Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  Olmsted was quick to concede that slavery was wrong. But he wasn’t certain that immediate freedom was the answer. Maybe it would constitute an unwitting cruelty to emancipate people who were dependent and for the most part uneducated. As a farmer and New Yorker, he wondered what would happen if freed blacks seeking employment suddenly swarmed into the North. Furthermore, he wasn’t so certain that one region of the country had any right to impose its viewpoints on another. Rather, he believed it was the South’s prerogative to end slavery on its own terms and in its own time. The United States was a democracy, built on compromise, and in his estimation the spirit of compromise—however imperfect—must be honored. Such gradualism was a common stance, one that Olmsted shared with many of his fellow Northerners.

  By contrast, his good friend Charley Brace was a true abolitionist. Brace was descended from a line of educators, intellectuals of modest means. There’s no evidence that any of his forebears owned slaves. What’s more, Brace’s father had been Harriet Beecher Stowe’s favorite teacher during her schoolgirl days in Hartford.

  Olmsted and Brace had always enjoyed ferocious arguments. It was great sport for them, simply what they did. The year 1852 found Brace back in the United States, recently released from prison in Hungary. He and Olmsted fell back into their old pattern, only now the topic of the day was slavery. Brace argued that slavery was a moral blight that must end immediately; Olmsted countered with a passionate call for, well, a go-slow approach. “I am not a red hot abolitionist like Charley,” Olmsted told Kingsbury.

  To bolster his case, Brace even went so far as to bring others to back him up for his debates with Olmsted at Tosomock Farm. On one occasion, he arrived with Theodore Parker, a preacher who railed against slavery. Another time, Brace brought William Lloyd Garrison, the noted abolitionist and editor of the Liberator. Even these heavyweights left Olmsted unmoved. In fact, he perceived the passion that surrounded the issue of slavery as suspect. If either abolitionists or slaveholders were more confident in their positions—if either party relied on facts rather than rhetoric—the volume might go down. “I think both sides very wrong” was Olmsted’s conclusion.

  Brace wasn’t about to give up, however. As the author of a new book called Hungary in 1851: With an Experience of the Austrian Police, he had entrée into literary New York. As it happened, Brace knew Henry Raymond, cofounder and editor of the New-York Daily Times. When Brace learned that the paper was looking to send a correspondent to the South, he suggested Olmsted to Raymond. Brace recognized that his friend was losing his passion for farm life. Brace also figured firsthand experience of the slave states was just what Olmsted needed to be shaken out of his gradualist stance. For his part, Raymond was glancingly familiar with Olmsted’s own recent book, Walks and Talks. Raymond was willing to consider Olmsted for the Southern assignment. He agreed to meet with Olmsted for an interview.

  At this point, the New-York Daily Times was a brand-new publication. It was part of a revolution in newspaper journalism. Between 1800 and 1850, literacy had exploded in urban centers such as New York and Philadelphia. This gave rise to a new kind of newspaper. On the decline were so-called blanket sheets, weekly papers that were large enough to sleep under and filled with commercial notices aimed at a genteel audience. The replacement for these was daily papers, smaller and more portable in size and designed for the now literate masses, on the go.

  Newsboys hawked papers on every corner, charging a penny a pop. Competition between publications was fierce. It was necessary to win readers anew each and every day with the best headlines, the freshest scoops. Predictably, papers put a premium on the lurid, the leering, the strange. Editor James Gordon Bennett put his New York Herald on the map with exhaustive coverage of the murder of the prostitute Helen Jewett, in the process creating America’s first tabloid crime scandal. Meanwhile, the New York Sun perpetrated one of U.S. history’s great news hoaxes, running a series claiming that life—in the form of a race of man-bats—had been discovered on the moon. When the hoax was exposed, the Sun shamelessly took credit for “diverting the public mind, for a while, from that bitter apple of discord, the abolition of slavery.”

  Into this thicket came the Times. The paper was launched in 1851 with the aim of distinguishing itself in a field that was surpassingly yellow. In an era when reporters relied on wild conjecture or just made stuff up, Raymond opted for balance and accuracy. Among the crowded ranks of New York dailies, this was one competitive niche that remained open. A prospectus, used to raise $100,000 in startup costs, contains what amounts to a mandate for the paper that would come to be called the Gray Lady: “We do not mean to write as if we were in a passion, unless that shall really be the case; and we shall make it a point to get into a passion as rarely as possible.”

  Olmsted’s interview with the Times lasted less than five minutes. Raymond didn’t even inquire about Olmsted’s views on slavery. Instead, the editor demanded assurances that Olmsted would base his reporting strictly on observation. Satisfied, Raymond hired Olmsted on the spot, assigning him to travel through the South for many months. He was to receive $10 for each published dispatch.

  Raymond could afford to take a chance on Olmsted. In fact, he really had no choice. The Times had recently hiked its price to two cents a copy and doubled its pages to eight. Circulation had immediately shrunk from 25,000 to 18,000. Raymond had extra news pages to fill and competitive ground to regain. What better way to make a name for an upstart paper than with a series on the topic of the day? While Olmsted’s qualifications might appear meager, he was actually a promising choice. He was fresh from a walking tour of England and had produced a book based on his observations—a reasonably parallel exercise. Furthermore, he was a farmer. The South was nothing if not an agrarian society; to make sense of the region’s manners and mores, he’d have this common experience to draw on.

  In October 1852, shortly after being hired, Olmsted wrote a letter to Fred Kingsbury describing his new job at the Times as requiring “matter of fact matter to come after the deluge of spoony fancy pictures now at its height.” Translation: Olmsted would need to stick to the facts, avoiding the emotionalism of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its ilk, what he here referred to as “spoony fancy pictures.”

  Critics of Harriet Beecher Stowe were fond of pointing out that she had written her novel with firsthand knowledge of but one slave state, Kentucky. She had never even set foot on a plantation. Olmsted was about to travel all over the South. He was about to see for himself. What he would see would change his thinking utterly.

  Olmsted set out on his journey in December 1852, timing his departure for after the fall harvest was done. Though he’d landed a newspaper assignment, he was still a farmer by trade. He planned to be gone for the winter, when nothing of great import was likely to occur. Just to be certain, Brace agreed to periodically check in on Tosomock Farm.

  Olmsted traveled first by train to Washington, D.C. There, he experienced something akin to culture shock. While selling slaves had been outlawed within the district—another Compromise of 1850 horse trade—owning slaves was still permitted. This was the U.S. capitol, yet Olmsted was stunned by how much it seemed a southern town. From Washington, he made forays into the Maryland countryside, then down into Virginia.

  There was something immensely lonely about this first leg of his journey, as he described it in his accounts. Olmsted ate alone in roadhouses, eavesdropping on fellow diners, trying to gather bits of scuttlebutt. From the town of Richmond, he tailed a funeral procession of slaves as they walked out into the countryside. Standing at a distance, Olmsted watched them heap dirt on the coffin, listened as they broke into a calland-response dirge, soon broken by wails of grief.

  Before coming south, Olmsted had been furnished by friends with letters of introduction to various plantation owners. But plantations proved to be maddeningly absentee operations. Whenever Olmsted called, the owners weren’t home. Drawing strangers into conversation, meanwhile, proved immensely difficul
t.

  Olmsted made no effort to disguise either his voice or appearance. He simply identified himself as a traveler, a suitably valid explanation. If someone pursued with further questions, he readily conceded that he was from New York. This was almost a point of honor; Olmsted figured people would open up if he was honest—well, to a point. He stopped short of revealing that he was a reporter. No matter, because at the outset he was rarely able to get anyone to say boo. “You can’t imagine how hard it is to get hold of a conversable man,” he wrote to Brace, “—and when you find one, he will talk of anything else but slavery &c.” Of Southerners, he added, “They are jealous of observation of things that would tell against slavery.”

  Olmsted recorded his impressions nonetheless and sent them off to Raymond. His initial dispatches were generously padded, full of observations about statues and aqueducts and farm equipment such as Hussey’s reapers. Describing Richmond, he included such superfluous detail as this: “The mean temperature in July and August is about 80 Fahrenheit, and in January 44 degrees.”

  In a letter to his father, Olmsted confessed that he felt like he wasn’t doing a very good job. The South was proving hard to penetrate. Olmsted was amazed by how like a foreign country it was, much more so than anyplace he’d visited during his recent tour through Europe. Raymond ran the dispatches anyway, even giving them prominent play. He had a newspaper to fill.

  Olmsted’s column, “The South,” was given a regular spot at the top of page 2. It often alternated with a series that Brace was writing for the Times called “Walks Among the New-York Poor.” Brace was just then in the process of founding the outfit for which he’d be remembered, the Children’s Aid Society. It would revolutionize social services for children in America, providing humane alternatives to almshouses and orphan asylums.

  For his dispatches, Olmsted used a pseudonymous byline, as was common practice in those days. “Yeoman” served as a veiled reference to farming, at this point the only profession Olmsted had managed to stick with for any amount of time. It was also an assertion that this particular correspondent could be counted on for earthy, no-nonsense commentary. The convention of using a pseudonym was doubly sensible because it kept Olmsted’s identity secret. As a Northerner writing about slavery, he would be in grave danger if his cover got blown. Of course, first he’d need to serve up something beyond the temperature statistics available in any almanac.

  Olmsted kept at it. If he possessed one winning quality as a reporter it was unflappability—the very trait that Kingsbury had singled out in a letter about Olmsted years earlier. Ashamed of his flat initial dispatches, Olmsted took to buttonholing strangers. He tried everywhere to engage people—waiting on train platforms, inside general stores, working in open fields. The law of averages dictated that some would talk. These conversations, in turn, landed him fresh invitations to other plantations, ones where cotton was grown as well as corn, rice, sugar—even a turpentine plantation.

  Gradually, the South began to open up before Olmsted. He found it a place of uncommon beauty. Passing beneath a live-oak tree, he paused for several minutes to stare up in wonderment. He noted the strange customs. Corn bread was served breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and he grew to hate it, describing it as “French friterzeed Dutch flabbergasted hell-fixins.”

  Most of all, the South was complicated. This was a world best rendered in shades of gray. On visiting a plantation along the James River in Virginia, what struck Olmsted most was how harried the owner appeared to be. He was beset by worry about money and crops, forced to manage his slave laborers even on the most trifling matters. “This is a hard life,” the man told him. “You see how constantly I am called on, often at night as well as day. I did not sleep a wink last night till near morning; my health is failing and my wife is feeble, but I cannot rid myself of it.” Why not hire an overseer? “I cannot trust an overseer,” the man continued. “I had one, and paid him four hundred dollars a year, and I had almost as much work and anxiety looking after him as in overseeing for myself.” This man may have been a slaveholder, but Olmsted found that he couldn’t really see him as wicked. He was merely an overworked farmer, someone with whom Olmsted could easily empathize.

  Olmsted proved an open-minded correspondent. He managed to recapture the natural inquisitiveness that had shone through in his letters home during his China voyage years back and, more recently, during his walk across England. He also showed an uncanny ability to capture the quirks and nongrammaticalisms of ordinary speech. His standard practice was to engage in leisurely conversation, then slip off by himself to jot down notes. One time at an inn, he requested a candle for his room. But why did he require a candle in his room? was the puzzled reply. Because, he explained, he needed to write by its light.

  Periodically, he’d craft his notes into a Times dispatch. He made a practice of preserving the anonymity of his subjects. After all, they hadn’t even been aware that they were talking to a reporter. Were their names, attached to their words, to show up in a newspaper article, his subjects might also be in danger of reprisal.

  Visiting a rice plantation, Olmsted was intrigued by the generous considerations given to the slaves. The slaves here were comfortably dressed and lived in well-appointed cabins, and there was a nursery where infants were tended while their mothers worked the fields. On this particular plantation, he learned, many of the slaves even owned guns.

  Apparently, they used the guns to hunt for game in the nearby woods, a perk that allowed them to supplement their usual food rations. Olmsted was dumbfounded. Here was a white family living in tremendous isolation, miles from the next-nearest white family, and surrounded by two hundred armed slaves. The family didn’t even bother to lock their doors or windows, noted Olmsted. When questioned, the owner laughed as though Olmsted was the crazy one. He led Olmsted into a cabin where an elderly female slave was busy separating rice tailings from a pile of chaff. After shooting a grin at Olmsted, the man informed the old slave that he was granting her freedom. The woman protested. “I lubs ’ou mas’r, oh, I lubs ’ou,” she cried. “I don’t want go ’way from ’ou.”

  Olmsted—clear-eyed reporter that he was—was left to grapple with this exchange. The rice plantation didn’t prove to be an isolated case, either. Strange as it was, a genuine regard seemed to exist, sometimes even approaching familial love, between some owners and their slaves. Meanwhile, it was hypocrisy to pretend that the North’s economic system was free of ruthlessness. “Oh God! Who are we to condemn our brother,” Olmsted demanded in a Times dispatch. “ . . . No slave freezes to death for want of habitation or fuel, as have men in Boston. No slave reels off into the abyss of God, from want of work that shall bring it food, as do men and women in New-York. Remember that, Mrs. Stowe. Remember that, indignant sympathizers.”

  Olmsted remained constantly on the move in the South. Even traveling short distances proved unduly complicated, and frequently it was necessary to transfer from one means of conveyance to another.

  At one point, he set off from Norfolk, Virginia, bound for Gaston, North Carolina, about ninety miles. He began his trip on a ferryboat that was supposed to connect with a train. Midway across Norfolk Harbor, the ferry simply stopped running and drifted for fifteen minutes. Apparently, the fireman had fallen asleep and stopped feeding coal into the ferry’s engine. Olmsted arrived at the train terminal a half hour late. Fortunately, the train arrived a full hour late.

  Chugging along inferior track, the train made an achingly slow journey to Weldon, North Carolina. There, Olmsted hired a stagecoach. The driver, not planning to depart for a while, suggested that Olmsted go eat dinner. He urged Olmsted to leave his luggage, which contained his reporting notes, among other things. Upon finishing dinner, Olmsted discovered that the coach had departed without him. Olmsted broke into a run and was able to quickly overtake the coach. The road was so preposterously rutted that it took four hours for the coach to travel fourteen miles, whereupon Olmsted was summarily turned out. Late that night,
he finally arrived in Gaston, exhausted. This was also no isolated incident. Olmsted soon concluded that the South was almost comically inefficient.

  Nowhere was this more evident than with slave labor. At any given time, Olmsted observed, only a portion of the slaves on a plantation were capable of work. Prior to the age of twelve, for example, children born to slaves could contribute very little, at most being called upon for such light duty as scaring birds away from crops. Old slaves were also capable of only the most minimal work. Same for a slave that was sick or injured. Female slaves who were menstruating weren’t considered fit for the demands of field labor, either. “They are forever complaining of ‘irregularities,’” a plantation owner told him. “They don’t come to the field, and you ask what’s the matter, and the old nurse always nods her head and says, ‘Oh, she’s not well, sir; she’s not fit to work, sir,’—and you have to take her word for it.”

  Add up all the slaves that couldn’t work, Olmsted found, and at any given time only about a third remained that could—an observation that was borne out in visit after visit to plantations. Yet masters had to house and clothe and feed their slaves, every last one. Moreover, the few slaves working didn’t exactly go all out. They broke tools and mistreated the mules, neglecting to give them food and water. One time, Olmsted watched with bemusement as an overseer on horseback rode toward a group of slaves who were shirking. They stepped up their pace, but in the meantime, slaves on the other side of the field had let up.

  Olmsted encountered several slave owners who also had experience running farms in the North. These men were in a good position to compare the two systems. All conceded that slave labor was drastically less efficient than hired farm labor. Olmsted did a rough average of the men’s varied assessments and concluded that a slave accomplished about half the work of one of the hired hands on his Staten Island farm.