A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Cent

by Rybczynski, Witold

  He remembers the trip from Norfolk, Virginia, to Raleigh, North Carolina, about one hundred and sixty miles. That is less than the distance from New York to Boston, which have recently been joined by rail. But what would have been a simple, daylong train journey in the North, here turned out to be a series of misadventures. He arrived in Norfolk after visiting the District of Columbia and Richmond, and spending Christmas with Fred Kingsbury’s uncle in Petersburg, Virginia. He also made a detour to see the Great Dismal Swamp, as a favor to Harriet Beecher Stowe, who planned to use this locale as the setting for her second antislavery novel.1 In Norfolk, he found that the only good hotel had been closed down due to insufficient business, and when he did find a room, there was rainwater from a leaky roof puddling on the floor, and no fireplace. It was January, and he was so cold and damp that he was obliged to go down to the warm but smoke-filled and stinking public bar. He sat in a corner and listened to the landlord and his drunken cronies complaining loudly and obscenely about the infidel abolitionists, chief among them the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin!

  The next morning, as he was about to have breakfast, he was told he would have to leave immediately or he would miss his train. He suspected he was being cheated since he had already been charged for the meal—this had happened to him once before. Nevertheless, he hurried to catch the ferry across the river to the railroad station. He and the porter carrying his luggage arrived at the dock just in time to see the stern of the departing boat. There was nothing to be done, so he bought some food from a market stall and sat down to wait. Twenty minutes later the ferry returned. His anxiety about missing the train—and having to spend another twenty-four hours in that dismal hotel—was aggravated when, halfway across the river, the paddleboat began to drift with the current because its stoker had gone to sleep. Finally, they arrived at the railroad station, a full half hour late. The train had not left; indeed, the ticket office was not even open. It was another hour before they pulled out of the station.

  The tracks ran eighty miles to Weldon, North Carolina, where a stagecoach was to carry the passengers fifteen miles to the village of Gaston, another railhead. By now it was well past lunchtime; the coach driver told him he had time to eat. At the inn he wolfed down some cold sweet potatoes. Fifteen minutes later he hurried outside, only to find that the stage, with his two valises on board, had left. The landlord, who had neglected to notify him, now pleasantly suggested he should stay the night. He declined and jogged up the road, soon overtaking the lumbering coach.

  The road was so muddy and rutted that progress was slow, and often precarious. At one point the coach turned over entirely on its side. It took four hours to reach their destination. Or almost to reach it. The stagecoach driver stopped abruptly and announced that it was too late in the day and this was as far as he would go. They were on the bank of the Roanoke River. Gaston was on the other side, a mile upstream, he told his now thoroughly distraught passengers. A scow across the river would come—“You jast holler,” he said, and drove away. No amount of hollering could convince the ferrymen to traverse the river—evidently there were too few passengers to make it worthwhile. As night fell, Olmsted volunteered to stay behind and guard the trunks and valises while the rest of the company walked up the road and crossed the railroad bridge to Gaston. One of the men soon returned with a barge and a gang of Negroes, and the baggage was soon loaded and brought up the river to the village.

  The train that was to have taken them to Raleigh was long gone. When Olmsted asked one of the railroad men how often the advertised connection between the stagecoach and the railroad occurred, the answer was “Not very often, sir; it hain’t been once, in the last two weeks.” He and the other stranded passengers were forced to stay overnight in a dismal hotel, undoubtedly operated by the railroad company, he thought. The next afternoon, the train arrived—one and a half hours late, this time. His journey to New Orleans continued in a like fashion: missed connections, delayed trains, bad roads, misinformation, indifferent service, and swindling publicans.

  • • • •

  Now Olmsted glances up at the barely visible, dark shore. He can see the glimmering lights of what he assumes must be plantation houses. That’s where he’s going now, to visit a plantation. Fashion Plantation, in St. Charles Parish, belongs to the only son of former president Zachary Taylor. He knows Dick Taylor from Yale and is looking forward to seeing him, and to learning about the detailed operation of a sugar plantation. He has already visited several plantations in Virginia and Georgia, but he is not satisfied that he really understands plantation life. It has proved more difficult than he expected to glean information from suspicious owners, closemouthed overseers, and silent Negroes. On the whole, he is discouraged with his journey so far. The vicissitudes of travel, and the few days that he spends in each place, have made it difficult to arrive at any coherent impression of Southern slavery. His writing is not going well, either. After a flurry of fourteen articles written while he was in Virginia, he has produced only four in the last six weeks.

  At least he is being published. He has in his coat pocket a fresh copy of the February 16 New-York Daily Times, which he has picked up in New Orleans. It contains his first article. He had privately admitted to his father that he thinks the first two articles are the “poorest of the lot,” but still, he feels pride at seeing his own words in print—on page two, no less. Raymond has written a fulsome editorial introducing the series. Olmsted agrees with the editor’s observation that most writing about slavery is from a preconceived point of view, but will his own reports really be able to “supply a defect which every unprejudiced person, at all interested in such inquiries, cannot fail to have felt”? It is an ambitious claim, perhaps too ambitious. Nor is he happy about the headline that Raymond has assigned to the series: “The South, Letters on the Productions, Industry and Resources of the Slave States.” It promises more than he fears he will be able to deliver.

  The ship’s bell rings, as it does every time they are about to dock. The clerk comes to tell him that in ten minutes they will be at Fashion. He goes to the deck at the bow of the steamboat. As they near the shore, he can see a Negro holding a lantern. The steamboat runs straight in and he is easily able to jump onto the levee. As the steamboat starts to pull away, the clerk throws a package and a bundle of newspapers ashore and tells the Negro that they are for his master and one of his neighbors.

  “Do you belong to Mr. Taylor?” Olmsted asks the Negro.

  “Yes, sir. Is you going to our house, master?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll show you the way, then, sir.”

  They walk off into the darkness. Behind them, the steamboat is already in midstream, resuming its journey.

  Olmsted was right about his first two articles: they are not very good. They contain little of the descriptive writing that enlivened the pages of his travel book, and precious few accounts of personal encounters and conversations, at which he excelled. Unlike his correspondence from China, the writing is flat and sounds contrived. He is trying too hard to deliver “the facts,” and he overwhelms the reader with statistics. Writing of Richmond, for example, he strings together information about the cost of coal and wood, the price of imported staples, the mean summer and winter temperatures, and discusses the mortality rate—all in a single paragraph. He tends to get bogged down in trivia. Instead of describing his journey down the Potomac, he pedantically computes the speed of the steamboat (121/2 miles an hour) and the cost of the journey (3.6 cents a mile) compared to the cost of railroad travel (42/3 cents per mile). Why is this significant? He does not say. He can’t resist digressing onto his favorite topic, scientific agriculture, and devotes two long paragraphs to the right way to spread guano, then follows with a detailed description of the comparative advantages of different reaping machines. He seems not to understand that what might have been appropriate for the audience of Walks and Talks of an American Farmer will not interest the reader of the New-York Daily Times.


  Raymond must have been dissatisfied, too; he complained to Brace, who had assumed the role of intermediary. Actually, Olmsted hoped his friend would look over his writing and make improvements, although it appears that Brace passed the pieces to Raymond unaltered. Informed of his editor’s displeasure, the novice correspondent fumed: “I can’t write different sort of letters. If Raymond wanted statesmanship and generalizations he is at the wrong shop.” It was not statesmanship that Raymond wanted, however, but engaging reporting. Olmsted’s problem was that although he had written a book and several magazine articles and, like most of his contemporaries, was an accomplished letter writer, he had no experience as a working journalist. It is no wonder that he had so much trouble. He was not used to observing, analyzing—and writing—on the run. As he had done with farming, he learned on the job. He taught himself to compress; to focus each report on a single subject; to balance data with local background; to restrain his natural urge to describe and explain every detail; and to let the people he met speak for themselves. He gained confidence, and the articles improved. His visit with Taylor turned out to be fruitful and provided much useful material.

  Although he became a skilled reporter, he was never a stylist in the literary sense. Edmund Wilson called his writing “pedestrian” and observed that his clumsy syntax often caused him difficulty in expressing himself. Pedestrian is too harsh, but the critique is just; Olmsted’s prose does sometimes get tangled, especially when he is trying to summarize his usually complicated conclusions. However, Wilson had a high regard for Olmsted’s Southern reporting. “He [Olmsted] 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,” observed Wilson. “He talked to everybody, and he sized up everything, and he wrote it all down.”

  It is the breadth of Olmsted’s curiosity that makes his writing compelling. He began his third article with a description of a Negro funeral. He came upon it as he was riding in the country one Sunday afternoon; he was the only white person in attendance. His account of the graveside singing and preaching is vivid and comes to life as he successfully renders the vernacular of the mourners. (Olmsted had a real gift for mimicry.) Indeed, while he was unsympathetic to the “wild and barbarous” singing and chanting, he had to admit that “I was deeply influenced myself by the unaffected fine feeling and the simplicity, natural, rude truthfulness and absence of all attempt at formal decorum in the crowd.”

  He learned the journalist’s knack of making his points though anecdotes. This passage recounts his brief exchange with a Virginia planter:

  “I have raised hay, potatoes, and cabbages, on my farm in New York, that found a market in Richmond,” I say to a planter, “but here you have a capital soil for such crops; how is it you don’t supply your own market?” “Well, I should be laughed at if I bothered with such little crops,” he replied. So it is—they leave such little crops to the niggers and Yankees, and then grumble because all the profits of their business go to build “Fifth-avenue palaces,” and “down-east school houses.” They will not bear it any longer, they are going straightway to do something for themselves—what? Establish a dignified State line of steamers to—Antwerp!

  Without a long-winded analysis, Olmsted deftly put his finger on one of the reasons for the backwardness of the South (and a common failing of many third-world countries today): the tendency to focus on lucrative export crops such as tobacco, rice, and cotton and the inability to foster a diversified local economy.

  Occasionally, Olmsted allowed himself to simply describe what he saw. Riding outside Savannah, he came upon a tree-lined drive leading to a plantation house.

  On the other side, at fifty feet distant were rows of old live oak trees, their branches and twigs slightly hung with a delicate fringe of gray moss, and their dark, shining, green foliage meeting and intermingling naturally but densely overhead. The sunlight streamed through and played aslant the lustrous leaves and waving, fluttering, quivering, palpitating, pendulous moss: the arch was low and broad; the trunks were huge and gnarled, and there was a heavy groining of strong, dark, rough, knotty branches. I stopped my horse, bowed my head, and held my breath. I have never in all my life seen anything so impressively grand and beautiful.

  This description is notable not so much for the language but for the light it casts on the sensibility of its author. The boyhood rambles in the Connecticut countryside had had their effect. Olmsted did not only look at his natural surroundings, he studied them and scrutinized their composition with as much attention as another might examine a great painting or listen to a work of music.

  • • • •

  In his editorial introducing the series, Raymond had described his special correspondent as an “intelligent gentleman, of decided ability, large experience, practical habits of action and of speculation, known already to the world by his published works.” What exactly these published works were was left to the reader’s imagination, however, for Olmsted’s name was never used. This was common practice. Authors of regular columns were often identified by pen names. Olmsted signed his letters “Yeoman.” Discretion was necessary, since the series began being published while he was still traveling in the South, and feelings against perceived abolitionists sometimes ran high. Except when formal introductions were necessary, Olmsted did not identify himself as a reporter; indeed, he often affected a Southern accent and was frequently not recognized as a Northerner. He took great pains to mask the identity of the people he interviewed. His sense of journalistic responsibility—so different from today—required him even to disguise the exact location of a plantation when he felt that the owner might be embarrassed by his own remarks, or by Olmsted’s observations.

  One day, Olmsted was traveling on a train to Richmond, Virginia. At a station, a white lady accompanied by her young daughter and a mulatto girl and a black nanny boarded the carriage. He politely offered his seat so that the group could sit together. The two young girls laughed and talked together and appeared to him to be friends. He noticed that the mulatto girl—“bright and very pretty”—was dressed just as expensively and behaved with equal aplomb and propriety as her white companion. Later, the four travelers shared a snack from the same wrapper. “Many people at the North would have been indignant or ‘disgusted’ with such proceedings,” he wrote, “but they excited no attention here.” In fact, Southern railroads required all blacks to travel in second class, although this rule was not closely followed and so-called house servants regularly accompanied their owners in first class. As Olmsted observed, these blacks were frequently well-dressed and well-mannered and appeared to be somewhat intimate with their masters. This in no way mitigated their oppression in Olmsted’s eyes, but he could not resist pointing out to his Northern readers that at least some slaves were accorded more humane treatment in the South than freed Negroes would have received under the same circumstances from people in the North who considered themselves more tolerant.

  Raymond underlined Yeoman’s neutrality in the slave debate: “Although he probably has opinions of his own upon the general subject of Slavery, he has no prejudices concerning it which will disqualify him as a dispassionate and accurate observer of facts, or detract from the weight due to the judgment he may form in regard to them,” he wrote, concluding that “upon this subject his opinions remain to be formed according to the facts he may meet.” Raymond was clearly trying to anticipate the charge that his reporter was merely an abolitionist mischief-maker. Olmsted, too, was sensitive to Southern sentiments and bent over backward to appear nonpartisan. Hence his inclusion of the story about the Richmond train. In the same article, he advised his readers that the real focus of his investigation would be on agriculture and on the general conditions of everyday life in the countryside. He offhandedly added, “No man can write of the South and put Slavery entirely in the background.” A month later, in a subsequent articl
e, he even went so far as to claim, “I did not intend when I commenced writing these letters to give much attention to the subject of Slavery.”

  He was being disingenuous. As he had pointed out to Kingsbury before leaving Staten Island, the opportunity to investigate slavery had attracted him to the undertaking. He had an ambitious goal: saving the Union. His plan was to ignore entirely the moral issues that formed the abolitionists’ platform, which, in his opinion, only served to polarize the two sides. Instead, he would argue the case against slavery on economic grounds. Southerners contended that they needed slaves to support their way of life. Olmsted wanted to demonstrate that, on the contrary, slavery was a burden, not a benefit. If he could convince people of this, he hoped slavery might be abandoned voluntarily; it would also silence the strident calls of abolitionists for drastic action, which he feared would lead to conflict.

  He arrived at the economic argument early. While he was still in Richmond and only twelve days into his trip, he wrote to Brace that “I shall be able to show conclusively, I think, that free labor is cheaper than slave (I have a two page letter on it now). The difficulty only consists in the want of hands (white) and the bad effect of slave faithlessness, corrupting them.” He described at length in his fourth article how he had visited a farm operated by a Quaker convert who had freed his slaves and replaced them with paid white laborers. The farmer told Olmsted that he reckoned that he had saved money.

  Olmsted’s argument about the economic shortcomings of slavery had several strands. He emphasized that slaves had no incentive to work either hard or efficiently. Again and again he compared the superior productivity of Northern labor to the relatively feeble efforts of slave workers. Once he recounted watching a group of slaves on a construction site carrying bricks. They appeared to him to be almost immobile. The master began to admonish them to work harder, but soon gave up. “It would only make them move more slowly still when I am not looking at them, if I should hurry them now,” he explained, “and what motive do they have to do better? It’s no concern of theirs how long the masons wait. I am sure if I was in their place I shouldn’t move as fast as they do.”