Genius of Place (30 page)

But McClellan reneged. Looking back, Olmsted reflected that he'd have to credit McClellan with a political subtlety that hadn't registered during their meeting. After all, the general had speculated on the size of the Confederate force. He'd provided a Confederate estimate of the Union force. What he'd held close was the one fact he knew cold: the actual size of the Union army.

Olmsted kept at it, camping out in the lobbies and anterooms of the Washington power elite. Bellows was forever impressed by Olmsted's drive: “His mind is patient in meditation, capable & acute, his will inflexible, his devotion to his principles & methods, confident and unflinching.” On another occasion, the reverend offered a telling backhand assessment, describing Olmsted as “a severe judge, seldom pleased & whose presence I dread more than every body else's.”

Olmsted even managed to gain an audience with Lincoln. On October 17, 1861, he and several other USSC commissioners visited the White House from nine to eleven in the morning. Lincoln not only refused to remove Surgeon General Finley but also suggested that the USSC was trying to “run the machine.”

Following the meeting, Olmsted composed a letter to his nine-year-old stepson, John Charles. Ordinarily, Olmsted wrote at tremendous speed in a dense scrawl. This time, he wrote slowly, forming his letters with great care. Given that his recipient was a child, Olmsted was more
charitable toward Lincoln than in earlier impressions, but still it's possible to read between the lines. “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.”

Olmsted had gone to the top of the chain of command without success, but he wasn't done. He convinced Henry Wilson, a Massachusetts senator, to introduce a bill calling for the reorganization of the Medical Bureau. The bill got off to an extremely unpromising start, kicking around in various committees. But soon this bill would change everything for the USSC.

Olmsted was driving himself hard. It wasn't until six months into the USSC job that he spent a night at the Willard without sleeping in his clothes. He crowed in a letter, “I have discovered that pale ale is an admirable prophylactic of nervous exhaustion.” A friend had brewed him a number of bottles.

 

Mary had the baby, a girl. This was Olmsted's second child. Little John Theodore had died just over a year earlier. Olmsted rushed back to New York. He'd been so busy that he wasn't clear on the child's birth date. It was October 28, 1861.

“We have a girl,” Olmsted wrote to Brace, “which though not what the country wants right now is to me personally more agreeable than a man-child would have been.” He added that he and Mary were considering the name: “Thank God things can't be much meaner in mytimes.” Although that was a grim joke, there was serious discussion about naming the baby Content. Content Pitkin Olmsted was the paternal grandmother whose books had given FLO so much precocious enjoyment. While the name was hopeful, it just didn't feel right. They named her Marion instead.

 

Returning to Washington, Olmsted began contemplating an enticing possibility. A joint army-navy expedition, led by General Thomas Sherman, had recently captured the Sea Islands, a plantation region in the Port Royal
Sound off the coast of South Carolina. The slave masters, foremen, and other whites had all fled the region. But the slaves had stayed behind and were, in effect, living as a free community. Olmsted began thinking about leaving the USSC to work with these former slaves instead.

The war was only a few months old, and everything about his current post remained distressingly undefined. Could the USSC make a difference in the lives of soldiers? Would the USSC even survive? Meanwhile, working with freed slaves seemed uniquely designed for him, something where he might be able to put to good use his very specific knowledge about the South and slavery.

Olmsted was familiar with the Sea Islands from his travels while writing his Southern books. He knew that Port Royal contained roughly one hundred of the richest cotton plantations in the Confederacy. He also knew that it was an incredibly isolated place, due in part to widespread diseases such as malaria and yellow fever. The Port Royal plantations were worked by the Gullah, blacks brought as slaves from West Africa, from areas that are now such countries as Gambia, Senegal, and Guinea-Bissau. In the New World, the Gullah proved immune to the diseases that periodically swept the Carolina lowlands. This was probably due to some kind of inherited resistance built up over generations in West Africa, where the same diseases were prevalent.

A unique master-slave relationship had grown up in the Port Royal plantations. Here, the white masters were in the habit of keeping their distance from the slaves. Even a vast plantation might have only a few white overseers. During the rainy season, when disease was rampant, the whites simply retreated inland. As a result, the Gullah didn't have the kind of contact with whites found elsewhere in Southern plantation culture. Many of the Gullahs' African cultural traditions remained intact. They even spoke their own dialect, as some of their descendants continue to do today.
Goober
, meaning
peanut
, is a Gullah word derived from
n'guba
, a word in the Kikongo language spoken in West Africa.
Gumbo
is another Gullah word, this one from Umbundu, another West African language.

When Sherman invaded Port Royal, the handful of whites had turned tail. But the Gullah had not joined them. This circumstance, Olmsted recognized, gave the lie to a favorite Southern notion, namely, that slaves
enjoyed a beneficial relationship with masters and would voluntarily join them in all situations. In this most isolated patch of the Confederacy, where slaves could easily be misinformed about the motives of the Union army, the Gullah chose not to join their fleeing masters.

To Olmsted, Port Royal presented an opportunity for a worthy experiment. He envisioned the former slaves still working the cotton plantations, but for their own profit and livelihood. With the Civil War in progress, this could be quite an object lesson, showing that blacks were capable of being moral, vital, productive members of society. In his books, Olmsted had argued that free labor trumped slave labor because it was a natural state, governed by practical self-interest and incentives. Now Olmsted saw a unique chance to prove his ideas. Perhaps Southerners would at last see slavery for the corrupt institution it was.

Olmsted had grown adept at moving between one situation and another, going from farmer to writer to park maker to head of the USSC. Constant change had become his personal status quo. Enticed by what he saw as a perfect opportunity, he began approaching power brokers in Washington, such as Salmon Chase, the treasury secretary. He proposed himself as “commissioner of contrabands” for the Port Royal plantations.
Contrabands
was a term then commonly in use, with overtones of property law, applied to blacks who were no longer slaves but not yet free, either.

Olmsted described his proposed new role as an “ambition with which I am fired,” adding, “I have, I suppose, given more thought to the special question of the proper management of negroes in a state of limbo between slavery & freedom than anyone else in the country. I think, in fact, that I should find here my ‘mission' which is really something I am pining to find, in this war.” In a letter to his father, he added, “I shall go to Port Royal, if I can, and work out practically every solution of the slavery question—long ago advocated in my book. I have talked it over with Mary and she agrees.”

As an experienced farmer, Olmsted knew that it was necessary to act immediately. Already it was autumn, and by February the fields would need to be listed (shaped with hoes so cotton seeds could take root), and planting loomed in April. A delay would mean a missed growing season,
and, rather than a noble experiment, the Union would be stuck with 12,000 paupers on its hands.

Olmsted launched a kind of all-fronts campaign. He dashed off a letter to Lincoln, outlining his “thoughts about the management of the negroes at Port Royal.” He hoped the president would support his bid to be commissioner of contrabands. He revived the pseudonym “Yeoman” and wrote an editorial for the
New York Times
, arguing that Port Royal could be the prototype for an experiment repeated across the South. Whenever a region was captured, the former slaves could work the plantation lands themselves, for their own livelihood. Over time, pockets of free blacks would be found everywhere across the South, and escaped slaves could be expected to rush to these beacon communities. “A hostile force would thus invade the enemy in his very stronghold,” he wrote.

Olmsted even teamed up with another congressman for another bill, to create a commissioner of contrabands post for Port Royal. This time, he worked with Lafayette Foster, a senator from Connecticut. Apparently, Olmsted drafted the bill, and Senator Foster didn't change a single word.

Knowing that time was crucial with the cotton crop, the bill was constructed broadly. Olmsted was careful to avoid any controversial provisions. For example, the bill didn't delve into the legal status of blacks in Port Royal, referring to them simply as “indigents” and “vagrants.” As for what department would oversee this project (War and Treasury were the natural candidates), those details were left to be worked out later. Olmsted lobbied hard. He drew up a petition and sent it to his father, who in turn got seventy-five signatures from citizens in Hartford. He circulated similar petitions in Boston, Chicago, New Haven, and New York, which were then used to drum up support for the bill in the House of Representatives. Olmsted intended to force action and quickly; he resolved to “keep up a steady hard fire without rest or intermission for a single day.”

CHAPTER 16

OLMSTED APPEARED TO be headed for Port Royal to become commissioner of contrabands. Then everything changed. Olmsted became aware that he had misread the political winds in Washington. He had been counting on Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase to act as his sponsor for the Port Royal post. But it became clear that the secretary had no real authority to appoint Olmsted, and, further, Chase had not even bothered to read Senator Foster's bill.

Olmsted withdrew his name from Chase's consideration. He refocused all his efforts on lobbying Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war, and apparently the person with the authority to appoint someone to Port Royal. Foster's bill passed quickly, but Olmsted was not Stanton's choice. Instead, the secretary picked a brigadier general to act as commissioner of contrabands. Port Royal wouldn't wind up being a disaster; the government didn't get stuck with 12,000 paupers. Neither did it become the noble experiment, the beacon to slaves throughout the South, that Olmsted had envisioned.

But at the exact moment the Port Royal post fell through, the bill to reorganize the Medical Bureau passed Congress. Olmsted wrote an exultant letter to his father, in which he also showed himself to be a sly observer of the Washington legislative process: “As for the Sanitary Commission, our success is suddenly wonderfully complete. The Medical Bill after having been kicked about like a football, from House to Committee & Committee to House & over & over again, at each kick losing on one side & gaining on another, until it was so thoroughly flabbergasted
that nobody knew where or what it was, and a new one had to be started—this process repeated several times—all of sudden a bill which is just the thing we wanted quietly passes thro' both houses the same day and before we know it is a law.”

Victory was made still sweeter by a coincidence. Clement Finley, the hidebound surgeon general, got into a personal scrape with Secretary of War Stanton and was immediately relieved of his duties. He was replaced by William Hammond, an energetic reformer half Finley's age. Just like that, there was a reorganized Medical Bureau headed by a new surgeon general. The response to this improved circumstance was almost instantaneous. It's incredible how quickly things moved. With a war on, facing a desperate need for medical aid, Olmsted recommitted to the USSC and mobilized the outfit at dizzying speed.

 

A new military campaign was just getting under way, directed by General McClellan. The goal was to move up the Virginia peninsula, through an area girded by the York River to the east and the James River to the west, and to take Richmond, the Confederate capital. This would be the largest military mobilization the United States had ever undertaken, featuring 121,500 troops, 1,150 wagons, 15,000 horses, and untold tons of equipment and supplies.

Such a huge mobilization was sure to generate enormous casualties. To support the campaign, the army's Medical Bureau was ramping up fast, adding hundreds of new surgeons and nurses to attend the injured on the battlefield. But backup would be needed. Per its original mandate, the USSC might be called upon to furnish the surgeons with information on the latest medical practices. And the USSC certainly would need to provide supplies gathered from its network of women's aids societies, items like bandages for the surgeons' use and socks and blankets for the soldiers. The USSC might even need to go beyond its official duties. Be prepared, Olmsted was told by the military brass: If there was an overflow of sick and wounded, the USSC might not only be called on for advice and supplies but also have to provide actual medical treatment. With a war on, the lines were blurring. The military's plan was to furnish the
USSC with unused ships that could be converted into floating hospitals stationed along the rivers of the Virginia peninsula. As to how such care was delivered—that was the USSC's concern.