Genius of Place

by Justin Martin

  Olmsted toured the camps. And he met with William Le Baron Jenney, an engineer and senior member of William Sherman’s staff. (Sherman was then serving under Grant.) Jenney was involved in an elaborate and somewhat fanciful plan. He was overseeing an effort to carve a canal through the equally swampy terrain east of the Mississippi. Then Grant’s troops could be transported by boat to the other side of Vicksburg. They could take the city by land.

  Olmsted doubted this plan would work. But Olmsted liked Jenney, especially after he learned that they shared a passion for architecture and gardening. The two had lunch in a tent on the grounds of an abandoned plantation house that served as Sherman’s headquarters. To Olmsted’s delight, Jenney reminisced about his student days in Paris, studying at the École Polytechnique and visiting the Louvre and the Palace of Fontainebleau. As they talked, the view across the Mississippi was of treetops hung with Spanish moss, vultures circling lazily above. A group of blacks was hard at work, tearing down an old gin house. Olmsted could hear drum beats and bugle calls and, way in the distance, the boom of big guns pitching shells at a rebel position. The conversation was a welcome respite from war. Olmsted recorded the meeting with Jenney as having a “peculiar zest in the midst of raw upper Louisiana plantation, where nature’s usual work is but half-done.”

  That evening, Olmsted had an appointment with Grant. But the general was distracted. He was dealing with a fresh slate of setbacks, as per usual. Grant pored over various reports, leaving Olmsted waiting. “I am not always as much occupied, as I am tonight,” said Grant, as Olmsted rose to go, “and whenever you see that I am not, understand that I shall be glad to talk with you.”

  The next evening they spent an hour together. The two were almost exact contemporaries; Olmsted was born the day before Grant in April 1822. But where Olmsted was a light drinker, Grant was known for prodigious alcohol consumption. According to the account of someone who walked in midmeeting, Grant was imbibing heavily that very night and had to cling to the back of a chair to remain standing. Maybe it was discretion, but Olmsted didn’t record any impressions of Grant’s drinking. He tended to be temperate in his view of excessive drinking and once described alcoholism as “a disease” that needed to be “cautiously and delicately helped”—an atypical view in his times.

  At any rate, Olmsted found Grant disarmingly candid, especially in detailing the annoyances of his job. The general was put off by governors who were forever demanding special considerations for soldiers from their states. This struck a nerve with Olmsted. He’d been dealing with the scourge of localism, too. But Olmsted truly warmed to Grant when the general declared the USSC indispensable and requested its help. Grant wanted the USSC to convert transport steamers to hospitals, as it had on the Virginia peninsula, but this time in support of his Vicksburg campaign. Olmsted, in turn, requisitioned two hundred barrels of potatoes and onions for immediate delivery to Grant’s army to ward off scurvy.

  For a normal person, possessed of normal ambition, fulfilling a demanding schedule of meetings and obligations would have been sufficient. Not Olmsted. Throughout his whole six-week journey to the various western USSC branches and to Grant’s Louisiana headquarters, he took copious notes.

  Apparently, on this trip, he once again saw the potential of shaping his observations into a book. Anthony Trollope had recently published North America, a much-acclaimed travelogue laced with trenchant social criticism. William Howard Russell’s My Diary North and South was hot off the presses, published in 1863. Both authors were British, and Olmsted didn’t feel either had succeeded in laying bare the American psyche. But he had been credited with doing exactly this, for one region of the country at least, with his Southern trilogy.

  While taking notes on his travels, Olmsted even adopted a new pseudonym, “Carl.” It was akin to “Yeoman,” which he’d used in his Times dispatches. Carl is a play on carl, an archaic term for a man of the people.

  Some of Olmsted’s notes are downright derivative. When Olmsted missed a train connection in Odin, Illinois, he took the opportunity to watch the people waiting in the station. Trollope had also missed a train during his American visit, and over the course of a lengthy layover, he had recorded memorable impressions of his fellow travelers. Other writings are merely cranky. A stay at the Burnet House in Cincinnati prompted him to list the establishment’s myriad shortcomings, followed by: “What else is necessary to justify the assertion that the palatial hotel is the dreariest of all American humbugs? . . .” But there are also sharp observations to be found among these jottings. During his travels, he was often struck by how the demands of commerce crowded out anything of lasting value—a venerable Olmstedian theme. “It seems useless to describe Chicago,” he writes at one point. “What it was when I saw it, it will not be by the time this is read.”

  Ultimately, Olmsted was unable to shape his Carl journals into a book. Even he couldn’t find the time.

  Lee’s army was on the move again. Once again, he was crossing onto Northern soil. This was a strategic move, an effort to capture Union territory, but also a pragmatic one. While camped in Virginia, his soldiers had eaten everything in sight—every cow, every chicken, every vegetable, every last morsel—and the barren farmland needed time to recover. Hungry Confederates were now massing in Maryland and Pennsylvania.

  Lee issued Order No. 72: no theft of private property, but federal property was fair game. The general knew that victory would be twice as hard for an invading army that enraged civilians by pillaging their farms. Instead, Southern troops visited Northern farms to “purchase” food using Confederate scrip. Who was going to say no to men with guns?

  One thing was for certain: A major battle was brewing, though no one was sure quite where it would take place. Olmsted ordered that stores of supplies be moved to a variety of locations, including Baltimore, Harrisburg, and Frederick. Whole sprawling armies were on the march, and everything was fluid, uncertain. The Confederates briefly occupied Frederick, forcing the USSC to hide its supplies there. The goods were federal property, after all, subject to seizure under Lee’s order. Presently, it became clear that the two armies were converging near the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The USSC started sending wagons laden with supplies to the front.

  The battle began on July 1, 1863, and lasted for three days. Opposing Lee was General George Meade, in the job less than a week. He’d relieved General Joseph Hooker, who, in turn, was Lincoln’s replacement for Mac the Unready—McClellan. The USSC continued to send a steady stream of wagons onto the battlefield. Many wagons were captured by Confederates, who stole the supplies and imprisoned the drivers and doctors onboard. But plenty got through, often at crucial points in the conflict. At the very moment that General James Longstreet was attacking the Union’s left flank, a pair of supply wagons marked “U.S. San. Com.” pushed through under heavy fire. They were carrying brandy, beef stock, bandages, and chloroform. Several hundred gravely injured Union soldiers had been laid out in an orchard behind a barn. Upon the approach of the wagons, a beleaguered battlefield surgeon supposedly cried, “Thank God! Here comes the Sanitary Commission. Now we shall be able to do something.”

  Olmsted was in Philadelphia when news of Gettysburg began to trickle in with wounded soldiers. Apparently, the Union had come within a hair’s breadth of defeat on several occasions. But its fortunes had swung when General George Pickett led his disastrous charge across three-quarters of a mile of open field, right into the teeth of Union fire.

  On July 5, pelted by a heavy rain, Lee’s defeated army filed along Hagerstown Road, headed back to Virginia. The Union army pursued, but it was a halfhearted effort. Olmsted sent a telegram to Bellows: “Private advices tend to confirm reports of capture of over fifteen thousand prisoners and one hundred guns. Lee retreating.” One of the USSC commissioners posted the telegram on a bulletin board, commenting, “Olmsted is wary, shrewd, and never sanguine. This despatch was not sent without strong evidence to support it.”

  Olms
ted proved correct in assigning victory to the North. But the USSC’s real work had only just begun, as a mass of wounded remained on the battlefield. The Union death toll, 3,155 soldiers, was dwarfed by its injuries, 14,531 men; a smaller Confederate force had lost 4,708, with 12,693 wounded. Rails to the east of Gettysburg had been knocked out during the battle, but as soon as they were restored, the USSC began a massive relief effort.

  Olmsted went on a buying mission in Philadelphia, purchasing tons of fresh eggs, butter, mutton, and milk. He also bought a vast quantity of ice. This he used to turn a boxcar into a makeshift refrigerated car. He filled a second railcar with tents and other supplies. On July 6, he was able to arrange for both cars to be attached to the very first train into Gettysburg.

  He then traveled to Gettysburg to supervise a relief station. It was a larger version of the station the USSC had created on the Virginia peninsula and again featured iron kettles hanging over a fire pit, cooking soup and heating coffee day and night. Tents were set up to care for wounded soldiers until trains could evacuate them.

  During the week following the battle, Olmsted arranged for an average of 40 tons a day of supplies to flow into Gettysburg, which included 300 yards of surgeon’s silk, 3,500 fans, 6,100 pounds of fresh butter, 4,000 pairs of shoes, 1,200 pairs of crutches—such a variety of items both humdrum and precious to serve so many men in so much pain.

  By July 18, the emergency had died down sufficiently that Olmsted was able to walk the fields of Gettysburg, as countless others would in the years to come. He was struck by the scale of the place; everything had happened across distances far greater than he had supposed. He also noted that the hills were gentle and rolling, so very out of kilter with the carnage that was everywhere still in evidence. “At some points,” he wrote, “where the ground was taken and retaken, I found plenty of evidence of terrible fighting.”

  Olmsted came across spent shells and twisted bayonets, broken-down wagons and half-buried dead horses. Particularly touching, to Olmsted, was the random strew of Union and Confederate caps, often together on the ground, shot through with bullet holes.

  CHAPTER 18

  “The Country Cannot Spare You”

  JULY 4, 1863, marked the turning point of the Civil War. On the very day Lee conceded defeat at Gettysburg, General John Pemberton surrendered at Vicksburg. Grant had figured out how to take the fortress city, though the canal plan had been abandoned.

  VICTORY! WATERLOO ECLIPSED! screamed the headline in the Philadelphia Inquirer. When news of the defeats reached England, the overseas market for Confederate war bonds collapsed, and the rebel cause was further hobbled. The chance that the South could win was now infinitesimal; hopes shifted to the possibility that a battered Union army might be too weary to keep fighting. What remained was an agonized denouement, stretching over nearly two more years, as the war slouched toward Appomattox.

  This was also a turning point for Olmsted. Gettysburg was the last major battle in which he played a role; his relationship with the USSC was souring fast. It’s almost as if the prolonged conflict was exposing tensions within the USSC, and factionalism—the very evil Olmsted had railed against—was now cropping up between him and his colleagues. The USSC board began to snipe at Olmsted, raising issues that struck him as picayune. A directive was issued, for example, requiring Olmsted to get approval for all expenditures over $1,000. On another occasion, a fellow USSC commissioner demanded that Olmsted dismiss four employees for causes ranging from “oafishness” to “beastly drunkenness.” Olmsted thought that the charges were trumped up; he took the call to fire the employees as a personal slight.

  Olmsted met the pettiness with still greater pettiness. The New York metropolitan police force had donated fifty boxes of lemons earmarked for soldiers at Vicksburg. Olmsted complained that it was wasteful to transport lemons all that distance. Why not send fifty boxes of lemons from a closer depot—from Tennessee, say, now under Union control? Why did the troops in Mississippi have to receive the New York lemons specifically? It’s a simple point, but Olmsted made it exhaustively and exhaustingly in a letter to the Reverend Henry Bellows. This was followed by a flurry of dispatches to Bellows, more long letters raising other small points. “I chafe and fume like a caged lion,” Olmsted wrote. “You can chloroform me or beat me blue and silent.”

  For Olmsted, infighting with the board had echoes of Central Park’s politics and his dealings with Andrew Green. Once again, bureaucrats and bean counters were mucking around, trying to bring down something that he had built. He began floating the idea that he might resign.

  George Templeton Strong, a fellow USSC commissioner, crafted an entry in his diary that includes a kind of plus-column and minus-column assessment of Olmsted. “He is an extraordinary fellow,” wrote Strong, “decidedly the most remarkable specimen of human nature with whom I have ever been brought into close relations. Talent and energy most rare; absolute purity and disinterestedness. Prominent defects, a monomania for system and organization . . . and appetite for power.”

  In another diary entry, Strong speculated that his colleague’s extreme drive was causing the worst traits in his nature to win out: “Olmsted is in an unhappy, sick, sore mental state. Seems trying to pick a quarrel with the Executive Committee. Perhaps his most unsanitary habits of life make him morally morbid. He works like a dog all day and sits up nearly all night, doesn’t go home to his family for five days 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!!!”

  Olmsted resented the challenges from his USSC colleagues. But something else was going on, too. By now, Northern victory was pretty much ensured, and Olmsted finally had the chance to contemplate life after wartime. It filled him with panic. Even if Olmsted didn’t leave the USSC, this wartime job would be ending soon enough anyway. He wouldn’t be able to return to work at his beloved Central Park, either. Vaux had recently resigned, worn down by political battles of his own. He’d gone ahead and submitted Olmsted’s resignation, too, a move to which Olmsted agreed. What could Olmsted do next to make a difference? What would he do to make a living? Minus the USSC job’s salary (which had been settled at $2,500 per year) and $1,200 from Central Park, his income would be nil.

  During this period, Olmsted got into a rare scrape with his father. Why, if his son was so worried about the future, the elder Olmsted demanded, was he limiting his options, battling his colleagues at the USSC, agreeing to quit Central Park in league with Vaux? Wasn’t firming up existing prospects the wise course? Olmsted responded defensively, listing some of his accomplishments and throwing around terms like principles of management to remind his father that he was a man of the world. That he’d hurt his son’s feelings clearly upset John Olmsted. Both father and son moved quickly to smooth things over. “However wanting in sagacity I may be, I am obstinate only in honest dutifulness,” wrote Olmsted, signing the letter, “Your affectionate Son.”

  Still, Olmsted was restless, unsettled by ill-focused ambition. He started looking for new work. He considered landscape architecture. His recent visit to Chicago had convinced him that the city was sorely in need of a pleasure ground. But landscape architecture was also a nascent profession, albeit one that he and Vaux had pioneered. He wasn’t sure whether there was enough demand for him to make a living at it.

  Journalism seemed a surer bet. Olmsted even came up with a promising idea in collaboration with Edwin Godkin, a friend and fellow journalist. Like Olmsted, Godkin had traveled across the South writing about slavery as a correspondent for the London Daily News. Now, the pair hit upon what seemed like a potentially winning journalistic formula: a serious magazine of ideas, similar to the Atlantic, covering weighty issues, like federalism—but rather than a monthly, it would be a weekly magazine, something of an innovation at this point.

  Olmsted and Godkin tossed around various names: Comment, Reviser, Scrutiny, perhaps the Maintainer or the Holdfast. They eve
n drew up a business plan, Prospectus for a Weekly Journal. The pair was able to raise only $3,000 of the $40,000 they estimated was needed to start the magazine.

  Olmsted approached Charles Dana, hoping he might invest in the venture. Dana—a onetime colleague at Putnam’s Magazine, and longtime second in command to Horace Greeley at the New York Tribune—was a field observer for the Union army. His job was to visit generals at their camps and report back to Washington. A particularly delicate assignment involved spending time with Grant to address rampant rumors of the general’s alcoholism. Dana concluded that Grant was an extremely capable commander and tactician, heavy drinking notwithstanding. Lincoln called Dana “the eyes of the government at the front.” Olmsted pitched his weekly journal idea to Dana. Dana thought launching a new magazine in the middle of a war was terrible timing. He told Olmsted, “I don’t believe it will succeed.”

  Early in August 1863, Olmsted received an envelope marked “Private.” It contained a letter from Dana concerning something called the Mariposa Estate, a sprawling gold-mining property near Bear Valley, California. Until recently, the owner of the enterprise had been John Charles Frémont, the famous explorer. But he’d recently sold a majority stake in the mines to a group of eastern financial backers that included George Opdyke, mayor of New York City. They were looking for a manager. Qualified candidates were in short supply during wartime, and finding someone willing to live in the wilds of California only upped the challenge. This was reflected in the enticingly generous salary, $10,000 a year plus stock incentives. Dana had been offered the job but turned it down, recommending Olmsted instead. “You are less rooted than I am,” Dana wrote. “It seems a chance you may like to accept.”