James Redpath | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | (1833-08-24)August 24, 1833 Berwick upon Tweed, England |
| Died | February 10, 1891(1891-02-10) (aged 57) New York City, U.S. |
| Occupation | Journalist, publisher, antislavery activist |
| Subject | Slavery in the United States,John Brown |
| Notable works | The Roving Editor: or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States (1859) The Public Life of Capt. John Brown (1860) Echoes of Harper's Ferry (1860) |
James Redpath (August 24, 1833 inBerwick upon Tweed, England – February 10, 1891, inNew York, New York) was an Americanjournalist andanti-slavery activist.
In 1848 or 1849, Redpath and his family emigrated from Scotland to a farm nearKalamazoo, Michigan. He worked as a printer in Kalamazoo andDetroit, where he wrote antislavery articles under the pseudonym "Berwick." Then he worked as a reporter forHorace Greeley'sNew-York Tribune. An early assignment at theTribune involved compiling "Facts of Slavery", a regular series of articles gathered from Southern newspaper exchanges. Beginning in March 1854, he traveled in theAmerican South to examine slavery for himself, interviewing slaves and collecting material. It appeared early in 1859 asThe Roving Editor: or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States, dedicated to "Old Hero" CaptainJohn Brown. The book's production costs were covered by prominent antislavery philanthropistGerrit Smith.[1]
In 1855, Redpath moved to the Kansas-Missouri border and reported for aFree Soil newspaper, theMissouri Democrat, on thedispute over slavery inKansas Territory. For the next three years, he was active in Kansas affairs, engaging in politics, writing dispatches, securing support in New England forFree Soil settlers, and writing poetry about Kansas. In 1856, he interviewed John Brown just days after themassacre at Pottawatomie Creek. Redpath and Brown shared the same abolitionist views, and he became Brown's most fervent publicist. In addition to his abolitionist views, he also advocatedreparations for slavery.[1]
Redpath returned east from Kansas in July 1858. During thePike's Peak Gold Rush of 1859, he and fellow journalist Richard J. Hinton prepared a guidebook for gold prospectors,Hand-Book to Kansas Territory and the Rocky Mountains' Gold Region. It was hoped that the book would spur a greater number of Free Soil immigrants to settle in Kansas Territory, which included part of what later becameColorado.
In 1858, Brown encouraged Redpath to move to Boston to help rally support for his plan for a Southern slave insurrection. After the failure ofJohn Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry (1859), Redpath wrote the first, and highly sympathetic, biography of the executed abolitionist,The Public Life of Capt. John Brown (1860). Announced on December 3, 1859, the day afterBrown's execution, according to an advertisement from the publisherThayer & Eldridge "a liberal percentage" of the profits were for Brown's family.[2]
In 1860, Redpath touredHaiti as a reporter and returned to the United States as the official Haitian lobbyist for diplomatic recognition, which he secured within two years. He simultaneously served as director of Haiti's campaign to attract free black emigrants from the United States and Canada.John Brown Jr. worked under him in 1860. HisGuide to Hayti (1860), available on theInternet Archive, is an anthology of articles by various authors on a wide range of Haitian subjects. Redpath hoped that the immigration of skilled blacks to Haiti would elevate conditions there and dispel racial prejudice in the United States. After the Civil War, he abandoned his ideas when he recognized that North American blacks preferred to remain at home.
In 1863 and 1864, following the failure of Redpath's Boston publishersThayer & Eldridge, he set up his own firm and began the series "Books for the Times," which includedWilliam Wells Brown'sThe Black Man,John R. Beard'sToussaint L'Ouverture, andLouisa May Alcott'sHospital Sketches. In 1864, he published another series of cheap paperbound books, titled "Books for the Campfires", principally intended for distribution toUnion Army soldiers. Later that year he abandoned publishing to serve as a war correspondent with the armies ofGeorge Henry Thomas andWilliam Tecumseh Sherman in Georgia and South Carolina. In February 1865, federal military authorities appointed him the first superintendent of public schools in theCharleston, South Carolina, region. He soon had more than 100 instructors at work teaching 3,500 African-American and white students. He also founded an orphan asylum.
In May 1865 in Charleston, Redpath organized what has been called the first-everMemorial Day service, to honor buried Union Army dead there. In 2014, however, this designation was disputed by Bellware and Gardiner inThe Genesis of the Memorial Day Holiday in America. They point out that it was actually a cemetery dedication, not meant to be repeated annually and not unlike the one that took place atGettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1863, that debuted Lincoln's famous address.David Blight, the main proponent of this thesis, confessed that he has no evidence that this cemetery dedication influenced General Logan to inaugurate the annual holiday.[3] Bellware and Gardiner creditMary Ann Williams and the Ladies Memorial Association ofColumbus, Georgia, as the true originators of the holiday, though this is only one of many precedents from 1865-66 for the holiday, known for a time as "Decoration Day."
His reputation as a radical abolitionist and his tentative steps toward integrating South Carolina's schools caused worried military officials to replace Redpath and remove an irritation to Southern-born presidentAndrew Johnson.
In 1868, Redpath started one of the first professional lecturing bureaus in the country,[4]: xi theBoston Lyceum Bureau. Later known as the Redpath Bureau, it supplied speakers and performers forlyceums all across the country. It represented figures such asMark Twain,Julia Ward Howe,Charles Sumner,Ralph Waldo Emerson,Wendell Phillips,Henry Ward Beecher,Susan B. Anthony,Nella Brown Pond,Lew Wallace,[5][full citation needed] andFrederick Douglass. The Redpath Bureau became the most prominent and successful agency of its kind. Leland Powers, a faculty[further explanation needed] at the Bureau, establishedhis own school after Redpath left.
Redpath sold his interest in the Bureau in 1875 and lived alternately in Washington, D.C., and New York, when not traveling. At the end of the decade, his health declined but, in 1880–81, he reported on famine and the land war in western Ireland. Redpath was deeply affected by the extreme poverty of much of rural Ireland and he convinced his friend and fellow-abolitionistDavid Ross Locke to supportIrish nationalism by taking him up theGaltee Mountains to show him the condition ofsmallholding mountain tenants. Redpath became an outspoken advocate of the cause of theLand League andCharles Stewart Parnell; pro-landlord commentators accused him of incitement to murder. Upon his return to the United States, he lectured on the lyceum circuit, wrote newspaper articles, and publishedTalks about Ireland andRedpath's Weekly, both devoted to Irish causes.
Redpath became editor of theNorth American Review in 1886. He died in 1891, shortly after being run over by a horse-drawn trolley in New York.
