Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  Olmsted was familiar with the Sea Islands from his travels while writing his Southern books. He knew that Port Royal contained roughly one hundred of the richest cotton plantations in the Confederacy. He also knew that it was an incredibly isolated place, due in part to widespread diseases such as malaria and yellow fever. The Port Royal plantations were worked by the Gullah, blacks brought as slaves from West Africa, from areas that are now such countries as Gambia, Senegal, and Guinea-Bissau. In the New World, the Gullah proved immune to the diseases that periodically swept the Carolina lowlands. This was probably due to some kind of inherited resistance built up over generations in West Africa, where the same diseases were prevalent.

  A unique master-slave relationship had grown up in the Port Royal plantations. Here, the white masters were in the habit of keeping their distance from the slaves. Even a vast plantation might have only a few white overseers. During the rainy season, when disease was rampant, the whites simply retreated inland. As a result, the Gullah didn’t have the kind of contact with whites found elsewhere in Southern plantation culture. Many of the Gullahs’ African cultural traditions remained intact. They even spoke their own dialect, as some of their descendants continue to do today. Goober, meaning peanut, is a Gullah word derived from n’guba, a word in the Kikongo language spoken in West Africa. Gumbo is another Gullah word, this one from Umbundu, another West African language.

  When Sherman invaded Port Royal, the handful of whites had turned tail. But the Gullah had not joined them. This circumstance, Olmsted recognized, gave the lie to a favorite Southern notion, namely, that slaves enjoyed a beneficial relationship with masters and would voluntarily join them in all situations. In this most isolated patch of the Confederacy, where slaves could easily be misinformed about the motives of the Union army, the Gullah chose not to join their fleeing masters.

  To Olmsted, Port Royal presented an opportunity for a worthy experiment. He envisioned the former slaves still working the cotton plantations, but for their own profit and livelihood. With the Civil War in progress, this could be quite an object lesson, showing that blacks were capable of being moral, vital, productive members of society. In his books, Olmsted had argued that free labor trumped slave labor because it was a natural state, governed by practical self-interest and incentives. Now Olmsted saw a unique chance to prove his ideas. Perhaps Southerners would at last see slavery for the corrupt institution it was.

  Olmsted had grown adept at moving between one situation and another, going from farmer to writer to park maker to head of the USSC. Constant change had become his personal status quo. Enticed by what he saw as a perfect opportunity, he began approaching power brokers in Washington, such as Salmon Chase, the treasury secretary. He proposed himself as “commissioner of contrabands” for the Port Royal plantations. Contrabands was a term then commonly in use, with overtones of property law, applied to blacks who were no longer slaves but not yet free, either.

  Olmsted described his proposed new role as an “ambition with which I am fired,” adding, “I have, I suppose, given more thought to the special question of the proper management of negroes in a state of limbo between slavery & freedom than anyone else in the country. I think, in fact, that I should find here my ‘mission’ which is really something I am pining to find, in this war.” In a letter to his father, he added, “I shall go to Port Royal, if I can, and work out practically every solution of the slavery question—long ago advocated in my book. I have talked it over with Mary and she agrees.”

  As an experienced farmer, Olmsted knew that it was necessary to act immediately. Already it was autumn, and by February the fields would need to be listed (shaped with hoes so cotton seeds could take root), and planting loomed in April. A delay would mean a missed growing season, and, rather than a noble experiment, the Union would be stuck with 12,000 paupers on its hands.

  Olmsted launched a kind of all-fronts campaign. He dashed off a letter to Lincoln, outlining his “thoughts about the management of the negroes at Port Royal.” He hoped the president would support his bid to be commissioner of contrabands. He revived the pseudonym “Yeoman” and wrote an editorial for the New York Times, arguing that Port Royal could be the prototype for an experiment repeated across the South. Whenever a region was captured, the former slaves could work the plantation lands themselves, for their own livelihood. Over time, pockets of free blacks would be found everywhere across the South, and escaped slaves could be expected to rush to these beacon communities. “A hostile force would thus invade the enemy in his very stronghold,” he wrote.

  Olmsted even teamed up with another congressman for another bill, to create a commissioner of contrabands post for Port Royal. This time, he worked with Lafayette Foster, a senator from Connecticut. Apparently, Olmsted drafted the bill, and Senator Foster didn’t change a single word.

  Knowing that time was crucial with the cotton crop, the bill was constructed broadly. Olmsted was careful to avoid any controversial provisions. For example, the bill didn’t delve into the legal status of blacks in Port Royal, referring to them simply as “indigents” and “vagrants.” As for what department would oversee this project (War and Treasury were the natural candidates), those details were left to be worked out later. Olmsted lobbied hard. He drew up a petition and sent it to his father, who in turn got seventy-five signatures from citizens in Hartford. He circulated similar petitions in Boston, Chicago, New Haven, and New York, which were then used to drum up support for the bill in the House of Representatives. Olmsted intended to force action and quickly; he resolved to “keep up a steady hard fire without rest or intermission for a single day.”

  CHAPTER 16

  In the Republic of Suffering

  OLMSTED APPEARED TO be headed for Port Royal to become commissioner of contrabands. Then everything changed. Olmsted became aware that he had misread the political winds in Washington. He had been counting on Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase to act as his sponsor for the Port Royal post. But it became clear that the secretary had no real authority to appoint Olmsted, and, further, Chase had not even bothered to read Senator Foster’s bill.

  Olmsted withdrew his name from Chase’s consideration. He refocused all his efforts on lobbying Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war, and apparently the person with the authority to appoint someone to Port Royal. Foster’s bill passed quickly, but Olmsted was not Stanton’s choice. Instead, the secretary picked a brigadier general to act as commissioner of contrabands. Port Royal wouldn’t wind up being a disaster; the government didn’t get stuck with 12,000 paupers. Neither did it become the noble experiment, the beacon to slaves throughout the South, that Olmsted had envisioned.

  But at the exact moment the Port Royal post fell through, the bill to reorganize the Medical Bureau passed Congress. Olmsted wrote an exultant letter to his father, in which he also showed himself to be a sly observer of the Washington legislative process: “As for the Sanitary Commission, our success is suddenly wonderfully complete. The Medical Bill after having been kicked about like a football, from House to Committee & Committee to House & over & over again, at each kick losing on one side & gaining on another, until it was so thoroughly flabbergasted that nobody knew where or what it was, and a new one had to be started—this process repeated several times—all of sudden a bill which is just the thing we wanted quietly passes thro’ both houses the same day and before we know it is a law.”

  Victory was made still sweeter by a coincidence. Clement Finley, the hidebound surgeon general, got into a personal scrape with Secretary of War Stanton and was immediately relieved of his duties. He was replaced by William Hammond, an energetic reformer half Finley’s age. Just like that, there was a reorganized Medical Bureau headed by a new surgeon general. The response to this improved circumstance was almost instantaneous. It’s incredible how quickly things moved. With a war on, facing a desperate need for medical aid, Olmsted recommitted to the USSC and mobilized the outfit at dizzying speed.

  A new military campaign
was just getting under way, directed by General McClellan. The goal was to move up the Virginia peninsula, through an area girded by the York River to the east and the James River to the west, and to take Richmond, the Confederate capital. This would be the largest military mobilization the United States had ever undertaken, featuring 121,500 troops, 1,150 wagons, 15,000 horses, and untold tons of equipment and supplies.

  Such a huge mobilization was sure to generate enormous casualties. To support the campaign, the army’s Medical Bureau was ramping up fast, adding hundreds of new surgeons and nurses to attend the injured on the battlefield. But backup would be needed. Per its original mandate, the USSC might be called upon to furnish the surgeons with information on the latest medical practices. And the USSC certainly would need to provide supplies gathered from its network of women’s aids societies, items like bandages for the surgeons’ use and socks and blankets for the soldiers. The USSC might even need to go beyond its official duties. Be prepared, Olmsted was told by the military brass: If there was an overflow of sick and wounded, the USSC might not only be called on for advice and supplies but also have to provide actual medical treatment. With a war on, the lines were blurring. The military’s plan was to furnish the USSC with unused ships that could be converted into floating hospitals stationed along the rivers of the Virginia peninsula. As to how such care was delivered—that was the USSC’s concern.

  As the USSC’s general secretary, Olmsted opted to oversee this endeavor himself. On April 27, 1862—exactly eleven days after the medical bill was signed into law—he set out aboard the Daniel Webster, a small steamer. Accompanying him were some medical personnel he’d drummed up, including four surgeons and twenty male nurses. There were also three carpenters and four female volunteers: Katharine Prescott Wormeley, Christine Kean Griffin, Laura Trotter, and a woman who appears in records only by her last name—Mrs. Blatchford. It was a stunning Sunday afternoon, and the four women sat above deck singing hymns and sewing a red-and-white USSC hospital flag. These were society ladies, drawn from the aid groups that funneled into the USSC. Katharine Wormeley, for instance, was a resident of Newport, Rhode Island, and a French scholar, who became well known after the war for her translations of authors such as Balzac.

  During the voyage, Olmsted oversaw a complete retrofit of the Webster . He ordered an apothecary’s shop built along with bunks to accommodate 250 patients. The entire boat was scrubbed, and various bulkheads were knocked out to open up the circulation of fresh air. It was still a few years before the breakthrough findings of Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister and the existence of microbes remained unknown, but there was a convention that cleanliness—for whatever reason, perhaps its proximity to godliness—could arrest the spread of disease.

  The Webster arrived on the peninsula while the siege of Yorktown was under way. The ship traveled up Cheeseman’s Creek, a tributary of the York River, and weighed anchor. The creek was crowded with military transports and battle ships. On either bank, Olmsted could see the forest, full of tents and thrumming with the activity of thousands of soldiers. As night fell, campfires illuminated this vast temporary city. Soldiers sang and played bugles, and occasionally the sound of big guns roared in the distance.

  Soon, the USSC had its first patients of the peninsula campaign, a group of Union soldiers desperately ill with typhoid fever. By necessity, the overstretched surgeons of the Medical Bureau focused on the battlefield wounded; those who succumbed to illness were given low priority. The sick soldiers had been left unattended in abandoned Confederate barracks that were really nothing more than crude huts. They had been alternately pelted by rain and baked by the sun. Olmsted described the squalid quarters as “a death-place for scores of our men who are piled in there, covered in vermin, dying with their uniforms on and collars up—dying of fever.”

  The soldiers were placed on stretchers and carried onto the Webster. First order was giving them stimulants, the Civil War medicinal description of whiskey and other liquors. Doctors had noticed you could revive someone with a stiff drink, so alcohol was viewed as a stimulant rather than a depressant. The soldiers were also given beef tea with muriatic acid, the oldfangled name for hydrochloric acid. It was considered a tonic when small doses were mixed into a hot drink. The volunteer women used damp sponges to dab the foreheads of those suffering from high fevers. That was about all the medical help then available to typhoidfever victims. Soon the Webster was filled with 182 soldiers, and it set sail for New York, where the sick were transferred to hospitals to convalesce.

  To replace the Webster, the quartermaster department (the army outfit in charge of transporting soldiers) issued Olmsted a new boat, the Ocean Queen. This was a 2,800-ton side-wheel steamship that had once belonged to Cornelius Vanderbilt. Olmsted assembled a fresh crew of USSC workers and ordered them to retrofit it for floating-hospital duty. Then he went ashore to bury a dead soldier.

  When Olmsted returned, he saw two small boats pulled up alongside the Ocean Queen. Both were packed with soldiers who had fallen ill with typhoid fever. Olmsted protested that the Ocean Queen wasn’t yet outfitted for patients; there wasn’t a single doctor among his new crew. Too late: Sick soldiers began staggering onto the Ocean Queen, and soon there were 900 onboard. Olmsted went onshore and after considerable searching located a single doctor willing to help out with this deluge of the infirm.

  Meanwhile, the female volunteers discovered a barrel of Indian meal tucked away in some forgotten corner of the Ocean Queen. When Olmsted returned after nightfall, they were ladling it out of buckets to the soldiers. Here’s his description of the scene: “Poor, pale, emaciated, shivering wretches were lying anywhere, on the cabin floors, crying with sobbing, trembling voices, ‘God bless you, Miss! God bless you!’ ... I never saw such misery or such gratitude.”

  Olmsted made the rounds cautiously, favoring his shattered left leg, careful not to step on the soldiers crowded everywhere on the decks of the Ocean Queen. The men lay head-to-head, taking up every available bit of space. Casting his lantern light across the ailing masses, he was pained to see how many of the soldiers had died. Olmsted limped back to his bunk and collapsed into exhausted sleep.

  Olmsted proved to be a talented administrator. As much as he was a writer or park maker, this was starting to be an important part of how he defined himself. He drew up rules on the chain of command, time of meals, and how to process patients. He divided work into two watches—“sea fashion”—based on his long-ago voyage to China. Upon receiving a new ship, he’d divide it into wards, segregating those with communicable diseases from those with other ailments. For many of his patients, the problem was simple exhaustion. These soldiers needed a few days free from combat duty, he figured, and it was imperative not to expose them to disease while they recuperated.

  Many of the troops were shockingly young, some just thirteen. So there was also the problem of soldiers who faked illness but were merely homesick. Upon learning that one of his ships had a large number of patients angling to return to New York City and its environs, Olmsted diverted the ship to Boston instead. He figured this would send a message: Don’t rely on hospital transports to desert the army.

  Whenever the ships returned from various ports, Olmsted always tried to arrange for them to carry fresh USSC supplies along with female volunteers—and more surgeons, always more surgeons.

  For the first part of the peninsula campaign, the USSC dealt mostly with disease victims. It aided relatively few soldiers who had been wounded in battle. All that changed with the battle of Williamsburg. The Medical Bureau surgeons were totally overwhelmed by the sheer volume of injuries. For days after the battle, wounded soldiers lay where they had fallen, suffering and starving.

  Those who survived were often carried to the USSC’s hospital transports anchored along the York River and its tributaries. Once aboard, surgeons would begin by rubbing a little powdered opium into a soldier’s wounds. Syringes for injecting morphine didn’t become available until later in the w
ar. Once the pain had deadened, it was possible to extract the bullet. For amputations, necessary on almost any wound to an extremity, chloroform was available as a general anesthetic—if one was lucky. Next, a dresser would pack lint around a soldier’s wound and apply bandages. Aftercare fell to the female volunteers; it consisted of washing the wounds with soapy water and putting on fresh lint and bandages.

  This was so much more than the good ladies of Hartford and Cleveland had signed on for. And it was thrilling! The female volunteers had expected to be charged with domestic duties aboard the hospital transports—cooking, cleaning, laundry—similar to what they did in their own households. Instead, they were helping soldiers in dire need, cleaning wounds and doling out medicine.

  Olmsted was a stickler about proper registration of any soldier who came onboard a hospital transport. He wanted to know a soldier’s company and regiment, for when he returned to combat, and next of kin, in case he died. For the female volunteers, one of the most poignant duties involved recording a soldier’s last words or, as Olmsted described it, “catching for mother or wife the priceless, last faint whispers of the dying.”

  The volunteers sent letters to loved ones with details about how the soldier died, the cause, and his final wishes. One bereaved wife wrote back, deeply pained that she hadn’t gotten to see her husband’s corpse. “Give him back to me dead if he is dead,” she begged, “for I must see him.” The soldier had been buried under an elm tree in an unmarked grave. In an effort to provide some comfort, one of the volunteers drew a sketch of his final resting place and sent it to the widow.

  Some of the women who worked on the hospital transports kept diaries or wrote letters that have survived. From these, it’s clear that service aboard the ships was harrowing but also strangely rewarding. It’s also clear that the female volunteers held Olmsted in special reverence. They called him “Chief” and were deeply appreciative of the trust and responsibility he granted them. Katharine Wormeley’s diary includes a vivid observation about Olmsted’s appearance and countenance:He is small, and lame . . . but though the lameness is decided, it is scarcely observable, for he gives you a sense that he triumphs over it by doing as if it did not exist. His face is generally very placid, with all the expressive delicacy of a woman’s, and would be beautiful were it not for an expression which I cannot fathom,—something which is, perhaps, a little too severe about it.... He has great variety of expression: sometimes stern, thoughtful, and haggard; at other times observing and slightly satirical (I believe he sees out of the back of his head occasionally); and then again, and not seldom, his face wears an inspired look, full of goodness and power. I think he is a man of the most resolute self-will,—generally a very wise will, I should think; born an autocrat, however, and, as such, very satisfactory to be under. His reticence is one of his strong points: he directs everything in the fewest possible words; there is a deep, calm thoughtfulness about him which is always attractive and sometimes—provoking.