Olmsted and Slavery

Frederick Law Olmsted (FLO) is best remembered as the 19th-century pioneer of landscape architecture and urban planning. His name is usually recalled in connection with the great urban parks: Central Park in Manhattan, Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Franklin Park in Boston, and a host of others throughout the United States. But before Olmsted (1822-1903) found his life’s work—through his election to the position of Superintendent of Central Park in 1857—he had already become well known to his contemporaries as a journalist and authority on antebellum society throughout the slave states. He made two trips through the South—from Virginia to Texas—in the early 1850s and reported on what he saw for the New York Daily Times [The New York Times 1857 and after] and the New York Tribune—which later formed the basis for three books that were critically well-received: A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), A Journey Through Texas (1857), and A Journey in the Back Country (1860). Olmsted deplored slavery and thought it responsible for a “barbarous” way of life throughout the South. In time, he became a Free Soil activist but never an abolitionist—always a proponent of the gradual emancipation of slaves after educating

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them for a life as freedmen.

Though intellectually and morally opposed to slavery, Olmsted was never able to empathize with the slaves themselves as human beings. Indeed, he expended far more intellectual energy on condemning the economics of slavery than he did the immorality of slavery. This was his objective from the inception of his first trip to the South in 1852, as he made clear in a letter to his old friend, Frederick Kingsbury. Olmsted said he intended to produce “a valuable book of observations on the Southern Agriculture and general economy as affected by Slavery,” a book that would offer a “matter of fact” contrast to “the deluge of spoony fancy pictures now at its height.” (FLO to FJK, October 17, 1852, in Charles Capen McLaughlin, editor in chief, The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, 5 volumes, 1981, Vol. II, pp. 82-85) The “spoony fancy pictures” Olmsted referred to were those offered by Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a flood of cheapjack imitations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic anti-slavery book.

The manner in which Olmsted distanced himself from the tragic dimensions of slavery is revealed in an incident presented first in a dispatch to The New York Times from the South and later included in The Cotton Kingdom (1861)—the revised and augmented version of his three earlier books about the Southern slave states. In this particular vignette, Olmsted watched as a truant slave girl was twice “viciously beaten” by a plantation overseer. What is most revealing is the difference between the version in the original dispatch and the version included in The Cotton Kingdom—not so much in the description of the incident itself as in Olmsted’s reaction to the beatings. (Times, November 21, 1853, McLaughlin, Papers, Vol. II, pp. 220-221; Cotton Kingdom, pp. 453-456)

In both the dispatch and the book, Olmsted preceded the actual description with a comment on the attitude of the slave overseer who administered the beatings—an attitude which Olmsted likened to that of ships’ officers. The material emphasized in the passage below was omitted in The Cotton Kingdom version (the phrase in brackets ends this passage as given in the book):

His conversation on this subject was exactly like what I have heard again and again, ad nauseam, from Northern shipmasters and officers [with regard to seamen.], only he had a less brutal disposition, and more respect for the negroes than those fellows have for the seamen that temporarily subject themselves to the atrocious tyranny and insolence they boast of exercising. (Ibid.)

It can be seen that Olmsted’s indignation in the dispatch version was reserved entirely for the tyrannized seamen and the overseer was made to seem less callous and cruel than ships’ officers.

Olmsted described the distressing scene, in both the dispatch and the book, in detailed, dispassionate prose. In the book (but not in the original dispatch), Olmsted stated that it was the first time he “had ever seen a woman flogged.” Though he had seen men “cudgeled and beaten, in the heat of passion,” he wrote in the book, it was never with “a hundredth part of the severity” used by the “perfectly passionless” overseer. Olmsted mentioned that he had continued to hear the girl’s “sobbing, spasmodic groans” after he had ridden to the top of the bank. In the earlier dispatch, however, Olmsted had merely stated that he “could not wait to see the end” but, after “a dozen or twenty blows,” he turned his horse’s head, whereupon the horse “burst through the bushes” and up the steep bank, “seemingly as excited and anxious to be doing something as I was.” Olmsted then added (in the dispatch only): “I must say, however, the girl did not seem to suffer the intense pain that I should have supposed she would.” (McLaughlin, Papers, Vol. II, p. 223); Olmsted, Journey, pp. 83-86)

The original dispatch is remarkable for Olmsted’s cool, almost casual attitude toward the flogging episode. Indeed, it read as if it was the horse’s impulse to flee from the horrid scene, rather than Olmsted’s (unless one can say that the horse merely reacted to Olmsted’s own repressed, unconscious anguish). It can be argued, with justice, that Olmsted’s “objective,” detached attitude heightened the awfulness of this terrible scene, which he had reproduced in such detail—and which therefore made it even more effective among his gentry intellectual peers as an anti-slavery tract than Uncle Tom’s Cabin with its florid prose.

But one must also notice the contrasting and unrestrained sense of outrage that Olmsted so clearly revealed when talking about the tyrannized seamen. Olmsted himself had shipped to sea when a youth and had sailed under such a tyrannical captain. Though he had never been flogged or even severely mistreated when at sea, it is plain that Olmsted had no difficulty in identifying with the seamen among whom he had lived, while he had a great deal of difficulty identifying with enslaved blacks.

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Thus, the issue is not of Olmsted’s moral sense—which was strong, although more from his head than his heart. The issue, rather, was of his ability to empathize, something he could do only with those with whom he could strongly identify. It was this that dictated his position on what he himself referred to as the “brutal punishment” of slaves. Brutality towards slaves is all too commonplace in the South, Olmsted wrote, but he added:

I believe very few overseers punish their slaves entrusted to them so wantonly, brutally, passionately, and cruelly as I have seen a clergyman in New England punish boys entrusted to them for education. ….it requires a man of peculiar temperament and governing abilities, to efficiently control and direct a large body of persons, dependent upon him and subject to his uncontrolled authority, whether they are negroes or sailors or peasants or children, without the use of the lash or other humiliating punishments. (Times, January 26, 1854; McLaughlin, Papers, Vol. II, p. 249)

One can admire the soundness of Olmsted’s understanding of human nature and the sense of his argument but at the same time one must wonder at the outrage so easily directed toward a clergyman brutalizing the boys in his care, an outrage lacking where a whole enslaved population was concerned. As in the case of the tyrannized sailors, Olmsted’s anger is aroused here only by the thought of the brutalized students—for, once again, he himself had been such a boy. After his father’s second marriage when Olmsted was seven-and-a-half, Frederick had been sent away from home to a rural boarding school run by a minister. Except for part of two school years, he would continue to be sent away to these crude, often cruel, boarding schools until the age of 17. At best, he had been allowed to idle away his days in the back woods of Connecticut—roaming, fishing, and hunting. At worst, he was subjected to rural clergymen, “deputy fathers,” who were more than puritanical—who were tyrannical and sometimes sadistic. “Here I suffered in many cruel ways,” Olmsted wrote four decades later of one such school, “and I still carry the scars of more than one kind of wound….” One of those scars, he suggested, was from being “again the smallest boy among sixty.” (McLaughlin, Papers, Vol. I, p. 105)

It is also apparent that the slave overseer was one of the few types of Southerners with whom Olmsted could empathize. But here again there was a basis for identification: Olmsted had been an “overseer” of small work forces on his Staten Island farm, and he would, within a few years, become the superintendent of a vast work force on Central Park. Thus, while he recognized at last the evil of the overseers’ treatment of slaves, he was also able to see—from their point of view—the necessity of that treatment. (As Superintendent of Central Park, Olmsted would receive recognition for his ability to direct free laborers with discipline and with great skill. In a diary entry of September 2, 1859, 19th-century New York lawyer and diarist George Templeton Strong commented on the “great progress” which had been made on the Park, adding: “Some three thousand men are employed, and there are no idlers. Everybody is earning his pay.” [Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, eds., The Diary of George Templeton Strong, 1974, Vol. II, p. 458])

It should be made clear that Olmsted never in any way justified the enslavement of the black race, nor did he ever suggest that the slave population was content with its lot. It is rather that he could not conceive of the efficacy of the abolitionist solution—immediate freedom for the blacks, whom he thought to be incapable of properly exercising that freedom. He thought that abolition, “the direct sundering of the tie of master and dependent,” might be “impracticable, fanatical, mischievous and unjust.” Rather, he sought “Amelioration, the improvement and the elevation of the negro….” (McLaughlin, Papers, Vol. II, pp. 179-180) A decade later, during the war, abolitionist Charles Loring Brace apparently asked Olmsted his opinion as to whether or not the slaves would rise up against their masters. Olmsted responded (in the cruder language he was to adopt during the war years): “Haven’t I told you again and again the niggers can’t combine—therefore can’t rise? Will they run? Yes, when they have something to run to. But they will not run to starvation.” (FLO to CLB, October 4, 1862, McLaughlin, Papers, Vol. IV, p. 451) This comment is typical of Olmsted’s curiously ambivalent view of the slaves—coldly patronizing but with a clear-eyed understanding of the slaves’ situation.

The fact is that Olmsted saw the slave in the same light that his Puritan forebears had seen the small child. “The negroes came to us from barbarism as from a cradle,” he wrote in an earlier letter. He saw them as subject to “strong and simple appetites and impulses,” to “violent and uncontrollable passions, and altogether undisciplined, un-

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educated, and unchristianized.” Separated from “their protectors and superiors,” they formed new attachments quickly “and with equal strength.” Those who had taken on the burden of such a “child” retained a responsibility for the upbringing of that “child”—and it was from this sense of the slave owner being duty-bound that Olmsted evolved his paternalistic concept of “amelioration” of the slave condition. (Times, July 8, 1853; McLaughlin, Papers, Vol. II, p. 187)

Olmsted’s language here should alert us to the fact that, rather than empathizing with the slaves, Olmsted saw in them his own childish, impulsive, unruly self—a “shadow self” that he had firmly repressed in the process of becoming the journalistic representative of his upright gentry peers. But we can note that the man who wrote these words was still financially dependent upon his own father. It should be recalled again that as a child he had been sent away from home to board with a succession of rural clergymen—some of whom had thought him to be a strong-willed child, even a “bad boy,” in need of firmness and discipline.

By the spring of 1863, however, Olmsted’s attitudes in regard to the freed slaves had shifted perceptibly. The turning point, he wrote a member of the Sanitary Commission of which he was General Secretary, was Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation—an act which not only changed Olmsted’s stand on the question but which, strangely enough, prompted him to turn at last upon the Southern slaveholders:

I opposed the proclamation until it was issued. I shall stand by it now as long as I live and I shall try to bring up my children to make it good. I shall be for continual war or for Southern independence rather than go back one step from it. There is but one way in which I believe prolonged peace to be practicable—it is called extermination. (FLO to Charles J. Stillel, February 25, 1863, in McLaughlin, Papers, Vol. IV, pp. 516-519)

His use of the word “extermination” was not a heated sentiment, written in haste. It represented his newly-considered policy and an apparently implacable hatred of the slave-holding aristocracy of the South. “Peace is to be come at by a gradual process,” he wrote his friend, Charles Eliot Norton, “not by a treaty, not by any act of Congress, least of all by any compromise but by the gradual wearing out, dying off, and killing off—extermination of the rebels.” (FLO to CEN, April 30, 1863, in McLaughlin, Papers, Vol. IV, pp. 618-621)

Olmsted’s outburst against the slave-holding Southern society was clearly an explosion of rage that came from the depths of his psyche. Looking inward, he found in himself an “instinct” that was stronger than his “love of life,” a “bitter feeling,” a hatred “tremendously deep and quiet.” (FLO to Henry Bellows, July 4, 1863; McLaughlin, Papers, Vol. IV, pp. 638-645) What Olmsted found was the hatred slumbering in his own unconscious, a hatred born in infancy and childhood—a hatred of those siblings who had remained at home when he was sent away, a hatred of the bigger boys who had tormented the boy who was the “smallest among sixty,” a hatred of the “deputy fathers” who brutalized and tyrannized him, and a hatred of his own father who had abandoned him to this hard fate. “Down with them, damn them!” (Ibid.) was a cri de coeur against all the hated rivals and oppressors in his life.

I have, in my writings on Olmsted, often expressed my belief that Olmsted continually made career choices which combined his feminine and masculine identifications and that the Sanitary Commission was one of these. The ultimate goal of the Sanitary Commission was one of nurturance but Olmsted suppressed the feminine aspect of this—stressed instead the “science” of administration and health care. Olmsted’s enormous physical effort during the Peninsula Campaign of the Civil War—when he personally superintended a fleet of hospital ships—was, in fact, compassion in action. But his writings were given over to his (or the Union’s) triumphs and humiliations, to his furies and hatreds and plans and scheming; they rarely display an empathy with the monumental human suffering then taking place.

Olmsted’s need to project a practical, even aggressive, masculinity, certainly led him to stifle the “feminine” compassion he might have felt for the slaves. But the fury expressed by Olmsted in the summer of 1863 against the Southern slaveholders suggests the principal reason why Olmsted—essentially a democrat by principle and moral to the core of his being—was never able to empathize with the plight of the slaves on a human level: Olmsted was a man possessed, all his life, by a rage, deep-felt and raw—a rage generated by his tormented childhood. He had been left with a sense of victimhood so great that it blinded him to the far greater suffering that the slaves had endured and were enduring at the hands of their taskmasters.

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