Journey Through The Coastal Slave States

 

David Mamet mentioned the book in the New York Times Book Review, as the last "great book" he had read.

Frederick Law Olmsted

I had never heard of it.

"Journey Through the Coastal Slave States."

I'd heard of the author: Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect, but who knew he had a career as a journalist in the 1850's and his letters from journeys in the slave holding South were avidly read back in New York and Boston?

I'm not sure it's for everyone, but if you've read as much about the American Civil War as I have, this one comes as a jaw dropping thunderbolt. You have to persist past the first few chapters. But you will be rewarded.

There are wonderful historians of the Civil War: the masterful James McPherson, the ardent Bruce Catton and even Shelby Foote (a Southern apologist) but these men were not alive during the Civil War. They have read the diaries, the primary sources, but when you read them, you read a second hand distillation, a point of view.

I have some volumes of newspaper and magazine articles from those years--Harper's and Vanity Fair, so I've read contemporary primary sources, but this book is astonishing on so many levels, it's hard to know where to begin.

For one thing, Olmsted marshals financial, economic numbers in such mass and detail it's hard to imagine how, in the pre computer age of America, 1850's, anyone could have done the work to measure acres under cultivation, dollar value of cotton, cedar shingles, farms, ships, but he seems to have all this at hand and he uses them to stunning effect.

What emerges, as he describes the huge variety of servitude, from slaves in the Great Dismal Swamp, who lived without overseers or, for that matter, any white supervision, returning to their owners only after nine months, to collect new clothes and provisions, to field hands who worked 14 hour days under the hot Virginia sun, to house slaves, the mind reels. 

Olmsted compares the lot of the Southern slave to that of the free white workers in New York City, often children, who are given starvation wages but no clothes, housing or food and, he makes a case that slave wages in the North may be worse than living in the master's slave quarters in the South, where at least you are clothed, fed and sheltered from the weather.  The downstream logic is pretty clear that the workers in the North would have benefited from a socialist revolution of their own, after the Southern slaves were freed. And this book examines the "they were better off as slaves" argument from every angle and you do not come away thinking, "Oh! Right!"

What comes up repeatedly is the great lengths slavers went to keep their slaves from ever developing intellectually, from learning to read.  Slaves were taught to do tasks which made money for the owners, but learning anything beyond that was forbidden.  In fact, Negro congregations could not meet on Sunday unless a white man was present at the religious service. You can guess why.

And there are those moments when Olmsted reveals what some Southerners, who, as he says, were among those who did not live like ostriches with heads buried, but who looked at the advantages of climate, water power, fertile soil, easily available resources like coal, iron and river transport, still managed to be poorer and less powerful than their Northern countrymen. Olmsted refers to the small, soil poor state of Massachusetts and the sparsely populated state of New York as disadvantaged, and yet, they are pushing ahead in wealth and prospects far beyond the South. And all this, Olmsted implies, is because in the North, intellectual property, the power of the mind, would drive advancement, prosperity and happiness.

One Southerner observes there are roughly 160,000 adolescent white boys in Virginia in 1853, and another 400,000 Black boys of that age and none of them have had a lick of education, and what a huge waste of economic potential--a mind is a terrible thing to waste, circa 1850, and this from a white planter! He goes on to say few books are published anywhere in the South and even fewer are read. "We are not a reading people." And he notes that a slave who had saved up enough (from side line wages!) to purchase his own freedom, planned to move to Liberia and the first thing he wanted to do when he got there was to learn to write so he could write his former master and tell him how he was doing.

One astonishing anecdote after another.

The picture you get from Olmsted is definitely not "12 Years a Slave" and nobody should forget for an instant the horrors of slavery. Nor is the image Margaret Mitchell's screed, where all the slaves are not just happy, loved and loving and loyal, but, well, slavish.  What Olmsted does is to display the wide variety of human experience, and broaden the mind. 

If you grew up in the South, you recognize something here. When I was a boy, there were still living Confederate army veterans having reunions not far from my home in Arlington, Virginia. And there were plenty of colored folk whose grandparents or even parents had been slaves of one sort or another. And this book stirred memories of these folks, and made me think anew.

It is true there is no such thing as a very fine Nazi.

Some evils are just so vile, there are no 'if's and's or but's." And slavery, but most importantly the racism undergirding it was just so vile. Which is not to say there were not, in the individual experiences of the individual slaves,  some mitigating circumstances that might help us today to understand what kept that peculiar institution going for so long.