CHAPTER VII

FREE-SOIL CRUSADE

1857

The Year 1857 marked the height of Olmsted’s efforts to promote free-labor colonization in the Southwest. This was also the most intense period of his writing about the South. The letters to Edward Everett Hale in this chapter indicate his plans early in the year and show how he tried to use his newly published book, A Journey Through Texas, to promote the immigration of free-soilers to that region. His letters to Samuel Cabot, Jr., tell the story of his involvement with the New England Emigrant Aid Company in planning the establishment of colonies in Texas and in seeking sources of men and money for the project. The chapter also contains the introduction and supplement that he wrote for the American edition of The Englishman in Kansas: Or, Squatter Life and Border Warfare, by the English newspaper correspondent Thomas H. Gladstone. These include Olmsted’s most thorough-going condemnation of Southern violence and the threat it posed to free institutions wherever slavery existed. The supplement to The Englishman in Kansas also records his assessment of the implications of the sectional policies of the Buchanan administration and of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Dred Scott case.