CHAPTER II

THE JOURNEY THROUGH
THE SEABOARD SLAVE STATES:
THE LOWER SOUTH

1853

The Letters in This Chapter describe Olmsted’s trip from Savannah, Georgia, through Montgomery and Mobile, Alabama, to New Orleans, and from there up the Red River. In “The South” numbers 44 and 45, Olmsted discusses his visit to the sugar plantation of his friend Richard Taylor, son of the late president, near New Orleans, and his stay on the great 15,000-acre plantation of Meredith Calhou non the Red River in Louisiana. In number 28 he describes those aspects of the Northerner Richard J. Arnold’s plantation outside Savannah which made it a model of what he believed slavery should be in America—a benevolent, patriarchal and civilizing institution.

Numbers 26 and 27 offer Olmsted’s most extensive discussion of the religion practiced by the slaves and explore the effect of slavery on their moral condition and mental capacity. In these letters, Olmsted also passes severe judgment on the ineffectiveness of Southern laws designed to protect slaves from harsh punishment and to regulate the internal slave trade.

Number 34 gives a general picture of the society of Georgia, and number 35 provides a description of Alabama, including a classic characterization of the frontiersmen of the region.