NOTE ON EDITORIAL METHOD

The editors of this collection are also staff members of the Frederick Douglass Papers, founded in 1973. They have a long history of participation in the systematic effort—funded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a number of generous private foundations—to locate and publish accurate texts of Douglass’s spoken and written words. Although this current volume is not part of that ongoing project, it draws heavily on the scrupulous textual editing standards of the Douglass Papers for selecting, reproducing, and citing Douglass quotations.

Quotation Selection

The principal criteria governing the editors’ decisions about which quotations by Douglass to select for reproduction are amply discussed in the preface to this collection. One other key decision that the editors made for this volume was not to include any quotation that could not be firmly attributed to Douglass’s authorship. In their research, the editors discovered dozens of quotations in print or on the Internet that could not be conclusively traced back to a particular speech or writing by Douglass or, worse, were actually the product of another speaker or writer. The body of Douglass’s verifiable statements is so vast and their quality is so rich that the editors decided that there was no need to include any questionable item in this collection.

The editors have categorized the Douglass quotations according to the most significant idea of the statement. They sometimes have provided subcategories in the interest of further clarification. Because Douglass sometimes addressed the same topic repeatedly over more than a half century of public life, the editors have chosen to arrange their presentation chronologically within each category or subcategory to illustrate the evolution of his thinking.

Textual Methodology

As experienced textual editors, the team preparing this volume was used to reproducing the texts of Douglass’s words as close as possible to how he spoke or wrote them, even if that required the reproduction of misspelled or inaccurate words or names. This form of critical editing also necessitated the reproduction of Douglass’s spoken statements in their entirety, including all the digressions and interruptions that accompany any speech or interview. In considering the needs of the intended readership for In the Words of Frederick Douglass, the editors decided that it would be beneficial to silently correct such errors and to modernize obscure spelling, missing capitalization, or distracting punctuation. Where lengthy or digressive statements have been extracted for this collection, the editors have inserted ellipses to indicate where there are intentional omissions. Scholars in need of exact texts are guided by notes to either the published texts of the Frederick Douglass Papers or the original sources of the quotation, whichever is most appropriate.

Sources for Quotations

There are many sources for Frederick Douglass’s quotations, but the principal categories are his speeches, his correspondence, his journalistic writing, and his autobiographies.

Speeches. The Frederick Douglass Papers has documented literally thousands of Douglass’s speeches, debates, and interviews from the years 1842 to his death in 1895. The texts of many of those Douglass’s addresses have not survived, but a systematic search uncovered a large number of his oral statements. In some cases, Douglass’s notes or full-length manuscripts for his speeches and lectures have survived in his papers now preserved by the Library of Congress. Many more texts were recovered from the newspapers of the era, which frequently reported on Douglass’s public appearances on behalf of many different causes. Finally, Douglass himself published many of what he regarded as his most significant addresses in his newspapers, separate pamphlets, and even his autobiographies. When we have extracted quotations from one of these speeches, we have accepted the determination made by the Douglass Papers of the best of sometimes several available sources for the text of that oral statement. That source is listed after the text of the quotation in a note supplying the title of the address, the date of its delivery, and the location of the full document in the Douglass Papers series. Readers interested in inspecting the actual document can obtain that information by consulting the Douglass Papers.

Correspondence. Douglass corresponded tens of thousands of times with his contemporaries. Thanks to his international reputation as a reformer, several thousand of his letters, dating back to only a few years after he gained his freedom, can be found in numerous library manuscript collections, government archives, and private holdings in the United States and many other nations. The Douglass Papers has collected copies of all these letters and is in the process of publishing the most historically significant of them. When possible, the editors of this volume have relied on the Douglass Papers for the texts of quotations originally appearing in Douglass’s letters. In those cases, the source appears in a note following the quotation, supplying the name of the other correspondent, the date of the letter, and the location of the document in the Douglass Papers. Other times, the editors have had to rely on contemporary newspapers or other published collections of Douglass documents for the text of quotations from Douglass letters. In those cases, the name of the correspondent and date of the letter are again supplied along with a brief description of that alternative source, with full publication information supplied in our bibliography.

Editorials/Essays. Douglass provided incisive commentary on public affairs during his lifetime as editor of four different periodicals and as a sought-after contributing author to many other periodicals. Because of a devastating 1872 fire at Douglass’s home in Rochester, New York, his own personal archive of bound copies of his three antislavery newspapers, the North Star, the Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and the Douglass’ Monthly, all originally published in that city, were destroyed. Efforts by the Douglass Papers staff resulted in the recovery of copies of more than 80 percent of those issues now found in libraries and repositories across the United States. More than 1,200 of Douglass’s own editorials in these three papers as well as his New National Era, published in Washington, D.C., in the 1870s, have survived. A careful search of contemporary periodicals revealed more than thirty additional articles written by Douglass for other newspapers and magazines. The Douglass Papers envisions publishing a two-volume selected collection of those journalistic works. The editors of this volume have studied that large collection to locate quotations that represent Douglass’s published commentary on a diverse range of issues. For each quotation in this category, a source note gives the title of the editorial or article, the name of the newspaper or magazine, and the date that the item was originally published.

Autobiographies. Frederick Douglass was practically unique in having composed and published three separate autobiographies during his lifetime. The first, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, was written in 1845 and published by his Boston abolitionist associates. Douglass wrote this book to answer critics who doubted that his claim to be a runaway slave. In his Narrative, Douglass not only provided the personal details to prove his enslaved past but authored a brilliant indictment of human bondage. This extremely well- written autobiography became not only a widely circulated abolitionist weapon but also a significant piece of American literary history, continuously in print down to today. Only ten years after Narrative, in 1855, Douglass wrote and published his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom. More than double the length of its predecessor, My Bondage and My Freedom was also intended as an abolitionist propaganda tool. It provided many more details about the inhumane treatment that Douglass had observed as well as personally endured during his youth as a Maryland slave. This book is noteworthy because it also gives an account of Douglass’s early experiences in the North, first as a laborer in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and then as a paid antislavery lecturer. Douglass not only provided interesting details on the early history of the abolitionist movement but documented the pervasive racism he encountered throughout antebellum northern society. In 1881, Douglass published his third autobiography, the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. This work retells Douglass’s life as a slave and as an abolitionist and then proceeds to recount his life as a Civil War army recruiter, a holder of important postwar governmental offices, a Republican Party political campaigner, and a leading spokesperson for the rights of the freed slaves. In 1892, Douglass expanded Life and Times by adding details of his later public services, especially his ambassadorship to the Caribbean republic of Haiti, and of his extensive tour of Europe and Egypt. These three autobiographies contain numerous statements by Douglass not only on his life experiences but on all aspects of nineteenth-century government, culture, and race relations. The Douglass Papers has reproduced each of these autobiographies in modern editions that follow the highest standards of critical editing to avoid the corruptions in language that appear in many of the reprinted versions of these three works. When this current collection extracts a quotation from one of the autobiographies, the source is identified in a note by a short title for the book, followed by the page number on which the passage appears in the Douglass Papers edition.