Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  Green’s goading was maddening, but deep down what really smarted for Olmsted was the inability to arrive at a precise number. He prided himself on achieving a rare combination, both artist and administrator. This required a grasp of the data: 288 park keeper arrests in 1859, $30 to be paid to a contractor for each transplanted elm that survives three years. Numbers are the currency of the practical realm, and with Green as his witness, Olmsted had busted an annual budget and couldn’t even account for the discrepancy.

  Given the situation, Olmsted opted for the only suitable course. He decided to resign. He didn’t want to go, but he took comfort at least in the fact that the bulk of the work was complete. Of course, Central Park wasn’t finished, never really would be in the final way of a Vermeer or the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper. It is, after all, a kind of living artwork. But by the end of 1860, Olmsted and Vaux had placed their stamp on Central Park, inexorably. As Olmsted had recently written to his father, “I have fixed what I most cared for on the park beyond reconsideration.”

  Olmsted’s resignation letter was forty-one pages long, full of selflaceration, grand claims, petty excuses, and digressions about art, finance, and god-knows-what. Although the letter was meant for the entire board, it repeatedly employed the salutation “Sir,” as in: “It is humiliating to me, Sir, to be dealt with in this way.” Perhaps this was a rhetorical device, intended by Olmsted to create a sense of intimacy, as if he was addressing a single person rather than an entire board. Maybe Olmsted was addressing a single person—Green.

  Olmsted’s resignation is a wild and woolly document. Just as Vaux’s bumbling manner somehow managed to convey a passion for art, something also shone through these forty-one rambling pages. “I love the park,” Olmsted wrote. “I rejoice in it and am too much fastened to it in every fibre of my character to give up. ... I don’t care a copper for myself, Sir, or for what becomes of me, but I do care for the park, which will last long after I’m dead and gone, years & years, I hope.”

  The board talked Olmsted down. Even Green appears to have been moved. Olmsted was persuaded to stay on, and it was even agreed that his resignation letter would be stricken from the minutes of the meeting at which it was considered. The board needed this man who had designed and then executed a masterpiece out of stone and turf and trees.

  The winter of 1860–1861 was another severe one for New York City. When the snow finally melted, a reporter for the New York World decided to visit Central Park. The reporter was surprised to see virtually no one there.

  It was the middle of the week in a kind of in-between season. The skaters, the people who came by the thousands to ride horse-drawn sleighs, the Scottish immigrants who enjoyed the sport of curling on a frozen corner of the Lake—all had departed with the first thaw. The horseback riders, Dodworth concertgoers, Ramble perambulators, and baseball players were yet to arrive.

  The previous summer, Central Park had already seen its first baseball games, and there’s even a newspaper account of a game where the Atlantic, a team from Brooklyn, bested the Liberty, hailing from New Brunswick, New Jersey. “The pitching appeared to get the best of the batting,” laments the account. The final score: 15–10.

  On this particular day, however, the reporter from the World noted only the first crocuses poking up out of the ground. And he saw that there were swans on the Lake. There had been swans the previous year, though they had died, perhaps victims of foul play. Many people suspected that they had been poisoned. But now there were new ones. The reporter counted about forty.

  Over the same lake so recently a glaze of ice, tracing and retracing the same paths where the skaters had glided and tumbled and laughed, the swans now traveled ... silent, intent.

  IV

  “Heroes Along with the Rest”

  CIVIL WAR SERVICE, 1861–1863

  CHAPTER 15

  In Search of a Mission

  APRIL 12, 1861, 4:30 a.m.: Rebels open fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. Civil war, long a threat hanging over the nation, has broken out.

  Olmsted immediately started searching for a way to contribute. Because his leg was still terribly damaged from the carriage accident the previous year, because he was still on crutches, Olmsted watched in frustration as his underlings at Central Park enlisted and headed down to Washington.

  Olmsted hungered to be involved, even though this was such a turnabout from the task he was just then completing. Central Park was a rarefied artwork of utmost majesty; war promised to be brutal and soulscarring. Yet for Olmsted, the two were strangely similar. Olmsted viewed the world as a social reformer, first and foremost. Designing a pleasure ground to edify the citizens of a growing metropolis was a noble cause in peacetime. Now it was war. Pleasure grounds were soon to give way to battlegrounds, and joining the cause was the proper course.

  He considered joining the navy, something that would allow him to draw on his experience of sailing to China as a young man. He sent a letter urging his sixty-nine-year-old father to join the navy, too. Olmsted also assembled some members of the park police into a home guard. He led them in military drills, but it felt like mere pageantry in the face of a mounting crisis.

  Ultimately, Olmsted would find the sense of purpose he so keenly desired with the United States Sanitary Commission, a battlefield-relief outfit. The USSC is now largely forgotten but was of incalculable importance in its day. Over the course of the Civil War, under Olmsted’s leadership, the USSC—in the assessment of distinguished historian Allan Nevins—grew into “the most powerful organization for lessening the horrors and reducing the losses of war which mankind had thus far produced.”

  But first the USSC would get off to a terribly choppy start, and its survival would be uncertain. Olmsted’s tenure in the capital would be marked by extreme impatience, particularly at the outset. He’d grown used to making rapid-fire change in his own life. Washington felt so sluggish by contrast. Seven decades after its founding, the city remained a work in progress, in many ways less complete than Central Park. And the leadership in Washington struck Olmsted as terribly ineffectual. At times, it would fill him with disgust.

  This was an earnest stance, naive even, but terribly useful in wartime. The stakes were truly high. Olmsted was someone who genuinely believed that big things could be done quickly.

  While Olmsted would become the recognized public face of the USSC (the “famous Olmsted,” said an awestruck soldier ministered to by FLO himself), it was not his brainchild. In fact, the USSC has its origins in one of those uniquely American grassroots movements.

  Eight days after Sumter, a patriotic rally was held in New York City’s Union Square (named for the union of two main streets, though the choice of venue seems apropos). An estimated 100,000 people were present, at the time the largest gathering in U.S. history. Major Robert Anderson was the big draw and he arrived bearing the very flag—thirty-three stars representing the thirty-three states in the now dissolved Union—that had been lowered when he surrendered Fort Sumter to General Beauregard. Major Anderson placed the flag in the stony grip of a statue of George Washington on horseback. The crowd went wild.

  After the Union Square rally, Major Anderson continued to travel through the North with his Sumter flag on a kind of fire-up-the-Union tour. The results were stunning. Men enlisted in droves. Women formed relief societies in places like Lowell, Massachusetts, and Newport, Rhode Island. They busied themselves sewing blankets, preserving fruit, gathering lint for dressing wounds—all to aid the soldiers who would soon be heading off to battle.

  One of these outfits was the Women’s Central Association of Relief, a group of New York City society women. They contacted the Reverend Henry Bellows, an Olmsted acquaintance, and asked the reverend to lend focus to their work. Apparently, the relief group approached Bellows because of a nineteenth-century convention holding that women required male oversight when participating in heady civic matters. According to an old history of the USSC, “Without concert of effort and a clear idea of c
ommon goals these devoted women might waste their zeal and produce as much harm as good from their excitement.”

  The women could not have lit on a better choice than Bellows, though. A transplanted New Englander and graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, Bellows was known for his urbane sermons, generously laced with progressive social ideas. His congregation at the All Souls Church included some of New York’s most influential citizens, such as William Cullen Bryant, industrialist Peter Cooper, and Moses Grinnell, a prominent merchant. Like Olmsted, like so many Americans at the onset of the Civil War, Bellows was searching about for a way to be meaningfully involved. He seized on the women’s war relief group. As it happens, he had his own brilliant notions about expanding its mission and making it much more than a local New York City aid society.

  Bellows envisioned a central organization that could coordinate the activities of all the various women’s relief outfits—Hartford, Cleveland, and Lowell—lately cropping up across the Union. Items such as blankets the women made, supplies like shoes that were donated, and money that was raised—all of it could be so much better used if it were funneled from the local relief societies into some kind of national clearinghouse.

  Bellows had an ambitious vision for this new organization. Besides acting as a central supply depot, the relief outfit, as Bellows saw it, could act as an adviser to the woefully shorthanded Medical Bureau, still staffed for a peacetime army. Surgeons at the front were likely to be poorly trained and overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the carnage. Maybe Bellow’s group could circulate monographs filled with sanitary advice, sanitary—in nineteenth-century parlance—meaning hygiene and cleanliness practices that could prevent disease. Perhaps it could also disseminate medical best practices, gleaned during recent Continental wars.

  During the 1850s, Britain and its allies had fought Russia in the Crimean War, a punishing conflict for control of a Black Sea peninsula. Within months of the war’s outbreak, the death rate among British troops had climbed to a startling annualized clip of more than 100 percent. Statistically speaking, that meant the entire army was on track to be dead within less than a year!

  Still more disturbing, 97 percent of the deaths happened not on the battlefield but in makeshift barracks hospitals from diseases such as typhus, cholera, and dysentery. The cause was obvious: The hospitals in Crimea were grossly overcrowded and relied on Dark Ages hygienic practices. In response, the British Sanitary Commission was created to clean up the pestilent barracks hospitals and change the military’s medical culture. Within a year, mortality had plummeted to an annualized rate of 25 out of 1,000 men.

  Now, as the Civil War began, Bellows proposed a similar outfit, dubbed the United States Sanitary Commission. Bellows assembled a board of notable men. Among them were prominent citizens such as George Templeton Strong, a New York City lawyer, and distinguished doctors such as Elisha Harris, chief physician of the quarantine hospital on Staten Island. There were career military officers and members of the government, such as Alexander Bache, superintendent of the U.S. Coast Survey and a great-grandson of Ben Franklin. Bellows rounded out his board with Oliver Wolcott Gibbs, America’s most accomplished chemist.

  The reverend went to Washington to lobby for the USSC. Thanks to his intense commitment, he was able to get his idea up for consideration very quickly. The army’s Medical Bureau did not like the notion of an outside body meddling in its affairs. But the bureau was willing to countenance the USSC so long as it confined its activities to providing supplies and the occasional piece of advice. Lincoln was also less than enamored of the idea; a sanitary commission struck him as unnecessary. But the enterprise slipped past as he settled into the vast, thorny business of executing a war. On June 13, he signed an executive order launching the USSC. “I approve the above. A. Lincoln,” he wrote.

  Bellows immediately turned his attention to finding a general secretary, essentially a chief executive officer to run this new outfit. The reverend had in mind Olmsted, who at thirty-nine was eight years his junior. Bellows was familiar with Olmsted’s work because, as a sometime journalist himself, he had written an article about Central Park for the Atlantic. Olmsted, in turn, had once approached Bellows about contributing to Putnam’s Magazine. The reverend was also a founder of the Century Club, which counted Olmsted as a member. Bellows described Olmsted as “long-headed,” a high compliment that implied prescience and foresight.

  A lot had changed in a few short years. When he landed the initial job as Central Park superintendent, there had been doubts about Olmsted’s administrative experience. At the time, he’d never managed more than eight people. Viele had questioned his pragmatism. But Olmsted’s work had gained him a national reputation as a talented administrator.

  Still, nothing in Olmsted’s background really qualified him to run a medical commission. Then again, nothing had prepared him to design a park. America was still in the grip of a pioneer spirit that valued derringdo over narrow specialization. This was doubly so with the outbreak of war; a kind of all-hands-on-deck attitude was now in sway.

  On June 20, 1861, Olmsted was offered the job and immediately accepted. In a letter to his half-sister Bertha, he described his new post: “It is a good big work I have in hand, giving me absorbing occupation and the sort of connection with the work of the nation without which I should be very uncomfortable.” He was granted a leave of absence from Central Park with the understanding that he would return periodically from Washington to continue work on the project. It was nearing completion, in any case. There would be other reasons to return, too. His wife planned to stay in New York. She was pregnant.

  Olmsted traveled to Washington by train. While making this same journey a decade before, he’d had his first glimpses of slavery. Now he witnessed his first evidence of a nation at war. Outside Havre de Grace, Maryland, he spotted a sign scratched in charcoal: “Bloody 11th Camp C.” As the train rolled on, he began to see scattered encampments with little groups of soldiers, squatting in front of tents, tending fires, muskets leaned together.

  Olmsted arrived in Washington at sundown and took a carriage to his hotel. The first sight that greeted him was the Capitol building, sitting on a low hill in an arrested state of repair. Its marble wings were unfinished; scaffolding surrounded a new, larger dome then under construction. The Washington Monument, half built, rose above a scruffy mall. Landscaping efforts had stalled in the aftermath of Downing’s death; the ambitious park that Downing and Vaux had been commissioned to design had never been realized.

  This was not the seat of a mighty war machine . . . not yet. It was really nothing more than a large town, population 75,000, according to the 1860 census. Even the major thoroughfares were largely unpaved and lined with stables and saloons, boardinghouses and little shops. Official Washington was represented by just a scattering of structures, including the redbrick headquarters of the Navy, State, and War departments and the Greek Revival building where Treasury resided. The White House, circa 1861, opened onto a small park where anyone could amble, right up to the front door.

  Still, this was the capital. In fact, Southerners had until recently held designs on making Washington capital of the Confederacy. They might have succeeded had they not been driven off by the small fighting force that trickled into Washington during the first days of the war. The rebels soon took up in Richmond instead. Washington was guarded by a single fort, twelve miles to the south.

  Olmsted checked into the Willard, the only halfway respectable hotel in town. It featured bathrooms on every floor, a rare luxury. Until recently, both Union supporters and secessionists had continued to stay at the Willard. To minimize friction, a convention had grown up: Northerners used the Pennsylvania Avenue door, while Southerners used the door on F Street. Now, this was Union territory. While covering the Civil War for the Atlantic, Nathaniel Hawthorne would use the Willard as his base.

  On his first night, Olmsted undertook his first official duty. He visited one of the camps on the outskirts o
f Washington. He was issued an official pass, inscribed with an ominous warning: If Olmsted fought against the Union or gave aid to the enemy, he would be subject to the death penalty. After drinking a brandy with a group of officers, he bedded down in a tent but had trouble sleeping due to strange noises such as sentinels making their rounds. Next morning, in the light of day, Olmsted was shocked by what he saw. Olmsted visited another nineteen camps in the days ahead, encountering endless variations on the same unsettling themes.

  Camps were crowded and filthy, with enlisted men packed five deep into stuffy little wedge tents. Many preferred to sleep outside on the hard ground. Each camp was supposed to have an eight-foot trench that served as a makeshift toilet. It was supposed to be covered once a day with six inches of fresh dirt. This regulation was routinely ignored. The men were in the habit of relieving themselves wherever they could find a free spot. Reaching the edge of camp was a bother at night, a luxury by day.

  This was largely a volunteer army, so the enlistees wore whatever they could piece together. Often uniforms were poorly made, and they were anything but uniform. Where items were missing the soldiers improvised, going barefoot in boots if they lacked socks, substituting straw hats for caps.

  Some took the improvisation to great lengths. Entire regiments were outfitted for a kind of wartime fantasia. In the preceding years, magazines had carried numerous stories about Zouaves, fierce battalions of Algerian soldiers who had sided with the French in North Africa. The exploits of these legendary fighters had captured the popular imagination. As a consequence, a number of so-called Zouave regiments were formed. Freshfaced Northern recruits emulated the dress of the Algerians, right down to the billowing trousers, wool turbans, and sashes, items appropriate for desert warfare but ridiculous for doing battle along the Atlantic seaboard.