A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States Slavery in the Years Before The American Civil War By Frederick Law Olmsted

A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States

Slavery in the Years Before The American Civil War

By Frederick Law Olmsted 

“Oh! No sir. I'd rather be free! Oh, yes, sir, I'd like it better to be free; I would that master.” 

A Louisiana Slave page 482

Frederick Law Olmsted was an accomplished man. He was born in 1822 in Hartford Connecticut to a successful merchant and was preparing to enter Yale when sumac poisoning weakened his eyes (Poor bastard). Instead, he settled on a farm that his father helped him buy in 1848, but was not content to stay there long. In 1850 he visited England to see their public gardens and was deeply impressed by Birkenhead park. He was so impressed he wrote a book about it called “Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England” which was published in 1852. This drummed up more job offers and he was employed by the New York Daily Times (now the New York Times) to head into the south on an extensive research journey across that region. From 1852 to 1857 he traveled across the south, sending back dispatches to the paper which were read and commented on across the nation. They would be collected into three books, this being the first one. Other than his books, was a well known public administrator and landscape architect, in fact, if you've ever been to New York, you've seen his work. He co-designed Central Park in 1858 with Calbert Vax, Central Park was an expression of Mr. Olmsted's belief that public green spaces were vital to the health and well being of a city and its inhabitants (And he was objectively and absolutely correct, on so many levels I cannot possibly overstate that fact.). He spent his time as park commissioner in New York battling to protect and expand that idea and developed it further that by conceiving of an interconnected system of parks and parkways to provide expanded green spaces. However, it is his earlier work that we're here to discuss so let's turn to it.

Journey begins in the state of Virginia, goes through the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama before ending in Louisiana. Most of the book - over 200 out of the 514 pages - are focused on Virginia, with Louisiana receiving second place with 100 pages. The vast majority of those pages are focused with laser-like intensity on New Orleans and the surrounding region. Mr. Olmsted barely spends any time on Alabama with a bare 19 or so pages devoted to it. The book could be described in several ways. Partly it was a travelogue with Mr. Olmsted frankly discussing the various experiences he has with the hotels, coaches, trains, and boats of the South; along with conditions of the road (almost universally bad [because as we’ll learn and I’ll discuss at length, the South did not invest in infrastructure]) and scenery. It is also an Anthropological work with interviews with various people he meets across the south and investigations into various ethnic and social groups, in fact, this book pays more attention to the poor whites and their various cultural works then any other book I've read. I'll be honest this alone makes it incredibly interesting to me (And me). It could also be considered a history book, as Mr. Olmsted takes pains to provide a brief history of each state, starting from pre-Revolution times to the 1850s. I'd recommend everyone read his brief history of South Carolina if only to see how to artfully write a history that comments while sticking to the dry facts, such as the fact that Charleston was a pirate hub and happily allowed Blackbeard to sell his stolen goods in their stores. It also serves as a political and social commentary on the South as it discusses the governing, religious, social and educational practices of the South, which would have given me gray hairs if I had any hair left on my head. South Carolina, for example, didn't have a public education system, with over 75% of its white population illiterate. Virginia, one of the best-educated southern states, had a public education system that existed more in theory than in fact. Lastly, it serves as a powerful statement in the most important debate in the United States at the time, the fate of Slavery (And before anyone says that slavery is over, it isn’t. Prisoners are regularly forced to work without pay or with very minimal pay which is often garnished from them as payment for their own imprisonment, and the Jim Crow practice of convict leasing has, in fact, started up again.).

Slavery was a bitterly divisive question even at the time of the Ratification of the Constitution and by the time of the 1850s, it had outweighed every other national question when it came to the passion it inspired and the blood and ink it spilled. Even before the civil war, if you doubt me, go look up Bleeding Kansas and the Filibusters and then come back. While the vast majority of the northern states had outlawed slavery soon after the revolution was successful - Vermont had abolished slavery in 1777, while still independent and Pennsylvania would do so in 1780 - by 1804 every state north of Virginia had outlawed slavery. Meanwhile the South, despite work by some figures (Jefferson, for example, had pushed for an emancipation plan but was furiously rejected), clung to Slavery. This was made worse by the invention of the cotton gin, which increased Southern demand for slave labor and ensured that the elite class of South would literally defend slavery to the death (A pity we didn’t execute the leaders of the Slaver-Rebellion. {Wouldn’t have helped, the issue was that reconstruction was abandoned half done, frankly breaking up the plantations and dividing them among the slaves and poor whites would have done it faster and better.} I don’t see these things as mutually exclusive. And yeah, Sherman’s forty acres and a mule would have done a pretty good job leveling the playing field.). The United States was deeply divided but the political struggle was merely a symptom of a deeper and more intractable problem.

That problem being that the nation had become host to two separate political, economic and social systems that could not coexist. In the Northern states, a capitalist system built on the supposition of free labor and mass participation in politics was developing into an industrial powerhouse and was a magnet for immigration across Europe. Its educational system created a large literate class that led to more inventions and experimentation that led to increases in efficiency and industry. It was not a perfect system, being prone to abusing the working class and having inadequate social networks for supporting those who could not support themselves but it was one that created social mobility and opportunity that drew millions to American shores. The South, on the other hand, had locked itself into a feudal caste system based on racial ancestry, where a man could enslave his half brothers and even his own children based on who their mother was. Do not believe that skin tone was any defense either, Journey itself provides evidence against this by showing us ads for runaway slaves (Which brings me to the Fugitive Slave Law! See, today, confederate apologists will scream and caterwall about how the civil war wasn’t about slavery, but was instead about States Rights. This is a revisionist lie. The South ramrodded the Fugitive Slave Law through congress. This not only forced police in free states - against their will I might add - to hunt down escaped slaves, but denied any black person accused of being a runaway slave the right to a hearing. Yes, this was used by southern slave owners as a means of kidnapping people who had never been slaves at all. {This led to riots in the North and mobs attacking jails to free captives. Don’t make the mistake of thinking your average Northerner wasn’t racist but they loathed the idea of some damn Dixiecrat coming into their state and kidnapping people without so much as a Mother May I.}) Some of them being blonde and blue-eyed but even if every slave was midnight dark of skin and hair, it was still a system where your parentage determined your lot in life for your entire life. If you were born a slave or a member of the poor white caste, it didn't matter how intelligent you were, how talented or driven. You would, barring the mercy of one of your masters, die as you were born, enslaved and poor. It wasn't only the slaves that suffered, the middle class was vanishingly rare in the South with the majority of white citizens living completely hand to mouth on small farms on plots of land that the wealthy just didn't want. Meanwhile the wealthy gathered as much of the prime farming land as they could and used it to grew cash crops. Cotton being the most famous but there were other cash crops like tobacco, rice, and even sugar (Extracting sugar from sugar cane is, by the way, absolutely fucking brutal and was one of the reasons the slave revolts in Haiti and Jamaica occurred decades prior to the American Civil War). As a result, the South was entirely dependent on exporting these commodities. Despite constant complaints about how nothing was made in the South, the elites of the South would bind themselves ever tighter to their cash crops and measure their wealth in the number of human beings they entrapped in bondage. (Okay, dear readers, this is what was going on. Social status and wealth were tied up in slavery. So someone who made good didn’t invest in say, a textile factory, printing press, or building a dairy industry. No. They bought slaves. {They would even go into debt to buy more slaves, despite already owning hundreds of people, it seems almost manic} As a result, industrializing the South was impossible. Becoming a slave-holder was the American Dream of the 1850s South.)

Mr. Olmsted adds another piece to the discussion. His argument is simple, slavery is bad for the slave and the master. In his work, he clearly sets out to show how slavery wasn't a pillar holding up the South but a chain pulling it down into poverty and stagnancy. Through first-hand accounts and fairly straightforward statistics, Mr. Olmsted is able to compare the economic output and efficiency of the North vs South. Additionally, he takes time to compare the physical well being of the slaves to the Northern Labor, by comparing their diets, living spaces, working days and more. He finds that it takes the labor of four slaves to equal the labor of a single free man, as slaves invariably take longer to complete a task, often don't do it as well and are more prone to breaking their equipment or finding an excuse not to finish. Mr. Olmsted also shows how this has seeped out to the entire of Southern society, as the trains and boats he uses to travel are constantly late or breaking down. Coaches fail because the slaves assigned to them don't take care of the harness or horses unless specially ordered to and watched while they do it. The white elites that Mr. Olmsted speaks to often attribute this to the African American slaves being childish and incapable of complex thought or motivation (Of course they do! They have to, or they cannot continue to deny the basic humanity and dignity of the people they hold in bondage. So they rationalize it by claiming that the slave is stupid to the point of being subhuman. Not even the Romans did this.) but Mr. Olmsted undermines this argument by taking pains to show us what the Slaves are doing. For example, the most efficient industries in this book are the ones where the slaves are given a goal, told they'll be paid for anything extra they do past this and then left utterly alone. An example that sticks most vividly in my head is a slave camp established in the Great Dismal Swamp for logging. The Slaves were left alone for months at a time, with each one given a quota and a bonus to be paid for being above the quota. The more above the quota you are, the bigger the bonus. The Slaves were always above quota, without fail, as long as they were paid. Removing the bonus resulted in their productivity dropping like a rock. Showing that the only way to get more than the bare minimum out of a man is to bloody well pay him for it and even holding the power of life and death over him doesn't change that! Slaves often conducted passive resistance in this book, misunderstanding orders, taking their time or faking sick to get out of work and frankly who can blame them? (I don’t.) Why work hard for a man who denies your basic humanity so deeply that he thinks it's okay to treat you like property?

Mr. Olmsted's work is also interesting in how he allows the white elites to make their defenses before pointing out the flaws in their arguments. For example, just about every slave owner claimed that no one would mistreat a slave, as slaves were expensive and such brutish behavior would result in social censor (You still find slavery apologists saying this to this day.). Mr. Olmsted was able to point out local stories (often told to him by those same elites) of slaves being murdered or tortured. These people are never convicted, even when their behavior was illegal because the way southern law was set up at the time made policing slave owners impossible. You see, a large amount of the slaves in the south were owned by a small group of people. They were kept on large isolated plantations where the only whites would be their owners, their owner's family and the overseers hired by their owners and dependent on their good word. The final ingredient, a common-law across the south was that an African American’s testimony was inadmissible as evidence. So if the only ones who saw you do it were the slaves, or people dependent on your goodwill... Well, you would walk. It's questionable whether the testimony of a white overseer would be enough to convict someone as well. Every other white person in this book, no matter their station or position in life speaks of having a deep and utter loathing for white overseers, seeing them as the most brutal, savage and undependable kind of men (Well yes, because everyone knew deep in their souls that what they were doing was wrong, so the person carrying out the dirty job of keeping the slaves oppressed is going to be the hated one. The face of the systemic evil. The sin-eater for the entire society. And yes, they were brutal often sadistic garbage people, but hating them allowed the slave-owners to escape their own guilt.). More then one slave owner states they'd rather leave the slaves in charge of themselves or use African overseers but they're forbidden from doing so by law (But they write the laws. That’s just an excuse.). Because of this it was common for laws regarding the treatment of slaves to be flouted in some measure, whether it was laws against making slaves work on Sunday, or how much meat a slave was required to be fed, they were simply unenforceable, not that there was a police force capable of heading over to the plantations to check in the first place.

We also take a long hard look at the poor whites of the South. There are many different cultural groups on display but they all often have certain things in common. They are forced onto marginal land that no one else wants. They must farm for a living for any industrial jobs (Which were few and far between. The entire South wasn’t even able to produce shoes and butter for its army during the civil war, despite having everything they needed for both) are often turned over to the slaves (for example a coal mine that Mr. Olmsted visited in Virginia had a large slave labor force). They have been told over and over again that manual labor is fit only for slaves so they avoid it and often their greatest hope is to own a slave someday. Due to the lousy infrastructure, they have limited opportunities for trade or education, rendering them deeply ignorant and lacking in contact with the outside world and they are thoroughly looked down upon and considered good for nothing. These people are often willing to talk to Mr. Olmsted though are not necessarily friendly (although some of them are). These people are ignorant, more racist than the elites and provincial, they ain't stupid. They knew that the reason they had been locked out of the good farmland and trades was because slave labor has allowed the elite class to take over those spaces completely. So while some of them like the idea of getting rid of slavery, their support was dependent on the freed slaves leaving so they don't have to compete with their labor. This provides perhaps the first documented stance of “they stole our jobs” in American history (And it continues to this day, and unlike with slave labor, it isn’t even factually justified. But the wealthy of society know a good scapegoat when they see it, and always have).

As a primary history source, this book is rather invaluable. That said it is written in the language of the time and can be a little hard to wade through. Also, Mr. Olmsted wrote many of his interviews trying to capture the speaker's dialect, which adds its own problems in understanding them (Oh dear god yes). There's also a lot of examples of casual racism in this book towards African Americans (racial slurs are everywhere in this thing! Do not bring it into a classroom for children!) Irish, Native Americans, Germans and other ethnic and racial groups. If I'm going, to be honest, you can't do a real representation of American society at the time without at least nodding at the racism that infected it at this point. Racism that frankly we're still dealing and struggling with, despite the denials of some (You all know who they are.). Additionally, there are weaknesses in this book, Mr. Olmsted didn't get a lot of chances to speak alone with African Americans freed or slave and when he did, he was often mistrusted (to be fair would you trust a random white guy if you were in their shoes? I wouldn't!). There is one unguarded instant of a slave speaking freely to him and, well it's the quote at the top of this review. So the book is heavily weighted towards the white experience, on top of that Mr. Olmsted barely spoke to any women so this book is incredibly weighted to the white male experience. That doesn't mean that the book is wrong or somehow less useful but you have to keep in mind that voices are missing here so it presents an incomplete picture of the south. I would honestly recommend combining this with My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglas to cover some of the gaps. As for A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States Slavery in the Years Before The American Civil War by Frederick Law Olmsted, I'm giving it a B+. It's incredibly informative but will be hard to read for a lot of modern readers and should be kept away from people who don't know not to echo the offensive terms in the book.

So this book was a primary source, historically speaking.  What does that mean?  I invite y'all to join me Sunday for a sidebar on what a primary source is versus a secondary source!  Next Friday, we will take a break from more scholarly activities and review the 1st volume Dark Horse Omnibus of Conan the Barbarian by Kurt Busiek!  That review was voted on by our paterons.  If you would like to vote on upcoming reviews, or see the full comments from our crazed editor, or even suggest new books consider joining us at https://www.patreon.com/frigidreads where tiers start at a 1$ a month.

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Red text is your editor Dr. Ben Allen

Black text is your reviewer Garvin Anders