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CHAPTER VII
FREE-SOIL CRUSADE
1857
The Year 1857 marked the height of Olmsted’s efforts to promote free-labor colonization in the Southwest. This was also the most intense period of his writing about the South. The letters to Edward Everett Hale in this chapter indicate his plans early in the year and show how he tried to use his newly published book, A Journey Through Texas, to promote the immigration of free-soilers to that region. His letters to Samuel Cabot, Jr., tell the story of his involvement with the New England Emigrant Aid Company in planning the establishment of colonies in Texas and in seeking sources of men and money for the project. The chapter also contains the introduction and supplement that he wrote for the American edition of The Englishman in Kansas: Or, Squatter Life and Border Warfare, by the English newspaper correspondent Thomas H. Gladstone. These include Olmsted’s most thorough-going condemnation of Southern violence and the threat it posed to free institutions wherever slavery existed. The supplement to The Englishman in Kansas also records his assessment of the implications of the sectional policies of the Buchanan administration and of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dred Scott case.
To Edward Everett Hale
| My Dear Hale, | 92 Grand Street New York January 10, ’57 |
I shall send you herewith a copy of my “Journey in Texas,” &c.
Brace tells me that in Boston last week he saw someone from Kansas who said it was a common thing for the more zealous fighting free soilers there to talk of “taking Western Texas next.” I have a constantly improving conviction that that is the thing to be done next—that it can be done easily and that [398] when it is done, the process of bringing the South to its senses will be very rapidly accelerated. Be sure that once surrounded, slavery will retreat upon itself & free soil will be advanced with a rapidity that will soon become frightful & Randolph’s prediction of the masters running away from the slaves will be realized, as soon as the concentration & the competition of free-labor is experienced.
I have said nothing directly about it in the book but much to lead men to think about it & with the greatest sincerity to induce immigration of Yankees thither.
Is there any inexpensive way in which I can get my book into the hands of the Kansians? I would like to supply some hundred copies at cost to any agency by which that would be effected. My purpose being to encourage attention to Texas among the right sort of men & to diffuse information about the country.
My brother John was for[ced] to leave the country again last week & this time goes with his family all—to Havana en route for Italy—to reside permanently—having given up all hope of being able to live in this climate. He has been rapidly declining in these two months past. I much fear I shall never see him again.
“Republicanism,” so far as I can judge, is steadily gaining ground in New York, since the election.
How can I get copies of “Texas” to the newspapers in Kansas? By mail best probably. Can you tell me the proper address?
Fred. Law Olmsted