CHAPTER III

FIRST CONCLUSIONS

1853–1854

As He Set Out on his second tour of the South in December 1853, Olmsted experienced his crucial encounter with Samuel Perkins Allison, a Yale classmate of his brother, John. A slaveholder and southern gentleman, Allison successfully challenged Olmsted’s defense of free-labor society by pointing out the shortcomings of the North. His arguments convinced Olmsted that he should dedicate himself to improving the civilization of the North in order to show the error of Southern proslavery critics and European defenders of aristocracy. At the same time, the encounter with Allison persuaded Olmsted that even the gentlemen of the South were sadly lacking in what he felt were fundamentally important attitudes and virtues. His talks with Allison also convinced him that the South would persist in a craven materialism that would require, for profit’s sake, the limitless expansion of slavery into new areas of the Western Hemisphere. His remarkable letter to Charles Loring Brace of December 1, 1853, sums up the conclusions he reached as a result of this meeting with Allison.

The rest of the chapter consists of the three letters of synthesis with which Olmsted closed his first series for the New-York Daily Times. In them he examines all elements of Southern society—slaves, nonslaveholding yeomen and slaveholding gentry—with a clarity and perception never exceeded in his later writings on the South. He explains his concept of property as a form of stewardship that entails responsibility, and he defines what the responsibilities of Southern slaveholders would have to be if slavery were to be permitted to exist for even a limited time. He spells out, in that context, what the role of the North should be concerning the amelioration and abolition of the institution of slavery.