Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  Olmsted hoped to stay in New York—even for one more day—to supervise a planting of trees in Central Park. But events were calling him away.

  John Olmsted was a kind father and extremely indulgent, allowing Fred to enjoy a kind of extended adolescence. He bankrolled many of his eldest son’s speculative schemes.

  During his early twenties, Olmsted hung out in New Haven and became friends with his brother John’s Yale circle. This 1846 daguerreotype features (l. to r.) Charles Trask, Charles Brace, Fred Kingsbury, Frederick Law Olmsted, and John Hull Olmsted.

  John Olmsted, Fred’s brother.

  Mary Perkins Olmsted, who was first John’s wife and later Fred’s wife.

  FLO in cap and cape, circa 1860.

  Olmsted and Vaux’s inspired Greensward plan beat out thirty-two other entries to become the design for Central Park. The Ramble, originally an untamed garden, was Olmsted’s favorite feature. The Cave added a sense of mystery during the early years of the park. (Its opening was later covered over.)

  Central Park’s creators (l. to r.): Andrew Green, George Waring Jr. (probably), Calvert Vaux, Ignaz Pilat, Jacob Wrey Mould, and Olmsted.

  The partners: Calvert Vaux (left), a trained architect of immense talent, and Olmsted (below), self-taught and sublimely intuitive, had a strained working relationship.

  During the Civil War, Olmsted headed the U.S. Sanitary Commission, forerunner of the Red Cross and a vital source of aid to wounded soldiers. Olmsted raised money and purchased this cannon, which was placed in front of the Free State Hotel in Lawrence during the Bloody Kansas struggles.

  Early environmentalist: Before this gathering of influential journalists, Olmsted delivered a seminal 1865 speech that stepped up efforts to preserve Yosemite, even helped set in motion the idea of a national park system. The photo was taken by Carleton Watkins, renowned for his images of Yosemite. Olmsted is in the front row (second from left).

  The Endale Arch—a beloved feature of Prospect Park, Olmsted and Vaux’s Brooklyn masterpiece.

  The plan for Riverside, Illinois, a model suburb featuring many innovative ideas that continue to influence modern suburbs.

  Nature ruled at Fairsted, Olmsted’s home in Brookline, Massachusetts.

  The 99 Steps in Boston’s Franklin Park.

  The Muddy River Improvement is just one portion of Olmsted’s ambitious park system for Boston—what came to be known as the Emerald Necklace.

  To achieve his vision for the U.S. capitol grounds, Olmsted had to battle Congress for decades. He won. This modern aerial view shows how faithful the capitol grounds have remained to Olmsted’s original plan.

  Olmsted (right) and three of his children, John, Marion, and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. Not pictured here: Charlotte, who had to be institutionalized, and the three children he lost.

  Olmsted’s design for the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago was one of his greatest, featuring winding waterways, a wooded island, and brightly colored boats with quiet electric engines (all visible in this photo).

  Olmsted and daughter Marion on the grounds of North Carolina’s Biltmore Estate.

  Changing of the guard: Olmsted was present for the initial sessions with painter John Singer Sargent. But by 1895, Olmsted was frail and failing fast. Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. stood in, even wore his father’s clothes, so that Sargent could finish the portrait.

  The Biltmore Estate near Asheville, North Carolina, is Olmsted’s swan song.

  He spent his final years at McLean, an asylum for which he’d earlier provided a landscape design. Proctor House (pictured here) is the residence hall where Olmsted likely lived.

  CHAPTER 17

  Antietam to Gettysburg

  SOON OLMSTED WAS back in Washington, contending with fresh emergencies. A large Confederate force, commanded by General Robert E. Lee, had crossed into Maryland, where a number of battles had been fought, leaving Union troops exhausted and supplies depleted. By taking the war to Northern soil, Lee hoped to influence the midterm elections, maybe force Lincoln to sue for peace. By entering Maryland, a slaveholding border state that hadn’t seceded, he hoped to fracture the fragile Union. On September 17, 1862, the two armies clashed in bucolic farm country near Antietam Creek. The soldiers soon found themselves boxed in tight in a cornfield, forced into close-range combat.

  It was a balmy day, the sun was brilliant. As the battle wore on, the soldiers’ faces turned black with powder from repeated musket firings, a surreal contrast to the blue sky overhead. Soon the stubble of the new autumn corn was splattered red with blood. And a peculiar smell hung over the battlefield, a mix of gunpowder, trampled vegetation, and human sweat. Forever after, among survivors of Antietam, this odor would be remembered as the very essence of terror.

  Antietam—a battle in which 3,654 soldiers lost their lives—is the single bloodiest day in U.S. military history. It also proved to be a logistical nightmare; Antietam is probably the Civil War battle in which medical supplies were most a problem.

  The USSC did what it could. It had become a well-prepared outfit. Under Olmsted’s leadership, the Sanitary Commission had grown into a formidable force at remarkable speed. The hospital transports used during the peninsula campaign had been a serious boon. While docked in various Northern ports, boats flying the red-and-white USSC flag had been seen by countless people, a tangible symbol of wartime relief and one that made soliciting support or funds all the easier.

  Olmsted had managed to set up twelve supply depots behind Union lines. Drawing on its network of women’s aid societies, the USSC had ready stores of dried fruit, onions, pickles, sauerkraut, and brandy. Books and Bibles were donated for wounded soldiers, along with games like dominoes and backgammon. Money raised by the aid societies was used to buy medical supplies such as bandages, quinine, and opium.

  The women provided an unending supply of home-sewn clothing. There was woolen underwear for winter, flannel for summer—and shirts, always more shirts. “Most of our ladies,” quipped Bellows, “have so magnified our soldiers in their hearts that the shirts and drawers they send us would fit the Anakims.” With Anakims, the good reverend was making a biblical reference to a race of giants mentioned in the book of Deuteronomy. Bellow’s advice to the women’s aid societies: If you make a piece of clothing, use your own husband’s actual dimensions as a guide. The USSC was forever providing directives. For a while, there was a mania for lint, and women gathered it by the barrelful until word came down from Washington that enough was enough.

  The USSC held regular sanitary fairs in various Northern cities to raise money, awareness, and whatever items were most needed at the time. Olmsted even arranged for notable people to go town to town, touting the organization in speeches. Horace Howard Furness, an eminent Shakespearean scholar, traveled through New York and Connecticut in service to the USSC and sent the following note to Olmsted: “I have addressed large bodies and little bodies, and nobodies and somebodies. I have spoken in Town Halls, in Concert Halls and in Court Rooms, in Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Lutheran and Episcopalian Churches, from pulpits and from judicial benches, before communion tables and baptismal fonts. I have seen before me eyes glistening with interest and eyes drowsy with sleep.”

  Following the battle of Antietam, barns and churches for miles around were converted into makeshift hospitals. A railroad bridge over the Monocacy River had been destroyed during the battle, cutting off a vital supply route. Olmsted dispatched USSC agents to Philadelphia with $3,500 to buy supplies. Under no circumstances, he instructed them, were they to place these items on trains, as that would leave desperately needed goods choked in the rail jam caused by the bridge outage. Instead, the agents scared up as many wagons as they could. USSC supplies arrived at Antietam a full day before those of the Medical Bureau.

  According to its records, during the week following Antietam, the USSC provided 28,763 dry goods, including shirts, towels, pillows, and tin cups; 30 barrels of linen bandages and lint; chloroform, opiates, and bedpans
; 2,620 pounds of condensed milk; 5,000 pounds of beef stock and canned meats; 3,000 bottles of “wine and cordials”; and assorted tons of lemons, crackers, tea, and sugar. Olmsted traveled to Antietam to oversee the relief effort. “It was very squalid,” he reported, “but everywhere I saw the great value of our work.”

  At Antietam, once again, General McClellan demonstrated his hesitancy. He allowed Lee’s army to slip back across the Potomac. Lincoln was furious, and McClellan was relieved of his command soon after. Still, Antietam was a Union victory. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had been driven back to the South.

  Lincoln had been holding out for a battlefield win, however slight, because he had a gambit planned. Five days after Antietam, on September 22, 1862, the president issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, promising freedom to the slaves in any Confederate state that did not return to the Union by January 1. For states in rebellion that didn’t respond by the deadline, Lincoln planned to follow through by decreeing their slaves free.

  Up to this point, the Civil War had enjoyed the support of abolitionists in the North, but its official purpose had been to prevent Southern secession. With the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln invested the Union’s efforts with a new, higher, almost mystical mandate. No longer was this merely a war to preserve the republic; this was about ending slavery. His timing was perfect. The soldiers and citizens of the North were growing weary of ceaseless war, but now with a fresh purpose, they were galvanized.

  Throughout the war, Olmsted—like so many Northern opponents of slavery—had been frustrated by Lincoln’s gradualism. It was a stance Olmsted himself had once held, before traveling the South in the 1850s. Now, Lincoln had made the same transition to red-hot abolitionist. Olmsted revised his estimate of the man: “The Proclamation of Emancipation by President Lincoln, looking at its possible economical and moral results in the future, is undoubtedly one of the great events of the century,” he declared in a New York Times editorial on September 28, 1862. Privately, in a letter to a fellow USSC commissioner, Olmsted wrote: “I shall stand by it [the proclamation] now as long as I live, and I shall try to bring up my children to make it good. I shall be for continual war, or for Southern independence rather than go back one step from it.”

  Olmsted sent a package to John Nicolay, Lincoln’s private secretary. The package contained several books, presumably a sampling of Olmsted’s Southern works. There’s no record of the titles sent, nor is there anything to indicate that Lincoln read them. An accompanying letter contained all kinds of suggestions on how the Emancipation Proclamation might be publicized—printed on linen, drawn up in handbills, distributed to slaves whenever the Union army encountered them. As with Port Royal, Olmsted liked the idea of enlisting Southern blacks to undercut the Confederacy. “Each would then become a centre of more correct rumors of the purposes and offers of the President,” he wrote to Lincoln, “and knowledge of the true designs of the government would thus be disseminated among those now so generally grossly deceived in this respect.”

  Beneath the charge of big events—the battles, the relief efforts, the political intrigue—Olmsted’s personal angst continued. “You are too near the machinery,” a friend wrote him right after Antietam. “You smell the grease and feel the thick air, and it makes you sick.”

  Olmsted was increasingly lonely in Washington, separated from Mary and his children. Mary sent him some photographs of herself. He commented on one he liked in particular and said that the photographs would have benefited if they had been taken in a garden. He ended the letter with, “Kiss all the young ones. I thought of them when I saw hundreds of men dying for them.” This was followed by a series of letters in which husband and wife grew testy from their long separation. Mary recited the stresses of raising children by herself. She asked to move to Washington. Olmsted resisted, citing financial woes. He’d already moved a couple of times, from the Willard to a cheaper place, then cheaper still. But then Olmsted relented. “Thank you for encouraging me,” he wrote to Mary as a kind of mea culpa. “That I suppose is what I need.”

  In November 1862, Olmsted moved his family to a furnished house in Washington at a very modest address, 332 G Street. “We will be as frugal as we can,” he told Mary. The owner was the retired captain of a potato steamer, and the house was filled with items taken from the boat. There was sticky mahogany furniture that plastered to one’s backside and a hideous ottoman with a pattern that Olmsted likened to a spider’s eye. But there were five hens, providing fresh eggs, and a cow for milk. Olmsted signed a six-month lease for $750. Six months was his estimate of how much longer the Civil War would last.

  Half a year later, the conflict still raged. In the spring of 1863, in his official capacity as general secretary of the USSC, Olmsted took a six-week trip. His itinerary included stops in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, St. Louis, Louisville, and Young’s Point, Louisiana. Mary balked at another separation. But Olmsted had told her, “It is a day for heroes, and we must be heroes along with the rest.” It was his way of saying that the war was bigger than the both of them and demanded sacrifice.

  The main purpose of the trip was to repair a schism that had grown up between the USSC in Washington and its western operations. The Louisiana leg was to meet with General Ulysses Grant. Olmsted planned to gauge the medical needs of Grant’s Army of the Tennessee, then involved in a protracted and unsuccessful siege of Vicksburg. The trip also held personal interest for Olmsted because, while he had traveled extensively in the South, he had never been to such northern cities as Cleveland and Chicago.

  In a stunningly short time, the USSC had grown into an institution renowned for its aid to wounded soldiers. There was even a song, “Sanitary Fair Quadrille”; it was no “Battle Cry of Freedom,” but popular nonetheless. The USSC was also becoming increasingly complex and far-flung. It now had branches in places such as Pittsburgh and Cincinnati. The branches connected with the women’s aid groups in that region. The aim, for Olmsted, was an efficient system that funneled goods and money from the tiniest hamlet to the vast Union army.

  But there were hitches, especially out West. This had everything to do with the way the army was structured. Soldiers tended to enlist in the town nearest to where they lived. Once in the army, they remained together in companies organized by common geography. This fostered cohesion on the battlefield. With medical relief efforts, the result could be just the opposite. As the USSC branches had learned, it was possible to solicit supplies earmarked for soldiers from a particular locale. Thus, Cincinnati could channel goods to Ohio soldiers, and Iowa could likewise take care of its own.

  To Olmsted, this was anathema. Such localism, as he saw it, was akin to the secessionist impulses that had led to the Civil War in the first place. This was the United States Sanitary Commission. It aided the Union army. Of course, he was also rankled by the personal affront. Individual branches were undercutting a national organization that he had built.

  Thomas Starr King, a Unitarian minister and friend of Bellows, had recently pledged $200,000 to the USSC. This upped the separatist tensions still further. The Cincinnati branch demanded $15,000 of that sum for its own coffers. Olmsted composed a 138-page treatise, spelling out in minute detail the organization and mission of the USSC, and circulated it to the branches. It was ignored.

  Obviously, Olmsted would need to engage in some delicate diplomacy. Bellows had the highest respect for Olmsted’s abilities, but he knew his colleague could be difficult. Trying to smooth the waters in advance of the trip, Bellows wrote a letter to a USSC operative in Louisville: “You understand ... the glorious and invaluable qualities of our General Secretary, his integrity, disinterestedness and talent for organization, his patriotism. You also understand his impracticable temper, his irritable brain, his unappreciation of human nature in its undivided form and his very imperfect sympathies to weak, mixed, and inconsequent people.”

  Judging from his memos, Olmsted was able to keep this harshness, the dark side of h
is reformer’s zeal, in check during his trip. He attended sanitary conferences and had tea with various USSC functionaries—all very civilized. In a letter to Bellows, Olmsted described his role as cultivating “a friendly feeling amongst all concerned by a little white lying.” He also gained no real concessions from the USSC’s western branches.

  The inspection of General Grant’s operation was more successful. On March 23, 1863, Olmsted arrived in Young’s Point, a small Louisiana town, and from there traveled to a nearby army outpost, along the western bank of the Mississippi. Grant had a vast force under his command. Anchored alongside his floating headquarters, the steamship Magnolia, were scores of craft: supply boats, coal barges, and ironclads, a new type of armored warship. At this point, nearly 30,000 troops were assembled. Because the surrounding land was swampy and impenetrable, they were camped on terraces cut into a levee.

  Across the top of the levee, Olmsted could see two long rows of graves stretching into the distance. These were for soldiers who had died of disease. Forcing an army to wait, as Olmsted knew, was always a bad thing. So far, Grant had not been able to figure out how to take Vicksburg, a Confederate fortress city on the Mississippi. Many thought Grant’s days were numbered and that he would soon be relieved.