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

by Rybczynski, Witold

  Despite this campaign, the board did nothing. Perhaps Olmsted did not pursue his case as energetically as he would have under different circumstances—he was still in a weakened state after his accident and could get around only on crutches. He was also distracted. Olmsted & Vaux had two more commissions: landscaping the grounds of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum on the Upper West Side and planning a rural cemetery in Middletown, New York. He was also busy with a new book project. In January the London publishing house of Sampson, Low, Son & Company had sent him several favorable reviews of A Journey in the Back Country and a proposal. They were interested in publishing an abridged version of his Southern trilogy. Olmsted agreed. Unable to edit and update the vast amount of material alone, he hired Daniel R. Goodloe, a newspaper editor, to assist him. It took them three months to pare down more than six hundred thousand words to less than half that amount.

  The British publisher hoped to capitalize on British interest in the American slavery question. Britain was the chief market for Southern cotton, more than a million tons a year. Many in the Southern states believed that British dependence on Southern cotton was so great that if hostilities were to break out, Britain would side with the South. Just the threat of British intervention, they hoped, would be enough to constrain the North. “No! you dare not make war upon cotton; no power on earth dares to make war on it,” boasted Governor James H. Hammond of South Carolina, “. . . cotton is king.” Thus Hammond unwittingly provided Olmsted with his book’s title: The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveler’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States.

  Olmsted hoped to influence British public opinion. He recognized that the Southern states’ total dependence on exporting cotton was also their chief weakness. Without British markets, the Southern economy would collapse. He pointedly dedicated his book to the great English philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill, “as an indication of the honour in which your services in the cause of moral and political freedom are held in America.” Mill, in turn, wrote an antislavery article on the American crisis the following year in Fraser’s Magazine. He acknowledged the writings of “the calm and dispassionate Mr. Olmsted.” Olmsted was also cited by the Irish economist John Elliot Cairns in his influential critique, The Slave Power. The Cotton Kingdom was widely reviewed in the British press and sold quickly enough that it was reprinted two years later. It undoubtedly had a small role in hardening some British attitudes against the Confederacy, which was never formally recognized by Great Britain.

  In this condensed form of The Cotton Kingdom, Olmsted’s Southern writing has survived to the present day as a minor classic. Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., who edited the 1953 edition, described it as “the nearest thing posterity has to an exact transcription of a civilization which time has tinted with hues of romantic legend.” He praised Olmsted’s account as “an indispensable work in the process of recapturing the American past.” Yet at the time, it must have appeared to its author as only a partial success. Whatever hopes Olmsted had of influencing his countrymen were thwarted by the rapid unfolding of events. The previous year Abraham Lincoln, a moderate who was nevertheless publicly committed to preventing the spread of slavery, had been elected president. South Carolina immediately seceded from the Union. It was soon followed by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. By February 1861, when Olmsted and Goodloe started working together, Jefferson Davis was elected president of the Provisional Government of the Confederate States of America. On April 12 a Confederate battery opened fire on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. A few days later Virginia seceded, followed by three more states. In July Congress formally declared war on the Confederacy. By the time The Cotton Kingdom appeared in print—November 1861—the two sides were fully engaged. There was no going back.

  • • • •

  Three days after the attack on Fort Sumter, George Templeton Strong wrote in his diary: “Events multiply. The President is out with a proclamation calling for 75,000 volunteers.” Men flocked to recruiting barracks. Olmsted organized a home guard of a hundred Central Park employees and drilled them every Sunday. He was a patriot and wanted to take an active part in the war. He wrote to his father that he was considering volunteering for the navy. Given his infirmity, that was hardly realistic. It was more likely that he would serve in some administrative capacity. Henry Whitney Bellows invited him to become a member of the board of directors of the Woman’s Central Association of Relief, an organization that was inspired by Florence Nightingale’s activities during the Crimean War. Hearing that Bellows was going to Washington to seek government support, Olmsted asked him to intercede for him with the government. He was interested in becoming superintendent of “contrabands,” as former slaves in the custody of the government were called. “I have, I suppose, given more thought to the special question of the proper management of negroes in a state of limbo between slavery & freedom than any one else in the country,” he wrote Bellows. “I think, in fact, that I should find here my ‘mission,’ which is really something I am pining to find, in this war.”

  While Olmsted planned what he might do in the war, his position on Central Park was unaltered. In March he tried again to pressure the board to act. This time his tone was conciliatory: “I do ask . . . if it is thought impracticable to secure a very decided change in the direction that I have indicated, that I may be definitely relieved of the responsibility of the superintendence of the work of construction.” The commissioners still did not act. They were divided between Olmsted and Green. They appreciated Olmsted’s achievements. The southern half of the park, now largely complete, was unquestionably a success. The problem was that it was expensive—or, at least, more expensive than anyone had expected. Green promised to control costs. And costs, not aesthetics, were uppermost in their minds. Finally, in June, they decided—on Green. Henceforth the comptroller would oversee expenses, hire and fire park employees, and have overall supervision of construction. Olmsted’s three-year tenure as architect-in-chief of Central Park was at an end.

  The board had called Olmsted’s bluff. For bluff it was: he did not resign. He remained as superintendent, continuing to oversee “finishing, planting and maintenance.” The board did agree to some of his demands. He could requisition the staff he needed from among the park employees. He was granted greater financial autonomy. He could overdraw up to five hundred dollars a week on approved expenses; he could personally authorize new expenses of up to one hundred dollars a week.

  These were significant concessions. The board made its decision on June 6. On June 20 Olmsted received an unexpected offer from the Reverend Mr. Bellows. Bellows wrote that he had succeeded in convincing the federal government to officially sanction private relief efforts for the war—President Lincoln had authorized the formation of the United States Sanitary Commission. This civilian agency would monitor the health and sanitary conditions of troops and would advise the army’s Medical Bureau. Bellows had been appointed president of the Commission, and he was writing on behalf of his board. Would Olmsted consider becoming resident secretary, or chief executive officer, of the new organization?1 Olmsted accepted immediately and departed New York for Washington a week later.

  “I have made no definite arrangement with C. P. Com.,” he wrote his father. “I presume it will result in my accepting an advisory connection with the park at a reduced salary.” The commissioners could hardly object to his wartime service, and they did grant him a leave of absence at half pay, on the understanding that he would maintain his connection with the park. His new salary at the Sanitary Commission was two thousand dollars a year. It was, from his point of view, a good solution. He could influence the completion of the park without the daily humiliation of working under Green’s augmented authority; and he could do his part in the war. Like most Northerners, he did not expect the war to last long, a month or two at the most. This would be a short break, just when he needed it. As Mary put it, “The appointment is a great honor to Fred, and the change
in employment will do him good.”

  * * *

  1. The other person considered for the position had been Edward Everett Hale.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  A Good Big Work

  THE REVEREND HENRY WHITNEY BELLOWS, a genial, handsome man, was eight years Olmsted’s senior. Like Horace Bushnell and Henry Ward Beecher, he was an establishment clergyman, a gifted orator, and an energetic civic leader. A native of Boston and a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Bellows came to New York to be the pastor of the First Congregational Church—he had commissioned Jacob Wrey Mould to design the dramatic new building. He was a founding member of the Century Association, a gentlemen’s club (of which Olmsted was a member) that promoted literature and the fine arts, and he was active in New York’s literary world. That was how he had encountered Olmsted, who approached him to write for Putnam’s. Both were Republican and moderate reformists. Bellows had a high opinion of Olmsted. “Mr. F. L. Olmsted is, of all men I know, the most comprehensive, thorough & minutely particular organizer,” he once wrote. “He is equally wonderful in the management of principles & of details. His mind is patient in meditation, capable & acute, his will inflexible, his devotion to his principles & methods, confident & unflinching.” Bellows was a shrewd judge of character. He understood that Olmsted’s talents came at a price. “I won’t guarantee you peace, comfort, daily satisfaction, if you harness in . . . with O,” he warned, “but I will promise you larger, better & nobler results (with whatever amount of friction in getting them) than you can secure under any other.”

  Bellows had great hopes for the Sanitary Commission. “Our plans have a breadth and height and depth which no similar military philanthropic undertaking ever had, since the world began,” he told a friend. To achieve this end he had assembled a board of accomplished professional men. His cofounders were Elisha Harris, a young physician who was superintendent of the Staten Island quarantine hospital, and William Van Buren, an ex–army surgeon and a professor at the University of the City of New York. Oliver Wolcott Gibbs was a physician and an eminent chemist; John S. Newberry had served as an assistant surgeon in the army; Cornelius Rea Agnew was surgeon general of the New York State militia. Not all the commissioners were doctors. George Templeton Strong, who became the treasurer, was a New York lawyer. Samuel Gridley Howe, at sixty the oldest member, was a Boston philanthropist who, as a young man, had organized the medical staff of the Greek army during the 1820s revolt against the Ottoman empire. The vice president of the Commission was Alexander Dallas Bache, a West Pointer and a professor of natural philosophy and chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. He was also the superintendent of the United States Coastal Survey and thus represented the federal government. So did the three army officers on the board: a captain in the engineering corps, a major in the subsistence bureau, and Robert Wood, who had until recently been acting surgeon general of the army’s Medical Bureau.

  As soon as Olmsted arrived in Washington, he got down to work. In ten days he inspected twenty troop encampments around the city. (One of the soldiers he met was George Waring, now a major in a New York regiment.) Olmsted was appalled at what he found. The volunteer army seemed to him entirely disorganized. The soldiers were slovenly and undisciplined; the officers struck him as little better. The more he saw, the more discouraged he became. The officers of the Medical Bureau were pointedly unhelpful—they did not hide their resentment at the intrusion of a civilian in their affairs. Government officials were downright obstructive. Olmsted despaired that he was wasting his time. “I do not get on very well; do not accomplish much & shall not I fear,” he informed Mary in one of his frequent letters home. He also fretted that his living allowance was not sufficient to cover the high cost of life in Washington—he was staying at the fashionable Willard’s Hotel. “I am inclined to regret at present that I accepted the post,” he wrote, but added: “I can hardly give it up.”

  Olmsted was in New York when news of the first major battle of the war reached him. The Union army invaded Virginia and on July 21, 1861, encountered the enemy near Manassas Junction. The Union troops outnumbered the Confederates. Yet at the height of the battle, the Northerners fell back. The retreat turned into a rout as the horde of soldiers swarmed all the way back to Washington, mixed with crowds of panicky Washingtonians who had come to the battlefield expecting to witness an easy victory. The next day it rained heavily. Only the impassable roads—and the Confederates’ caution—saved the capital from being overrun.

  Olmsted hurried back to Washington. He described the beaten troops as a “disintegrated herd of sick monomaniacs.” He meant that they were shell-shocked—although that is a term from a later war. “They start and turn pale at the breaking of a stick or the crack of a percussion cap—at the same time they are brutal savages. That is the meaning of ‘demoralization.’ It is a terrific disease.” If demoralization was a disease, the Sanitary Commission had a responsibility to look into it, he reasoned. He immediately assembled a team of investigators. Four were physicians, including John Hancock Douglas, a young New York doctor who would become Olmsted’s closest colleague on the Commission. Ezekiel Brown Elliott, an actuary, brought statistical expertise to the team. Frederick Newman Knapp, a cousin of Bellows’s, was a minister. He, too, would become Olmsted’s friend. Charles Brace came down from New York to assist in the inquiry. Olmsted sent them out with instructions to “elicit information as to the condition of the troop before, during, and after the engagement.” To make sure that they did not miss anything, he provided them with a questionnaire of seventy-five items.

  Six weeks after the battle, Olmsted presented his report to Bellows and the board. “Report on the Demoralization of the Volunteers” does not mince words:

  Our army, previous to and at the time of the engagement, was suffering from want of sufficient, regularly-provided, and suitable food, from thirst, from want (in certain cases) of refreshing sleep, and from the exhausting effects of a long, hot, and rapid march, the more exhausting because of the diminution of vital force of the troops due to the causes above enumerated. They entered the field of battle with no pretense of any but the most elementary and imperfect military organization, and in respect of discipline, little better than a mob, which does not know its leaders. The majority of the officers had, three months before, known nothing more of their duties than the privates whom they should have been able to lead, instruct, and protect. Nor had they, in many cases, in the meantime, been gaining materially, for they had been generally permitted, and many had been disposed, to spend much time away from their men, in indolence or frivolous amusement, or dissipation.

  In this long and detailed report, Olmsted placed the blame for the demoralization of the troops not only on the circumstances surrounding the battle but on the conditions present before the battle: lack of preparedness, inadequate training, incompetent leadership. Such a damning indictment of the government was too much for Bache and the army officers. They threatened to resign if the report was made public. Even George Templeton Strong, who considered it “an able paper,” felt that “its publication would have done mischief—would have retarded recruiting.” The report was never released. Still, Olmsted’s elaborate social survey was a turning point for the Commission. It convinced Bellows that the deficiencies of the official government agencies charged with taking care of the sick and wounded were severe. It was also becoming evident to all that this would not be a short war. “It is no longer right for the Commission to proceed on the supposition that it is meeting a wholly temporary emergency,” Olmsted advised. “Measures should also be taken to establish the organization of the Commission for the duties which it shall undertake for the war on a firm basis.” He calculated that a working capital of fifty thousand dollars would be required, as well as a monthly revenue of not less than five thousand dollars. It was a conservative estimate.

  The United States Sanitary Commission became a large organization. “It is a good big work I have in hand,” Olms
ted wrote his half sister Bertha, “giving me absorbing occupation and that sort of connection with the work of the nation without which I should be very uncomfortable.” Olmsted personally created this effective bureaucracy from scratch, something he had been unable to do in Central Park. He established a strictly hierarchical organization with himself at the head. Immediately under him were three associate secretaries—Newberry, Douglas, and John Foster Jenkins, another New York physician. Each was responsible for a geographic region: the West (really the Midwest); the area between the Mississippi and the Alleghenies; and rest of the East.

  The first function of the Commission was to monitor conditions among the troops in order to advise the army’s Medical Bureau. Olmsted sent more than twenty sanitary inspectors (assisted by so-called agents) into the field. The inspectors were experienced, university-educated medical men. Olmsted’s instructions to a neophyte describe the scope of their duties:

  1st The visitation of regimental camps, the object and method of which you will find indicated in a proof-sheet of instructions enclosed. These instructions are imperfect and incomplete, but your own judgment will supply their deficiency. It is only necessary to say that the main object is not to obtain a record but to facilitate and insure the giving of instruction and advice where needed.

  2nd The visitation of Hospitals:—the object of which is to stir up the surgeons and nurses by an exhibition of watchfulness and interest in their doings; to observe the wants of the patients and administer to them as far as possible. (See Resolutions 37 & 41, and 43, enclosed).

  3rd To look after troops arriving, departing, or passing through by rail: The arrangement may be more perfect at Baltimore than here, where a man is most usefully employed in and around the station, giving information and advice, setting stragglers right, conveying word to friends, and making the sick comfortable amidst the confusion, disorder, and ignorance which prevail with new comers.