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

by Rybczynski, Witold

  Allison’s hope that slavery would spread was not idle speculation. On January 23, 1854, Stephen A. Douglas would introduce the Kansas-Nebraska Act to the Senate. This legislation was enacted by Congress two months later, overturning the long-standing Missouri Compromise. Henceforth, the new territories of Kansas and Nebraska would be free to decide whether to outlaw slavery. This enraged abolitionists and raised the hopes of the pro-slavery factions.

  • • • •

  By the time that Douglas proposed his bill, Frederick and John were in Texas. They made their way through the eastern part of the state (“an unpleasant country and a wretched people,” wrote Olmsted). In January they arrived in San Antonio, then a rapidly growing little city of about six thousand. Olmsted found its picturesque mixture of peoples and building styles as interesting in its own way as New Orleans. Around the main plaza stood an old Spanish stone cathedral, buildings of adobe, and recently built hotels and stores of brick. San Antonio was the site of several missions, including the famous Alamo, which was used as an armory and still bore the scars of its 1836 siege. The main street was crowded with Mexican drovers, Plains Indians, and American soldiers. The men all carried revolvers (as did Frederick and John), and gunfights were common. The town amusements, according to Olmsted, were a troupe of Mexican acrobats who performed in the street, and a local theater company that served up “horrors and despair, long rapiers, and well oiled hair.” There was also, he observed sardonically, the occasional hanging.

  Frederick and John planned to go to Mexico, but were advised that it was too dangerous for solitary travelers. They were unable to find a guide, or a party to which they could attach themselves, and had to wait. Meanwhile, they made several camping trips into the surrounding region, less for journalistic purposes than as part of John’s putative cure.

  Winter turned to spring. They were in no hurry. They made excursions into the prairie, went up into the Guadalupe Mountains, and traveled as far as the Gulf of Mexico. Frederick rode Nack, a roan “Creole pony”; Fanny, a mare, was John’s mount. They were also accompanied by Judy, a bullterrier, and Mr. Brown, the pack mule. Mr. B, as he was called, carried their supplies, which included a bag of books. When it rained, they would stay in their tent, reading. Olmsted sketched.1 There were long talks around the campfire at night. They marveled at the Western landscape, the enormous sky, the vast plain, so different from the tame Connecticut countryside of their boyhood. Frederick was a month short of his thirty-second birthday, John was twenty-eight. I am tempted to say that they were playing at cowboys—except that this term did not come into popular use until at least twenty years later. The cowboys they did see—they were called drovers—were mounted on mules and were not old Texas hands but young Easterners, working their way west to the California gold fields.

  Olmsted described this idyllic period in a letter to an acquaintance in New York:

  We are traveling about, without definite aim, in an original but on the whole, very pleasant fashion. The spring here is very beautiful. The prairies are not mere seas of coarse grass, but are of varied surface with thick wooded borders and many trees and shrubs, standing singly and in small islands. Having been generally burnt over or the rank grass fed closely down, they have very frequently a fine, close, lawn-like turf, making an extremely rich landscape. At this season, moreover, there are a very great variety of pretty, small, modest flowers. . . . We ride and take along with us a pack-mule which carries our tent, bedding and stores. Always in the evening we search out a pleasant spot by some water-side and take plenty of time to pitch our tent securely & make every thing comfortable about us. So we have from fifty to a hundred pleasant spots we could find in this great wilderness. It gives me an entirely new appreciation of the attachment of nomad tribes to their mode of life. I was always however much of a vagabond.

  * * *

  1. His later books on his Southern travels included woodcuts prepared from his travel sketches.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Texas Settlers

  OLMSTED KEPT SENDING REPORTS back to the Times. When he got to Natchitoches, he immediately recorded his impressions of the town, which was the jumping-off place for settlers “pursuing their Western destiny,” as he put it in his newspaper account. This region was less well-known to New Yorkers, and with Raymond’s encouragement, Olmsted included more background information on “frontier scenes and incidents.” He met Texas Rangers, Indians, and pony express riders. He recounted fighting a prairie fire (started by “the Doctor”) and watching a cattle drive. He described life in a frontier fort and included an eyewitness’s account of a Comanche raid.

  He discussed social and economic conditions—and, of course, slavery. Texas confirmed Olmsted’s earlier observations about the negative effects of slavery. Indeed, the primitiveness he was coming to associate with a slave-owning society was, if anything, emphasized by the rough conditions of the frontier. But he did discover something new and unexpected. Shortly after crossing the border from Louisiana, he and his brother were caught in a bitterly cold north wind. They sought shelter in a log cabin that turned out to belong to German settlers, who offered them a bed for the night. The fastidious Olmsted admired their snug home—which compared favorably with the poor accommodations he had experienced two days earlier at the house of an American rancher. The next morning, they were served breakfast.

  There was also pfannekuchen, something between a pancake and an omelette, eaten with butter and sugar. The sugar was refined, and the butter yellow and sweet. “How can you make such butter?” we asked, in astonishment. “Oh, ho! it is only the American ladies are too lazy; they not work enough their butter. They give us fifty cent a pound for our butter in San Antone! yes, fifty cent! but we want to eat good butter, too.” Such was the fact. At the house of the American herdsman, who owned probably one hundred cows, there was no milk or butter—it was too much trouble. . . . The German had a cow driven into a pen to be milked at daylight. His wife milked her herself. The American owned a number of negroes. The German was happy in the possession of freedom, undebilitated by mastership or slaveship.

  Olmsted was curious about these enterprising settlers who were so different from the rough and uncouth people he had encountered on his previous Southern travels. He learned that his hosts were part of a large German immigrant community that had come to western Texas in the early 1840s. They told him about several German settlements near San Antonio. Nine days later the brothers stopped in one of these, Neu Braunfels. The town was unremarkable: small houses with verandas lining a wide main street. One of the houses had a sign hanging over the porch: “Guadalupe Hotel, J. Schmitz.” Inside, the brothers found a neat public room, furnished in dark oak furniture with stenciled panels and scroll ornaments on the walls. The four men smoking at one of the tables greeted them politely as they entered. The food they were served in this Texas Gasthaus—on a clean, white tablecloth!—was excellent.

  During the time they spent in the region of San Antonio, Olmsted and his brother revisited Neu Braunfels several times. The town and the immediate vicinity were home to about three thousand people, the majority of whom were German immigrants. Neu Braunfels must have reminded Olmsted of Hartford, for it had a full complement of stores, small tradesmen’s shops, blacksmiths, wagon-makers, tailors, shoemakers, as well as doctors’ and lawyers’ offices. As in New England—and missing in most of the Southern settlements he had visited earlier—there were numerous signs of civic improvement: a local newspaper, free schools, and private academies. In addition, he discovered many associations: an agricultural society, a mechanics’ institute, and clubs for music, dancing, gardening, and political debate.

  Notably absent in Neu Braunfels was slavery. The one black slave in town belonged to an American; the Germans did not own slaves and, on the whole, were opposed to slavery. One can imagine Olmsted’s excitement. Here was living proof of his hypothesis that a conscious decision not to adopt slavery provided a superior economic and social fo
undation for building a civilized society.

  There were several German settlements: Fredericksburg, Neu Wied, and Sisterdale. San Antonio, too, had a large German community. There they met Adolf Douai. Douai, Saxon-born, had arrived in the United States two years earlier. He was well-educated—he had a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Koenigsberg—a freethinker, and a committed republican. Like many of the German immigrants, he had fled Germany after the unsuccessful revolution of 1848. He was also editor of the San Antonio Zeitung, a weekly newspaper. Douai, only a few years older than Olmsted, was in many ways a Saxon version of Charles Brace—energetic, high-minded, idealistic, and a committed abolitionist. He and the Olmsted brothers took to one another immediately. Douai accompanied them on a trip to Sisterdale. He introduced them to the scholars and professional men who were the leading figures of the expatriate community. “Educated, cultivated, well-bred, respectful, kind and affable” was how Olmsted described them. He felt at home among these kindred spirits.

  Olmsted was enthusiastic about the German settlements and devoted several detailed Times articles to this subject. He never failed to underline the connection he saw between the vitality of these communities and the absence of slavery:

  In Neu-Braunfels and the surrounding German hamlets, there are five Free Schools for elementary education, one exclusive Roman Catholic School, a town Free School of higher grade, and a private Classical School. In all of these schools English is taught with German. The teacher of the higher department of the central town school is paid four hundred dollars a year; that of the primary department, (a female,) two hundred dollars. I have been several times told by Americans that the only reason that there were no negroes owned by the Germans in the town was, that none were rich enough to buy one. This may be the case, but if so, the provisions they have made for the education of their children are certainly liberal, and promise much for the future intelligence and industry of the white community. That such a community—generally industrious, active-minded, and progressively intelligent—can never exist in intimate connection with enslaved labor, I am well convinced.

  In one of his articles, he predicted the eventual division of Texas into several smaller states (as was possible in the original annexation act) and considered it likely that the areas where the majority consisted of German settlers would form a free-soil state. “And such a State, self-governed by such a people, I hope to live to see there,” he concluded. He actually hoped to see it and live there. At one point, Frederick and John seriously considered joining the German settlers. It seems to have been John’s idea. He had undertaken this trip with half an eye to finding a home in a warm climate, and Frederick, with his habitual enthusiasm, agreed that they should become pioneers together. They wrote home describing their plans. They needed Mary’s approval—and their father’s financial aid. If both were forthcoming, they planned to spend the summer making preparations for the move.

  Either Mary or John Olmsted—more likely both—refused to endorse their proposal. That was hardly surprising. From the distance of Tosomock Farm, the idea of the two brothers becoming Texas pioneers and joining a group of German political exiles must have sounded far-fetched. Finally, it seemed that way to them, too, and they gave up the notion. Being unable to find a traveling party, they also gave up the idea of a trip through Mexico. They contented themselves with a brief, four-day outing, guided by a retired Texas Ranger. (They found conditions across the border just as dangerous as they had been told.) Nor did they go to California, as Olmsted had hoped. They could have joined one of the cattle drives and wagon trains that were westward bound, but I think that their adventurous spirit was flagging. On April 24 they left San Antonio and started their journey home.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Yeoman Makes a Decision

  ON MAY 26, 1854, the brothers arrived at Bayou Sara, Louisiana, a little town on the Mississippi River. Here they parted company. John had decided that he could not continue the saddle trip. His health had not improved; far from it, he felt worn. He wanted to get back to Staten Island and his family as quickly as possible. He boarded a steamboat bound for New Orleans, where he could take passage to New York. Frederick decided that he would go on alone. He was no less fatigued than his brother, but he wanted to revisit the cotton-producing region that he had passed through so precipitously the year before. Taking Judy the bullterrier, and mounted on Belshazzar, a stallion that had replaced Nack, he set off with “a deep notch of sadness,” as he later recollected. It took him slightly more than two months to reach Richmond, Virginia—almost a thousand miles in the saddle. There, he boarded a steamship bound for New York. He, Bel, and Judy arrived at Tosomock Farm on August 2. This time he had been away almost nine months.

  This final leg of Olmsted’s trip proved a valuable experience. Traveling alone was less pleasant, but it made him a more effective observer. He brought a seasoned traveler’s eye to bear on his surroundings. This area, which he referred to as the backcountry, was less urbanized and less economically developed than either the Atlantic seaboard or the Deep South. There were smaller plantations, rural communities, and common farms.

  For most of this part of the trip Olmsted was unencumbered by the need to write regular reports to the Times. “Letters from the Southwest,” as his series was titled, ends abruptly with the thirteenth letter describing his excursion into Mexico. It is unclear exactly why Raymond cut the series short. He was not displeased with Olmsted’s reporting, for he subsequently published two of the unused letters as unsigned editorials. The Times consisted of only eight pages. Since advertising and commercial notices regularly consumed two or three pages, space was at a premium. Raymond probably decided that his readers were more interested in the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, where Douglas’s act had stirred up the pro- and antislavery factions, than in German settlers and Texas cattle drives.

  • • • •

  Shortly after arriving in Staten Island, Olmsted started to write the first of three books based on his Southern travels. A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States describes his trip from Virginia to Louisiana. Although the forty-six newspaper articles comprised sufficient material for a book, he did not intend to write merely a compilation. He wanted to support his findings with more “facts,” which involved considerable background reading: government reports, almanacs, and a prodigious number of newspapers and magazines. He made slow progress, not the least because he continued to write occasional articles for the Times. Prompted by a dramatic maritime collision, he wrote letters on the security of ocean steamers and the behavior and treatment of merchant seamen—his old concern. He conducted a newspaper survey on the working conditions of farm laborers and reported the results in a feature article. He reviewed a German book on American slavery. The author, Friedrich Kapp, was then living in New York. Olmsted had met his uncle in Texas, and he and Kapp began agitating for a free state in western Texas.

  The latter issue had come to the fore in September, when John received a letter from Adolf Douai. Antislavery sentiment on the part of some of the progressive German settlers was running high, he wrote. A Free party had been formed and had produced a powerful reaction on the part of native-born, slaveholding Americans against the immigrants. There had even been talk of lynch law and reprisals against the San Antonio Zeitung, which supported the Free party. The newspaper’s nervous shareholders decided to sell. Douai appealed to the two brothers to help him secure a loan of $350 to buy the newspaper. They responded by circulating an appeal among their acquaintances and friends, including Charles Brace and Henry Ward Beecher. “A Few Dollars Wanted to Help the Cause of Future Freedom in Texas,” signed by Olmsted, raised more than two hundred dollars. The money was forwarded to Douai as a donation. Olmsted worked hard to support his German friends. He helped locate a supplier of newsprint. He purchased English type for the newspaper, which would henceforth be bilingual. He canvassed for new subscribers. He convinced Raymond to publish editorials in the Times enco
uraging Northern emigration to western Texas. Olmsted also promised Douai to write a fortnightly article for the Zeitung.

  Olmsted’s efforts as a journalist and political activist did not go unnoticed. He began to acquire a reputation in New York. He spent more and more time in the city. He frequently met Brace, now busy directing the Children’s Aid Society. Through him he was introduced to New York’s literary world. He began to understand that to be taken seriously in this world he would have to cease being a part-time farmer and devote more time to becoming a full-fledged man of letters. He consulted with his friends. He learned of a young publisher, Joshua Dix, who had just bought the well-regarded Putnam’s Monthly Magazine from George Putnam, Olmsted’s Staten Island neighbor. Dix was a friend of Brace’s and knew Olmsted. They reached an agreement: Olmsted would become the third partner in Dix, Edwards & Company. He started working with them in March 1855 and wrote his father, “I should probably [emphasis added] take up my residence in New York.”