An early assignment at the Tribune involved compiling "Facts of Slavery", a regular series of articles gathered from Southern newspaper exchanges.

[1] In 1855, Redpath moved to the Kansas-Missouri border and reported for a Free Soil newspaper, the Missouri Democrat, on the dispute over slavery in Kansas Territory.

It was hoped that the book would spur a greater number of Free Soil immigrants to settle in Kansas Territory, which included part of what later became Colorado.

After the failure of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry (1859), Redpath wrote the first, and highly sympathetic, biography of the executed abolitionist, The Public Life of Capt.

In 1863 and 1864, following the failure of Redpath's Boston publishers Thayer & Eldridge, he set up his own firm and began the series "Books for the Times," which included William Wells Brown's The Black Man, John R. Beard's Toussaint L'Ouverture, and Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches.

Later that year he abandoned publishing to serve as a war correspondent with the armies of George Henry Thomas and William Tecumseh Sherman in Georgia and South Carolina.

They point out that it was actually a cemetery dedication, not meant to be repeated annually and not unlike the one that took place at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1863, that debuted Lincoln's famous address.

David Blight, the main proponent of this thesis, confessed that he has no evidence that this cemetery dedication influenced General Logan to inaugurate the annual holiday.

His reputation as a radical abolitionist and his tentative steps toward integrating South Carolina's schools caused worried military officials to replace Redpath and remove an irritation to Southern-born president Andrew Johnson.

Upon his return to the United States, he lectured on the lyceum circuit, wrote newspaper articles, and published Talks about Ireland and Redpath's Weekly, both devoted to Irish causes.