James Redpath
James Redpath | |
---|---|
Berwick upon Tweed, England | |
Died | February 10, 1891 New York City, U.S. | (aged 57)
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 in
Life
In 1848 or 1849, Redpath and his family emigrated from Scotland to a farm near
In 1855, Redpath moved to the Kansas-Missouri border and reported for a
Redpath returned east from Kansas in July 1858. During the
In 1858, Brown encouraged Redpath to move to Boston to help rally support for his plan for a Southern slave insurrection. After the failure of John 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 after Brown's execution, according to an advertisement from the publisher Thayer & Eldridge "a liberal percentage" of the profits were for Brown's family.[2]
In 1860, Redpath toured Haiti 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. His Guide to Hayti (1860), available on the Internet Archive, is an anthology of articles by various authors on a wide range of Haitian subjects. Redpath hoped that 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 publishers
In May 1865 in Charleston, Redpath organized what has been called the first-ever
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 president Andrew Johnson.
Boston Lyceum Bureau
In 1868, Redpath started one of the first professional lecturing bureaus in the country,[4]: xi the Boston Lyceum Bureau. Later known as the Redpath Bureau, it supplied speakers and performers for lyceums all across the country. It represented figures such as Mark 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] and Frederick Douglass. The Redpath Bureau became the most prominent and successful agency of its kind. Leland Powers, a faculty[further explanation needed] at the Bureau, established his 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-abolitionist
Redpath became editor of the North American Review in 1886. He died in 1891, shortly after being run over by a horse-drawn trolley in New York.
Works
- Redpath, James (1859). The Roving Editor; or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States. A. B. Burdick.
- Redpath, James; Hinton, Richard J. (1859). Hand-book to Kansas Territory and the Rocky Mountains' Gold Region; accompanied by reliable maps and a preliminary treatise on the pre-emption laws of the United States. New York: J. H. Colton.
- Redpath, James (1860). The Public Life of Capt John Brown. Thayer & Eldridge.
- Redpath, James (1860). Echoes of Harper's Ferry. Thayer & Eldridge.
- Redpath, James (1861). A Guide to Hayti. G.W. Colton.
- Redpath, James (1881). Talks about Ireland. P. J. Kenedy.
References
- Pennsylvania State University Press. p. 16.
- ^ Thayer & Eldridge, publisher (December 3, 1859). "The Book for the Times". Harper's Weekly. p. 782.
- ISBN 978-0692292259.
- ISBN 978-0801446733.
- ^ Crawfordsville Saturday Evening Journal, September 18, 1886
Further reading (most recent first)
- McKivigan, John R. (2008). Forgotten Firebrand: James Redpath and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America. ISBN 978-0801446733.
- McKivigan, John R. "James Redpath" in: Encyclopedia of Antislavery and Abolition. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2007
- Koontz, John P. "James Redpath" in: Writers of the American Renaissance: an A-to-Z guide. Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003
- Hart, Jim A. "James Redpath, Missouri Correspondent," Missouri Historical Review, 57.1 (1962–63): 70–78.
- Boyd, Willis D. (October 1955). "James Redpath and American Negro Colonization in Haiti, 1860-1862". S2CID 144323055.
- Horner, Charles F. The Life of James Redpath and the Development of the Modern Lyceum. New York: Barse and Hopkins, 1926.
- "James Redpath and the Pioneer Bureau he Founded." Lyceum Magazine. Aug. 1922.
- Cyclopædia of American Biography. 1915. Google books
- The Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans. 1904. Google books
- Pond, James Burton. Eccentricities of Genius: Memories of Famous Men and Women of the Platform and Stage. NY: G.W. Dillingham, 1900. Internet Archive