Background

James Redpath was born on August 24, 1833 in Berwick-on-Tweed, Scotland, the son of James Redpath, who was Scotch, and Marie Ninian Davidson Redpath, who was English.

Education

The father, a man of some education, wished James to become a clergyman, and (though the boy had a fancy for the printing business) began his education with that in view.

Career

At sixteen James collaborated with his father in the writing of a little volume, Tales and Traditions of the Border. About 1850 the Redpath family emigrated to Michigan and settled on a farm. James soon found work in a printing office at Kalamazoo, twenty miles distant.

A few months later he went to Detroit, where his writing attracted the attention of Horace Greeley, who offered him a position on the staff of the New York Tribune. Thus at nineteen, young Redpath formed a connection which continued intermittently during thirty years thereafter. The political troubles in Kansas attracted his attention, and he made several visits to that disturbed territory between 1854 and 1859, each time writing a series of newspaper articles which attracted wide attention. He had by this time become a fiery abolitionist.

Between 1854 and 1860 he traveled through the Southern states, studying slavery and writing articles, some of which were published in 1859 under the title, The Roving Editor, or Talks with Slaves in the Southern States.

Several more of his books came from the press in those two years - A Handbook to Kansas Territory (1859); Echoes of Harper's Ferry (1860); The Public Life of Captain John Brown (1860); and also A Guide to Hayti (1860), for he had pushed his research to that island and had decided that it would be a good asylum for Southern negroes.

In 1859 Redpath had been appointed commissioner of emigration in the United States by the Haitian president.

During the Civil War he was a correspondent with the Union armies. At the close of the war he was made superintendent of education at Charleston, South Carolina, where he had much to do with reorganizing the school system of the state, especially colored schools.

Among his early clients were Emerson, Greeley, Beecher, Thoreau, Sumner, Bayard Taylor, Wendell Phillips, Mary A. Livermore, and Julia Ward Howe. A little later he began booking humorists, such as Mark Twain, Josh Billings, and Petroleum V. Nasby, and poets, who read their own writings. When he added magicians such as Kellar and Herrmann, there was some criticism, but he insisted that they had a legitimate place in platform entertainment. Next he took on musical soloists and quartettes, and finally organized small opera companies, or groups which gave a varied entertainment.

By 1879 Redpath had become much interested in Ireland, and during the next two years he made two journeys to that country, writing journalistic letters which vigorously denounced English rule and landlordism. A volume of these letters was published as Talks about Ireland in 1881. In 1886 Redpath became an editor of the North American Review but relinquished the place in the following year when he suffered a slight stroke of paralysis.

On Feburary 5, 1891, he was run over by a street car in New York City and died five days later.

Achievements

• He founded the Haitian Emigrant Bureau in Boston and New York, established a newspaper on the subject, and in the course of years sent several thousand ex-slaves to the negro republic. Later he became Haitian consul at Philadelphia and was instrumental in procuring recognition of Haitian independence by the government of the United States. He likewise founded a colored orphan asylum, and in a little cemetery near Charleston established what was probably the first regular decoration of soldiers' graves in May of each year. Observing the need of an organized agency for the booking of lectures (which were important and popular functions in those days), Redpath established such a business in 1868, at first calling it the Boston Lyceum Bureau, later substituting his own name for "Boston. "

Works

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  • Talks about Ireland (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Talks About Ireland I delivered tltis Lect...)

  • Talks About Ireland (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Talks About Ireland I delivered tltis Lectu...)

  • The Roving Editor: Or, Talks With Slaves in the Southern States (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from The Roving Editor: Or, Talks With Slaves in ...)

  • The public life of Captain John Brown: with an autobiography of his childhood and youth

    ( About the Book Books about African-American Studies di...)

  • Slavery in Kansas (1859)

    (James Redpath (1833 - 1891) was an American journalist an...)

  • Echoes of Harper's Ferry (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Echoes of Harper's Ferry This volume has co...)

  • Guide to Hayti

    (This is a reproduction of a classic text optimised for ki...)

  • The public life of captain John Brown: With an authobiography of his childhood and youth

    (This is a reproduction of a classic text optimised for ki...)

  • A guide to Haiti

    (A guide to Haiti. 214 Pages.)

Personality

For the better part of his life he was an energetic reformer - always seething with ardor in some cause or other, scornful of compromise, his enthusiasm giving interest and often brilliancy to his writing.

Connections

He had married, in 1888, Mrs. Caroline Chorpenning.

Father:

James Redpath

Mother:

Marie Ninian Davidson Redpath

Spouse:

Caroline Chorpenning