FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED
1822
April 26, Friday: Frederick Law Olmsted was born, as the son of a comfortable drygoods merchant of Hartford, Connecticut. HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED
1825
What had once been a nice 5-acre pond, “The Collect,” about which New-Yorkers had congregated for summer pic-nics and winter ice-skating, had by this point become a slum, and the worst of our nation. It was being referred to as “Five Points” because it was near the complex intersection of Baxter, Park, and Worth. It was under the control of gangs denominated, in the public press, the “Dead Rabbits” and the “Plug Uglies,” the thugs of which could travel underneath the tenements by means of secret tunnels. The “Old Brewery” tenement, which slept more than 1,000 persons in its 95 rooms, would average a murder per night for the next 15 years. Commenting on the Scorsese movie “Gangs of New York”: “In my own research of New York history, through first-person accounts and newspaper reports, I have found that our past was often at least as violent and squalid, if not more so, than the movie depicts.” — Kevin Baker
Charles Dickens, one of the notables who would go slumming there,1 would write:
Let us go on again, and plunge into the Five Points.... Where dogs would howl ... men and women and boys slink off to sleep, forcing the dislodged rats to move away in quest of better lodgings.... All that is loathesome, drooping and decayed is here.
John Whitehead, a New-York deliveryman, began selling off parcels of his farm higher up on Manhattan Island to black New-Yorkers. A trustee of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church who was earning his living as a common laborer, Epiphany Davis, either on his own initiative or for his church, purchased twelve of the lots in what would come to be known as “Seneca Village” for $578. A 25-year-old “shoe shine boy” named Andrew Williams purchased three lots for $125.00 and by 1832 his little farm would have been subdivided into more than 24 land parcels owned by black citizens. Due primarily to segregation, of the 100 black voters in New-York in 1845, 1 in 10 would live in Seneca Village, and of the 71 black property owners in New- York as of 1850, 1 in 5 would own their property there. The first stage in ethnic cleansing would therefore seem to be the segregation of the ethnics who are later to be cleansed. The second state of this ethnic-
1. Other notables who would go slumming there would include a Russian grand duke, Davy Crockett, Richard Henry Dana, Jr., and Abraham Lincoln. HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED cleansing effort would be that this is the area which would be targeted for demolition by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1857 when they set out to create a “surpassingly beautiful pleasure grounds [for the] refreshment and recreation” of the real citizens of New-York. You can visit this Seneca Village area near the West 85th Street entrance to the present Central Park, where a spring now trickles picturesquely through picturesque rolling hills covered with picturesque white oaks.
In the course of creating these hills and this spring in 1871, and installing these trees, decomposed bodies would be dug up.2
Brillat-Savarin’s PHYSIOLOGY OF TASTE described “Edward,” a sumptuary monster he had encountered in
2. And, may one presume, discarded? —The record which remains does not state. According to Roy Rosenzweig’s and Elizabeth Blackmar’s THE PARK AND THE PEOPLE (NY: Henry Holt, 1994), no historical village of the Senecas ever has been situated anywhere near this site — so that is not going to provide us with an explanation for the name. HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED America during the mid-1790s on display in a tavern window on Broadway Avenue in New-York: Edward was at least six feet four in height, and as his fat had puffed him out in every direction, he was almost nine feet round the waist. His fingers were like those of the Roman emperor who used his wife s bracelets as rings; his arms and his thighs were tubular, and as thick as the waist of a man of ordinary stature, and he had feet like an elephant, covered with the thick fat of his legs. The weight of fat kept down his lower eyelids and made them gape; but what was hideous to behold were three round chins hanging on his breast, and more than a foot long, so that his face appeared to be the capital of a truncated column. Thus Edward passed his life, sitting at a window on the ground floor looking out on the street, drinking from time to time a glass of ale, of which a pitcher of huge capacity stood always near him. So extraordinary an appearance could scarcely fail to arrest the attention of the passers-by; but they had to take care not to stop too long, as Edward quickly put them to flight by saying to them in a sepulchral voice: “What are you staring at like wild cats? Go your way, you lazy bodies! Begone, you good-for- nothing dogs!” and other similar amenities. (MED. XXI) HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED
1845
In the segregation phase of ethnic cleansing, of the 100 black voters on Manhattan Island, 1 in 10 lived in the district known as Seneca Village which eventually would be seized by Frederick Law Olmsted in order to enact his grand Central Park as a “surpassingly beautiful pleasure grounds [for the] refreshment and recreation” of the real citizens of the area.
Although during this year Olmsted put in a semester at Yale College, study turned out to be too much like work, and he therefore abandoned academia to operate as a gentleman farmer, first in Connecticut and then on Staten Island. For his pears he would win a silver spoon!
At some point during this period of his life he would see fit to denounce American outhouses as offensive to refined sensitivities: “troublesome, unhealthy, indelicate, and ugly,” and would attempt a Gothic summer- house thingie featuring on the one side a view of his garden but on the other a two-hole or four-hole necessary. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1849
Charles Kingsley, author of the manly adventure WESTWARD HO!, advised an audience at the University of Cambridge that degenerate races such as, for one instance, the North American Indian, were better dead than red:
The truest benevolence is occasional severity. It is expedient that one man die for the people. One tribe exterminated, if need be, to save a whole continent. “Sacrifice of human life?” Prove that it is human life.
Later, in a private letter, he would explain how Anglo-Saxons could spread virtue through extermination:
Because Christ’s kingdom is a kingdom of peace; because the meek alone shall inherit the earth, therefore, you Malays and Dyaks of Sarawak, you are also enemies to peace ... you are beasts, all the more dangerous, because you have a semi-human cunning.
Clearly, by “Westward Ho!” he did not mean “Ho-Ho-Ho, Merry Christmas!”
Sometimes sanitation through ethnic cleansing was something that simply took care of itself, without the intermediation of any white man. Conveniently, a cholera epidemic was at this point filling the cemeteries of the colored Seneca Village district of upper Manhattan Island, which eventually Frederick Law Olmsted would be able to seize in order to enact his Central Park scheme for a “surpassingly beautiful pleasure grounds HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED [for the] refreshment and recreation” of the peaceful white citizens of the civilized city of New-York.
Speaking of New-York, it was in this year that John Snow did his investigations at the Broad Street pump which led to his suggestion that cholera was spread by way of contamination of the public water supply.3
Snow had worked as an anesthetist with the stricken coal miners outside Newcastle-upon-Tyne during England’s 1st great epidemic of the cholera, in 1831-1832. His new theory would not be immediately accepted, as the forces of colonialist denial were very strong and the Indian Medical Service was engaged in the usual blaming of the victims, by alleging without evidence that cholera actually was afflicting only those who were anyway predisposed to such infections:
The alleged predisposition was nothing visible or evident: like the elephant which supports the world, according to Hindoo mythology, it was merely invented to remove a difficulty.
Eventually a simplistic story would be derived, which now requires neutralization. According to this simplistic story, it was the removal of the handle of the Broad Street pump that ended the outbreak of cholera, thus demonstrating the correctness of Dr. Snow’s theory on the mode of communication of cholera. However, the pump handle was not removed until September 8th, after the outbreak had largely waned, its peak having been on September 1st. Dr. Snow himself never made any allegation that the epidemic had waned because of the removal of the pump handle, nor does the raw data support such an inference. Dr. Snow’s actual suggestion as to what had caused the waning of the epidemic was that this had been brought about by a general public flight
3. Rosenberg, Charles E. THE CHOLERA YEARS: THE UNITED STATES IN 1832, 1849, AND 1866. Published in 1987 HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED in all directions, out of the geographical area that was being afflicted. HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED
1850
In the segregation phase of ethnic cleansing, of the 71 black property owners on Manhattan Island, 1 in 5 at this point owned their property in the up-island district known as Seneca Village which eventually would be seized by Frederick Law Olmsted in order to enact his grand Central Park as a “surpassingly beautiful pleasure grounds [for the] refreshment and recreation” of the real citizens of the area. HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED Thomas Mayne Reid, Jr.’s THE RIFLE RANGERS: A THRILLING STORY OF DARING ADVENTURE AND HAIRBREADTH ESCAPES DURING THE MEXICAN WAR. WAR ON MEXICO
Jeez, guy, give it a rest, will you?
Literally thousands of escaped US slaves were living in Mexico, having in the absence of an organized network made their way there either individually or in small groups. These thousands did not compare, however, with the numbers still enslaved in Texas. According to the US census there were 58,161 slaves there, out of a population of 212,592: more than 28% of the Texas population was enslaved.4 Finding the Mexican government to be totally uncooperative, Texas slaveowners took measures to stop escapes as well as reclaim runaways, pressuring the US government to set up border patrols. With only a few troops available to patrol an extended frontier, this would never prove adequate.5
Over the following couple of years Mrs. William Cazneau, who lived in the border town of Eagle Pass between Texas and Mexico, would be documenting the experience of an acquaintance of hers who encountered an ex- slave in Monterey. Much to the surprise of white Americans, former slaves were obtaining wealth and status in their new communities south of the border.
4. Frederick Law Olmsted. A JOURNEY THROUGH TEXAS. (NY: Dix, Edwards and Company, 1857), page 472. 5. Ronnie C. Tyler. “Fugitive Slaves in Mexico,” Journal of Negro History, Volume 57, Issue 1 (January 1972), page 4. HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED
Frederick Law Olmsted visited England and wrote WALKS AND TALKS OF AN AMERICAN FARMER IN ENGLAND. HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED
1852
After returning from a stay in England Frederick Law Olmsted was able to publish his notes on rural life there, and on the practices of the artisans of Liverpool, as WALKS AND TALKS OF AN AMERICAN FARMER IN ENGLAND.
December: Frederick Law Olmsted had met the editor of a new New-York newspaper, the Times, and had determined to make himself over as a foreign correspondent. the foreign country which he would explore would be the American South. He would spend four months touring the states of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South and North Carolina, and Virginia. The controlling idea of society at that time was that slavery, by enabling the existence of a leisure class, was creating human culture and cultivation. What Olmsted would report was the precise opposite of this: “The whole South is maintained in a frontier condition by the system which is apologized for on the ground that it favours good breeding.... The child born today on the Northern frontier, in most cases, before it is ten years old, will be living in a well organized and tolerably well provided community; schools, churches, libraries, lecture and concert halls, daily mails and printing presses, shops and machines in variety, having arrived within at least a day’s journey of it; being always within an influencing distance of it. There are improvements, and communities loosely and gradually cohering in various parts of the South, but so slowly, so feebly, so irregularly, that men’s minds and habits are knit firm quite independently of this class of social influences.” Olmsted observed that “In a Northern community a man who is not greatly occupied with private business is sure to become interested in social enterprises.... School, road, cemetery, asylum, and church corporations; bridge, ferry, and water companies; literary, scientific, art, mechanical, agricultural, and benevolent societies; all these things are managed chiefly by the unpaid services of gentlemen during hours which they can spare from their private interests. [Our young men] are members and managers of reading rooms, public libraries, gymnasiums, game clubs, boat clubs, ball clubs, and all sorts of clubs, Bible classes, debating societies, military companies; they are planting road-side trees, or damming streams for skating ponds, or rigging diving-boards, or getting up fireworks displays, or private theatricals; they are always doing something.” In this “The South” series of articles for the New-York Daily Times, which he would be signing “Yeoman,” Olmsted would denounce Harriet Beecher Stowe for uncritically accepting as hard information HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED stories that had come to her “in a very inexact, or in a very suspicious form, as in novels and narratives of fugitive slaves.” Fugitive lawbreakers he considered to be, as sources, by their very nature “suspicious.” Men who supposed that they owned other human beings were, on the other hand, not only not delusional, they were not as sources in any similar manner suspicious.
This is what the capital building looked like in this season, in Washington DC:
(That’s actual smoke you can see ascending from the dome: the building was being heated during the winter, you know, heated by wood fuel.)
This is what the White House, or Executive Mansion, was looking like: HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED December 11, Saturday: Frederick Law Olmsted set out on a 14-month tour from Virginia down through the Deep South into Texas. He had already decided that slavery was wrong before beginning this journalistic assignment of touring the slave states extended to him by a fellow Free-Soiler, Henry Raymond, editor of the New-York Daily Times. A Hartford-born scientific farmer and the son of a prosperous merchant, he had studied agricultural science and engineering at Yale. Having put a large part of his 130-acre farm on Staten Island into fruit trees, by the time he came to the plantation system of the South he was not inclined to make the usual sort of “city boy” idealistic mistakes about farming. He would send off his newspaper articles as he went along and subsequently rework these into three books, A JOURNEY IN THE SEABOARD SLAVE STATES in 1856, A JOURNEY THROUGH TEXAS in 1857, and A JOURNEY IN THE BACK COUNTRY in 1860. Then he would condense and considerably revise the initial three books and issue the material again in 1861as THE COTTON KINGDOM. He hoped to persuade the white planters that the enslavement of others wasn’t paying off for them – a mission not unlike that the indignant North Carolinan, Hinton R. Helper, intended for his polemical THE IMPENDING CRISIS OF THE SOUTH which would appear shortly after Olmsted’s first book, but carried out by Olmsted in a considerably more subtle and indirect manner. Then in later years Olmsted would become a landscape architect, and design New York’s Central Park and the White City of the Chicago’s World Fair. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:
I think the slaves generally (no one denies that there are exceptions) have plenty to eat; probably are fed better than the proletarian class of any other part of the world. I think that they generally save from their ration of meal. My informant said that commonly as much as five bushels of meal was sent to town by his hands every week, to be sold for them. Upon inquiry, he almost always found that it belonged to only two or three individuals, who had traded for it with the rest; he added, that too often the exchange was for whisky, which, against his rules, they obtained of some rascally white people in the neighborhood, and kept concealed. They were very fond of whisky, and sometimes much injured themselves with it. To show me how well they were supplied with eggs, he said that once a vessel came to anchor, becalmed, off his place, and the captain came to him and asked leave to purchase some eggs of his people. He gave him permission, and called the cook to collect them for him. The cook asked how many she should bring. “Oh, all you can get,” he answered — and she returned after a time, with several boys assisting her, bringing nearly two bushels, all the property of the slaves, and which they were willing to sell at four cents a dozen. One of the smokers explained to me that it is very bad economy, not to allow an abundant supply of food to “a man’s force.” The negroes are fond of good living, and, if not well provided for, know how to provide for themselves. It is, also, but simple policy to have them well lodged and clothed. If they do not have comfortable cabins and sufficient clothing, they will take cold, and be laid up. He lost a very valuable negro, once, from having neglected to provide him with shoes. Lodgings The houses of the slaves are usually log-cabins, of various degrees of comfort and commodiousness. At one end there is a great open fire-place, which is exterior to the wall of the house, being made of clay in an inclosure, about eight feet square and high, of logs. The chimney is sometimes of brick, but more commonly of lath or split sticks, laid up like log-work and plastered with mud. They enjoy great roaring fires, and, as the common fuel is pitch pine, the cabin, at night when the door is open, seen from a distance, appears like a fierce furnace. The chimneys often catch fire, and the cabin is destroyed. Very little precaution can be taken against this danger. Several cabins are placed near together, and they are called “the quarters.” On a plantation of moderate size there will be but one “quarters.” The situation chosen for it has reference to convenience of obtaining water from springs and fuel from the woods. On some of the James River plantations there are larger houses, boarded and made ornamental. In these, eight families, each having a distinct sleeping-room and lock-up closets, and every two having a common kitchen or living-room, are accommodated. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:
He had had an Irish gang draining for him, by contract. He thought a negro could do twice as much work, in a day, as an Irishman. He had not stood over them and seen them at work, but judged entirely from the amount they accomplished: he thought a good gang of negroes would have got on twice as fast. He was sure they must have “trifled” a great deal, or they would have accomplished more than they had. He complained much, also, of their sprees and quarrels. I asked why he should employ Irishmen, in preference to doing the work with his own hands. “It’s dangerous work (unhealthy?), and a negro’s life is too valuable to be risked at it. If a negro dies, it’s a considerable loss, you know.” He afterwards said that his negroes never worked so hard as to tire themselves-always were lively, and ready to go off on a frolic at night. He did not think they ever did half a fair day’s work. They could not be made to work hard: they never would lay out their strength freely, and it was impossible to make them do it. This is just what I have thought when I have seen slaves at work-they seem to go through the motions of labor without putting strength into them. They keep their powers in reserve for their own use at night, perhaps. Mr. W. also said that he cultivated only the coarser and lower-priced sorts of tobacco, because the finer sorts required more painstaking and discretion than it was possible to make a large gang of negroes use. “You can make a nigger work,” he said, “but you cannot make him think.” Although Mr. W. was very wealthy (or, at least, would be considered so anywhere at the North), and was a gentleman of education, his style of living was very farmer-like, and thoroughly Southern. On their plantations, generally, the Virginia gentlemen seem to drop their full- dress and constrained town-habits, and to live a free, rustic, shooting- jacket life. We dined in a room that extended out, rearwardly, from the house, and which, in a Northern establishment, would have been the kitchen. The cooking was done in a detached log-cabin, and the dishes brought some distance, through the open air, by the servants. The outer door was left constantly open though there was a fire in an enormous old fire-place, large enough, if it could have been distributed sufficiently, to have lasted a New York seamstress the best part of the winter. By the door, there was indiscriminate admittance to negro children and fox-hounds, and, on an average, there were four of these, grinning or licking their chops, on either side of my chair, all the time I was at the table. A stout woman acted as head waitress, employing two handsome little mulatto boys as her aids in communicating with the kitchen, from which relays of hot corn-bread, of an excellence quite new to me, were brought at frequent intervals. There was no other bread, and but one vegetable served-sweet potato, roasted in ashes, and this, I thought, was the best sweet potato, also, that I ever had eaten; but there were four preparations of swine’s flesh, besides fried fowls, fried eggs, cold roast turkey, and opossum, cooked I know not how, but it somewhat resembled baked sucking-pig. The only beverages on the table were milk and whisky. I was pressed to stay several days with Mr. W., and should have been glad to have accepted such hospitality, had not another engagement prevented. When I was about to leave, an old servant was directed to get a horse, and go with me, as guide, to the rail-road station at Col. Gillin’s. He followed behind me, and I had great difficulty in inducing him to ride near enough to converse with me. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:
I wished to ascertain from him how old the different stages of the old- field forest-growth, by the side of our road, might be; but, for a long time, he was, or pretended to be, unable to comprehend my questions. When he did so, the most accurate information he could give me was, that he reckoned such a field (in which the pines were now some sixty feet high) had been planted with tobacco the year his old master bought him. He thought he was about twenty years old then, and that now he was forty. He had every appearance of being seventy. He frequently told me there was no need for him to go any further, and that it was a dead, straight road to the station, without any forks. As he appeared very eager to return, I was at length foolish enough to allow myself to be prevailed upon to dispense with his guidance; gave him a quarter of a dollar for his time that I had employed, and went on alone. The road, which for a short distance further was plain enough, soon began to ramify, and, in half an hour, we were stumbling along a dark wood- path, looking eagerly for a house. At length, seeing one across a large clearing, we went through a long lane, opening gates and letting down bars, until we met two negroes, riding a mule, who were going to the plantation near the school-house, which we had seen the day before. Following them thither, we knew the rest of the way (Jane gave a bound and neighed, when we struck the old road, showing that she had beef lost, as well as I, up to the moment). It was twenty minutes after the hour given in the time-table for the passage of the train, when I reached the station, but it had not arrived; nor did it make its appearance for a quarter of an hour longer; so I had plenty of time to deliver Tom’s wife’s message and take leave of Jane. I am sorry to say she appeared very indifferent, and seemed to think a good deal more of Tom than of me. Mr. W. had told me that the train would, probably, be half an hour behind its advertised time, and that I had no need to ride with haste, to reach it. I asked Col. Gillin if it would be safe to always calculate on the train being half an hour late: he said it would not; for, although usually that much behind the time- table, it was sometimes half an hour ahead of it. So those, who would be safe, had commonly to wait an hour. People, therefore, who wished to go not more than twenty miles from home, would find it more convenient, and equally expeditious, taking all things into account, to go in their own conveyance-there being but few who lived so near the station that they would not have to employ a horse and servant to get to it. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:
Half an hour after this I arrived at the negro-quarter — a little hamlet of ten or twelve small and dilapidated cabins. Just beyond them was a plain farm-gate, at which several negroes were standing; one of them, a well-made man, with an intelligent countenance and prompt manner, directed me how to find my way to his owner’s house. It was still nearly a mile distant; and yet, until I arrived in its immediate vicinity, I saw no cultivated field, and but one clearing. On the edge of this clearing, a number of negroes, male and female, lay stretched out upon the ground near a small smoking charcoal pit. Their master afterwards informed me that they were burning charcoal for the plantation blacksmith, using the time allowed them for holidays — from Christmas to New Year’ — to earn a little money for themselves in this way. He paid them by the bushel for it. When I said that I supposed he allowed them to take what wood they chose for this purpose, he replied that he had five hundred acres covered with wood, which he would be very glad to have any one burn, or clear off in any way. Cannot some Yankee contrive a method of concentrating some of the valuable properties of this old field pine, so that they may be profitably brought into use in more cultivated regions? Charcoal is now brought to New York from Virginia; but when made from pine it is not very valuable, and will only bear transportation from the banks of the navigable rivers, whence it can be shipped, at one movement, to New York. Turpentine does not flow in sufficient quantity from this variety of the pine to be profitably collected, and for lumber it is of very small value. Mr. W.’s house was an old family mansion, which he had himself remodeled in the Grecian style, and furnished with a large wooden portico. An oak forest had originally occupied the ground where it stood; but this having been cleared and the soil worn out in cultivation by the previous proprietors, pine woods now surrounded it in every direction, a square of a few acres only being kept clear immediately about it. A number of the old oaks still stood in the rear of the house, and, until Mr. W. commenced his improvements, there had been some in its front. These, however, he had cut away, as interfering with the symmetry of his grounds, and in place of them had planted ailanthus trees in parallel rows. On three sides of the outer part of the cleared square there was a row of large and comfortable-looking negro-quarters, stables, tobaccohouses, and other offices, built of logs. Mr. W. was one of the few large planters, of his vicinity, who still made the culture of tobacco their principal business. He said there was a general prejudice against tobacco, in all the tide-water region of the State, because it was through the culture of tobacco that the once fertile soils had been impoverished; but he did not believe that, at the present value of negroes, their labor could be applied to the culture of grain, with any profit, except under peculiarly favorable circumstances. Possibly, the use of guano might make wheat a paying crop, but he still doubted. He had not used it, himself. Tobacco required fresh land, and was rapidly exhausting, but it returned more money, for the labor used upon it, than anything else; enough more, in his opinion, to pay for the wearing out of the land. If he was well- paid for it, he did not know why he should not wear out his land. His tobacco-fields were nearly all in a distant and lower part of his plantation; land which had been neglected before his time, in a great measure, because it had been sometimes flooded, and was, much of the year, too wet for cultivation. He was draining and clearing it, and it now brought good crops. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report: Free-labor Farm in Virginia I have been visiting a farm, cultivated entirely by free-labor. The proprietor told me that he was first led to disuse slave-labor, not from any economical considerations, but because he had become convinced that there was an essential wrong in holding men in forced servitude with any other purpose than to benefit them alone, and because he was not willing to allow his own children to be educated as slave-masters. His father had been a large slaveholder, and he felt very strongly the bad influence it had had on his own character. He wished me to be satisfied that Jefferson uttered a great truth when he asserted that slavery was more pernicious to the white race than the black. Although, therefore, a chief part of his inheritance had been in slaves, he had liberated them all. Most of them had, by his advice, gone to Africa. These he had frequently heard from. Except a child that had been drowned, they were, at his last account, all alive, in general good health, and satisfactorily prospering. He had lately received a letter from one of them, who told him that he was “trying to preach the Gospel,”and who had evidently greatly improved, both intellectually and morally, since he left here. With regard to those going North, and the common opinion that they encountered much misery, and would be much better off here, he said that it entirely depended on the general character and habits of the individual: it was true of those who were badly brought up, and who had acquired indolent and vicious habits, especially if they were drunkards, but, if of some intelligence and well-trained, they generally represented themselves to be successful and contented. He mentioned two remarkable cases, that had come under his own observation, of this kind. One was that of a man who had been free, but, by some fraud and informality of his papers, was re-ënslaved. He ran away, and afterwards negotiated, by correspondence, with his master, and purchased his freedom. This man he had accidentally met fifteen years afterwards, in a Northern city; he was engaged in profitable and increasing business, and showed him, by his books, that he was possessed of property to the amount of ten thousand dollars. He was living a great deal more comfortably and wisely than ever his old master had done. The other case was that of a colored woman, who had obtained her freedom, and who became apprehensive that she also was about to be fraudulently made a slave again. She fled to Philadelphia, where she was nearly starved, at first. A little girl, who heard her begging in the streets to be allowed to work for bread, told her that her mother was wanting some washing done, and she followed her home. The mother, not knowing her, was afraid to trust her with the articles to be washed. She prayed so earnestly for the job, however-suggesting that she might be locked into a room until she had completed it — that it was given her. So she commenced life in Philadelphia. Ten years afterwards he had accidentally met her there; she recognized him immediately, recalled herself to his recollection, manifested the greatest joy at seeing him, and asked him to come to her house, which he found a handsome three- story building, furnished really with elegance; and she pointed out to him, from the window, three houses in the vicinity that she owned and rented. She showed great anxiety to have her children well educated, and was employing the best instructors for them which she could procure in Philadelphia. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:
This gentleman, notwithstanding his anti-slavery sentiments, by no means favors the running away of slaves, and thinks the Abolitionists have done immense harm to the cause they have at heart. He wishes Northerners would mind their business, and leave Slavery alone, say but little about it —nothing in the present condition of affairs at the South— and never speak of it but in a kind and calm manner. He would not think it right to return a fugitive slave; but he would never assist one to escape. He has several times purchased slaves, generally such as his neighbors were obliged to sell, and who would otherwise have been taken South. This he had been led to do by the solicitation of some of their relatives. He had retained them in his possession until their labor had in some degree returned their cost to him, and he could afford to provide them with the means of going to Africa or the North, and a small means of support after their arrival. Having received some suitable training in his family, they had, without exception, been successful, and had frequently sent him money to purchase the freedom of relatives or friends they had left in slavery. He considered the condition of slaves to have much improved since the Revolution, and very perceptibly during the last twenty years. The original stock of slaves, the imported Africans, he observed, probably required to be governed with much greater severity, and very little humanity was exercised or thought of with regard to them. The slaves of the present day are of a higher character; in fact, he did not think more than half of them were full-blooded Africans. Public sentiment condemned the man who treated his slaves with cruelty. The owners were mainly men of some cultivation, and felt a family attachment to their slaves, many of whom had been the playmates of their boyhood. Nevertheless, they were frequently punished severely, under the impulse of temporary passion, often without deliberation, and on unfounded suspicion. This was especially the case where they were left to overseers, who, though sometimes men of intelligence and piety, were more often coarse, brutal, and licentious; drinking men, wholly unfitted for the responsibility imposed on them. He had read UNCLE TOM’S CABIN; mentioned several points in which he thought it wrong —that Uncle Tom was too highly painted, for instance; that such a character could not exist in, or spring out of Slavery, and that no gentleman of Kentucky or Virginia would have allowed himself to be in the position with a slave-dealer in which Mr. Shelby is represented— but he acknowledged that cases of cruelty and suffering, equal to any described in it, might be found. In his own neighborhood, some time ago, a man had been whipped to death; and he recollected several that had been maimed for life, by harsh and hasty punishment; but the whole community were indignant when such things occurred, and any man guilty of them would be without associates, except of similar character. The opinions of this gentleman must not, of course, be considered as representative of those of the South in general, by any means; but as to facts, he is a competent, and, I believe, a wholly candid and unprejudiced witness. He is much respected, and on terms of friendship with all his neighbors, though they do not like his views on this subject. He told me, however, that one of them, becoming convinced of their correctness some time ago, freed his slaves, and moved to Ohio. As to UNCLE TOM, it is generally criticised very severely, and its representations of Slavery indignantly denied. I observe that it is not placarded outside the booksellers’ stores, though the whole fleet of gunboats that have been launched after it show their colors bravely. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:
It [UNCLE TOM’S CABIN] must, however, be a good deal read here, as I judge from the frequent allusions I hear made to it. With regard to the value of slave-labor, this gentleman is confident that, at present, he has the advantage in employing freemen instead of it. It has not been so until of late, the price of slaves having much advanced within ten years, while immigration has made free white laborers more easy to be procured. He has heretofore had some difficulty in obtaining hands when he needed them, and has suffered a good deal from the demoralizing influence of adjacent slave-labor, the men, after a few months’ residence, inclining to follow the customs of the slaves with regard to the amount of work they should do in a day, or their careless mode of operation. He has had white and black Virginians, sometimes Germans, and latterly Irish. Of all these, he has found the Irish on the whole the best. The poorest have been the native white Virginians; next, the free blacks: and though there have been exceptions, he has not generally paid these as high as one hundred dollars a year, and has thought them less worth their wages than any he has had. At present, he has two white natives and two free colored men, but both the latter were brought up in his family, and are worth twenty dollars a year more than the average. The free black, he thinks, is generally worse than the slave, and so is the poor white man. He also employs, at present, four Irish hands, and is expecting two more to arrive, who have been recommended to him, and sent for by those he has. He pays the Irishmen $120 a year, and boards them. He has had them for $100; but these are all excellent men, and well worth their price. They are less given to drinking than any men he has ever had; and one of them first suggested improvements to him in his farm, that he is now carrying out with prospects of considerable advantage. House-maids, Irish girls, he pays $3 and $6 a month. He does not apprehend that in future he shall have any difficulty in obtaining steady and reliable men, that will accomplish much more work than any slaves. There are some operations, such as carting and spreading dung, and all work with the fork, spade, or shovel, at which his Irishmen will do, he thinks, over fifty per cent more in a day than any negroes he has ever known. On the whole, he is satisfied that at present free-labor is more profitable than slave-labor, though his success is not so evident that he would be willing to have attention particularly called to it. His farm, moreover, is now in a transition state from one system of husbandry to another, and appearances are temporarily more unfavorable on that account. The wages paid for slaves, when they are hired for agricultural labor, do not differ at present, he says, from those which he pays for his free laborers. In both cases the hiring party boards the laborer, but, in addition to money and board, the slave-employer has to furnish clothing, and is subject, without redress, to any losses which may result from the carelessness or malevolence of the slave. He also has to lose his time if he is unwell, or when from any cause he is absent or unable to work. The slave, if he is indisposed to work, and especially if he is not treated well, or does not like the master who has hired him, will sham sickness — even make himself sick or lame — that he need not work. But a more serious loss frequently arises, when the slave, thinking he is worked too hard, or being angered by punishment or unkind treatment, “getting the sulks,” takes to “the swamp,” and comes back when he has a mind to. Often this will not be till the year is up for which he is engaged, when he will return to his owner, who, glad to find his property safe, and that it has not died in the Swamp, or gone to Canada, forgets to punish him, and immediately sends him for another year to a new master. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:
“But, meanwhile, how does the negro support life in the swamp?” I asked. “Oh, he gets sheep and pigs and calves, and fowls and turkeys; sometimes they will kill a small cow. We have often seen the fires, where they were cooking them, through the woods, in the swamp yonder. If it is cold, he will crawl under a fodder-stack, or go into the cabins with some of the other negroes, and in the same way, you see, he can get all the corn, or almost anything else he wants.” “He steals them from his master?” “From any one; frequently from me. I have had many a sheep taken by them.” “It is a common thing, then?” “Certainly, it is, very common, and the loss is sometimes exceedingly provoking. One of my neighbors here was going to build, and hired two mechanics for a year. Just as he was ready to put his house up, the two men, taking offense at something, both ran away, and did not come back at all, till their year was out, and then their owner immediately hired them out again to another man.” These negroes “in the swamp,” he said, were often hunted after, but it was very difficult to find them, and, if caught, they would run again, and the other negroes would hide and assist them. Dogs to track them he had never known to be used in Virginia. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1854
Mrs. Caroline Lee Hentz’s THE PLANTER’S NORTHERN BRIDE (Philadelphia: T.D. Peterson). The gist of this was that the author, although a personal friend of the misled Harriet Beecher Stowe, had quite a bit more life experience in regard to human slavery. What a crock was her UNCLE TOM’S CABIN! Actual southern white masters cared for their black slaves and watched over them and provided for them. Northern white abolitionists were selfrighteous busybodies and were motivated by a desire for personal gain rather than a desire to benefit humankind. Besides, it would be manifestly wrong to encourage the terror of a slave uprising, and besides, in the “free” North there’s a crying need for cheap labor, so there!
Benign White Mistress
... the negroes of the south are the happiest labouring class on the face of the globe.
Frederick Law Olmsted would write of encountering an escaped US slave during his travels through Mexico. Much to the surprise of white Americans, former slaves were holding their own in their new communities south of the border.
Bronson Alcott was so perturbed about the capture and return of “fugitive slaves” to the slaveholders of the South that, for the 1st time in his life, he abandoned his posture of complete noncooperation with government, and went to the polls and voted. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:
Recreation and Luxury among the Slaves Saturday, Dec. 25. From Christmas to New-Year’s Day, most of the slaves, except house servants, enjoy a freedom from labor; and Christmas is especially holiday, or Saturnalia, with them. The young ones began last night firing crackers, and I do not observe that they are engaged in any other amusement to-day; the older ones are generally getting drunk, and making business for the police. I have seen large gangs coming in from the country, and these contrast much in their general appearance with the town negroes. The latter are dressed expensively, and frequently more elegantly than the whites. They seem to be spending money freely, and I observe that they, and even the slaves that wait upon me at the hotel, often have watches, and other articles of value. The slaves have a good many ways of obtaining “spending money,” which, though in law belonging to their owner, as the property of a son under age does to his father, they are never dispossessed of, and use for their own gratification, with even less restraint than a wholesome regard for their health and moral condition may be thought to require. A Richmond paper, complaining of the liberty allowed to slaves in this respect, as calculated to foster an insubordinate spirit, speaks of their “champagne suppers.” The police broke into a gambling cellar a few nights since, and found about twenty negroes at “high play,” with all the usual accessories of a first-class “Hell.” It is mentioned that, among the number taken to the watch-house, and treated with lashes the next morning, there were some who had previously enjoyed a high reputation for piety, and others of a very elegant or foppish appearance. Passing two negroes in the street, I heard the following: “Workin’ in a tobacco factory all de year roun’, an’ come Christmas, only twenty dollars! Workin’ mighty hard, too-up to 12 o’clock o’ night very often — an’ then to hab a nigger oberseah!” “A nigger!” “Yes — dat’s it, yer see. Wouldn’t care if ’twarnt for dat. Nothin’ but a dirty nigger! orderin’ ’round, jes’ as if he was a wite man!” It is the custom of tobacco manufacturers to hire slaves and free negroes at a certain rate of wages per year. A task of 45 lbs. per day is given them to work up, and all that they choose to do more than this they are paid for — payment being made once a fortnight; and invariably this over- wages is used by the slave for himself, and is usually spent in drinking, licentiousness and gambling. The man was grumbling that he had saved but $20 to spend at the holidays. One of the manufacturers offered to show me, by his books, that nearly all gained by overwork $5 a month, many $20, and some as much as $28. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:
Ingenuity Of The Negro Sitting with a company of smokers last night, one of them, to show me the manner in which a slave of any ingenuity or cunning would manage to avoid working for his master’s profit, narrated the following anecdote. He was executor of an estate in which, among other negroes, there was one very smart man, who, he knew perfectly well, ought to be earning for the estate $150 a year, and who could do it if he chose, yet whose wages for a year, being let out by the day or job, had amounted to but $18, while he had paid for medical attendance upon him $45. Having failed in every other way to make him earn anything, he proposed to him that he should purchase his freedom and go to Philadelphia, where he had a brother. He told him if he would earn a certain sum ($400 I believe), and pay it over to the estate for himself, he would give him his free papers. The man agreed to the arrangement, and by his overwork in a tobacco factory, and some assistance from his free brother, soon paid the sum agreed upon, and was sent to Philadelphia. A few weeks afterwards he met him in the street, and asked him why he had returned. “Oh, I don’t like dat Philadelphy, massa; ant no chance for colored folks dere; spec’ if I’d been a runaway, de wite folks dere take care o’ me; but I couldn’t git anythin’ to do, so I jis borrow ten dollar of my broder, and cum back to old Virginny.” “But you know the law forbids your return. I wonder that you are not afraid to be seen here; I should think Mr.______(an officer of police) would take you up.” “0h! I look out for dat, Massa, I juss hire myself out to Mr.______himself, ha! ha! He tink I your boy.” And so it proved, the officer, thinking that he was permitted to hire himself out, and tempted by the low wages at which he offered himself, had neglected to ask for his written permission, and had engaged him for a year. He still lived with the officer, and was an active, healthy, good servant to him. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:
Qualities as a Laborer A well-informed capitalist and slave-holder remarked, that negroes could not be employed in cotton factories. I said that I understood they were so in Charleston, and some other places at the South. “It may be so, yet,” he answered, “but they will have to give it up.” The reason was, he said, that the negro could never be trained to exercise judgment; he cannot be made to use his mind; he always depends on machinery doing its own work, and cannot be made to watch it. He neglects it until something is broken or there is great waste. “We have tried reward and punishments, but it makes no difference. It’s his nature and you cannot change it. All men are indolent and have a disinclination to labor, but this is a great deal stronger in the African race than in any other. In working niggers, we just always calculate that they will not labor at all except to avoid punishment, and they will never do more than just enough to save themselves from being punished, and no amount of punishment will prevent their working carelessly and indifferently. It always seems on the plantation as if they took pains to break all the tools and spoil all the cattle that they possibly can, even when they know they’ll be directly punished for it.” As to rewards, he said, “They only want to support life, they will not work for anything more; and in this country it would be hard to prevent their getting that.” I thought this opinion of the power of rewards was not exactly confirmed by the narrative we had just heard, but I said nothing. “If you could move,” he continued, “all the white people from the whole seaboard district of Virginia and give it up to the negroes that are on it now, just leave them to themselves, in ten years time there would not be an acre of land cultivated, and nothing would be produced, except what grew spontaneously.” The Hon. Willoughby Newton, by the way, seems to think that if it had not been for the introduction of guano, a similar desolation would have soon occurred without the Africanization of the country. He is reported to have said: I look upon the introduction of guano, and the success attending its application to our barren lands, in the light of a special interposition of Divine Providence, to save the northern neck of Virginia from reverting entirely into its former state of wilderness and utter desolation. Until the discovery of guano —more valuable to us than the mines of California— I looked upon the possibility of renovating our soil, of ever bringing it to a point capable of producing remunerating crops, as utterly hopeless. Our up-lands were all worn out, and our bottom-lands fast failing, and if it had not been for guano, to revive our last hope, a few years more and the whole country must have been deserted by all who desired to increase their own wealth, or advance the cause of civilization by a proper cultivation of the earth. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:
Improvement of the Negro in Slavery “But are they not improving?” said I; “that is a point in which I am much interested, and I should be glad to know what is your observation? Have they not, as a race, improved during the last hundred years, do you not think?” “Oh, yes indeed, very greatly. During my time —I can remember how they were forty years ago— they have improved two thousand per cent.! Don’t you think so?” he asked another gentleman. “Yes; certainly.” “And you may find them now, on the isolated old plantations in the back country, just as I recollect them when I was a boy, stupid and moping, and with no more intelligence than when they first came from Africa. But all about where the country is much settled their condition is vastly ameliorated. They are treated much better, they are fed better, and they have much greater educational privileges.” Educational Privileges “Educational privileges?” I asked, in surprise. “I mean by preaching and religious instruction. They have the Bible read to them a great deal, and there is preaching for them all over the country. They have preachers of their own; right smart ones they are, too, some of them.” “Do they?” said I. “I thought that was not allowed by law.” “Well, it is not — that is, they are not allowed to have meetings without some white man, is present. They must not preach unless a white man hears what they say. However, they do. On my plantation, they always have a meeting on Sundays, and I have sometimes, when I have been there, told my overseer, — ‘You must go up there to the meeting, you know the law requires it;’ and he would start as if he was going, but would just look in and go by; he wasn’t going to wait for them.” A Distinguished Divine He then spoke of a minister, whom he owned, and described him as a very intelligent man. He knew almost the whole of the Bible by heart. He was a fine-looking man — a fine head and a very large frame. He had been a sailor, and had been in New Orleans and New York, and many foreign ports. “He could have left me at any time for twenty years, if he had wished to,” he said. “I asked him once how he would like to live in New York? Oh, he did not like New York at all! niggers were not treated well there - there was more distinction made between them and white folks than there was here. ‘Oh, dey ain’t no place in de worl like Ole Virginny for niggers, massa,’ says he.” Another gentleman gave similar testimony. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:
How they are Fed I said I supposed that they were much better off, more improved intellectually, and more kindly treated in Virginia than further South. He said I was mistaken in both respects — that in Louisiana, especially, they were more intelligent, because the amalgamation of the races was much greater, and they were treated with more familiarity by the whites; besides which, the laws of Louisiana were much more favorable to them. For instance, they required the planter to give slaves 200 pounds of pork a year: and he gave a very apt anecdote, showing the effect of this law, but which, at the same time, made it evident that a Virginian may be accustomed to neglect providing sufficient food for his force, and that they sometimes suffer greatly for want of it. I was assured, however, that this was very rare —that, generally, the slaves were well provided for —always allowed a sufficient quantity of meal, and, generally, of pork —were permitted to raise pigs and poultry, and in summer could always grow as many vegetables as they wanted. It was observed, however, that they frequently neglected to provide for themselves in this way, and live mainly on meal and bacon. If a man does not provide well for his slaves, it soon becomes known, he gets the name of a “nigger killer,” and loses the respect of the community. The general allowance of food was thought to be a peck and a half of meal, and three pounds of bacon a week. This, it was observed, is as much meal as they can eat, but they would be glad to have more bacon; sometimes they receive four pounds, but it is oftener that they get less than three. It is distributed to them on Saturday nights; or, on the better managed plantations, sometimes, on Wednesday, to prevent their using it extravagantly, or selling it for whisky on Sunday. This distribution is called the “drawing,” and is made by the overseer to all the heads of families or single negroes. Except on the smallest plantations, where the cooking is done in the house of the proprietor, there is a cook-house, furnished with a large copper for boiling, and an oven. Every night the negroes take their “mess,” for the next day’s breakfast and dinner, to the cook, to be prepared for the next day. Custom varies as to the time it is served out to them; sometimes at morning and noon, at other times at noon and night. Each negro marks his meat by cuts, so that he shall know it from the rest, and they observe each other’s rights with regard to this, punctiliously. After breakfast has been eaten early in the cabins, at sunrise or a little before in winter, and perhaps a little later in summer, they go to the field. At noon dinner is brought to them, and, unless the work presses, they are allowed two hours’ rest. Very punctually at sunset they stop work and are at liberty, except that a squad is detached once a week for shelling corn, to go to the mill for the next week’s drawing of meal. Thus they work in the field about eleven hours a day on an average. Returning to the cabins, wood “ought to have been” carted for them; but if it has not been, they then go to the woods and “tote” it home for themselves. They then make a fire —a big, blazing fire at this season, for the supply of fuel is unlimited— and cook their own supper, which will be a bit of bacon fried, often with eggs, corn-bread baked in the spider after the bacon, to absorb the fat, and perhaps some sweet potatoes roasted in the ashes. Immediately after supper they go to sleep, often lying on the floor or a bench in preference to a bed. About two o’clock they very generally rouse up and cook and eat, or eat cold, what they call their “mornin’ bit;” then sleep again till breakfast. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:
Clothing As to the clothing of the slaves on the plantations, they are said to be usually furnished by their owners or masters, every year, each with a coat and trousers, of a coarse woolen or woolen and cotton stuff (mostly made, especially for this purpose, in Providence, R. I.), for Winter, trousers of cotton osnaburghs for Summer, sometimes with a jacket also of the same; two pairs of strong shoes, or one pair of strong boots and one of lighter shoes for harvest; three shirts; one blanket, and one felt hat. The women have two dresses of striped cotton, three shifts, two pairs of shoes, etc. The women lying-in are kept at knitting short sacks, from cotton which, in Southern Virginia, is usually raised, for this purpose, on the farm, and these are also given to the negroes. They also purchase clothing for themselves, and, I notice especially, are well supplied with handkerchiefs which the men frequently, and the women nearly always, wear on their heads. On Sundays and holidays they usually look very smart, but when at work, very ragged and slovenly. At the conclusion of our bar-room session, some time after midnight, as we were retiring to our rooms, our progress up stairs and along the corridors was several times impeded, by negroes lying fast asleep, in their usual clothes only, upon the floor. I asked why they were not abed, and was answered by a gentleman, that negroes never wanted to go to bed; they always preferred to sleep upon the floor. Fraternity As I was walking in the outskirts of the town this morning, I saw squads of negro and white boys together, pitching pennies and firing crackers in complete fraternization. The white boys manifested no superiority, or assumption of it, over the dark ones. An old, palsied negro-woman, very thinly and very raggedly clad, met me and spoke to me. I could not, from the trembling incoherency of her voice, understand what she said, but she was evidently begging, and I never saw a more pitiable object of charity at the North. She was, perhaps, a free person, with no master and no system to provide for her. I saw, for the first time in my life, two or three young white women smoking tobacco in clay pipes. From their manner it was evidently a well- formed habit, and one which they did not suspect there was occasion for them to practice clandestinely, or be ashamed of. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED’s report:
Religious Condition With regard to the moral and religious condition of the slaves, I cannot, either from what I observe, or from what is told me, consider it in any way gratifying. They are forbidden by law to meet together for worship, or for the purpose of mutual improvement. In the cities, there are churches especially for them, in which the exercises are conducted by white clergymen. In the country, there is usually a service, after that for the whites especially, in all the churches which, by the way, are not very thickly scattered. In one parish, about twenty miles from Richmond, I was told that the colored congregation in the afternoon is much smaller than that of the whites in the morning; and it was thought not more than one-fifth of the negroes living within a convenient distance were in the habit of attending it; and of these many came late, and many more slept through the greater part of the service. A goodly proportion of them, I am told, “profess religion,” and are received into the fellowship of the churches; but it is evident, of the greater part even of these, that their idea of religion, and the standard of morality which they deem consistent with a “profession” of it, is very degraded. That they are subject to intense excitements, often really maniacal, which they consider to be religious, is true; but as these are described, I cannot see that they indicate anything but a miserable system of superstition, the more painful that it employs some forms and words ordinarily connected with true Christianity. A Virginia correspondent of the N. Y. Times, writing upon the general religious condition of the State, and of the comparative strength and usefulness of the different churches, says: The Baptists also number (in Eastern Virginia) 44,000 colored members. This makes a great difference. Negroes join the church —perhaps in a great majority of cases— with no ideas of religion. I have but little confidence in their religious professions. Many of them I hope are very pious; but many of them are great scoundrels —perhaps the great majority of them— regardless of their church profession as a rule of conduct. They are often baptized in great numbers, and the Baptist Church (so exemplary in so much) is to blame, I fear, in the ready admission it gives to the negroes. The Baptist Church generally gets the negroes — where there are no Baptists, the Methodist. Immersion strikes their fancy. It is a palpable, overt act, that their imagination can take hold of. The ceremony mystically impresses them, as the ceremonies of Romanism affect the devotees of that connection. They come up out of the water, and believe they see “the Lord.” In their religion, negroes are excessively superstitious. They have all sorts of “experiences,” and enjoy the most wonderful revelations. Visions of the supernatural are of nightly occurrence, and the most absurd circumstances are invested with some marvelous significance. I have heard that the great ordeal, in their estimation, a “seeker” had to pass, was being held over the infernal flames by a thread or a hair. If the thread does not break, the suspendee is “in the Lord.” It is proper, therefore, I think, to consider this circumstance, in estimating the strength of a Church, whose communicants embrace such a number of negroes. Of the Methodists, in Eastern Virginia, some six or seven thousand are colored. This condition of the slaves is not necessarily a reproach to those whose duty it more particularly is to instruct and preach the true Gospel to them. It is, in a great degree, a necessary result of the circumstances of their existence. The possession of arbitrary power has always, the world over, tended irresistibly to destroy humane sensibility, magnanimity, and truth.... HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1856
To give you some idea what “Republican” meant in that era, this was the year in which “Central Park” in New- York began to be established. as a central metaphor, a self-consciously designed “republican establishment,” replacing what had been characterized (falsely) as a fetid swamp in the past at that location, a place at which the white male recent immigrant was to be enabled to ride with his family in a carriage past scenes of natural beauty in order for such a white male recent immigrant to be humanized and civilized and acculturated into the American quest.
The ideal of natural beauty selected for such a purpose was of course that offered in the landed estates of English nobility, so admired and/or envied by Frederick Douglass.
GOD IN CONCORD by Jane Langton © 1992 Penguin Books USA Inc. 13 The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken. . . . Walden, “Economy” Viking Penguin
Julian Snow’s two-week vacation was over. He was back at work at the landfill next to Pond View. His boss at Public ISBN 0-670-84260-5 — PS3562.A515G58
Seneca Village in upper Manhattan Island consisted at this point of dozens of homes and barns, and boasted its own schools, churches, and graveyards. The village, although primarily black, also hosted HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED a substantial Irish presence. This entire district was shortly to be seized by the city under its powers of “eminent domain” so that Frederick Law Olmsted might enact his grand Central Park gentrification scheme of a “surpassingly beautiful pleasure grounds [for] refreshment and recreation.” The geist of this project was that this was to be a self-consciously “republican” venue through which the recent immigrant, white and leisured of course, would be able to ride in a carriage with his family past scenes of natural beauty in order for such persons to be humanized and civilized and acculturated into our American quest. The ideal of natural beauty selected for such a purpose was of course to be that offered in the estates of the English nobility: there was to be an entire absence of darkie hovels and Irish shanties. During this year Olmsted’s A JOURNEY IN THE SEABOARD SLAVE STATES recycled his newspaper columns from his trip into the American South of 1852. The material in the files for 1852 was taken from pages 88-115, “A Tabacco Plantation in Virginia”:
[click here] October 20, Monday: The Surveyor General’s office moved to Lecompton, that had come to function as the capital of the Kansas Territory. THE 2D GREAT AMERICAN DISUNION
Henry Thoreau wrote to Thomas Cholmondeley in gratitude for the gift of the Indian books (you will note that in this thank-you note Thoreau makes mention of the volumes of Jean Froissart’s CHRONICLES on his shelf, in an edition printed in 1855: presumably that would be due to the fact that the antique family of his benefactor, as Cholmondeley of course well knew, had received honorable mention in that illuminated medieval work). At some point, also, Thoreau sent to England a packet including a copy of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, Walt Whitman’s POEMS and LEAVES OF GRASS,6 and Frederick Law Olmsted’s book on the general culture of the Southern states, A JOURNEY IN THE SEABOARD SLAVE STATES. Concord Mass. Oct 20th 1856. Dear Cholmondeley I wish to thank you again for those books. They are the nucleus of my library. I wrote to you on the receipt of them last winter, (direct- ing as now) but not having heard from you, do not know in what part of the world this may find you. Several here are enquiring if you have returned to England, as you had just started for the Crimea at the last accounts. The books have long been shelved in cases of my own construction made partly of the driftwood of our river. They are the admiration of all beholders. Alcott and Emerson, besides myself have been cracking some of the nuts. Certainly I shall never pay you for them. Of those new to me the Rig Veda is the most savory that I have yet tasted. As primitive poetry, I think as any extant. Indeed all the Vedantic literature is priceless. There they stand occupying two shelves, headed by Froissart, stretching round Egypt and India “Ultima Thule”, as a fit conclu- sion. What a world of variety. I shall browse there for some winters to come. While war has given place to peace on your side, perhaps a more serious war still is breaking out here. I seem to hear its dis- tant mutterings, though it may be long before the bolt will fall in our midst. There has not been anything which you could call union be- tween the north and south in this country for many years, and there cannot be so long as slavery is in the way. I only wish that northern –that any men –were better material, or that I for one had more skill to deal with them; that the north h ad more spirit and would settle
6. Would this be the “Henry Thoreau’s copy of LEAVES OF GRASS” that was knocked down on auction at Sotheby’s in 2002 or 2003, evidently to a Whitman collector, for US$119,500? HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED the question at once, and here instead of struggling feebly and pro- tractedly away off on the plains of Kansas. They are on the eve of a Presidential election, as perhaps you know. — and all good people are praying that of the three candidates Fremont may be the man; but in my opinion the issue is quite doubtful. As far as I have ob- served, the worst man stands the best chance in this country. But as for politics, what I most admire now-a-days, is not the regular gov- ernments but the irregular primitive ones, like the Vigilance commit- tee in California and even the free state men in Kansas. They are the most divine. — I have just taken a run up country, as I did with you once, only a little farther this time; to the Connecticut river in New Hampshire, where I saw Alcott, King of men. He is among those who ask after you, and takes a special interest in the oriental books. He cannot say enough about them. “And then that he should send you a library! Think of it!” I am sorry that I can give but a poor account of myself. I got “run down'' they say, more than a year ago, and have not yet got fairly up again. It has not touched my spirits however, for they are as indif- ferently tough, as sluggishly resilient, as a dried fungus. I would it were the kind called punk; that they might catch and retain some heavenly spark. I dwell as much aloof from society as ever; find it just as impossible to agree in opinion with the most intelligent of my neighbors; they not having improved one jot, no r I either. I am still immersed in nature, have much of the time a living sense of the breadth of the field on whose verge I dwell. The great west and north west stretching on infinitely far and grand and wild, qualifying all our thoughts. That is the only America I know. I prize this western reserve chiefly for its intellectual value. That is the road to new life and freedom, – if ever we are dissatisfied with this and not to exile as in Siberia and knowing this, one need not travel it. That great north-west where several of our shrubs, fruitless here, retain and mature their fruits properly. I am pleased to think of you in that England, where we all seem to have originated, or at least sojourned which Emerson values so much, but which I know so little about. That island seems as full of good things as a nut is of meat: and I trust that it still is a sound nut without mould or worm. I hope that by this time you are settled in your mind and satisfactorily employed there. My father mother and sister send their best wishes, and would be glad to see you in this country again. We are all quite anxious to hear that you are safe and sound: I in particular hope that you are in all respects unscathed by the battle of life, ready for still worthier encounters. Yours, H. D. T. HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED Frederick Douglass spoke in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin: HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED
1857
During this year Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were creating a Central Park for New-York beneficiaries,7 using as their raw materials an area which had previously been a neighborhood of smelly glue factories, edifices for the poor, the disabled, and the institutionalized criminal, and had been inhabited by the less desirable and less influential of New York citizens. Seneca Village was gone from the face of this earth. The south-west corner of the area being cleared had been occupied by Irish, and Germans had been scattered here and there. Black homeowners who had been in the area since 1825 with papers of title were of course being referred to in the city’s newspapers as “squatters,” as “nuisances,” and as “insects.”
You can visit this “Seneca Village” area near the West 85th Street entrance, where a spring now trickles picturesquely through picturesque rolling hills covered with picturesque white oaks. In the course of constructing this entrance in 1871, decomposed bodies would be dug up. Seneca Village extended from what is now 79th to what is now 86th and from what is now 7th Avenue to what is now Central Park West. After the condemnation proceedings and the destruction of the evidence this area would come to be characterized, by the righteous white New Yorkers who had it demolished, as a swamp having sported an occasional shanty, and as a site of degeneracy, but prior to razing it had been home to some 250 persons who had been living in multistory frame homes with gardens. These people had three churches and at least one school, but had lacked a proper complexion: due primarily to segregation, of the 100 black voters in New-York City in 1845, 1 in 10 had been living in this “Seneca Village,” and of the 71 black property owners in New- York City as of 1850, 1 in 5 had owned their property there.
What I am suggesting here is that New York’s Central Park originated as part of its sewage system. It was a part of the city’s sewerage plan, a part which caused, not undesirable excrement, but undesirable people, to disappear to someplace else. Ethnic cleansing! Sanitation! “Bye-bye, undesirables!” (Flush.)
7. From this year until 1895, Olmsted would be designing 17 major urban park systems, such as Boston’s 7-mile “Emerald Necklace,” and would in addition be designing the campus of UC-Berkeley, and Capitol Hill in Washington DC. HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED Frederick Law Olmsted’s A JOURNEY THROUGH TEXAS; OR, A SADDLE-TRIP ON THE SOUTHWESTERN TEXAS FRONTIER: WITH A STATISTICAL APPENDIX:
May 26, Tuesday: Thomas Cholmondeley, in London, was writing to Henry Thoreau to let him know that he had received, and had read in their entirety, the copies that had been posted to him of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, Waldo Emerson’s POEMS, Walt Whitman’s LEAVES OF GRASS, and Frederick Law Olmsted’s book on the Southern states.
May 26. 1857 HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED London. My dear Thoreau I have received your four books & what is more I have read them. Olmstead was the only entire stranger. His book I think might have been shortened–& if he had indeed written only one word instead of ten – I should have liked it better. It is a horrid vice this wordiness– Emerson is beautiful & glorious.– Of all his poems the “Rhodora” is my favorite. I repeat it to myself over & over again. I am also delighted with “Guy” “Uriel” & “Beauty” Of your own book I will say nothing but I will ask you a question, which perhaps may be a very ignorant one. I have observed a few lines about Now there is something here unlike anything else in these pages. Are they absolutely your own; or whose? And afterward you shall hear what I think of them. Walt Whitmans poems have only been heard of in England to be laughed at & voted offensive– Here are “Leaves” indeed which I can no more understand than the book of Enoch or the inedited Poems of Daniel! I cannot believe that such a man lives unless I actually touch him. He is further ahead of me in yonder west than Buddha is behind me in the Orient. I find reality & beauty mixed with not a little violence & coarseness, both of which are to me effeminate. I am amused at his views of sexual energy – which however are absurdly false. I believe that rudeness & excitement in the act of generation are injurious to the issue. The man appears to me not to know how to behave himself. I find the gentleman altogether left out of the book! Altogether these leaves completely puzzle me. Is there actually such a man as Whitman? Has anyone seen or handled him? His is a tongue “not understanded” of the English people. It is the first book I have ever seen which I should call “a new book” & thus I would sum up the impression it makes upon me. While I am writing, Prince Albert & Duke Constantine are reviewing the guards in a corner of St James Park. I hear the music. About two hours ago I took a turn round the Park before breakfast & saw the troops formed. The varieties of colour gleamed fully out from their uniforms– They looked like an Army of soldier butterflies just dropped from the lovely green trees under which they marched. Never saw the trees look so green before as they do this spring– Some of the oaks incredibly so– I stood before some the other day in Richmond & was obliged to pinch myself & ask “is this oak tree really growing on the earth they call so bad & wicked an earth; & itself so undeniably & astonishingly fresh & fair”.? It did not look like magic. It was magic. I have had a thousand strange experiences lately – most of them delicious & some almost awful. I seem to do so much in my life when I am doing nothing at all. I seem to be hiving up strength all the while as a sleeping man does; who sleeps & dreams & strengthens himself unconsciously; only sometimes half-awakes with a sense of cool refreshment. Sometimes it is wonderful to me that I say so little & somehow cannot speak even to my friends! Why all the time I was at Concord I never could tell you much of all I have seen & done!– I never could somehow tell you anything! How ungrateful to my guardian genius to think any of it trivial or superfluous! But it always seemed already-told & long ago said – what is past & what is HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED to come seems as it were all shut up in some very simple but very dear notes of music which I never can repeat. Tonight I intend to hear Mr. Dow the american lecture in Exeter hall– I believe it is tonight. But I go forearmed against him – being convinced in my mind that a good man is all the better for a bottle of Port under his belt every day of his life. . . . I heard Spurgeon the Preacher the other day. He said some very good things: among others “If I can make the bells ring in one heart I shall be content.” Two young men not behaving themselves, he called them as sternly to order as if they were serving under him– Talking of Jerusalem he said that “every good man had a mansion of his own there & a crown that would fit no other head save his”. That I felt was true. It is the voice of Spurgeon that draws more than his matter. His organ is very fine – but I fear he is hurting it by preaching to too large & frequent congregations. I found this out – because he is falling into two voices the usual clerical infirmity.
. . . The bells – church bells are ringing somewhere for the queens birthday they tell me– I have not a court-guide at hand to see if this is so. . . . London is cram-full. Not a bed! Not a corner! After all the finest sight is to see such numbers of beautiful girls riding about & riding well. There are certainly no women in the world like ours. The men are far, far inferior to them. I am still searching after an abode & really my adventures have been most amusing. One Sussex farmer had a very good little cottage close to Battle – but he kept a “few horses & a score or two of Pigs” under the very windows. I remarked that his stables were very filthy. The man stared hard at me – as an english farmer only can stare: ie, as a man stares who is trying to catch a thought which is always running away from him. At last he said striking his stick on the ground– “But that is why I keep the Pigs– I want their dung for my hop-grounds” We could not arrange it after that! I received a very kind note today from Concord informing me that there was a farm to be sold on the Hill just over your river & nearly opposite your house. But it is out of the question buying land by deputy! I have however almost decided to settle finally in America– There are many reasons for it. I think of running over in the trial-trip of the Great Eastern which will be at the close of the year. She is either to be the greatest success – or else to sink altogether without more ado! She is to be something decided. I was all over her the other day. The immense creature musical with the incessant tinkling of hammers is as yet unconscious of life.– By measurement she is larger than the Ark. From the promenade of her decks you see the town & trade of London; the river –(the sacred river)–; Greenwich with its park & palace; the vast town of Southwark & the continuation of it at Deptford; the Sydenham palace & the Surrey hills. Altogether a noble Poem. . . . Only think, I am losing all my teeth. All my magnificent teeth are going. I now begin to know I have had good teeth. This comes of too many cups of HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED warm trash– If I had held to cold drinks – they would have lasted me out; but the effeminacy of tea coffee chocolate & sugar has been my bane. Miserable wretches were they who invented these comforters of exhaustion! They could not afford wine & beef. Hence God to punish them for their feeble hearts takes away the grinders from their representatives, one of whom I have been induced to become. But, Thoreau, if ever I live again I vow never so much as to touch anything warm. It is as dangerous as to take a Pill which I am convinced is a most immoral custom. Give me ale for breakfast & claret or Port or ale again for dinner– I should then have a better conscience & not fear to lose my teeth any more than my tongue. Farewell Thoreau. Success & the bounty of the gods attend you yrs ever Thos Cholley. HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED Cholmondeley wrote Thoreau about losing his teeth, speculating that this was due to warm drinks: “Only think, I am losing all my teeth. All my magnificent teeth are going. I now begin to know I have had good teeth. This comes of too many cups of warm trash– If I had held to cold drinks — they would have lasted me out; but the effeminacy of tea coffee chocolate & sugar has been my bane. Miserable wretches were they who invented these comforters of exhaustion! They could not afford wine & beef. Hence God to punish them for their feeble hearts takes away the grinders from their representatives, one of whom I have been induced to become. But, Thoreau, if ever I live again I vow never so much as to touch anything warm. It is as dangerous as to take a Pill which I am convinced is a most immoral custom. Give me ale for breakfast & claret or Port or ale again for dinner– I should then have a better conscience & not fear to lose my teeth any more than my tongue.”
The Dred Scotts became free at last. See, life isn’t always totally vicious, especially when your case has gotten lots of media attention. What happened was that the surgeon/owner, John Emerson, had died while the Dred Scott lawsuit had been dragging through the courts, and Emerson’s widow had remarried, and her new husband was more easily embarrassed than her old. So Dred Scott was able to go to work as a hotel porter in St. Louis. HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED Friend Daniel Ricketson leaving Concord, to his journal:
Left Concord at 7 1/ A.M. Had a long conversation with ELLEN EMERSON 2 Miss Ellen Emerson, eldest daughter of R.W. Emerson, LOUIS AGASSIZ who attends the school of Professor Agassiz at Cambridge. She is a very sensible, open-hearted, intelligent young lady, but quite peculiar and original in her ideas upon many subjects; modest of her own qualities, but evidently a strongly marked person, one that will grow in strength and finally make a noble woman. I was on the whole quite interested and pleased with her. DR. WALTER CHANNING In Boston called about noon at Dr. Walter Channing’s, in Bowdoin St.; there saw besides the doctor the two ELLERY CHANNING eldest children of my friend Wm. Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller C. and Caroline Sturgis C., daughters RGARET FULLER CHANNING worthy of a poet and of whom any father might be proud: ROLINE STURGIS CHANNING sweet sensitive girls, Margaret not 13 and Caroline about 10. How tenderly I regarded them, deprived of their lovely mother and so neglected by their talented and wayward father! Dined with Arthur B. Fuller, the MADAM OSSOLI brother, and Mrs. Fuller, the mother of the revered and lamented Margaret and Ellen — Madam Ossoli and Mrs. ELLEN FULLER CHANNING William E. Channing. After a long and instructive as well as interesting conversation, the latter part with Mrs. Fuller, I left, deeply impressed with their genuine goodness and beauty of character, about 5 P.M. In the dining-room were three engravings (saved from the wreck) of Madam Ossoli’s, to wit: “Tasso’s Oak,” “Pine in the Colonna Gardens, Rome,” Michael Angelo’s “Cypresses, Rome;” also a scene in Rome, with her residence there. In Mr. Fuller’s own room upstairs were several line engravings from paintings by Zampieri. In the front parlor was a raised plaster head of Margaret, and the engraving underneath the same, placed in the memoirs of her by her brother, very much like the original daguerreotype of Miss Ellen Channing with a child in her arms — a sweet motherly face, truly lovely; also a fine portrait of the deceased wife of Mr. Fuller, a sweet open face. In the dining-room was a portrait of the Hon. Timothy Fuller, the father of Margaret — reddish hair, blue eyes, and rather mild countenance — the portrait resembling in style that of Fisher Ames. Mr. F. presented me with several manuscript pieces of Margaret’s, and Mrs. Fuller with a volume of poems by J.W. Randall, a friend of hers. HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED At a later point he added the following observation to his journal, about this meal with the Fullers:
The short stay at my friend Arthur B. Fuller’s, where I only dined, was very agreeable from the cordiality of Mrs. Fuller, the mother of the celebrated M.F. Ossoli. I was introduced to Richard H. Fuller, Esq., of the legal profession, but also a farmer, or rather the owner of a farm at Wayland, some twenty miles north of Boston. He as well as the rest of the family are very devout and intelligent people.
May 26. Pink azalea in garden. Mountain-ash a day; also horse-chestnut the same. Beach plum well out, several days at least. Wood pewee, and Minott heard a loon go laughing over this morning. The vireo days have fairly begun. They are now heard amid the elm-tops. Thin coats and straw hats are worn. I have noticed that notional nervous invalids, who report to the community the exact condition of their heads and stomachs every morning, as if they alone were blessed or cursed with these parts; who are old betties and quiddles, if men; who can’t eat their breakfasts when they are ready, but play with their spoons, and hanker after an ice-cream at irregular hours; who go more than half-way to meet any invalidity, and go to bed to be sick on the slightest occasion, in the middle of the brightest forenoon,—improve the least opportunity to be sick;—I observe that such are self-indulgent persons, without any regular and absorbing employment. They are nice, discriminating, experienced in all that relates to bodily sensations. They come to you stroking their wens, manipulating their ulcers, and expect you to do the same for them. Their religion and humanity stick. They spend the day manipulating their bodies and doing no work; can never get their nails clean. Some of the earliest willows about warm edges of woods are gone to seed and downy. P. M.—To Saw Mill Brook. It is very hazy after a sultry morning, but the wind is getting east and cool. The oaks are in the gray, or a little more, and the silvery leafets of the deciduous trees invest the woods like a permanent mist. At the same season with this haze of buds comes also the kindred haziness of the air. I see the common small reddish butterflies. Very interesting now are the red tents of expanding oak leaves, as you go through sprout-lands,—the crimson velvet of the black oak and the more pinkish white oak. The salmon and pinkish-red canopies or umbrellas of the white oak are particularly interesting. The very sudden expansion of the great hickory buds, umbrella-wise. Now, at last, all leaves dare unfold, and twigs begin to shoot. As I am going down the footpath from Britton’s camp to the spring, I start a pair of nighthawks (they had the white on the wing) from amid the dry leaves at the base of a bush, a bunch of sprouts, and away they flitted in zigzag noiseless flight a few rods through the sprout-land, dexterously avoiding the twigs, uttering a faint hollow what, as if made by merely closing the bill, and one alighted flat on a stump. On those carpinus trees which have fertile flowers, the sterile are effete and drop off. The red choke-berry not in bloom, while the black is, for a day or more at least. Roadside near Britton’s camp, see a grosbeak, apparently female of the rose-breasted, quite tame, as usual, brown above, with black head and a white streak over the eye, a less distinct one beneath it, two faint bars on wings, dirty-white bill, white breast, dark spotted or streaked, and from time [to time] utters a very sharp chirp of alarm or interrogation as it peers through the twigs at me. A lady’s-slipper. At Cliffs, no doubt, before. At Abel Brooks’s (or Black Snake, or Red Cherry, or Rye) Hollow, hear the wood thrush. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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In Thrush Alley, see one of those large ant-hills, recently begun, the grass and moss partly covered with sand over a circle two feet in diameter, with holes two to five inches apart, and the dry sand is dark-spotted with the fresh damp sand about each hole. My mother was telling to-night of the sounds which she used to hear summer nights when she was young and lived on the Virginia Road,—the lowing of cows, or cackling of geese, or the beating of a drum [this is a reference to the drumming of the male Ruffed Grouse Bonasa umbellus in the woods] as far off as Hildreth’s, but above all Joe Merriam whistling to his team, for he was an admirable whistler. Says she used to get up at midnight and go and sit on the door-step when all in the house were asleep, and she could hear nothing in the world but the ticking of the clock in the house behind her. HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED
1858
April 28, Wednesday: John Brown was in Chicago.
In a $2,000 contest, the “Greensward” plan of Frederick Law Olmsted, beating 32 other designs, was chosen for New-York’s new Central Park. Primarily, this plan won because its initiator was perceived as separate from the political system of that time and place, an outsider, a non-beneficiary of the process at hand. (The actual work of design would be done by another man, Calvert Vaux, who had training in architecture and who was neither so well, nor so poorly, connected.)
What had been on the approximately 770 acres of land at the time? The standard story, the story that the white people created and that the white people wanted to remember, was that it had been merely smelly swamp, weedy trees, and rocky outcroppings with an incredible coating of city filth. The skating pond that Vaux and Olmsted included in the plan would create a skating sensation, with 100,000 persons showing up of an afternoon.
Such skating was all the rage. In this same year, at Toronto, the 1st ice-skating rink in Canada was opening for business. (Québec City boasts the 1st covered rink in Canada, with a large shed built over the natural ice to protect it from heavy snowfall.)
April 28. Blustering northwest wind and wintry aspect A.M.– Down river to look at willows.... I see the fish hawk [Osprey Pandion haliaetus] again.... As it flies low, directly over my head, I see that its body is white beneath, and the white on the forward side of the wings beneath, if extended across the breast, would form a regular crescent. Its wings do not form a regular curve in front, but an abrupt angle. They are loose and broad at tips. This bird goes fishing slowly down one side of the river and up again on the other, forty to sixty feet high, continually poising itself almost or quite stationary, with its head to the northwest wind and looking down, flapping its wings enough to keep its place, sometimes stationary for about a minute. It is not shy. This boisterous weather is the time to see it. HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED
1859
While work on Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park project was proceeding, he himself was suffering in a period of depression. The commissioners voted to pack him off to Europe for awhile.
Because of the new fascination with wild scenery as an artistic subject, a letter from Albert Bierstadt to The Crayon giving his impressions of Western scenes would be widely reprinted.
Publication of the 2d edition of William Elliott’s CAROLINA SPORTS BY LAND AND WATER (this had appeared in 1846), an early example of the hunter-as-conservationist, a phenomenon which would become increasingly important for conservationism.8
8. The conservation movement was little more than a shabby fraud. From the historical record, these early environmental technocrats were intent not on solving our ecological crisis but on destroying the earth as quickly as possible. Their net impact has been negative: we would have been better off had we never had a conservation movement, to teach us how to manage our looting so that we looted with greater and greater effectiveness and economy. According to Samuel P. Hays’s EXPLORATIONS IN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY: ESSAYS BY SAMUEL P. HAYS (Pittsburgh PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1998), these men were mere pawns of the powers that be, careerists bought by their careers: Conservation, above all, was a scientific movement, and its role in history arose from the implications of science and technology in modern society. Conservation leaders sprang from such fields as hydrology, forestry, agrostology, geology, and anthropology. Vigorously active in professional circles in the national capital, these leaders brought the ideals and practices of their crafts into federal resource policy. Loyalty to these professional ideals, not close association with the grass-roots public, set the tone of the Theodore Roosevelt conservation movement. Its essence was rational planning to promote efficient development and use of all natural resources. The idea of efficiency drew these federal scientists from one resource task to another, from specific programs to comprehensive concepts. It molded the policies which they proposed, their administrative techniques, and their relations with Congress and the public. It is from the vantage point of applied science, rather than of democratic protest, that one must understand the historic role of the conservation movement. The new realms of science and technology, appearing to open up unlimited opportunities for human achievement, filled conservation leaders with intense optimism. They emphasized expansion, not retrenchment; possibilities, not limitations.... They displayed that deep sense of hope which pervaded all those at the turn of the century for whom science and technology were revealing visions of an abundant future.... Conflicts between competing resource users, especially, should not be dealt with through the normal processes of politics. Pressure group action, logrolling in Congress, or partisan debate could not guarantee rational and scientific decisions. Amid such jockeying for advantage with the resulting compromise, concern for efficiency would disappear. Conservationists envisaged, even though they did not realize their aims, a political system guided by the ideal of efficiency and dominated by the technicians who could best determine how to achieve it. HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED
1860
During this decade Frederick Law Olmsted would be helping to initiate a new magazine, The Nation. “A newspaper may well be the only substitute for whatever, in a society more elaborately civilized, keeps a man’s commonplace civilization alive.” He was coming to the attitude that it was the trait of communicativeness which marked the civilized person from the uncivilized.
“The modern man’s daily prayer is reading the daily newspaper.” — G.W.F. Hegel
During this year A JOURNEY IN THE BACK COUNTRY recycled more of his newspaper articles about his 1852 trip through the South. HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED
1861
Frederick Law Olmsted’s THE COTTON KINGDOM re-recycled the three books which he had previously based upon his newspaper articles about his 1852 trip through the South.
This sketch in The Illustrated London News (Volume 38, pages 138-140) was accompanied by an eyewitness description of slave auctions in Richmond, Virginia:
The civil war would not be kind to Lowell MA. Recruitment of Irish and other foreign-born Americans by the Union Army would steal away the labor supply. The mills would sell off their raw unprocessed cotton and close for long periods and the remaining mill operatives would be out of work. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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A WEEK: Already, as appears from the records, “At a General Court PEOPLE OF held at Boston in New England, the 7th of the first month, 1643- A WEEK 4.” — “Wassamequin, Nashoonon, Kutchamaquin, Massaconomet, and Squaw Sachem, did voluntarily submit themselves” to the English; and among other things did “promise to be willing from time to time to be instructed in the knowledge of God.” Being asked “Not to do any unnecessary work on the Sabbath day, especially within the gates of Christian towns,” they answered, “It is easy to them; they have not much to do on any day, and they can well take their rest on that day.” — “So,” says Winthrop, in his Journal, “we causing them to understand the articles, and all the ten commandments of God, and they freely assenting to all, they were solemnly received, and then presented the Court with twenty-six fathom more of wampom; and the Court gave each of them a coat of two yards of cloth, and their dinner; and to them and their men, every of them, a cup of sack at their departure; so they took leave and went away.” What journeyings on foot and on horseback through the wilderness, to preach the Gospel to these minks and muskrats! who first, no doubt, listened with their red ears out of a natural hospitality and courtesy, and afterward from curiosity or even interest, till at length there were “praying Indians,” and, as the General Court wrote to Cromwell, the “work is brought to this perfection, that some of the Indians themselves can pray and prophesy in a comfortable manner.” It was in fact an old battle and hunting ground through which we had been floating, the ancient dwelling-place of a race of hunters and warriors. Their weirs of stone, their arrowheads and hatchets, their pestles, and the mortars in which they pounded Indian corn before the white man had tasted it, lay concealed in the mud of the river bottom. Tradition still points out the spots where they took fish in the greatest numbers, by such arts as they possessed. It is a rapid story the historian will have to put together. Miantonimo,— Winthrop, — Webster. Soon he comes from Montaup to Bunker Hill, from bear-skins, parched corn, bows and arrows, to tiled roofs, wheat-fields, guns and swords. Pawtucket and Wamesit, where the Indians resorted in the fishing season, are now Lowell, the city of spindles and Manchester of America, which sends its cotton cloth round the globe. Even we youthful voyagers had spent a part of our lives in the village of Chelmsford, when the present city, whose bells we heard, was its obscure north district only, and the giant weaver was not yet fairly born. So old are we; so young is it.
OLIVER CROMWELL HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1881
March 4, Friday: While Charles S. Sargent and Frederick Law Olmsted were at the height of their campaign to convince city officials to bring the Arnold Arboretum into the Boston park system, George Barrell Emerson died at the Brookline home of his daughter Lucy Lowell, in the 84th year of his age (Emerson Preparatory School in Washington DC would be named in his honor).
As James Abram Garfield succeeded Rutherford B. Hayes as President of the United States, “President Garfield’s Inauguration March” by John Philip Sousa was receiving its initial performance.9
9. How could anyone tell they hadn’t heard it before? –All these Sousa thingies sound like the same piece of bombastic crap: “Wham wham wham. Ta, ta de ta ta, doodle oh tee ay. (Repeat.)” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1890
For $50,000, Boston erected a sparkplug-style lighthouse similar to Plum Beach Light in Rhode Island, some 500 yards off Deer Island, to better mark a treacherous sandbar alongside President Roads, the main shipping channel into the Boston Harbor anchorage. The fixed white light of this lighthouse changed, every thirty seconds, to a two-second flash of red. The structure was of cast iron, painted chocolate brown. There were five stories beneath the lantern room, some of which were living quarters. The first crew was made up of John Farley, lighthouse keeper, and his assistant Michael J. Curran. This structure would persist until 1982, when, its cylindrical iron caisson poured full of concrete having become unsound, it would be replaced HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED by an automatic beacon.
During the 1890s the MDC would be taking over Nut Island and building a sewage treatment facility there.
William Howell’s redesign of Thomas Kennedy’s two-pipe siphonic water closet eliminated the lower trap without causing any degradation of functionality. GOD IN THE JAKES WATER SUPPLY
John Brewer, owner of the World’s End peninsula, retained the landscape architect who had done Boston’s HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED park system and New-York’s Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted, to develop his magnificent estate overlooking all of Boston Harbor.
The use of Boston Harbor’s Castle Island as a park was approved by the US Congress.
The filling of Boston’s Back Bay added more land than the entire original Shawmut peninsula. Since the most convenient fill, from Boston’s original three hills, had already been utilized, this fill mostly came from the Needham Heights. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1893
At the age of 70, the Reverend Robert Collyer wanted to retire from being the pastor of the Unitarian Church of the Messiah in New-York, but his congregation was pleading with him to continue.
When Charles Eliot was taken into the landscaping firm of Frederick Law Olmsted, its name became Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1894
Allen French received his A.B. degree from Harvard College. He would teach English at Harvard from 1908 to 1913 and again in 1919-1920.
Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. also graduated from Harvard in this year. Prior to his graduation he had worked on landscape architecture jobs under the direction of his father Frederick Law Olmsted. He would enter Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot as an assistant shortly before his father’s involvement would be effectively curtailed due to the arrival of senile dementia. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1897
Francis Henry Allen’s NATURE’S DIARY.
Having been too senile to work effectively for years, Frederick Law Olmsted retired, so when Charles Eliot died, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. became a full partner in the landscaping firm Olmsted, Olmsted & Eliot. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1903
August 28, Friday: Frederick Law Olmsted, senile, died at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts at the age of 81. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1960
During the 1960s Malcolm X would peruse the reports of Frederick Law Olmsted, published as THE COTTON KINGDOM, and would comment that this had helped him understand the nature of the evil that was slavery.
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2016. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: November 4, 2016 HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.
Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX
FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with