Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  As it happened, the “mere fact of having been to Europe” was worth something. George Putnam, his Staten Island neighbor and distant relative, was in the process of launching a new line of books. Rather than issuing the standard hardcover, Putnam was eager to try out a recent publishing innovation—the paperback. He planned to publish a variety of different kinds of books in this format: biographies, poetry collections, philosophical treatises, and travelogues. He intended to sell the books for 25¢ apiece.

  Putnam approached Olmsted about writing an account of his recent walking tour. Putnam thought it best to focus just on the main leg, across the English countryside. Olmsted accepted immediately. Of course, he had never attempted to write a book. As a first step, he contacted various friends and family members to gather up all the letters he’d sent during his walking tour. In fact, he asked Kingsbury, a friend who had not gone on the walking tour, to send along “every scrap” of correspondence he’d received from him, his brother, or Brace. He knew he’d need these various letters to refresh his memory about where he’d gone, what he’d done, and when. Fortunately, while in England, he’d also taken some “pocketbook notes” that formed a kind of diary, though it was a pretty spare document. But at least this provided another source to draw upon. Olmsted got down to work.

  Emboldened by Putnam’s book offer, Olmsted also decided to make a pilgrimage to Newburgh, New York, to meet with Andrew Jackson Downing. Downing is not to be confused with Alexander Jackson Davis, the architect whom Olmsted contacted about designing a farmhouse at Sachem’s Head. As mentioned, Andrew Jackson Downing was editor of the Horticulturist and Journal of Rural Art and Rural Taste, the magazine that had earlier published some letters Olmsted had written seeking farming advice. Now Olmsted was hoping to get some additional writing assignments from Downing’s publication.

  Downing was a formidable figure. The fact that America was predominantly a rural society coupled with the fact that farming was the leading profession had helped make him one of the most powerful and influential tastemakers in the country during the mid-nineteenth century. His dictates were followed by literate gentleman farmers. Downing was also the source consulted by wealthy city dwellers who owned second homes in the country.

  Downing wore his hair in a flowing black mane and had intense dark eyes. He cultivated an air of romantic brooding and made it a practice to rarely smile, and as for breaking into laughter—never. His pronouncements, delivered in the pages of the Horticulturist, were taken as gospel: Houses shouldn’t be square boxes. Asymmetry is preferable, as it puts your home in harmony with nature. Don’t paint your house white! Don’t clear-cut the trees on your property. That’s the way subsistence-grubbing pioneers behave. If you’re going to lead a virtuous rural life, leave some ornamental trees to beautify your property. But keep it simple. Lavish rural houses are soul distorting, reminiscent of the way landed gentry in the old country live.

  It’s hard to overestimate Downing’s influence on life in nineteenth-century America. In fact, he is often credited as being the person that popularized the front porch in American homes. He argued that a porch provides a modest, but necessary, transition between one’s domestic life and the wider world. “A good house will lead to good civilization” is one of his many, many pronouncements. Olmsted had long been a big disciple of Downing and an avid reader of the Horticulturist.

  As Downing’s star had risen, he’d started receiving requests to put his moral and aesthetic notions into practice. People began asking him to build them suitable country homes. But he wasn’t an architect. Rather, he was a gardener, writer, and cultural critic. So he hired a young Englishtrained architect named Calvert Vaux to help him expand into the design of country homes.

  Olmsted’s visit to Newburgh occurred during the summer of 1851. Years later, both Olmsted and Vaux would recount having their first brush with one another at this point. But nothing even remotely memorable would stand out for either party. Vaux was simply a novice architect working for the celebrated Downing. Olmsted was simply a farmer hoping to land some writing assignments. That panned out. The Horticulturist would publish a brief Olmsted-penned piece titled “A Note on the True Soldat Laboureur Pear.”

  Not long after the visit to Newburgh, Olmsted also completed his book. It’s remarkable how quickly he managed to churn it out, and it was a vast work besides, featuring enough text to fill some seven hundred pages. Of course, this was way too long for Putnam’s new line of 25¢ paperbacks. The publisher decided to split the book in two and bring out a second volume at a later date.

  Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England reads like a book that has been dashed off in an unholy hurry. It’s a meandering, scarcely organized account of the trip he took with his brother John and Charley Brace. There are long technical descriptions of farm implements. These are often followed by passages of social commentary, maybe bemoaning the conditions of the rural poor. But Olmsted is just as likely to write a comic passage on the manners of a country innkeeper. The first sixty pages are devoted to an account of the sailing-ship voyage from New York to England aboard the Henry Clay. It seems an odd choice for a book intended as an account of a walking tour. But as Olmsted would state in the preface to a later edition, he had written his book while standing on “one farmer’s leg and one sailor’s leg.”

  Indeed, these were both professions he’d pursued—and his first book was going to cover them, and so much more. Walks and Talks can best be viewed as a kind of compendium of the scattershot interests and enthusiasms of its author. Olmsted dedicated the work to George Geddes.

  On publication, in early 1852, Walks and Talks would garner a handful of notices, mostly lukewarm, and would sell slowly. Still, it’s notable for a couple of reasons. Describing the everyday people he encountered in England, Olmsted showed himself to be a keen observer with a good ear for mimicking speech (“Sit ye down now, and take a pint,” he quotes one local as saying. “These gentlemen be from Ameriky, and I talks with’um about going there”). This was reminiscent of the vivid letters he’d sent his family from China.

  There’s also a prescient passage in Walks and Talks that celebrates the fine art of park making: “What artist, so noble, has often been my thought, as he, who with far-reaching conception of beauty and designing power, sketches the outline, writes the colors, and directs the shadows of a picture so great that Nature shall be employed upon it for generations, before the work he has arranged for her shall realize his intentions.”

  Olmsted was busy writing. He was busy farming. When he finally paused to look around, he was pained to see that nearly everyone he knew seemed to have formed a serious romantic attachment. His brother had gotten engaged to Mary Perkins, the Staten Island neighbor and inspiration for the two-knives poem. After being released from prison in Hungary, Brace had set out for the United States, but he’d stopped in Ireland along the way and fallen head over heels for a woman named Letitia Neill. They would marry in a few years. Kingsbury was about to be married. My God, even Charley Trask—fifth wheel that he was—had somehow managed to get engaged.

  That pretty well covered it: Everyone else in the “uncommon set” of friends had found a mate. So, too, had a number of women with whom Olmsted had earlier enjoyed dalliances. He got the news that Sophia Stevens, a woman to whom he’d been bold enough to read Ruskin’s Modern Painters, was engaged. The unimpeachable Miss B. was already married—had been for a while. Making matters all the worse, every one of these people was younger than Olmsted, by at least a few years. He was nearly thirty now and he despaired of ever finding a wife. In a letter to Brace, he confessed his predicament: “As it is, I am likely to be all along a bachelor or to marry believing that the ‘highest element of love’ is not of earth, and so secure from disappointment if I shall not find it.” In other words: His idealism was to blame for his being alone. And were he to marry, it would only be after first coming to terms with the fact that pure love doesn’t exist in this world. In another letter, he
struck a different note: “The sun shines, ice is cold, fire is hot, punch is both sweet and sour, Fred Olmsted is alone, is stupid, is crazy and is unalterably a weak sinner and unhappy and happy. This is my truest most solid and sustainable standpoint.”

  Lofty sentiments notwithstanding—and loopy sentiments notwithstanding—Olmsted wound up simply doing what people have done since time immemorial: He surveyed the available prospects and settled on the most promising one. Emily Perkins (no relation to Mary Perkins) had grown up on Asylum Street in Hartford, near the Olmsted home. She was in her early twenties, pretty—black hair and soft, friendly eyes—and came from a good family. Her father was a prominent lawyer.

  Fred and Emily had courted casually for several years, ever since he had joined a literary group that she belonged to. At one point, he’d taken her on a ride over the ice on a horse-drawn cutter. On another occasion, Olmsted had shown up at her family’s home in Hartford at nine in the morning, an absurdly early hour to come calling. But he did that with all the girls. Olmsted had once written to Kingsbury: “The conclusion is that Emily is the most lovely and loveable girl. Oh, she is. Well, I really think she has the most incomparably fine face I ever saw. And she is a real tender sensible downright good woman.” Not exactly a description of a love for the ages.

  With all his friends settling down, however, Olmsted now sought to heat things up. In February 1851, he asked Emily Perkins to enter into a formal correspondence with him, a very serious step. He’d once made the same request of Elizabeth Baldwin, only to be rebuffed. But Emily agreed. By late summer, they were engaged. Still, she made it clear that she didn’t want to announce their engagement to the rest of the world. Apropos of this, she wrote Olmsted the strangest letter. In it, she complained about the annoyance of all the little domestic decisions that they were bound to face, such as buying furniture and picking out carpet. But Olmsted kept after her. Finally, she relented and announced their engagement.

  The timing could not have been worse. In early August 1851, John suffered a severe lung hemorrhage and began coughing up blood. He’d been living with respiratory problems for some time now, but the Olmsted family had tried to be hopeful, despite the ominous signs. For years now, John Sr. had regularly told his son to stand up straight. He walked with a slouch, considered a telltale indicator of one of the nineteenth century’s most dreaded diseases. But the family had long been in a kind of denial. They had hoped it really was just bad posture. “Sit erect when you sit—shoulders well back when you walk,” his worried father had once advised him.

  Now it was confirmed. John had tuberculosis. On receiving the news, he wrote a letter to Kingsbury that contained the alarming assertion that he had just received a “sentence of death.” John had been in training to become a doctor, so he recognized the severity of his diagnosis. But he also managed to strike a philosophical note: “Yet we all have it upon us—& how absurd it is to get worried when the particular mode of death is indicated.”

  Olmsted tried to be more hopeful. Apparently, John’s doctor had indicated that the tuberculosis was an “incipient” form. With the right treatment, there was a possibility that the course of the disease could be slowed, maybe even arrested.

  And then another blow: Olmsted received a letter from Emily Perkins’s mother, announcing that her daughter wished to break off the engagement. According to this letter, Emily had started to have serious second thoughts about the impending marriage. Apparently, she had experienced a “revulsion of feeling,” as it was indelicately put to Olmsted. Likely, the mother and daughter didn’t even know about John’s diagnosis. Somehow this made it all the worse.

  Olmsted hoped that maybe Emily would have a change of heart. He rushed to Hartford and met with Mother Perkins, who assured him that the engagement was off. Olmsted wasn’t even allowed to meet with Emily to plead his case. It was simply over. Olmsted was heartbroken yet left with very little to contemplate. He never even received an explanation as to why she had ended their relationship. Even that small satisfaction he was denied. Emily Perkins was packed off to Worcester, Massachusetts, to stay with relatives, clear her head, wait until any gossip about her illconsidered engagement died down.

  Everything was so mixed up. John wrote, “I am to be examined by Wednesday, married on Thursday (probably), and am to sail for Italy Thursday week.” Mary had stayed with him, despite the diagnosis, and it appeared that they were pressing forward with their plans, and quickly.

  On October 16, 1851, John and Mary were wed. On October 22, they sailed from New York aboard the Asia, bound for Liverpool. From there, the newlyweds set off for Italy, where they hoped the balmy climate would help keep John’s tuberculosis under control.

  Back on Tosomock Farm, Olmsted felt devastated and alone. Late in the autumn of 1851, he composed a letter to his father in which he mentioned that he’d been watching ships sail past on the bay. Some of them, he surmised, were no doubt bound for China, a place where he had once gone. And John’s ship? Why, it had sailed to Liverpool, the same place they’d sailed together on the happier occasion of commencing their walking tour. Just now, Olmsted confessed to his father, his own life “seems to me somebody else’s story.” It had been a strange, confusing, painful time.

  Outside the farmhouse, on Raritan Bay, the tall ships kept sailing past, headed who knows where.

  II

  “The Cause of Future Freedom”

  SOUTHERN TRAVELS AND JOURNALISM, 1852–1857

  CHAPTER 6

  “The South ”

  EVERYBODY WAS READING Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Olmsted—ever the bibliophile—read it, too. Olmsted wanted to be familiar with this provocative work that had people talking; he was curious to see what the fuss was about. He had no inkling of how this book—and the myriad cultural currents swirling around it—was about to impact his own life.

  Uncle Tom’s Cabin created a literary mania, the likes of which the world had never before seen. During its first year in print, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s opus on slavery sold a record 200,000 copies. That dwarfed the combined first-year sales of such earlier literary sensations as Don Quixote, Tom Jones, and Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Only the Bible had sold more copies, and that was over the course of centuries. In Boston alone, three hundred newborn girls were christened Eva in 1852, apparently named after a selfless and doomed slave girl who was a beloved character in Stowe’s novel.

  Even in the South, Stowe’s book was read with avid interest. It was viewed as a window into the Northern mind-set and as a clue to abolitionist intentions. Southern writers rebutted with works like Aunt Phillis’s Cabin, and a whole body of anti-Tom literature—at least twenty titles strong—was born.

  Granted, even many devotees of Uncle Tom’s Cabin conceded that the book was melodramatic and moralistic. It just happened to be their melodrama, jibing with their morals. According to detractors—plenty existed in the North as well as the South—the book’s portrayal of plantation life was propaganda at best, downright falsehood at worst. But one thing no one could deny: Stowe’s timing was perfect. Her book came out during a period when slavery—an issue that had divided America from its inception—had once again exploded into the forefront of the national consciousness.

  California had recently petitioned for statehood, threatening to tip a delicate balance: fifteen free states, fifteen slave. The result was the Compromise of 1850. It allowed for California to be admitted as a free state. Among other things, the compromise also spelled out that settlers in western territories such as Arizona and Utah be allowed to make up their own minds about slavery. As a concession to Southerners, a new Fugitive Slave Act was drafted, updating a statute originally passed in 1793. The new act pretty much abrogated runaway slaves’ rights, such as they were. Now, one need only claim to own an escaped slave, and the claim had to be honored—no trial, no questions asked. Any person who aided a runaway slave would be subject to a $1,000 fine and up to six months in jail.

  T
he Compromise of 1850 was congressional horse trading, nothing more. It bought time. But simmering tensions remained, and it was virtually ensured that violence would eventually erupt. Citizens of slave states worried about being marginalized and isolated. They had just seen their hopes dashed that California might be split in two, creating a slave state and a free state. Fears ran high that popular sovereignty in territories such as Utah would halt the westward expansion of slavery. An earlier bargain, the Missouri Compromise of 1820, had already arrested slavery’s northward expansion, limiting it to below the 36°30’ latitude line. (Missouri, though above that line, had been admitted as a slave state. It was supposed to be the lone exception.)

  Northerners weren’t exactly sanguine about the 1850 act, either. A particular sore point was the recast Fugitive Slave Act. It dictated that Northern abolitionists, following their consciences, could no longer help runaway slaves without risking a fine or jail time. Stowe, who had once lived in the free state of Ohio bordering the slave state of Kentucky, wrote her book specifically as a reaction to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

  Amid the maelstrom, despite having read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Olmsted remained a gradualist. He believed that slavery should be phased out over time. During the eighteenth century, when slavery was still legal in Connecticut, some of Olmsted’s own Hartford forebears had been slaveholders. Partly as a consequence, perhaps, he tended to hold a rather measured view on the subject.