CHAPTER V
THE SEARCH FOR LOVE AND CERTITUDE

1846

In Many Ways, 1846 was a decisive year for Olmsted. He suffered a rebuff from the girl he most admired, received his best training in agriculture from a gentleman farmer he would later emulate, reached important conclusions about his religious faith, and expanded his political concerns amid questions raised by the Mexican War.

Olmsted began the year in Hartford recuperating from the series of fainting spells he had suffered while at Yale in the fall of 1845. When Elizabeth Baldwin came from New Haven on a visit, he was delighted at the attention she paid to him and the serious talks they had. It hurt him deeply, therefore, when she refused to correspond with him after she returned to New Haven.

That spring she played an important part in a religious revival among Olmsted’s friends in New Haven that led many of them to feel they had attained salvation. Olmsted’s parents urged him to join his friends so that he, too, might benefit from the revival. He went to New Haven and reveled in the atmosphere, holding long talks with Miss Baldwin and others. As a result, he had a conversion experience, but he was not sure whether the change of heart he felt came from the direct action of God’s grace or was simply a response to the “Human Sympathy” that his friends held out to him. This question of the reality of religious experiences that took place during revivals was an old one, and in debating it he was trying to find a reasonable answer to one of the many religious questions then troubling his contemporaries.

Throughout Olmsted’s youth, the traditionally stable religious condition of Connecticut was unsettled. In 1818 dissenting groups forced the legislature to abolish the position of the Congregational church as the official state church. Fearful of what the effects of disestablishment would be, Congregational [226]ministers launched a series of revivals that brought many converts and halted the spread of Unitarianism in the state.

At the same time there were doctrinal quarrels within the Congregational church itself. Nathaniel Taylor of the Yale Divinity School evolved a “New Haven Theology” that expanded the area of free will and limited the concept of natural depravity. To combat Taylor’s doctrine, the strict Calvinists, centered in the Hartford region, founded the Hartford Theological Seminary. The seminary’s president, Bennet Tyler, carried on a long rear-guard action against the rising liberal theology in what was known as the “Taylor-Tyler” controversy. Further divisions within the Congregational church arose in the 1840s over the teachings of Horace Bushnell on Christian nurture and the nature of Christ.

Olmsted was aware of these religious issues as he grew up, since Hartford’s leading Congregational ministers, Joel Hawes and Horace Bushnell, often clashed on doctrinal questions. The aversion to controversy over points of doctrine that Olmsted expresses in his letters was probably due in part to this continuing rancor in Hartford. His father apparently found this controversy distasteful, too, because when Joel Hawes and other orthodox Congregational ministers in the Hartford region tried to convict Bushnell of heresy for his book God in Christ (1848), John Olmsted left Hawes’s church and joined Bushnell’s.

Although influenced by both Hawes and Bushnell, Olmsted did not restrict himself to the teachings of Congregationalists. He read Unitarian doctrine, examined the beliefs of Catholics, Episcopalians, and Quakers, and almost joined a Presbyterian church.

Before the New Haven revival had run its course, Olmsted left his friends and traveled to Camillus, New York, where he continued his agricultural education with George Geddes. His letters describe his experiences as a farmer’s apprentice and show that while he was learning the techniques of prize-winning farming he still had time to pursue the religious questions that had occupied him in the spring.

His religious experience in New Haven in March 1846 made him anxious to take the next step that was expected of him: make a profession of faith and join a church. But most churches required members to follow religious practices and profess beliefs that Olmsted considered narrow and sectarian. He tried to resolve his religious difficulties through wide and thoughtful reading of theological works and the Bible, but could not reconcile his views with the admission requirements of the churches. He joined no church while at the Geddes farm and disappointed his family by not becoming a church member when he returned to Hartford in the fall.

During the summer of 1846, his reading of Thomas Carlyle’s spiritual autobiography, Sartor Resartus, strengthened his resistance to joining a doctrinally narrow church. The book made a strong impression on Olmsted [227]and defined for him what the fruits of conversion should be. He sympathized with the hero, Teufelsdröckh, who, like himself, had suffered uncertainty about his role in life, had loved and lost a lady of high station, and felt himself a talented but poorly educated lover of nature. In Carlyle’s affirmation of life and his assertion that salvation lay in doing the duty that lay nearest, Olmsted found a message that met his needs. Therefore he turned from questions of doctrine and concerned himself with what he considered to be his duties toward others.

His immediate role in life was to take up the profession of scientific farming. He had learned much from George Geddes, and by the end of the summer he was ready to start farming on his own. In November 1846 his father bought him a farm on Sachem’s Head in Guilford, Connecticut, to which he moved the following spring and began to work the land.