Genius of Place (17 page)

Using San Antonio as a base, the Olmsteds made several other forays. They traveled to the Gulf coast, going as far as Port Lavaca. They also hired another former Texas Ranger as a guide and took a dip down into Mexico that was by turns dangerous and drab. One night, they stayed at an inn, only to wind up sleeping outside in the courtyard with their Colts and knives placed within easy reach. That was the Ranger's idea. He wanted to stay close to the horses to ward off thieves. They made a few desultory inquiries about joining an immigrant party bound for California, but this came to nothing.

Mostly, they were drawn to the Germans. The brothers decided that maybe they should sell Tosomock Farm and settle in Texas instead. The dry air of the hill country would be a balm for John's tuberculosis. The intellectual climate was certainly to their tastes. They could even take part in a political battle then starting to brew. The original treaty that turned Texas from a separate republic into the twenty-eighth state included the following provision: As the state's population grew, Texas might be split up into as many as five different states. For any new states established, Congress agreed, the all-important slavery question would be determined by popular sovereignty. Of course, the hill country was a stronghold for nonslaveholding Germans. Perhaps the Olmsted brothers could become pioneer residents of the brand-new free state of West Texas. The state, in turn, could act as a bulwark, preventing slavery from spreading through the rest of the southwestern territories. John sent a letter to Staten Island to his wife, Mary, floating the idea. Mary's response has been lost, but it can probably be paraphrased in four words:
Get back here now!

In April 1854, the Olmsted brothers started home. As they neared the Louisiana border, they sold Fanny and Nack and Mr. Brown. It was hard to say good-bye to the animals that had accompanied them for hundreds of miles of hard travel and high adventure.

The brothers themselves parted way at Bayou Sara, Louisiana. John boarded a steamer and headed north. Fred, a tireless traveler, made his way slowly toward home via the backcountry, the less developed regions of states such as Alabama, Mississippi, and North Carolina. This was about the only part of the South he hadn't covered. He'd walked all over Connecticut as a child; he'd walked all over England a few years back. Now, he was intent on completing his tour of the South; he didn't want to miss anything.

Olmsted could outlast just about anyone, man or beast. John was gone. The horses were gone. The mule was gone. From the Texas party, only Judy, the bull terrier, remained. Olmsted had bought a fresh mount, a stallion named Belshazzar. Judy ran alongside Olmsted and Belshazzar. The dog wore tiny moccasins, fashioned for her worn-out paws.

CHAPTER 8

AFTER TAKING HIS TIME traveling the backcountry of the South, Olmsted arrived home to find Tosomock Farm in disarray. Tools were blunted and broken. It had been nearly two years since the pear trees had been pruned, and vines were wrapped tight around their trunks. The peach trees weren't yielding peaches.

One couldn't blame the contract workers. They had been hired as winter caretakers. With the arrival of spring, they had been woefully shorthanded—there were only two of them—and they hadn't received adequate direction, besides. Mary had been busy caring for an infant. John had arrived two months before his brother, but he was a doctor by training and in no position to provide guidance.

On his return, Olmsted discovered that he felt a surprising nonchalance about the sorry state of the farm. His passion for the place had utterly dissipated.

 

More pressing, it seemed, was a message that arrived from the Texas Germans. In September 1854, the Olmsted brothers received a plea for assistance from Adolph Douai, editor of the
San Antonio Zeitung
. Lately, Douai had become more and more outspoken, railing against slavery in the pages of the paper. This had exposed a rift within the Texas German community.

Many of the Germans, while privately against slavery, didn't wish to be so open about their convictions. Life as an immigrant farmer on the frontier was challenge enough, and they wanted to keep a low profile. Douai's
incendiary articles might invite the ire of the slave owners that surrounded them everywhere in Texas. The stockholders of the
Zeitung
decided to disassociate themselves from the paper by putting it up for sale.

Douai stepped forward as the buyer. But the financial demands of running a paper—the relentless need for paper stock and printer's ink—quickly sank him into debt. Douai had bold plans for the
Zeitung
, too. He intended to publish an English-language edition. He asked the Olmsteds for a loan.

The Olmsteds were happy to help. Rather than giving Douai a loan, they decided to solicit donations from sympathetic parties in the North and to give the proceeds to Douai as a gift. The Olmsteds circulated a letter, titled: “A Few Dollars Wanted to Help the Cause of Future Freedom in Texas.”

The brothers managed to raise more than $200. Brace gave money, as did the proprietor of a New York silk-goods outfit. Olmsted also drummed up subscriptions among his acquaintances to the new English-language edition.

Unfortunately, publishing an English edition ushered in disaster for Douai. Prior to this, the
Zeitung
, despite having the second-largest circulation among Texas papers, had also been an underground publication in a way. After all, most people in the state didn't speak German. Even if Douai had published the most provocative antislavery screed imaginable, it only would have unnerved some of his fellow Germans. The slaveholders could not have read it.

Now they could. The reprisals came fast and furious. Skittish advertisers, afraid to be associated with Douai's vocal abolitionism, fled the paper in droves. Other Texas papers took aim at Douai, including the
Austin State Times
, which published editorials calling for his death, even helpfully suggesting the means of accomplishing this—by drowning. Armed goons showed up at Douai's home and milled around outside, making threats.

Douai simply could not afford the courage of his convictions. He had seven children and an elderly father to support and keep safe from harm. Heartbroken, he sold his printing equipment and fled to the North. In a grim irony, the buyer of the equipment was a Texan, not of German descent,
who intended to publish a paper sympathetic to the interests of slaveholders.

The Olmsted brothers helped Douai get settled by providing contacts and letters of introduction. He eventually opened a school in Boston that featured a kindergarten. In the years ahead, Douai would become instrumental in launching the kindergarten movement in the United States. The idea of compulsory public schooling for very young kids was novel in nineteenth-century America and was rooted in German theories about child development and socialization. Douai even wrote a much-read manual on how to run a kindergarten.

 

This was a time of ratcheting tensions. Even as the Olmsted brothers had made their Southern journey, while they traveled across Texas, a controversial piece of legislation was working its way through Congress, one that would drastically increase the rancor between slaveholders and abolitionists.

On January 4, 1854, Senator Stephen Douglas, later to achieve renown as Lincoln's political and debating rival, introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act. It provoked several months of ferocious congressional debate and after going through many iterations was finally signed into law by President Franklin Pierce. Back home now, Olmsted would soon become involved in the fallout from this controversial bill.

The act broke the vast Nebraska territory into two territories—Kansas and Nebraska—and specified that in each, the issue of slavery would be determined by popular sovereignty. By opening the possibility of slavery in two territories north of that 36°30' line, the act overturned the earlier Missouri Compromise. Southern slaveholders insisted that the Missouri Compromise had been forced on them, a compromise they'd never abided in the first place. Northern abolitionists were livid, even more exercised than they had been when the new Fugitive Slave Act—the spark for
Uncle Tom's Cabin
—passed in 1850.

Almost immediately, Kansas became disputed territory for people on either side of the slavery divide. So-called border ruffians poured in from the neighboring slave state of Missouri to illegally vote in various territorial elections. Soon, they managed to establish a legislature in the town
of Lecompton. This legislature issued a series of decrees, draconian measures such as the death penalty for anyone speaking out against slavery. Opponents called them the “bogus laws.” These settlers established a competing legislature in the town of Topeka. The territory of Kansas had two legislatures now, one free-soil, the other proslavery.

Ruffians from Missouri and even more distant slave states continued to flow into Kansas, trying to tip the balance. To tip it back, the Reverend Edward Everett Hale helped establish the New England Emigrant Aid Company. This outfit relocated farmers with free-soil leanings, paying for their passage from states such as Connecticut and Maine to Kansas. It was a similar model to the German companies that had dumped paupers in Texas to block U.S. expansion.

The territory of Kansas became a testing ground, a place where the conflicts that rended the Union played out. And it quickly escalated beyond the novelty of competing legislatures. There was no shortage of violence, and fifty-five people died. In every way, the events of Bleeding Kansas can be seen as a precursor to the all-out civil war that would erupt a few years hence.

Olmsted entered into a correspondence with Hale, inquiring about how he might aid the cause of Kansas. In a truly bizarre twist, Hale was married to Emily Perkins, the woman who earlier had been Olmsted's fiancée, only to break off their engagement. “I can't well write a word to you without much emotion even now,” closes a letter from Olmsted to Hale, “but I am anything but a miserable or even a dissatisfied man & most sincerely. Your friend, Fred. Law Olmsted.”

The uneasy relationship proved oddly productive. Through Hale, Olmsted made the acquaintance of James Abbott. Abbott was someone who had moved to Kansas under the aegis of the New England Emigrant Aid Company. He was now an officer with a militia, bent on making sure that if Kansas entered the U.S. as a state, it would be a free state.

Abbott traveled back East seeking funds to purchase weapons for his militia. After visiting Hartford and Providence, he had raised enough money to buy one hundred Sharps rifles, a.k.a. “Beecher Bibles.” They were named after Henry Ward Beecher, brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, a fiery abolitionist preacher who was in the habit of handing out
these guns to free-soil farmers. Abbott was hoping to raise sufficient funds for an additional hundred Beecher Bibles. In New York, he connected with Olmsted, whom he dubbed as “acting commissioner” of his free-state activities.

Olmsted managed to raise more than $300 from assorted people, including Brace, always willing to support a liberal cause, and Horace Greeley, editor of the
New York Tribune
and coiner of the term
Bleeding Kansas
. Being diligent, Olmsted decided to talk with an expert before purchasing any weapons. He consulted a veteran of European warfare, a man who had fought under Garibaldi during the turmoil that gripped Italy in 1848. In this expert's opinion, Abbott's militia already had enough assault weapons. What they sorely needed was a defensive weapon to stave off an attack.

So Olmsted visited the New York State Arsenal and used the money he'd raised to purchase a mountain howitzer and ammo. Olmsted appears to have gotten caught up in the sub rosa-ness of this activity. To keep Abbott apprised, Olmsted sent him a series of letters employing all too crackable code (such as
h
for howitzer). Olmsted arranged for the weapon to be divided into several pieces—to avoid detection—and shipped west. Abbott referred to Olmsted as a “prompt and energetic friend of Kansas.”

Olmsted's howitzer was mounted in front of the Free State Hotel in Lawrence. When the town was sacked, the weapon was seized by a marauding band of South Carolinians. But the free-state militia got it back as part of a prisoner exchange. Quite a picaresque tale for a howitzer, especially one that managed to weather the entire Bleeding Kansas episode without once being fired in battle.

In a few short years, Olmsted had managed quite a transition himself. On the matter of slavery, he'd started out a gradualist, but given all he'd witnessed during his Southern travels, given all the changes to the country at large, he'd come around to Charley Brace's way of thinking. Olmsted was a red-hot abolitionist.

CHAPTER 9

HERE'S ANOTHER WAY Olmsted was changing: Weary of the farmer's life, he was eager to commit himself to the writer's life instead.

During 1853 and 1854, Olmsted had received $720 for his
Times
dispatches. That was a goodly chunk of what the farm had cleared over the same period. In fact, Olmsted was forced to rely on a $1,000-per-year subsidy from his generous father just to stay afloat. There had to be a better way. Olmsted began work on a book. It was an account of his first Southern journey, the one that covered the old-line seaboard slave states. He drew on the notes that he'd used to craft the pieces for the
Times
. But it was also necessary to flesh out these anecdotes with economic statistics and details about the history of slavery in the United States. This required him to travel into Manhattan to visit libraries. Olmsted was thrilled by these research jaunts.

For this book, Olmsted intended to use his real name rather than “Yeoman”; he wanted credit for his unique observations and theories about slavery. As the weather turned cold, he devoted still more time to the book, less to farming. Olmsted was “writing as much as he dares,” reported his brother.