IT DIDN'T START WITH HILLBILLY HEROIN:

Frederick Law Olmsted, a young, Yale-educated farmer from Staten Island (soon to tackle the design of New York's Central Park) made three trips across the South in the early 1850s, traveling by steamboat, train, stagecoach, and horse. Olmsted's letters on his travels began to appear in the recently founded New York Times in 1854, and in book form two years later, and his descriptions of southern society appalled his well-bred readers.

Olmsted's central conclusion was that the cotton cartel had done the southern people more harm than good. The mass of its citizens were impoverished and "their destitution is not just material... it is intellectual and it is moral." Olmsted described the city of Norfolk as "a dirty, low, ill-arranged town... It has a single creditable public building... No lyceum or public libraries, no public gardens, no galleries of art."

Olmsted was dismayed to find acre after acre of uncultivated land, testifying to an attitude of wasteful "complacency." Inefficiency abounded. At one stop, he encountered six mules and five Blacks tugging a stuck wagon. He also meticulously described the condition of the slaves. Those in the steamy pine barrens worked in "coarse gray gowns" and heavy shoes while an overseer rode among them, "carrying in his hand a raw-hide whip, constantly directing and encouraging them." The slaves slept in windowless huts, unfit for animals.

But--Olmsted's point--their condition was inferior only by a degree to that of poor whites. Olmsted described some of the latter in North Carolina leaning vacantly against the sides of their hovels as he passed--saying nothing, only blinking, "as if unable to withdraw their hands from their pockets" and shade their eyes from the sun.

Tweet   @brothersjudd