As one door closed, another opened. The man who helped to open it was E. L. Godkin. Edwin Lawrence Godkin was the son of a prominent Anglo-Irish clergyman. Godkin was brilliant but mercurial. He gave up law school in London and worked for a publisher. He wrote a history of Hungary, became a journalist, and spent two years covering the Crimean War. He returned to Belfast to work on the Northern Whig and was offered the editorship—he was only twenty-five. Instead, he emigrated to the United States. He arrived in New York in 1856 and soon met Olmsted, who was then writing A Journey Through Texas. Godkin, nine years Olmsted’s junior, greatly admired Olmsted’s Southern reporting and used it as a model when he went South as a correspondent for the London Daily News. Their friendship blossomed. “I would limp ten miles to talk an hour with him,” said Olmsted. A handsome, witty, charming man, Godkin presently married into a prominent New Haven family and spent the next two years in Europe. When he returned to New York, he and Olmsted saw each other often.
Shortly after Olmsted came home from his Western trip for the Sanitary Commission, Godkin wrote: “I have been thinking and talking a great deal about a first class weekly paper ever since I saw you. . . . I don’t know whether you were in joke or earnest in saying you would go into such a scheme with me; but if in earnest, I need hardly say I should be very glad to make some such arrangement.” Olmsted was not joking, and the two were soon making plans. Their idea was to publish a weekly newspaper that would “secure a more careful, accurate and elaborate discussion of political, economical and commercial topics, than is possible in the columns of the daily press.” This was to be a paper of opinion: supportive of the war, antislavery, Federalist, and opposed to states’ rights. A weekly newsmagazine was a new idea. Olmsted and Godkin hoped that “at some time in the course of every week many men can find an opportunity, and will have an inclination, to deliberately read three or four articles in which real thought and study are brought to bear upon matters of public interest.”
They could not decide on a name for the newspaper. They toyed with “The Loyalist” and “The Week”; Olmsted even considered “Yeoman’s Weekly.” Between themselves they called it “the paper.” The division of labor was clear: Godkin would be the editor; Olmsted, the publisher. On June 25 he organized a small meeting at the Union League Club of New York to test the waters. The paper, which was expected to sell for twenty cents a copy (the New-York Times cost three cents), was not to be a mass-market publication, but according to their prospectus it would be commercially viable in time. What was needed was working capital—forty thousand dollars—to cover the first year of operation. Olmsted’s plan was to seek sponsors rather than investors. After his presentation a wealthy businessman immediately pledged a thousand dollars. Howard Potter, a lawyer, William J. Hoppin, a founding member of the Century Association, and George Templeton Strong agreed to serve as trustees. “The thing starts so favorably,” Olmsted wrote Mary excitedly the next day, “I shall go into it strong, meaning to succeed.”
He was in New York on July 4 when word of the battle of Gettysburg reached the city. He coordinated the Commission’s relief effort, which was massive—the Union side had suffered twenty-three thousand casualties during the three days of fighting. He toured the encampment and met General Meade. Olmsted was disappointed that Lee’s invading force had escaped, but was heartened by the news that Vicksburg had finally fallen to Grant, and that Rosecrans was winning in Tennessee. The tide had turned. “I think we can hold our heads up with good conscience again,” he wrote Mary.
The outcome of his own battles within the Sanitary Commission was less auspicious. He had proposed a reorganization plan to the board in June. It was a sensible compromise: decentralize the supply function of the Commission by creating four geographical departments, while maintaining central control over inspection, research, and general policy. The board accepted his plan. Newberry, who disliked the proposal, threatened to resign. The Chicago branch of the Commission objected to being required to collaborate with the Western Sanitary Commission. The board, concerned over the threat of regional splintering, backed down. Newberry, allowed to go his own way, promptly printed his own fund-raising circular, The Sanitary Reporter. Meanwhile, the Executive Committee undermined Olmsted’s efforts, making contradictory public statements and privately criticizing his methods. The careful system of organization he had put in place was unraveling. “I am really oppressed beyond endurance by my grief that the grand purposes which I have had at heart in the Commission should appear to me to be sacrificed to little personal whims and good purposes of a narrow and ambiguous kind,” he protested to Bellows.
Olmsted was ready to step down. He had promised Mary “six months more,” and the six months had come and gone. But the fund-raising for “the paper” was not going well. He asked Bellows to approach New York benefactors, but with few results. He sent Godkin to Cambridge with a letter of introduction to Charles Elliot Norton. Godkin and Norton became close friends, but were not successful in finding patrons. Altogether, in one month Olmsted and Godkin raised only three of the forty thousand dollars. Olmsted told himself that it was because it was summer, and many people were away in their country retreats. One hot August day in Washington, he ran into his old friend from Putnam’s, Charles Dana, who was now serving as assistant secretary of war. Naturally, talk turned to “the paper.” What did the experienced editor think of the idea? “I don’t believe it will succeed,” Dana responded bluntly. Then, not wanting to dishearten Olmsted, he added, “But I am not sure, and I shall be glad to have it tried.”
* * *
1. Lee’s advance into Maryland had been stopped at Antietam, but the Union had not yet begun an offensive. Nor was a peaceful resolution possible after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all slaves in the Confederate states.
2. Grant and Olmsted were exact contemporaries, both born in 1822, one day apart.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
A Letter From Dana
A PHOTOGRAPH OF OLMSTED at this time shows him sitting in a wooden armchair, reading what appears to be a newspaper. He is fashionably dressed in a well-cut jacket and high-buttoned waistcoat of matching dark cloth, and light-colored trousers. A starched white collar peeks out above a patterned cravat. He is not wearing any jewelry, except for a wedding band. He still has a mustache, and his hair, thinning on top, is long in the back. He appears lean and fit, although his serious countenance shows signs of tiredness. Or perhaps he is bored with sitting still for the photographer. Though slouched in the chair, he does not look relaxed. He appears ready to jump up at a moment’s notice, as if he is waiting for something to happen.
Fate played a major role in Olmsted’s career. “Yes, but is he lucky?” Napoleon Bonaparte is supposed to have asked about a general. Olmsted was lucky. Raymond’s offer to write about the South, Elliott’s suggestion that he might make a good Central Park superintendent, Vaux’s proposal to collaborate on Greensward, Bellows’s invitation to lead the Sanitary Commission—all had come to him unsolicited, and all occurred at opportune moments. And now it happened again.
The chance meeting with Charles Dana in Washington had started it. The following week, Dana was approached by a group of New York businessmen. They were looking for someone to manage a large California gold-mining property that they had recently purchased. He declined the offer. Remembering that Olmsted seemed to be casting about for a new position, Dana recommended him. One of the owners was George Opdyke, the mayor of New York, who had earlier tried to recruit Olmsted to be street commissioner. A few days later, Dana wrote to Olmsted that the manager’s job was his for the asking. Olmsted was with Mary and the children at Knapp’s summer house in Walpole, New Hampshire, when he received the offer. “I am rather disposed to decline it chiefly, or partly, because I think it might be too much for me,” he casually mentioned to his father. Yet he immediately left Walpole for New York.
His eagerness is understandable. The gold mine in question was not just
any mine, but the huge Mariposa Estate. A contemporary assayer described it as “one of the most gigantic mining operations in the world.” The property covered seventy square miles and included six mines, two towns, a railroad, and a tenant population of about seven thousand. The previous owner was none other than General John C. Frémont. The Mariposa Estate was originally a Spanish land grant—Las Mariposas. Frémont, a key participant in the annexation of Upper California, had acquired the land two years before the great California gold rush. The estate was located astride the fabled Mother Lode, and Frémont became a rich man. Nevertheless, his political activities at the state and national levels—he ran unsuccessfully for president—ate up his fortune. In 1863, more than a million and a half dollars in debt, he sold the estate to Morris Ketchum, a millionaire New York banker. Ketchum founded a public company, the Mariposa Company, the group that had now approached Olmsted with the offer to manage the Estate.
Olmsted arrived in New York on Sunday, August 9; the next day he met Opdyke and some of the trustees of the Mariposa Company. They were anxious to get Olmsted; they urgently needed a manager, and with his experience of running Central Park and the Sanitary Commission, he was a strong candidate. They offered him an annual salary of ten thousand dollars and one hundred shares of company stock. They wanted an immediate decision. First, Olmsted assured himself that the new owners were “respectable, steady, careful capitalists.” Morris Ketchum’s reputation was unassailable. The illustrious board included Frémont himself, as well as Opdyke. Olmsted consulted Oliver Gibbs’s geologist brother, who had spent a decade in California and the Northwest. Olmsted spoke to George Templeton Strong and to Howard Potter, a trustee of “the paper” and knowledgeable about California. All advised him to go. So did David Dudley Field, who was now legal counsel to the Mariposa Company. Jenkins and other friends had personal misgivings about Olmsted’s departure but thought he could not afford to pass up the opportunity. John Olmsted was decidedly in favor; so was Mary.
On Wednesday Olmsted wrote to Mary: “I think that I shall make up my mind tonight, and if the result of enquiries today is favorable, shall decide to go.” The results were favorable. He resolved to visit the Mariposa Company offices on Saturday. Then he received a letter from Bellows—an impassioned plea not to accept the position. “I don’t know a half-dozen men in the whole North, whose influence in the next five years I should think more critically important to the Nation,” he wrote. “I don’t know how it is to come in—whether by means of the Newspaper (which I think can be made to go) or by means of political office—but I am sure it is to be largely felt.” This was not simple flattery. Bellows understood Olmsted. He knew that Olmsted shared his own concern for public service, and he thought that Olmsted was destined for greater things than overseeing a gold mine.
The country can not spare you at such a juncture. I think you must feel this in your bones. I don’t think you can make up your mind to become the agent of a set of money-makers on the Pacific Coast—let them offer you a fortune or no, while Providence is holding out the splendid opportunity of usefulness in the Nation and to Humanity—at the most critical and serious lustre of its history! You are not the man to throw away your duty and your reward at once, into the Mariposa claim.
Their professional disagreements had not affected their friendship. Olmsted valued Bellows’s opinion and was stung by the imputation that he was shirking his civic duty. So instead of going to the Mariposa office he wrote Bellows a letter. He emphasized that he had to think of his family. He described his dissatisfaction with the situation at the Commission. He did concede that if the newspaper project were on a more solid footing, he might stay, even if it meant making a financial sacrifice. Finally, he promised that he would wait until the following week before making a final decision.
Olmsted spent the next day—Sunday—at the Sanitary Commission’s office mulling things over. He wrote a second letter to Bellows. In it he reiterated—at great length—the points he had made the previous day. He said that he appreciated Bellows’s opinion of his prospects, but judged it extravagant. He made it clear that he was disappointed with the Executive Committee. “If the Sanitary Commission had trusted me as it originally proposed to do, it would have accomplished more than it has done.” In part, he blamed himself: “I see what ought to be done but I can’t get other men to see it.” On one thing, he had clearly already made up his mind. “Whether I go to California or not, I shall expect some instructions for winding up my official affairs,” he wrote. “My interest in the Sanitary Commission has ceased.”
Bellows’s answer contained a hard remark: “I think the faith of many, already pinned unconsciously to you, would fail and grow cold, if you should quit the field under what would seem to be a pecuniary temptation.” Strong was more understanding. “Olmsted has not a mercenary nerve in his moral organization,” he noted in his diary, “but he has a wife & children to provide for—and he wants the luxury of paying certain debts of the old Putnam’s Magazine concern with which he was connected, for which he was never legally liable nor morally liable, so far as I can make out.” Yet Olmsted did consider himself morally liable. He still owed George Curtis’s father-in-law $7,500; in addition, he had further debts of $4,500. “If I should die, my wife & children would be in absolute poverty.” The thought weighed heavily on him. He was not in the best of health. This was a time without life insurance, Medicare, or Social Security. Were he to die, his family’s welfare would depend completely on whatever he could leave them. At the moment, that was less than nothing.
California represented an opportunity to clear his debts and—finally—to accumulate some savings. Attractive, too, was the idea of returning East as a rich man—for Olmsted had no intention of spending more than five years in California. “A poor man is considered a failure,” he reminded Bellows, “and can not command deep confidence in his undertakings for public ends.” This was not a rationalization. Most of the men in public life did come from wealthy families. If he, too, had money, he would be taken more seriously and would be freer to assume the sort of civic responsibilities that Bellows alluded to.
Like many Easterners, Olmsted considered the Western frontier to be savage and uncivilized. Nothing he had seen in Texas had changed his mind. He expected the Mariposa Estate, which was two hundred miles inland, to be “dreary.” Nor did he have any illusions that running the mines would be easy. The owners had been frank with him about past mismanagement; there was a lot to do. But he was confident he could succeed. “If they will really put the management in my hands as they propose, for two or three years, I know (humanely speaking) that I can astonish them.”
Bellows’s response to Olmsted’s letters contained a final plea: “My ambition for you, has been to see you in some independent position, the Head of a Bureau, a department, the editor of a Great Newspaper.” By then it was too late. Olmsted had made up his mind and officially accepted the position of manager of the Mariposa Estate. Sometime the following week, he attended a meeting of the Executive Committee to announce his resignation. “Olmsted has completed his arrangement with the Mariposa people and is to busy himself for five years in a mountain gorge of California,” George Templeton Strong sardonically wrote in his diary. But ever the honest observer, he added, “We can ill spare him.”
On September 1, 1863, Olmsted officially resigned from the Sanitary Commission. Two weeks later he was on board the steamship Champion, bound for San Francisco. That morning, the New-York Times contained an editorial titled “Departure of Mr. F. L. Olmsted for California.” Written by E. L. Godkin, it was a fulsome tribute that recounted Olmsted’s activities of the last decade: the writing on the South, Central Park, the Sanitary Commission. Godkin lamented the loss of Olmsted to public service. He concluded:
We can only console ourselves by the reflection that few leave behind them so many delightful reminders, not only of his taste and talent, but of his hearty love of liberty and justice, and of his unwavering faith in their
ultimate triumph; and that none carry with them more fervent wishes for their happiness and success.
A generous and heartfelt accolade; to Olmsted it may have sounded like an obituary.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Never Happier
Bear Valley, California
Friday, January 1, 1864
A plastered stone building houses the company store of the Mariposa Estate. Above the store is a suite of rooms that serves as the manager’s office. Today part of the space has been converted into a dining room. Desks have been moved aside and a long table stands in the center of the room. It is covered with the remnants of a New Year’s Day dinner.
The guests have all left. Olmsted is reclining on a sofa. The dinner went well, he thinks. A little bit of civilization in this barbarous place. They were sixteen in all: twelve gentlemen and four ladies. He had invited all the mine superintendents. He is slowly getting to know them; they strike him as capable men. The guest of honor was Judge Lewis Jones, accompanied by his wife and sister. He likes Jones. He was a superintendent of the Estate and is now a county judge. Jones is a Unionist, but most of the superintendents are Southerners and avowed Secessionists. Olmsted managed to steer the conversation away from politics. It helped that Pieper and Martin were there, he thinks. He has known them a long time. They both came out with him from New York on the Champion. John Pieper, assistant superintending engineer on Central Park, is now his chief engineer. His wife and baby appear to be settling in well. Howard Martin is a bachelor. He was chief clerk of Central Park and followed Olmsted to the Sanitary Commission. Now he is chief accountant of the Mariposa Estate.
Charles Wauters, his French valet, comes in to clear the last of the dishes. Charles takes them back to the nearby hotel, Oso House, where the food was prepared. Olmsted’s indigestion is bothering him—he shouldn’t have eaten so much. Maybe he should get up and walk around. He gets up and crosses into the room where he normally works. A partially emptied crate of books is on the floor. It is from Mason Brothers, the New York publisher and bookseller. He picks up one of the leather-bound volumes and leafs through it. The crate contains a full set of Sir Walter Scott: twenty-seven novels and six short stories. It is a parting gift from the Washington staff of the Sanitary Commission. Just the thing, especially now that his eyes ache and his head throbs every time he sets pen to paper; reading, for some reason, doesn’t distress him. He will have to see a doctor soon. But not that sawbones in Mariposa—he will find a good physician the next time he is in San Francisco.
A Clearing In The Distance: Frederick Law Olmsted and America in the 19th Cent Page 25
