21. There is strong documentation for the substance of the second meeting. Four days afterward Douglass wrote Lincoln responding to the President’s request for help get ting slaves to escape. Two months later Douglass described the meeting in a letter to Theodore Tilton on October 15, 1864. Both letters are printed in Life & Writings, vol. 3, pp. 405–7. The following year, after Lincoln’s assassination, Douglass drafted several speeches about Lincoln that include a few more details. These speeches are discussed more fully in the next chapter. The dialogue is taken from Douglass’s third autobiography, first published in 1881 and, though it is plausible and consistent with earlier accounts, it must be read as the memory of a conversation that took place more than fifteen years earlier. Once again, Lincoln left no record of the meeting.