James Redpath
Except for one booklength biography – John R. McKivigan’s scholarly Forgotten Firebrand of 2008 – the name of James Redpath has barely been kept alive today. Yet for forty years, from before the Civil War to 1890, the restless, ginger-haired Scotsman – Red to friends – was well known for an outstanding career with many surprising turns. Among other things, he helped make John Brown a saint and Mark Twain a star, and invented a national holiday.
Born in 1833, he came as a boy with his family to Michigan in the late 1840s. He was nineteen when Horace Greeley saw his writing in a Detroit paper and brought him to New York in 1852. He soon chafed at toiling in the bowels of the New York Tribune as an anonymous cub reporter. About the time that Redpath came to New York, Frederick Law Olmsted began a series of long tours of the cotton South, writing dispatches for the new New York Times. Although he’s remembered today as the co-designer of Central Park, a project that would begin in 1858, Olmsted made his first impact through these Times articles on slavery and the South, collected in several bound volumes that were widely read in the years leading up to the war.
Bored with his office job, Redpath decided to follow in Olmsted’s footsteps. He traveled extensively in the South, by foot, rail and other conveyances, beginning in 1854. Warned that Southern whites might react hostilely and even violently to the presence of a “Greeley spy” among them (Greeley was an outspoken opponent of slavery), he traveled under assumed names and mailed his dispatches to friends in the North, who relayed them to his editors at the Tribune and the National Anti-Slavery Standard, the weekly organ of the American Anti-Slavery Society. This would be standard procedure for Northern journalists in the South as relations deteriorated. In 1859 the New York abolitionist publisher A. B. Burdick would collect Redpath’s articles as The Roving Editor; or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States.
Redpath’s personal, epistolary writing is as companionable now as it was then, sometimes witty and sarcastic – he had fun reporting Southerners’ very low opinions of Greeley – other times angry. He surreptitiously interviewed slaves, free blacks, mulattoes, poor whites, plantation owners. He saw slave auctions in New Orleans, caught services in both white and black churches, and toured Charleston’s infamous slave pen the Sugar House, where slaveholders too squeamish or just lazy to whip their slaves themselves could pay a small fee to have it done for them. Whites, he reported, almost uniformly insisted that their slaves were happy and content. The slaves themselves consistently told him otherwise.
What Redpath saw and heard in the South converted him not just to abolitionism but to the conviction that with the right incentives slaves could easily be roused to armed insurrection. “At Richmond and at Wilmington,” he wrote, “I found the slaves discontented, but despondingly resigned to their fate. At Charleston I found them morose and savagely brooding over their wrongs… [I]f the guards who now keep nightly watch were to be otherwise employed – if the roar of hostile cannon was to be heard by the slaves, or a hostile fleet was seen sailing up the bay of Charleston – then, as surely as God lives, would the sewers of the city be instantly filled with the blood of the slave masters.”
In 1855 Redpath headed west to put his convictions into practice on the Missouri-Kansas border. That’s where he met the grand old man of armed slave revolt, John Brown. The ill-conceived Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 had thrown the decision open to the sparse populations of the two territories whether to join the union as free states or slave states. No one forecast Nebraska to go slave, but Kansas became a battleground. Only about a thousand settlers lived there, while Missouri held some ninety thousand slaves and its political leaders were anxious to spread the institution across the border. Abolitionists, including four of Brown’s sons and their families, set out to colonize Kansas and keep it free. They were soon under attack by armed squads of pro-slavery Missourians known as Border Ruffians.
Brown arrived in 1855 with rifles, swords and other supplies for his sons’ defense. A particularly fearsome Missouri posse who called themselves the Kickapoo Rangers sacked and burned the abolitionist town of Lawrence, Kansas on May 21 1856. On May 24, Brown led seven others, including three of his sons, on a retaliatory raid, dragging five pro-slavers from their cabins and brutally hacking them to death in what became known as the Pottawatomie Massacre.
Brown and his small band then went into hiding to evade federal troops and Missouri vigilantes. On June 2 they surprised a vigilante squad, killed four and took two dozen prisoners. Brown’s name was now on every lip in Kansas and Missouri. To pro-slavers he was a feared and hated bogeyman. Most Kansans, including his son John Jr., were appalled by Pottawatomie and terrified of pro-slavery reprisals, while a few others saw Brown as a righteous avenger.
Redpath was of the latter opinion when he rode out from Lawrence to find Brown. He discovered his band camped in a wooded creek bed, roasting a pig. Redpath came away from this first meeting convinced that Brown was “the predestined leader of the second and the holier American Revolution.”
In August 1856, when some three hundred Missourians burned the settlement of Ossawatomie, they shot and killed Brown’s son Frederick. “The shot that struck the child’s heart,” Henry Ward Beecher would later say, “crazed the father’s brain.” Brown led the defense in an all-out battle and killed some thirty of the attackers. He was known as Ossawatomie Brown from then on.
With both federals and vigilantes scouring Kansas for him, Brown slipped out and traveled around the northeast and Canada seeking help with his plan to form a guerrilla army that would invade the South and spark an armed uprising among the slaves. Redpath stayed in Kansas. He went from writing about the armed abolitionists to fighting alongside them in several skirmishes with the pro-slavers. He got his photo taken dressed like a frontiersman, posed with a rifle and a prominently displayed copy of the New York Tribune. Then he too came east to raise funds for Brown among Boston abolitionists and promote him in the pages of the Tribune.
Brown’s plan to invade the South was so audacious, and so patently fraught with doom, that he never recruited more than twenty-one followers. His small force seized the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (in what would become West Virginia in 1862) on the night of October 16 1859. Local militia and a contingent of U.S. Marines led by Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant Jeb Stuart took the arsenal back in a bloody siege on the morning of the 18th. Fifteen people were killed, including two of Brown’s sons, the mayor of the town and one local black man Brown’s men mistakenly shot. Brown was hastily tried and hanged on December 2.
In January 1860, a month after Brown was hanged, the new Boston abolitionist press Thayer & Eldridge published as their first title James Redpath’s dashed-out The Public Life of Capt. John Brown. A worshipful biography of the “warrior-saint,” it became a best-seller and helped turn the public image of Brown in the North from a well-intentioned madman to a martyr often compared to Christ, while translating abolitionism from a political movement to a holy crusade. If Brown’s act was the spark that led to the Civil War, Redpath’s bestseller was tinder.
During the Civil War Redpath served as a battlefield correspondent for the Tribune and was with William Tecumseh Sherman’s forces when they took Charleston in early 1865. The Union army commander then appointed Redpath superintendent of the occupied city’s public schools, which he filled with mostly black students. Northern charities paid his teachers’ salaries. He also organized an orphanage for black children and a black home guard militia, and created the annual observance known today as Memorial Day.
In 1868 Redpath edited Behind the Scenes, the memoir of Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave who held the unusual distinction of having worked as a dressmaker and maid for both Jefferson Davis’ wife Varina and Abraham Lincoln’s wife Mary. That year he started a new career as an impresario booking lecture tours. He culled his first speakers from among his old abolitionist circles: Henry Ward Beecher, Frederick Douglass and others. From there he branched out. He booked P. T. Barnum to speak on temperance, Brigham Young’s twenty-seventh wife to explain polygamy, and lecturers on Confucianism, Zoroastrianism and, most controversially of all, atheism. He convinced the shy cartoonist Thomas Nast to tour, showing stereopticon slides of his illustrations. Probably Redpath’s biggest coup was to transform the journalist and novelist Mark Twain into a star lecturer. Twain had previously tried his hand at lecturing – or “yelling,” as he called it – but it was largely Redpath’s vigorous and clever promoting that made him so successful at it. Twain portrayed him as the promoter J. Adolphe Griller in The Gilded Age, “who had the brains to plan great enterprises and the pluck to carry them through.”
Recognizing Redpath’s publicity skills, Thomas Edison hired him in 1878 to promote his first hand-cranked cylinder phonograph. The public demonstrations Redpath arranged drew large crowds, but the machine failed to sell.
In the mid-1880s Redpath took the last and in some ways most curious of his many career turns. As the managing editor of the New York-based magazine North American Review, he engaged many celebrated figures to write on current or historical events. In this capacity James Redpath, the erstwhile biographer of John Brown, became the ghostwriter for Jefferson Davis, the former president of the Confederacy. They had met in the mid-1870s, when Redpath tried and failed to talk Davis into doing a lecture tour for him. Beginning in 1888, Redpath spent a few months-long stays at Jefferson’s plantation house, where despite some ghosts of old political disagreements he got along well with both Davis and Varina. Davis started on an autobiography at Redpath’s urging, but died with much left to do on it in 1889. Varina decided to complete it for him, and Redpath spent months helping to pull it into shape. A ponderous two volumes, Jefferson Davis appeared in 1890 to poor sales. But it did bring Varina to New York, where, at 64, she started her own journalism career writing for her friend Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, was a doyenne among the city’s many Southern expats nicknamed the Confederate carpetbaggers, and became moderately friendly with Ulysses S. Grant’s widow Julia.
Jefferson Davis was in effect the final act of Redpath’s long and varied career. In 1891 he was crossing Manhattan’s Park Avenue when he was struck down by a horse-drawn trolley. He died a few days later.
by John Strausbaugh