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May 28 - May 30, 2023
Olmsted spent his final days in an asylum; in a great irony, it was one for which he had earlier designed the grounds.
Even the notion of giving a child a middle name, as in Frederick Law Olmsted, was new in this era. Records show that virtually no one born during colonial times had received one. John Quincy Adams, America’s sixth president, was the first to have a middle name. Over time, American parents began latching onto this long-standing practice of the European gentry, whiff of pretension and all. The year 1822 produced a bumper crop of middle-named babies; Fred-Law’s exact contemporaries include Rutherford Birchard Hayes (the nineteenth president), noted explorer Edward Fitzgerald Beale, and Henry
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In 1632, this original Olmsted set out from Essex, England, aboard the ship Lyon, bound for America. He had buried his wife and lost four of his seven children. Anxious for a fresh start in the New World, he settled first in the colony of Massachusetts. But in 1636, he joined an expedition led by the Reverend Thomas Hooker that headed south on foot to found a new community. The group wound up in the Connecticut Valley and settled in a place they named Hertford, after a town in England. (It was later Americanized to “Hartford.”) As part of a land distribution, James Olmsted was given 70 acres
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On February 28, 1826, Charlotte Olmsted died of an overdose of laudanum. Laudanum is a tincture consisting of opiates dissolved in alcohol. It was a common patent medicine, a mainstay in many nineteenth-century American households, used to aid sleep, suppress coughs, relieve menstrual cramps, and myriad other things. Laudanum was also highly addictive and frequently lethal. Charlotte’s death happened just six months after the birth of a new baby, John Hull Olmsted. This was her second child—Fred’s baby brother.
To learn what was where, Fred used A Geography and Atlas, a brand-new book by Hartford resident Jesse Olney. By introducing children first to observable details such as lakes and hills and then moving to the more abstract, such as countries and continents, Olney revolutionized the way that geography was taught. His book quickly became a mainstay in virtually every school in the United States—dame, public, private, or otherwise.
Whampoa Reach,
Yet, hard as it was, the voyage aboard the Ronaldson also changed something essential about Fred. He’d faced a formidable challenge and, for once, had stuck with something to completion. He may have appeared a gaunt and diminished figure on the wharf that April day. But he was larger somehow, too, having perhaps bulked up in terms of inner strength. He still had a long way to go; plenty of dead ends lay ahead, and settling into adulthood was going to be drastically more difficult for him than for most people. But Fred had taken the first steps toward filling out that grand name, Frederick Law
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Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle. This was an experimental work by the acclaimed Scottish author, blending fact and fiction, with a kind of meta device thrown in as well, designed to make readers aware that fact and fiction were being mixed and to force them to question which was which, and to contemplate whether such distinctions really even exist.
In a letter to his father, Olmsted confessed that he felt like he wasn’t doing a very good job. The South was proving hard to penetrate. Olmsted was amazed by how like a foreign country it was, much more so than anyplace he’d visited during his recent tour through Europe. Raymond ran the dispatches anyway, even giving them prominent play. He had a newspaper to fill.
Visiting a rice plantation, Olmsted was intrigued by the generous considerations given to the slaves. The slaves here were comfortably dressed and lived in well-appointed cabins, and there was a nursery where infants were tended while their mothers worked the fields. On this particular plantation, he learned, many of the slaves even owned guns.
Olmsted was dumbfounded. Here was a white family living in tremendous isolation, miles from the next-nearest white family, and surrounded by two hundred armed slaves. The family didn’t even bother to lock their doors or windows, noted Olmsted. When questioned, the owner laughed as though Olmsted was the crazy one. He led Olmsted into a cabin where an elderly female slave was busy separating rice tailings from a pile of chaff. After shooting a grin at Olmsted, the man informed the old slave that he was granting her freedom. The woman protested. “I lubs ’ou mas’r, oh, I lubs ’ou,” she cried. “I
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Olmsted encountered several slave owners who also had experience running farms in the North. These men were in a good position to compare the two systems. All conceded that slave labor was drastically less efficient than hired farm labor. Olmsted did a rough average of the men’s varied assessments and concluded that a slave accomplished about half the work of one of the hired hands on his Staten Island farm.
Olmsted was growing convinced that slavery was flawed from an economic standpoint.
Olmsted met a fishing boat operator who was in the habit of paying slaves to blow up stumps, giving them a quarter or fifty cents a day. Sure enough, slaves clamored to be selected for this dangerous duty and accomplished it with aplomb. “What! Slaves eager to work, and working cheerfully, earnestly and skillfully?” asked Olmsted in a dispatch. He added, “Being for the time managed as freemen, their ambition stimulated by wages, suddenly they, too, reveal sterling manhood, and honor their creator.”
Thomas Jefferson once warned that if it continued, slavery would be as damaging to whites as blacks. This Olmsted also found to be true. At the time when he visited the South, more than 70 percent of whites didn’t own a single slave. Yet slavery permeated every aspect of society. Olmsted tried to get an umbrella fixed and was stunned by the ineptitude of the white repairman. The very concept of work had been degraded. This went a long way toward explaining the rutted roads and constant delays encountered everywhere while traveling. Nobody wanted to do anything. Whites didn’t value work because
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Not only was slavery a flawed economic system, but it promoted cultural deficiency as well. Sure, this beau ideal existed: the Southern gentleman, possessed of perfect manners and impeccable breeding, enjoying the leisure to pursue refinement in all things. It was a myth, concluded Olmsted. Why, his host had talked of guano, when he had talked at all. Plantation owners simply lived too far apart one from another for any cultural commerce. They were consumed by the mere act of subsisting. This was such a contrast to Northern city life, including his own upbringing in Hartford, where density
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In Nashville, the brothers boarded a steamboat that traveled along the Cumberland River on route to the mighty Mississippi. Lying in his darkened cabin, Olmsted could hear his fellow passengers laughing and playing cards deep into the night. As the steamer pitched to and fro, he wrestled with his recent encounter with the Nashville plantation owner. He got up and tried to compose his thoughts in a letter to Brace. What was it about Allison that provoked him so? Maybe, Olmsted confessed, he was just insecure in the face of the planter’s easy convictions. One had to admit that his wealth and
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Incredibly, tensions between the North and South had erupted into violence in the very halls of Congress. On about the sixth blow, the cane broke, but Brooks kept whacking Sumner. “Hit him, Brooks, he deserves it,” yelled a fellow Southern senator. Meanwhile, a Northern congressman rushed to Sumner’s aid. “I’m dead,” cried Sumner. “Oh, I’m most dead!” Sumner lived, but he was never the same. It would be more than three years before he was sufficiently recovered to return to his Senate seat.
America was supposed to be a beacon of democracy in hidebound old Europe, but instead his country was an object of scorn. He recorded the following impression: “The position of an American traveling in Europe is just now a most unpleasant one. In railway carriages and other public places when he is not known as an American, he is obliged to hear language applied to his country which it is difficult to allow to pass in silence, and yet which he cannot deny to be just.”
Then came another letter from Dix. This time, Olmsted’s young partner said that everything at Putnam’s was copacetic. He’d merely panicked. Ignore my earlier letter, Dix urged, and don’t rush home on account of my overreaction. Stick around—enjoy England. The turnabout enraged Olmsted: “Write me in a fever of fear & trembling & what not one week—all going to the devil & no hot pitch to be had at any price unless I come home in my shirt tail to help you heat it up & then next day—all as smooth & jolly [as] a summer’s sea of champagne and icebreezes. Damn you for a high pressure hypochondriac.”
By midcentury, Manhattan Island had seventeen parks, all of them small and totaling a paltry 165 acres. Many of these parks were mere squares, oriented to their immediate neighborhoods. Meanwhile, places like Gramercy Park and St. John’s Park were private, reserved for the exclusive use of the people who owned the surrounding properties.
The Washington Monument, half built, rose above a scruffy mall. Landscaping efforts had stalled in the aftermath of Downing’s death; the ambitious park that Downing and Vaux had been commissioned to design had never been realized.
Camps were crowded and filthy, with enlisted men packed five deep into stuffy little wedge tents. Many preferred to sleep outside on the hard ground. Each camp was supposed to have an eight-foot trench that served as a makeshift toilet. It was supposed to be covered once a day with six inches of fresh dirt. This regulation was routinely ignored. The men were in the habit of relieving themselves wherever they could find a free spot. Reaching the edge of camp was a bother at night, a luxury by day.
While walking to the USSC offices, Olmsted caught his first glimpse of Abraham Lincoln. The president was moving at a brisk clip, headed to the War Department, accompanied by three other men. Olmsted thought the president looked younger than expected. He was put off by the president’s style of dress, describing Lincoln as wearing a “cheap & nasty French black cloth suit just out of a tight carpet bag. Looked as if he would be an applicant for a Broadway squad policemanship, but a little too smart and careless.”
“Lincoln has no element of dignity; no tact, not a spark of genius,” he writes in one, and in another: “The official machinery is utterly and absurdly inadequate for the emergency & there is no time to think of enlarging it. I feel the whole business is exceedingly uncertain & should not be much surprised to get up & find Jeff Davis in the White House.” To Mary, he struck this plaintive note: “Give me some good news of yourself, please, and of the park. I can not get on long without you here.”
The data was stark. Of twenty-nine regiments surveyed, ten reported that at least a third of their number had simply collapsed from exhaustion before the battle even started. For many of these soldiers, the cause of such breakdown was want of water, food, or sleep. Others had been worn out by the need to march the final miles to battle at a punishing pace known as “double-quick.” Combining the march and the retreat, Olmsted determined that the average soldier traveled forty-four miles on foot the day of the battle.
Remarkably, the bureau had begun the Civil War with just twenty-six surgeons and eighty assistants. Most of them had spent recent years at isolated frontier outposts, and as a consequence their skills were dangerously outdated.
“Dear Charley,” Olmsted wrote. “I went to the White House to-day and saw the President. He is a very tall man. He is not a handsome man. He is not graceful. But he is good. He speaks frankly and truly and straight out just what he is thinking. Commonly he is very sober but sometimes he laughs. And when he laughs he laughs very much and opens his mouth very deep.”
Once aboard, surgeons would begin by rubbing a little powdered opium into a soldier’s wounds. Syringes for injecting morphine didn’t become available until later in the war.
Anthony Trollope had recently published North America, a much-acclaimed travelogue laced with trenchant social criticism.
(Frémont was the brand-new Republican Party’s very first presidential candidate in 1856. Olmsted voted for him, but Frémont lost the election to Democrat James Buchanan.) “Why, when I came to California I was worth nothing,” he once joked, “and now I owe two millions of dollars.”
Before arriving in Panama, as was the practice, Olmsted started taking several grains of quinine each day, prophylactically, so as to ward off malaria. The “Chagres shakes”—named after a river that ran alongside the rail line in Panama—was a particularly virulent strain. In 1852, Ulysses Grant had lost 250 men while marching across Panama. As an old man, he’d remember the horrors of Panama more vividly than those of the Civil War.
Gold is one of the heaviest elements on earth. As the slurry slid across the amalgamation table, even the tiniest specks of gold drifted to the bottom of the mix and dropped into the bed of mercury. Gold and mercury’s chemical relationship is nonexistent. Bits of gold simply collected in the mercury until the mercury was utterly laden. Then it was “clean-up time.” The so-called amalgam was scooped into buckets and carried to a retort room. There, it was heated in iron kettles until all the mercury had vaporized, leaving behind gold. Gold captured in this fashion is called doré. Olmsted noticed
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Things came full circle in 1906, when after years of mismanagement by the State of California—and following the tireless efforts of Galen Clark and John Muir—Yosemite became a national park. With his August 1865 address, Olmsted played a key early role in the conservation of America’s wild spaces.
At two o’clock in the morning on August 28, 1903, Olmsted died. He was eighty-one.
