Memorial Day and Mary Cotton Redpath

By Sarah Wright

Memorial Day is the time when we remember those members of the armed forces who died for our country. But what most locals don’t know is that Memorial Day was the idea of Mary Cotton Redpath, born in Wolfeboro in 1823. 

The Cotton family was part of Wolfeboro for many years. In fact, an area in North Wolfeboro was once known as Cottonboro. Colonel William Cotton, a veteran of the French and Indian Wars, first settled in Wolfeboro with his wife and eight children in 1780. He purchased Cutter’s Mountain, later renaming it Cotton Mountain, and built his home there. Because his home was on the main road connecting Wolfeboro to Portsmouth, the Cotton family often hosted travelers overnight. 

The home remained in the Cotton family for over 150 years and the family grew steadily in that time. There were many notable descendents of the Colonel, but Mary Cotton Redpath is the most widely known. Her determination is credited with bringing about the first Memorial Day in May of 1865 in Charleston, South Carolina, to honor those who died in the Civil War. How did Mary end up in South Carolina?  

In her youth, Mary’s parents decided to send her to the Young Ladies Seminary for her education. The school was located in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and when Mary was in her late teens, she married Ezra Taylor Kidder of Sudbury. Ezra and his brother operated a mercantile firm in Boston that specialized in goods from the West Indies. Mary and Ezra had a son and a daughter, but soon after the birth of their second child, they separated and divorced. 

Not long after that, Mary met James Redpath of England, who was visiting the area. James married Mary, who was 10 years his senior, in 1857. Little is known of their courtship, although some of the romantic poems that James wrote to Mary have survived. However, their honeymoon was short-lived as Mary’s ex-husband Ezra sought to regain custody of his children. To escape the Massachusetts law that favored Ezra, the Redpaths fled to Mary’s native New Hampshire. When the dust later settled, they moved back to Massachusetts and settled in Malden. 

James Redpath was not one to live a quiet life. An active Irish sympathizer in England, he soon joined the abolitionist movement in the States, and was friendly with other well-known abolitionists, including Henry Ward Beecher, Charles Sumner, Frederick Douglass, Wendell Phillips, Gerrit Smith, and William Lloyd Garrison. In fact, local legend has it that the Redpath’s house was a stop on the Underground Railroad. 

James was a writer and reporter. He spent years on the road, with much of his time spent in Kansas, where he involved himself in the local politics, setting his sights on Governor Robert J. Walker. He briefly returned east to the Boston area to raise funds to start his own antislavery newspaper, and then went back to Kansas to continue ruffling feathers there, as well as in neighboring Missouri. 

Naturally, with all his traveling, James’ marriage to Mary suffered. Although James had developed a strong relationship with Mary’s children, he lamented about the increasing financial burden of supporting his family in letters to friends. But Mary wasn’t just twiddling her thumbs at home while James was away. She spent much of her time doing philanthropic work. She was also very spiritual, and enjoyed researching different religions and coming up with her own interpretations in her quest for the truth. She and her husband later founded the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, the first of its kind in this country. The Bureau was a leading booking agent for speakers like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Susan B. Anthony, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. 

All the while, James remained devoted to the abolitionist cause. He was becoming increasingly frustrated with politicians and lawmakers and began exploring violent tactics to get the message out. His supposed involvement in an orchestrated a prison break, which put James at risk of arrest by U.S. Marshals. But James persisted, even looking to other countries for inspiration, spending time in Haiti after becoming intrigued by successful uprisings there. He ended up working with the Haitian government for a few years, appointed as an advisor for bringing more Americans and Canadians to Haiti. 

At this point, the history of the Redpaths finally leads to South Carolina. After returning to the States and struggling and failing in starting his own publishing companies, James decided to follow the armies of George Henry Thomas and William Sherman as a war correspondent for the New York Tribune. Mary Redpath was with her husband in Charleston, when General Sherman’s famous “March to the Sea” ended in the city. They took up residence there when James was appointed as superintendent of schools in the region by federal military authorities. He soon had more than 100 teachers and almost 4,000 students, both black and white. (His reputation as a radical abolitionist and his ideas for integrating the schools eventually caused military officials to replace Redpath, possibly to appease Southern-born President Andrew Johnson.) 

Toward the end of the Civil War, the Charleston Race Course area (now part of the Citadel’s campus), was used as a prisoner-of-war camp. More than 200 Union soldiers died in deplorable conditions at the camp, and their bodies were thrown into a mass grave. Mary Redpath was dismayed at the treatment of the soldiers, while they were alive and after they died, and felt they deserved proper recognition for their part in winning the war. 

Thus, a memorial celebration was planned. In May of 1865, Mary held a memorial service in the Zion’s church and then military authorities and northerners joined more than 10,000 newly-freed men, women, and children in a tribute parade for Union soldier POWs. (Workmen had re-buried the dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery.) Mary rode to the cemetery in a carriage with the ranking Union general. She then led the crowd in decorating the graves of the soldiers with wildflowers that had been gathered for the occasion. 

This observance of Memorial Day eventually spread nationally, thank to Mary’s efforts. 

(In the 1880s, the Union dead were moved to the National Cemetery in Beaufort, South Carolina. The Charleston site is now a park honoring Confederate General Wade Hampton.)  

Mary died in 1914 at the age of 91 and is buried in Wolfeboro, in the Dudley Cotton cemetery on Cotton Mountain Road.