2. My account of the first meeting is based on the following sources. Frederick Douglass to George L. Stearns, August 12, 1863. The letter to Stearns, two days after the White House visit, is the earliest and—I assume, therefore—the most reliable of the several descriptions Douglass left of his first meeting with Lincoln. My own account takes the Stearns letter as the baseline but adds material from Douglass’s later accounts. On December 3, 1863, Douglass included a general description of the meeting and his initial impressions of Lincoln in a speech delivered at a convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society in Philadelphia. The text is in FDP, ser. I, vol. 3, pp. 606–8. Douglass’s most detailed account, though far removed from the event and thus less reliable, was in the last of his three autobiographies, first published in 1881 and revised eleven years later. See Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, intro. Rayford Logan (New York, 1881; rev. ed., 1892; repr. New York, 1962), pp. 347–49. In 1888 Douglass contributed a chapter to Allen Thorndike Rice, Reminiscences of Abraham Lincoln (New York, 1888), pp. 185–95. This last reminiscence is vague, collapses several different conversations into one, and adds no new information. Lincoln himself left no account of the meeting. His secretary, John Hay, made a brief reference to it in his diary confirming some of the substance of Douglass’s August 12 letter to Stearns. For providing me with a copy of the indispensable Stearns letter I am greatly indebted to Professor John R. McKivigan, editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers.