The Slave States Before The Civil War Edited with an Introduction by Harvey wish

by Frederick Law Olmstead, Harvey Wish (Editor)

F.M. Olmsted wrote these clear-sighted accounts of life in the south in the eighteen-fifties. Some topics covered : Slavery customs in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and the other seaboard states; backwoods life in the southern mountain states; slavery and freedom in Texas; the effect of slavery on the black and on the white man.

Genres: History, American History, Civil War

284 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

Reviews

[Bill FromPA · Rating 5 out of 5]

This seems a reasonable abridgment of Olmsted's multi-volume eyewitness account of the antebellum South. Editor Harvey Wish could have made it clearer in his lengthy introduction that Olmsted was traveling with a dog during many of his excursions; this would have made the odd references to "Jude" less confusing. The only glaring error occurs in the chapter "Route Through Western Texas" where Olmsted (or his brother) writes "At two o'clock the thermometer, in a cool, shady spot, stood at 79⁰ [centigrade], and the sky was nearly clear." The brackets presumably indicate the insertion by an editor who really should have known better.

Olmsted's work itself is a fascinating blend of travelogue, interviews, sociology, and economics. The argument that emerges from his book is that the system of slavery supporting the "cotton kingdom" is a blight upon the entire region where slaves are held or traded, simultaneously inflating the cost of labor while limiting its supply by stigmatizing a large range of manual labor as "nigger work". It sometimes seems in this account that slaveholders cling to the system primarily because Northern abolitionists object to it so vehemently; I suspect, though Olmsted doesn't suggest this, it is rather the brutal and unambiguous way that the system preserves the illusion of white supremacy that made its elimination so unthinkable to most of the white Southerners that the author encountered.

In traveling through mainly rural areas, Olmsted finds himself, like Odysseus, dependent on the hospitality of residents of the country through which he travels, a hospitality which is often bluntly denied him. The varying accommodation he does find among often reluctant hosts is seldom worse than that provided by the few commercial inns he describes, with their dirty sheets and unpalatable food. His stay among German settlers in Texas is the main exception to the general rule of ignorance, dirt, and suspicion he finds prevalent in the slave states; the town of Neu Braunfels is depicted as an oasis of free labor, education, and gemütlichkeit.

By far the most interesting parts of the book for me were Olmsted's accounts of his conversations with various Southerners, including his rare opportunities to converse with slaves. These personal encounters have their Dickensian moments, such as Olmsted's meeting with the unhappy proprietor of a "Grosery" in backwoods Virginia who "was sorry he had ever come here. It was the worst job for himself ever he did, when he came here, though all he wanted was to just get a living."

[Mark Lisac · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading history can be frustrating because it often leaves a feeling that you would like to have seen everything in person. Olmsted delivered a rare gift. He wrote in a way that puts what he saw and heard before you, almost as if he were travelling with a video device. His purpose was to investigate the nature and effects of slavery in the U.S. South during a 14-month tour in 1852-53. A curious and sensitive observer, he managed to include description of the physical environment and infrastructure, economic analysis, depictions of many individuals and the nature of their local society, depictions of slaves and what they had to say (on the few occasions he could talk with them directly), and even some lovely snippets of nature description, the latter prefiguring his later career as the influential architect of New York City's Central Park and many other landmarks. An eye-opening and astonishing work.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frederick Law Olmsted is probably better known as the architect of Central Park and the Columbian Exposition World Fair in Chicago in 1883. But before that he was a well-known journalist (which I didn't know). He had published a book on his rambles through England (which gave him a lot of ideas on landscape architecture) and was asked to do the same with the Southern States. Although he was hired by a anti-slavery editor (NOT an abolitionist), the focus was to be on the actual living conditions, society, etc. of the area.

The result was actually three volumes of well over 600 pages each. This book is a MUCH condensed version but doesn't lose any of the overall "taste." Olmsted IS a very good writer and manages to take the reader right into whatever he is experiencing, whether it is experiencing extremely bad service in most of the public houses on his trip or meeting with the Germans of Neu Braunsfel in Texas and contrasting their industry with the lack thereof he has seen elsewhere.

My favorite parts were the time he was off to Mr. W's house and wasn't sure of the way. At the livery stable he was told it was tricky, but if he followed these directions he'd get there. Whereupon follows a exceeding long list of the kinds of instructions you expect in the backcountry now - go to the empty farmhouse and turn left, go straight down the road until you come to a dead sycamore tree on the left of the road and veer right through the field to another dead sycamore.... You get the idea. He even wrote the instructions down but it was such a nice day for riding, he got lost. Thereafter anytime he asked for directions from black or white he was told "road goes straight there. Don't get off the road, just follow the road," and inevitably he would go a mile and discover a very distinct fork. His telling is hilarious.

The other part is when he is in the backcountry along the Appalachians. The people he meets are extremely poor. When they find he is from New York, they have an inevitable question: "Do you know Mr. -------------? He lives up there in New York." You can almost hear him sighing deeply and then patiently answering that New York City has more residents than there are ants on this farm.

It's a delightful read. Olmsted leaves no doubt that he doesn't see the warmth and hospitality that were supposed to be the South's trademark. Although he doesn't see any cruel treatment of slaves, he shows how slavery does not make sense economically and should be abolished. He's got a great touch with characters much like Dickens and Twain and it's hard to imagine that he kept a straight face during some of the conversations he had.

Everyone who is interested in the antebellum South should read this book. Even those who aren't but enjoy travel books should.

[Bob Newman · Rating 5 out of 5]

A moderate conclusion to a radical problem

Frederick Law Olmstead not only designed a large number of urban parks and green spaces as well as being one of the designers of the great exposition at Chicago in 1893, he also took a trip through the slave states of the US South back in 1852-54. That trip lasted 14 months and he published a six volume work on his findings. Yours truly will not be caught dead reading a six volume report, I’m afraid, but this edited book, published a mere 74 years ago, has a much more reasonable length. I bought it as a university undergraduate around 62 years ago, but only got round to reading it now. [OK, OK, so I’m a bit slow off the mark!]
The reason that Olmstead did this was to prove that slavery as an agricultural system or system of organizing work was inefficient and uneconomic. Of course the abolitionist movement had been crying out against the evil of slavery for some time on moral and/or religious grounds. Perhaps Olmstead wanted to seem more impartial and didn’t wish to point a condemnatory finger at the slave-owning southerners, that’s why he avoided the moral implications of slavery and kept making the point that since the system was so uneconomic, it should be abolished.

In the introduction, Harvey Wish (a history professor in Ohio), writes:
Olmstead “believed that everything he (saw) indicated that slavery was wasteful and did not pay, that it injured the entire South by exhausting the soil and driving away free labor and democratic institutions, that it held back many Southern communities to a primitive frontier level, socially and culturally, and that it coarsened or brutalized the slaveholder’s character.” (p.19) He pointed out many times that slaves were not inclined to work quickly or with any degree of attention—passive resistance being the only possible answer to their condition. Plus, he reiterated that slavery had a deplorable effect on white owners, who were often devoid of human sympathy, lazy, and lacking morals.

The author also noted that many owners of big plantations lived far away and turned all management over to overseers who tried to wring the most work out of the slaves.
On his long, slow way around most of the southern states—roads were abysmal, towns often few and far between—the author noted that the class of non-slave-owners were those who most hated and despised black people and that those whites themselves were quite ignorant and immoral. I think this was quite natural since due to slavery, there were no chances for employment for such people, who lived out on the fringes. Condemned mostly to poverty, the poor whites’ only comfort was that they “were superior” to the blacks, a comfort they continued to hold for over a century more and probably still may.
Whether you are interested in the history of slavery or not, the book is like a window onto America back in those days—the dialects, the nature of the people, the conditions of life and travel, the emptiness of the land, the vast forests and the total isolation from the world of those who lived there, plus the conversations with people from all walks of life Olmstead met. That’s why I have given it five stars.

[Amy Sawyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting account of Olmstead's travels through the South in the 1850's. I especially enjoyed the concluding chapter using data from the 1850 census highlighting the negative economic impact of slavery. Most of what we hear from this time period are anti-slavery arguments grounded in morals or political philosophy, not economics.

[Melissa]

Goodreads review

[Rock · Rating 4 out of 5]

The introduction to this edition brags that Olmsted's was the definitive account of the antebellum South, and having read the book the claim is easy to believe. Olmsted is careful, detailed, and mostly fair in his travelogue, admitting in a later version that was published after the outbreak of the war that he was trying his best to be neutral and succeeded a little too well. Yet he's also humorously hard on the ineptitude of Southern transportation and hospitality, and his like any honest account of a system of slavery contains many heartbreaking stories that outrage our contemporary sense of ethics just as they would have outraged antebellum abolitionists. An interesting aside is contained in the long section adulating the German colonists of the Texas Hill Country, which is explained in the introduction as ammo for Olmsted's advocating for the creation of a Free State in West Texas. The aside has a macabre aspect for the contemporary reader who reflects that such gradualism necessarily kept millions enslaved and in a state of terror in the existing Slave States, and so does this entire account to some degree, but despite that (and occasional sloppiness and disjointed narrative) Olmsted's writing is fresh, personal, readable, yet detailed and enlightening.

[Kathryn Bundy · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a gem! This travelogue is not only entertaining and informative, it is packed with details of everyday life in the American south during the 1850s. The author, who I only associated with landscape architecture until now (he designed Central Park in NYC, among many, many other projects)turns out to have been a well known journalist, as well, and founded The Nation magazine in the mid-nineteenth century.

For the most part, his tone in this collection of three separate travel accounts, is that of an observer and is relatively objective. The addition of a prologue to the third part, in which he plainly states his personal views on slavery and southern social conditions, was written shortly after the beginning of the Civil War.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, perhaps in part because I am a transplanted midwesterner living in North Carolina for the past quarter century. I am always interested in learning more about my adopted state, and this window into history is particularly striking.