Ten years have passed since 1881, when Douglass wrote and published the book’s first two parts. Much has changed. The Freedmen’s future appears bleaker than it did 10 years earlier. Douglass is now:

[…] summoned again […] by what is called the negro problem, to come a second time upon the witness stand and give evidence upon disputed points concerning myself and my emancipated brothers and sisters who, though free, are yet oppressed and are as much in need of an advocate as before they were set free (435).

While the events of 1881–1891 constitute the primary subject of the book’s third part, this brief first chapter finds Douglass reflecting on his abolitionist days, when he played a crucial role in the “grandest moral conflict of the century” (438).

At the 1881 inauguration of President James Garfield, Douglass, serving as United States Marshal of the District of Columbia, escorts both Garfield and outgoing President Rutherford B. Hayes from the Senate chamber. Nothing unusual occurs that day. Douglass mentions it because he was “treading the high places of the land” while still “identified with a proscribed class whose perfect and practical equality with other American citizens was yet far down the steps of time” (440).