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

by Rybczynski, Witold

  Olmsted witnessed the caning of a black woman for shirking work (actually he only witnessed the beginning of the punishment—he was too shocked to stay). It was evident to him that corporal punishment, especially when it was brutal—which was often the case—was ineffective, for it also penalized the slave owner. An injured slave was likely to be even less productive than before, and he still had to be fed while he recuperated. Olmsted observed that on those plantations where beatings were commonplace, slaves often ran away and hid in the forest or swamp—not permanently, but for short stretches of time. Feigned sickness was another common technique for avoiding work; so was malingering. If his own employees at Tosomock had acted that way, Olmsted pointed out, he would simply have dismissed them. But a slave could not be fired. He might be sold, but then he would have to be replaced, and the cycle would continue.

  Not only were slaves unwilling workers, they were mostly unskilled. Olmsted discovered that the great unresolved conundrum of Southern slave owners was “how, without quite destroying the capabilities of the negro for any work at all, to prevent him from learning to take care of himself.” Most Southern states made it illegal to teach slaves to read and write, and Olmsted estimated that only one in five among house servants, and one in one hundred of the field hands, might be able to read haltingly. Lacking schooling, instruction, or apprenticeship, the majority were kept ignorant. This obviously affected their work habits. They mistreated farm animals, for example. He was told that the reason that mules, rather than horses, were commonly used was that they were more resistant to abuse and neglect. Generally slaves were not trusted with machinery or with good tools—which further reduced their productivity.

  Traveling on a train in South Carolina, Olmsted met an elderly farmer. When the man discovered that Olmsted, too, owned a farm, he asked him:

  “Do you work any niggers?”

  “No.”

  “May be they don’t have niggers—that is, slaves—to New York.”

  “No, we do not. It’s against the law.”

  “Yes, I heerd ’twas, some place. How do yer get yer work done?”

  “I hire white men—Irishmen, generally.”

  “Do they work good?”

  “Yes, better than negroes, I think, and don’t cost nearly as much.”

  “What do yer have to give ’em?”

  “Eight or nine dollars a month, and board, for common hands, by the year.”

  “Hi, Lordy! and they work up right smart, do they? Why, yer can’t get any kind of a good nigger less’n twelve dollars a month.”

  “And board?”

  “And board ’em yes; and clothe, and blank, and shoe ’em, too.”

  Paradoxically, while they were untrained and unskilled, slaves were expensive. The lucrative cotton trade had driven up the price of field hands to more than a thousand dollars a head, which raised the cost of slave and nonslave labor throughout the South (slave owners often rented their slaves, hence the twelve dollars a month mentioned above). All activities that used slave labor were affected. That was why it was cheaper for Virginians to import their potatoes or cabbages from the North.

  Slave owners in noncotton states often sold slaves to cotton planters. Once, in a New Orleans street, Olmsted observed a group of about twenty slaves whom a local plantation owner had recently purchased. “Louisiana or Texas, thought I, pays Virginia twenty odd thousand dollars for that lot of bone and muscle.” He glanced at a nearby steamboat, full of settlers from Europe, preparing to sail up the Mississippi to the Midwest. “Yonder is a steamboat load of the same material—bone and muscle—which, at the same sort of valuation, is worth two hundred and odd thousand dollars,” he mused, “and off it goes, past Texas, through Louisiana—far away yet, up the river, and Wisconsin or Iowa will get it, two hundred thousand dollars’ worth, to say nothing of the thalers and silver groschen, in those strong chests—all for nothing.”

  The other part of Olmsted’s argument was that slavery had a corrupting effect on society as a whole. As his trip progressed, he found more and more evidence to support his claim. Because manual work was done by slaves—hence was a kind of punishment—it was not highly valued; because slaves worked slowly, laggardness became customary; because slaves tended to work carelessly, carelessness was the norm. He observed that all who dealt with slaves “have their standard of excellence made lower, and become accustomed to, until they are content with slight, false, unsound workmanship. You notice in all classes, vagueness in ideas of cost and value, and injudicious and unnecessary expenditure of labor by thoughtless manner of setting about work.” Much of the incompetence and inadequacy that he witnessed during his journey he attributed to this lackadaisical attitude on all sides.

  Olmsted’s South bore little resemblance to the mythic Old South of elegant mansions and graceful cotillion balls. This was no accident. Before the trip Olmsted had complained of the “spoony fancy pictures” that appeared in contemporary books and articles and portrayed Southern life as aristocratic and genteel. He saw that the Southern gentry represented only a tiny fraction of society, and consequently he devoted relatively little space to them. He knew that there were enlightened planters such as his friend Dick Taylor, but on the whole, he did not have a high opinion of Southern society. Although he saw some beautiful plantation houses, he found civic society in towns to be woefully undeveloped. Although this part of the United States had been settled as long as—or, in some cases, longer than—the Northern states, he was shocked to find that it was a different, backward country. Beyond Virginia, he wrote, there were few libraries, colleges, or concert halls. Local book and newspaper publishers were rare. That was hardly surprising. Literacy—among whites—was considerably lower than in the North.

  Unlike Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the strength of a single, fleeting visit to Kentucky, Olmsted observed slavery for several months. His first impression of black slaves gave rise to some harsh judgments. “The negroes are a degraded people,” he wrote in the Times, “degraded not merely by position, but actually immoral, low-lived; without healthy ambition, but little influenced by high moral considerations, and in regard to labor not [at] all affected by regard for duty.” His view was critical—not racist. It seemed to him that slaves were kept in a perpetual—and destructive—condition of dependence. “Slavery in Virginia, up to the present time, however it has improved the general character and circumstances of the race of miserable black barbarians that several generations since were introduced here, has done nothing to prepare it, and is yet doing nothing to prepare it, for the free and enlightened exercise of individual independence and responsibility,” he concluded.

  The conviction that freed slaves would be unprepared to instantly assume the duties and responsibilities of free citizens was central to Olmsted’s gradualism. He never changed his opinion that wholesale abolition was ill-advised. But encounters with individual slaves did cause him to temper his views regarding their personal qualities, and to recognize that their degraded condition was neither innate nor permanent. He discovered that some slaves possessed property and had savings. He learned that some free blacks owned plantations (and slaves). He met slaves who were blacksmiths and mechanics and was impressed by their abilities and intelligence.

  Once, while he was being driven back to New Orleans after visiting Dick Taylor’s plantation, he struck up a conversation with the driver, William, a house servant. Olmsted commented about the possibility of free slaves being sent to Liberia, an idea that he had discussed with Taylor. “Why is it, massa, when de brack people is free, dey wants to send em away out of dis country?” was the response. Olmsted was taken aback. He had assumed that blacks would be grateful for the opportunity of returning to Africa. He was also embarrassed to admit that many whites were afraid of blacks and would be happiest to see them depart. Seeking to change the subject, he asked William what he would do if he were set free.

  “If I was free, massa; if I was free” (with great anim
ation), “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 would do—I buy me, fus place, a little house, and little lot land, and den—no; and den—den—I would go to old Virginny, and see my mudder. Yes, sar, I would like to do dat fus thing; den, when I com back, de fus thing I’d do, I’d get me a wife; den, I’d take her to my house, and I would live with her dar; and I would raise things in my garden, and take ’em to New Orleans, and sell ’em dar, in de market. Dat’s de way I would live, if I was free.”

  Olmsted was evidently touched by the slave’s simple—and not unreasonable—version of the American pursuit of happiness.

  Such conversations, and there were many throughout his journey, enabled Olmsted to write convincingly not only about the institution of slavery, but about slaves themselves. It would be too much to say that he was able to see slavery through the eyes of slaves, but he did emphasize the humanity of American blacks. “I cannot see how it can be doubted that the beings called negroes are endowed with a faculty, which distinguishes them from brutes, of perceiving the moral distinction of good and evil; of loving the good and regretting the evil which is in themselves. They are, beyond a question, I think, also possessed of independent reasoning faculties,” he wrote.

  As Brace had hoped, Olmsted’s ideas about slaves and slavery did undergo a transformation as a result of his firsthand experience of the South. Although he strove mightily to present both sides of the slavery question in his Times reports, by the end of his trip, his moderate views had hardened considerably. Here is the bellicose tone with which he ended the series:

  Yet, mainly, the North must demolish the bulwarks of this stronghold of evil by demonstrating that the negro is endowed with the natural capacities to make a good use of the blessing of freedom; by letting the negro have a fair chance to prove his own case, to prove himself a man, entitled to the inalienable rights of a man [emphasis added]. Let all who do not think Slavery right, or who do not desire to assist in perpetuating it, whether right or wrong, demand first of their own minds, and then of their neighbors, FAIR PLAY FOR THE NEGRO.

  The reference to the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence is unmistakable, as is the call for integrating freed slaves into American society. The man who once wrote his father, “Hurrah for gradual Emancipation and a brisk trade with Africa,” has come a long way.

  * * *

  1. Olmsted wrote two letters to Stowe describing the Swamp. Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp appeared three years later.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A Traveling Companion

  AFTER LEAVING FASHION PLANTATION, Olmsted spent three more weeks in Louisiana. He was captivated by New Orleans. “There is no city in America so interesting to a traveler, or in which one can stroll with more pleasure and with so long-coming weariness,” he informed his readers. Olmsted visited New Orleans only fifty years after the Louisiana Purchase. Although the city had grown rapidly under American rule, it retained much of its colonial past. Most of the original French buildings—of wood—had perished in fires; the characteristic brick and wrought-iron architecture was a product of the forty-year Spanish occupation that had ended in 1801. But traces of the French city remained in the original street layout and in the Creole patois that Olmsted found charming if not always easy to understand. He stayed at the St. Charles Hotel, ambled among the orange trees in the Place d’Armes, and sat in sidewalk cafés. He thought himself back in Paris.

  He carried a letter of introduction to Thomas Bayne, a lawyer who had been a Yale classmate of Brace and John Hull’s. Olmsted interviewed Bayne about Louisiana’s unique legislation governing the legal status of enslaved and free blacks. The so-called Code Noir, which dated from the French colonial period, defined no less than nine major categories of mixed race such as mulatto (white and black), quadroon (white and mulatto), sang-mêlé (white and quarteron), and many more subcategories. Despite—or perhaps because of—such distinctions, Louisiana was unique in the South when it came to tolerating relations between blacks and whites. Bayne introduced Olmsted to the city’s cosmopolitan quadroon society. Olmsted was fascinated by this demimonde of “free people of slight African blood,” especially by the women. “They are generally very pretty,” he wrote, “and often extremely beautiful. I think that the two most beautiful women I ever saw were of this class.” He devoted most of one of his Times reports to a remarkably candid discussion of the liaisons that took place between women of mixed race and white gentlemen. He made the practical if unconventional argument that such domestic arrangements were a better choice for young unmarried men than resorting to the street prostitutes who were common in New York. It is impossible not to read a wistful, personal note into his account of these marriages of convenance, as he called them. It was almost a year and a half since Emily Perkins had turned him down, and no one had succeeded her. However, there is no evidence that he succumbed to the charms of these New Orleans beauties.

  After leaving New Orleans, he visited several more plantations, among them that of Meredith Calhoun, one of the largest cotton growers in the South, who owned fifteen thousand acres and more than seven hundred slaves. Olmsted spent two days there, interviewing both Calhoun and his overseers. Olmsted had originally intended to proceed up the Red River to Texas, but various exasperating delays—and lost luggage—caused him to cut short his western excursion. He traveled north by Mississippi steamboat as far as Memphis. From there, by a combination of rail and stagecoach, he traversed the upcountry of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia, finally arriving in Washington. This last portion of his journey—more than seven hundred and fifty miles—he covered in less than two weeks. He was hurrying home for the spring planting.

  He reached Tosomock Farm on April 6, 1853, almost four months to the day after his departure. Over the next summer and fall he busied himself with farming. He continued to write. The Times had started the series when he was halfway through his trip; eight of his articles had been published by the time he returned home. Working from his early drafts and travel notes, he continued to supply the newspaper with reports that chronicled his experiences and encounters up to and including the visit to the Calhoun plantation.

  Olmsted’s reporting is remarkable. He combines descriptive narrative with statistics and information in a way that has become commonplace in modern journalism but was unusual in the mid-nineteenth century. He never stoops to punditry. He does not lecture but gently steers the reader to the conclusion that the facts demand. He understood that ordinary people are worth listening to, and he lets them speak for themselves. He records exactly what they say, slang, dialect, grammatical errors, and all. It gives his articles a lively, novelistic immediacy.

  The New-York Daily Times published forty-six articles in all (only two were rejected), an average of almost one a week. The final article appeared on Monday, February 13, 1854, in its usual position at the top of page two. In the same issue, Raymond editorialized that these were “decidedly the best reports that have ever been made, of the industrial condition and prospects of the Southern section of the Union.” Not everyone agreed with Yeoman’s evenhandedness. Some Southern pro-slavery advocates thought him too critical. “[The Times] sends a stranger among us ‘to spy out the nakedness of the land,’ ” thundered the editor of the Savannah Republican. “What is its object, if it be not an evil one?” On the other side, some die-hard Northern abolitionists found the economic reports too tolerant and “designed to gloss over the evils of Slavery.” Controversy did not displease Raymond. He commissioned Olmsted to return to the South. Yeoman would pick up his trip where he had left off and continue on into Texas, which had been admitted as a slave state eight years earlier.

  At this time, Olmsted was not alone. His brother, John, and Mary, since married, had just returned from Europe. Thanks to the elder Olmsted’s generosity, they had been living in Italy and Switzerland, hoping
that a change in climate would improve John’s health. Since fresh air and outdoor exercise were (mistakenly) thought to be an effective treatment for tuberculosis, John, who did not feel strong enough to establish a medical practice, decided that a farm might be the best place for him. Shortly after Olmsted returned from the South, John, Mary, and their new son, John Charles (born in Geneva), moved to Tosomock Farm. When Frederick announced that he was leaving on a second trip, his brother suggested that he should accompany him. As John later put it: “[My] motive for this journey was the hope of invigorating weakened lungs by the elastic power of a winter’s saddle and tent-life.” One can understand that Olmsted was not thrilled by the idea of taking an invalid along on what promised to be a strenuous outing. But he could not really object, for by then he had been enlisted in what was becoming an Olmsted family project—taking care of John.

  The brothers left Staten Island on November 10, 1853. They traversed the upcountry of Kentucky and Tennessee by a combination of rail, stagecoach, and riverboat. After reaching Louisville, they continued down the Ohio River to the Mississippi, and directly south to New Orleans. Their ultimate destination was the town of Natchitoches, Louisiana, not far from the Texas border. This was as far west as Olmsted had reached the previous spring, and there they planned to purchase horses and begin their saddle trip.

  They did not dawdle on the way, except for a detour to Nashville to visit the home of Samuel Perkins Allison, a Yale classmate and friend of John’s. Allison belonged to a wealthy family that was among the largest slave owners in Tennessee. He was intelligent, educated, and immersed in local politics, having recently run—unsuccessfully—for Congress. Olmsted was eager to meet him—this was just the sort of informed Southerner to whom he needed to talk. The trio engaged in two days of intense debate, since with Olmsted talk always turned in that direction. He liked Allison, but the frank conversation disabused Olmsted of any idea that the Southern gentry might be ready to compromise on slavery. Allison was unrepentant about the need for slaves. He adamantly insisted that the South “must have more slave territory”; he even believed that California would eventually become a slave state. Olmsted was unnerved that such views could be held by someone he considered a “good specimen of the first class gentleman of the South.” He had hoped that his own moderate ideas might be shared by the Southern gentry. Instead, he complained in a letter to Brace, “they do not seem to have a fundamental sense of right. . . . Their moving power and the only motives which they can comprehend are materialistic.”