INTRODUCTION

In 1852, at the age of thirty, Frederick Law Olmsted began the first of several brief public careers that he pursued before 1865, when he finally chose landscape architecture as his profession. During the years 1852–57 he was primarily a literary man, a traveler and writer. In that short span of time he became the most prolific and influential of those travelers who published accounts of their visits to the South. He spent a total of fourteen months on two journeys through the South, and wrote seventy-five long letters of description for the New-York Daily Times and the New York Daily Tribune. He also completed two large volumes on his Southern travels: A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, published in early 1856, and A Journey Through Texas; Or, A Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier, published in early 1857. In the latter year he published an American edition of The Englishman in Kansas; Or, Squatter Life and Border Warfare, by the English newspaper correspondent Thomas H. Gladstone, to which he added a long introduction and a supplement. By the fall of 1857 he had also written most of his third volume on the South, A Journey in the Back Country.

Olmsted’s role in the literary world during these years was broader than that of a commentator on the South. From the spring of 1855 to the spring of 1857 he was a partner in the New York publishing firm of Dix, Edwards & Company. For the first ten months of that period he served as managing editor of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, a liberal patron of American writers and an influential vehicle for moderate antislavery views. He then spent the spring and summer of 1856 in Europe and England, acting as agent for the publishing firm. In August 1857 the successor firm to Dix, Edwards & Company failed, bringing Olmsted’s career in the literary world to an abrupt end. At that point, in September 1857, Olmsted secured the post of superintendent of New York’s [2] nascent Central Park and took a major step along the path that would lead him to a career in landscape architecture.

Although Olmsted changed in five years from a farmer to a writer and publisher, and then to a park administrator, the single problem of slavery dominated his thinking and gave unity to his various activities. In all his endeavors, he felt that he was engaged in a crucial battle for men’s minds. Like his Puritan forebears in New England, he believed that the society of which he was a part was like a “city upon a hill.” The free-labor society of the North had a historic mission whose outcome held great significance for the future of both the New World and the Old. Olmsted was firmly convinced that it was the responsibility of the North in the decade of the 1850s to vindicate two concepts: the viability of the republican form of government and the superiority of a society based on free labor to that based on slavery.

The failure of Europe’s republican revolutions, which had promised to sweep away the anachronistic institutions of monarchy and aristocracy, troubled him. He was distressed during the 1850s to see monarchists in England and on the Continent pointing to the political turmoil produced in the United States by the slavery question as proof of their claims that a republican political system could not provide stable government. At the same time, he was concerned by the charges of proslavery apologists in the South that the free society of the North was incapable of producing a true civilization. The North, these apologists argued, had no means of creating those cultural institutions and works of art that, historically, had depended on the patronage of a ruling aristocratic class. Such critics could be disproved, Olmsted concluded, only if the society of the North realized its full promise for improving the lot—both economic and intellectual—of the common man. His major professional activities of the 1850s served that end, which required the establishment of popular journals of literature and opinion like Putnam’s Monthly, and which called for the creation of such communal institutions of popular education and recreation as libraries, museums and parks.

While Olmsted’s allegiance to republican government and free-labor society were strong from the beginning of the period, political events during the five years between 1852 and 1857 produced significant changes in his views of the South. The single most important development was the new pressure brought to bear by the South for the expansion of slavery following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. Before that event, which occurred in the midst of his second Southern journey, Olmsted’s writings dealt primarily with the society of the South and with the prospects for ameliorating the condition of the slaves and preparing them for eventual freedom. After the Kansas-Nebraska Act became law, his writings focused increasingly on the threat posed to free-labor society by the expansion of slavery in the territories. He used his writings to point out the danger of the South to the nation at large, and worked actively to prevent the advance of slavery on the southwestern frontier. To that end, he raised money to arm the free-state settlers in Kansas. He also worked [3] with both local German residents and the New England Emigrant Aid Company to build a barrier of free-soil colonies across Texas in an attempt to remove slavery from West Texas and to counter any move by the national administration to turn the Indian Territory south of Kansas into a slaveholding state.

The present volume includes many of the personal letters that Olmsted wrote during the five-year period 1852–57, as well as numerous professional letters dealing with questions about publishing and free-labor colonization. It also contains what the editors judge to be all of Olmsted’s significant statements on the South, slavery and the sectional crisis that did not appear in his three well-known volumes of travel accounts or in the abridged version that he published in 1861 as The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States. These annotated documents, supplemented by the appended calendars of newspaper letters and the annotated itinerary of Olmsted’s two Southern journeys, provide the reader with a chronicle of Olmsted’s changing views on the South. They also serve as a guide to the process by which Olmsted wrote his books on the South, and provide identification of persons’ and places mentioned in those volumes.

Like many members of his generation, Olmsted became concerned about slavery primarily as a result of the controversy over the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850 that followed it. During the summer of 1846, full of patriotism and what he called a “wonderful taste for the pomp & circumstance of glorious war,” Olmsted declared that he was almost ready to go and fight. He said so despite the mounting Northern opposition to a war that would expand slavery in the United States, and despite the fact that he was living with a pacifist, George Geddes, and was reading with approval the antislavery newspaper True American, edited by Cassius Clay.. He did believe by this time, however, that slavery was one of the great curses of the age, and within a year he admitted to having a strong sense of sectional allegiance. To his friend Frederick Kingsbury, a Connecticut Yankee who had lived for some years in Virginia, he wrote: “You’ve no sort of sectional feeling—I have the strongest in the world. ” That sectional feeling and the New England values he had absorbed while growing up would in time influence the way he perceived the South and responded to it; but neither led him to the moral condemnation or immediatism that were the hallmarks of Northern abolitionists. He believed that the process of emancipation would be long and complex and could be carried out effectively only by carefully preparing the slaves for freedom. He saw social change as a slow process and believed that social reform should come about through an educational process that would change the habits as well as the beliefs of men.

Olmsted was also unable to share what he viewed as the abolitionists’ conviction of their own moral superiority. He found in them the same lack of Christian charity and the same overweening confidence in the rightness of their beliefs that had dismayed him in the various Protestant denominations he [4] had examined in his search for religious faith. His inability to achieve an unshakable conviction about various “points of doctrine” had kept him from joining any church and had set him on the road to what he later called “a vague blundering indefensible rationalism.” The same emphasis on reason kept him from accepting the doctrines of any reform group without careful thought and much argument. As he argued the issue of slavery with his abolitionist friend Charles Loring Brace, he refused to accept the idea that slaveholders could not be conscientious Christians and should therefore be excluded from church membership.

In defining his view of slave ownership and the role that Northerners could play in bringing about emancipation, Olmsted drew upon a tradition of moderate antislavery thought. Although the specific sources of his views can only be conjectured, they were strikingly similar to the teachings of Horace Bushnell, who was for some years the Olmsted family’s minister in Hartford and strongly influenced the thought of the young Olmsted. Like Bushnell, Olmsted believed that since many Southerners had inherited their slaves, they should not be condemned for failing to free their bondsmen immediately. Slaveholders were justified in keeping their slaves, however, only so long as they attempted to make slavery a civilizing and Christianizing institution. This meant that they should at least teach their slaves the basic tenets of Christianity, observe the sanctity of marriage, and refuse to break up families when selling their slaves. Since he viewed slaveholders simply as trustees holding the children of heathen barbarians until they were ready for freedom, Olmsted declared that they should train their slaves in self-reliance and skills that would enable them at some not-too-distant date to survive as free men.

Olmsted also held the view—widely shared in his time—that under the Constitution the federal government had no authority to abolish slavery in the states. Slavery was a state institution founded on state laws. Emancipation could come only by action of state governments or through the manumission of slaves by their owners, in accordance with state laws. Northerners should not—and under the Constitution could not—use coercion to bring about the abolition of slavery. Only by persuasion, by appealing to considerations of economics and morality, Olmsted believed, should those Northerners opposed to slavery attempt to improve the condition of the slaves and bring about emancipation. Like Bushnell, he felt that Northerners should make their appeals as Christian gentlemen; they should reason with their Southern brethren rather than attack and condemn them.

Olmsted’s references to the slavery question are infrequent and brief in his early letters, but he made a clear statement of his position in Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England, which he published in 1852. In that book, he justified the continued existence of slavery in the South, saying that it was necessary to educate and civilize the still-barbaric slaves before freeing them. Such education, whereby members of a society were elevated to a position of equal freedom and rights with others, was, he declared, “a very necessary [5] part of all rightful government. ” Olmsted asserted that society was justified in depriving its weakest and most dangerous members of full freedom until they could be educated to discharge their responsibilities as free men and citizens. By the same token, he believed that it was the solemn duty of those with wealth and education to serve as the trustees of those who could not care for themselves, and to bring them as quickly as possible to full participation in society. This paternalism was the responsibility of Southern slaveholders to their slaves, and there was little that Northerners could do except encourage the Southerners to carry out their responsibilities. “The law of God in our hearts binds us in fidelity to the principles of the Constitution,” Olmsted concluded. “They are not to be found in ’Abolitionism,’ nor are they to be found—oh! remember it, brothers, and forgive these few words—in hopeless, dawnless, unredeeming slavery. ” As the first letter in the present volume indicates, Olmsted still held these views as he prepared to leave for the South in the fall of 1852.

By the time of his departure on his first journey, however, Olmsted’s sense of the unpleasant implications of his constitutional responsibility of forbearance concerning southern slavery had been strengthened by events both in America and abroad. During his travels in England and Europe in 1850, he had been dismayed by the shadow that fell between himself and the “most earnestly republican and radically democratic” Englishmen because of the existence of slavery in the United States. They could not grasp the concept, so natural and convenient for him, of a federal system under which slavery was a local institution of individual states that were in no way subject to the political action of the central government. His experience in England made Olmsted wish, whimsically, that the Southerners would send lecturers there to explain that “we at the North have nothing to do with their peculiar institution, and are not to be expected to carry pistols and bowie knives and fight every body that chooses to attack it all over the world.”

When he wrote these words, with their overtones of violence, passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, and the use of federal officials to return runaway slaves under its provisions, had revealed the price the South was to demand under the Constitution for the protection of its slave property. Olmsted was disgusted by Northern defenders of the Fugitive Slave Law and of the Compromise of 1850, of which it was a part, but he saw no reason to adopt more radical views. He resisted the attempts of Charles Loring Brace to convert him to abolitionism, even when his friend arrived for the weekend at his Staten Island farm with such powerful advocates of abolitionist doctrine as Theodore Parker and William Lloyd Garrison. He also resisted the appeals of the rising Free Soil party, remaining a loyal Whig until that party’s demise following the elections of 1854. Still, the enmity stirred up by the Fugitive Slave Law left its mark. As he prepared for his first journey through the South, he told his friend Frederick Kingsbury that while he thought himself a “moderate Free Soiler,” representing “pretty fairly the average sentiment of good thinking men on our [6] side,” he nevertheless “would take in a fugitive slave & shoot a man that was likely to get him.”

By the time Olmsted began his Southern tours, his sense of the anachronistic nature of slavery and of the aristocratic principles that underlay slave society had been strengthened by the misfortunes of European republicanism. During his European trip of 1850, the reformers he met strongly impressed him, and he returned to the United States with a keener interest in their struggle. His concern for the Hungarians’ attempt to create a republic free of Austrian domination became more personal when Austrian officials in Hungary imprisoned Charles Loring Brace for five weeks in 1851 on suspicion of being an intermediary between Hungarian revolutionaries in England and Hungary.

Although Olmsted’s European trip of 1850 gave greater personal meaning to his observation of European politics, his desire for the spread of republicanism had been strong from the beginning of the revolutions of 1848. Responding to the scene in the French Chamber of Deputies in March 1848, when Louis Philippe tried to save his dynasty by abdicating in favor of his grandson, only to be greeted by a cry from the galleries “It is too late, ” Olmsted exclaimed: “Hear it fools, Hear it slaves, and have Faith. Hear it Nicholas! Hear it, Metternich! Hear it Irish landlords! Hear it Scotch lairds and English hunters. Hear it Slaveholding sons of America and prepare to meet-or avert—your fate.” The means were unclear and the end was not in sight, but Olmsted was confident that all vestiges of ancient privilege and injustice—all “relics of barbarism”—were destined to fall before the march of nineteenth-century progress.

That optimism was the brighter side of Olmsted’s ideas on social change, the foil to the elitism that was implicit in his view of the role of trustees in improving the condition of the lower classes. He and his close friends believed that it was possible to uplift all elements in American society. They were shocked to find their English counterparts less sanguine, and willing to accept the indefinite existence of a poor, degraded class of laborers. Offended by such a view, Olmsted declared: “We hold that party in England, which regard their labouring class as a permanent providential institution, not to be improved in every way, educated, fitted to take an equal share with all Englishmen in the government of the commonwealth of England, to be blasphemers, tyrants, and insolent rebels to humanity.”

In addition to his concern for the politics of slavery and his interest in European republicanism dating from the late 1840s, Olmsted carried with him to the South a set of standards of civilization that he had been formulating for a much longer time. These standards were drawn for the most part from the values of the regional culture in which he grew up—the precepts of community and domesticity that were rooted in the Puritan values of the seventeenth-century founders of Connecticut. Many of these ideas were a family inheritance, [7] for he traced his American ancestry back to James Olmsted, one of the original proprietors of Hartford in 1636. Frederick absorbed the values of this society in his childhood, and later gleaned them from the writings of such representatives of the Connecticut mind as Timothy Dwight and Horace Bushnell. It is not surprising that his image of the good society was to a large extent an idealized version of the New England town. Men should live in communities, where they could easily engage in the mutual exchange of ideas and services that was the basis of civilized existence. Drawing directly from Puritan ideology, Olmsted believed that the chief purpose of life was to be of service to other members of society, and he held that a society that permitted extensive division of labor made possible the highest form of community. The more specialized the skill that each member of the work force was able to practice, the more effectively he or she could meet the needs of others. Close settlement in communities was necessary for such an exchange of services, and it brought other benefits as well. Communities were able to support public schools and other institutions of popular learning and recreation, all necessary for the development and perpetuation of civilization, and they fostered the creation of good transportation facilities—roads and bridges—which increased the exchange of both information and goods.

Another prerequisite for the growth of civilization was stability and continuity of settlement. Like many other Connecticut thinkers, Olmsted deplored the decivilizing effects of the American tendency to depopulate old areas and press on to sparsely settled frontiers. Part of his mission as a gentleman-farmer in the late 1840s and early 1850s had been to instruct others in ways to improve their lands and to create farms that were both productive and permanent. In that way, a stable society might be created wherein the work of one generation laid the basis for a higher level of civilization in succeeding generations. The tidy, 200-year-old towns of the Connecticut valley gave Olmsted his first impressions of such a society, and during his trip to England in 1850 he saw how centuries of settlement could merge the dwellings of men with their natural surroundings.

As a gentleman-farmer, Olmsted drew from traditions of the English gentry, with its responsibility to provide leadership for the agricultural community it dominated. At the same time, he felt himself to be a participant in the tradition of the English yeomen, with their care for the land and their sturdy independence. It was in that spirit that he signed himself “Yeoman” in his letters to the New-York Times and New York Tribune.

While Olmsted’s identity in print was a humble one-a “farmer” in his first book and a “yeoman” in his letters from the South-his activity as a farmer showed him to be more the squire than the yeoman. When he decided in 1845 to become a farmer, his purpose was to serve as a gentleman farmer and agricultural reformer. After making the decision, he wrote to a friend: “I suppose it’s no very great stretch of ambition to anticipate my being a Country [8] Squire in Old Connecticut in the course of fifteen years. I should like to help then as far as I could—in the popular mind—generosity, charity, taste &c.—independence of thought, of voting and of acting. The education of the ignobile vulgus ought to be much improved and extended.”

It was characteristic of Olmsted that in stating his intentions as a farmer, he chose for himself the role of civilizer and advocate of taste. As a gentleman-farmer, as in his various other professional roles, he sought to realize his concept of civilization in America. He had always before him an image of the society that America should become, and the elements of taste, domesticity and gentility were usually to be found at the heart of his enterprise. The millennium he hoped to achieve was an American society in which people of all classes had the opportunity to acquire the “mental & moral capital of gentlemen” and did so. He looked forward to a time when universal gentility would provide a common cultural bond between people of all income levels and occupations—when, in that sense, America would be a classless society of gentlemen.

The most important means of moving people from barbarism to civilization was cultivation of taste—aesthetic sensibility, orderliness, and a knowledge of what was “fitting” both in the arrangement of physical objects and in conduct. The most effective school for taste was the home, for it was there that both young and old would absorb the values of taste and gentility in the most direct and complete way. In looking to taste and the home for the establishment of new social values, Olmsted drew from the teachings of major figures in New England’s past. Timothy Dwight—president of Yale College in Jefferson’s time and the “Pope of Connecticut,” who opposed Jeffersonian rationalism and Democratic-Republican politics—had taught that taste was the first faculty acted on in the process by which men escaped “from a grovelling, brutish character; a character in which morality is effectually chilled or absolutely frozen.” Olmsted had learned the lesson from Dwight’s accounts of his travels in New England and New York, and he had learned it again from the writings of the horticulturist, landscape gardener and taste-maker Andrew Jackson Downing, a man of Massachusetts stock who had absorbed Dwight’s teachings and gave them far more graceful expression than the old Connecticut divine had ever cared to do. Moreover, the importance of the home as a school for civilization was as old as the Connecticut belief that children should be raised up in an atmosphere of “steady habits.” Olmsted’s family’s own minister, Horace Bushnell, who influenced him in many ways, taught modern versions of the old ways of training youth in his sermons on “Christian Nurture” and “Unconscious Influence.”

Olmsted’s social values bore a close resemblance to those of his mentors Timothy Dwight and Horace Bushnell—ministers both—but his was a later and more secularized version of their precepts. He did not look to the church to play the same role in the community as did those earlier thinkers. Olmsted believed that the home and public institutions ought to assume the [9] traditional function of the church in the New England community. This shift in emphasis owed something to the secularizing spirit of the times, but Olmsted had personal reasons as well. After the age of five, he had received most of his schooling in the homes of country parsons away from Hartford, and he had seen many things that lowered his opinion of the ministerial profession. He disliked the tyranny that church members exerted over the conduct and thought of individuals in the small New England and New York towns where he lived. He was distressed by the divisive nature of sectarianism and the controversy over “points of doctrine” that it fostered. He was also suspicious of revivalism, as were many others in Connecticut, the “Land of Steady Habits.” In his own quest for belief he gave precedence to reason and rationality, and had difficulty accepting the inspiration of the Bible (which he eventually rejected) or the ultimate truth of any particular creed or sectarian set of beliefs. He never joined a church, and he came increasingly to judge religion by the way it affected conduct and contributed to the welfare of society in general. With such a set of social and cultural values, firmly based in the traditions of Connecticut and serving as the basis for his program for civilizing America, it is not surprising that during his travels in the South, Olmsted often judged the society he saw and found it lacking.

Olmsted’s opportunity to travel through the South came as an outgrowth of his long-standing argument with Charles Loring Brace about slavery. When Brace discovered in mid-1852 that Henry Raymond was looking for a traveling correspondent to tour the South for his newly founded New-York Times, and that the editor had read and admired Olmsted’s Walks and Talks, he proposed Olmsted for the task. Olmsted had not previously met Raymond, but a single meeting of the two men was sufficient for the editor to offer him the role of correspondent. Olmsted later testified that Raymond asked him nothing about his views on slavery or any other subject, but simply requested that he confine his statements to matters that he observed personally. Raymond had doubtless learned something of his new correspondent’s views from Brace, as well as from Walks and Talks, and must have been confident that what Olmsted wrote about the South would be compatible with the moderate free-soil stance of the Times—and that indeed was the case. Privately, Olmsted said that he hoped to “make a valuable book of observations on Southern Agriculture & general economy as affected by Slavery: the condition of the slaves—prospects—tendencies-& reliable understanding of the sentiments and hopes & fears of sensible planters & gentlemen that I should meet. Matter of fact to come after the deluge of spoony fancy pictures now at its height shall be spent.”

Since Olmsted was to be paid only after his letters appeared in the Times, he was fortunate that he could once again draw on his father’s funds to finance his travels. With that problem easily solved, he departed in early December for his first visit to the South below the District of Columbia. His aim was to travel by public transportation, going through the eastern seaboard [10] and Gulf states to New Orleans, thence up the Red River some distance into Texas, and then back to New York through the interior of those same states. Much of his observation of the South and slavery would therefore come from chance encounters on trains, stagecoaches and steamboats, and in hotels and houses where he stopped for the night.

For access to plantations that did not provide facilities for travelers using public conveyances, however, he had to rely on letters of introduction that he brought with him from the North. His most important contacts of this sort were persons connected with Yale College—the friends and classmates of his brother, John, and the acquaintances of his distant cousin Denison Olmsted, a professor of science at Yale who had many southern connections. By these means Olmsted gained access to seven farms and plantations that provided him with his important exposures to slavery and agriculture in the South. During the first part of his journey, in the region of Washington, D.C., and in Virginia, he visited four of those places: the 2,000-acre, mixed-crop farm of the agricultural reformer Charles Benedict Calvert at Riversdale, just outside the District of Columbia in Maryland, where he spent part of a day; a James River plantation, with 20 to 40 slaves, that produced corn, wheat and clover, where he spent three hours; a free-labor farm, Rocouncy (near Richmond), owned by the Quaker Nathaniel Chapman Crenshaw, where he stayed overnight; and the 1,300-acre tobacco plantation, with 60 slaves, of Thomas W. Gee near Stony Creek, south of Petersburg, Virginia. Olmsted had planned to stay at the Gee plantation overnight, but became lost on the way from the train station, spent the night at a roadside farm and had time for little more than a meal at Gee’s before returning to the train.

During the rest of the trip, three of Olmsted’s most promising connections failed to gain him access to plantations. He passed by the plantations in Halifax County, North Carolina, of Thomas Pollok Devereux, who had nearly 600 slaves and 4,400 acres in that region, and decided not to retrace his steps when he failed to find Devereux in his Raleigh town house. In Montgomery, Alabama, he spent a week waiting in vain for his friend Jefferson Franklin Jackson to arrange for him to visit a cotton plantation, despite the fact that Jackson’s law partners were rapidly becoming large slaveholders. By the time he reached New Orleans, Olmsted complained that he had rarely found people to whom he had letters of introduction and had “been able no more than to glance at the outside of things—Occasionally getting peeps in through accidental openings.” In New Orleans he also discovered that the plantation of another acquaintance from Yale, Anthony Wayne Baker, with nearly 200 slaves, was a two-day journey away in St. Mary’s Parish, and so did not attempt to visit it.

Nevertheless, Olmsted’s letters of introduction and his acquaintance with Yale students of the mid-1840s did provide him access to the three large plantations where he was able to gain more than a passing glimpse of slavery: White Hall, a large rice plantation on the Ogeechee River near Savannah—one of several plantations in the area owned by Richard J. Arnold, with a total slave [11] population of nearly 200—where Olmsted stayed three days; Fashion, the 1,200-acre sugar plantation of Richard Taylor in St. Charles Parish on the Mississippi near New Orleans, with 65 slaves, where he stayed one or two days; and the great cotton plantation of Meredith Calhoun on the Red River in Rapides Parish, Louisiana, consisting of four adjoining farms with a total of 15,000 acres and over 700 slaves, where he spent two to three days. Olmsted visited none of these places long enough to become a part of the daily routine of the plantation, but they did afford him the opportunity to examine closely the regimen of work and the agricultural practices of each.

Olmsted’s second trip through the South was even more barren of opportunities to examine plantation slavery, and he seems to have had few letters of introduction for the purpose. His letters introduced him to the newspaper editor George Dennison Prentice and the physician and botanist Charles Wilkins Short in Louisville; and in Nashville he and his brother made a crucially important renewal of acquaintance with Samuel Perkins Allison. None of his introductions gained him access to plantations. Olmsted and his brother stopped overnight at a few places as they rode through East Texas, but he described only the appearance and domestic amenities of those places, and mentioned only the house servants. That was probably all he saw during his visits. He made many friends and spent much time in the German settlements outside San Antonio, but what he discovered there was a free-labor society of recent immigrants, and not the South he had set out to see. On the last stage of the second trip, as he rode alone through the back country from Mississippi to Virginia, he once again saw slaveholding establishments. This time they were off the beaten track, away from railroads and stagecoach routes. The first part of the trip was through the inland cotton districts of Mississippi and Alabama, but even so, he stopped at only one sizable cotton plantation that he was able to examine in detail—a plantation of three square miles with 135 slaves in Claiborne County, Mississippi. In fact, this was the only plantation he investigated during the whole second journey, which lasted nine months. He gained many impressions of interior and piedmont cotton country and of the life of the “Highlanders”; but for the most part his knowledge came from conversation, observation along the road, and what he saw in the houses where he spent the night.

The chief source of information about Olmsted’s Southern journeys is the series of letters he wrote for the New-York Daily Times between 1852 and 1854. He described his first journey in fifty letters under the heading “The South,” which appeared between February 16, 1853, and February 13, 1854. Material from those letters made up a substantial part of the book A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, which he published in early 1856. During his second journey in the South, Olmsted began a second series for the Times. Entitled “A Tour of the Southwest,” it consisted of fifteen letters that appeared between March 6 and June 7, 1854. The series described his travels with his brother, John, across Texas to the Mexican border, and then stopped abruptly. Most of [12] the material in these letters later became part of A Journey Through Texas, which appeared in early 1857. In 1857, as he was writing A Journey in the Back Country, Olmsted published a series of ten letters in the New York Daily Tribune entitled “The Southerners at Home, ” which appeared between June 3 and August 24. The series ended just at the time when he turned his full attention to seeking the position of superintendent of Central Park, to which he was appointed on September II, 1857. The Tribune letters appeared almost verbatim in Back Country, which he had nearly completed in 1857 but did not publish until 1860.

Olmsted took extensive notes during his two Southern journeys, but none of them have survived. Presumably they, and all of the original letters he wrote for the New York newspapers, were lost in a fire at his Staten Island farm in 1863 while he was in California managing the Mariposa Estate. Private letters to his friends and family during this period also are scarce. It is therefore impossible to determine with assurance which of his original observations found their way into his writings on the South and which he decided not to use. It is possible, however, to reconstruct part of the evolution of his views in the crucial five years between 1852 and 1857 by comparing the newspaper letters he wrote in 1852–54 with the books he wrote between 1854 and 1857. Both of his series of letters for the New-York Daily Times contain several complete letters and portions of numerous others that did not appear in later books. This is especially true, and significant, in the case of the first series of letters, “The South.”

In part this is because it was John Hull Olmsted who wrote A Journey Through Texas, using Olmsted’s newspaper letters and manuscript notes. The material relating to the first Southern journey is also richer because more private letters that Olmsted wrote while in the South have survived, and because of the large number of letters from the series “The South” that he did not republish. Only two full letters and portions of three others from the series “A Tour in the Southwest” were left out of A Journey Through Texas, while Olmsted omitted twenty-one (either whole or in part) of the “The South” letters from Seaboard Slave States and Back Country.

The first four chapters of this volume present the surviving private letters that Olmsted wrote during his two Southern journeys, together with all of the significant material that appeared in his three series of newspaper letters but was not included in his published books. In most cases the newspaper letters are presented here in their entirety, even if some portions did appear in later books. Shorter passages that the editors have judged to be significant are presented in notes to relevant passages in the letters. In this way the three stages of Olmsted’s process of publishing his material, as well as the evolution of his views, can be reconstructed. For a listing of which sections of the two-volume compilation The Cotton Kingdom, published in 1861, are drawn from which of Olmsted’s three books on his Southern travels, the reader should consult the version of that work edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr.

[13]

The personal letters that survive from Olmsted’s first Southern tour are useful primarily as a guide to his itinerary and for identifying the individuals he met who were known to his family and friends. The letters from the New-York Daily Times included in this volume, however, reveal much about his early reaction to the South. Although Olmsted thought poorly of them as his first efforts at correspondence, letters one and two of “The South” series gave his original statement of intent and his first impressions of slave society as he set them down soon after entering Virginia. Letter two raised an issue that he returned to in later letters—the absurdity of the South’s complaints about the predominance of the North in manufactures and trade, and the belief expressed by Southern commercial conventions that the South could legislate a change in that situation. The North had not stolen the legitimate trade and industry of a city like Richmond, Olmsted declared. Rather, the Southerners had let them go to the North by default, in spite of the manifest advantages to be gained by, and the great natural opportunities provided for, trade and manufacturers in Richmond and elsewhere in the South. He developed this theme especially in letter fourteen. Similar themes were the poor farming practices of Virginians, both in the past and in the present day, and Olmsted’s anticipation of the success that Northerners would have in restoring the old fields and worn-out land of the state. He dealt with these matters in letters ten and eleven.

Although he claimed that when he set out he did not intend to “give much attention to the subject of Slavery,” Olmsted soon decided that “the character of the whole agriculture, ” and indeed of many crucial aspects of the whole society, stemmed from that institution. He discussed this effect extensively in letters seven and eight, and returned to the subject in letter thirty-three; but even in his first letter he was already firmly convinced of the economic superiority of free labor to slave labor. A good deal of the material in letters seven and eight appeared again in chapter 3 of Seaboard Slave States, “The Political Economy of Virginia,” but the original treatment was more direct and contained fewer references to the work of others. Simply from his own observations and conversations, Olmsted soon confirmed his first observation. Not only did slaves work slowly and poorly, but their presence resulted in a degradation of labor—the lowering of standards of skill and speed—for the whole laboring community, black and white.

A related topic was the condition of free blacks in the South. Olmsted dealt with this in letters eight and nine, and included much of that material in Seaboard Slave States, pages 129–33, but, the original treatment was more comprehensive, and more severe in its judgment of the industry and morality of free blacks and slaves, than the later version in the book.

Another concern that was central to Olmsted’s interest in slavery was the extent to which the treatment of slaves was humane and civilized, and the extent to which slavery served as a civilizing and Christianizing institution. In discussing Richard J. Arnold’s Georgia rice plantation in letter twenty-eight, Olmsted reasserted his belief that paternalistic slavery could move the slaves of [14] the South from their native barbarism to civilization. Unfortunately, he observed, there were few institutions in the South that could help make such enlightened treatment the rule rather than the exception; in fact, there was little to rely on except the individual inclination of planters. He pointed out in particular the weakness of Southern laws restricting the sale of slaves and forbidding the breaking up of families. For the most part, he said, these laws were unenforced and unenforceable. This demonstrated that there was no great disposition among Southerners to bring about the strengthening of the family that gradualist antislavery men considered essential.

All in all, Olmsted concluded, “the mind and higher faculties of the negro are less disciplined and improved in slavery than in the original barbarism of the race.” He rejected claims that a large proportion of slaves were practicing Christians, and argued strongly that American slavery had accomplished little in the way of training its subject people in true Christian doctrine and practice. He cited as proof the statements of ministers in that part of the South where missionary activity had been most energetic and supposedly most effective.

He saw little evidence in his travels that the slaves had gained a real understanding of Christian doctrine, or that their faith had produced the kind of conduct he felt should be the fruit of conversion. Suspicious of revivalism since his own attempts to experience conversion in his youth, he saw little that was Christian or civilized about the religious excitements that passed for religion among the slaves.

Olmsted repeated in Seaboard Slave States some of his conclusions about the regrettable nature of the Christianity practiced by slaves, but he did not repeat his more favorable estimation of their physical treatment. In a spirit of forbearance, and with a willingness to admit the shortcomings of free society that disappeared in his later writings, he conceded in his Times letters that American slaves were as well fed, clothed, and housed as the agricultural proletariat of Europe, and were protected from the kind of starvation and suffering that had afflicted Irish peasants during the Great Famine of the previous decade: In his last two letters he devoted much attention to this issue, concluding that the slaves he had seen and heard about experienced approximately the same degree of discomfort and corporal punishment, and did the same amount of hard labor, as sailors in the British navy.

While he apparently did not change his opinion on this question, Olmsted was unwilling in his later writings to emphasize those aspects of Southern society that he had found to be better than traditional wisdom in the North held them to be. By the time he wrote his books, his emphasis had changed. He was less concerned about the condition of slaves, or even about the extent to which the “peculiar institution” was a civilizing and Christianizing one. In the intervening years his attention had moved in the same direction as that of most other moderate antislavery thinkers in the North—to a concern with the threat of “Slave Power” to whites in and outside the South.

The most striking change in Olmsted’s writings is the absence in his [15] books on the South of those pleas to Northerners for understanding and forbearance toward their Southern brethren that he had made repeatedly in his newspaper letters. As early as letter eight, he wrote that the North should realize how difficult it would be for the South to make all the changes necessary to rid itself of slavery. He urged an end to Northern denunciations of slave-holders and called for an admission that slavery was something over which the North had no control. In “The South” number ten, he described the evils suffered by free laborers in the North and in Europe and ended with the apostrophe, “Oh, God! who are we to condemn our brother? No slave ever killed its own offspring in cool calculation of saving money by it, as do English free women. No slave is forced to eat of corruption, as are Irish tenants. No slave freezes to death for want of habitation and 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.”

In his last letter, Olmsted continued the conciliatory theme, reasserting that slaveholding itself was not wrong if the owners would meet their responsibilities as trustees and trainers of their slave-wards. At the same time, he questioned the title of Northerners to property in products produced by sweated labor, or drawn from land originally wrested from the Indians by force and fraud. Moreover, he reminded his Northern readers that they had a responsibility to defend the right of Southern states to permit their citizens to hold slaves. There must be no Northern interference with that right, he averred, and the South would be justified in breaking up the Union should the North seek to use the federal government to abolish slavery ill the states. Instead of attempting to interfere where they had no right, Northerners should instead apply themselves where they had both the power and the responsibility to strengthen free society and disprove those who claimed that blacks were incapable of surviving as free men. Northerners should work to secure, in their own section, “FAIR PLAY TO THE NEGRO. ”

While Olmsted’s description of the condition of slaves was in some respects less forbidding than that of many abolitionists, his view of the condition of nonslaveholding whites in the South, and of the effect on them of the institution of slavery, was severe indeed. “So far as they can be treated as a class, ” he wrote in “The South” number forty-seven, “the non-slaveholders are unambitious, indolent, degraded and illiterate;—are a dead peasantry so far as they affect the industrial position of the South.” Such a conclusion was only part of the distressing picture he drew of the condition of the whites—the “master class”— in the South.

Olmsted’s analysis concerning the nonslaveholders of the South was similar to that of other Northern observers, but his extensive analysis of the condition of the slaveholders was more original and comprehensive. He had gone to the South believing in the Emersonian doctrine of “compensation”—that evil elements in individuals and societies were compensated by peculiar [16] elements of good. His travels in England and on the Continent had sustained that view, and he embarked on his Southern travels expecting to discover the advantages that Southern society gained from the deplorable disadvantage of slavery. He found none; even the planter slaveocracy failed to produce from within itself, as a result of its wealth and leisure, either a high level of culture or a class of truly cultivated and socially responsible gentlemen. Most of these conclusions Olmsted drew together and set down early in his second tour of the South, as his steamboat worked its way up the Cumberland River toward Nashville during the last days of November 1853.

At this point, Olmsted had the pivotal experience of his decade of involvement with the South. In Nashville he and his brother encountered Samuel Perkins Allison, a native Tennesseean of the planter class and a classmate of John’s at Yale. Allison proved to be the conversable Southerner—the man willing to talk through the problem of slavery and its effect on the society of the South—that Olmsted had sought without success during his first journey. Allison was familiar with the societies of both North and South, and strenuously challenged Olmsted’s comparison of the two. As a result, the Olmsted brothers spent most of their two days in Nashville locked in argument with their Southern friend and adversary. The experience was a sobering one, as Olmsted recounted to Charles Loring Brace in the remarkable letter of December 1, 1853, which he wrote on his way back down the Cumberland River.

Olmsted’s conversations with Allison convinced him that there was a fundamental difference between the gentlemen-planters of the South and the earnest, improvement-minded group of Northern gentlemen of which he and his close friends were members. The Southerners were really aristocrats, he decided, concerned only with perpetuating the economic and political power of their own privileged class. They had no thought that government should promote the education and improvement of the lower classes. Moreover, the ruling conception of the Southern gentleman—that of honor—impressed him as “mere deference to time honored rules & conventionalisms” that left little room for intellectual originality. All in all, he concluded, Allison and his group lacked a “fundamental sense of right,” which was something that Olmsted and his friends—“all our earnest fellows,” as he called them—shared.

Allison himself demonstrated the inferiority of the Southern “high-toned” gentleman to the Northern gentleman-reformer; but he also forced Olmsted to admit that the fruits of free-labor society, as demonstrated by society at large in the North, were not what he wished them to be. “He silenced us and showed us that our own position was by no means consistent and satisfactory,” Olmsted confessed to Brace. Allison argued that there were very few gentlemen worthy of the name in the North, and dismissed Olmsted’s claim that that shortcoming was compensated by the “general elevation of all classes at the North.” Olmsted had to admit the truth of much of Allison’s critique, and to acknowledge “the rowdyism, ruffianism, want of high honorable [17] sentiment & chivalry of the common farming & laboring people of the North.”

Allison’s exposure of the shortcomings of Northern free society made Olmsted “very melancholy,” but such a passive state was not one that he could maintain for long. Almost immediately, Allison’s challenge led him to reaffirm the mission of reforming and civilizing the North, a mission that he and his friends had already embraced. He now saw more clearly than before the urgency of creating in the North a state of society that elevated all classes and gave the lie to proslavery apologists and their mudsill theory of society. “I must be either an Aristocrat or more of a Democrat than I have been—a Socialist Democrat,” he exclaimed to Brace. “We need institutions that shall more directly assist the poor and degraded to elevate themselves.” Mere “laisser aller” was not enough: the power of government must be used in the North to encourage “a democratic condition of society as well as of government. . . .” Defining the purpose that would underlie much of his own activity in the years to come, Olmsted concluded, “The poor need an education to refinement and taste and the mental & moral capital of gentlemen.”

Olmsted’s first step in his renewed program of education of the North was to write—as his steamboat worked its way back down the Cumberland—letter number forty-six for the Times “South“ series. In it he vigorously exposed the shortcomings of Southern society as reflected in the kind of gentlemen it produced. In that way he could win at least part of the argument that had gone so badly when he and Allison were face to face.

Olmsted carried away from his confrontation with Allison one further conviction, a belief that would soon be startlingly confirmed in the politics of the nation. Allison convinced him that the South was determined to expand the area of slaveholding both within the United States and into the Caribbean and Central and South America. A month later Stephen A. Douglas introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, which touched off new controversy over the expansion of slavery and set in motion a series of events that would change many of Olmsted’s views concerning slavery and the South.

Only one private letter that Olmsted wrote during the rest of his second Southern tour has survived, while five of the fifteen letters in his “Tour of the Southwest” series for the New-York Daily Times contain significant material that did not appear in the book Journey Through Texas. In one of those letters, which he wrote on April 18, 1854, Olmsted expressed his growing sense of the materialism and selfishness of the South as it sought to expand and protect slavery. Three other letters dealt with his exciting discovery of a number of German settlements in the San Antonio region that he thought could provide a nucleus for the creation of a free-labor society in West Texas.

From the beginning, Olmsted’s contact with the Germans of West Texas delighted him. When he and his brother came upon Neu Braunfels, they were gratified to find the signs of enterprise and culture, and the communal [18] setting, that were sadly missing in the rest of the South. The clean German inn where the brothers stayed was a traveler’s delight, while the sight of smiling, well-scrubbed children on their way to school the next morning led Olmsted to exclaim, “Nothing so pleasant as that in Texas before, hardly in the South.”

Olmsted found stronger grounds for his admiration of the Germans in Texas when he and his brother proceeded to San Antonio. There they met Adolf Douai, the intrepid editor of the antislavery San Antonio Zeitung. The brothers traveled with Douai to the German settlements around Sisterdale, north of San Antonio, and by the end of the trip Olmsted recorded, “I never saw a man more cheerful, strong in faith, and full of boundless hopes and aspirations for the elevation of all mankind . . . . ” In San Antonio, Olmsted also formed a friendship with one of Douai’s closest allies, Charles Riotte, the scion of a prosperous Prussian family and supporter of republicanism in Germany, with whom he carried on a long correspondence about American institutions.

The most pleasant discovery Olmsted made during his stay with the Texas Germans was that of the small “Latin Settlement” of Sisterdale, a tiny collection in the hills north of San Antonio of cultured and politically progressive refugees from the reaction that followed the revolutionary movements of 1848. The group included the noblemen Ottomar von Behre and Baron von Westphal, the scholars Ernst Kapp and August Siemering, and the active antislavery men Julius Dresel and Edouard Degener. During his first evening at Sisterdale, Olmsted was charmed by the musical performances held at Degener’s log cabin, which included a waltzing party and the performance, accompanied by a good piano, of ensemble sections of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

While in the Sisterdale area, Olmsted found teamsters camped on the prairie who hummed airs from Mozart and recited passages from Dante and Schiller “as they lay on the ground looking up into the infinite heaven of the night.” He also had the remarkable experience of engaging in “discussions of the deepest and most metaphysical subjects of human thought, with men who quote with equal familiarity, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Paul and Aristotle, and who live in holes in the rock, in ledges of the Guadalupe, and earn their daily bread by splitting shingles. ” Such a society offered Olmsted a glimpse of his millennium: men living in communities that overcame the decivilizing effects of immigration and frontier settlement, communities where even those who performed menial tasks and manual labor possessed “refinement and taste and the mental & moral capital of gentlemen.”

Olmsted’s German friends intended to do more than secure their own economic advancement and preserve their cultural traditions; they were also determined to create in their part of Texas a society free of the incubus of slavery—a society that embodied the republican ideals for which they had fought in Germany. They must have explained their beliefs and immediate plans to Olmsted, since the men of Sisterdale had formed an organization for political action, which they called Der Freie Verein, in November 1853, only three months prior to his first visit. They were anxious to formulate a platform [19] that would provide the basis for an alliance of like-minded Texans for the purpose of influencing the presidential elections of 1856. On March 15, 1854, the Sisterdale organization issued a call for a mass meeting of Germans in San Antonio on May 14 and 15, which would coincide with the annual saengerfest there. Olmsted may well have been involved in discussions following the call, since he and his brother arrived in Sisterdale for their second visit on March 16 and spent the next week in the vicinity, “visiting and [being] visited by the settlers” there.

The platform that the San Antonio convention drew up contained many of the principles of Olmsted’s Sisterdale friends, including such proposals as the direct election of the president, U. S. senators, judges, and most administrative officers; popular recall of representatives; abolition of corporal punishment, capital punishment, and imprisonment for debt; graduated income and inheritance taxes; sale of public land only to actual settlers; a homestead law; creation of free schools and universities open to all; and rigorous separation of church and state.

With its endorsement of many changes that did not receive widespread support in the United States until the Progressive era, the platform gave evidence of the broad range of the reform thought of the Germans, but it was the platform’s statement on slavery that had the greatest significance for the future of German political influence in Texas and for the situation of the Germans themselves. The platform declared slavery an evil, affirmed that it was a question for each state to handle without interference by the federal government, and requested federal assistance for any state desiring to bring about abolition of the institution within its boundaries. Soon proslavery Americans and conservative Germans condemned these sentiments and brought down upon the progressive and antislavery Germans, and on Douai’s newspaper in particular, the wrath of the rising nativist movement in Texas.

Olmsted was probably unaware of the results of the San Antonio meeting as he rode alone through the back country on his way home, but in late June he did write Charles Riotte from Chattanooga, expressing his desire to provide what assistance he could for the antislavery forces in West Texas. Soon after, Adolf Douai informed him more fully of his own problems. In response, Olmsted undertook to raise funds and guarantee the notes of his friend in order to ensure the survival of the Zeitung. During the fall he and his brother collected $200, which they forwarded to Texas as a gift. They also supplied Douai with correspondence for his paper and discussed with him the way to encourage free-soil colonization of West Texas. In return, Douai sent not only his thanks but also a flow of vivid descriptions of the menace to his newspaper, and even to his life, of violent proslavery and nativist elements in the San Antonio region. In late October he reported that he had been “threatened for weeks with lynching, and as I did not care for it, they seem to have organized for lynching the press. ”

The vehemence of the proslavery response to the Zeitung and to the [20] San Antonio platform of 1854, so graphically portrayed by Douai in his letters (some of which arrived with broken seals), provided Olmsted with a first-hand account of the violent threat to the antislavery cause, and to freedom of thought and press, posed by defenders of the “peculiar institution” in the South. His involvement in the free-soil activities of the Germans in Texas gave him a taste of those problems a few months before similar events in Kansas intruded on the consciousness of the North. [t was through this experience in the fall of 1854 that Olmsted began to form an increasingly radical view of the threat posed by the expansion of slavery and Southern violence—a process that reached a crescendo in the summer of 1857.

After he returned to New York at the end of his second journey through the South, Olmsted began to write his first book of travels, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States. For the most part he drew from the letters he had written for the New-York Times, but he supplemented that primarily descriptive material with more analytical discussions of the historical background of the society of the seaboard states. To prepare for that task, he spent a considerable amount of time in the libraries of New York City. He was convinced that historians should study the development of society at large, as well as the actions of those with power, wealth and education. As he observed, “The dumb masses have often been so lost in this shadow of egotism, that, in later days, it has been impossible to discern the very real influence their character and condition has had on the fortune and fate of nations.” It was in this spirit that he had walked across England and parts of the European continent in 1850. It was also in this spirit that he wrote the chapters of Seaboard Slave States on the social history of Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia.

In Virginia, Olmsted found from the beginning the debilitating spirit of aristocracy and the degradation of the laboring class that impressed him so painfully in his own time; in South Carolina he perceived a supercilious aristocratic prejudice at work from the earliest years; and in Georgia he found a contrasting measure of “life, enterprise, skill and industry” that stemmed directly from the nonslaveholding character of the state’s original settlers. The writing of Seaboard Slave States took Olmsted over a year; he completed it in November 1855 and it was published in January 1856.

During the fall and winter of 1854, Olmsted was still a gentleman-farmer taking advantage of the slack season to follow literary pursuits. In April 1855, however, he left farming and his Staten Island farm behind and moved to New York City to devote himself exclusively to literary work. His father’s wealth and generosity made it possible for him to embark on yet another career: John Olmsted provided his son with $5,000 with which he became a partner in the newly formed publishing firm of Dix, Edwards & Company.

Part of Olmsted’s work with Dix & Edwards was a direct extension of the writing in which he was already immersed. The firm was to be the publisher of Seaboard Slave States, and Olmsted’s arrangements as a partner left him time for his own work. His primary role in the firm was to function as [21] managing editor of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, which Dix & Edwards had recently acquired from the publisher George Palmer Putnam. Since its founding in 1853, the journal had served as an important patron of American writers and a model of the Victorian journal dedicated to popular education and enlightenment. The original editor of Putnam’s, Charles Briggs, had turned to other employment, and Olmsted assumed some of his duties. At the time, John Hull Olmsted said that his brother “acts as publisher, i.e. editing publisher, answers letters, receives literary men, and conducts the literary side of the business. ”

Fortunately, Olmsted did not have to carryall the responsibility himself. He was soon able to enlist the secret support of three leading figures in the New York publishing world, two of whom had been closely associated with Putnam’s Monthly during its first years. The actual work of choosing and editing manuscripts for publication in Putnam’s was carried out, incognito, by George W. Curtis, who was on the editorial staff of the New York Tribune and wrote articles for the “Easy Chair” column in Harper’s Monthly. Curtis was also well known by this time as the author of travel tales and social satire. For occasional articles, especially on political topics, Olmsted could turn to Parke Godwin, an editor of William Cullen Bryant’s New York Evening Post, and the poet’s son-in-law. He also received assistance from Charles A. Dana, the city editor of the Tribune, who, while not associated with the earlier Putnam’s, had been a member of Brook Farm with Curtis.

The fact that the role of the other editors of Putnam’s was kept secret gave Olmsted a better opportunity to gain recognition in the “literary republic of New York, ” as he called it, without being overshadowed by his better-known associates. This was gratifying, since he was anxious to secure a reputation as a literary man. In undertaking to edit Putnam’s, his goal was to make it “more than ever the leading magazine and the best outlet of thought in the country.” He planned to publish the work of the best American writers and thinkers and to pay them well. It was during his editorship that Putnam’s published such important works as Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno and Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod. Other notable figures contributed during that period, among them Longfellow and Whittier. Olmsted’s attempts to solicit manuscripts also brought him into communication with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Theodore Parker. The high point of such associations with literary figures came when he gave a luncheon for James Russell Lowell on the eve of the author’s departure for Europe in June 1855.

In addition to seeking a reputation for himself, Olmsted sought through his work on Putnam’s Monthly to use the journal as a vehicle for carrying out one part of the program for improving the society of the North that he had outlined after his debates with Samuel Perkins Allison. In his letter to Charles Loring Brace of December I, 1853, he had called for the creation of a journal that would mold the thought of the American people, a subject he had [22] clearly discussed with Brace before: “We ought to have that Commentator as an organ of higher Democracy and a higher religion than the popular,” he wrote his friend. “And it ought to be great—sure of success—well founded. Bound to succeed by its merit, by its talent. A cross between the Westminster Review & the Tribune, is my idea.”

This concern was not new to Olmsted. Even before he had thought about the need for such a journal he had been intrigued by the opportunities for popular education that were open to the religious tract societies. He was dismayed, however, by their approach and by the “flattering sick school-girl sentimentalism” that so often cloyed their publications. “Why in God’s name,” he had exclaimed to his father in the summer of 1849, “do not great good men, real men who are capable of thinking for others, and are not thought for by all the old women that would fain have a name to live after they have got into their dotage—take hold of this immense engine of good?”

The business of publishing was not all high-minded endeavor, however. Problems of money soon intruded into the arcadia of literary life, represented in their most immediate form by Arthur T. Edwards, the partner with major responsibility for the financial affairs of the firm. One point of contention was the reimbursement of foreign authors for publication of their work in Putnam’s Monthly. The absence of an international copyright law made such payments legally unnecessary, and Putnam’s competitor, Harper’s Monthly, filled much of its space with pirated material. Olmsted objected to such a course and tried to convince Edwards of the “absolute moral right” of foreign authors to payment in return for publication of their works. He also argued that because Dix & Edwards had published an American edition of Charles Dickens’s popular magazine, Household Words, it should provide some payment to the original English publishers of the magazine, Bradbury & Evans.

While that debate involved somewhat abstract issues of principle and policy, Edwards’s own policies hit closer to home when he rescinded an agreement to advance Olmsted the money for publishing Seaboard Slave States. Forced to turn to his father once again for financial assistance, Olmsted pondered, “I wonder how I could have been swerved from my repeated resolution not to be a business-man, knowing so well my unaptness for it.” By the time his connection with the publishing firm of Dix & Edwards was over (two years later), Olmsted had learned more painfully how great a mistake he had made.

The future still seemed promising, however, when in February 1856 he embarked on an eight-month trip to Europe and England for the firm. His twenty-four-year-old half-sister Mary accompanied him on the first part of the tour. They landed in England, proceeded to Paris, and then went on to Rome to join his half-sister Bertha and her companion, Sophia Stevens Hitchcock. Olmsted and the young women spent some time in Rome, traveled south as far as Amalfi, then toured northern Italy and went on to Vienna, Prague and Leipzig. In Leipzig, Olmsted attended to business with publishing firms and then the [23] group proceeded to Dresden ; there they split up. By late May, Olmsted reached London, where he spent most of the next five months seeking consignments from English publishers. At the same time, he gained entree to the publishing and literary world of London and took much pleasure and some pride in the acquaintances he made. His most pleasing experiences were with the circle of men who owned and wrote for the humorous magazine Punch. The high point of his stay in London was the supper party that William Thackeray gave at his house each year for the editors of Punch and their close associates

Although he did not know it, during his European tour of 1856 Olmsted was also laying the basis for the professional activity that would take up far more of his life than the two years he spent as an editor and publisher with Dix & Edwards. While living in London he found himself drawn to the city’s parks, and he later recalled that he spent all possible spare time in them. In the process, he learned much about the role that urban parks and public grounds could play in the life of a city. During his tour of Italy, which he had not visited before, he also absorbed images of landscapes, gardens and the settings of buildings that he would draw upon years later when he designed public grounds and college campuses in the semiarid climate of California.

Olmsted’s European idyll was short-lived, however. By midsummer 1856 he began to receive worried reports from his partner Joshua A. Dix concerning Arthur Edwards’s handling of the firm’s finances. In the fall, Olmsted returned to New York prepared to resign as a partner, but instead agreed to remain with the firm. The firm ’s financial problems continued to mount thereafter, and were complicated by the deterioration of the general economic situation as the Panic of 1857 approached. In April 1857, both Dix and Edwards withdrew from the firm and were replaced by the partnership of Olmsted, George W. Curtis and their printer, J. W. Miller, which took the name of Miller & Company. Olmsted withdrew from the firm in June, and two months later, on August 6, it failed. He had been right in his misgivings about embarking on a business career. He lost all the money his father had loaned him to invest in Dix, Edwards & Company, and found himself morally, if not legally, liable for some of the debts of Dix & Edwards that the firm of Miller & Company had assumed.

Faced anew with the problems of earning a living and recouping his finances, Olmsted hoped to find another niche in the “literary republic” of New York. His best chance, he felt, was to write for the New-York Times, but there was no immediate prospect of that. Instead, he retired to a seaside inn near New Haven, Connecticut, to pursue the one literary activity that was still within his power—completion of the third volume of his Southern travels, A Journey in the Back Country. While he was there, an opportunity presented itself that eventually led him to a career in landscape architecture. A fellow guest at the hotel was his friend Charles W. Elliott, one of the commissioners of New York’s new Central Park. The commission was about to hire a superintendent, [24] Elliott told Olmsted, and wanted a Republican with few political enemies. When Elliott urged him to apply for the position, Olmsted agreed to leave at once for New York and to decide on the way whether to apply for it.

Faced with the lack of other prospects, Olmsted decided to make the attempt, and set out to rally his friends and acquaintances in support of his candidacy. Although he was about to leave the “literary republic,” his membership in it stood him in good stead. Many important literary men signed the petitions he circulated, and the consideration that in the end led the commissioners to select him was the fact that among those who endorsed him was the most respected literary figure in New York, Washington Irving.

During the time of his partnership in the firm of Dix & Edwards and its successor, literary work absorbed most of Olmsted’s time. Even so, he remained active in the free-soil cause. By the summer of 1855, a year after he had volunteered to assist Adolf Douai and the Germans in Texas, the situation there had deteriorated badly. Douai’s uncompromising antislavery position angered proslavery and nativist elements in the San Antonio area and caused increasing anxiety among conservative Germans. By August 1855 Douai was reporting to Olmsted that an influential group of Germans was attacking him in newspapers and by word of mouth and was circulating rumors that he was on the verge of bankruptcy. Many of his advertisers had left him, he said, and he had lost a sixth of his subscribers. Many others, thinking that his paper would soon fail, refused to pay their bills. By late summer Douai was receiving new threats against himself and his paper, and for two weeks kept his printing office under armed guard.

At the same time that the danger of Douai’s position in Texas was increasing, the threat of civil war was growing in the territory of Kansas. On March 30, 1855, the election of members of the territorial legislature was carried for proslavery interests by the fraudulent votes of Missourians. The creation of this “bogus” legislature, which remained the officially recognized lawmaking body during the next few crucial years, presented an ominous threat to the free-soil group in the territory. The free-soil leaders in Lawrence, the western headquarters of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, immediately appealed to their eastern supporters for two hundred Sharps rifles and two field guns. Soon, emissaries of the free-state settlers hurried East to secure arms. Among them was James Burnett Abbott, who sought guns for his company of the free-state militia, which was being formed to counteract any aggressive actions by the “bogus” legislature or by the proslavery territorial militia and bands of armed “border ruffians.”

Abbott secured one hundred Sharps rifles from the officers of the New England Emigrant Aid Company in Boston, and then went on to Hartford, Providence and New York, raising enough funds to purchase seventeen more. He returned to Kansas in late September 1855, leaving Olmsted in charge of soliciting funds for more weapons. With the money that he collected, Olmsted [25] bought a mountain howitzer and ammunition. In October he shipped the howitzer—packed in several cases and disguised—to Kansas City. The men from Lawrence who were sent to claim it barely managed to carry the cannon back to their town before proslavery bands closed the roads. The “Sacramento,” as it came to be called, was the first free-state cannon in Kansas and was in place at the Free State Hotel in Lawrence by December 1855, when the “Wakarusa War” brought proslavery forces to the verge of invading the town.

As conflict with the “bogus” legislature and proslavery groups increased, the free-state movement gained strength. In December 1855 its supporters ratified the free-state Topeka constitution, and on January 15, 1856, they held elections for a slate of state officers and legislators. They also elected Charles Robinson, an agent of the New England Emigrant Aid Company, as the free-state governor. On March 4 the free-state legislature convened at Topeka, in defiance of Franklin Pierce’s administration and the proslavery legislature that it recognized. Soon the official territorial government, led by the newly appointed governor, Wilson Shannon, undertook to suppress the free-state government and to arrest its leaders for treason.

In Texas, the spring of 1856 saw the collapse of the free-soil movement that Olmsted had worked to sustain. The success of the nativist movement in suppressing antislavery agitation had so alienated Olmsted’s friend Charles Riotte that in December 1855 he secured a grant of two million acres of land near Monterrey, in the state of Nuevo Leon, Mexico, which he planned to colonize with Germans from their homeland and from the United States. In January he informed Olmsted of his intention to move to Monterrey, and held to that purpose despite Olmsted’s objections to his project. At the same time, Adolf Douai was reaching the end of his endurance. In late January he wrote Olmsted that he had lost his influence in the German community because so many blamed him for bringing down on them the fury of the Know-Nothings. At the same time, he refused the Olmsted brothers’ offer to raise more money to keep the Zeitung alive. In March Douai sold his press to a group of antagonists that he said were about to ruin him. He published the last issue of the Zeitung on March 29, 1856, and in early May left Texas for Boston.

By the time of the free-state elections in Kansas and Douai’s retreat from Texas, Olmsted was on the other side of the Atlantic. What he learned of events in America, and what he saw of the European response to them, increasingly troubled him.

Soon after his arrival in London for the summer came the news of the “sacking” of Lawrence on May 20 by sheriff Samuel Jones and a force of several hundred men, who had come to the town as a posse for a federal marshal seeking to arrest free-state leaders for treason against the territorial government. Though the invaders killed none of the residents (who offered no resistance), they destroyed the Free State Hotel, the house of free-state “governor” [26] Robinson, and the presses of the town’s two antislavery newspapers. They looted a number of shops and houses and carried off Olmsted’s howitzer for their own use. Two days later, Preston Brooks of South Carolina caned Charles Sumner of Massachusetts into insensibility on the floor of the Senate for his insulting references to Brooks’s kinsman, Senator Andrew P. Butler, in a speech on Kansas. In Kansas on May 24 came the brutal murder by John Brown and his men of five proslavery men along Pottawatomie Creek. That atrocity unleashed three months of violence in the territory and spawned hundreds of incendiary reports and editorials in Eastern newspapers and the English and European press.

Olmsted left little record of how the events in “Bleeding Kansas” during the summer of 1856 impressed him, but he did express dismay at the ill-repute that they gave the American republican experiment, even among previously sympathetic foreigners. He discovered that the anarchy in Kansas and the other violent signs of the times were playing into the hands of the European forces of aristocracy and reaction epitomized by Emperor Napoleon III, who was building his Second Empire on the ruins of the French republic he had betrayed and overthrown. One indication of Olmsted’s concern was the letter “How Ruffianism in Washington and Kansas is Regarded in Europe,” which he wrote to the New-York Daily Times on June 19, 1856.

Olmsted was too occupied with business and too far from the scene to do much for the free-soil cause during his stay in Europe in 1856. During that time, however. his brother. John. was writing A Journey Through Texas from Olmsted’s newspaper letters and travel notes. When Olmsted returned to New York in November, the manuscript was all but completed. The notes from which John had written the book, however, were more than two years old, and the volume contained no analytical sections like the historical chapters that Olmsted had added to Seaboard Slave States. To remedy this deficiency, Olmsted sat down in December 1856 to write a long “Letter to a Southern Friend” as an introduction to the book. Part of his theme was the superiority of free-labor colonization in establishing society on the frontier. He described in detail the variety of public institutions (from roads to schools) that free-labor settlers quickly established in new communities. He contrasted this process of building a society with the approach of slaveholders, who tied up their capital in slaves and deferred for years the creation of public institutions or even the provision of domestic amenities. In this introduction, Olmsted once again set forth his view that slavery perpetuated a “frontier condition of society.”

That theme directly served the purpose for which he wished to use Journey Through Texas. As soon as he received proof sheets of the book in January 1857, he set out to use them to promote the cause of free labor in Texas. He authorized Edward Everett Hale and James Elliot Cabot to send copies, at his expense, to any persons they felt should be influenced in favor of free-labor colonization. He hinted to Hale, with no apparent success, that he was looking for an agency that would send a hundred copies of the book, at cost, [27] to settlers who might be interested in “taking Texas next.” Hale did agree, however, to forward sets of selected pages of the book to newspaper editors throughout New England, with the suggestion that they use the material to present Texas to their readers in a favorable light.

Olmsted hoped to convince a few hundred New Englanders to form the vanguard of a substantial movement into Texas of Northern and European nonslaveholders. He also wanted to gain the support of influential Englishmen in order to attract their countrymen, and to that end he wrote in January 1857 to George Robinson, second viscount Goderich. At the same time, he was corresponding with the owners of West Texas land that might be desirable for free-labor colonies.

As Olmsted pursued his scheme for free-labor colonization in the Southwest in the spring of 1857, his writings on the South reflected his increasing concern about the consequences of the expansion of slavery. He was particularly alarmed at the willingness of the South to resort to violence in order to expand the area of slaveholding and ensure the safety of slave property in new areas. In examining that subject, he became more and more convinced of the cultural differences between North and South that slavery created. Already in his introduction to Journey Through Texas he had declared that slave labor was not as economical as free labor, and that Southerners clung to their “peculiar institution” for other than economic reasons. Ownership of slaves conveyed status in the South, he observed, as did land with the English, horses with the Arabs, and beads and vermilion with Indians. It also trained men to desire absolute command over those working under them: as he phrased it, “slavery educates, or draws out, and strengthens, by example and exercise, to an inordinate degree, the natural lust of authority, common as an element of character in all mankind.”

There was danger for the nation, Olmsted decided, in the fact that slavery could expand only if unacceptable demands were made on the nonslaveholding population. The protection of slave property required the enforcement of a whole series of oppressive laws: “When you demand of us to permit slavery in our territory,” he had declared to his “southern friend,” “we know that you mean to take advantage of our permission, to forbid freedom of discussion, and freedom of election; to prevent an effective public educational system; to interrupt and annoy our commerce, to establish an irresponsible and illegal censorship of the press; and to subject our mails to humiliating surveillance.” In consequence, the people of the North were resolved that slavery should expand no further. “They will accept anything else that you may place in the alternative,” he warned. “Be it disunion, be it war, foreign or domestic, it will not divert them from their purpose.”

The conclusion of Olmsted’s December 1856 “Letter to a Southern Friend,” with its litany of the ways in which slave society threatened free institutions, was based in part on the history of Southern attempts to suppress antislavery agitation within its borders during the previous twenty years, and in [28] part on what Olmsted had learned of the harassment of Adolf Douai and his other friends in West Texas.

To a large extent, however, Olmsted based his predictions concerning the future demands of the “Slave Power” on what he saw taking shape in Kansas. As soon as it convened for its first session in July 1855, the “bogus” legislature passed a series of severe laws for the protection of slave property in the territory. Particularly harsh and provocative was the “Act to Punish Offenses Against Slave Property,” which imposed the death penalty on anyone who assisted a slave insurrection or introduced into the territory any publication for the purpose of inciting revolt among either slaves or free blacks. The act also made it a felony, punishable by at least two years at hard labor, to make any statement denying the right of persons in the territory to hold slaves, or to circulate a document containing such a denial. Olmsted was also distressed by the way territorial officials rode roughshod over the rights of free-state settlers, inciting the “sacking” of Lawrence, as sheriff Samuel Jones had done, and holding free-state men in jail without bond, as had been the case with Charles Robinson and others.

When Olmsted wrote his introduction to Journey Through Texas, the worst violence in Kansas was past, owing to governor John W. Geary’s “pacification” of the territory just before the presidential election in the fall of 1856. Even in that process, however, the antislavery side had borne the brunt of official actions. Most of those arrested under Geary’s regime were free-state men, and the ardently proslavery territorial judges promptly released proslavery men on bail while refusing bail for those on the other side. Moreover, Geary was rebuffed both by the judges and by the legislature when he attempted to promote moderate policies. In December, over Governor Geary’s veto, the legislature passed a bill that would have put the whole state-making process firmly in the hands of the proslavery elements. Abandoned by the Pierce administration and increasingly threatened by violence from proslavery ruffians, Geary resigned as governor on March 4, 1857, the day of James Buchanan’s inauguration. Olmsted expected that Buchanan would appoint a new governor more sympathetic to the “bogus” legislature, and that attempts to enforce the laws and collect the taxes of the legislature more vigorously would lead to new confrontation and violence in the territory.

On March 6, the U. S. Supreme Court added another ominous ingredient to the sectional controversy. In its decision on the Dred Scott case, the Court declared that slaveholders had the right to carry their property into all territories, and implied that it might be illegal for the states themselves to outlaw slavery within their borders.

In the midst of this controversy, Olmsted undertook to have the firm of Miller & Company, of which he was a partner, publish The Englishman in Kansas; Or, Squatter Life and Border Warfare, a highly colored account of the violence of proslavery “border ruffians” in Kansas. The author was Thomas H. Gladstone, a correspondent for the Times of London who had visited the territory [29] in the early summer of 1856. Olmsted had presumably read some of Gladstone’s letters to the Times while still in England in the fall of 1856. As the American editor of the volume, he provided an introduction—probably written in late March and early April 1857—and a supplement that he dated April 13.

The task Olmsted set for himself in his introduction to The Englishman in Kansas was to explain the reasons for the violence displayed by the border ruffians in Gladstone’s account, and to explore the implications of their conduct for the future of American society. His conclusions were severe, and his predictions dark and foreboding. The contrast the Englishman found in Kansas between the character of men from the North and those from the South—both descended from the same English stock—would be incredible, Olmsted declared, if there were not prior reason to expect men from the slave states to display “a special proneness to violence, and a distrust, or habitual forgetfulness, of law and civilized customs under exciting circumstances.” This dangerous quality, he asserted, was inevitably and necessarily bred into the character of Southerners, and grew more ingrained with every passing generation.

The Southerners’ lack of respect for human life stemmed from a fundamental instinct for self-preservation: the safety of the master race in a slave society depended on constant schooling of the slaves in habits of obedience, and of the masters in habits of command. It also required the masters to be mentally prepared at all times to respond, with violence, to any sign of insubordination. They must, Olmsted said, “hold themselves always in readiness to chastize, to strike down, to slay, upon what they shall individually judge to be sufficient provocation.” This attitude nullified “the usual sentiment of the sacredness of life” where slaves were concerned, and it poisoned the relations of whites as well. Southern newspapers were full of evidence that Southerners acquiesced in violent acts and that juries were most reluctant to convict men for them. The fundamental conditions for the perpetuation of slavery, Olmsted concluded, diminished in the people of the American South “that constitutional and instinctive regard for the sanctity of human life, the growth of which distinguishes every other really advancing people just in proportion to their progress in the scale of Christian civilization.”

One perverse effect of the use of violence to safeguard slavery was the barbaric quality it gave to the upper classes in the South. A Southern gentleman might attack and kill a slave for a slight show of insubordination, and indeed the stability of his society required that he do so. This very fact, Olmsted observed, had devastating implications. It exposed a fundamental flaw in Southern gentility and greatly strengthened the case against the Southern gentleman which he had begun to build following his arguments with Samuel Perkins Allison in late 1853. “Thus slavery educates gentlemen in habits,” Olmsted concluded with satisfaction, “which, at the North, belong only to bullies and ruffians.”

Olmsted’s concern in the spring of 1857, however, was the threat of Southern violence against the free-labor society of the North. On this score, [30] the implications of the Kansas experience were painfully clear. It indicated that in the future, slaveholders would require the suppression of all opposition, all questioning of their right to hold slaves, and would demand the right to use both legal process and extralegal violence to protect and strengthen the institution. The safety of the masters in a slave society required that they must be permitted to act “in a spirit of cruel, unconsiderate, illegal, violent, and pitiless vengeance.” “To educate the people otherwise,” Olmsted declared, “would be suicidal.” Therefore, he asserted, “no free press, no free pulpit, nor free politics can be permitted in the South, nor in Kansas, while the South reigns.” The acts of the “bogus” legislature, as well as the actions of the border ruffians, had demonstrated the truth of this assertion. Nor was the experience of Kansas an unusual and isolated incident.

The whole tenor of the Democratic party under Pierce, and now under Buchanan, was to provide support by the federal government for the spread of slavery and the suppression of free institutions wherever slaveholders found them dangerous to their interests. And now the Dred Scott decision raised the possibility that slaveholders would demand protection of their ownership of slaves not only in all remaining territories but in the states as well. The power of the federal government, already used to force the return of fugitive slaves from free states, would soon be used to force slaves, as slaves, into those states. Wherever the slaveholders went, they would carry with them their traditions of violence and their hostility to the exercise of free speech and free press. The experience of “Bleeding Kansas” would be repeated again and again.

Unless the whole trend of federal policy was reversed, Olmsted anticipated the spread of a life-and-death struggle between slavery and free institutions. In an outburst that showed how much he had been radicalized in five years’ time, he exclaimed, “Shall we hereafter exercise our rights as citizens of the United States, which are simply our natural rights as men, only by favor of Sharps rifles and in entrenched villages?”

That question was of immediate importance to Olmsted because he was actively engaged in the attempt to create a barrier of free-labor settlements across the path of advancing slavery from Kansas to Texas. The anticipated policy of the Buchanan administration and the hostility of Texans to his German friends indicated to him that any settlements of free laborers in the Southwest would indeed have to resort to entrenchments, Sharps rifles and mountain howitzers if they were to survive.

By mid-April 1857, the Buchanan administration had promised to continue support for the “bogus” legislature in Kansas. That policy threatened to produce more violence as the free-state settlers strengthened their resolve to resist the authority of officials appointed by the legislature. As Olmsted pointed out, President Buchanan had accepted the laws of the “bogus” legislature as legal, and had not moved to punish the violence of proslavery adherents during the previous year. He had also supported the provision (vetoed by Geary) for a census and for the convening of a constitutional convention that would ensure a [31] proslavery constitution. In early April the appointment of Robert J. Walker as territorial governor gave no encouragement to Olmsted, despite Walker’s stated belief that the climate of Kansas would not permit the survival of slavery. It was the agency of man, rather than that of nature, that concerned Olmsted in Kansas, and he judged that Walker would do nothing to oppose the operation of the “bogus” legislature, with its oppressive laws and unjust officials.

The future of Kansas, however, was not Olmsted’s primary concern. That was the sphere of action of the New England Emigrant Aid Company and of federal officials, and he could do little to affect the outcome of the conflict there. He looked instead to the regions south of Kansas, where he believed the next struggle would take place, and where he hoped the Emigrant Aid Company would soon concentrate its efforts. He had met with little success when he tried in January and February of 1857 to interest the company in distributing Journey Through Texas to potential settlers, but events were moving quickly and by the spring the company’s officials were thinking more seriously about Texas. In mid-May, Colonel Daniel Ruggles of the regular army, who had been stationed in Texas for several years, visited Boston and presented the executive committee of the Emigrant Aid Company with a proposal for buying land and founding settlements there. Olmsted talked with Ruggles soon after and during the next month also went to Boston and met with the company’s executive committee. On June 19 the committee authorized its “Texas committee” to employ Olmsted and others to gather information and help select land for purchase. Samuel Cabot, Jr., Olmsted’s principal correspondent in the committee, asked him to draw up a “good plan of action in a matured form,” and on July 4, 1857, Olmsted sent Cabot a long proposal.

The area that Olmsted was most anxious to colonize was along the Red River opposite the Indian Territory between Texas and Kansas. Both Olmsted and the Emigrant Aid Company’s officers were apparently convinced that the Buchanan administration intended to open the Indian Territory to settlement in the very near future, and planned to do so in a way that would make it a slave state. Olmsted believed that the next battle against the advance of slavery would be fought in that region, which he called “Neosho.” He was anxious to gather along the Red River the armed settlers whose entrenched villages would form the vanguard of free-labor forces when the struggle began. Being the first settlers on the land and well armed, the men from the Texas colonies could move into Neosho in force as soon as the area was opened to settlement, face down proslavery border ruffians, and make it unsafe to move slaves into the territory.

In his outline of the settlement plan, Olmsted proposed that the Emigrant Aid Company create a land company with at least one hundred thousand dollars of capital. Twenty thousand dollars should be invested immediately in twenty thousand acres of land and such improvements as mills, cotton gins and school houses. Two thousand acres of land should be offered without charge to a group of settlers to form the nucleus of the colony. The response to Olmsted’s [32] proposal came quickly, and on July 8, Charles J. Higginson—brother of Thomas Wentworth Higginson and one of the officers of the company—proposed that the venture begin with ten thousand dollars of capital that the newly formed Boston Kansas Company, of which he was a trustee, had ready to invest. The Emigrant Aid Company’s officers also wanted to expand Olmsted’s role in their Texas scheme. They proposed that he go to Texas to select land and asked if he would go to England to seek support there. They also wanted him to accompany to Texas any representatives that English supporters might send to the United States in the fall. In mid-July the company asked Olmsted to write a statement for them on the feasibility of increasing the cotton supply by creating free-labor settlements in the Southwest. They intended to use the statement in their search for support in England.

Olmsted had already anticipated these requests. On July 6, two days after his letter to Samuel Cabot, Jr., he had written the secretaries of the cotton supply associations of Manchester and Liverpool, giving them the statement on free labor and cotton supply that the Emigrant Aid Company asked him to prepare soon after. He also wrote to several individuals in England, including two members of Parliament—Lord Goderich and C. Fowell Buxton—and to John Delane, the editor of the Times of London, urging that they support the sending of English colonists to Texas. Goderich had already replied to Olmsted’s earlier letter, saying that he sympathized with the plan to “turn the flank” of slavery by blocking its expansion westward with a ring of free states. But he refused to involve Englishmen in so dangerous an undertaking.

In his letter to the cotton supply associations, Olmsted took Goderich’s response into account and made no mention of gaining Texas and other areas for freedom. Instead, he limited himself to describing the way that colonization of Englishmen in the Southwest would help insure a steady supply of cotton. He warned Samuel Cabot, Jr., that there should be no mention to the English of the role that the Emigrant Aid Company would play in creating the Texas settlements. At the same time, he was at work on the more comprehensive proposal he had promised Cabot in July. To that end he secured offers of land in northern Texas, land owned by merchants who had already bought the “free-labor” cotton grown around Neu Braunfels.

Other circumstances intruded before Olmsted could make his final proposal, however, or begin to act on it. The failure of the publishing firm of Miller & Curtis on August 6 ended any possibility of income from his publishing venture and saddled him with debts. He quickly sought other employment and on September 11 received the appointment as superintendent of Central Park. Three days later he announced to Samuel Cabot, Jr., that he could no longer play a major role in organizing free-labor colonization in the Southwest.

For the next two and a half years the Emigrant Aid Company continued to study the project without taking further action. Finally, in March 1860, the executive committee agreed to authorize a subscription of fifty [33] thousand dollars to finance a series of settlements in Texas. Their purpose was to extend the barrier to slavery’s expansion that already existed in the form of a hundred-mile-long line of German communities north and south of San Antonio from the Rio Frio to the Rio Llano. To secure the two-hundred-mile stretch northward to the mouth of the Little Wichita, the committee proposed to create six or eight communities on two-thou sand-acre tracts set fifteen miles apart. Once the land was purchased, the company planned to send in armed settlers as quickly as possible, “without even letting the settlers themselves (except a few chosen men) know the object in view, until we feel ourselves strong enough to bid defiance to the Slave power.”

Despite this brave statement of intent, no effective move was made to carry out the plan before the outbreak of the Civil War. What success Olmsted’s friends and associates achieved in fostering free -labor colonies in the slave states came in border states suffering from the emigration of population, rather than on the frontier in the path of slavery’s advance. Eli Thayer turned to west Virginia and his stillborn settlement of Ceredo, while Charles Loring Brace and James Hamilton worked with others to settle a few German wine-growers in Missouri.

Olmsted’s appointment as superintendent of Central Park marked the virtual end of both his colonization attempts and his writing on the South. During the summer of 1857 he had been writing a series of letters entitled “The Southerners at Home” for the New York Daily Tribune. They described his journey on horseback through Mississippi and Alabama during the summer of 1854. The series stopped abruptly on August 24, after only ten installments: failing eyesight had kept him from writing during the first two weeks of August, and at that point he turned his attention to securing the Central Park appointment. The letters he wrote for the Tribune became, with little alteration, the first, fourth and fifth chapters of A Journey in the Back Country, which he finally published in 1860.

By the fall of 1857, Olmsted had also completed most of the remainder of the manuscript of Back Country. The second and third chapters of the book described his journey through the Red River country of Louisiana and across northern Mississippi during his first trip to the South. He had published that account in November and December of 1853, in the last five descriptive letters of “The South” series for the New-York Daily Times. The sixth and seventh chapters of Back Country, narrative in form and appearing to follow closely the notes that Olmsted made as he traveled, described his journey through the Appalachians in Tennessee and North Carolina, and across Virginia to Richmond.

While those first 290 pages of Back Country were drawn primarily from previously published newspaper letters, the final 200-page section was a very different matter. It provided the analysis that was lacking in the first half of the book, and it is significant that Olmsted stated clearly that he wrote almost all of that material, as well, during 1857.

[34]

In the preface to Back Country, which Olmsted wrote in early 1860, he informed his readers that the book “was prepared for the press nearly in its present form and announced for publication three years ago.” He said that at that time he had intended to add a chapter on the “natural history of southern politics,” but that before he could do so he was “interrupted by unanticipated duties.” This is clearly a reference to his sudden switch from literary work to the superintendency of Central Park in September 1857, and indicates that by that time he had virtually completed the rest of Back Country, and not just the material that had appeared in newspapers. He further testified that the narrative part of the book concerning slave insurrection had been printed, and that the material in the last chapter on the subject had been written “some time before the John Brown plot is supposed to have formed.” Olmsted’s reference in this case is probably to the gathering of men by John Brown at Tabor, Iowa, in the summer of 1857, which was the first stage of his preparation for raids into Missouri and Virginia.

This evidence shows that in 1857, while Olmsted ·actively worked with the New England Emigrant Aid Company to foster free-labor colonization in the Southwest, he also continued the impassioned analysis of the South and the problems it posed for the country that he had begun earlier in the year with his introductions to Journey Through Texas and Englishman in Kansas. Much of the last section of Back Country dealt with concerns that Olmsted had expressed at the time of his colonization activities: the consequences of the fact that American slavery was peculiarly a system of colonization, due to its constant requirement of new fertile land; the effect that the continued expansion of slavery would have on the slave states and the territories; and the effect that the checking of slavery’s expansion would have on the society of the slave states. In Back Country, Olmsted also gave much attention to the question of cotton supply, which he had raised with prospective English supporters of free-labor colonization, and he further developed his view that free whites were capable of providing at least as steady a flow of cotton from the South as were enslaved blacks. He also took time to consider further some themes from his earlier writings: answering Southern claims that there had been great improvement in the condition and intelligence of their slaves; casting new aspersions on “Southern Breeding”; and providing new examples, in response to an attack on him by J. D. B. DeBow, of the poor quality of Southern hospitality to strangers.

Internal evidence and the dates of quotations he used suggest that Olmsted wrote only the two most foreboding parts of’ Back Country after 1857: one was his discussion of the increasing demand in the South for resumption of the African slave trade, with his prediction that many Northerners would acquiesce in the resumption of trade even if it remained illegal; the other was his analysis of the comparative military capacities of the North and South in the face of imminent disunion and war.

When Back Country was finally published in 1860, it contained brief sections that he must have written after the summer of 1857 and that dealt [35] with the most recent phases of the sectional crisis. Even so, no part of the book contained a more virulent condemnation of the South than the portion of the last chapter, describing murder, mayhem and slave-burning in the South, that Olmsted extracted verbatim from his introduction to Englishman in Kansas. By the spring of 1857 his anger about the expansion of slavery and about Southern violence was as strong as it would become until the Civil War itself raised both his thoughts and actions to a new level of intensity.

Secession and the prospect of Civil War did bring Olmsted one more chance to write about the South—the compilation of his three books into the single volume The Cotton Kingdom. Although he delegated most of the work of abridgment to a collaborator, the antislavery author and editor Daniel Reaves Goodloe, Olmsted wrote most of the new material himself. The purpose of the longest section, which served as an introduction to the book, was to increase the propaganda value of the work with its intended English audience. Olmsted sought to show in that introduction that although cotton was “King” in the South, the region had gained little real wealth or power from its staple crop. Part of his argument was his old contention that the South’s large income from cotton brought the society itself neither the institutions nor the amenities of civilization, but simply went to buy more slaves. He coupled this claim with a reassertion of his belief that a society of free laborers in the South could supply the world with cotton as cheaply and efficiently as could slaves.

The fact that the new sections Olmsted wrote in 1861 for The Cotton Kingdom repeated arguments he had already made is one more indication of the extent to which 1857 was the critical year of his involvement with the South, the culmination of five years of intensive travel, study, writing and organizing activity.

The letters Olmsted wrote between 1852 and 1857 provide a remarkable chronicle of the way he experienced and came to interpret the society of the South. They also show how he turned to actions as well as words to strengthen the cause of free labor as the decade of the 1850s advanced. His letters supplement the record that he left in the three famous and influential volumes on the South that were published between 1856 and 1860. They give a far richer setting for the whole drama of his involvement with the issue of slavery than the books alone provide. Equally important, his letters constitute a remarkably full record of one thoughtful observer’s response to the growing sectional antagonism that in 1861 exploded into the armed conflict of the Civil War.