Forgotten Firebrand: James Redpath and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America (review)

James Redpath was a remarkable man, playing a role in a disconcerting number of the social reform movements of the mid to late nineteenth century. As ubiquitous as Forrest Gump a century later, unlike the fictional character, Redpath was no mere observer. A journalist, editor, agitator, and impresario, he was at the center of things.

Redpath left no collection of papers, and John R. McKivigan, the Mary O’Brien Gibson Professor of History at Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis, has spent many years digging up information about his peripatetic subject, publishing a new edition of Redpath’s The Roving Editor in 1996 (University Park, PA, 1996). The author of The War Against Proslavery Religion (Ithaca, NY, 1984), the editor or coeditor of numerous books on slavery, and since 1994 the director of The Frederick Douglass Papers, McKivigan has done an excellent job of ferreting out a large quantity of information. He has explored the published writings of Redpath’s associates and rummaged through countless manuscript collections for letters to, from, and about Redpath to provide a thorough biography in which his subject’s character comes through clearly.

Redpath’s family immigrated to Michigan from Scotland in the late 1840s. After a few years as a novice reporter in Detroit, Redpath was hired away by Horace Greeley and went to work for the New York Tribune, the most influential newspaper in the country, rising to exchange editor—the person responsible for scanning other newspapers for stories interesting or important enough to reprint. Responsible for the regular feature “The Facts of Slavery,” Redpath developed mild abolitionist leanings and a bright idea. He would go South and report on slavery directly, interviewing not only white southerners but the slaves themselves. Taking jobs with leading local newspapers, he kept his activities secret, sending reports to abolitionist journals in the North. He published his collected letters as The Roving Editor.

Moving on to Kansas, Redpath not only reported but also participated in efforts to make it a free state, getting to know John Brown in the process and playing a tangential role in Brown’s abortive raid on Harper’s Ferry and a major role in his defense afterward—including the publication of a best-selling biography. Redpath then traveled to Haiti and became the country’s General Agent of Emigration. He established a promotional newspaper and sent subagents to recruit settlers for the black republic, rekindling a controversy in the black community over emigration. When this effort stalled after a promising start, Redpath turned to publishing. His small company put out cheap paperback classics for soldiers, radical antislavery polemics, and a few books for general readers. His authors included Wendell Phillips, the escaped slave William Wells Brown, Louisa May Alcott, and Walt Whitman, with all of whom he remained friends. This cash-strapped operation folded, forcing Redpath to renew his journalism career as a war correspondent with Sherman’s army. As he was well known as sympathetic to the freedmen, the military put him in charge of Charleston’s schools, which he ran with surprising success, insisting that black and white pupils attend the same schools, if not the same classes. He lost his job in the conservative reaction fomented by President Andrew Johnson in the fall of 1865.

Redpath traveled in radical circles in Boston, which he considered home after marrying a Massachusetts woman in 1857. Still freelancing as a correspondent, he worked closely with radical Republican Benjamin F. Butler, echoing his radical views in print and serving as clerk for Butler’s special committee investigating the Lincoln assassination. In 1868, Redpath launched his most innovative endeavor, the Redpath Lyceum Bureau. Helping organizers of educational lyceums around the country, he in effect became an agent for famous and not-so-famous speakers, among them Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, Frederick Douglass, Henry Ward Beecher, Julia Ward Howe, Anna Dickinson, David Ross Locke (“Petroleum V. Nasby”), and Mark...