BIOGRAPHICAL DIRECTORY

Charles Loring Brace (1826–1890) introduced Olmsted to a number of influential people during the period 1852–57, and thereby provided him, at least indirectly, with his most important professional opportunities of those years. The two had known each other since childhood, but their friendship had broadened into an intellectual companionship during Olmsted’s visits to Yale in the years 1844–46, when Brace, John Hull Olmsted and Frederick Kingsbury were students there.

After graduating from Yale, Brace spent two years studying for the ministry, first at Yale Divinity School and then at Union Theological Seminary in New York. By the time Brace moved to New York City, Olmsted was already working his farm on Staten Island. Brace’s frequent visits to the farm kept the old friendship alive, permitting the two friends to continue the intense debates on religion and politics they had begun at Yale. Brace described one such weekend to Frederick Kingsbury as follows: “But the amount of talking done upon that visit! One steady stream from six o’clock Saturday night till twelve the next night, interrupted only by meals and some insane walks on the beach! And this not like ours together, easy, discursive, varied, but a torrent of fierce argument, mixed with diverse oaths on Fred’s part, and abuse on both!”

As the letters from Olmsted to Brace in this volume show, some of that habit of abuse carried over into the later correspondence of the two men. In his letters of the 1850s and 1860s, Olmsted was often impatient with Brace and frequently upbraided him. Such treatment apparently did not faze Brace, who was earnest, generous and thick-skinned enough to tolerate the sallies of his combative friend. Olmsted, for his part, appreciated the vigor that enabled Brace to keep pace with him in their long and intense arguments. Years later he offered this description of the Brace he had known in college: “He never showed fatigue, lassitude or ennui; was always disposed to pursue a debate [50] through the night; was always ready to walk ten miles further, wade a quagmire or swim a river, if there was a prospect that it would add to the success of a day’s outing. He was simple and sturdy and resolute; not good in finesse but the best of us all in grit and steadfastness . . . .” Those qualities helped to make a success of the six-month walking tour of England and the Continent that Brace took with the Olmsted brothers in the summer of 1850.

Slavery was one of the issues the two friends discussed frequently. Brace attempted unsuccessfully to convert Olmsted to his own abolitionist views. Despite the fact that Brace sometimes brought other abolitionists with him for the weekend to argue his case—including such leaders in the cause as William Lloyd Garrison and Theodore Parker—Olmsted held resolutely to his belief in gradual emancipation. That long-standing debate with Brace was of great importance for Olmsted because it was Brace who arranged for Henry Raymond to propose that Olmsted tour the South as a correspondent for the New-York Daily Times. Brace’s connections helped as well to make the southern journeys successful: Olmsted received letters of introduction from Asa Gray, husband of Brace’s first cousin Jane Loring Gray. It is also likely that it was through Brace’s connections with the family of Lyman Beecher that Olmsted came to provide Harriet Beecher Stowe with a description of the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia during his first journey through the South. (Brace’s mother’s sister was the stepmother of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher, and the mother of James and Thomas Kinnicut Beecher and Isabella Beecher Hooker). When Olmsted went to England in 1856, Brace himself wrote a letter of introduction to Sir Charles Lyell, the eminent geologist.

Brace’s position in the worlds of philanthropy and literature in New York City also was helpful to Olmsted. As head of the Children’s Aid Society, Brace worked with many leaders in both fields. He introduced Olmsted to the family of George Schuyler, whose daughter Louisa Lee Schuyler became one of Olmsted’s most effective associates when he ran the U.S. Sanitary Commission during the Civil War. Through Brace, Olmsted also met Mrs. Schuyler’s father, James Alexander Hamilton, who assisted him in his free-soil colonization activities. And it was Brace who took the lead in cultivating the friendship of the poet Anne Charlotte Lynch Botta, whose literary salon enabled the two young men to meet leading members of the city’s “literary republic,” which Olmsted sought to enter in the mid-1850s.

Brace’s assistance was valuable in Olmsted’s literary career and in the work on Central Park that followed it. Joshua Dix, who was primarily responsible for Olmsted’s venture into the publishing world as a partner in the firm Dix, Edwards & Company, had become a friend of Brace’s before Olmsted began his tours of the South; and it was Charles Wyllys Elliott, another friend who came to Olmsted through Brace, who informed him in August 1857 that the Central Park commission was looking for a superintendent, and urged him to apply for the post. At that time both Asa Gray and James A. Hamilton provided important statements of support for Olmsted’s candidacy. Olmsted [51]

also expected Brace to look after a variety of petty details while he was traveling—from overseeing the publication of his letters in newspapers to dealing with nurserymen and caring for his orchards.

In addition to a skilled opponent in argument and a great source of assistance in his professional activities, Olmsted found in Brace a dedicated, energetic and like-minded social reformer. Whatever reservations he may have felt about the “cant” involved in Brace’s religiosity, Olmsted greatly appreciated his friend’s reformist and philanthropic activities. As early as 1847 he had viewed Brace as an able comrade in the cause of improving American society and combating the materialism that seemed so universal in it. “There’s a great work wants doing in this our generation, Charley,” he exclaimed; “let us off jacket and go about it.” Brace’s mission of working with the poor and abandoned children of New York City impressed Olmsted. The methods he employed—providing education for the underprivileged, strengthening domestic institutions, and utilizing the process of “unconscious influence” by which those with better education and culture trained the lower classes in manners and citizenship—were the means that Olmsted himself believed were necessary [52] for improving American society. It is significant that it was to Brace that Olmsted wrote the revealing letter of December 1, 1853, in which he defined the task that lay before Northern reformers if they were to disprove the arguments of proslavery critics. The “moral” he offered in that letter was the course of action that both he and Brace would follow throughout most of the rest of their lives: “. . . go ahead with the Children’s Aid,” Olmsted counseled, “and get up parks, gardens, music, dancing schools, reunions which will be so attractive as to force into contact the good & bad, the gentlemanly and the rowdy.”

During the years 1852–57, Olmsted had reason to envy Brace in his personal life as well as to approve his professional activities. While Olmsted was still smarting from being jilted by Emily Perkins, Brace found himself a wife and helpmate in his Children’s Aid Society work. In June 1854 he left for Ireland, intent on winning the hand of Letitia Neill, one of the daughters of Robert Neill of Belfast whom he and Olmsted had met in 1850. At that time, Olmsted had been attracted to the Neill daughters. After his return he had written Brace, remarking how much the people he had met during his six-month tour meant to him and adding: “Even Neill and the ladies I love. I believe I would half marry one of them if she were here. Indeed I do.” Instead, it was Brace who did the marrying; Letitia became his wife on August 21, 1854, in Belfast, shortly after Olmsted returned to New York from his solitary ride through the back country of the South.

Samuel Cabot, Jr. (1815–1885), a Boston physician, was the son of the prominent Boston merchant Samuel Cabot (a partner of Thomas Handasyd Perkins) and son-in-law of the pioneering Massachusetts textile manufacturer [53] Patrick Tracy Jackson, Sr. Cabot became a member of the executive committee of the New England Emigrant Aid Company in March 1855, when the company was organized under its Massachusetts charter. Olmsted corresponded with him in 1857 when he was working with the company to promote free-labor colonization in Texas.

Cabot played an important part in sending relief supplies to Kansas, but his most notorious role was that of treasurer of the “rifle committee” organized by some officers of the Emigrant Aid Company. In that capacity he collected funds and purchased arms for free-state settlers in Kansas. Olmsted dealt with Cabot as a member of the Emigrant Aid Company’s three-member “Texas Committee,” which was formed in May 1857. At Cabot’s request he evolved a plan for creating free-labor colonies in Texas and wrote an appeal to cotton-supply associations in England setting forth the advantage they would gain from a supply of cotton grown in the American Southwest by nonslaveholders. Cabot hoped to engage Olmsted to go to Texas to select land for the Emigrant Aid Company to buy, and also to represent the company and its interests in England. Beginning in September 1857, however, Olmsted’s involvement with Central Park prevented him from carrying out any missions for the company. By the end of the year he had turned over to Cabot and his associates the task of creating free-soil settlements in Texas.

GEORGE W. CURTIS (1824–1892) became Olmsted’s closest friend among the “generation of serious literary men of somewhat earnest semi-political disposition antagonistic to the growing war spirit of the Slave States,” with whom he became associated in the 1850s. As the secret literary editor of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine in 1855–56, when Olmsted was managing editor, Curtis made available the wealth of his literary and editorial experience. Although he protested against the vagaries of Olmsted’s spelling-the “illegal” spelling of “the Law” or “Mr. Law,” as he called his friend (a combination of Websterized spelling and Olmsted’s idiosyncratic treatment of double consonants)—theirs was a cordial relationship that developed into a lifelong friendship of special warmth. When Olmsted began his work as editor, Curtis readily agreed to his desire to reform the art and music reviews of Putnam’s [54]

Monthly by replacing Clarence Cook and Richard Grant White with William Henry Hurlbert. He also allowed Olmsted to play a major role in shaping the political stand of the journal.

By the time he became associated with Olmsted on Putnam’s staff in the spring of 1855, Curtis had already helped Charles Briggs to edit the magazine for over two years. In 1855 he refused the offer of Dix, Edwards & Company to make him editor and instead assumed, incognito, the role of literary editor. By that time he had established himself as an author, having published two books describing his travels in Egypt and Syria, a volume of whimsical stories and essays entitled Lotus-Eating, and the Potiphar Papers, a satirical portrayal of New York’s high society. He was also writing the “Editor’s Easy Chair” column in Harper’s Monthly.

While the association of Curtis and Olmsted with Putnam’s Monthly was presumably enjoyable to both men, it was probably their financially disastrous involvement with the publishing firm of Dix, Edwards & Company and its successors that provided the shared experience that most cemented their friendship in later years. In 1856, Curtis became a general partner in the firm. In the spring of 1857, when the firm was on the verge of bankruptcy, its [55] creditors accepted an arrangement whereby Joshua Dix and Arthur T. Edwards left the partnership, and a new firm, Miller and Company, was formed by Olmsted, Curtis and the printer J. W. Miller. Olmsted withdrew from the latter in June 1857, but continued to be responsible for at least his share of the debts accumulated by Dix, Edwards & Company between 1855 and 1857.

Ever since his return from England in the fall of 1856, Olmsted had been hoping to leave the partnership, transform into a loan the money he had put into the firm when he became a partner, and then continue as an employee by advising in literary matters, corresponding with contributors, and looking after the firm ’s U.S. sales of books originally published in England. He presumably expected to pursue such an arrangement with Miller & Curtis after June 1857, and may have done so briefly:

When the firm of Miller & Curtis failed in August 1857, Olmsted was responsible for some of the debts of its predecessor, and lost both the $5,000 of his father’s money that he had invested and any prospect of continued employment with that firm. The situation was even worse for Curtis. In 1856 he had married Anna Shaw, the daughter of the philanthropist Francis George Shaw. Her father had provided funds to strengthen Curtis’s publishing firm in 1857; but when the firm failed, Shaw was held by a technicality to be a general partner and to be liable for an unlimited amount of its debts. After a little more than a year of marriage, Curtis faced the loss of all of his own money and the responsibility for his father-in-law’s loss of as much as $70,000. Shaw dealt with the creditors of the publishing firm, paying at least $24,000 in settlement of claims. In 1860, Olmsted’s lawyer, William Emerson, calculated that he should repay Shaw one-third of that amount, and that Curtis was responsible for an equal sum.

Both Olmsted and Curtis did attempt to repay Shaw. For Curtis, the effort was long and grueling. For the next sixteen years he followed the lecture and lyceum circuit, slowing earning the funds to settle his accounts with Shaw. In 1873, prostrated by illness and exhaustion, he abandoned the effort after accomplishing much of it. Olmsted’s attempts at repayment were less extensive and exhausting, but in 1860 he did sign over to Shaw his copyright to Journey in the Back Country, at a value of $500. His remaining debt to Shaw presumably made up a large part of his total indebtedness of $12,000, of which he said in 1863: “. . . though the sheriff is not likely to trouble me about [it], my self-respect is.”

While the memory of shared misfortune—and some gratitude on Curtis’s part for Olmsted’s attempt to repay Shaw—helped to create a special friendship between the two men, there were several aspects of Curtis himself that must have appealed strongly to Olmsted. Curtis was the epitome of the gentleman and scholar who dedicated himself to the pressing social and political issues of the day. During the mid-1850s he preached that doctrine in his writings and in such lectures as “The Duty of the American Scholar” and [56] “Patriotism,” and after the Civil War he devoted himself increasingly to the cause of civil service reform. To this dedication to public service he added a particularly winning manner, attractiveness of person and sweetness of temper.

The two men saw each other infrequently after the 1850s, but frequently exchanged warm greetings through mutual friends. Curtis also promoted Olmsted’s interests on occasion. In 1862, he and Francis Shaw urged Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase to appoint Olmsted to head the Freedman’s Bureau when it was created, and he assisted Olmsted and their mutual friend, gentleman-scholar and reformer Charles Eliot Norton in the fight to create the public reservation at Niagara Falls in the 1880s.

Joshua A. Dix (1831–1894) provided Olmsted with the opportunity to enter the field of publishing by joining the firm of Dix, Edwards & Company as a partner. He had become a friend of Charles Loring Brace’s in 1852 or earlier, while employed by the New York publisher George Palmer Putnam, In the summer of 1854, Dix left Putnam’s establishment and worked with the publisher Thomas McElrath. Soon after, he purchased from McElrath the American publishing rights to Household Words, a magazine edited in England by Charles Dickens, and started his own publishing company. On March 1, 1855, he formed a partnership with Arthur T. Edwards and acquired Putnam’s Monthly. A month later, Olmsted joined the firm as a partner.

Dix felt a “great friendship for Fred,” according to John Hull Olmsted, and was a congenial, if ineffective, partner. He caused Olmsted great concern, however, during the summer of 1856. While Olmsted was still in London, Dix began to send him alarming reports of mistakes and irregularities committed by Edwards in the conduct of the firm’s finances, indicating as well that he had no control over Edwards and had not attempted to call him to account. Olmsted replied that from the first he had relied on Dix’s assurances of Edwards’s total [57] honesty and great skill as a businessman. He then proceeded to vent his anxiety and frustration in mock rhetoric:

Have you not imposed upon me sweetly?-Did you not with honeyed persuasion tempt me from that quiet and blissful philosophic retirement to which I assured you I had surrendered myself for life with the strongest determination never to become the slave of exciting, wearing commerce . . . . Did I not allow myself to be so imposed upon, impelled by a high moral purpose, & be damned to you, namely to save that great engine Putnam’s Monthly from the hands of Philistine cowardice ...

After that outburst, Olmsted concluded: “Is it not my duty to be after you with a sharp stick? It is, and I’m coming.”

Olmsted attempted to withdraw as a partner in the firm as soon as he returned to New York in October 1856. The partnership dragged on, however, until it faced bankruptcy in the spring of 1857. Then Dix and Edwards withdrew and Olmsted formed a new partnership, with George W. Curtis and J. W. Miller. Dix tried to weather the Panic of 1857 that followed by selling insurance, and in September Olmsted saw him going about “in slightly shabby clothing,” distributing his business card. He soon moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey, and after 1880 served as a superintendent of schools for that city. No correspondence between Dix and Olmsted survives for the years after 1857, and it is doubtful that their active friendship lasted beyond that date.

Karl Daniel Adolf Douai (1819–1888) was the editor of the antislavery San Antonio Zeitung when Olmsted met him in Texas in early 1854. During the next two years he and Olmsted worked closely together in an effort to create a nonslaveholding state in West Texas. The common beliefs they shared and their mutual dedication to the antislavery cause made them fast friends.

Douai was born in Altenburg, Saxony, of French stock. His father was [58] an impoverished schoolteacher and his mother died when he was still a child. By his early teens, according to his own account, he assumed much of the responsibility for supporting himself. He thus began early a life of hard work in the face of pressing necessities and frequent reverses. His difficulties were frequently compounded by his unrelenting independence of thought and intransigent assertion of his beliefs.

Educated at the Altenburg Gymnasium and Jena and Leipzig universities, Douai hoped to teach philosophy and theology at the University of Jena. He earned a doctorate at the University of Koenigsberg in East Prussia with a dissertation on the philosophy of Hegel. Under the influence of the German theologian David Strauss, he began to write a defense of Christianity by applying the principles of historical criticism and Hegelian philosophy to the Bible. In the process he became increasingly unorthodox in belief. During his religious quest he became a friend and disciple of Gustave Adolf Wisclicenus of Halle, whose followers began in the mid-1840s to form free congregations (freie gemeinden) independent of the state church of Saxony. Those pietistic groups emphasized the importance of the inner spirit and challenged the ultimate authority of the Scriptures.

By the time Douai emigrated to America in 1852 he was a self-confessed “infidel,” or freethinker, insisting that all religious doctrines be capable of rational proof. His own quest led him to believe in an imminent God who imposed spiritual as well as material unity on the universe and acted as a moral force within it.

In 1841, Douai began his lifelong—if intermittent—career as a pedagogue with five years of service as a private tutor in western Russia. In 1843 he married Agnes von Beust, from a noble family of Saxony, and four years later returned to Altenburg and founded a school there.

With the outbreak of revolution in Saxony in 1848, Douai became a political agitator and journalist. He edited a newspaper in Altenburg and wrote pamphlets for the republican cause, for which he was arrested three times and served a total of twelve months in prison. He was also elected to the Reformlandtag of Sachsen-Altenburg. After his third prison term, state officials made it impossible for him to support himself by means of his school, the eight freie gemeinden that he formed, or an emigration agency that his father had set up before being imprisoned and exiled for his own role in the revolution of 1848.

Douai emigrated to Texas with his wife, children and father in 1852. He settled first in Neu Braunfels and attempted unsuccessfully to establish a school there. Then, with the encouragement of Charles Riotte and Gustav Theissen, he agreed to edit the San Antonio Zeitung. In July 1853 he published the first issue of that weekly newspaper.

Olmsted met Douai in January 1854 and found in him a kindred spirit with whom he could share both political and religious views. During their trip with Douai to Sisterdale in early February, the Olmsted brothers “listened to some details of a varied and stormy life, . . . and were not long in falling into [59] discussions that ran through deep water, and demanded all our skill in navigation.” Douai, too, was pleased to find that his new friends shared many of his religious and political views. “It is very agreeable to me to see that your own ideas on the subject of Religion and Morals almost coincide with mine,” he wrote some months later.

Douai’s political and social beliefs, and his strong allegiance to them, also appealed greatly to Olmsted. The German editor was a European republican who had suffered economic loss, imprisonment and exile for his beliefs. In Texas he was dedicating himself to the program of free-labor colonization that Olmsted believed would solve the problem of the decivilizing effect of frontier settlement and would demonstrate the viability of a free-labor economy in the South. Moreover, the formation of a free state in West Texas would halt the expansion of slavery into the Southwest. Beyond that, Douai was proving once again his willingness to risk his safety and that of his family in the interest of a cause in which he believed.

When Olmsted returned to New York in the fall of 1854, he was ready to help the cause of a free state in West Texas. By that time, the San Antonio Platform of 1854, which Douai had promoted, had divided the German community and the stockholders of the Zeitung. Douai’s friends among the stockholders prevailed, however, and on September 17, 1854, he became owner as web as editor of the paper. At that point Olmsted began to raise funds to assist him, provided correspondence from the North for the Zeitung and solicited subscriptions to it among his acquaintances.

In December 1854, Friedrich Kapp reported to Douai of Olmsted’s activities that “not even a brother could do more and in a more appropriate way” for him and his paper. Douai expressed his appreciation to the Olmsted brothers, saying, “I never before witnessed in friends of so short an acquaintance such a readiness to help his friends, and such an untiring energy in overcoming all hindrances, that obstructed their efforts!”

Nonetheless, Douai had to face many difficulties. During the summer of 1854. proslavery gangs threatened him with Violence, and the following year rising nativist sentiment in Texas turned against the Germans. Douai’s editorial policy fed the flames when in February 1855 he declared that West Texas should be made a free state. The necessity for this declaration, however, he blamed on the injudicious statements of others, citing especially Friedrich Kapp’s lecture on the history of the Germans in Texas, published in the New York Daily Tribune of January 20, 1855, which included a prediction that the Germans were to play a central role in the creation of the“Free State of Western Texas.”

Increasing opposition from within the apprehensive and generally conservative German community also reduced Douai’s subscriptions, thereby hurting him financially. By August 1855 he was working far into the nights, setting most of the type for the Zeitung himself. At the same time, threats of violence against his press and himself led Douai to sleep armed in his office and at times [60] to mount a guard of his friends. Learning of Douai’s problems, Olmsted renewed his assistance, guaranteeing payment of a debt of $150 and soliciting funds for the Zeitung from members of peace groups.

By January 1856, however, Douai was nearing the limit of his endurance. There could be no effective free-soil movement in Texas, he warned, without a strong nucleus of from two thousand to four thousand “Northern back-bone people” to strengthen the fading resolve of the Germans. He saw no prospect of such an influx in the near future and declared that in any case he could no longer serve as a leader. “I can not do much in favor of that project,” he confessed in discouragement. “In spite of my peaceable character I am almost hated by everyone hereabout. Whatever I take in hand, is sure to be lost forever. If this is a fault of mine—I do not know; perhaps I serve rather as a scape-goat for the sins and faults of others.” He refused the Olmsted brothers’ offers of continued assistance and soon after abandoned his efforts. In April he sold the Zeitung’s press and type to his opponents, claiming that otherwise they would have bought their own press and ruined him through competition. In May he left for New York with his wife, father and seven children to start a new life there. His loyal supporter Charles Riotte assumed the still-unpaid original debt of $600 (at 48 percent interest) that Douai had assumed when he purchased the Zeitung in the fall of 1854.

Soon after he reached New York, Douai proceeded to Boston, where he had the best prospect of employment. The German community there provided him with private pupils and a teaching position in a school, and raised money for him to give scientific lectures and to campaign for the Republican party. He continued to write, providing articles for several German-language periodicals as well as for the New American Cyclopedia, edited by George Ripley and Olmsted’s erstwhile co-editor of Putnam’s Monthly, Charles A. Dana. In 1858, Douai won a prize offered by a St. Louis newspaper with his novel Fata Morgana, which described an attempt by a group of Germans who had become disillusioned with the United States to found a colony in Mexico. A major source for Douai’s material was clearly the similar project of Charles Riotte in 1856.

Douai continued his pedagogical activities with the publication of a German grammar that went through five editions between 1858 and 1859. In 1859 he helped found a German school in Boston, a school which offered one of the first kindergartens in the United States. He also secured a position from Samuel Gridley Howe at the Perkins Institute for the Blind, in part through the intercession of the Olmsted brothers.

While in Boston, Douai kept alive his interest in establishing a free state in West Texas, advising Howe on the subject and consulting with other members of the New England Emigrant Aid Company. Both he and Olmsted were present at the meeting on November 23, 1858, at which the directors of the company revived the West Texas colonization project and appointed a committee, which included Howe, to devise a plan of action.

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Although he prospered in Boston, Douai could not stay clear of controversy for long. At a large meeting held in May 1859 to honor the memory of Alexander Humboldt, he asserted that the great geographer had been a freethinker like himself. This offended many influential persons in Boston and led to a sharp decrease in his sources of income. In July he left Boston for New York.

For the next twenty-eight years Douai remained in the New York region, actively engaging in the fields of education, free thought, and journalism. As an educator he was director of the Hoboken Free Academy and the Green Street School in Newark, New Jersey. He published a manual for kindergartens that was based on the teachings of Friedrich Froebel, a German disciple of Pestalozzi, and edited a series of “rational readers” that combined the methods of the two educational theorists. Still an active freethinker, he was an executive member of a freie gemeinde established in Hoboken in 1865 and he participated the next year in the founding of a national Bund der Freidenker.

It was in the area of political journalism, however, that Douai was most influential. He campaigned for the Republican party in 1860 and propagandized for it as editor of the New Yorker Demokrat. A delegate to the party’s national convention, he served as secretary of the German contingent. During the 1860s he became a Marxist, probably having been influenced by Friedrich Adolf Sorge, a member of the staff of the Hoboken Academy and a leading publicist of Marxist theory in the United States (as well as secretary of the First International).

In 1868, Douai became editor of the Arbeiter Union, the organ of the central body of German trade unions of the same name in New York City, a post he held until the demise of the paper in 1870. In 1876, with the formation of the Working Men’s party (which became the Socialist Labor party the following year), he performed editorial functions for three of its publications. From 1878 until his death ten years later, he was an editor of the influential New Yorker Volkszeitung, a daily newspaper published in New York by German socialist and trade union groups.

After their collaboration in the West Texas free-state movement of the 1850s, Olmsted and Douai apparently lost contact with each other. The only extant correspondence between them in later years is a letter of introduction to Olmsted that Douai gave an acquaintance in 1884. Addressing his “Dear old friend,” Douai wrote:

I regret in a lively manner that I was for many years prevented from cultivating. intercourse with you which is so desirable to me, by the constant pressure of business on me.

   For more than twenty years I could not even see your dear old face.

   But I hope, this will not always be the case.

   Take the assurance of my undying respect for you and let me continue to think that I still have a place in your remembrance.

ARTHUR T. EDWARDS (1828–1857) was one of Olmsted’s partners in the publishing firm of Dix, Edwards & Company. He had been a clerk in a dry-goods establishment and was reputed to have outstanding financial ability. After Dix and Edwards formed their partnership in March 1855, Dix wished to take Olmsted on as an additional partner. Edwards agreed reluctantly and his relations with Olmsted were strained from the first. Olmsted wanted the firm to practice the kind of liberality that he was used to in his own finances, while Edwards preferred a policy that seemed to him both ungenerous and unwise.

In June 1855 Olmsted and Edwards had a heated argument concerning the obligation of Dix & Edwards to pay English publishers for republication rights in the United States. A rather stiff reconciliation of the two men followed immediately, and they continued to work together. Olmsted’s serious difficulties with Edwards developed in the spring and summer of 1856. As soon as he reached England in March 1856, Olmsted purchased more than 150 wood blocks and electrotypes at a cost of over $750. When Edwards received the bill, he promptly protested. “We cannot imagine the reason for making such a purchase,” he wrote, “as we were particular in instructing you not to make purchases without consulting us in regard to them . . . . There is no earthly use to which we can possibly put them, and when they arrive we shall if possible sell them for what they will fetch.” He then warned Olmsted to make no further purchases without consulting his partners. This attempt by Edwards to discipline him offended Olmsted, and he was angry that his partners would sell the wood blocks without waiting to learn why he had purchased them.

In July 1856 Olmsted became even more concerned about Edwards’s policies when Dix informed him that during the previous six months Edwards had twice made errors in his accounts of over $1,500. One of the errors had occurred just before the bill for Olmsted’s wood blocks arrived, and was the apparent cause of Edwards’s severe response. Olmsted learned further that Edwards was lending the firm ’s funds to his brothers without informing his partners.

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Olmsted at first considered buying out Edwards’s interest in the partnership. By the time he returned to New York in October 1856, however, he had decided instead to withdraw as a partner, make a loan of the $5,000 he had provided the firm when he became a partner, and then work for Dix & Edwards as a salaried employee. He remained as a partner, however, until April 1857, when Dix and Edwards themselves left the partnership in the face of impending bankruptcy. The next fall, during the Panic of that year, Olmsted reported to his brother: “I see my friend Edwards, pale, nervous, anxious, proper and evidently shinning, in the streets, but avoid meeting or a recognition. He is a bad as well as a foolish man.” Hard times and ill health soon took their toll on Edwards: on December 17, 1857, he died in Dubuque, Iowa.

PARKE GODWIN (1816–1904) assisted Olmsted in editing Putnam’s Monthly Magazine during 1855 and early 1856, serving primarily as a writer of articles on political questions. His essays for Putnam’s Monthly on the South, slavery and nativism express views similar to Olmsted’s, indicating the accuracy of the claim Olmsted made in the summer of 1856 that his own proposals concerning the magazine’s position on political issues had hitherto been decisive. The letters in this volume indicate, however, that Godwin did not always follow Olmsted’s editorial suggestions once he had written an article.

Godwin had collaborated with George W. Curtis and Charles A. Dana from 1853 to 1855, when Putnam’s Monthly was under the ownership of George Palmer Putnam. He was also an editor of the New York Evening Post, whose chief editor was his father-in-law, William Cullen Bryant. Godwin remained connected with the Post until 1878—the year that marked the end of Olmsted’s involvement in New York City parks—and Olmsted occasionally turned to him for editorial support in park matters. No correspondence of importance between the two men has survived for the years after 1856, and it appears that they saw little of each other after that time.

Edward Everett Hale (1822–1909), author and Unitarian minister, was an important associate of Olmsted’s in his free-labor colonization activities. In working with Hale, however, Olmsted had to overcome the natural diffidence that he felt toward the man who had married a woman he himself had planned to wed. In the summer of 1851, following a courtship and correspondence of over two years, Olmsted had become engaged to Emily Baldwin Perkins of Hartford. Almost immediately, she changed her mind and broke off the engagement. A little over a year later, in October 1852, she married Hale. Olmsted’s distress even four years later is evident in his admission to Hale that “I can’t well write a word to you without much emotion even now, but I am anything but a miserable or even a dissatisfied man . . . .”

In the summer of 1855, Hale was already one of the leading figures in the New England Emigrant Aid Company. By then, Olmsted had already informed Hale about his own free-soil activities and had sent him letters from Adolf Douai and Charles Riotte describing their difficulties with proslavery nativists, letters that Olmsted hoped Hale would use as the basis for articles on the subject.

Olmsted probably came to correspond with Hale in 1855 because of Hale’s prominence in the Emigrant Aid Company’s fund-raising efforts of that year. During the summer, Amos Lawrence had threatened to resign from the company if he had to continue to finance its operations virtually by himself. Hale then took’ the lead in soliciting funds: in July he sent a form letter to many of the clergymen in New England, urging them to collect contributions from their parishioners. During October and November 1855, he left his church and devoted all of his time to raising funds for the company.

As early as April 1855 Hale had become involved in the attempts of free-state settlers in Kansas to secure arms. When the “bogus” territorial legislature was elected, Charles Robinson, the Emigrant Aid Company’s agent in Lawrence, appealed to him for assistance in sending two hundred Sharps rifles and two field guns to Kansas. Olmsted joined in these efforts later in the year when James B. Abbott toured the East seeking funds. He became Abbott’s agent in New York, kept Hale informed of his activities, and purchased the one cannon that was sent to Lawrence.

Early in 1856 Olmsted continued to inform Hale of his activities, [65]

reporting on Kansas-related developments in New York and describing the enthusiastic plans that Eli Thayer laid before him while in the city. At the same time, he promoted Hale’s literary career. In January 1856 he accepted Hale’s short story “The Spider’s Eye,” which appeared in the July 1856 issue of Putnam’s Monthly. It was the first story that Hale published in a major journal and the first piece of secular fiction that he published outside his brother’s ephemeral Boston Miscellany. Hale reciprocated by writing an enthusiastic review of Seaboard Slave States for the July 1856 issue of the North American Review.

Early in 1857 Olmsted once again sought assistance from Hale, who was now a director and member of the executive committee of the New England Emigrant Aid Company. He was anxious to secure Hale’s aid in using A Journey Through Texas to encourage emigration to the state by New Englanders. Accordingly, Hale sent selected pages of the book to a number of New England editors with the suggestion that they draw from them discreetly in their editorials. He also placed a highly favorable review of the book in his family’s newspaper, the Boston Daily Advertiser.

Olmsted also discussed with Hale the desirability of convincing textile [66] manufacturers to spin cotton into thread in West Texas and of encouraging expansion of sheepherding in the region. In addition, he solicited Hale’s assistance for friends in San Antonio who were anxious to secure the services of a Unitarian minister. After early 1857 the collaboration of Olmsted and Hale on free-soil matters apparently ended. When Olmsted began to work with the Emigrant Aid Company later in the year to promote colonization in Texas, he dealt with Samuel Cabot, Jr., and the “Texas Committee.”

After the Civil War, Olmsted and Hale saw little of each other. Even though they lived in adjoining towns near Boston after 1881, their families had no social contact. During 1869 and 1870, when Hale was living near Boston and Olmsted was still in New York, they did assist each other in park and community planning. Around 1869, Hale and a group of Bostonians attempted to create a series of suburban communities for workingmen along railroad lines running out of Boston. Hale outlined such a scheme in “How They Lived at Naguadavick,” part of Sybaris and Other Homes, which he published in 1869. Olmsted responded to Hale’s request for information on the subject by sending him descriptions and plans of the suburban village of Riverside, Illinois, which he and Calvert Vaux were designing at the time. Hale, in turn, indicated that he hoped to secure Olmsted’s professional advice if any of the projected communities were actually built. Agitation for a public park in Boston was increasing rapidly at this time and Olmsted provided Hale with his views on that subject as well. Hale used them to argue the case for a park, most notably in his Thanksgiving Day sermon in 1869 entitled “The People’s Park.”

Friedrich Kapp (1824–1884), a leading figure among the Germans in the North in the 1850s and 1860s, became a close friend and valued ally of Olmsted’s. Kapp was born in Hamm, Westphalia, where his father was director [67] of the gymnasium. In 1848 he became a newspaper correspondent and took part briefly in the revolution in Germany. He moved to New York City in 1850, where he practiced law and wrote on political topics. His home became the center of a literary and political circle. He was active in the Republican party, played an influential part in gaining German support for it, and was a presidential elector for Lincoln in 1860.

Only an occasional reference in Olmsted’s letters tells of his relations with Kapp, but the two men must have been in frequent contact, especially after Olmsted moved to Manhattan in 1855. They first met following Olmsted’s second journey in the South, during which he had met Kapp’s uncle Ernst Kapp in Sisterdale. By that time Friedrich Kapp had already given careful study to American politics, particularly to the influence of slavery on it. Later in 1854 he published in Germany a book on American slavery entitled Die Sklavenfrage in den Vereinigten Staaten. Olmsted reviewed the book in the New-York Daily Times of January 15, 1855, and praised it highly. He welcomed Kapp as “the first writer on the United States who views us from the stand-point of European Republicanism,” and declared that the book gave “the clearest and most comprehensive introduction to American politics which has yet been written by a foreigner.” The similarity of the views of the two men on politics and slavery is indicated by Olmsted’s reference in his review to Kapp’s assessment of the implications of the Kansas-Nebraska Law:

The author, in conclusion, intimates that in the passage of the Nebraska bill the supremacy of the South over the North was probably permanently established, and that what is likely to occur hereafter will only consolidate the power of the planting interest; that the theories of Mr. Calhoun will subvert entirely the principles of Jefferson, and that such alterations of the Constitution as will be necessary to change the old Democratic Republic into an Oligarchical, Slaveholding Aristocracy will soon be openly advocated and finally effected.

By January 1855 Kapp had also dedicated himself to the free-soil cause in Texas. On January 18 he delivered an address that was printed in the New York Daily Tribune. In it he recounted the history of the Germans in Texas and predicted that they would succeed in creating a free state in its western portion. During the next five years he and Olmsted collaborated in promoting the free-soil cause. Kapp assisted Olmsted in his search fer land to purchase for colonies in Texas and helped publicize the idea of creating a free-soil barrier to the expansion of slavery.

As a testimonial to their work together and to the value that he placed on Olmsted’s writings, Kapp dedicated to Olmsted the expanded history of American slavery that he published in 1861 as Geschichte der Sklaverei in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika. “I inscribe these pages to you,” ran the printed dedication, “as a proof of my friendship for you, and as a token of my appreciation of your excellent exposition of American slavery.” In the dedication he also expressed the conviction that “the conflict now on the eve of a decision in the United States, is neither more nor less than one of the manifold phases of the [68]

struggle between aristocracy and democracy (in the original sense of the word) which has agitated the civilized world for more than twenty centuries . . . .”

Kapp presented the first bound volume of the book to Olmsted, saying, “I hope that the dedication, as it now reads, will answer your views; I copied the conclusion entirely from you.” That conclusion reads as follows:

In conclusion, my dear Olmsted, let us still cherish the hope that events are preparing, in not only the old country, but in all parts of the continent, for a day when all labor of head and of hand may be as harmoniously and happily combined and as worthily directed in motive, as in the good and beautiful work, which you have the present satisfaction of guiding. It was in scenes of industry such as now surround you, that Faust at the end of his career hoped to find greater happiness than in all human wisdom, causing him to exclaim:

“Such busy multitudes I fain would see,
Stand upon free soil with a people flee!”

In addition to his antislavery political writing and activities, Kapp also carried on original research and writing concerning the historical relation between Germans and the United States. Between 1858 and 1871 he published biographies of the revolutionary generals Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben and Johann Kalb, as well as a history of German emigration to the United States and a monograph on Frederick the Great and the United States.

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Kapp returned to Germany in 1870 and became a naturalized Prussian. During all but two of his remaining years he was a member of the German Reichstag. In addition to his political career he retained his interest in America, and in 1876 published a two-volume study of the United States entitled Aus und über Amerika.

Frederick John Kingsbury (1823–1910) became a close friend of Olmsted’s when he, John Hull Olmsted and Charles Loring Brace were fellow students at Yale in 1842–46. During the next few years he and Olmsted kept up a correspondence that focused especially on political issues. Kingsbury had a keen critical sense and conservative attitude that, as Olmsted confessed, punctured many of his favorite theories and taught him “much-needed discipline of mind.” By the early 1850s the correspondence waned as the two pursued careers in very different fields.

After graduating from Yale and studying law in Boston and Hartford, Kingsbury had returned to his native Waterbury, Connecticut. There he married Alathea Scovill, heiress to the city’s largest manufacturing fortune, and engaged in professional activities and civic service, as had his father and grandfather before him. During the 1850s he practiced law, served twice in the state legislature, and functioned as an officer in local banks—including a savings bank that he helped found in Waterbury. He became increasingly involved with the manufacturing concerns in Waterbury and in 1857 became a director of the Scovill Manufacturing Company.

Olmsted’s letters to Kingsbury in this volume are primarily concerned with his first journey to the South and indicate that Kingsbury’s uncle Abner Leavenworth of Petersburg, Virginia, was a helpful source of hospitality and information for him when he visited that city.

Bertha Olmsted (1834–1926), Olmsted’s youngest half-sister, was apparently in awe of her energetic, older half-brother and looked to him for advice as she entered womanhood in the mid-1850s. She had seen little of him as a child, since he was living outside Hartford during those years. Long afterward, in response to a query concerning her early memory of him, she wrote, “I can only remember him at home for short vacations, which were remarkable to me, because being a timid child, he tried to cultivate my courage by teasing and frightening me.” While Olmsted’s approach to her had become somewhat subtler by the mid-1850s, he was still ready with advice and counsel of all kinds, as the letters to her in this volume demonstrate.

After attending school in Hartford, Bertha spent six months during 1852 studying French and music at a female seminary in Middlebury, Vermont.

[71] The seminary’s principal, Stephen W. Hitchcock, had just married Sophia Stevens, who had lived with the Olmsted family while she was teaching at Hartford High School from 1848 to 1851. Hitchcock died in 1852, and in November of that year Sophia left for a long stay in Europe that was financed in part by John Olmsted. In October 1854 he sent Bertha to Europe for over three years of travel and study under Sophia’s supervision. The two spent most of 1855 in Paris, where Bertha studied French and music and went Sightseeing. Later in the year they moved to Rome, where Olmsted and his half-sister Mary joined them in March 1856. Then followed two months of travel in Italy, after which the group proceeded to Dresden.

While Bertha and Sophia were in Rome they received the constant attentions of Edward Sheffield Bartholomew (1822–1858), a Connecticut-born sculptor who had lived in Hartford from c. 1836 to 1850 and then moved to Rome. Bertha assumed that Sophia was the object of his interest, but when the young women left Italy in the late spring of 1856, Bartholomew presented Bertha with a letter declaring his love for her. Surprised and taken aback by this revelation, she was uncertain for some time what her response should be. She had the dubious benefit of conflicting counsel, since Olmsted urged Bartholomew’s qualities while Sophia Hitchcock categorically declared her opposition to the match. In early June, however, Bertha refused Bartholomew’s suit. Her decision disappointed Olmsted and provided the occasion for the letters to her on life and love that appear in this volume.

In January 1857 Bertha returned to Hartford with John Olmsted and Mary Bull Olmsted (who had gone to Europe in July 1856). In April 1861 she became engaged to William Woodruff Niles (1832–1914). Still ready with views on what his sister should and should not do, Olmsted observed, “I suppose no man will be allowed to marry during the war but it does not interrupt engagements.” Despite Olmsted’s views, Bertha and Niles were married in June 1862. Niles had graduated from Berkeley Divinity School in New Haven in 1861 and was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1862. After serving in several small New England parishes, he was elected bishop of the Episcopal church in New Hampshire in 1870, a position he held until his death.

John Olmsted (1791–1873), Olmsted’s father, was a successful drygoods merchant in Hartford, Connecticut. He prospered, and was able to sell [72]

his interest in his firm in 1851 and live comfortably for the rest of his life. He also provided liberally for the education and travel of the five of his children who lived to maturity. He was especially generous to his two oldest sons, neither of whom showed any marked ability for earning a living. He sent John Hull Olmsted to France for six months in 1840 to study French, paid for his education at Yale and for his medical studies thereafter, and supported him and his family while he traveled in search of his health in Europe in 1851–53 and in Cuba and Europe in 1857. He paid for Frederick Law Olmsted’s education away from home and for his apprenticeship with working farmers. He bought Olmsted a farm in Guilford, Connecticut, in 1846 and another on Staten Island in 1848. He also paid for the six-month tour of England and the Continent that Olmsted and his brother took with Charles Loring Brace in 1850.

During the years 1852–57, John Olmsted continued to give his eldest son significant financial help. He advanced funds to cover the cost of the two journeys through the South and supplied substantial sums to meet the expenses of running the Staten Island farm. He also provided large amounts of money to launch Olmsted in his publishing career-including $5,000 to make him a partner of Dix, Edwards & Company, and $500 to pay for the printing of Seaboard Slave States. John Olmsted’s wealth, generosity and patience made it possible for Olmsted to spend the twenty years from 1837 to 1857 receiving [73]

training and experimenting with a variety of professional activities without a fixed or reliable income. During the mid-1850s, John Olmsted’s support of his son’s ventures as farmer, travel-writer and editor-publisher was particularly important, for it gave Olmsted the freedom to broaden his experience in a variety of ways.

John Hull Olmsted (1825–1857) was Olmsted’s closest friend and confidant. He and Olmsted were the only children born to John Olmsted and his first wife, who died when Olmsted was three and his brother was less than six months old. A year later, their father married Mary Ann Bull, who had been a close friend of their mother’s. Between 1832 and 1842, six children were born to the couple, two of whom died in childhood.

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Although the bond between Olmsted and his brother was strong from their early years, they seldom lived under the same roof for long. When he was seven, Olmsted went away to live with a minister and attend school in a town thirty miles from Hartford. He returned to live with his family for only short periods thereafter. The brothers were both in the New York City region after 1848, and in 1851 the discovery that John was suffering from tuberculosis added a new poignancy to their relationship. Despite his illness, John married Mary Cleveland Bryant Perkins—a Staten Island neighbor of Olmsted’s—in the fall of 1851. The couple spent the next year and a half in Europe. They returned in the summer of 1853 with a baby son, soon after Olmsted completed his first southern journey. John and his family then settled with Olmsted on his Staten Island farm. From that time until Olmsted moved to Manhattan in April 1855, the brothers were constantly together. During that period they spent over six months traveling to Texas and exploring that state and part of northern Mexico.

When Olmsted moved to Manhattan in April 1855, John continued to operate the farm, a task he found increasingly difficult and onerous. He therefore welcomed the opportunity for literary activity that came when he undertook to write A Journey Through Texas from Olmsted’s notes and published letters. The brothers agreed that for that work he was to receive two thirds of the royalties from sales of the volume. John completed the book by the time Olmsted returned from Europe in the fall of 1856. Even before A Journey [75] Through Texas was published in January 1857, however, John left America on a last, vain search for improved health. He and his family went first to Cuba, then to Switzerland, and finally to Nice, where on November 24, 1857, John Hull Olmsted died.

With his brother’s death vanished the last glimmers of the humor and vivacity of youth that had flashed so often in the letters Olmsted had written in previous years. John’s death left him lonely and faced with new responsibilities. To assuage his grief, Olmsted turned with great energy to his professional responsibilities. From that time on he immersed himself in work. He now had to look after John’s widow and three children as well. They returned to the Staten Island farm in the spring of 1858, and he visited them when he could. Soon he arranged to meet those responsibilities in a more complete way: on June 13, 1859, he and Mary were married.

Charles N. Riotte was born in St. Wendel, Prussia, in 1814. He was trained in the law and served for some time as a judge in a superior court in Prussia. He also became director of a railroad, anticipating the consistent interest he would show in railroad promotion during his twenty-five years in the New World. He emigrated to the United States in 1849 and settled in San Antonio. While there he gave Adolf Douai both moral and financial support and at times helped edit the San Antonio Zeitung. In 1854 he became an American citizen.

Olmsted met Riotte during his journey through Texas in 1854, and tried to convince him to move to New York and practice law. Instead, Riotte remained in the Southwest until he was expelled from Texas by Confederate authorities in the spring of 1861. Olmsted’s first discussions with Riotte about the possible future of a free-soil West Texas aroused his enthusiasm, and even before he left the South he wrote his new friend offering his services to the cause. During the fall of 1854, Riotte corresponded with Olmsted concerning the prospects of attracting free-soil settlers to Texas. As part of such a program he urged construction of a railroad from San Antonio to the Gulf Coast along a route similar to the one he had proposed while a director of the San Antonio and Mexican Gulf Railroad.

Increasing difficulties with proslavery nativists and the absence of any prospect of a strong flow of antislavery settlers to West Texas soon led Riotte to [76] resolve to leave the United States. Accordingly, in December 1855 he negotiated an agreement with General Vidaurri, governor of Nuevo Leon and Coahuila in Mexico, for a land grant of two million acres on which he proposed to create a colony of German and Mexican settlers.

In January 1856 he announced to Olmsted that he intended to move to Monterrey, Mexico, with his wife, seven children and two servants. Olmsted objected to his plans, but Riotte replied that the difference in attitude between Americans and Germans, aggravated by the nativist movement in Texas, had convinced him that Germans could not become a part of American society:

We are judged from the standpoint of an American—indeed a very, strange people! We look upon a political society or state as a congregation of men; whose aim it is to elevate the wellbeing of the aggregate by the combined exertion, and if required, sacrifice of the individuals, and thus to benefit all. Americans look first upon themselves as private individuals, entitled to ask for all rights and benefits of an organized community even to the detriment of the whole and think to secure the wellbeing of the community by the wellbeing of the single individual, even if mostly acquired to the prejudice of the community. To us, the State is a ideal being, whose welfare must be our pride, must be secured by the exertions of our head and the work of our hand and will then redound to the benefit of all—to the Americans it is the formal guarantee of certain (inalienable) rights in a loose conglomeration of human beings to secure an internal “bellum intra omnes et contra omnes”;—to us honor of the state is that of each citizen,—to you (dont take that personally) the honor of the state has its foundation in the greatness of some men,—we idealize the community—you the individual! How is it possible, that we ever should amalgamate? If you follow the difference of our starting points up through all phases of political and social life you will, I believe, arrive to the same conclusion I came to, that is, a decided: Never!

Riotte apparently did not attract a very large group of settlers or stay for long in Mexico himself: he served on the San Antonio Library Committee in 1857, ran a German-American school there in 1859, and in 1860 requested Olmsted’s assistance in seeking the position of assistant collector of customs in that city. With the election of Lincoln he applied for the post of U.S. minister in Costa Rica. Olmsted supported his appointment, and in so doing offered Charles Sumner his estimation of Riotte’s character and the extent of his contribution to the antislavery cause:

If he fails to produce upon you the impression of a man of the tight stamp for such an office as that to which he aspires, have the goodness to consider that at present he carries with him the effect of ten years of hard fighting with continual defeat, disappointment and increasing poverty-and that he has too good a temper to have been made sour or savage by it. No man comes out of such a battle without some evidence of it in his face or manner. I believe him to be a man of good parts, education, & breeding and in the vain, hopeless and inglorious struggle in which he has been engaged with Slavery on the South-Western frontier, he has acted with great discretion, bravely and nobly.

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Riotte secured the Costa Rican post and served there from 1861 until January 1867. During that time he carried on his correspondence with Olmsted, discussing at length the possibility of constructing a railroad across the isthmus in that country. He argued that such a railroad would make Costa Rica a commercial tributary to the United States and would pave the way for annexation. In December 1865, after receiving a letter from Olmsted on the subject, he wrote that he had convinced the president and minister of foreign affairs of Costa Rica to arrange for construction of the railroad. Moreover, he reported, the minister had agreed to Riotte’s proposal that Olmsted be one of the two representatives of Costa Rica who would negotiate terms with capitalists in New York. Nothing seems to have come of the plan, however.

After his removal from office by Andrew Johnson in 1867, Riotte spent two years in Hoboken, New Jersey, where Adolph Douai also was living. He then served from April 1869 to January 1873 as U.S. minister to Nicaragua. Failing to secure another diplomatic appointment, he left the United States in mid-1874. He presumably returned to Prussia, a course of action that a decree of amnesty in 1861 had made possible, and that his friend Friedrich Kapp had already followed.

While Olmsted’s long correspondence with Riotte did not convince his friend to remain in the United States, it may at least have given him a greater appreciation of Americans and their political institutions. “You have reconciled me with America and the Americans,” Riotte wrote Olmsted in early 1857, “at a time when my experience in Texas had led me to believe, I, a republican by principle, had started in the wrong direction when going to the U. S.”