Genius of Place (15 page)

“You have not got enough yet,” said the overseer. “Pull up your clothes—lie down.”

Sall drew up her garments to about her waist and lay down on the ground. She turned on her side, facing the overseer. The man began to strike her again with the rawhide whip, this time lashing her across her thighs and back. “Oh, don't; Sir, oh, please stop, master; please, Sir, please, Sir! Oh, that's enough, master; oh, Lord! Oh, master! master!”

Looking on, Olmsted was overcome with visceral horror mixed with a terrible sense of complicity. The only other time he'd witnessed a scene like this was aboard the
Ronaldson
, when Captain Fox ordered that young sailors be “rope's ended.”

The South was a region best rendered in shades of gray, but Olmsted couldn't help but perceive the episode in stark black-and-white: This was so very wrong. Olmsted's horse flared its nostrils and bolted up out of the gully.

CHAPTER 7

Tief Im Herzen Von Texas

OLMSTED COULDN'T AFFORD to miss the spring planting season. He returned to Staten Island in April 1853.

By this time, nine of his
Times
dispatches had already appeared. In the months ahead, while on Tosomock Farm, Olmsted crafted two new dispatches each week, drawing on his travel notes. Ultimately, forty-eight Southern letters would be published. The dispatches were highly successful. Because his accounts were provocative yet balanced—per the original mandate—they grabbed readers' attention, and, as a bonus, they also managed to draw the ire of the Southern press. “The
Times
, however, is not content with the present calm,” complained the
Savannah Republican
. “It sends a stranger among us ‘to spy out the nakedness of the land.' What is its object, if it be not an evil one?”

Raymond of the
Times
was a classic crusty newspaper editor, sparing with praise. But he was pleased with the Southern dispatches, and even went so far as to communicate this to Olmsted. The series helped the
Times
's circulation rebound. By the end of 1853, it had returned to 25,000. And circulation would keep growing, soon hitting 40,000, second only to the
Herald
among New York dailies. In the early life of the
Times
, Olmsted's series was a key to establishing the paper's journalistic identity. “The
Times
signaled itself by publishing Olmsted's letters from the South,” wrote Edwin Godkin, a correspondent for the paper during its early years and later a friend of Olmsted's.

The success of the Southern series also had an unintended consequence for Olmsted. He grew still more disenchanted with the farmer's
life. Increasingly, writing seemed more appealing. Because his letters were published under the pseudonym “Yeoman,” few knew that the
Times
pieces were Olmsted's handiwork, save for the people that he chose to tell. But he wasn't shy about sharing this with fellow New Yorkers. (The risk had lain in disclosing his identity to Southerners.)

In the spring of 1853, Anne Charlotte Lynch visited Olmsted at Tosomock Farm. Years back, she had been his classmate at Miss Rockwell's school in Hartford. Now, she was a poet and the host of a Greenwich Village salon, attended by such luminaries as the painter Daniel Huntington, abolitionist journalist Lydia Child, and Felix Darley, the noted illustrator. Before his death in 1849, Edgar Allan Poe had been a regular and had recited “The Raven” before an appreciative gathering. Olmsted confessed in a letter to his father that he didn't care much for Lynch's own poetry. But he was thrilled to reconnect with this childhood acquaintance because she “knew all the distinguished people.”

Olmsted tried his hand at a literary work, which appeared in a prestigious new publication,
Putnam's Monthly Magazine
. The magazine belonged to George Putnam, his onetime Staten Island neighbor who had recently moved to Manhattan. Through a separate enterprise, a book publishing company, Putnam had also brought out Olmsted's
Walks and Talks
.

“Gold Under Gilt” is a brief fable (occupying a single page in the July 1853 issue of
Putnam's
) about a wealthy Fifth Avenue couple who drop everything to minister to their gravely ill servants. The couple risks contracting a terrible disease because they feel a moral obligation to do the right thing. The servants still succumb. But as Olmsted concluded, “Here was another ‘deed for New-York to be proud of.' Gilt sometimes covers gold.”

Olmsted's odd little parable provides a window into his mind-set at this time. It's no coincidence that the setting is New York, his stomping grounds, but also a progressive Northern city. The tale's moral—human values transcend the economic differences that separate people—speaks to his growing sense of noblesse oblige. Perhaps it relates to a nagging conscience as well. Whether witting or unwitting, “gilt covers gold” is a pun on “
guilt
covers gold,” as in privileged people such as himself feeling
an obligation to those who are less fortunate. Olmsted had been to the South, he'd seen slavery firsthand, and, as Brace had predicted, it had changed his thinking, utterly.

In the summer of 1853, Olmsted's brother returned to America. Since being diagnosed with tuberculosis, John had been living in Italy and Switzerland. He'd hoped that a favorable climate would help arrest the progress of his disease. John and Mary now had a newborn infant son. While overseas, he'd been unable to work as a doctor, the profession for which he'd trained. It was just too demanding, given his illness. He'd made a few dollars writing about Italy for the
Philadelphia Bulletin
. Otherwise, John's travels had been bankrolled by his father. The senior Olmsted could always be counted on to provide help—financial or emotional—to John and Fred.

Fred was there to meet John when his ship, the
Humbolt
, sailed into New York Harbor. John and his family simply moved to Tosomock Farm. They were at loose ends and planned to stay there until they figured out what to do next.

Meanwhile, Fred—also adrift—was on the lookout for a writing assignment that would take him
off
the farm. He approached Raymond with the idea of a London travelogue, or perhaps he could write a series of dispatches on agricultural practices around the United States. Neither idea grabbed Raymond.

How about another Southern swing then? For his last journey, Olmsted had visited such established slaveholding bastions as Virginia and South Carolina, winding up in Louisiana. Why not pick up where his previous trip had left off with a journey through Texas? Texas had joined the United States as a slave state less than a decade earlier, in 1845. Olmsted proposed a trip across this vast new land to document the effects of slavery on a place very different from the Old South—a frontier society. Raymond was sold on this idea and signed up “Yeoman” for a fresh series of dispatches.

John asked to join his brother. Fred immediately agreed. The arid climate of Texas, coupled with the invigoration of outdoor life, was seen as a sensible regimen for a tuberculosis sufferer. Here was the plan: The brothers would visit Texas and perhaps continue west all the way to
California. Mary and the newborn would stay behind in Staten Island. Whatever needed tending on Tosomock Farm would fall to a pair of contract laborers Olmsted had hired the previous spring.

Once again, it made sense to leave after the fall harvest. On November 10, 1853, Fred and John set off together on a new Southern adventure.

 

The brothers took the unscenic route to Texas. Because Olmsted had already wended his way through much of the South, this time the goal was to get to their destination as quickly as possible. They set out on a westerly course, traveling by railroad, coach, and steamship through Maryland, Ohio, and Kentucky.

Along the way, the pair did find time for one side trip. They made a jog down to Nashville to meet with Samuel Allison, an old classmate of John's from Yale. Allison was that rarest of types in Olmsted's experience, a plantation owner and slaveholder who was truly prosperous. Allison had deep family roots in Tennessee. He lived in a bona fide mansion, set on ample acreage and surrounded by every luxury.

Olmsted found Allison far more garrulous than the planters he'd previously met, such as the man who spoke haltingly of guano. But Allison's views were also disturbing. He argued that slavery must be extended, through a sort of manifest destiny, southward to the Amazon rain forest. He was concerned about impending war in Europe, but chiefly in terms of how it might impact the price of slaves and cotton. Allison was obstreperous. He worked overtime to convince the Olmsted brothers that there had been no gentlemen at Yale and that very few existed in the North, period. On only one occasion, Allison recalled, had he encountered genuine breeding among Northerners. This was when he'd met some Schuylers, members of the old Dutch aristocracy. Olmsted was immensely put off by Allison and was glad to take his leave of the man.

In Nashville, the brothers boarded a steamboat that traveled along the Cumberland River on route to the mighty Mississippi. Lying in his darkened cabin, Olmsted could hear his fellow passengers laughing and playing cards deep into the night. As the steamer pitched to and fro, he wrestled with his recent encounter with the Nashville plantation owner. He got up and tried to compose his thoughts in a letter to Brace. What
was it about Allison that provoked him so? Maybe, Olmsted confessed, he was just insecure in the face of the planter's easy convictions. One had to admit that his wealth and luxury were enticing. It would be great to feel that comfort was one's natural station, the fruits of aristocracy. Then again, Allison was so very uncurious. The man seemed to see everything through the narrow prism of his mercantile interests. Sure, he had the financial means to keep more than one candle burning at a time, unlike so many so-called Southern gentlemen. But Olmsted couldn't help noticing that Allison was still in the grip of a kind of poverty, a cultural poverty. What was Allison's higher calling—to
be
a gentleman? What kind of calling was that? If heaven exists, Olmsted posited to Brace, Southerners will be delighted. They will thrive on the leisure. But Northerners will be disappointed. They will just want to get to work. He concluded his letter to Brace with this: “Well, the moral of this damnedly drawn out letter is, I believe, go ahead with the Children's Aid 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 rowdy.”

This carries an echo of Olmsted's earlier exhortation: “There's a great work wants doing in this our generation, Charley, let us off jacket and go about it.” The two friends were older now and in more of a position to put their words into action. Olmsted was urging Brace to continue his good works with the Children's Aid Society. He himself was traveling through a South sorely in need of reform. In this extraordinary passage, he was also making a bold assertion about the cultural primacy of the antebellum North, a place where it was possible to “get up” parks and dancing schools, a place that drew its vitality from differences, the interplay of the “gentlemanly and rowdy.” Of course, “parks” was a curious—and oddly prescient—choice of examples.

After traveling less than a month, the Olmsted brothers arrived in New Orleans. The city was the natural jumping-off point for any trip into Texas. In those days, there were two main ways to go. One could board a ship and travel across the Gulf to the Texas coast. Or one could travel by steamer along the Red River into western Louisiana, then cross into Texas by land. The brothers chose the latter.

At the Louisiana-Texas border, they began to make preparations for a frontier journey. Choosing the right horses was especially important. They were about to set off across a vast prairie, and a horse that grew “jaded”—in the parlance of the day—could leave you stranded miles from help. Fred purchased a roan Creole pony named Nack. John chose a chestnut mare named Fanny.

The brothers also bought a Sharps rifle, a pair of Colt revolvers, and some sheathed knives. Texas was dangerous. There was an ever-present threat of encountering hostile Indians, horse thieves, all manner of outlaws. Texas also was sparely settled. It might be necessary to hunt for food. Fred and John repaired to the outskirts of the tiny town where they'd purchased their weaponry and unleashed a fusillade. “After a little practice,” Olmsted boasted, “we could very surely chop off a snake's head from the saddle at a reasonable distance.”

This made for compelling adventure writing in a
Times
dispatch. Truth be told, the Olmsted brothers of Hartford would never pass for hardened Texas drovers. (
Drovers
was the appellation for men who drove cattle; the term
cowboy
hadn't even been coined yet.) The brothers bought a pack mule named Mr. Brown. As for packing, they found it quite a challenge to winnow down the accoutrements of civilized life. No way could they part with their gingerbread, and as for getting rid of books—simply out of the question. They improvised, festooning the mule with large wicker hampers, generously stuffed with their possessions.

In San Augustine, the brothers hired a former Texas Ranger to serve as a guide. The man suggested that they replace the laughable mule hampers with an aparejo. An aparejo is a streamlined Mexican pack, consisting of a straw-filled leather sack with loops of rope hanging off of it. Travelers simply place the sack on a mule's back, like a saddle, and secure their possessions with the loops of rope. But the Olmsted brothers stubbornly clung to their mule rig. The townsfolk of San Augustine gathered in the street to see off this quirky traveling party. There was much animated discussion about packs. Onlookers speculated that Mr. Brown the mule would simply collapse after a few steps. By the time they were ready to leave, Olmsted had grown unsure himself. “We should have half Texas hooting at our heels,” he observed. “But nothing happened. The mule
walked off with as much unconcern as if he had been trained to carry hampers from his birth.”