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by
Tony Horwitz
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March 12 - March 30, 2022
Olmsted’s initial faith in reasoned discourse had also waned. In the course of his travels, the South’s “leading men” had struck him as implacable: convinced of the superiority of their caste-bound society, intent on expanding it, and utterly contemptuous of the North. “They are a mischievous class—the dangerous class at the present of the United States,” Olmsted wrote, seven years before the Civil War.
“These principles cannot stand together,” Abraham Lincoln declared of slavery and freedom in 1854. “They are as opposite as God and Mammon; and whoever holds to the one must despise the other.”
Just before turning twenty-one, he found a berth as a poorly paid ship’s “boy” on a merchant vessel to China. This proved such a nightmarish passage that the crew almost mutinied and the captain was later prosecuted for excessive flogging—brutality that became the yardstick by which the adult Olmsted measured human degradation, including slave labor.
But that middle ground had caved in, and blue-collar West Virginia—staunchly Democratic in the twentieth century—had turned strongly Republican in recent elections. Klempa blamed some of this rightward turn on race. The state was 95 percent white, and even the waning Democratic base was so unenthusiastic about Obama that it had given 41 percent of the vote in the 2012 presidential primary to a jailed felon, Keith Judd.
“Washington’s waging a ‘war on coal’?” Klempa scoffed. “It’s a joke, like having a war on midgets.”
Two years later, West Virginia formally joined the Union as the thirty-fifth state, its seal proclaiming in Latin, “Mountaineers Are Always Free.” This withdrawal from Virginia proved to be the only lasting secession to occur in the Civil War era.
were known as “floating white palaces,” up to three hundred feet long, with plush furnishings and formal dining. However, they were notoriously unsafe due to primitive boilers that frequently exploded, scalding passengers and setting fire to the vessels. “The boats were made of white oak, hickory, and walnut—all good firewood,”
“If you’re thinking miners with picks and shovels, those days are long gone,” he said. The coal he oversaw was extracted by machinery he likened to the carriage of a typewriter. “It goes across the coal seam with teeth that chew at the coal, and then ratchets back to cross the seam again.” With only twelve workers per shift at the coalface, the mine produced six million tons a year.
Tugs referred to small boats that worked at docks and harbors. Towboats were much bigger and more powerful and, despite their name, pushed rather than towed barges down the river. I changed tack, asking what there was to do at ports we’d visit along the Ohio. “Huntington’s got titty clubs,” my neighbor replied. “If you’re into fat naked ladies with C-section scars, that’s your town.”
I asked the captain what our ETA was for reaching the next city along the Ohio, Marietta, about seventy miles downriver. “ETA?” he laughed. “Out here it’s WAG—a wild-ass guess. There are so many variables.”
After his killing, when the river settlement failed to prosper, a legend arose that the chief had cursed Point Pleasant. This belief resurfaced in 1967, when a bridge linking the town to Ohio collapsed amid Christmas-shopping traffic, dumping cars and passengers and gifts into the icy river. Forty-six people died, one of the worst bridge disasters in US history.
“Have you ever seen the Mothman?” I asked. “He just left,” the bartender replied. “That’s why it’s empty in here.” “So I take it you’re not a believer?” “If you’re making money off the Mothman, you’re a believer,” he said. “My dad was a miner; he believed in coal, until he died at sixty from silicosis.”
He’d nonetheless kept campaigning against Answers in Genesis, for over a decade, applying his paleontological skills to layers of literature and tax filings. He’d publicized, among other embarrassments, that the man who had served as the model for Adam at the Creation Museum had a sexually graphic website called Bedroom Acrobat.
Paradoxically, Olmsted had a hand in the despoiling of this landscape. Though best known for designing city parks, he was an early architect and advocate of suburbs. Olmsted envisioned these outlying neighborhoods as refuges from urban centers, combining the “ruralistic beauty of a loosely built New England village” with easy access to city jobs and amenities.
“Were it only free.” Olmsted wasn’t referring in this instance to slaves, though he described their whip-driven toil at a Lexington hemp factory. Rather, his indictment was aimed at the bound minds and mouths of whites. “Discussion may be learned, witty, delightful, only—not free. Should you come to Lexington, leave your best thoughts behind.”
Need more info about that hemp factory.
Olmsted recounted all this without context, knowing that his readers would be familiar with Cassius Clay (a name little known today, except in relation to the boxer Muhammad Ali). In the 1840s and ’50s, Clay was a nationally renowned firebrand who had a very strong influence on Northerners like Olmsted.
The staff had to patiently explain that the black boxer from Louisville was named after his father, Cassius Clay Sr., who in turn had been named for the once-famous white Kentuckian. This may have been done out of respect for Clay’s antislavery views or because the family’s forebears had worked at White Hall.
The new president, Franklin Pierce, was a Northern “doughface,” easily plied by Southern interests, as conflict loomed over slavery’s status in the Kansas and Nebraska Territories.
Olmsted’s catalog in the Times of “elevating” venues included “public parks and gardens.” Designing these democratic spaces would also draw together the disparate strands of Olmsted’s character.
He has hoped that creating a meeting place would encourage dialog.
After my talk about race with the bookie in Greenville, I’d taken an eyeball census of the American Queen’s 410 passengers. There were a number of Asian tourists but only four blacks, a family from Canada on board because one was a scholar who’d been invited to give a talk about escaped slaves. He told me it was strange to find his presentation touted in the boat’s daily newssheet as a “fun and entertaining lecture about life in the Underground Railroad.”
At about the fifth such mention of “servants,” Jamie, the Californian I’d met on the American Queen, interjected: “Do you mean they were slaves?” “Of course they were,” the guide testily replied. “How many slaves were here, and where did they live?” “About thirty house servants; they had quarters out back.” She moved briskly on, pointing out where the boudoir and conservatory were to have been. After a quick stop at the restrooms, located in the former slave quarters, we were herded back onto the bus. “They can’t even mouth the S-word,” Jamie stewed in the seat beside me. “For them it’s like
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slaveholders often deployed religion as a tool of social control, tailoring prayers and sermons to stress the duty to obey one’s master.
As I listened to Long fulminate against the “favored few” and champion the little man, Bernie Sanders was voicing similar themes on the campaign trail. Trump tapped this populism, too, with a style and tactics that Huey foreshadowed. A belligerent entertainer, Long mocked Washington “elites” and disparaged the character and appearance of other candidates, calling them “thieves, bugs, and lice,” or belittling them with nicknames like “Turkey Head” and “Old Buzzard Back.” He went after judges, told bodyguards to rough up the press, warned supporters to “watch out for the lying newspapers!,” and
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Edwin Edwards, laughed off the frequent charges against him, boasting that the only way he’d lose an election “is if I’m caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.” He won four times before going to prison for bribery, fraud, and other crimes. But Louisiana was more forgiving of crooked politicians than of the felons I’d met at Angola. Released after eight years, Edwards married a woman fifty-two years his junior, starred with her in a reality show, and won a primary for Congress. “People say, well, they’re all crooks anyhow,” Edwards told a reporter, when asked about going to
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When freedom came, ex-slaves searching for long-lost kin often found that their wives had started new families with other men, out of necessity, on the orders of a master, or because they never expected to see their former partner again. This legacy made Nottoway all the more grotesque, because the mansion was now a premier wedding venue, touted as the South’s largest antebellum mansion. “Every Castle Needs a Queen,” one of Nottaway’s brochures stated.
a golf course occupied the spine of the narrow park, making it difficult to stray far from perfectly mown fairways and greens—the sort of manicured landscape Olmsted disliked—and
It was dark as we drove back to the Plantation Inn, apart from the lights and flares from chemical plants. “Oh, look, there’s the nitrogen fertilizer, and there’s the ammonia that will blow you right up!” Andrew exclaimed, like a demented tour guide. “If Timothy McVeigh built a town, it would be Donaldsonville, Louisiana.”
“The main advantage claimed for slavery,” Olmsted wrote, was “the benefit arising to the inferior race, from its forced relation to and intercourse with the superior.” But this supposed, paternalistic uplift “amounts to nothing” on large plantations like Calhoun’s, where the absentee owner relied on a manager and overseers who supervised 150 to 250 slaves apiece. “Each laborer is such an inconsiderable unit in the mass of laborers, that he may even not be known by name.”
When Hamilton spoke up about the need to reexamine and reinterpret the 1873 event, some whites agreed. They formed a biracial “heritage association” to research the violence and discuss how to present it. This effort included the use of ground-penetrating radar to discern the 1873 trench-works and mass grave by the courthouse, where bones had turned up during construction work. Hamilton had been optimistic about changing the sign, honoring the black dead, and possibly creating a museum. “I thought, times have finally changed and blacks and whites can come together over this,” he said. “Hear
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Texans would vote overwhelmingly to secede in 1861, with their leaders condemning “the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race or color” and declaring that the “beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery” should “exist in all future time.”
It was also mentioned on the historical plaques that seemed to adorn every sidewalk and building—even lampposts—in the old district. “A dentist would be concerned here with all the plaque,” Andrew said, channeling Groucho as I dragged him to every marker I could find. “I’m expecting to see a plaque saying that this was the site of the original plaque in Nacogdoches.”
But the main attraction at the battlefield was its twentieth-century makeover: a tribute to Texas overstatement. Laid out like the National Mall, the park had a reflecting pool and a shaft modeled on the Washington Monument, except the reinforced concrete phallus was a few feet bigger than the one in the nation’s capital. “This is the tallest masonry monument in the world,” an elevator operator assured me as I rode to the top for a 360-degree panorama of shipping channels and petrochemical plants. “It’s in The Guinness Book of World Records.”
He married twice, to much younger women (“I fancied that you were in my arms, and we were felicitating ourselves,” he wrote to one), not counting a native woman he cohabited with while living among the Cherokee, who called him “Big Drunk.” Houston also shot a man in a duel and severely caned a congressman in public.
