Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  Every moment on the peninsula seemed to bring a fresh challenge for the USSC. One Sunday in late May, Olmsted received an order from the quartermaster department to convert the Spaulding, a boat he’d been using, from a floating hospital back into a boat for transporting soldiers. He was given a new boat, the Elm City. Olmsted launched into what by now had become a familiar drill: Remove patients, medical supplies, and bedding from the old boat; scrub down the new boat. He and a crew of thirty surgeons, nurses, and volunteers worked all day. That evening, the quartermaster department issued a new order. Keep the Spaulding, Olmsted was told. The Elm City was the boat the army wanted. Oh, and please load it with sufficient coal for an eighteen-hour journey.

  Now, an entire day’s work—on a Sunday no less—by Olmsted and his crew had to be reversed. It was also necessary to locate twenty tons of coal and load it onto the Elm City. Olmsted made the rounds of other hospital ships currently in his possession, scrounging coal. Meanwhile, two soldiers died during the shuttling back and forth. By four in the morning, the task was complete. The Spaulding was back to being a hospital ship. The Elm City was ready to transport troops.

  Such work was wearying. Such work could make one insane. “Will you please engage a pleasant room for me in Brown’s Bloomingdale Hotel,” joked Olmsted. This was a reference to David Brown, a doctor at Bloomingdale’s Asylum, where he and Vaux had recently done a landscaping job.

  As spring gave way to summer, the fighting along the peninsula grew more desperate and merciless. General McClellan and the Union army pushed to the outskirts of Richmond. There, they fought the battle of Fair Oaks, the largest conflict so far in the Civil War’s eastern theater and second only to Shiloh in terms of casualties. Stationed at a distance, Olmsted was aware of Fair Oaks and gleaned from reports that it had been a bloodbath, but the battle was followed by an eerie calm for the USSC. It was a full day before the injured began to pour in.

  And pour in they did. The wounded arrived by train, and there were so many that Olmsted set up a processing station between the rail depot and his hospital ships. Many arrived at night, so Olmsted used candles to mark a path to guide the soldiers. The processing station consisted of a long trench filled with burning wood, above which hung big iron kettles suspended on forked stakes. Olmsted instructed that the soldiers be given warm gruel and hot coffee, with as much condensed milk as they desired. Those who arrived feverish received brandy and other “stimulants.” The wounded were given lemonade with ice, a luxury. This lemonade treatment was based on the odd notion that someone who had taken a bullet could derive great benefit from a cool drink.

  As the casualties stumbled by, or were carried past on stretchers, the female volunteers tried to determine their ailments and triaged them accordingly. Critical cases went straight to the ships. An overflow hospital, consisting of twenty tents, was set up for the others.

  In the midst of all of this, Olmsted lost contact with Mary. He sent her eight unanswered letters. “I need not say that my anxiety has become painful almost beyond endurance,” he wrote in his ninth missive. “It is useless to speculate on the cause of my not getting letters from you.” As it turned out, Mary had recently moved to a new address. Their home at Mount St. Vincent was being turned into Central Park Hospital, a facility for the Union wounded. These were chaotic times, and with all that was going on, it appears that the couple had failed to communicate on this simple matter.

  For days after Fair Oaks, the trains kept rolling in, at all hours day and night. Sometimes there were several hundred soldiers packed into a single car. Typically, they hadn’t had a drink or a single morsel of food since before the battle. The soldiers showed up, Olmsted observed, “without beds, without straw, at most with a wisp of hay under their heads. They arrived, dead and alive together, in the same close box, many with awful wounds festering.”

  Union and Confederate soldiers often arrived together. Olmsted estimated that about a quarter of the troops treated by the USSC after the battle of Fair Oaks were enemy combatants. While their treatment was the same, he also couldn’t resist some patriotic bias, observing that the rebel wounded were prone to “not only more whimpering, but more fretfulness and bitterness of spirit.”

  The USSC converted boat after boat into floating hospitals. Sometimes as many as five were anchored abreast, and the USSC staff scrambled from one to another using gangplanks. Horrible, inhuman shrieks and howls issued from the State of Maine, designated as the vessel where operations were performed. Whenever a boat filled up, it set off for New York or Boston to deliver patients to hospitals. When things worked out, a USSC hospital transport returned in time to relieve the one that had just left.

  So great was the emergency that Olmsted’s system for registering patients broke down entirely. Throngs of soldiers piled onto the boats. “In this republic of suffering,” Olmsted had recently written, coining an apt phrase for wartime, “individuals do not often become very strongly marked in one’s mind.” Now, this was truer still. Everything had been reduced by the scope of the carnage, leaving only harried USSC workers aiding anonymous soldiers, doing what little was possible.

  Fair Oaks was the pivotal moment of the peninsula campaign. General McClellan had managed to push to within striking range of Richmond. But just when a decisive blow was possible, he held off. This was partly due to McClellan’s innate caution, a trait that earned him the unflattering nickname “Mac the Unready.” He was forever overestimating the number of Confederate troops he faced. His decision also stemmed from his depleted army, badly in need of reinforcements. The peninsula campaign had taken its toll.

  On July 4, 1862, Olmsted sailed up Chesapeake Bay, en route to Washington, aboard the Wilson Small, a steamer that had become his floating headquarters. As he moved north, he was distressed to see that not a single boat bearing soldiers was headed south. Why weren’t reinforcements being sent?

  Next day, Olmsted arrived in Washington. He went to the White House hoping for an audience with Lincoln. But the president was indisposed. He had taken to his bed in the middle of the day, apparently worn out by the demands of the war. Sailing back south, Olmsted composed a letter to Lincoln. He begged the president for 50,000 fresh troops. “Without these,” he wrote, “the best army the world ever saw must lie idle, and, in discouragement and dejection, be wasted by disease.”

  Olmsted sent the letter to a fellow USSC commissioner and instructed him to deliver it. But it was no use. Soon McClellan was retreating back down the Virginia peninsula. Where only weeks before the USSC had been overwhelmed, the flow of soldiers in need of help now slowed to a trickle. Olmsted and some of the USSC volunteers sat out on the deck of a boat for a whole night, reminiscing about the intense experience they had shared together. Every so often, way in the distance, they could see a flash, hear a vague rumble, as a shell exploded. The military campaign itself seemed to be fading away.

  By mid-July 1862, Olmsted’s work on the peninsula was done. He sailed to New York aboard the Daniel Webster. Katharine Wormeley watched as the Chief disembarked. Olmsted appeared haggard, but she also thought she noticed something triumphant in his manner. The peninsula campaign may have been a tactical failure for McClellan, but for Olmsted, achievement was measured by a different yardstick. He estimated that USSC hospital transports had cared for perhaps 10,000 soldiers. Back in New York, the first thing he did was arrange for the USSC to send a boatload of vegetables to the retreating troops to stave off scurvy. “The summer’s work has paid splendidly in lives saved and pain alleviated,” he told the Reverend Henry Bellows.

  Olmsted spent the first years of the Civil War in a kind of heightened state of awareness, agonized by the human misery he witnessed, exultant when he was able to provide some measure of relief. His energy level was staggering, but the exertion came at a price. As the war dragged on, he would become increasingly prone to both despondency and panic. Still, the amount he accomplished is quite simply amazing. It’s almost as if Olmsted was in two places at o
nce.

  Sometimes he was. While Olmsted was on the Virginia peninsula, making a difference with his hospital transports, he was also making an impact across the Atlantic, with a just-published literary effort.

  Right before the Civil War started, Olmsted had been approached by a London publishing house, Sampson Low, Son & Company. The firm had done the English editions of Olmsted’s Southern trilogy. They had asked whether Olmsted would be willing to abridge those books into a single volume that might find a fresh audience.

  All together, Olmsted’s Southern trilogy had sold maybe 25,000 copies. Commercially, the series had been underwhelming. But the books had achieved an outsized influence. Not so many people read Olmsted, but the right people read him—politicians, professors, and journalists. While numerous abolitionist titles were available, many of them full of fervent moralizing, Olmsted’s readers valued his nuanced firsthand accounts of plantation life and his sophisticated critique of slavery on economic grounds. Charles Eliot Norton, the noted critic who would later become a friend of Olmsted’s, described the books as “the most important contribution to an exact acquaintance with the conditions and result of slavery in this country that have ever been published. They have permanent value, and will be chief material for our social history, whenever it is written.”

  Olmsted’s books had also found a small but influential audience in England. Charles Dickens, who had traveled widely in the American South, was impressed with the accuracy of Olmsted’s reporting. Karl Marx, who lived in London from 1849 onward, cited Olmsted’s writings in Capital, his monumental three-volume work. Charles Darwin was so horrified by some of the incidents described in Olmsted’s A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States that he couldn’t sleep at night. This was at the time when Darwin was writing Origin of Species, so Olmsted’s work had special resonance. Given Darwin’s thesis that all humans shared common ancestry, the idea that one person could enslave another seemed grotesquely contrary to nature.

  Olmsted had jumped at the opportunity to publish a new work for English readers, even though Sampson Low offered no payment. Olmsted teamed up with Daniel Goodloe to prepare the new edition. Goodloe was a wise choice. A onetime clerk for President Zachary Taylor, he had lost his job due to a letter he wrote in praise of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He had become editor of the abolitionist National Era, where he wrote frequently on the economics of slavery, a topic of special Olmsted expertise.

  Olmsted well knew that editing one’s own work is like digging one’s own grave, so he gladly handed that task off to Goodloe. Time was tight, so he gave Goodloe latitude to cut as he saw fit. Goodloe pared three volumes, 606,000 words, down to a single work of 276,500 words. Meanwhile, Olmsted updated the data used in the earlier volumes. He changed the average price of a slave to $1,400, adjusted for inflation from $1,000, the figure he’d used a few years before.

  While work on the volume was under way, the Civil War had broken out. Early in the summer of 1861, just as Olmsted began his tenure with the USSC, he had finished the book. He added a new introduction, “The Present Crisis,” that covered events right up to the first shots at Fort Sumter. Now, he stated, his “impression” about the South had hardened into a “conviction.” He also framed this new introduction so as to specifically address British readers: “It is said that the South can never be subjugated. It must be, or we must. It must be, or not only our American republic is a failure, but our English justice and our English law and our English freedom are failures.” As a final touch, Olmsted repositioned a particularly brutal episode he’d witnessed during his Southern travels, the whipping of the slave Sall. He placed it at the end of the new volume, making it the dramatic climax. Olmsted titled his book The Cotton Kingdom.

  Olmsted’s timing was perfect. In A Journey in the Back Country, published in 1860, he had warned that Southern secession would bring war. That prediction had borne out. Just as the Civil War began, Olmsted had a brand-new volume, full of his unique observations about the South and aimed at an English audience.

  Early on, Great Britain was surprisingly ambivalent about the Union. The Trent Affair, where Northerners boarded a British ship to seize two Confederate diplomats, had actually brought England and the Union to the brink of war. The influential Times of London provided sympathetic coverage to the Southern cause. In some British circles, Jefferson Davis was viewed as a superior, more experienced executive than Abraham Lincoln. British companies would even manufacture two battleships for the Confederacy, the CSS Alabama and CSS Florida.

  The Confederacy, in turn, was banking on Britain coming to its aid. England can’t live without our cotton was the Southern refrain. “What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years?” demanded South Carolina senator James Hammond in a famous speech, shortly before the Civil War. “England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her save the South. No! You dare not make war upon cotton; no power on earth dare make war upon it. Cotton is king.” Olmsted had taken his book’s title from Senator Hammond’s famous speech.

  The Cotton Kingdom was no best-seller. But once again, Olmsted managed to reach the opinion leaders in English society. Emma Darwin, wife of Charles, wrote the following in a letter to J. D. Hooker, the celebrated British botanist: “About America I think the slaves are gradually getting freed & that is what I chiefly care for. The Times evidently thinks that is to be deplored, but I think all England has to read up Olmsted’s works—again & get up its Uncle Tom again.”

  The Cotton Kingdom received favorable notices in such high-tone British publications as the Athenaeum and the Westminster Review. In an essay in Fraser’s, John Stuart Mill argued that Britain and the Confederacy were at odds—cotton be damned—and if the South was victorious in its current conflict, he predicted war with England within five years. As to what had led him to such conclusions, Mill credited the “calm and dispassionate Mr. Olmsted.”

  England would undergo a shift on the question of its loyalties in the conflict. In the end, not only would Britain withhold its military support from the South, but it also refused even to recognize the Confederacy as a legitimate government. It’s difficult to assess the precise extent of Olmsted’s influence on British public opinion. Crediting him with convincing England not to side with the South would surely be going too far. But it’s clear that he helped shape the debate. And the truly remarkable thing: He did so by means of a book, The Cotton Kingdom, published at the same time that he was busy—crazily busy—running the USSC.

  Small wonder that by August 1862, Olmsted was exhausted. His Civil War service had been harrowing. This, on the heels of several years filled with traumatic events: the death of his brother, a carriage accident, the death of a child. Shortly after Olmsted returned from the Virginia peninsula, he experienced another of his breakdowns. This time it appears that he was suffering from something akin to what’s now known as posttraumatic stress syndrome.

  Olmsted spent a week recuperating on Staten Island with his family. Upon returning to Washington, his condition grew worse. He was nauseous and had a perpetual ringing headache. To combat his symptoms, he was given mercury. Mercury was used as a purgative to flush toxins from the body. Typically, it was administered in the form of tiny blue pills. By the 1860s, the medicinal use of mercury was in decline. People were becoming aware that it was a toxin in its own right.

  The phrase mad as a hatter is based on the observation that there was a high incidence of insanity among people who made hats for a living. Mercury nitrate used to be the favored compound for removing fur from pelts to create felt for hats. Eventually, the connection was made between mercury and insanity. For someone such as Olmsted, given to fragile emotional states, probably nothing could be more counterproductive than taking those tiny blue pills.

  Olmsted soon developed jaundice along with a bizarre skin irritation. “I itched furiously,” he wrote his wife, “and where I plowed the surface with my fingerends, it presently became purple, and a purple maculation began t
o grow on my arms. A little exertion or excitement shook me so that my voice trembled.”

  After another round of recuperation in Saratoga Springs, he headed back to Washington, stopping in New York again for more family time and a visit with Vaux. His partner had been diagnosed with malaria. Fever had caused Vaux to have wild hallucinations, and he had been acting so rashly that a nurse sometimes needed to restrain him. Andrew Green had tried to visit, and Vaux had demanded that Green leave. “He has said, of course, some very clever and sensible things,” quipped Olmsted.

  During Olmsted’s visit, Vaux babbled about glass and colors and drapery and seemed to believe he could float in the air. Olmsted departed, terribly distressed by Vaux’s condition. The pair had worked out an arrangement where they shared the annual proceeds from their position with Central Park, with Olmsted taking $2,000 and Vaux receiving $2,500, since he did more work. After seeing Vaux, Olmsted reduced his own share to $1,200. He borrowed $300 from his father to help out the Vaux household.