James Redpath (August 24, 1833 in Berwick upon Tweed, England – February 10, 1891, in New York, New York) was an American journalist and anti-slavery activist.
Life
In 1848 or 1849, Redpath and his family emigrated from Scotland to a farm near Kalamazoo, Michigan. He worked as a printer in Kalamazoo and Detroit, where he wrote antislavery articles under the pseudonym "Berwick." Then he worked as a reporter for Horace Greeley's New-York Tribune. An early assignment at the Tribune involved compiling "Facts of Slavery", a regular series of articles gathered from Southern newspaper exchanges. Beginning in March 1854, he traveled in the American South to examine slavery for himself, interviewing slaves and collecting material. It appeared early in 1859 as The Roving Editor: or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States, dedicated to "Old Hero" Captain John Brown. The book's production costs were covered by prominent antislavery philanthropist Gerrit Smith.
In 1855, Redpath moved to the Kansas-Missouri border and reported for a Free Soil newspaper, the Missouri Democrat, on the dispute over slavery in Kansas Territory. For the next three years, he was active in Kansas affairs, engaging in politics, writing dispatches, securing support in New England for Free Soil settlers, and writing poetry about Kansas. In 1856, he interviewed John Brown just days after the massacre 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 advocated reparations for slavery.
Redpath returned east from Kansas in July 1858. During the Pike'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 became Colorado.
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.
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 Thayer & Eldridge, he set up his own firm and began the series "Books for the Times," which included William Wells Brown's The Black Man, John R. Beard's Toussaint L'Ouverture, and Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches. In 1864, he published another series of cheap paperbound books, titled "Books for the Campfires", principally intended for distribution to Union Army soldiers. Later that year he abandoned publishing to serve as a war correspondent with the armies of George Henry Thomas and William Tecumseh Sherman in Georgia and South Carolina. In February 1865, federal military authorities appointed him the first superintendent of public schools in the Charleston, 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.