II
Annotated Itineraries of
Olmsted’s Southern Journeys

Introduction

The compilation of accurate itineraries of Olmsted’s travels is a difficult task. A major cause of that difficulty is the fact that Olmsted took considerable care to disguise the identities of the people and places he visited during his travels. He made this clear in a passage in Back Country that he wrote in reply to J.D.B. DeBow’s attack on him for abusing the hospitality of his hosts:

There are numbers of men in the South for whom I have a warm admiration, to whom I feel grateful, whose respect I wish not to lose. There are others for whom I have a quite different feeling. Of a single individual of neither class have I spoken in these three volumes, I believe, by his true name, or in such a manner that he could be recognized, or his home pointed out by anyone who had not been previously familiar with it and with him, being, as a rule, careful to so far differ from the actual order of the events of my journey in narrating them, that facts of private life could not be readily localized.

As Olmsted asserts in this statement, he gave the names of only those persons he met in passing and about whom he had nothing negative or controversial to report. Among these were J. Seguine and Mr. Wallace of the Great Dismal Swamp; Mrs. Barclay near Fayetteville, North Carolina; Mr. Peabody in Columbus, Georgia; Henry Clay’s son James in Lexington, Kentucky; Mrs. Stoker and Mr. Strather between Natchitoches, Louisiana, and San Augustine, Texas; the immigrants Julius Froebel, Mr. Ujhazy and Ottomar von Behr (in a footnote added after von Behr’s death), and G. W. Kendall, editor of the New Orleans Picayune, in the San Antonio region; and John Woodland, whose services as a guide in Mexico Olmsted wished to recommend. He also revealed the identity of Adolf Douai (calling him “the German editor, Dr. Douai”), with whom he spent a good deal of time in San Antonio and during his travels to the [464] Sisterdale settlements. Although he reported that he had deep discussions with Douai, he revealed none of the antislavery editor’s opinions.

In this group, the most interesting example of Olmsted’s avoidance of unfavorable comments about persons whose names he revealed is the case of Mr. Strather. In the passage in which he identified Strather, Olmsted gave a glowing description of his house and hospitality. But in another section, summing up various experiences in East Texas, he gave—without mentioning the name of his host—a damning description of his house, family and fare.

As for men from whom Olmsted received extensive hospitality and whose farms or plantations he described at length, he usually referred to them by letters that were to some extent correct: “Mr. C.” for Charles Benedict Calvert, “Mr. D.” for Edouard Degener, and “Mr. T.” for Gustav Theissen. In two cases the initials are correct, but not for the man’s last name: “Mr. R.” for Richard Taylor, and “Thomas W.” for Thomas W. Gee. Richard J. Arnold is a special case: Olmsted referred to him as “Mr. A.” in the letters in “The South” series, but changed the name to “Mr. X.” in Seaboard Slave States.

It should also be noted that while Olmsted frequently gave names or initials of persons he encountered in the first two volumes of his writings about the South, he seldom did so in Back Country, where the names he gave were almost certainly fictitious. This suggests that J.D.B. DeBow’s criticism led him to be more cautious than he had been previously.

Part of Olmsted’s method of disguising the identities of those he visited was to offer only meager descriptions of the personal characteristics and domestic surroundings of those with whom he stayed the longest. His omission of such details is unfortunate, since it was just such considerations of domestic amenity and taste that greatly concerned him as a social commentator. The information he did provide concerning the plantations he visited was primarily agricultural—crops grown and amount harvested, acreage, amount of livestock and number of slaves. This material enables the modern-day researcher to identify some of these places from the manuscript census. So far as the editors can tell, Olmsted did not attempt to mislead his readers with intentionally false statements.

Another problem encountered in preparing such itineraries is the fact that Olmsted did not always make clear whether he actually visited a place he described, or simply learned about it through conversation. One such instance is his discussion of North Carolina fisheries in Seaboard Slave States, pages 351–55. He could not have visited the Currituck Bay region at the point in his narrative that the discussion occurs. He could conceivably have done so during his time in the Great Dismal Swamp region, but there is no indication that he did. Also, his statement “If I owned a yacht, I think I would make a trip to Currituck next summer, to witness this Titanic dentistry,” suggests that he had not witnessed the process of clearing out underwater stumps that he describes at length. Therefore, the editors have not included a visit to that region in these itineraries.

[465]

Olmsted’s chief means of disguising where and when a particular event occurred was to place it out of order in his narrative, or in a section of general discussion. In such cases he did not claim that he was presenting events in the actual order of their occurrence. Instead, he simply described a place he visited without describing his route to and from it, and left the reader to draw his own conclusions. For instance, his description of a visit to a “free-labor farm”–probably that of Nathaniel Crenshaw, a Quaker who had freed his slaves and made no secret of his opposition to slavery–appears in Seaboard Slave States immediately after Olmsted’s visit to Thomas W. Gee. In fact, Crenshaw’s farm was near Richmond, and Olmsted visited it more than a week before he went to Gee’s. By placing the description of the free-labor farm where he did, Olmsted suggested to the reader that it was somewhere in the vicinity of Petersburg and thus helped hide Crenshaw’s identity.

Olmsted’s disguising of the location of two other plantations he visited–those of Richard Taylor and Meredith Calhoun–is even more misleading. In Seaboard Slave States his description of Taylor’s plantation follows his discussion of the area around Opelousas, Louisiana, and the Red River region. Since it is the last plantation described in the book, there is no indication of where he went after visiting it. By this means, Olmsted suggested that the plantation was far from its actual site: Taylor lived twenty miles north of New Orleans, and Olmsted visited him before he went up the Red River.

The most remarkable of Olmsted’s attempts to conceal the time and place of a visit was his treatment of Meredith Calhoun’s plantation on the Red River. He had good reason to be circumspect, since in his account of the plantation he described the whipping of a slave girl.

In his letters in “The South” series and in Back Country, Olmsted presented the description of Calhoun’s plantation as part of a general discussion of slavery that followed the conclusion of his account of his travels. In the book he did add a statement that the plantation was on a tributary of the Mississippi, accessible only by steamboat, and that its 1,000 slaves made up one fifth of the population of a county where blacks heavily outnumbered whites. He then inserted the chapter in which the material appears, entitling it “The Property Aspect of Slavery,” between a chapter describing a trip through southern Mississippi, ending twenty-five miles below Vicksburg, and one describing a trip across northern Mississippi, beginning at Vicksburg.

This arrangement has confused careful scholars as well as casual readers of Back Country. For instance, Charles S. Sydnor assumed that the plantation was in Mississippi and cited Olmsted’s description of it more than thirty times in his study of slavery in that state.

It has also been confusing to readers that the description of the Calhoun plantation appears in the volume that apparently deals with Olmsted’s ride through the back country of the eastern South after the journey through Texas with his brother in early 1854. Only those who take note of the dating of the chapters, and who know that the material in the second and third chapters [466] of Back Country originally appeared in five letters near the end of “The South” series in the New-York Daily Times in November and December of 1853, would know that Olmsted visited these places during his first southern journey. In his admirable edition of Cotton Kingdom, Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., apparently assumed that the first three chapters of Back Country had been arranged in the order of their occurrence. As a result, he misdated the beginning of the third chapter of Back Country—which appears in Cotton Kingdom—as 1854, though the actual date was 1853.

An additional problem arises from Olmsted’s use of datelines in his accounts. Sometimes the date he gave was for the day an event occurred, and other times it indicated when he wrote the passage. Moreover, the day of the week and the day of the month he gave in his private letters do not always match. For instance, the date in his letter to Charles Loring Brace of Thursday, December 22 [1852] is incorrect, since the 22nd was a Wednesday. In such cases, he usually appears to have given the correct day of the week and the wrong day of the month. In this case the letter should probably be dated Thursday, December 23, 1852. Another apparent instance of Olmsted’s mistaking the day of the month is his letter to Frederick Kingsbury dated February 26, 1853. He must instead have written it–at least in large part–on Sunday, February 27, since it describes events that occurred on that day. For these reasons, the dates given by the editors in the itineraries sometimes differ from those that Olmsted supplied.

For the creation of a full itinerary, it is necessary to have adequate information in some form. The information provided in Olmsted’s newspaper letters and books, supplemented by private letters and entries in John Olmsted’s journal recording his receipt of letters from the South, makes possible a fairly complete itinerary of the first southern journey up to the point where Olmsted left the train forty miles east of Memphis on his return trip. After that, all we know is that he completed his journey back to New York by public transportation “along the eastern base of the Appalachian Chain in the upper parts of the States of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia. . . .”

In the book Journey Through Texas, prepared by John Hull Olmsted, the frequent and apparently accurate indication of the dates on which events occurred greatly simplifies the task of drawing up an itinerary for that part of Olmsted’s second southern journey. His ride alone through the back country from Bayou Sara, Louisiana, to Richmond, Virginia, however, presents greater problems. It is possible to give a good account of his itinerary from Bayou Sara to Jackson, Mississippi, but his travels from there to Chattanooga, Tennessee, during the next three weeks can be reconstructed only in a general way. From there to Richmond his narrative is sufficiently detailed to permit a fairly full accounting of his movements.

In the itineraries that follow, firm dates are given in roman type; tentative dates are italicized.