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

by Rybczynski, Witold

  A month later Olmsted moved from Staten Island to rented rooms on lower Broadway. It is inaccurate to say that he simply lost interest in farming. When he set out on his Southern travels, he must have had in mind his old mentor George Geddes, who combined farming with a wide variety of nonagricultural activities. But Geddes had inherited a large, productive farm and was a wealthy man. After eight years as a farmer, Olmsted still depended on his father’s financial support—about $1,000 a year. The farm was not paying its way. On the other hand, he had earned a total of $720 (about $20,000 in modern dollars) from the Times for his two series. This was a modest income for what amounted to fourteen months of beginner’s work, but it was evidence that perhaps his talents lay in that direction.

  Olmsted’s father, who still held a note on the farm, agreed. He had pinned his hopes on John, who—it was now clear—would remain an invalid. Frederick, on the other hand, did seem to be having some success with his writing. In his own quiet way, John Olmsted was proud of his eldest son’s achievements. He advanced Frederick five thousand dollars to invest in the publishing firm and instructed him to sign over title of the farm to his brother. This Frederick was willing to do. John and Mary had been living at Tosomock for two years. They now had a second child, Charlotte. In many ways it must have seemed to Frederick that it was now more their home than his. John agreed to take over the farm. He had to live somewhere, after all, and Mary’s modest inheritance of seven hundred dollars a year meant that he did not have many options. Yet he was not thrilled with the prospect of becoming a farmer. “I regret to be left in the lurch, but I suppose things will go on as they did in his absence last summer,” John wrote to his half sister Bertha. His despondency is palpable. His tuberculosis was getting worse. Now he also had to deal with a farm that was showing the ill effects of two years of desultory management by his neglectful brother. It was not Olmsted’s finest hour. He told his father that his absence in New York would be temporary, “for a year perhaps.” Yet he knew—at least so I think—that he was leaving for good.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “Much the Best Mag. in the World”

  MAGAZINE PUBLISHING, which had been a cottage industry at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had been transformed by urbanization, greater literacy, and increased leisure time into a mass-market enterprise. In 1825 there were fewer than one hundred magazines in the United States; by 1850 there were at least six hundred. Olmsted’s decision to enter this dynamic field indicates his ambition. After years of depending on his father, he wanted financial success as well as intellectual prominence. He hoped that Dix, Edwards & Company would provide both.

  It was not an unreasonable expectation. Putnam’s Monthly Magazine was only two years old but it already had a reputation. Its circulation of almost twenty thousand could hardly match the one hundred thousand of its chief rival, Harper’s Monthly, but its literary standing was higher. The success of Harper’s was based on serializing English novels by such lionized writers as Charles Dickens and Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton. This had the double virtue, to the publisher, of being both popular and cheap—since Harper’s did not pay royalties to foreign authors. Putnam’s was different. As its masthead announced, it was the “Magazine of American [emphasis added] Literature, Science and Art.” It published Melville, who was not then well-known, as well as essays, poetry, and short stories by Thoreau, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Fenimore Cooper.

  Joshua Dix, only twenty-four, had big plans for the fledgling firm. He had purchased the American publishing rights to Charles Dickens’s popular weekly periodical, Household Words. He was thinking of starting a magazine for children. He also intended to branch out into book publishing. He assured Olmsted that A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States would be one of their first titles.

  The first order of business, however, was to assemble a staff to write and edit Putnam’s. Charles Briggs, the founding editor, had stepped down. His brilliant assistant was George William Curtis. Curtis, a genial, handsome man and a popular public lecturer, was two years younger than Olmsted. He was already a well-known author and wrote a widely read column in Harper’s. He was offered the editor’s position but agreed only to read and edit manuscripts. He probably wanted to see how the magazine would fare under its new owners. Two other Putnam’s alumni also agreed to help: Charles A. Dana, a literary critic, and Parke Godwin, whose specialty was political commentary. All three were seasoned journalists. This still left the post of editor vacant. Dix had worked for George Putnam, but as a clerk; Arthur Edwards had no background in publishing. They were businessmen. Olmsted, a published author and journalist, was the only partner equipped to deal with the literary affairs of the firm. He became the managing editor.

  He loved it. He was inexperienced but had the help of Curtis, as well as Dana and Godwin. His organizational abilities came to the fore. Curtis half-jokingly referred to him as Mr. Law. A large part of Olmsted’s responsibility was dealing with contributors. His outgoing nature helped. In Boston he met Longfellow and James Russell Lowell, as well as the Harvard botanist Asa Gray; in Concord he visited Emerson; he went to Andover to solicit articles from Harriet Beecher Stowe; and in New York he dined with Washington Irving and chatted with William Makepeace Thackeray, who was in the United States on a lecture tour. He acquired an essay by Thoreau and a short story by Melville. He was elected a member of the Press Club. Just as he had planned, he was becoming an active citizen in what he called the “literary republic.” At this time, too, he met a friend of Curtis’s, Charles Eliot Norton, a young man with literary interests who lived in Cambridge.

  Olmsted was happy. The circulation of the magazine improved. The new owners had overcome the first hurdle: maintaining the high standard set by George Putnam. The Times referred to the new Putnam’s as “the most original magazine published in this country.” One day Curtis excitedly told his colleagues that, according to Longfellow, Thackeray had called Putnam’s “much the best Mag. in the world.” Less than two months after arriving in New York, Olmsted proudly related to his father:

  The best writers seem already to have acquired confidence that we can be depended upon to do our duty strongly & boldly and that the Magazine is to be more than ever the leading magazine and the best outlet of thought in the country. This is more than half the battle. If we can get the writers, there is little fear but that we shall get the readers. It is generally understood that we have capital enough at command and shall pay generously & promptly, and the consequence is that we are now declining every day manuscripts that we should have accepted during the first month.

  He was boasting. Dix, Edwards & Company was chronically short of capital. To succeed it needed to grow; to grow it had to spend money. It acquired several books for publication; it purchased Schoolfellow, a children’s magazine. Abruptly, Edwards informed Olmsted that there would not be sufficient funds to advance him the printing cost for A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States as previously agreed. Dix, Edwards & Company would distribute the book, but Olmsted would have to find the five hundred dollars himself.1 Shamefacedly, he turned to his father for the loan.

  By the end of the year his book was ready for publication. Its full title was A Journey in the Slave States, with Remarks on Their Economy. Thanks to the profusion of these “remarks,” the book had grown to almost twice the length of the original newspaper series. The book was not his only sideline. He continued to help Adolf Douai, whose newspaper was foundering. He sent him articles and personally guaranteed his printing debts in New York.2 He contacted the New England Emigrant Aid Company, which had been founded for the express purpose of promoting free-soil settlement. This led to an extended correspondence with one of the Emigrant Aid Company’s leading figures, the Reverend Edward Everett Hale, who lived in Boston. By a remarkable coincidence, this clergyman was the husband of his ex-fiancée, Emily Baldwin. It was not, at first, an easy relationship. After four years, Olmsted still felt the sting of Emily’s rejection. In one of his letters to Hale th
at is otherwise all business, he closed with the following candid confession: “I can’t well write a word to you without much emotion even now, but I am anything but a miserable or even a dissatisfied man & most sincerely. Your friend, Fred. Law Olmsted.”

  Hale and the Emigrant Aid Company were embroiled in advancing the free-soil cause in Kansas. In preparation for the day when “popular sovereignty” would decide whether the territory would be a free or a slave state, pro-slavery squatters from Missouri had started to post claims to border lands. The Emigrant Aid Company countered by sending antislavery people from New England to Kansas. They settled in border towns such as Topeka and founded Lawrence, named in honor of one of the prominent supporters of the Company. In March 1855, five thousand pro-slavery Missourians crossed into Kansas and stuffed ballot boxes to elect a pro-slavery legislature. The antislavery settlers elected their own government. The situation grew dangerous. There was violence. The free-soilers in Lawrence felt threatened. The Emigrant Aid Company sent them a shipment of two hundred rifles disguised as schoolbooks. The weapons were mordantly referred to as “Beecher’s Bibles,” after Henry Ward Beecher, who was a vocal supporter of the antislavery settlers.

  Like Beecher, Olmsted regarded the situation in Kansas as critical. He was a moderate on abolition, but he was not a pacifist. “I suppose that you will be helping them to arm in Kansas,” he wrote Hale, “which is a better thing & I don’t want to divert anything from it.” Through Hale, he met a leader of the Lawrence militia and became his official representative in New York. Olmsted organized a public appeal that raised more than four hundred dollars. It was his responsibility to purchase the weapons, and he energetically immersed himself in arms dealing. He sought out a British veteran of guerrilla warfare and with his advice determined that instead of more rifles the besieged settlers would be better served by heavier defensive weapons. He went on a shopping spree at the New York State Arsenal and purchased a mountain howitzer together with fifty rounds of canister and shell and, for good measure, added five hand grenades, fifty rockets, and six swords. He told the private sellers that the shipment was intended for “landing in boats on some foreign coast.” The helpful Olmsted also forwarded the free-soilers a copy of Manual of the Patriotic Volunteer, on Active Service, in Regular and Irregular War, the relevant sections underscored in ink.

  • • • •

  A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States was published in January 1856. Olmsted had earlier showed it in galley form to George Ripley, the founder of Brook Farm, who was now Harper’s literary editor. Ripley, whom Olmsted considered the best critic in the country, advised that it would be an undoubted literary success but tactfully warned that the book’s commercial appeal might be limited. That was a well-considered judgment. It took three months to sell the first run of two thousand copies. A second printing of one thousand was ordered. That took a further two months to sell. The third printing, two thousand copies, remained largely unsold. Olmsted was disappointed. “There can be little doubt that the book will pay eventually 20 per cent. on cost of publication,” he had assured his father. Instead, he would be lucky to break even.

  The feeble commercial success of Seaboard Slave States had several causes. It was a daunting tome—more than seven hundred densely packed pages.3 The freshness of Olmsted’s original reporting was dampened by the reams of documentary research that he had included. Two years before, when Yeoman had written about the South, there was comparatively little antislavery literature; now the market was flooded. As the violence escalated in Kansas, the public believed less and less in compromise. Olmsted’s moderate position now appeared too tame. This was apparent the following year, when Hinton Rowan Helper published The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It. Helper, a South Carolinian turncoat, made the same argument about slavery’s negative effects on the economy of the South as Olmsted had, and he likewise anchored his book in copious statistics. But Helper’s writing, unlike that of the gentlemanly Olmsted, made no pretense at evenhandedness. It was extreme, intemperate, and vituperative. The manuscript was so inflammatory that no respectable publisher would accept it. Helper had to have it printed by a New York book agent who required extra payment as a guarantee against financial loss. To everyone’s surprise, the book became a cause célèbre. It was banned and burned in the South; in the North, it sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was the subject of acrimonious debate. Helper is largely forgotten today, but his book was second only to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in its impact on popular antislavery sentiment.4

  Olmsted tried hard to be fair. But the general public—then as now—was attracted by easy answers. Easy answers were something he refused to provide. His conservative instincts required careful—and lengthy—exposition. He knew that his book was too long. “I am much worried by its bulk,” he wrote his father. “This ponderosity becomes a goblin of botheration to me.” Ponderosity, indeed. He could have shortened it, but he didn’t. That was his stubbornness. He would follow the course he had set himself, whatever the results.

  The book was not a commercial success, but it was critically well-received. Ripley had been right about that, too. It was lauded by the Liberator and the Christian Examiner in Boston, by the National Era in Washington, and, of course, by Putnam’s. Hale, writing in the North American Review, called the book “singularly fair,” but primly added, “It cannot, of course, be wholly free from travelers’ mistakes, but we have not detected any.” This was ungrateful considering that Olmsted was advancing Hale’s literary career by publishing him in Putnam’s. Harriet Beecher Stowe was more generous. In a long article on antislavery literature in the Independent, she gave Seaboard Slave States pride of place—“the most complete and thorough work of this kind,” she called it. “The book is very thorough and accurate in its details, and is written in a style so lively and with so much dramatic incident as to hold the attention like a work of fiction.” Welcome praise coming from that celebrated writer.

  Seaboard Slave States soon appeared in Britain, where its critical reception was, if anything, even warmer. A firsthand account of life in the American South was a novelty, and Olmsted’s reasoned position on slavery appealed to the British. A favorable review first appeared in the Athenaeum and was quickly followed by a two-installment review in London’s Daily News, and long, laudatory reviews in the Examiner, the Times, and the Saturday Review. “Mr. Olmsted observes with accuracy and reflects with care . . . although he is not prepared with a remedy for American Slavery, he is a careful and temperate pathologist of the disease,” wrote the reviewer of Household Words. Both Fraser’s Magazine and the Edinburgh Review used Seaboard Slave States as the basis for feature articles: “What Are the United States Coming To?” and “Political Crisis in the United States.” Fraser’s Magazine was in the forefront of Victorian periodicals. The Edinburgh Review was the most influential quarterly of the day—among its regular contributors were Olmsted’s boyhood heroes Carlyle and Macaulay. In a way he was now in their company.

  * * *

  1. Authors generally financed their own books. Olmsted’s earlier agreement was unusual and probably part of his original arrangement with Dix, Edwards & Company.

  2. When Douai publicly called for the creation of a new free-soil state of Western Texas, he encountered strong opposition not only from Americans but also from many in the German community. Advertisers and subscribers abandoned the paper. Despite Olmsted’s help, Douai was eventually forced to close the newspaper.

  3. To avoid the expense of two volumes, the typesetter used small, compressed type for the long quotations that Olmsted scattered liberally throughout the text.

  4. The irony was that Helper was an embittered crank who despised blacks.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Abroad

  BY THE END OF 1855, Dix, Edwards & Company had published only seven books. The slim list included a short biographical sketch by Emerson and an essay by George Curtis. There were two crowd-pleasers: The History of Tom Thumb, by
the prolific British novelist Charlotte Mary Yonge, and The Holly-Tree Inn, Charles Dickens’s latest Christmas story. British writers such as Yonge and Dickens were popular with American readers, and if the firm was to expand, it needed more such work. Both Dix and Olmsted felt it was shortsighted—not to say dishonorable—to pirate foreign books as Harper’s was doing. They decided that the best course of action was to establish formal relationships with British publishing houses by becoming their official agent in the United States. This would give the firm a jump on the competition, who were mostly importers. Dix had already engaged a London representative, but it was decided that this ambitious undertaking required one of the partners to go to England in person. Olmsted was the obvious choice. The magazine seemed to be running smoothly, so he could relinquish his editorial duties. The prospect of travel always excited him. He wasted no time. Accompanied by his half sister Mary, he made the frigid transatlantic crossing in mid-February of 1856.

  After spending three weeks in London, they traveled to Paris. There they met Bertha, his other half sister, who had been sent to France to study. She was staying with an Olmsted family friend, Sophia Stevens, now Sophia Hitchcock and recently widowed. Sophia was now living in Paris, thanks in part to John Olmsted’s apparently boundless generosity. Frederick had courted her six years earlier, before becoming engaged to Emily Perkins. He and Sophia corresponded regularly and had remained friends.