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

In this first modern study of the outspoken abolitionist and journalist James Redpath, John McKivigan resurrects the reputation of a well-traveled agitator who faded from public memory after he died in 1898.... McKivigan has heroically ferreted out scattered letters and newspaper articles as well as details about Redpath's disorganized personal life. The result is a careful and fluidly written chronicle that sets Redpath's varied and controversial activities in their historical context.... Whatever angle they adopt, historians of reform and journalism will appreciate McKivigan's work in uncovering the role that Redpath played in vital movements of his era.

McKivigan has provided a well-written and researched account of an important and fascinating life. Brief and succinct, the biography fills a surprising gap in our understanding of nineteenth-century reform.... Redpath's broad areas of reform interest and somewhat erratic career clearly deserve the fine biography that McKivigan has written.

McKivigan offers a measured biography of the too-little-remembered James Redpath, who was at the cutting edge of a series of mid- and late-nineteenth-century reform movements.... Two of the book's more intriguing sections discuss Redpath's association with the assault on Harpers Ferry designed to spark a mass slave revolt, and his ties to the former president of the Confederacy. McKivigan notes the uniqueness of Redpath's close ties to both slaves and slaveholders while underscoring that the reformer remained dedicated to equality for blacks and whites.

The author makes a convincing case that Redpath has been 'one of the nation's most colorful and unjustly forgotten characters.'... What secondary scholarship about Redpath has failed to appreciate, according to McKivigan, was that he was unlike most political journalists, both before and in most cases since, who aspired to patronage or even elected office by finding ways to profit from literary support for unpopular causes. In McKivigan's words, a study of his life 'contributes to the scholarly appreciation of change and continuity in nineteenth-century American reform,' a reform movement that, thanks to the extensive work in this book, will not be forgotten.

James Redpath managed to play a role in almost every meaningful reform movement of his day. Along the way he wrote, edited, organized, ran a business, worked for the governments of Haiti and the United States, went undercover among the slaves of the Old South, agitated for Irish rights, fought in Bleeding Kansas, and not only eulogized John Brown but also befriended Jefferson Davis. John R. McKivigan takes us straight through every one of those episodes in graceful prose.

Little in James Redpath's life seems to have escaped John McKivigan. This narrative biography takes the reader on a journey through Redpath's life and works, his involvement in many of the leading reform movements of the nineteenth century, and his struggles against oppression and inequality in the United States and in Ireland.