Genius of Place (14 page)

Periodically, he'd craft his notes into a
Times
dispatch. He made a practice of preserving the anonymity of his subjects. After all, they hadn't
even been aware that they were talking to a reporter. Were their names, attached to their words, to show up in a newspaper article, his subjects might also be in danger of reprisal.

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.

Apparently, they used the guns to hunt for game in the nearby woods, a perk that allowed them to supplement their usual food rations. 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 don't want go 'way from 'ou.”

Olmsted—clear-eyed reporter that he was—was left to grapple with this exchange. The rice plantation didn't prove to be an isolated case, either. Strange as it was, a genuine regard seemed to exist, sometimes even approaching familial love, between some owners and their slaves. Meanwhile, it was hypocrisy to pretend that the North's economic system was free of ruthlessness. “Oh God! Who are we to condemn our brother,” Olmsted demanded in a
Times
dispatch. “ . . . No slave freezes to death for want of habitation or fuel, as have men in Boston. No slave reels off into the abyss of God, from want of work that shall bring it food, as do men and women in New-York. Remember that, Mrs. Stowe. Remember that, indignant sympathizers.”

 

Olmsted remained constantly on the move in the South. Even traveling short distances proved unduly complicated, and frequently it was necessary to transfer from one means of conveyance to another.

At one point, he set off from Norfolk, Virginia, bound for Gaston, North Carolina, about ninety miles. He began his trip on a ferryboat that was supposed to connect with a train. Midway across Norfolk Harbor, the ferry simply stopped running and drifted for fifteen minutes. Apparently, the fireman had fallen asleep and stopped feeding coal into the ferry's engine. Olmsted arrived at the train terminal a half hour late. Fortunately, the train arrived a full hour late.

Chugging along inferior track, the train made an achingly slow journey to Weldon, North Carolina. There, Olmsted hired a stagecoach. The driver, not planning to depart for a while, suggested that Olmsted go eat dinner. He urged Olmsted to leave his luggage, which contained his reporting notes, among other things. Upon finishing dinner, Olmsted discovered that the coach had departed without him. Olmsted broke into a run and was able to quickly overtake the coach. The road was so preposterously rutted that it took four hours for the coach to travel fourteen miles, whereupon Olmsted was summarily turned out. Late that night, he finally arrived in Gaston, exhausted. This was also no isolated incident. Olmsted soon concluded that the South was almost comically inefficient.

Nowhere was this more evident than with slave labor. At any given time, Olmsted observed, only a portion of the slaves on a plantation were capable of work. Prior to the age of twelve, for example, children born to slaves could contribute very little, at most being called upon for such light duty as scaring birds away from crops. Old slaves were also capable of only the most minimal work. Same for a slave that was sick or injured. Female slaves who were menstruating weren't considered fit for the demands of field labor, either. “They are forever complaining of ‘irregularities,'” a plantation owner told him. “They don't come to the field, and you ask what's the matter, and the old nurse always nods her head and says, ‘Oh, she's not well, sir; she's not fit to work, sir,'—and you have to take her word for it.”

Add up all the slaves that
couldn't
work, Olmsted found, and at any given time only about a third remained that
could
—an observation that was borne out in visit after visit to plantations. Yet masters had to house and clothe and feed their slaves, every last one. Moreover, the few slaves
working didn't exactly go all out. They broke tools and mistreated the mules, neglecting to give them food and water. One time, Olmsted watched with bemusement as an overseer on horseback rode toward a group of slaves who were shirking. They stepped up their pace, but in the meantime, slaves on the other side of the field had let up.

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.

The same clear-eyed approach that had made Olmsted open to the South's charms was demanding that he acknowledge the region's deficiencies. It was becoming increasingly clear to him that slavery wasn't working, but not for the usual reasons. Olmsted's perspective went something like this: Slavery, with its myriad inefficiencies, was a defective system when it came to labor and production. Olmsted's criticism of slavery was uniquely his own and based on empirical observation. As such, it differed greatly from the emotional appeals of abolitionists. Olmsted was growing convinced that slavery was flawed from an
economic
standpoint.

Olmsted's ceaseless travel took him to the North Carolina coast and an unusual operation where slave labor was employed in fishing. Slaves aboard boats used sweep seines to catch herring and shad. Frequently, the nets got fouled by huge underwater cypress stumps. To remove particularly pesky stumps, it was necessary to send down a diver with a crude detonating device, an iron tube packed with gunpowder.

This was demanding work. 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.”

On another occasion, Olmsted was particularly pleased when he got the chance to talk with a slave one-on-one, without a master or anyone else present. At the end of a visit to a sugar plantation, a slave was enlisted to drive Olmsted in a buggy to his next destination. For a white Northern stranger, this was quite a rare opportunity. Olmsted wanted to make sure he didn't blow it. His mind was swirling with questions, but he was careful to let the conversation unfold naturally.

What is your name?
he asked the slave.

Olmsted continued on for some minutes in this casual vein. When the moment was right, he slipped it in:
What would you do if you were free?

“If I was free, massa,” said William, immediately warming to the subject, “if I was free I would—well, sar, de fus thing I would do, if I was free, I would go to work for a year, and get some money for myself,—den—den—den, massa, dis is what I do—I buy me, fus place, a little house, and little lot land . . . ”

Olmsted had a knack for mimicking speech patterns. And the man's modest dreams touched Olmsted as well. There were slaves, queasy truth be told, who wished to remain slaves. He'd seen as much. But there were probably many more like William, living out their lives in silent rebellion.

 

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 work was fit only for slaves. Slaves—lacking incentive—didn't do much of it, either.

Only a select few plantation owners, blessed with fertile land or good luck, really benefited from this system. But the very idea of aristocracy, the
notion of one type of person naturally superior to another, was so seductive to many plantation owners that they kept at it, inefficiency be damned. Other plantation owners were simply trapped in a system that didn't really serve them. In unguarded moments, several admitted as much to Olmsted.

For most, it was a hardscrabble life. Passing the night at a planter's “mansion,” Olmsted couldn't help but notice that the floors were uncarpeted and the windows covered in paper curtains. On the wall hung a clock, manufactured in his home state, Connecticut. (Everything that required manufacturing came from the North.) The clock was stopped dead. Thus, there wasn't even a ticktock to punctuate the long stretches of silence between Olmsted and his taciturn host.

After a modest meal, Olmsted decided to turn in. He asked for a candle. To Olmsted's puzzlement, the host followed him upstairs to the bedroom and stood there holding the candle. Olmsted reached for it, but the host's grip tightened. That's when it struck him. For thrift's sake, the household was skimping on candles. With the host standing there, Olmsted changed into his nightclothes. Then the man blew out this lone candle and left with an abrupt “Good night, sir.”

The next morning, Olmsted stayed for a breakfast of bacon, eggs, and the dreaded corn bread. As he ate, he puzzled over whether this was a representative example of “genuine planter's hospitality.” Maybe the man expected to be compensated for the night's stay. He decided to err on the side of offering payment. When Olmsted broached the subject, the man didn't hesitate for a moment, saying, “I reckon a dollar and a quarter will be right, sir.”

This episode was one of many that led Olmsted to another of his unique observations: 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 forced people into contact
with each other, and with new ideas. As he traveled the South, Olmsted noted that he rarely saw a book of Shakespeare or a pianoforte or even a picture hanging on a wall.

 

By March 1853, Olmsted was several months into his journey. He'd covered an immense amount of ground, traveling across Maryland and Virginia, wending his way through the Carolinas and Georgia. He was now deep into the Mississippi Delta. As the historian Edmund Wilson once wrote, “He tenaciously and patiently and lucidly made his way through the whole South, undiscouraged by churlish natives, almost impassable roads or the cold inns and uncomfortable cabins in which he spent most of his nights. He talked to everybody and he sized up everything and he wrote it all down.”

There's one thing Olmsted hadn't yet seen. But that would change soon enough. An overseer was giving Olmsted a tour of a cotton plantation on the banks of the Red River, about thirty miles southeast of Natchitoches, Louisiana. As they rode on through a gully, the overseer suddenly pulled up his horse.

“What that? Hallo!—who are you there?”

Someone was lying in the brush, trying to hide.

“Who are you there?” the overseer repeated.

The person rose up slightly. Through the brush, Olmsted could just vaguely make out a figure.

“Sam's Sall, Sir.”

The person was a slave, an identity that permeated her whole being. Her name was Sall. And she belonged to Sam.

The overseer demanded that Sall provide an explanation for why she wasn't at work in the fields. She said that her father had locked her in her bedroom. When she woke up in the morning, he had already left. She had pushed on a loose plank and finally had been able to crawl out. As to why she was now hiding in a gully, she was vague.

“That won't do—come out here.”

Sall emerged from the brush and stood facing Olmsted and the overseer. Olmsted could now see that Sall was a young woman, about eighteen years old.

“That won't do,” repeated the overseer. “You must take some—kneel down.”

Sall lowered herself to her knees. The overseer got down off his horse, carrying a rawhide whip in his left hand. He struck the girl repeatedly across the shoulders. Sall took the punishment, not crying out but merely wincing, occasionally saying, “Please, Sir!”

After he'd lashed her about thirty times, the overseer demanded again that Sall explain why she was hiding in the gully. Again, Sall repeated the same story.