Olmsted is sitting on a veranda on the south side of the building. Since the veranda is glassed-in, he is comfortably warm in the afternoon sun. Immediately adjacent to the building is an attractive garden, with grass and clumps of trees whose leaves are starting to change color. Beyond, the landscape is in disarray, a giant construction site. The trace of the old Boston Post Road cuts an ungainly diagonal between piles of excavated earth and fresh gravel. There are few trees and the ground is strewn with boulders. There is still no sign of the great meadow that he and Vaux have planned for this area. About half a mile away he can see the banks of raw earth that mark the edges of the new reservoir being built by the Croton Aqueduct Board. This area should have been planted over by now, but relations between the board and the Park Commission have not been smooth. But they are making progress.
He is in an easy chair. His extended left leg is supported by a footstool. The leg is bound in a splint and bandaged from hip to toe. A pair of crutches lie on the floor. He has been writing a letter, and as he awkwardly shifts his position, the movement causes him to wince. It is six weeks since the accident and he is mending, but slowly. Today is the first day he has been able to sit himself down without assistance. The leg still hurts.
He can’t complain. His thigh is broken in three places. It was so badly shattered that the bone protruded from his torn flesh. The surgeons concluded that if the leg was not amputated, gangrene would probably set in. Gangrene was fatal—he would be dead in a week. Yet he was in such a weakened state that if the leg were cut off, he might not survive the operation. They decided to do nothing. He had less than one chance in a hundred of recovery, his doctor later told him. One chance in a hundred—and he is still alive.
It had happened this way. One Monday evening after work he had gone for a drive with Mary and their new baby, John Theodore. He wanted to try out a new horse that he was thinking of buying. As they were passing through Carmansville, near Washington Heights, the horse bolted. It was Olmsted’s own fault—he was exhausted and had fallen asleep, dropping the reins. As he stood up to retrieve the reins, the runaway carriage struck a lamppost. He was flung out and landed on a large boulder. The next thing he remembered, he was lying on the ground unable to move. He looked up to see Mary clutching the baby, both of them unhurt. She quickly took charge and he was carried on a shutter to a house across the street. The oddest thing was that it belonged to his boyhood friend Charlie Trask, whom he had not seen in years.
Olmsted resumes his letter. It is addressed to his father. He has been describing his slow recovery, but he does not want to harp on his injury. He writes instead about John and Charlotte’s new tutor, Miss Centayne. “It is a regular school business, with silence, order & discipline for two hours, which order & discipline is the best of it for them. They have music & dumb-bell exercise & ten runs across the court for ‘recess.’ ” He discusses the current campaigns of Garibaldi in southern Italy. He tells him that his friend Friedrich Kapp, with whom he worked on the free-soil cause in western Texas, has just published a history of American slavery. The book is prefaced by a handsome dedication to Olmsted. He describes the recent visit of Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales, to Central Park. The prince ceremoniously planted an English oak; Green, who had appropriated the role of host, planted an American elm alongside. Olmsted and Vaux witnessed the ceremony, but were not introduced to the prince. “Only as they were leaving, some one pointed me out to the Prince & he turned & bowed to me several times until he caught my attention and I returned his salute.”
Olmsted writes of everything except the one thing that is foremost in his thoughts. His son, John Theodore, is dead. He died suddenly of infant cholera, only eight days after the carriage accident. He was exactly two months old. Olmsted knows that his father, who has lost three of his children, sympathizes with him and would like to know how he and Mary are doing. He will have to read between the lines. “Mary rather worse—pretty constant sharp and sick headache. Took advice of doctor yesterday—simply ordered to be quiet & take it easy. Only wants strength.” Poor Mary! It has been hardest on her. He has his work to occupy him. He is still not mobile, but his staff make their reports at his bedside, and he has himself carried about the park regularly on a litter chair. Without the activity he might have been overwhelmed.
He has stopped writing now. He is staring out at the park—his park—but his eyes are unfocused. The sheet of paper slips from his fingers and flutters to the floor. He does not notice. He sits a long time. Eventually, as the sun swings around to the west, the shaded veranda turns cool. He painfully eases himself out of the chair with the help of the crutches and limps indoors.
* * *
1. By coincidence, the author of the text was Frederick Perkins, the brother of Olmsted’s ex-fiancée, Emily. Although Olmsted knew Perkins well, he had nothing to do with producing the book.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
King Cotton
ON AUGUST I, shortly before the accident, A Journey in the Back Country finally appeared in print. He had finished it three years earlier. The publisher was Mason Brothers, who also reissued A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States. Unlike its predecessor, Back Country was written from start to finish rather than compiled from newspaper articles. The successful balance between anecdotes, conversations, vivid descriptions, documentary references, and sociological data makes this by far the best of the Southern trilogy.
Olmsted’s two-month horseback ride had taken him through some of the poorest, most backward, and most isolated regions in the South. Back Country continues the theme of his earlier books: the corrosive effects of rural slavery on economic and social life.
I will not here conceal for a moment that I was disappointed in the actual condition of the people of the South, citizen and slave; that the more thoroughly and the longer I was acquainted with that which is ordinary and general, the greater was my disappointment. In the present aspect of affairs, it would be an affectation of moderation if I refrained from expressing my conviction that the larger part of the people of the South are in a condition which can not be too much deplored, the extension and aggravation of the causes of which can not be too firmly and persistently guarded against.
However much he deplored Southern society, Olmsted remained consistent in his opposition to abolition. The previous year, John Brown had led an unsuccessful slave uprising at Harpers Ferry. Brown was hailed as a martyr by Emerson, Longfellow, and Thoreau—but not by Olmsted. “I do not see that a mere setting free of the blacks, if it could be accomplished, would surely remedy these evils,” he wrote in the preface. He understood, as many did not, that the problem was not emancipation itself, but what would follow emancipation. He predicted that successful emancipation could not be accomplished at one stroke but would take several generations. He had no illusions about the depth of popular prejudice against blacks. “I do not now say that it is, or is not, right or desirable, that this should be so, but, taking men as they are, I think a happy and peaceful association of a large negro, with a large white population, can not at present be calculated on as a permanent thing.” (The Jim Crow era would prove him right.) Yet he remained hopeful that change was possible. “It would be presumptuous in any man to predict when, or in what manner, slavery is to end,” he wrote, “but, if the owners of slaves were so disposed, it appears to me that there would be no difficulty whatever, politically, financially, or socially, in diminishing the evil of slavery, and in preparing the way for an end to it [emphasis added].”
It was now more than seven years since his first Southern trip. With the appearance of his third book, the broad scope of his investigation became evident. Among thoughtful people, Olmsted’s ambitious undertaking was received with accolades. “No more important contributions to contemporary American history have been made than in this volume and the two that preceded it,” wrote James Russell Lowell, who had succeeded Longfellow at Harvard and was also the editor of The Atlantic Monthly. Lowell’s friend Charles Eliot Nor
ton wrote to the British poet Arthur Hugh Clough: “Olmsted’s ‘Journey in the Back Country’ is worth reading. I regard Olmsted’s three volumes of travels in the Slave States as the most important contributions to an exact acquaintance with the conditions and result of slavery in this country that have ever been published.” That was high praise, coming from someone who was starting to make his mark as a critic, essayist, and author. The North American Review praised Olmsted’s impartiality, reasonableness, and conciliatory tone, calculated to “rebuke and allay both Northern and Southern fanaticism.” The London Times proposed that “a new edition of the whole series would be an addition to our economic science, as well as a help to a better knowledge of the difficulties of our American kinsmen.” It was all very gratifying, especially when the Westminster Review contrasted A Journey in the Back Country favorably with Hinton Helper’s vitriolic The Impending Crisis of the South.
• • • •
Olmsted needed cheering up. The death of an infant son coming on top of a crippling accident was a hard blow. He survived both catastrophes, but he was not unscathed. The accident left him with one leg an inch shorter than the other and a permanent limp. Like Byron, he overcame the infirmity largely by ignoring it. “Though the lameness is decided, it is scarcely observable,” wrote Katharine Wormeley, who met him the following year, “for he gives you a sense that he triumphs over it by doing as if it did not exist.” John Theodore’s death was more difficult to disregard. In photographs of this period, Olmsted first exhibits that pensive, detached demeanor that Wormeley described as “severe.”
Nothing slowed him down. When he was not being carried around the park, he was working on a new project. In July 1860 he and Vaux were engaged by the Central Park Commission to plan the eighteen hundred acres of Manhattan Island that lay north of 155th Street (where the street grid of the Commissioners Plan of 1811 ended). Olmsted elaborated his vision from his sickbed. Tenth Avenue would be extended to the tip of the island as a commercial thoroughfare. The rest of Washington Heights would be a garden suburb. Circuitous roads lined by “villa residences” on large lots would follow the contours of the topography. His intention was to ensure the “tranquillity and seclusion—freedom from the turmoil of the streets—and means and opportunities for amusement and exercise which can not be had in a town mansion, certainly not without the liability of observation from neighbors or the public in the streets.” With all the publicity attendant on Central Park, Olmsted & Vaux, as the new partnership was called, seemed likely to prosper. The consulting fee for Washington Heights was $2,500; and there already was a second commission, a large estate in New Rochelle.
Olmsted was pleased with this work, not the least because he was still financially strapped. His annual park salary was now $4,000, but in addition to his new family and his existing debts, he had assumed partial financial responsibility for the failure of Miller & Curtis. The case had finally worked its way through the courts. Through a legal technicality, Curtis’s father-in-law, Francis George Shaw, had been held liable for the bankrupt firm’s debts and made to pay $24,000 in claims. Curtis felt honor-bound to reimburse Shaw (it took him all of sixteen years). Although Olmsted was not legally responsible, he would not allow his friend to shoulder the entire burden. Olmsted’s lawyer, William Emerson, calculated that his portion of the debt amounted to $8,000, and Olmsted undertook to repay this amount. Among other things, he signed over all the royalties from A Journey in the Back Country to Shaw.
• • • •
“I hope I shall have been worth saving against odds,” Olmsted had written his father after the accident. Now things were looking up. But Central Park was not going well. He found himself increasingly on the defensive in his relations with Green, who had taken over everyday management during Olmsted’s convalescence. The comptroller continued to question the smallest expenses. Did the men really need rubber coats and boots? Why did the winter uniforms for the park police cost so much? Was it necessary to assign so many workers to the maintenance of the skating pond? Each request required a considered response from Olmsted. His frustration is obvious in his closing remarks in one of these letters: “I know your time is employed with more important matters, but so it is but right that some of mine should be.” He also adds this postscript: “We are again, since some days, obliged to borrow coal to keep at work in these offices—the third time, at least, this winter.” Borrowing coal! This is how petty the dispute had become.
On January 22, 1861, matters came to a head. Olmsted submitted his resignation in a brief, formal letter. The board took no action but invited him to elaborate his reasons to a meeting of the executive committee a week later. He began by modestly explaining a sense of personal failure. In preparing a report on the next year’s work, he said, he had concluded that not enough remained of the last appropriation—$820,000—to complete the park. He realized that work had fallen behind schedule. In other words, more had been spent and less achieved. What was worse, he—who was responsible for organization and planning—could not explain where the money had gone.
Have the bridges and arch ways taken more money than you voted for them? Those we built ourselves have not. The cost of those built by contract we don’t yet know. Have the roads cost more than we reckoned? They have, a small percentage. Has the embankment material from outside cost more than we reckoned? It has not. What is it that has cost so much more and why? That is what I cannot tell you. That is what I want to know. That is what I have no means of knowing.
Then his tone changed. He reminded the commissioners that they themselves could not avoid some of the blame for this state of affairs. They had severely limited his authority over expenditures. “Instead of $100 being put in my hands and my being required afterwards to account for it, using it at my discretion, I find myself obliged to advance the money out of my private means. And when after three or four months I send my bill for it, I send vouchers for items of 121/2 cents and then, Sir, I can not be reimbursed until I have undergone a cross-examination for an hour, it may be, as to the necessity under which I had been constrained to pay the said 121/2 cents.” Such a state of affairs was not only humiliating, it was inefficient.
He scolded the commissioners for denying him an adequate staff. He reminded them that there had once been talk of hiring a foreign expert—Jean-Charles-Adolphe Alphand, Sir Joseph Paxton, or Sir William Hooker—to design the park. “If either of those gentlemen had undertaken the laying out and general supervision of the park, he would undoubtedly have brought some portion of his professional staff with him—because such assistants as those gentlemen are accustomed to employ are not to be had here.” “I know what I say, gentlemen,” he added. “I have been in their offices and I know what sort of assistance they have.” He admitted that when he had started, he was hardly to be compared with these illustrious figures. Yet this was no longer true. After two years of superintending every detail of the park, he now found his judgment called into question. This, despite the fact that no less than four investigating commissions had found no fault with his management. “Have you heard any one call me a careless, an inefficient, a lazy or neglectful officer? I believe the worst that has been said of me, Sir, is that I am a mild enthusiast.” He closed by raising the one question that he knew was uppermost on everyone’s mind: his relationship with Green.
It was no secret that the two men were at loggerheads. He denied that this was the real reason for his resignation. Then he artfully recounted that others—including other commissioners—had warned him that Green was conspiring against him. Of course, he didn’t believe it himself. He desisted from making any personal accusations, but he made it clear that the board would have to choose between Green and himself. “With such an arrangement as you have made of the relative and associated duties of myself and Mr. Green, no two men who have much self-respect could work long together without quarreling. I have not quarreled with Mr. Green, and I am not going to quarrel with Mr. Green. But, I repeat, gentlemen, that a
ll this shows me that you yourselves recognize something wrong in your machinery. And the mending of the machinery, gentlemen, is your business, not mine.” With that statement, he ended his presentation. He had spoken for almost three hours.
A resignation by the well-known architect-in-chief coming so soon after the state Senate hearings into park finances would have caused a public scandal. This was something the commissioners wanted to avoid, as Olmsted well understood. Yet they were not ready to overrule Green. Instead, they promised that changes would be made if Olmsted withdrew his resignation. He did so. Over the next few months he continued to struggle to get a grip on the park budget. Whether he really lacked the staff and resources to prepare the paperwork—as he had told the board—or whether the vast project with its myriad public and private contractors was beginning to get away from him is not clear. What is plain is that he still had difficulty controlling park expenditures—and he continued to smart under Green’s unceasing directives.
Meantime, to bolster his position, he evoked support from the press. In March an article on Central Park appeared in the New York World that singled out “the able superintendent.” The following month, The Atlantic Monthly published a long article on the subject of urban parks, focusing on Central Park. The author (suggested by Olmsted) was the Reverend Henry Whitney Bellows, a prominent New York churchman and civic leader. Bellows roundly praised Olmsted’s achievement and emphasized his importance. “He is precisely the man for the place,—and that is precisely the place for the man. Among final causes, it would be difficult not to assign the Central Park as the reason of his existence.”
A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Cent Page 21