The Roving Editor: Or Talks With Slaves in the Southern States, by James…

Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0271015330, Paperback)

A new edition of a major abolitionist work that confirms the authenticity of newspaperman James Redpath’s interviews with slaves during the mid-nineteenth century.

"John McKivigan has done a splendid job of editing this paperback volume. . . . This little-known book, largely overshadowed heretofore by Frederick Law Olmsted's famous The Cotton Kingdom, will now, in this fine reprint, take its rightful place among the many volumes that enable us to gain some sense of the reality of American slavery and of the extremes to which Americans were driven to be rid of it."—Georgia Historical Quarterly

"No other text about slave opinion before the Civil War exists. This new edition of Redpath’s book makes a welcome addition to our understanding of how blacks felt about the peculiar institution on the eve of its demise."—Clarence E. Walker, University of California, Davis

While a reporter at Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, James Redpath developed a strong curiosity about slavery and decided that he would travel south "to see slavery with my own eyes." Redpath interviewed slaves, recorded their opinions, and collected these letters into book form, publishing them in 1859 as The Roving Editor. While some historians over the years have utilized Redpath’s book, many have treated it as merely another travel account of the antebellum South, dismissing the interviews as the fabrication of a radical abolitionist.

John R. McKivigan has uncovered important historical records that certify for the first time the authenticity of Redpath’s interviews; he presents here the original newspaper articles that supply the places and times of many of the slave encounters, which Redpath had edited out of the book. Furthermore, using Redpath’s unpublished correspondence, McKivigan verifies his residence in southern communities at the times these interviews were reported to have taken place, making The Roving Editor one of the most valuable and compelling sources of the slaves’ own testimony regarding their treatment in the late antebellum period.