Part 41
In 1863 Mr. Redpath began business as a publisher; but finding it 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.
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.