Charles also brought up his misgivings about his ambition in a letter to his father: “It is Sunday, and from some thoughts I have had, I thought I would ask your advice. All to-day, at the most solemn times, I have thoughts come over me which completely carry me away. These thoughts are principally on ambition, my studies, and things connected with them, and I want to know whether a person can be ambitious and still attend to his Christian duties.” Charles went on to explain that when he had been at church that morning, he had not been able to prevent himself from being utterly distracted from the sermon by thoughts of “some dire struggle going on between this and that fellow.” Borrowing from Bushnell, Charles speculated in this letter that he might try to study out of the desire to be a good influence on his fellow students rather than out of personal ambition. But immediately recognizing the hypocrisy of this stratagem, he concluded, almost in despair: “I should like to know whether you, when a young man, had such feelings come over you, and exclude everything else.”35
What is most intriguing about this question is that Charles seems to have believed that, if not in the past, then certainly in the present, his father had so supremely mastered his own being that he was never distracted during sermons or, perhaps, on any other occasion. It is hard to imagine even the most devout sixteen-year-old today—especially one as well educated as Charles—asking his father whether he had ever been distracted. But during the early nineteenth century complete control of the mind and body was still seen as both a real possibility and an ideal. And nurturing that control, perhaps especially among the Braces and their social circle, was a passionately conducted group effort and lifelong project.
Many of the letters exchanged between Charles, his family, and his friends contain confessions of one or another weakness and requests for advice about how that weakness might be corrected. Charles constantly worried about being too comfortable and not self-sacrificing enough. To his father he wrote: “[I]f I am going to do any good in life, I must begin by denying myself now.”36 And to a friend: “I should like a less easy life, where there is more of responsibility and strong influence. For I think the firm Christian character is made best in hard duties.”37
With all of his faith that virtue lay in subordinating himself to others, Charles seems nevertheless to have been equally convinced that he could not be truly admirable unless he stood apart from and, indeed, somewhat above his fellow human beings. He wanted to be “independent”—as in being an “independent” thinker, but also as in being “self-reliant,” especially financially. Lydia Maria Child’s recommendation that children be brought up with a “dread of being dependent on others” had been perfectly realized in Charles, who had a mortal aversion even to the appearance of being “dependent” for money, luxury, or even simple pleasures on anyone outside his family. The intensity of his aversion is revealed in yet another letter asking for advice from his father, this time about his relations with his great friend and college roommate, John Olmsted.
Olmsted’s father was a prosperous Hartford dry goods merchant who made considerably more money than John Brace. At Yale, John Olmsted was constantly receiving shipments of pies and other confections from home and buying dumbbells, fencing foils, and boxing gloves, all of which he was more than willing to share with Charles. Owning little more than his books and clothing, and receiving comparatively meager shipments from home, Charles was anxious about accepting such favors when he was unable to return them. “I want to know,” he told his father, “whether it will seem at all dependent in me to use these things. If the slightest expression that way should ever drop from [John], I should separate from him immediately, but as it is, I don’t hardly think he considers it so at all.” What is surprising about this inquiry is that Charles’s concern—again, perhaps, reflecting the ideas of Horace Bushnell—was not for his own morality or reputation, but for John’s. “I have to be much more careful of myself than I would be at home, or than persons generally would, for John notices very particularly, and is influenced in his own conduct by what he sees in mine.”38
With all of his anxiety about his moral character, and all of his emphasis on Christian humility and denial, Charles seems never to have had much doubt about his moral and intellectual superiority. Not only an excellent student at Yale and a good boxer, he was the animating force of his small social circle—including, among others, John Olmsted and John’s older brother, the future author and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. One member of that group, Fred Kingsbury, first set eyes on Brace while the latter—having decided to risk his independence—was engaged in a boxing match with John Olmsted. In his own autobiography, Kingsbury explained that in Brace he saw “something . . . in the intense earnestness with which he went into the boxing that impressed me at once, and it was a true index of his character.”39
That “intense earnestness,” and the magnetism it exerted on his closest friends, is visible in an 1846 photograph of Brace, the Olmsted brothers, Fred Kingsbury, and Charles Trask. The broad-shouldered Brace, with long, greasy hair, a tight dark jacket, rumpled waistcoat, and flamboyant silk tie, sits at a table surrounded by his friends. He is looking straight into the camera with a brooding impatience, as if he could not bear sitting still even so long as it took the photographer’s phosphorus to flash, while the hardy and handsome FrederickLaw Olmsted gazes over at him with an expression of contemplative appreciation.
Far from resenting Brace’s attempts to “influence” them, the Olmsted brothers responded with eagerness to his ideas and example. Once, when they were separated for a few months, John Olmsted wrote Brace to say how much he missed his “influence.”40 And in 1848, just as Brace was about to move from New Haven to New York City, where the Olmsted brothers had already gone to live, Frederick wrote, “Let us help each other . . . to give our thoughts a practical turn. . . . Throw your light on the paths in Politics and Social Improvement and encourage me to put my foot down and forwards. There’s a great work wants doing in this our generation, Charley—let’s off jacket and go about it.”41
Brace would indeed have a profound effect on Frederick Law Olmsted’s career. He introduced his old friend to the New York Daily Times editor who assigned him to write the series of articles on southern slavery—collected in The Cotton Kingdom, Olmsted’s first great public success. Brace also introduced Olmsted to Charles W. Elliot, a member of the commission to develop Central Park. When Olmsted was campaigning to be appointed superintendent of the park, Brace got him the recommendation letter from Washington Irving that ultimately convinced the Democratic city authorities that Olmsted deserved the position despite his Republican sympathies. And finally, a letter from Brace’s uncle, Asa Gray, the world-famous botanist, would help Olmsted and his partner, Calvert Vaux, win the job of actually designing the park.
But the influence definitely went two ways. Without Frederick Olmsted’s practical-mindedness and passion for argument, Charles might never have undertaken social service work but pursued instead a career as a minister-philosopher that, in all likelihood, would have been decidedly less auspicious. Brace had enormous intellectual ambition and breadth of learning and—despite his early self-image—an astute practical imagination, but he lacked the capacity for rigorous and original thought that would have allowed him to emulate his first mentor, Horace Bushnell.
Frederick Law Olmsted was in love with Emma Brace. “Yes, certainly, I really love her, love her dearly,” he confessed to his brother (who also claimed to love Charley’s little sister—to have loved her in fact since he was five years old), “but,” Fred continued, “I’ve no intention of marrying her, and she knows it, and moreover I know that she’s no intention of marrying me, whatever I wish.”42 Proclamations of love were a common motif in Frederick Olmsted’s correspondence. In a single letter he might declare himself smitten by one woman in the first sentence, by a second in the next, by a third in the following, and so on—never wholly serious, never only joking. And as it was with love, so had it been wit
h almost every other aspect of his life.
In 1837, when fifteen-year-old Fred Olmsted entered Yale, he had already been to thirteen schools—the result of his own restlessness and his father’s indecision about what sort of education might best suit him—and his commitment to college was to prove no more durable. He dropped out during his first year, ostensibly because of temporary blindness from a bad case of sumac poisoning, and he would never officially re-enroll or get a degree from any university. Over the next few years he studied engineering, taught at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and worked for an importer in New York City. In the fall of 1842, when he was twenty years old and his younger brother John and their good friend Charley Brace had just enrolled at Yale, Frederick returned to New Haven and sat in on some classes, but he was off again before the spring term was over, sailing out of New York as a seaman on a ship bound for Hong Kong. A year later he was back at Yale, full of stories about his adventures on the far side of the world and nursing the lingering effects of a shipboard case of typhus. But after a couple of months in New Haven, he was off again, this time to study farming in upstate New York, and then to run a farm, with considerable ineptitude, that his father bought for him in Sachem’s Head, Connecticut. The farm went bust after only one season.
As unsteady as his early career may have been, Frederick Olmsted had decidedly firm opinions and a passion for expressing them. In a letter to Fred Kingsbury, Brace described the “torrent of fierce argument, mixed with diverse oaths on Fred’s part,” that he and Olmsted, much to their mutual enjoyment and illumination, were having almost every time they saw each other. “I must say,” Brace continued, “Fred is getting to argue with the utmost keenness,—a regular Dr. Taylor mind in its analytic power! But what is queerest, never able to exercise that power except in discussion! . . . I shouldn’t be surprised if he turned out something rather remarkable among men yet.”43
Brace and Olmsted had two main bones of contention: abolition and religion. Charles was a passionate opponent of slavery, as well as a friend of the prominent abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Theodore Parker. Olmsted also abhorred slavery but, unlike Brace, did not want it abolished by law or by force. Describing himself as a “peace man,” he maintained that slavery should be brought to an end through rational persuasion—and indeed, his book The Cotton Kingdom attempted to do just that, by demonstrating that, morality aside, slavery did not make economic sense.
Brace and Olmsted had always argued about religion, but their theological disputes came to a head in 1847, when, after a stint teaching at Connecticut country schools, Brace enrolled at Yale’s Divinity School with the intention of becoming a minister. Olmsted was a deeply religious man, but also passionately honest and determinedly pragmatic, to say nothing of being “independent” to the point of rebelliousness. He had little time for theology, especially when it presented unverifiable assertions as truth. He objected in particular to any doctrine that elevated blind faith over sincere exploration of religious ideas, and he believed that good conscience and good works mattered more to one’s ultimate salvation than doctrinal purity or even faith itself.
In many ways Frederick Law Olmsted was precisely the sort of young man who had helped spawn a fashion among American Protestants for youthful conversion. The advance of capitalism had created the now-familiar social problem of the “generation gap.” Prior to the eighteenth century the lives of most children were essentially identical to those of their parents. But as the pace of social change accelerated, the world into which children matured was ever more different from that of the previous generation. The new demands and possibilities that young people encountered, especially the growing need to travel far from home to find work, were a source of anxiety to parents and children alike. The countless young Americans who, like Frederick Olmsted, were overwhelmed by choice and took long years to settle on a career were seen as particularly susceptible to vice and dangerous ideas. Since the moral certainty that followed “rebirth” was held to be the most effective inoculation against temptation, a fashion for early conversion swept the nation. Prior to the American Revolution, people were typically “born again” in their thirties, forties, or even fifties, but by the start of the Victorian era conversions in the late teens or early twenties were all but the norm.
Several of the Olmsted children were “saved” at this age, shortly after the death of their sister. John’s conversion came at a revival at Yale in February 1846, when he was nineteen, and Charles Brace heard his call to the ministry when he too was “reborn,” at twenty, later that same year. But the elder of the Olmsted brothers was never to be similarly united with God, a fact that caused him some dismay but also seemed a result of dearly held principles. He often trumpeted the virtues of his “unsettled” state in his arguments with Charley.
In a letter written in March 1848, when Brace had nearly finished his year at Yale’s Divinity School and was preparing to move to the more liberal Union Theological Seminary in New York City, Olmsted declared, with typical sensitivity to his friend’s feelings:
I never knew the man that had graduated at a Theological Seminary that showed ordinary charity at his heart. I do believe it is harder for an editor and a clergyman to enter the Kingdom than for a rich man. . . . I thank God, Charley, you are not settled yet, not absolutely pinned down to any or but comparatively few Theological dogmas (I hope political too). For if you reach this state it will be perfectly impossible for you practically to have charity for those that differ from you—and I believe that one spark of charity is of more value than all the results, settlings of all the study, the light, or Grace of Belief of Drs. Taylor, Edwards, Luther, Calvin (whose opinions have been a terrible curse).44
Brace seems to have been unperturbed by his friend’s attacks, perhaps because, while clearly disagreeing with Olmsted on the virtues of ministers and theology, he was as staunch a supporter of unfettered inquiry as Olmsted. Several months before receiving this letter he had written to a friend:
[T]hat there can be anything wrong in searching for truth freely, or in uprooting the dearest opinion to see what lies under it, or in applying our individual judgment to any truth (be it even of God’s existence), I do not see. . . . I am determined never for a moment to refuse hearing a truth because it is new, and never to be afraid to dig under a belief because it is old and dearly loved. God help me in it. I have no more fear of Freethinking than I have of charity.45
In the conservative atmosphere of Yale’s Divinity School, there were many who found Brace’s religious speculations “dangerous.” To one of these critics he wrote that the times when his faith was all “unsettled” were long past, and that, in any event, God was merciful regarding errors that resulted from a sincere quest for the truth. The main topic of the letter, however, was Brace’s notion of God’s mercy, a notion that would play a key role in both his rejection of orthodox religion and his embrace of social activism.
He began the letter by objecting to Calvinism’s emphasis on God as “The Lawgiver” and to its constant references to the “Throne of Law” and the “Dignity of the Law.” “It seems to me,” he said, that “the government of a State does not present the best type of God’s government (if we may call his influence a government).” On the contrary, Brace maintained, “[i]t isn’t a Lawgiver which we find presented in the New Testament, but a Father seeking our happiness. The only abstract justice I can see, which He must uphold, is whatever will tend to the most happiness.” The main reason human government (as embodied in law) is not a good model for God’s government is that law can apply only to the “overt” acts of man. No human law can pardon an offender merely because he repents, because human beings cannot look into the heart of a man to determine whether his repentance is sincere. And this is precisely what makes human law both inferior to God’s and an inferior metaphor for God’s governance. Instead, Brace believed, “family government” was a more appropriate metaphor for God’s relationship to humanity:
In this letter Brace revealed four of the fundamental beliefs on which his work with poor families and children would rest. First, during an era when the majority of upper-class Americans thought of poverty and criminality as more or less synonyms, Brace denigrated the mechanisms (the law and its executive institutions) that supposedly determined who was “criminal.” He asserted that the highest justice understood that lawbreakers might have motives or other qualities that redeemed them, and that God cared less about the law than about promoting human happiness.
Second, Brace elevated the family beyond being the prime instrument by which God shaped human beings, as it had been for Bushnell, to the very image of God’s relationship to humanity: God was a father who loved all of His children and wanted only their happiness.
Third, Brace’s notion that the good father—like God—“tries to govern motives and dispositions, as well as overt action” implied that those doing God’s work through charity were at least sanctioned to engineer the souls of those they helped. And indeed, all of Brace’s charitable work would aim to “improve” the character of its beneficiaries—a goal he had in common with most Protestant charities.
And finally, Brace chose to illustrate God’s beneficence by His forgiving of sins in cases of sincere repentance. The encouragement of such repentance would be Brace’s primary goal when he first began to work with the miserable and the poor of New York City, but it would also be one that he would shortly disregard as tragically insufficient.
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