James Redpath

James Redpath (August 24, 1833 in Berwick upon Tweed, England - February 10, 1891, in New York, New York) was an American journalist and antislavery activist.

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 South to examine slavery for himself, interviewing slaves and collecting material published in 1859 as The Roving Editor: or, Talks with Slaves in the Southern States. 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 setters, 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 1858, Brown encouraged Redpath to move to Boston to help rally support for his plan for a Southern slave insurrection. After the failure of Brown's 1859 attack on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, Redpath wrote a highly sympathetic biography of the executed abolitionist, The Public Life of Capt. John Brown (1860).

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.

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