uncongenial to his tastes, he soon abandoned it. His life from the fall
of 1864 to 1866 was spent in the South, chiefly as army correspondent of
Northern journals. He was at Atlanta with General Sherman, at the battle
of Nashville with General Thomas, and with General Steadman and Colonel
Rousseau in their movements to flank General Hood. Having accepted an
offer from the New York _Tribune_ to join Sherman’s army, Mr. Redpath
arrived in South Carolina in time to send the first report of the
capture of Charleston to the North. General Sherman having gone forward,
Mr. Redpath was appointed to superintend the white and colored schools
of that city, and resigned his office as correspondent. During his three
or four months’ stay in Charleston he organized all the day schools, and
established night schools for adults; he instituted a public
reading-room and library for the freedmen, recruited the first colored
militia companies, founded an asylum for colored orphans, and
established the custom, which has since become national, of decorating
the graves of those who fell in the war. _He was the founder of
Decoration Day._ On its first celebration, which occurred in Charleston,
S. C., on the first day of May, 1865, upward of ten thousand persons,
with a full battalion of soldiers, were present, and advantage was taken
of the occasion to consecrate the ground where the martyrs of the Civil
War were buried, the ground having been previously enclosed by the
colored people of the district. Mr. Redpath was afterward appointed
General Superintendent of Education of the Freedmen for the “Department
of the South,” which included South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida; but
he did not accept the position, as business affairs obliged him to leave
that part of the country.
On his return to the North, Mr. Redpath devoted himself exclusively to
journalism, and contributed to the leading newspapers of New York and
Boston until 1868. In that year he established the Boston Lyceum
Bureau--now the Redpath Lyceum Bureau--in conjunction with Mr. George L.
Fall, and up to October, 1874, was engaged chiefly in this sphere of
labor. The bureau, it is now generally admitted, has done more than any
other agency to revive the lecture system, which was rapidly dying out
all over the country. Since the establishment of the bureau, the number
of lectures given in the United States has increased tenfold, chiefly
under the impulse which it gave to the system. It has more than
quadrupled the number of lectures that were given in New England when
it was organized.
“Jim” Redpath did several first things, to some of which I have already
made reference. He was also the first “interviewer” in the United
States, as his “interview” (as he called it in the _Tribune_) with old
John Brown, which I witnessed, giving the Puritan leader’s account of
the fight with Henry Clay Pate at “Black Jack”--one of the memorable
events of the “Free State” struggle--was the earliest of actual
newspaper interviews. He afterward popularized this form of getting at
public men’s opinions in an easy way by calling those he had early in
the Civil War days with Charles Sumner, “Stump Speeches in Slippers.”
As I think of my friend, whose name to the public was perhaps written in
water, I wonder why he was not wider, better, and more enduringly known.
Some one has told me of an old clergyman who in his later years had
slipped from all organization and yet managed to keep actively engaged
in sermonizing and teaching. Some one asked him what church he was
“ministering to.” His reply was, “The Church of Divine Fragments.” The
last words seem to me always to fit the years and career of James
Redpath. His days and his intellect were made indeed of “divine
fragments.” Every ethical breath or cause seemed to draw him, but he did
not remain to round out either the cause or his own work. But what a lot
of service, according to his light, he rendered! The anti-slavery
struggle captured his clear-brained youth. His courage, moral and
physical alike, was beyond compare. The remarkable series of letters
that he wrote, “unsigned,” from the slave States in the winter of
1855-56, of the long journeys “a-foot” that he made among the slaves and
non-slave-holding whites, would have made him world-famous could they
have fitted to and happened in these days. Then his equally remarkable
journeys in Ireland, nearly thirty years later, during the early Land
League agitation, the account of which also appeared in the New York
_Tribune_, were almost equal to them for the peril encountered and the
high courage displayed. Between these two points Redpath had been the
first superintendent of non-racial public schools in Charleston, S. C.,
and had also been the first Northern journalist to interview Jefferson
Davis, whom he invited to a lecture tour in the Union States. His life
was full of large beginnings and alive with “divine fragments,” dramatic
contrasts, and active with vigorous work, so that while he moved, and
where he did so, he for the time being filled the centre of the stage.
Yet he has left little behind him, and that little is fading. He
published “The Roving Editor,” a record of his audacious journeys and
insurrectionary agitation in the seaboard slave States--a book that is
quite forgotten and of which copies are not easily to be found. He wrote
“The Public Life of John Brown,” which was published within twenty days
of the latter’s execution in Virginia, and during the last year of his
life he wrote “The Life of Jefferson Davis.”
At one time Redpath entered the service of “The Black
Republic”--Hayti--planning an exodus to it of our free colored people
and, _sub rosa_, it has been said, an extended slave insurrection, which
Fort Sumter made nugatory. Yet he had no war record, civic or military,
except for a brief space as a recruiting officer of colored troops. It
is reported that he got possessed with some Tolstoian views against war,
yet there never lived a braver man than James Redpath. In his last years
he identified himself with Henry George’s single-tax views, after he had
been managing editor, under Thorndyke Rice, of _The North American
Review_.
But his enduring public monument is the early shaping of the American
lecture-platform system as we now see it, and the enduring personal,
even tender regard with which all who knew James Redpath continue to
hold him in memory. No man was more loved and admired by those who knew
him well. Even those who in later years differed widely from him on
personal grounds speak of him still in terms of lingering affection and
loving regret.
THE LYCEUM.
The lyceum platform stands for ability, genius, education, reform, and
entertainment. On it the greatest readers, orators, and thinkers have
stood. On it reform has found her noblest advocates, literature her
finest expression, progress her bravest pleaders, and humor its happiest
translations. Some of the most gifted, most highly educated, and
warmest-hearted men and women of the English-speaking race have in the
last fifty years given their best efforts to the lyceum, and by their
noble utterances have made its platform not only historic, but symbolic
of talent, education, genius, and reform.
Until the Redpath Lyceum Bureau was founded by James Redpath in Boston,
in 1867, lecture committees were in the habit of applying to lecturers
or readers direct. These committees were usually made up from the
leading citizens of the town, with a view to securing the services of
the ablest men and women of letters for the entertainment of their
public. The fee was generally nominal, but sufficient to cover the
actual expenses of the star and furnish a small honorarium. Edward
Everett, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John B. Gough, Wendell Phillips, George
William Curtis, Garrison, Sumner, Lowell, Edward Everett Hale, Bayard
Taylor, Frederick Douglass, Dr. Chapin, Henry Ward Beecher, Julia Ward
Howe, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anna E. Dickinson, and
Mary A. Livermore were the principal men and women of letters obtainable
on these conditions.
Among the great readers who could attract large metropolitan audiences
year after year were George Vandenhoff and James E. Murdoch--famous
Shakespearian actors in their day--Professor Churchill of Andover, Prof.
Robert R. Raymond, and Charlotte Cushman. All of these were attractions
wherever they appeared. Mr. Shillaber (“Mrs. Partington”) as a humorous
lecturer was also very popular. Of course there were many lesser
lights, but the platform stars available before the war could almost be
numbered on one’s fingers.
The lyceum had never been regarded by these gifted advocates of reform
and progress from the point of view of “revenue only.” In every city and
village there was a lyceum, sustained by the people for the purpose of
furnishing the best courses of lectures and entertainments. The expenses
for talent being light, and attractions of the highest class being
popular, most lyceums were financially prosperous.
At that time music had not been introduced into the courses, which were
at once the pride and the boast of every community. Then the music hall
and town hall were considered the only proper places for wholesome
entertainments, such as concerts and lectures. The religious element
predominated in getting up courses of lectures. New England town and
public halls were all arranged for lectures and concerts, with an
express proviso that no entertainment should be given that required a
drop-curtain. A year or two after the war, when over a million men had
returned from military strife to civil pursuits, having been through
four years of excitement that rendered it next to impossible to settle
quietly down, there came an unprecedented demand for entertainments and
amusements. The men and women nearest to the hearts of the public were
those whose patriotism and ability had made their names household words
during the war, and they were sought after for lectures all over the
country.
It was about this time (1867) that James Redpath, one of the earliest
founders of “The Freedman’s Bureau,” a journalist and father of many
brilliant thoughts, conceived the idea of making and booking engagements
for lectures. His bureau revolutionized the lyceum and lecture field. It
created a profession, and made the management of the work a business
requiring skill and systematic care. Redpath was the friend of Phillips,
Garrison, Sumner, Gough, Emerson, Whittier, Mrs. Livermore, Mrs.
Stanton, Miss Anthony, Anna Dickinson, and other patriotic platform
heroes and heroines. Before that time our great lecturers were satisfied
to receive from $50 to $100 a night and their expenses. Even John B.
Gough never accepted a higher fee. When Charles Sumner was paid $500 for
a lecture in Providence, such a fee was unprecedented. Even Wendell
Phillips used to lecture for $25 or $50, and seemed to be willing to do
so for that sum quite as readily as for $500 afterward. He wished the
people to hear him, and he spoke for a cause. One morning Mr. Phillips
came into our office in Boston to get his list of appointments. I said:
“Mr. Phillips, we have an open date. Springfield offers $250 for it.
Natick wants it, but they can pay only $75.”
“What’s the population of the two towns?” asked Mr. Phillips.
We looked it up, and gave him the census report of each town.
“Natick offers more in proportion to its number of inhabitants than
Springfield. Let Natick have it,” he said.
Mr. Redpath satisfied these lecturers that he could save them the
trouble and annoyance of voluminous correspondence, and at the same time
could obtain such fees as the lectures were worth, a suggestion which
seemed to meet with general favor. By paying Redpath ten per cent. on
all their business transactions they could be relieved of the care of
bookings, and their income would not be diminished, to say the least.
Redpath’s Bureau took charge of Mr. Gough’s business, and he cleared
$40,000 for the season of 1871 and 1872, and during the last decade of
his life his income was never less than $30,000, thus showing what could
be done with experience and good management.
Mr. Redpath was the first manager to pay a lecturer a $1,000 fee. He
paid it to Mr. Beecher for a lecture in Music Hall, Boston, in 1872. The
gross receipts were over $3,000.
When the Redpath Bureau took Wendell Phillips’ business, he could easily
get from $250 to $500 a night. There were several men who could command
these figures. Men like Beecher, Chapin, Phillips, Sumner, Gough, and
Emerson did not lecture merely for the money they made out of it. They
put a good deal of love of their ideas, cause, or purposes into their
work. There are men now who could make large incomes by lecturing if
they would. There are almost daily calls for Seth Low, Chauncey M.
Depew, Gen. Horace Porter, Bourke Cockran, and St. Clair McKelway, but
they are not available.
Redpath would have been unsuccessful if he had depended upon himself for
the management of the details of the business; but he was fortunate in
associating with him his friend Mr. George Fall, a man of remarkable
executive ability, who at once grasped the magnitude of the scheme and
assumed the direction of the business details.
It was to be the Redpath Lyceum Bureau (Redpath & Fall, proprietors).
Circulars were sent out over the country announcing the list of lectures
to be secured. The newspapers talked about the plan, saying that every
city, East and West, could have a lecture course of the best talent in
the world by merely addressing the Redpath Lyceum Bureau. In the town in
which I lived (Janesville, Wis.), John B. Gough and Anna Dickinson were
secured. Each received $400 per night. Tickets sold at from $1 to $5,
and the local lyceum cleared about $600, after paying all expenses. It
was the same way all over the country. There was not a town which could
not afford a great lecturer, but experience and ability were required to
secure one.
About this time (1867-68) Petroleum V. Nasby was a great attraction and
money-maker. Such a thing as losing money on a big lecture course seemed
impossible. Carpenter & Sheldon, managers of the Star Course in Chicago,
secured every lecturer and reader that the bureau had at its command,
and they paid the highest prices. Their “Chicago Star Course” tickets
invariably sold at a premium. Long before the date of the first lecture
of the course there was not a ticket to be had. It was the same in
Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Rochester, Pittsburg, Columbus, Cincinnati,
and St. Louis. Everywhere the star course was the fad. One Sunday in
Rochester I attended a Baptist Sunday-school. Two of the prizes for
some specially meritorious object were tickets to the Athenæum Star
Course, in Corinthian Hall, where the holders could hear John B. Gough,
Mary A. Livermore, Mrs. Scott-Siddons, the Rev. George Dawson of
England, and the Hon. William Parsons of Ireland, and Ann Eliza Young of
Utah. The list of lecturers was printed on the ticket and read off by
the superintendent.
T. B. Pugh’s Star Course in Philadelphia was considered a greater
property than any theatre in that city. He gave an annual course of ten
lectures and concerts, and sold every seat in the great Academy of
Music, from orchestra to amphitheatre (all reserved), just as soon as
the tickets could possibly be passed out to the waiting crowd. The
prices ranged from $3 to $8. It was the same with Hathaway & Pond’s Star
Course in Music Hall, Boston, and with the Franklin Lyceum in
Providence; in fact, all the large cities looked to the star lecture
courses for the highest class of entertainments, and they surely had
them. Lyceum treasuries were full, the people were liberal in their
patronage, and the public was satisfied. It was a marvellous
intellectual movement, and that it no longer exists in this shape must
be looked upon with sincere regret by those who watch the progress of
the age.
The first hard blow that the lecture platform got was from the clear,
humorous light operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. People went to hear them
who would not previously go to the theatre. To a large extent they took
the place of the lecturers in New England, causing the public halls to
be remodelled; and the curtain went up where previously it had been
forbidden. The fun and the good music were popular, wholesome, and
profitable; but when less gifted imitators sent out poor companies, not
so clean, with poor music, there was a reaction, and the lecture-concert
system began to regain some of its lost ground, and the poor trash of
the show business had to go under.
During the years between 1871 and 1877 the lyceum flourished. It began
to show weakness in 1874-75. There were not enough good lecturers. The
war-horses of the platform were disappearing. Sumner died. Emerson was
worn out. Curtis had assumed the editorship of _Harper’s Weekly_.
Gough’s throat was thickening up, and it was an effort to listen to him.
Douglass had gone as minister to Hayti. Henry Ward Beecher’s lecture
engagements must bend to his church obligations at home. He was a
preacher and the pastor of a church. Anna Dickinson got to scolding her
audiences; besides, she had a craze for the stage. Mrs. Livermore could
lecture only six nights a week. She had over eight hundred applications
for a single season, more than she could accept, not only from lyceums,
but from churches, colleges, temperance and women’s societies. About the
same conditions obtained with Mrs. Julia Ward Howe. There were over five
hundred lyceums to be supplied. The great champions of woman’s right had
said and told all that there was to say. Nast had abruptly stopped in
the very zenith of his popularity. Spurgeon, Gladstone, and John Bright
refused to consider fabulous offers inviting them to come to America.
There must be something to make the courses attractive or they would go
under. It was determined to augment them with music. I went to New York
and arranged for a grand concert company to open the principal courses
in the large cities. It had to be composed of the leading stars in the
profession, and nothing but the very best would do. One season we paid
Max Strakosch $10,000 for ten concerts to be given in the leading star
courses in Boston, Portland, Providence, Worcester, Springfield,
Hartford, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington. That company
consisted of Clara Louise Kellogg, Anna Louise Cary, George Conley,
basso, Brignoli, tenor, Alfred Pease, pianist, George W. Colby,
accompanist. We used one of these concerts for the star course in
Boston. I ran one independently on Sunday night in the Boston theatre.
They were sold to each of the other courses for $200 more than we paid
Strakosch. It was the finest vocal quartette available in America, and I
would like to see it “bested” now under conditions similar to those then
existing.
Next came a great lyceum star, Ole Bull, the most popular violinist ever
known. His name assured the success of almost any course where there was
an auditorium of ample capacity. I paid him $500 a concert every time he
played for me. The great Norwegian “fiddler,” as musicians called him,
had not appeared in public for several years. It was almost accidental
that I secured him. He was at the Parker House, Boston, on his way from
his home in Norway to Madison, Wis., his American home. I met him in the
elevator, and asked if he were not going to play in Boston. His wife,
who was with him, replied that he would not play in Boston until he
could receive $500 a concert. Boston had never appreciated him.
[Illustration]
I was looking for a substitute for one of the attractions that had
disappointed us for the star course in Boston, the date being the
following Tuesday. I told Mr. Bull that our house was sold out, being in
the star course, and that there was no way of making it possible for him
to draw a great crowd on his merits. The audience, however, would be of
more than average intelligence, and would be appreciative. I offered to
give him $250 and all the money taken in at the door on the night of the
concert. He accepted at once, saying that was fair enough. Mrs. Bull did
not like it, and was persistent in insisting that her husband ought to
have $500. We left the matter as Mr. Bull and I had agreed. They
returned to New York that day (it was Friday). I announced in the papers
that Ole Bull would play in the star course the Tuesday following. The
next evening I got a note from the manager of Music Hall asking me to
send around the tickets for the Ole Bull concert. He said that over four
hundred applications had come in, and one especially, from Henry W.
Longfellow, for six seats. What were we to do? There were four rows of
seats under the back gallery that we had never put on sale, because no
one could ever hear a speaker from that part of the hall. We concluded
to number and sell those seats at $1.50 each. We also figured that we
could put three hundred chairs on the stage, and four hundred “standees”
wherever they could get in. On Sunday before the concert, Mr. and Mrs.
Bull arrived in Boston. I called and found Mrs. Bull still determined
that Mr. Bull must have $500. I did not tell her that under the present
arrangement he would get twice that sum, but I gave her a check for
$500, and took her receipt. The sale, in addition to the course tickets,
was over $1,100. I afterward paid Ole Bull $25,000 for fifty concerts,
and made a handsome profit.
Concerts and novelties were now called for in courses. In consequence,
the call for lectures was much diminished. Gilmore’s band was a strong
attraction for large cities, but too expensive for the average lyceum,
so we made a feature for two seasons of Mme. Camilla Urso, the
violinist, and a supporting company, which proved very profitable, not
only to lyceums, but to the star. Adelaide Phillips, the popular
contralto, was another great lyceum favorite, supported by Tom Karl,
then the handsomest young tenor, and with the ladies the greatest
favorite in the profession. It was found necessary that a new attraction
for a feature of courses must be produced every season, and that feature
music. Redpath had another thought--opera; English opera in lyceums, so
“The Redpath English Opera Company” was organized with this original
announcement:
“To meet a long-felt want in lyceums for an entertainment which would
combine exquisite music and dramatic situations, to take the place of
the miscellaneous concerts which have become almost as unpopular as
readings,” etc.
This little company consisted of a quartette of young singers. They gave
Flotow’s opera, “Martha,” complete, omitting the choruses. The orchestra
was a piano only. They were beautiful singers. Miss Clara Nichols,
soprano; Flora E. Barry, contralto; George H. Clark, tenor; Edward
Payson, basso; John Howard, piano.
This was the most delightful hit of that season (1875-76). We could give
a whole opera, without a chorus, for $250, and if necessary for much
less. Every lyceum applied for it. In many places it could not be given,
because the drop-curtain was the dividing line in classifying the
character of the entertainment to be given in the public halls. In
Worcester, Providence, Salem, Clinton, Natick, and suburban cities,
where we could not use scenery, we produced the opera without. It gave
great delight, and seemed to whet the appetite for richer feasts of real
opera, and the advancement of the drama, which now so largely occupies
the field of amusements. The bureau made about eighteen thousand dollars
for that little opera company the first season it was out. It was the
pioneer English opera company outside of the largest cities. In less
than two years there were scores of English opera companies.