Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide

by Tony Horwitz

At the start of the Civil War, as slaves began flocking to Union lines, he sought a position as a “superintendent” of “negroes in a state of limbo between slavery & freedom.” As the war raged on, he told a government inquiry that “cities of Refuge” should be established for protecting and “assimilating” freedmen. He also warned that military victory for the Union would not vanquish “leaders and desperate men” in the South, who would fight on by other means: paramilitary bands, assassination, electoral intrigue, “and all manner of underhanded annoyance and obstruction.” The nation must be prepared for a protracted and uncompromising campaign, “for years,” to wear down and eliminate revanchist elements and their support from the mass of “nominally submissive” whites. Olmsted, in essence, foresaw postwar Reconstruction and the undermining of it by white terror, resistance, and the faltering will and effort of a war-weary North. What he couldn’t anticipate was that Calhoun’s estate, where he saw the evils of slavery most vividly, would become a pivotal battleground in the long, violent, and unfinished struggle to overturn the legacy of slavery. —