A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States

This book is a marvel.

I knew Frederick Law Olmsted was a landscape architect. He designed New York's Central Park and Chicago's World's Fair. He plays a substantial role in “Devil in the White City,” which involves both the World's Fair and H.H. Holmes, Chicago's notorious 19th-century serial killer.

However, this book is a travelogue. Shortly, before the Civil War, in approximately 1855, a younger Olmsted took a trip from New York down the Atlantic Coast and over to Texas. This is an account of his trip. It contains his observations about the culture, geography and economy of the South.

For Olmsted, the trip south was like entering a foreign country. He expresses his amazement of seeing blacks in chains being marched down streets in Washington DC. He describes slave auctions and slave-life on plantations and work colonies.

Olmsted was an abolitionist. His constant theme was that the South was poor and backward because of slavery. Slavery, obviously, restrained the energy and industry of slaves. His narrative is constantly filled with descriptions of how difficult it was to get slaves to put in a full day's work. For many slaves, the work day ended early, compared to Northern free men. Likewise, slaves had no reason not to take the easy way out and abandon work or feign stupidity if that would lighten their load. Finally, if things got to hard, slaves would take off for the swamps and forests where they would hang out until masters were concerned that their investment - their walking capital stock - had gone permanently missing. When the slave returned, the master was usually too pleased with the return of his capital investment to be too concerned with insubordination.

Olmsted notes:

"”He afterwards said that his negroes never worked so hard as to tire themselves — always were lively, and ready to go off on a frolic at night. He did not think they ever did half a fair day's work. They could not be made to work hard: they never would lay out their strength freely, and it was impossible to make them do it. This is just what I have thought when I have seen slaves at work — they seem to go through the motions of labor without putting strength into them. They keep their powers in reserve for their own use at night, perhaps.”

And why not? And where hasn't that been the case in any slave empire, including the Communist ones?

Likewise, the non-slave classes were corrupted by slavery according to Olmsted. Slaves depressed the economic scale and made honest labor something disrespectable. The result was that the poor white population remained poverty-stricken. In addition, poorer whites could not compete with slaveholders for the best property and found themselves losing out. Finally, many southern states - South Carolina, in particular - weighted representation by wealth such that the slave-owning class was far better represented than the “cracker” class.

Olmsted is clear that there was nothing paternalistic in slavery. Slaves yearned for freedom. However, the canard about masters taking care of slaves in order to protect their investment in humans, as they did their investment in cattle, has some truth. Consider this for example:

“He had had an Irish gang draining for him, by contract. He thought a negro could do twice as much work, in a day, as an Irishman. He had not stood over them and seen them at work, but judged entirely from the amount they accomplished: he thought a good gang of negroes would have got on twice as fast. He was sure they must have “trifled” a great deal, or they would have accomplished more than they had. He complained much, also, of their sprees and quarrels. I asked why he should employ Irishmen, in preference to doing the work with his own hands. “It's dangerous work (unhealthy?), and a negro's life is too valuable to be risked at it. If a negro dies, it's a considerable loss, you know.”

So, if it was a choice between valueless Irishman being killed or injured or a negro in whom the master had an investment, the choice was obvious.

Actually, the Irish come in fairly low on the social spectrum in Olmsted's book:

“The accuracy with which the lines are made straight is said to be astonishing; and this, as well as the plowing, and many other operations performed by negroes, as I have had occasion to notice with colored laborers at the North, no less than among the slaves, indicates that the race generally has a good “mathematical eye,” much more so at least than the Irish.”

And:

“But it is much more evident that involuntary subjection directly tends to turpitude and demoralization. True, it may tend also to the encouragement of some beautiful traits, to meekness, humility, and a kind of generosity and unselfishness. But where has it not ever been accompanied by the loss of the nobler virtues of manhood, especially of the noblest, the most essential of all, that without which all others avail nothing for good: TRUTH. What is the matter with the Irish? No one can rely on them — they cannot rely on one another. Though sensitive to duty, and in their way conscientious, they absolutely are not able to comprehend a rule, a law; and that a man can be fixed by his promise they have never thought. A promise with them signifies merely an expressed intention. Irishmen that have long associated with us, we can depend on, for we have their confidence; but to a stranger still, their word is not worth a farthing. They are inveterate falsifiers, on the general principle that no man can want information of them but for his own good, and that good can only exist to their injury. What is the cause of this? their religion? — that to which it is attributed in their religion is the effect of it, more than the cause. It is the subjection of generations of this people to the will of landlords, corrupted to fiendish insensibility by the long continued possession of nearly arbitrary power. The capacity of mind for truth and reliance has been all but lost, by generations of unjust subjection. It is the same — only in some respects better, and some far worse — even already, with the African slave of the South. Every Virginian acknowledges it. Religion, to call that by the name which they do, has become subject to it. “They will lie in their very prayers to God.”

Honestly, this is an epic look at the Southern world just before the Civil War overturned it. For all that the Civil War was just over the horizon, Olmsted doesn't foreshadow that possibility. He sees the problems with slavery and wonders how two totally different cultures will co-exist, but he doesn't predict the cataclysm that would soon follow.