Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  The same clear-eyed approach that had made Olmsted open to the South’s charms was demanding that he acknowledge the region’s deficiencies. It was becoming increasingly clear to him that slavery wasn’t working, but not for the usual reasons. Olmsted’s perspective went something like this: Slavery, with its myriad inefficiencies, was a defective system when it came to labor and production. Olmsted’s criticism of slavery was uniquely his own and based on empirical observation. As such, it differed greatly from the emotional appeals of abolitionists. Olmsted was growing convinced that slavery was flawed from an economic standpoint.

  Olmsted’s ceaseless travel took him to the North Carolina coast and an unusual operation where slave labor was employed in fishing. Slaves aboard boats used sweep seines to catch herring and shad. Frequently, the nets got fouled by huge underwater cypress stumps. To remove particularly pesky stumps, it was necessary to send down a diver with a crude detonating device, an iron tube packed with gunpowder.

  This was demanding work. Olmsted met a fishing boat operator who was in the habit of paying slaves to blow up stumps, giving them a quarter or fifty cents a day. Sure enough, slaves clamored to be selected for this dangerous duty and accomplished it with aplomb. “What! Slaves eager to work, and working cheerfully, earnestly and skillfully?” asked Olmsted in a dispatch. He added, “Being for the time managed as freemen, their ambition stimulated by wages, suddenly they, too, reveal sterling manhood, and honor their creator.”

  On another occasion, Olmsted was particularly pleased when he got the chance to talk with a slave one-on-one, without a master or anyone else present. At the end of a visit to a sugar plantation, a slave was enlisted to drive Olmsted in a buggy to his next destination. For a white Northern stranger, this was quite a rare opportunity. Olmsted wanted to make sure he didn’t blow it. His mind was swirling with questions, but he was careful to let the conversation unfold naturally.

  What is your name? he asked the slave.

  William.

  Where were you born?

  Far away, in Virginia.

  Olmsted continued on for some minutes in this casual vein. When the moment was right, he slipped it in: What would you do if you were free?

  “If I was free, massa,” said William, immediately warming to the subject, “if I was free I would—well, sar, de fus thing I would do, if I was free, I would go to work for a year, and get some money for myself,—den—den—den, massa, dis is what I do—I buy me, fus place, a little house, and little lot land . . . ”

  Olmsted had a knack for mimicking speech patterns. And the man’s modest dreams touched Olmsted as well. There were slaves, queasy truth be told, who wished to remain slaves. He’d seen as much. But there were probably many more like William, living out their lives in silent rebellion.

  Thomas Jefferson once warned that if it continued, slavery would be as damaging to whites as blacks. This Olmsted also found to be true. At the time when he visited the South, more than 70 percent of whites didn’t own a single slave. Yet slavery permeated every aspect of society.

  Olmsted tried to get an umbrella fixed and was stunned by the ineptitude of the white repairman. The very concept of work had been degraded. This went a long way toward explaining the rutted roads and constant delays encountered everywhere while traveling. Nobody wanted to do anything. Whites didn’t value work because work was fit only for slaves. Slaves—lacking incentive—didn’t do much of it, either.

  Only a select few plantation owners, blessed with fertile land or good luck, really benefited from this system. But the very idea of aristocracy, the notion of one type of person naturally superior to another, was so seductive to many plantation owners that they kept at it, inefficiency be damned. Other plantation owners were simply trapped in a system that didn’t really serve them. In unguarded moments, several admitted as much to Olmsted.

  For most, it was a hardscrabble life. Passing the night at a planter’s “mansion,” Olmsted couldn’t help but notice that the floors were uncarpeted and the windows covered in paper curtains. On the wall hung a clock, manufactured in his home state, Connecticut. (Everything that required manufacturing came from the North.) The clock was stopped dead. Thus, there wasn’t even a ticktock to punctuate the long stretches of silence between Olmsted and his taciturn host.

  After a modest meal, Olmsted decided to turn in. He asked for a candle. To Olmsted’s puzzlement, the host followed him upstairs to the bedroom and stood there holding the candle. Olmsted reached for it, but the host’s grip tightened. That’s when it struck him. For thrift’s sake, the household was skimping on candles. With the host standing there, Olmsted changed into his nightclothes. Then the man blew out this lone candle and left with an abrupt “Good night, sir.”

  The next morning, Olmsted stayed for a breakfast of bacon, eggs, and the dreaded corn bread. As he ate, he puzzled over whether this was a representative example of “genuine planter’s hospitality.” Maybe the man expected to be compensated for the night’s stay. He decided to err on the side of offering payment. When Olmsted broached the subject, the man didn’t hesitate for a moment, saying, “I reckon a dollar and a quarter will be right, sir.”

  This episode was one of many that led Olmsted to another of his unique observations: Not only was slavery a flawed economic system, but it promoted cultural deficiency as well. Sure, this beau ideal existed: the Southern gentleman, possessed of perfect manners and impeccable breeding, enjoying the leisure to pursue refinement in all things. It was a myth, concluded Olmsted. Why, his host had talked of guano, when he had talked at all. Plantation owners simply lived too far apart one from another for any cultural commerce. They were consumed by the mere act of subsisting. This was such a contrast to Northern city life, including his own upbringing in Hartford, where density forced people into contact with each other, and with new ideas. As he traveled the South, Olmsted noted that he rarely saw a book of Shakespeare or a pianoforte or even a picture hanging on a wall.

  By March 1853, Olmsted was several months into his journey. He’d covered an immense amount of ground, traveling across Maryland and Virginia, wending his way through the Carolinas and Georgia. He was now deep into the Mississippi Delta. As the historian Edmund Wilson once wrote, “He tenaciously and patiently and lucidly made his way through the whole South, undiscouraged by churlish natives, almost impassable roads or the cold inns and uncomfortable cabins in which he spent most of his nights. He talked to everybody and he sized up everything and he wrote it all down.”

  There’s one thing Olmsted hadn’t yet seen. But that would change soon enough. An overseer was giving Olmsted a tour of a cotton plantation on the banks of the Red River, about thirty miles southeast of Natchitoches, Louisiana. As they rode on through a gully, the overseer suddenly pulled up his horse.

  “What that? Hallo!—who are you there?”

  Someone was lying in the brush, trying to hide.

  “Who are you there?” the overseer repeated.

  The person rose up slightly. Through the brush, Olmsted could just vaguely make out a figure.

  “Sam’s Sall, Sir.”

  The person was a slave, an identity that permeated her whole being. Her name was Sall. And she belonged to Sam.

  The overseer demanded that Sall provide an explanation for why she wasn’t at work in the fields. She said that her father had locked her in her bedroom. When she woke up in the morning, he had already left. She had pushed on a loose plank and finally had been able to crawl out. As to why she was now hiding in a gully, she was vague.

  “That won’t do—come out here.”

  Sall emerged from the brush and stood facing Olmsted and the overseer. Olmsted could now see that Sall was a young woman, about eighteen years old.

  “That won’t do,” repeated the overseer. “You must take some—kneel down.”

  Sall lowered herself to her knees. The overseer got down off his horse, carrying a rawhide whip in his left hand. He struck the girl repeatedly across the shoulders. Sal
l took the punishment, not crying out but merely wincing, occasionally saying, “Please, Sir!”

  After he’d lashed her about thirty times, the overseer demanded again that Sall explain why she was hiding in the gully. Again, Sall repeated the same story.

  “You have not got enough yet,” said the overseer. “Pull up your clothes—lie down.”

  Sall drew up her garments to about her waist and lay down on the ground. She turned on her side, facing the overseer. The man began to strike her again with the rawhide whip, this time lashing her across her thighs and back. “Oh, don’t; Sir, oh, please stop, master; please, Sir, please, Sir! Oh, that’s enough, master; oh, Lord! Oh, master! master!”

  Looking on, Olmsted was overcome with visceral horror mixed with a terrible sense of complicity. The only other time he’d witnessed a scene like this was aboard the Ronaldson, when Captain Fox ordered that young sailors be “rope’s ended.”

  The South was a region best rendered in shades of gray, but Olmsted couldn’t help but perceive the episode in stark black-and-white: This was so very wrong. Olmsted’s horse flared its nostrils and bolted up out of the gully.

  CHAPTER 7

  Tief Im Herzen Von Texas

  OLMSTED COULDN’T AFFORD to miss the spring planting season. He returned to Staten Island in April 1853.

  By this time, nine of his Times dispatches had already appeared. In the months ahead, while on Tosomock Farm, Olmsted crafted two new dispatches each week, drawing on his travel notes. Ultimately, forty-eight Southern letters would be published. The dispatches were highly successful. Because his accounts were provocative yet balanced—per the original mandate—they grabbed readers’ attention, and, as a bonus, they also managed to draw the ire of the Southern press. “The Times, however, is not content with the present calm,” complained the Savannah Republican . “It sends a stranger among us ‘to spy out the nakedness of the land.’ What is its object, if it be not an evil one?”

  Raymond of the Times was a classic crusty newspaper editor, sparing with praise. But he was pleased with the Southern dispatches, and even went so far as to communicate this to Olmsted. The series helped the Times’s circulation rebound. By the end of 1853, it had returned to 25,000. And circulation would keep growing, soon hitting 40,000, second only to the Herald among New York dailies. In the early life of the Times, Olmsted’s series was a key to establishing the paper’s journalistic identity. “The Times signaled itself by publishing Olmsted’s letters from the South,” wrote Edwin Godkin, a correspondent for the paper during its early years and later a friend of Olmsted’s.

  The success of the Southern series also had an unintended consequence for Olmsted. He grew still more disenchanted with the farmer’s life. Increasingly, writing seemed more appealing. Because his letters were published under the pseudonym “Yeoman,” few knew that the Times pieces were Olmsted’s handiwork, save for the people that he chose to tell. But he wasn’t shy about sharing this with fellow New Yorkers. (The risk had lain in disclosing his identity to Southerners.)

  In the spring of 1853, Anne Charlotte Lynch visited Olmsted at Tosomock Farm. Years back, she had been his classmate at Miss Rockwell’s school in Hartford. Now, she was a poet and the host of a Greenwich Village salon, attended by such luminaries as the painter Daniel Huntington, abolitionist journalist Lydia Child, and Felix Darley, the noted illustrator. Before his death in 1849, Edgar Allan Poe had been a regular and had recited “The Raven” before an appreciative gathering. Olmsted confessed in a letter to his father that he didn’t care much for Lynch’s own poetry. But he was thrilled to reconnect with this childhood acquaintance because she “knew all the distinguished people.”

  Olmsted tried his hand at a literary work, which appeared in a prestigious new publication, Putnam’s Monthly Magazine. The magazine belonged to George Putnam, his onetime Staten Island neighbor who had recently moved to Manhattan. Through a separate enterprise, a book publishing company, Putnam had also brought out Olmsted’s Walks and Talks.

  “Gold Under Gilt” is a brief fable (occupying a single page in the July 1853 issue of Putnam’s) about a wealthy Fifth Avenue couple who drop everything to minister to their gravely ill servants. The couple risks contracting a terrible disease because they feel a moral obligation to do the right thing. The servants still succumb. But as Olmsted concluded, “Here was another ‘deed for New-York to be proud of.’ Gilt sometimes covers gold.”

  Olmsted’s odd little parable provides a window into his mind-set at this time. It’s no coincidence that the setting is New York, his stomping grounds, but also a progressive Northern city. The tale’s moral—human values transcend the economic differences that separate people—speaks to his growing sense of noblesse oblige. Perhaps it relates to a nagging conscience as well. Whether witting or unwitting, “gilt covers gold” is a pun on “guilt covers gold,” as in privileged people such as himself feeling an obligation to those who are less fortunate. Olmsted had been to the South, he’d seen slavery firsthand, and, as Brace had predicted, it had changed his thinking, utterly.

  In the summer of 1853, Olmsted’s brother returned to America. Since being diagnosed with tuberculosis, John had been living in Italy and Switzerland. He’d hoped that a favorable climate would help arrest the progress of his disease. John and Mary now had a newborn infant son. While overseas, he’d been unable to work as a doctor, the profession for which he’d trained. It was just too demanding, given his illness. He’d made a few dollars writing about Italy for the Philadelphia Bulletin. Otherwise, John’s travels had been bankrolled by his father. The senior Olmsted could always be counted on to provide help—financial or emotional—to John and Fred.

  Fred was there to meet John when his ship, the Humbolt, sailed into New York Harbor. John and his family simply moved to Tosomock Farm. They were at loose ends and planned to stay there until they figured out what to do next.

  Meanwhile, Fred—also adrift—was on the lookout for a writing assignment that would take him off the farm. He approached Raymond with the idea of a London travelogue, or perhaps he could write a series of dispatches on agricultural practices around the United States. Neither idea grabbed Raymond.

  How about another Southern swing then? For his last journey, Olmsted had visited such established slaveholding bastions as Virginia and South Carolina, winding up in Louisiana. Why not pick up where his previous trip had left off with a journey through Texas? Texas had joined the United States as a slave state less than a decade earlier, in 1845. Olmsted proposed a trip across this vast new land to document the effects of slavery on a place very different from the Old South—a frontier society. Raymond was sold on this idea and signed up “Yeoman” for a fresh series of dispatches.

  John asked to join his brother. Fred immediately agreed. The arid climate of Texas, coupled with the invigoration of outdoor life, was seen as a sensible regimen for a tuberculosis sufferer. Here was the plan: The brothers would visit Texas and perhaps continue west all the way to California. Mary and the newborn would stay behind in Staten Island. Whatever needed tending on Tosomock Farm would fall to a pair of contract laborers Olmsted had hired the previous spring.

  Once again, it made sense to leave after the fall harvest. On November 10, 1853, Fred and John set off together on a new Southern adventure.

  The brothers took the unscenic route to Texas. Because Olmsted had already wended his way through much of the South, this time the goal was to get to their destination as quickly as possible. They set out on a westerly course, traveling by railroad, coach, and steamship through Maryland, Ohio, and Kentucky.

  Along the way, the pair did find time for one side trip. They made a jog down to Nashville to meet with Samuel Allison, an old classmate of John’s from Yale. Allison was that rarest of types in Olmsted’s experience, a plantation owner and slaveholder who was truly prosperous. Allison had deep family roots in Tennessee. He lived in a bona fide mansion, set on ample acreage and surrounded by every luxury.

  Olmsted
found Allison far more garrulous than the planters he’d previously met, such as the man who spoke haltingly of guano. But Allison’s views were also disturbing. He argued that slavery must be extended, through a sort of manifest destiny, southward to the Amazon rain forest. He was concerned about impending war in Europe, but chiefly in terms of how it might impact the price of slaves and cotton. Allison was obstreperous. He worked overtime to convince the Olmsted brothers that there had been no gentlemen at Yale and that very few existed in the North, period. On only one occasion, Allison recalled, had he encountered genuine breeding among Northerners. This was when he’d met some Schuylers, members of the old Dutch aristocracy. Olmsted was immensely put off by Allison and was glad to take his leave of the man.

  In Nashville, the brothers boarded a steamboat that traveled along the Cumberland River on route to the mighty Mississippi. Lying in his darkened cabin, Olmsted could hear his fellow passengers laughing and playing cards deep into the night. As the steamer pitched to and fro, he wrestled with his recent encounter with the Nashville plantation owner. He got up and tried to compose his thoughts in a letter to Brace. What was it about Allison that provoked him so? Maybe, Olmsted confessed, he was just insecure in the face of the planter’s easy convictions. One had to admit that his wealth and luxury were enticing. It would be great to feel that comfort was one’s natural station, the fruits of aristocracy. Then again, Allison was so very uncurious. The man seemed to see everything through the narrow prism of his mercantile interests. Sure, he had the financial means to keep more than one candle burning at a time, unlike so many so-called Southern gentlemen. But Olmsted couldn’t help noticing that Allison was still in the grip of a kind of poverty, a cultural poverty. What was Allison’s higher calling—to be a gentleman? What kind of calling was that? If heaven exists, Olmsted posited to Brace, Southerners will be delighted. They will thrive on the leisure. But Northerners will be disappointed. They will just want to get to work. He concluded his letter to Brace with this: “Well, the moral of this damnedly drawn out letter is, I believe, go ahead with the Children’s Aid and get up parks, gardens, music, dancing schools, reunions which will be so attractive as to force into contact the good & bad, the gentlemanly and rowdy.”