A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States

by Frederick Law Olmsted

In 1852, Frederick Law Olmsted, began his first journey down the Eastern Seaboard to visit the slave states of Washington, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana. His dispatches to The New York Times form the basis of this fascinating account of slavery before the American Civil War. This first-person account of the pre-war South presents a stark depiction of those states which relied upon a slave economy. He provides a vivid description of how both the slave-owning elites and the African-American populations lived and worked, supporting his observations with critical analysis. “A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States remains a classic on a par with Alexis de Tocqueville’s endlessly cited critique of a generation earlier.” The New York Review of Books “As an argument against slavery, his book seems to us worth any number of Uncle Tom’s Cabins; for he writes upon the subject without noise or passion, and contents himself with stating in a simple manner what he has observed, and what conclusions he has founded upon his observations.” The Saturday Review “No one can ever understand rightly the industrial and economic history of the southern states without a definite conception of the practical workings of slavery itself. These are the considerations which make Mr. Olmstead’s book of permanent value.” Francis W. Shepardson, Journal of Political Economy “Some of the most interesting works that have been written on America … are the production of a native, Mr. F. L. Olmsted.” The British Quarterly Review A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States is essential reading for anyone interested in nineteenth century American history and the development of the abolition movement before the American Civil War. Frederick Law Olmsted was an American journalist, social critic, public administrator and landscape architect. He was particularly famous for assisting in the design of many of America’s most loved parks, including Central Park in New York City, Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and Elm Park in Worcester, Massachusetts. He wrote three different accounts of his travels across America. A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States is his most famous and was published in 1856. Olmsted died in 1903.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American, American History

516 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 31, 2007

About the author

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903)

Reviews

[Jamie Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

“[Master] M. ‘Our dear brothers — our children! God has appointed us to govern you.’
[Slave] S. ‘Show us your heavenly authority.’
M. ‘You must have faith: Reason deceives.’
S. ‘Do you rule us without Reason?’
M. ‘God wishes Peace: Religion prescribes Obedience.’
S. ‘Peace supposes Justice: Obedience wishes to know the Law.’
M. ‘One is here below only to suffer.’
S. ‘Show us an example!’
M. ‘Do you wish to live without God and without Kings?’
S. ‘We would live without Tyrants.’”
– Constantin François de Chassebœuf, Comte de Volney


I knew of Frederick Law Olmstead only as the designer of New York City’s Central Park, and did not know he had been a farmer and a journalist in his youth. In 1856 he published A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, describing his trip from Washington D.C. south to Georgia and then west to Louisiana. His book is considered one of the best depictions of life in the antebellam South in the years just before the American Civil War, and in particular the lives of slaves and their owners. It is in the public domain and can be downloaded from https://archive.org, along with his second book about traveling in the South, A Journey through Texas: Or a Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier.

In 2019 Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic, published Spying on the South, in which he retraces Olmsted's trip from A Journey Through Texas and writes about what has and hasn't changed in the American South in the intervening years.

This book is mostly well written, but includes extended discussions of everything that interested him. He had a farm in New York and frequently spends pages talking about agriculture, including things like fertilizers, crop rotations, and the best breeds of cattle for making butter. He also takes time to quote from newspapers as well as long sections from economic reports. As a result the book is part travelogue and part social commentary, but also crop and livestock guide, economic development analysis, and descriptions of rail, horse, and steamboat transportation.

In discussing the foundations of slavery, Olmstead focused on the underlying economic factors which caused it to persist even as its inefficiencies resulted in the South falling farther and farther behind the North in agricultural and industrial output. Putting the focus on economics was a good idea, because by the time his book came out numerous other books already existed condemning slavery on moral and ethical grounds, and adding another one was not going to change the terms of the debate. Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been published a few years previously, and he mentions it several times as being the subject of intense discussion and anger in the South about how slavery was portrayed.

Part of the book’s interest is in its descriptions of the places Olmstead visited and his travels along the way. Until very recently traveling long distances was difficult, time consuming, and dangerous. Olmstead moved by trains, which were almost never on time; stage coaches, slow, uncomfortable and usually driven by “ruffians;” and paddlewheel steamboats, the most comfortable and preferred means of travel, but also rarely on schedule and occasionally crowded and filthy. In addition, many of the hotels and roadside inns he stopped at were dirty, miserable places with poor food and worse service.

He described the towns he visited and the people he met, and whenever he could he looked at the lives of slaves and the effects that slavery had on both blacks and whites. As a farmer himself, he had experience hiring workers, and thus an eye for what constituted a good day’s work. He believed that slaves were generally only about one-quarter as efficient as free laborers and needed to be constantly watched to get even that much out of them. Basic economic theory holds that if you want people to do something and do it well, incentivize them, but the slave’s incentive was to do only as much as would keep him from getting whipped.

There is also a bit of recurring weirdness in his opinion of the Irish. I first thought it was a kind of running joke, but he seemed to be serious in thinking them even more lazy and dishonest than the slaves. It reminded me of a line from the movie Blazing Saddles: “We’ll give some land to the n*****s and the chinks...but we don’t want the Irish!”

There is a subtext that runs like a drumbeat through the book: slavery degrades whites as much as it does blacks. By depressing wages it reduced the incentives to work, and since most white laborers did not want to do the kind of jobs that slaves did they had fewer opportunities to work. When they did get hired they were as inefficient as the slaves, because they recognized the low level of productivity they could get away with. In addition, the rural character of the South meant that schools were few and poorly supported, so much of the white population was illiterate, as was almost all of the black, since it was illegal to teach them to read and write.

The justifications used to maintain slavery grate on a modern reader, full of ignorance and condescension, and the certainty that whites are and always will be the superior race. From preachers, legislators, judges, and newspapers there was a steady stream of self-righteous claims that slavery was actually good for the blacks, because it allowed them to be Christianized and taught obedience and the value of a hard day’s work. Importation of slaves into the United States had been banned since 1808, but there was agitation to permit it once again, both to add to the slave workforce and because it would allow even more souls to be saved.

Five years after the book’s publication the country was convulsed by civil war, but only twice in the book are there quotes from newspapers that hint that there may be a need for the South to disassociate itself from the United States. Otherwise, while most Southerners believed that slavery would exist in perpetuity, Olmstead describes no conversations in which the people he talked to mentioned secession.

At 515 pages this book is too long, with too many digressions and wandering descriptions of people and places. There is also the odd fact that blacks are always quoted in the same exaggerated slave-speak no matter where in the South they lived. For instance, “I tort so, sar, I knew ‘ou wan’t one of dis country people, ‘peared like ‘ou was one o’ my country people, way ‘ou talks; and I loves dem kine of people.” Still, it is a vivid picture of the last years of a culture on the eve of destruction. When he describes great mansions all I could think was, “Wait till Sherman gets here.”

I ended up highlighting many passages from this book. I have collected some of them into rough categories and added them below.

The Lives of slaves:
- That a change of the relations in which a man is placed should change his ideas of moral right and wrong, is neither new, nor peculiar to the color of the blacks. Homer tells us it was so, 2,600 years ago: “‘Jove fixed it certain, that whatever day / Makes man a slave, takes half his worth away.’”

- involuntary subjection directly tends to turpitude and demoralization.

- Slaves brought up to house-work dread to be employed at field-labor; and those accustomed to the comparatively unconstrained life of the negro-settlement, detest the close control and careful movements required of the house-servants. It is a punishment for a lazy field-hand, to employ him in menial duties at the house.

- if work should be systematically increased very much, there is danger of a general stampede to the “swamp” — a danger the slave can always hold before his master’s cupidity. In fact, it is looked upon in this region as a proscriptive right of the negroes to have this incitement to diligence offered them.

- “The strap, gentlemen, you are probably aware, is an instrument of refined modern torture, ordinarily used in whipping slaves. By the old system, the cow-hide — a severe punishment — cut and lacerated them so badly as to almost spoil their sale when brought to the lower markets. But this strap, I am told, is a vast improvement in the art of whipping negroes; and, it is said, that one of them may be punished by it within one inch of his life, and yet he will come out with no visible injury, and his skin will be as smooth and polished as a peeled onion!”

- Mr. R. himself also acknowledged Slavery to be a very great evil, morally and economically. It was a curse upon the South; he had no doubt at all about it: nothing would be more desirable than its removal, if it were possible to be accomplished. But he did not think it could be abolished without instituting greater evils than those sought to be remedied. Its influence on the character of the whites was what was most deplorable.

- The slave is without motive, without inducement to exertion. His food, his clothing, and all his wants are supplied as they are, without care on his part, and when these are supplied he has nothing more to hope for. He can make no provision for old age, he can lay up nothing for his children, he has no voice at all in the disposal of the results of his earnings. What cares he whether his labor is productive or unproductive. His principal care seems to be to accomplish just as little as possible.

Effect on Whites:
- The possession of arbitrary power has always, the world over, tended irresistibly to destroy humane sensibility, magnanimity, and truth.

- He did not see how white laborers were ever going to come into competition with negroes here, at all. You never could depend on white men, and you couldn’t drive them any; they wouldn’t stand it. Slaves were the only reliable laborers — you could command them and make them do what was right.

- It is, I have no doubt, utterly impossible, except as a camel shall enter the eye of a needle, for a man to have the will of others habitually under his control, without its impairing his sense of justice, his power of sympathy, his respect for manhood, and his worshipful love of the Infinite Father.

- Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of heaven on a country. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects Providence punishes national sins by national calamities.

The Irish:
- What is the matter with the Irish? No one can rely on them — they cannot rely on one another. Though sensitive to duty, and in their way conscientious, they absolutely are not able to comprehend a rule, a law; and that a man can be fixed by his promise they have never thought. A promise with them signifies merely an expressed intention.

- They are inveterate falsifiers, on the general principle that no man can want information of them but for his own good, and that good can only exist to their injury. What is the cause of this? their religion? — that to which it is attributed in their religion is the effect of it, more than the cause. It is the subjection of generations of this people to the will of landlords, corrupted to fiendish insensibility by the long continued possession of nearly arbitrary power. The capacity of mind for truth and reliance has been all but lost, by generations of unjust subjection.

- [At a steamboat landing, where cotton bales were pushed down a ramp from the top of a steep hill. The Irish workers had the dangerous job of stopping the heavy bales when they reached the bottom, and the slaves the much less dangerous work of stacking them. When asked why the work was divided this way, Olmstead was told] “The n*****s are worth too much to be risked here; if the Paddies are knocked overboard, or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything!”

- [On seeing a white man working under the direction of a black master carpenter] It was the first case I had seen of a white man acting under the orders of a negro, though I have several times since seen Irishmen doing so.

The Old South:
- The Court-room was strewed, to the depth of an inch or two, with saw-dust, to absorb the tobacco juice; and the spitting was incessant, by men of every race.

- Having the least democratic government, South Carolina was, almost from the first, distinguished as the worst governed, most insubordinate, and most licentious and immoral of all the English settlements in America. Negroes, from Africa, were not only eagerly purchased, but wars were made upon the Indians of the country, for the purpose of capturing them, and using them as slaves. The different tribes of Indians were encouraged to war with one another, and the prisoners of each and all tribes and parties, were bought for slaves.

- The absurd state and sectional pride of the South Carolinians, their simple and profound contempt for everything foreign except despotism; their scornful hatred especially of all honestly democratic States, and of everything that proceeds from them; the ridiculous cockerel-like manner in which they swell, strut, bluster, and bully in their confederate relations, is so trite a subject of amusement at the North, that I can only allude to it as affording another evidence of a decayed and stultified people.

- Of the free native population of Georgia, according to the census returns, one in nine and a half, on an average, are without the smallest rudiments of school-education (cannot read or write). In Maine, which among the old Free States compares most closely with Georgia in density of population (that of one being 16, the other 15 to square mile), the proportion is one in two hundred and forty-one.

Slaveowner society:
- The extremists of the South esteem [abolitionists] as madmen, or robbers; and invariably misrepresent, misunderstand, and, consequently, entirely fail to meet their arguments. The extremists of the North esteem the slave-holders as robbers and tyrants, willfully and malevolently oppressive and cruel.

- [From a newspaper:] Without, then, going the length of declaring that Slavery in the abstract — Slavery everywhere — is a blessing to the laboring classes, may we not candidly and calmly, and upon the maturest and soberest reflection, say that to the black race of the Union it is a blessing, and perhaps the greatest blessing we can now confer upon them?”

- the negro is here, and here forever; is our property, and ours forever; is never to be emancipated; is to be kept hard at work, and in rigid subjection all his days.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 5 out of 5]

New Yorkers from Lake Erie to Staten Island owe a tremendous debt to Frederick Law Olmsted who designed Central Park in Mid Manhattan and the exquisite Buffalo Park System that they ought to repay by reading his extraordinary Journey Through the Seaboard Slave States which was was published in 1856 as the American Civil War was rapidly approaching.

In this extraordinary book, Olmsted describes his voyage through Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Lousiana. By this point a highly committed abolitionist, Olmsted fills this very long book with a comprehensive attack on all aspects of slave society.

He describes the incredible physical violence practiced against the slaves as their owners casually whip them in public view. People ignore a black woman in tears as she sees her children being taken from her in order to be sold away into some distant location. He argues that the like skins of American blacks suggests systematic exploitation of female slaves by their white owners.

Olmsted also describes an economy that has been grievously undermined by slavery. Management practices and work quality are laughable by the standards of the bustling Yankee states. Managers and supervisors attend their officers in a highly erratic fashion, account keeping is abysmal and entrepreneurial imagination is totally absent.

After marshalling evidence for over 500 pages, Olmsted comes to a very simple conclusion. Slavery is a moral and economic outrage. The time for change was long overdue.

[Peter Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a marvel.

I knew Frederick Law Olmsted was a landscape architect. He designed New York's Central Park and Chicago's World's Fair. He plays a substantial role in "Devil in the White City," which involves both the World's Fair and H.H. Holmes, Chicago's notorious 19th-century serial killer.

However, this book is a travelogue. Shortly, before the Civil War, in approximately 1855, a younger Olmsted took a trip from New York down the Atlantic Coast and over to Texas. This is an account of his trip. It contains his observations about the culture, geography and economy of the South.

For Olmsted, the trip south was like entering a foreign country. He expresses his amazement of seeing blacks in chains being marched down streets in Washington DC. He describes slave auctions and slave-life on plantations and work colonies.

Olmsted was an abolitionist. His constant theme was that the South was poor and backward because of slavery. Slavery, obviously, restrained the energy and industry of slaves. His narrative is constantly filled with descriptions of how difficult it was to get slaves to put in a full day's work. For many slaves, the work day ended early, compared to Northern free men. Likewise, slaves had no reason not to take the easy way out and abandon work or feign stupidity if that would lighten their load. Finally, if things got to hard, slaves would take off for the swamps and forests where they would hang out until masters were concerned that their investment - their walking capital stock - had gone permanently missing. When the slave returned, the master was usually too pleased with the return of his capital investment to be too concerned with insubordination.

Olmsted notes:

""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."

And why not? And where hasn't that been the case in any slave empire, including the Communist ones?

Likewise, the non-slave classes were corrupted by slavery according to Olmsted. Slaves depressed the economic scale and made honest labor something disrespectable. The result was that the poor white population remained poverty-stricken. In addition, poorer whites could not compete with slaveholders for the best property and found themselves losing out. Finally, many southern states - South Carolina, in particular - weighted representation by wealth such that the slave-owning class was far better represented than the "cracker" class.

Olmsted is clear that there was nothing paternalistic in slavery. Slaves yearned for freedom. However, the canard about masters taking care of slaves in order to protect their investment in humans, as they did their investment in cattle, has some truth. Consider this for example:

"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.”

So, if it was a choice between valueless Irishman being killed or injured or a negro in whom the master had an investment, the choice was obvious.

Actually, the Irish come in fairly low on the social spectrum in Olmsted's book:

"The accuracy with which the lines are made straight is said to be astonishing; and this, as well as the plowing, and many other operations performed by negroes, as I have had occasion to notice with colored laborers at the North, no less than among the slaves, indicates that the race generally has a good “mathematical eye,” much more so at least than the Irish."

And:

"But it is much more evident that involuntary subjection directly tends to turpitude and demoralization. True, it may tend also to the encouragement of some beautiful traits, to meekness, humility, and a kind of generosity and unselfishness. But where has it not ever been accompanied by the loss of the nobler virtues of manhood, especially of the noblest, the most essential of all, that without which all others avail nothing for good: TRUTH. What is the matter with the Irish? No one can rely on them — they cannot rely on one another. Though sensitive to duty, and in their way conscientious, they absolutely are not able to comprehend a rule, a law; and that a man can be fixed by his promise they have never thought. A promise with them signifies merely an expressed intention. Irishmen that have long associated with us, we can depend on, for we have their confidence; but to a stranger still, their word is not worth a farthing. They are inveterate falsifiers, on the general principle that no man can want information of them but for his own good, and that good can only exist to their injury. What is the cause of this? their religion? — that to which it is attributed in their religion is the effect of it, more than the cause. It is the subjection of generations of this people to the will of landlords, corrupted to fiendish insensibility by the long continued possession of nearly arbitrary power. The capacity of mind for truth and reliance has been all but lost, by generations of unjust subjection. It is the same — only in some respects better, and some far worse — even already, with the African slave of the South. Every Virginian acknowledges it. Religion, to call that by the name which they do, has become subject to it. “They will lie in their very prayers to God.”

Honestly, this is an epic look at the Southern world just before the Civil War overturned it. For all that the Civil War was just over the horizon, Olmsted doesn't foreshadow that possibility. He sees the problems with slavery and wonders how two totally different cultures will co-exist, but he doesn't predict the cataclysm that would soon follow.

[Netanya Cranford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Revealing facts never taught in my history classes

This journal describes the South in excruciating detail from many viewpoints --agriculture, transportation, sources of manufacturing power, living conditions of poor whites and slaves, sugar, rice, and tobacco farming, roads and bridges, and so much more. Early into the book I couldn't believe the South thought it might win any dispute against the North. They had to have seen, early on, that they didn't have the infrastructure to succeed in breaking from the north. One example stands out: wealthy planters sold their raw cotton to the north where it was made into clothing, which the southerns bought back. Why couldn't they develop that industry themselves? The same with farming machinery: the southern farmers bought their plows from the North instead of making them locally. They had plenty of water power to manufacture goods but no distribution system of rail or road. The entire book left me shaking my head about that period of US history. Nothing is ever as it seems.

[Clay Olmstead · Rating 4 out of 5]

,A first hand account of a trip through Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama and Louisiana around 1850. The author observes and analyzes Southern culture, labor and the economy. The reader can see that our current racial divisions have their roots firmly set in the America of two hundred years ago. Sadly, we have not changed as much as we'd like to think.

Modern readers might be disappointed that this isn't more of a polemic; at first the author attempts to understand all sides of the issue; but by the end, you can see that he's had enough, and he isn't going to let white people get away with their old rationalizations.

Some people today might be startled by the language, which would be considered offensive today. You have to keep readiing to get a more complete picture of the the times. That alone was worth the effort, at least to me.

[Crissie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thorough expose on America's infamous Peculiar Institution (bka SLAVERY) and how its true impact was not far worse than most care to admit even though they continue to exist on this day. Mr. Olmsted holds nothing back in this book that takes a hard look at the social, economic, and political realities of human chattel slavery. His volume presents every side of all possible fences that run a full gambit from poor "white trash," to the wealthy slaver class, to northern industrialist elite groups, to politicians, to captives held in lifelong bondage who enriched everyone but themselves. A MUST READ for any honest individual who can stand to face the truth more than revel in BS fiction.

[Gerrigray · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading about slavery from those who lived it and those who observed it is a must for getting a sense of what it was like for slave and owner.his observation of slavery by the Do read "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in order to understand why her book was so influential. She describes both slave life and owners.
For a novel about a slave owner and his antislavery daughter try the historical novel "Invention of Wing" by Sue Monk Kidd.

[Babs M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting. His travels throughout the south over several months with interactions and conversations with the people and slaves and free blacks. Tell you more than you would be told in any book by those that had not lived it. His goal was to report as objectively as possible and he did a decent job.

[Thomas Rosenthal · Rating 4 out of 5]

olmstead’s assessment of the economy of slavery

There are many reasons why slavery is bad for society, but in this travel log by a master observer the fallacies of slavery are cataloged for all to understand.

[Justinmmoffitt · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a very interesting read.

[Steven Lindsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slavery, et al

If you can abide the free use of the n word, you can learn a lot about antebellum attitudes of free labor and slavery among the rich and the poor.