large-scale revisions of
Life and Times deemed indisputably Douglass's own: the addition of eight
paragraphs to the end of the West Indian Emancipation speech in the "Appendix";
and the revised paragraph concerning Hon. Robert C. Winthrop that appeared in the
1883 and subsequent printings of the English edition but never in the American
typesettings until now.

John Lobb anticipated the most radical emendation of the Life and Times copy-
texts made in the present edition when he decided to give independent chapter status