“Palmer’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin Co.” (Library of Congress)
From a Seneca County, New York newspaper in 1865 (in same column as the April 9, 1865 written communication between Generals Lee and Grant regarding surrender):
JAMES REDPATH, the abolition leader, now the Charleston correspondent of the New York Tribune, boasts that he induced a negro to break the bust of Calhoun in a Charleston office. The cowardly scoundrel, probably, didn’t have courage to face even the inanimate bust of the noble South Carolinian! Such a deed is in prefect [sic] keeping with the spirit of abolitionism. John C. Calhoun was a great and a good man – and once elevated to the office of Vice President of the United States. We never read of his making any such disgusting exhibition of himself as that which marked the debut of the besotted boor who now occupies that position. What a wonder it is that some of these latter day reformers do not break down the marble statue of the great Washington, who was as great a rebel as he was a slaveholder.
I haven’t found anything to confirm this particular story, but James Redpath was working in Charleston 150 years ago.
In February 1865, federal military authorities appointed him the first superintendent of public schools in the Charleston, South Carolina, region. He soon had more than 100 instructors at work teaching 3,500 students of both races. He also founded an orphan asylum. In May 1865 in Charleston, Redpath organized the first-ever Memorial Day service to honor buried Union Army dead there.
His reputation as a radical abolitionist and his tentative steps toward integrating South Carolina’s school caused worried military officials to replace Redpath and remove an irritation to Southern-born President Andrew Johnson. Ironically, Redpath served as the ghost writer of Jefferson Davis’s history of the Confederacy.
You can read about the beginnings of reconstruction in Charleston and James Redpath’s part in reopening the schools in the Richmond Daily Dispatch of March 14, 1865.
“Grave of John C. Calhoun, Charleston, S.C.” (Library of Congress)
