Genius and Empathy: Darwin, Olmsted, and Slavery

Introduction

Melvin Kalfus and Ralph Colp, Jr.

Charles Darwin and Frederick Law Olmsted are men of genius who had substantial influ-

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ence on both sides of the Atlantic. Both men gave considerable thought to the problem of slavery and both (like the vast majority of their peers) considered it to be a totally immoral institution. But Charles Darwin’s reaction to the plight of the slaves was far more emotional and empathetic than that of Olmsted’s—who resisted the abolitionist point of view and maintained a rather cool, detached attitude toward the slaves themselves. The essays that follow consider some of the psychological reasons for such differing reactions of two of the great minds of the Victorian era to the human tragedy that was at the heart of the slavery question—the most urgent moral issue of their time. In our brief introduction below, we will give a brief background to the issues raised in our separate articles.

In the decades just prior to the Civil War, intellectuals—mainly from New England and mainly of Puritan heritage—formed a close connection with their counterparts in Great Britain

Initially, this “Victorian Connection” began as a type of cultural exchange. The relationship became far more intimate as the expanding circles of kinship and friendship reached across the Atlantic—especially as the young Americans began to travel abroad in search of their English roots and European culture.

Nowhere is the evidence of this connection stronger than in the case of Frederick Law Olmsted, who was to be America’s premier landscape architect, but who first made his reputation on both sides of the Atlantic with his three books about slavery and the antebellum South: A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856); A Journey Through Texas (1857); and A Journey in the Back Country (1860).

While Darwin had made an enormous impact on Olmsted and his peers, Olmsted himself had had a significant impact upon Darwin and other British intellectuals, in the sphere in which he first gained public recognition—the question of slavery in the American south. Olmsted’s first book, Slave States, was reviewed in Great Britain just as Olmsted arrived in London in 1856 for his second visit there. The London Times recommended the book as offering “new light on the workings of the slave system in retarding the legitimate progress of the South,” and it seems to have influenced the views of the two British intellectuals who mattered most to Olmsted, Mill and Darwin. A few years later, on the eve of the Civil War, all the major literary publications in Britain gave strong approval to Back Country, and Darwin praised it as a book that drew “an admirable picture of man and Society in the Southern States.” The London Times thought that Olmsted’s books on the South provided “a better knowledge of the difficulties of our American kinsmen.” (Laura Wood Roper, FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted, 1973, pp. 115, 152)

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As our articles will reveal, Darwin and Olmsted approached slavery from very different perspectives. Charles Darwin, raised in a strong family anti-slavery tradition, was emotional repulsed by slavery based mostly upon his strong identification with slaves and empathy for them. Frederick Olmsted maintained a detached attitude to the subject while also seeing the institution of slavery as immoral. The essays discuss their attitudes and provide some psychological insights to what slavery meant in the lives of each of these brilliant men.

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