Charles Philip Redmond was born on September 24, 1832, in New York City to prominent Quaker parents James and Ann Redmond. In 1839, the family moved to New Jersey, where James secured a place in the Whig Party’s State Central Committee and a seat in the state legislature. Charles enrolled at Princeton University in 1849 and graduated with honors four years later. He earned a Master’s degree from Princeton in 1856 and studied law at the University of Virginia from 1858 to June 1859. He then followed his father and brother to Dubuque, Iowa, where he began practicing law.

On April 23, 1861, shortly after the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter, Redmond enlisted as a private in Company I of the three-month 1st Iowa Infantry. The regiment traveled to Missouri, where it participated in the Battle of Wilson’s Creek on August 10—the first major battle of the Trans-Mississippi Theater. He mustered out on August 20, 1861, in St. Louis, Missouri.

Redmond moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, around 1863, and the following year he became a captain in the state’s Unionist militia. On September 24, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln appointed Redmond as the district attorney for eastern Arkansas. He later served as clerk of the state’s U.S. Circuit and District Courts and then judge of the Pulaski County criminal court. He was active in local Republican politics, and in 1867 he led a reading of the Declaration of Independence at an African-American political meeting. That same year, he served as a delegate to the Union State Convention in Little Rock, which sought to organize the “loyal men throughout the state.” 

At the convention, Redmond declared himself a “radical” and endorsed the “reconstruction measures of Congress.” Even so, he introduced resolutions assuring voters that the party “desire[d] no proscription, no confiscation,” and sought to “obliterate the use of the words traitor and rebel.” He hoped to reunify the state and nation, and he feared that more radical policies would alienate the white southern population. “We have to live here among these people,” he explained, “and he did not wish to make them hate us.” Facing extensive opposition, however, Redmond agreed to withdraw the resolutions.

On September 6, 1866, he married his distant cousin, Mary “Amy” Crossman Frost, at St. John the Baptist Episcopal Church in New York City. They lived in Arkansas for the next fourteen years, finally returning to New York in 1880. Redmond died of paralysis on Long Island on September 19, 1888, and was buried in his wife’s family plot at St. John the Baptist.

Documents:

Charles P. Redmond Calls for Reconciliation