FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO JAMES REDPATH¹Born in Berwick-on-Tweed, Scotland, James Redpath (1833–91) immigrated with his family to the United States around 1850 and soon found work as a reporter for Horace Greeley’s New York Daily Tribune. In the mid-1850s he traveled throughout the South, reporting on the institution of slavery and calling for its immediate abolition. By the late 1850s, Redpath had moved to Kansas, where he edited the Doniphan Crusader of Freedom and supported the fight to make the territory a nonslaveholding state. Redpath befriended John Brown in Kansas and, after the latter’s execution, became his first biographer, writing The Public Life of Captain John Brown (Boston, 1860). In 1859 and 1860, Redpath toured Haiti as a reporter and returned to the United States as the official Haitian lobbyist for diplomatic recognition, a status he secured within two years. During the Civil War, he was a frontline correspondent with the Union army commanded by William Tecumseh Sherman, who in 1865, when South Carolina was under federal military occupation, appointed Redpath superintendent of the state’s public schools. Returning north in 1868, Redpath organized the first professional speakers bureau, which included Douglass among its clients. During the 1880s he returned to his earlier career as a journalist-activist by editing newspapers and writing books and pamphlets on behalf of Irish nationalism, woman suffrage, and socialism. Douglass to James Redpath, 10 April 1869, Miscellaneous Mss., University of Illinois at Chicago Library; McKivigan, Forgotten Firebrand; Charles F. Horner, The Life of James Redpath and the Development of the Modern Lyceum (New York, 1926); Willis D. Boyd, “James Redpath and American Negro Colonization in Haiti, 1860–1862,” Americas, 12: 169–82 (October 1955); DAB, 15: 443–44.

Rochester, [N.Y.] 29 July 1871.

MY DEAR MR REDPATH:

What upon earth can you want with the character of my lecture? People
ought by this time to take me on trust, especially as their expectations
have always been remarkably moderate and never disappointed. It is too
late now to do much to improve my relation to the public—I shall never
get beyond Fredk Douglass the self educated fugitive slave. While my lecture on Santo Domingo²From January to March 1871, Douglass served as assistant secretary to the special investigating committee sent by the U.S. government to study the feasibility of annexing the Dominican Republic, a small Caribbean nation that occupied the eastern portion of the island of Santo Domingo, which it shared with Haiti. Douglass began lecturing on Santo Domingo within a month of his return to the United States. He used the address both to provide his audiences with a physical and historical description of Santo Domingo and to foster support for President Ulysses S. Grant’s effort to annex the Dominican Republic. Douglass revised the text for this lecture several times for presentations in cities such as Baltimore, Boston, Rochester, and Chicago during the 1871–72 winter lyceum. He revived the lecture for the following season but found it drew much smaller audiences. Baltimore American and Commercial Advertiser, 25 April 1871; NNE, 26 October 1871, 2 May 1872, 23 January, 25 May 1873; Boston Evening Transcript, 15 November 1871; NASS, 25 November 1871; Chicago Tribune, 30 December 1871; St. Louis Democrat, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 January 1873; Bangor (Me.) Daily Whig & Courier, 15 March 1873; Speech File, reel 18, frames 259–88, 289–311, 312–26, 327–47, FD Papers, DLC. will be historical, descriptive and political, favor-

annexation or some other extention of power over that Country, I shall
endeavor not to forget that people do not attend lectures to hear statesmanlike addresses, which are usually rather heavy for the stomachs of young
and old who listen. People want to be amused as well as instructed. They
come as often for the former as the latter, and perhaps as often to see the
man as for either. Get me all the appointments you can—but I beg that
you will say nothing to create expectations which may be disappointed.

Yours very truly

FREDK DOUG LASS

ALS: Alfred W. Anthony Collection, NN.