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

by Rybczynski, Witold

  A major battle for Richmond was in the offing, but for the moment there was little to do except prepare and attend to the constant flow of sick men. There was near panic on June 13, when General Jeb Stuart’s cavalry, on its famous three-day reconnoitering ride behind the Union lines, briefly occupied Tunstall’s Station, less than four miles away. Stuart’s men failed to stop a train that brought the news to White House. Olmsted immediately ordered the hospital ships to weigh anchor. Stuart had every intention of destroying the supply base. Only the delayed return of two marauding squadrons prevented him from doing so.

  While McClellan, in his now chronically hesitant way, slowly prepared to attack Richmond, Robert E. Lee, commanding general of the Army of Northern Virginia, acted. On June 25 Lee’s forces attacked. They failed to break through the Union lines, but Lee, as audacious as his opponent was timid, continued his thrust. The next day he won a decisive victory. He pressed on, hoping to encircle his enemy. The shaken McClellan pulled back to the James River, where he could use his gunboats to advantage. This meant abandoning White House. On June 27 a flotilla of ships, including the Hospital Transport Service, sailed away, just ahead of the Confederate forces. Olmsted referred to it as the “skedaddle of the Pamunkey.”

  The new supply base was Harrison’s Landing, on the James River. The Wilson Small arrived there on June 30. Olmsted and the others could hear the boom of cannons at nearby Glendale. On the next day, the sound of battle was even closer. Soon McClellan’s army began to arrive at Harrison’s Landing. A major and a chaplain came on board the Wilson Small. They were eagerly questioned. “Defeat! No; we have retreated but we never turned our backs on them. We have faced and fought and beaten them for five days.” That was true. But the fact remained that during what became known as the Seven Days, Lee had driven his opponent twenty miles back down the Peninsula; Richmond was no longer threatened. The Union forces regrouped and prepared to resist an attack. It never came. McClellan believed that he was vastly outnumbered. In fact, the two armies were evenly matched. Yet the Confederates, who had suffered severe casualties, were not in a position to take the offensive.

  Still, about four thousand wounded were at Harrison’s Landing. This time, there was little of the confusion that had followed the battle of Fair Oaks. Treatment and transport functioned smoothly. This was largely due to the appointment of a new medical director: Jonathan Letterman. Letterman, who would go on to organize the army’s first effective ambulance service, was young and innovative. He believed in the value of sanitary principles and sound organization. He impressed Olmsted. “I like him at first sight better than any Surgeon U.S.A. whom I have seen,” he wrote. “He asks & offers cooperation, and will have it with all my heart, so far as it is worth-while to give it.”

  Yet Letterman’s appointment finally undermined the work of the Hospital Transport Service. With a competent medical director in charge, the efficacy of the army’s own transports improved, making the Sanitary Commission’s parallel service unnecessary. On July 13 Olmsted wrote Bellows recommending that all transport operations be consolidated under the Medical Bureau. Bellows agreed. The hospital ships were costing the Commission about twenty thousand dollars a month, leaving precious little for its other activities. The hospital ships and stores were turned over to the quartermaster’s department. The emergency was over. After eleven weeks, Olmsted and the others prepared to return home.

  An estimated eight thousand to ten thousand casualties were carried by Olmsted’s ships. The death rate in the Peninsular Campaign was 165 per thousand, which was about half the rate experienced by the British army during the Crimean War. Much credit was due to the Hospital Transport Service. It is harder to assess the effect of this wartime experience on Olmsted himself. It certainly wore him out physically, as it did all his coworkers. He was neither a starry-eyed idealist nor a romantic, so the horrors that he saw did not disillusion him. If anything, the bungling and incompetence that he witnessed convinced him of the value of sound organization. Nor did his experience turn him against the war. He remained convinced that an unequivocal military victory—however long it took—was necessary to destroy slavery and reestablish a healthy Union. What must have been a great satisfaction to him, apart from the comfort that he brought to the wounded soldiers, was the exceptionally close relations that he established with his colleagues—Knapp, Ware, Grymes, Wormeley, and the others. Let us give the last word to that fine woman Katharine Wormeley.

  Did I say somewhere that Mr. Olmsted was severe, or something of that kind? Well, I am glad I said it, that I may now unsay it. Nothing could be more untrue; every day I have understood and valued and trusted him more and more. This expedition, if it has done no other good, has made a body of lifelong friends. We have a period to look back upon when we worked together under the deepest feelings, and to the extent of our powers, shoulder to shoulder, helping each other to the best of our ability, no one failing or hindering another. From first to last there has been perfect accord among us; and I can never look back to these months without feeling that God has been very good to let me share in them and see human nature under such aspects. It is sad to feel that it is all over.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “Six Months More Pretty Certainly”

  OLMSTED RETURNED from the Peninsula in poor health—he had contracted a serious case of jaundice. “I grew daily more yellow, until I could have passed for rather a dark mulatto; the whites of my eyes gave place to a queer glistening saffron colored substance, and my skin became flabby leather, dry and dead.” In July he spent a week on Staten Island with his family—not at the farm, which was still occupied by a tenant. He traveled to Walpole, New Hampshire, where he stayed with Frederick Knapp, who was recuperating from malaria. From there he joined Mary and the children in Hartford. His health did not improve. At the end of the summer one of the commissioners took the matter in hand and took Olmsted to Saratoga Springs for ten days. There was no time for a lengthy convalescence. On September 16, 1862, Union and Confederate forces joined battle near Antietam Creek, Maryland, about sixty miles from Washington. It was the bloodiest single day of the entire war. The Sanitary Commission reacted quickly. Olmsted, fearing that the railroad would be choked with traffic, sent supplies by wagon train; they arrived on the battlefield twenty-four hours ahead of anything else.

  Olmsted continued to visit New York regularly, although by this time his relationship to Central Park had changed. He was no longer a part-time superintendent. Instead, earlier that year, the commission had appointed the firm of Olmsted & Vaux “Landscape Architects to the Board.” The partners shared the $4,500 annual fee; Olmsted took $2,000, but assured Vaux that he was prepared to make do with less if Vaux, who was doing the brunt of the work, needed additional funds. (A few months later Vaux became seriously ill. Olmsted reduced his own share of the fee to $1,200.)

  Olmsted missed his family. In October 1862 Mary and the children moved to Washington. He rented a furnished house that cost $125 a month, more than they could really afford. “We will be as frugal as we can,” he advised Mary, “& San. Com. must pay me enough for it.” He added: “Well, I think I have got to be normally in Washington for six months more pretty certainly—at least six months, don’t you?” Olmsted hardly expected the war to be over in six months—by then, no one did.1 “Six months more” referred to his apprehension about the future of the Sanitary Commission. Its national role was being called into question by the rise of two rival voluntary-aid organizations. The first was the Christian Commission, representing Protestant ministers, the American Tract Society, and the Young Men’s Christian Organization. Unlike the Sanitary Commission, which, following Olmsted’s secular views, was decidedly nonsectarian, the Christian Commission put great emphasis on holding prayer meetings, and on distributing religious tracts and Bibles. It lacked official stature, but its religious mission attracted public support. The second rival was the Western Sanitary Commission, an independent organization based in St. Louis and create
d by the famous explorer General John C. Frémont. Frémont was violently opposed to slavery; in August 1861 he had declared martial law in Missouri and unilaterally freed all the slaves of secessionist owners. Lincoln eventually relieved Frémont of command, but the Western Sanitary Commission continued and found ready financial support among New England abolitionists.

  Also critical, in Olmsted’s view, was the regional factionalism that had emerged within the Sanitary Commission itself. John Newberry was the associate secretary responsible for the Western division. Contrary to Olmsted’s instructions, Newberry gave local branches in cities such as Cincinnati and Indianapolis considerable autonomy. The states of the Midwest, who resented what they perceived as Eastern bias, insisted that money raised in a particular state should be used only for the relief of its own soldiers. At the same time, when the Commission received a large donation from California, the Cincinnati branch—reversing the logic—demanded its “fair share.” Such provincialism was exactly what Olmsted, who believed that the Commission must be a national organization, wanted to avoid. His efforts to impose discipline were complicated by the fact that Newberry, nominally his subordinate, was also on the board of the Commission.

  The governance of the Sanitary Commission had undergone a major change. During Olmsted’s absence in Virginia, John Foster Jenkins was acting general secretary. Jenkins was a loyal subordinate but, mild-mannered, he did not exercise strong leadership—he preferred to leave that to the Executive Committee. The Committee, which was founded only to deal with small matters that might come up between board meetings, took over. It consisted of Bellows, Strong, Gibbs, and two of the medical men, Agnew and Van Buren. They now met daily (in New York) and issued directives for the acting general secretary to carry out.

  The Executive Committee continued its overseeing role even after Olmsted returned. He hated being second-guessed. “If Jenkins or Knapp ask me for instructions, instead of taking hold to answer them, I think, ‘What have the Committee said about that?’ ‘How is that under the rule of the Committee?’ ‘What will the Committee think about it?’ ” The Committee questioned his decisions about hiring and firing. In December it passed a resolution limiting the general secretary’s discretionary spending to one thousand dollars, except in emergencies. This drove Olmsted to consider resigning. Only the exhortation of Bache, the vice president of the board, who had become a close friend, persuaded him to stay.

  It was starting to be Central Park all over again! Yet this was different. There was no dark shadow of Green; Olmsted’s personal relations with the members of the Committee were good. George Templeton Strong, the treasurer, did want more financial control, yet he and Olmsted agreed on most political issues. Strong had such a high opinion of Olmsted that he thought he would make an excellent secretary of war. “I believe that Olmsted’s sense, energy, and organizing faculty, earnestness, and honesty would give new life to the Administration were he in it,” Strong confided to his diary. Bellows, too, admired Olmsted, as did Van Buren. Agnew was a strait-laced religious man who sometimes found Olmsted too tolerant with subordinates, but he was fond of the general secretary—it was he who had taken Olmsted to Saratoga Springs. Olmsted and Gibbs liked each other immensely. They spent a lot of time together discussing the need for a social and political loyalists’ club to promote national unity. Their efforts, supported by Bellows and Strong, led to the founding of the Union League Club of New York.

  Part of Olmsted’s problem was of his own making: he was overdoing it. “He works like a dog all day and sits up nearly all night,” Strong noted in his diary, “doesn’t go home to his family (now established in Washington) for five days and nights together, works with steady, feverish intensity till four in the morning, sleeps on a sofa in his clothes, and breakfasts on strong coffee and pickles!!!” No wonder he was short-tempered and picked quarrels with the Executive Committee.

  The Committee rejected Olmsted’s advice to centralize authority. It was rattled by the popular success of the Christian and the Western Sanitary Commissions and wanted to avoid controversy. The board proposed that Olmsted and Knapp make a tour of Midwestern cities to placate Newberry and his fiercely local partisans, and perhaps even to seek cooperation with the Western Sanitary Commission in St. Louis. Olmsted agreed but he was not sanguine. “I go west for personal recreation,” he told Bellows wryly, “. . . and to cultivate a friendly feeling amongst all concerned by a little white lying, and also to demonstrate the fact that we are not obstinate mules and are willing to give way to people’s mistakes & to pretend that we don’t think them mistakes.” But of course he was not made to be a diplomat. It is likely that the commissioners were happy to get Olmsted out of their hair. George Templeton Strong later admitted in the privacy of his diary: “There will be a battle when the Commission meets, and incredible as it seems to myself, I think without horror of the possibility of our being obliged to appoint somebody else General Secretary.”

  Olmsted and Knapp were gone six weeks. They visited Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, and Cleveland. They had amicable if inconclusive meetings with Newberry at his headquarters in Louisville. Bellows and the board wanted news of conditions in the field. Olmsted and Knapp made two visits to war zones. First they went to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where the Union Army of the Cumberland had recently fought a battle. They were welcomed by General William Rosecrans, an outspoken supporter of the Sanitary Commission. The second visit took them to Grant’s Army of Tennessee, which was camped north of Vicksburg. They inspected a Commission hospital ship and met Admiral David Porter, whose gunboats and ironclads were anchored south of Vicksburg. Porter’s men were showing signs of scurvy. (Olmsted had two hundred barrels of potatoes and onions put on board the flagship.) They dined with General Ulysses S. Grant. His siege of Vicksburg had so far been a failure, and his military future seemed dim. Most people who first met the unpretentious general were unimpressed—not so Olmsted. “He is one of the most engaging men I ever saw. Small, quiet, gentle, modest—extremely, even uncomfortably, modest—frank, confiding and of an exceedingly kind disposition. He gives you the impression of a man of strong will, however, and of capacity, underlying these feminine traits.” This was how many people described Olmsted himself.2

  The great fortress of Vicksburg commanded the Mississippi; Grant’s latest plan was to build a canal through the swamps and transport his troops to the other side of the city. The young captain in charge of the work was William Tecumseh Sherman’s chief engineer, Captain William LeBaron Jenney. Olmsted was not impressed by the size of the canal (which, indeed, proved too shallow and was abandoned), but he and Jenney hit it off. The Massachusetts-born Jenney was trained as an engineer but was interested in architecture and gardening. He had studied in Paris and they talked excitedly of that city’s parks and architecture. The peculiarity of the circumstances did not escape Olmsted.

  Reminiscences of Cranch and Fontainbleau [sic]; of student-life at the Politechnique [sic] and Centrale, discussions of the decorations of the Louvre, had a peculiar zest in the midst of raw upper Louisiana plantation, where nature’s usual work is but half-done; looking across the River into tree-tops hung with the weird Spanish-moss, vultures floating above; shouts and turmoil of a gang of contrabands tearing down the gin-house of the plantation—Captain Janney [sic] wants the material for bridges—the drums beating and bugles sounding for evening parade behind the distant boom of Farragut’s big guns on the Hartford, pitching shells at intervals into my quondam host’s, Dick Taylor’s, rebel batteries at Warrenton.

  The last was a reference to his friend Dick Taylor, now a major general in the Confederate army. Olmsted had visited Fashion Plantation ten years earlier.

  • • • •

  Olmsted returned to Washington on April 14. He cagily informed Bellows that he did not wish to immediately resume his duties as general secretary (Jenkins was once again serving as acting general secretary). He wanted to prepare a report on a reorganization of the Sanitary Commission
and present it to the board at its mid-June meeting. He was resigning without resigning. Bellows could hardly refuse. He knew that to do so might push Olmsted to really step down. Olmsted himself was not hopeful. “If I should leave the Commission Sanitary, as I am liable to do at any moment,” he wrote his father, “I should be obliged to call on you to tide me over to the next berth.”

  The reason for Olmsted’s remark was an offer by his father to lend him three thousand dollars to improve Tosomock Farm, which was still unsold. Even though John Olmsted generously asked for a repayment of only two thousand dollars, Olmsted declined; he felt he was in no position to take on more debt. This led to a rare quarrel. His father thought Frederick was being ungrateful—and impractical. He accused him of not taking enough care of the farm, and he reproached him for throwing over his job on Central Park. “You have no right to demand of me invariable success in everything,” Olmsted responded testily. “I act always on certain, plain, simple principles of management. Generally they carry me through. Once or twice they have failed. Where is the man whose management never does fail.” The rift did not last long. A few days later, John Olmsted wrote a conciliatory note. Olmsted responded: “However wanting in sagacity I may be, I am obstinate only in honest dutifulness.” Still, his father’s criticism struck home. Olmsted was not confident about his financial future. Earlier, Vaux had warned him that Green and the Commission were making his life impossible—he might have to step down. Olmsted agreed. On May 12 Olmsted & Vaux resigned as landscape architects to the Board. Not only did that mean the loss of $1,200 a year, but it also closed the door on his hope of returning to the superintendency of Central Park.