"Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide"

[fiefoe]

Tony Horwitz went all over the map, and parts of this book were intensely interesting.

• But this farsighted designer was molded by an eccentric apprenticeship: as a merchant seaman to China, an experimental farmer, a European wanderer, and—most significantly—the undercover correspondent known as Yeoman, a Connecticut Yankee exploring the Cotton Kingdom on the eve of secession and civil war.
• He became a close friend and intellectual sparring partner of Fred’s, and the two continued their disputations by letter after Olmsted returned to farming. “Every time you run your pen against me, you scrape me a little brighter,” Fred wrote.
• The young Olmsted also seemed a rather modern and familiar figure: black sheep in his privileged flock, a drifter and dreamer, a gifted underachiever whose youth was extended with the support of an anxious but loving and indulgent family.
• listing a comically long menu of traits Fred sought in a mate. These included “infinite capabilities and longings,” “comprehension of what is incomprehensible to others,” and “fondness for landscapes, clams, pork and old dressing gowns.” John concluded, “He won’t be content with less than infinity—while he himself is only finite & a farmer.”
• a guiding philosophy in the works of Thomas Carlyle, whom he considered “the greatest genius in the world.” Two of the Scottish thinker’s precepts had particular influence on him. Carlyle wrote that conviction “is worthless till it convert itself into Conduct,” and in choosing a life of service to others, “do the Duty which lies nearest thee.”

• Walking along the river I came to what Olmsted called Wheeling’s “only ornament,” a single-span suspension bridge “as graceful in its sweep as it is vast in its design and its utility.” In his day, it was the longest such bridge in the world and a vital corridor for overland commerce and settlers.
• The interior was an industrial Hades: bubbling caldrons of molten metal, mountains of black sand, heaps of slag, enormous chains rattling along rails overhead. Workers, clad in what looked like silver-hooded space suits, moved through this underworld wielding blowtorches, shoveling ash, and dangling huge cones over craters. VanSickle, shouting over the noise, ticked off job titles that sounded almost Neolithic: pitman, melter, molder, rammer, chipper. Their work also put the “heavy” in heavy industry. We watched men “charging the furnace,” which meant feeding it enormous chunks of pig iron that arrived in the shape of dinosaur eggs, weighing up to seven tons. Broken into pieces with an enormous spherical crusher called a “headache ball,” the iron was then picked up by a giant magnet and dropped into the blast furnace, creating the column of fire I’d seen from the road.
• “Washington’s waging a ‘war on coal’?” Klempa scoffed. “It’s a joke, like having a war on midgets.” But coal remained such a potent symbol and powerful lobby that politicians paid ritualistic homage to it, like the football players patting carbon on their “Mantrip” to the Mountaineers’ stadium. In ads, the state’s governor took “dead aim” at climate change legislation with a scoped rifle, blasting a hole in it. A Senate candidate dramatized her defense of coal and “our way of life” (a phrase that echoed antebellum defenders of slavery) by pulling a switch to cut off the White House lights.
• Many in the state’s south resisted Wheeling’s lead and fought for the Confederacy, including some of Henline’s ancestors. The split persisted after the war as mining took hold in the state’s southern coalfields and political power also shifted south, to Charleston. “We were divided, and then we were conquered,” Henline contended. Out-of-state barons bought up the land, timber, and mineral rights, taking advantage of people who lacked written claim to their property or understanding of its value. “That’s the great irony of West Virginia history,” he said. “We declared independence only to become an internal colony, ruled by King Coal.” ... “So you’d think we’d turn the page and try to develop our human resources,” Henline said. Instead, West Virginians displayed a “twisted allegiance” he likened to Stockholm syndrome. “The attitude is, ‘We’re blue-collar, we dig stuff up, we suffer, but we suffer with dignity.’” He shook his head. “To me, there’s nothing dignified about suffering to make other people rich.”
• Tugs referred to small boats that worked at docks and harbors. Towboats were much bigger and more powerful and, despite their name, pushed rather than towed barges down the river.
• Given our cargo, it was a marvel we moved at all. The Keeney pushed over fifteen thousand tons of coal, plus the weight of the steel barges—in all, a load roughly equivalent to 150 loaded railcars. The barges also formed an unwieldy expanse of over two acres, stretching a thousand feet from the Keeney’s bow.
• “You hit a wooden pier at half a mile an hour and it’s toothpicks,” he said. “Hit a bridge pylon and those barges would fold up like an accordion.” Such calamities were rare,

• Olmsted, in matters of belief, was torn between transcendent longings and a hatred of dogma. “I crave and value worshipfulness,” he wrote, “but I detest and dread theology & formalized ethics.”
• Darwin closely studied Olmsted’s work while finishing his own, praised it in letters to colleagues, and shared many traits with the American. Both were well-born wanderers who went off to sea, and late bloomers who struggled to settle on a career (prompting Darwin’s father to warn that Charles would become “a disgrace to yourself and all your family”). Darwin was a religious skeptic, an avid gardener, and a close observer of nature; in later years he lent support to Olmsted’s campaign to preserve wild spaces. Darwin also came from a family of abolitionists and hated slavery.
• Kentucky had some of the nation’s richest fossil beds, including one near the Creation Museum that was 454 million years old.
• Also alarming was the Tennesseans’ militancy regarding the most volatile issue of the day—whether or not slavery would expand beyond the states where it already existed. “Allison said they must have more slave territory,” Olmsted wrote. “He thought California would be a Slave State” and coveted Cuba and Mexico, too, if the US could find “some honorable excuse” to “get possession.” This wasn’t idle fancy; throughout the 1850s, proslavery adventurers, known as “filibusters,” mounted military expeditions to seize land and topple governments in Latin America.
• He realized that he’d underestimated the extremist resolve of the South’s leading men, and that they in turn misjudged the motives and determination of Northerners like himself. Nashville effectively extinguished Olmsted’s faith that middle ground could be found, or that Southerners had the “justice” and “good sense” to recognize the evils of slavery and gradually work toward ending them.
• Olmsted also sensed a dangerous insecurity underlying the South’s violent code of honor. Slavery accustomed whites to deference, “uncontrolled authority,” and vigilance against any hint of insubordination. They were “always in readiness to chastise, to strike down, to slay, upon what they shall individually judge to be sufficient provocation.” This cavalier wrath, aimed at slaves and each other, menaced the nation, too. In politics, as in personal affairs, slaveholders lashed out at any challenge to their power and property. The South’s truculent ruling class also relished displays of martial spirit and prowess. “They are brave, in the sense that they are reckless of life,” Olmsted wrote in the Times,
• For the American experiment to survive and thrive, there must be “places and times,” he wrote, “that the rich and the poor, the cultivated and well bred, and the sturdy and self-made people shall be attracted together and encouraged to assimilate.” Such venues would “exert an elevating influence upon all the people,” and demonstrate to “enemies of Democracy” the potential for mass uplift and the virtue of seeking “the highest good, of the whole community.” ... Olmsted’s catalog in the Times of “elevating” venues included “public parks and gardens.” Designing these democratic spaces would also draw together the disparate strands of Olmsted’s character. He could be a reformer and an aesthete, democratic socialist and civilizer, a leveler of “mental & moral capital.” Make everyone a gentleman.
• Case in point: his etymology of “highfalutin.” According to some linguistic sleuths, this term for ostentatious display derived from the high fluting of nineteenth-century steamboat stacks, perched atop vessels beside the most luxurious quarters.
• Olmsted, as usual, cast a more discerning eye on the landscape and took pleasure in deflating “spoony” travelogues about the majesty of the Mississippi. “Nothing can be less striking than the river scenery after the first great impression of solemn magnitude is dulled,” he wrote. “The eye finds nowhere any salience.” He also punctured the river’s reputation as a throbbing artery of commerce. “Human life along the Mississippi is indescribably insignificant,” he observed, calling the river valley “a great wilderness of unexplored fertility, into which a few men have crept like ants into a pantry. We give it a vast importance in our thoughts, but it is an entirely prospective one.”
• Chinese arrived in the Delta as field laborers, in the late 1800s, and for decades occupied a racial twilight zone in the Jim Crow South. When a yellow fever epidemic hit Greenville, no one knew where to bury the Chinese dead. They ended up in the Jewish cemetery, since neither the black nor the white one seemed appropriate.
• another painful chapter of Greenville history: the Great Flood of 1927, which submerged the Delta and displaced almost a million Mississippians. While whites in the Delta evacuated, blacks were confined to tent camps and forced at gunpoint to labor at rebuilding the river levees.
• Then we stopped at Longwood, a mansion so ornate and oversized it made Magnolia Hall look like a starter home. The exterior was a massive octagon of brick, with Moorish arches and six floors ascending to a bulbous, bloodred dome. It seemed a mash-up of the Alhambra, Sancta Sophia, and the Taj Mahal—which was more or less what the owner had intended. Haller Nutt was a cotton mogul with five plantations who became entranced by a sketch in a book of house designs, an “Oriental Villa” blending Byzantine, Persian, and Arabesque themes.
• He also rode steamboats toting slaves to market or distant plantations. On one, slaves were crowded in the hold, except for a few boys sequestered on deck because their owner “had no handcuffs small enough for them.” In the 1830s, steamboats performed another grim transport, carrying tribes exiled west of the Mississippi as part of Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal policy.
• These behemoths couldn’t go beyond Baton Rouge due to a bridge built during the reign of Huey Long, Louisiana’s famed Depression-era governor. “The story goes,” Hay said, “that Huey had the bridge built low because he didn’t want to share the ship traffic with ports in other states upriver.” This tale was typical of Huey Long, a bombastic figure wreathed in lore, much of it his own creation. But our visit to Baton Rouge also revealed Long in a more complex light, as a figure who presaged developments in my own era’s politics.
• A belligerent entertainer, Long mocked Washington “elites” and disparaged the character and appearance of other candidates, calling them “thieves, bugs, and lice,” or belittling them with nicknames like “Turkey Head” and “Old Buzzard Back.” He went after judges, told bodyguards to rough up the press, warned supporters to “watch out for the lying newspapers!,” and started his own, American Progress, so he could speak directly to the public, as he did at huge rallies and on radio.
• Long could also be extremely crude. In one of many instances of incivility, he grabbed a dinner plate from a woman at a fancy party, telling her: “I’ll eat this for you. You’re too fat already.”
• A demagogue; a crude and clever bully; a putative champion of the little man who erected towers that exalted him; a divisive figure lashing out at judges, the press, and other brakes on unbridled power; a womanizer and wheeler-dealer of dubious ethics who boasted he could shoot someone in public and get away with it. Many Americans know Huey Long best from Robert Penn Warren’s fictional classic, All the King’s Men. Warren also wrote nonfiction and had a dark awareness of how the past haunted and weighed on the present. “History, like nature, knows no jumps,” he observed in 1956, writing about white resistance to civil rights. “Except the jump backward.”
• While I was at Nottoway, John and his wife, Anna, had visited a plantation where a cruel master used to roll slaves down the levee in barrels with nails driven into them.
• Several Northern firms, including Brooks Brothers, thrived on “plantation clothing,” both fine suits for masters and cheaper wares used to dress up slaves for auction.
• Rather, it was the communal setting and the preacher’s rousing delivery that produced an unconscious and “wholly unintellectual” response, one that left the congregation inspired and refreshed. Olmsted didn’t make the connection here, but the “unconscious” and “unintellectual” experience he described seemed akin to the spiritual, healing uplift he felt in the presence of nature, and that he would later seek to bring to the masses through his parks.
• He’d also been intrigued to learn that Louisiana had very high death rates, due to diet, smoking, poverty, and other factors, and was home to a literary publication called Exquisite Corpse.
• “Cajun” was a corruption of “Acadian,” the term for restive French colonists on the east coast of Canada who were driven out during the British conquest of the eighteenth century. Le Grand Dérangement, as this upheaval was known, scattered Acadians all over the map, and some four thousand eventually found refuge in Louisiana.
• None of them seemed perturbed by the apparent monsoon. All had Doppler radar on their phones and checked it the way others did text traffic.
• It was hard to catch these thrashing behemoths, which sportsmen stalked with heavy rods, traps, nets, and even pistols. Marty had another method. He went into the bayou at night in a small boat, armed with a spotlight and crossbow. “Just you and dem gar and de alligators and de snakes,” he said. “I’m not scared of nothing, and don’t turn nothing down.” Many people considered gar a “trash fish,” barely suitable for dog food, but Marty disagreed. “I like it barbecued, with tomato gravy. Coon-ass and a little Italian thrown in.” He planned to go after gar the next night and urged us to join him. “Biggest thrill you’ll ever have,” he assured us.
• He spent the rest of our drive replaying all the crazy things Marty had told us: busting ass, blowing up reefs, squirting Cheez Whiz underwater to attract and spear tropical fish... Gaunt and jumpy, smoking and drinking and talking in a manic rush, Marty read like a pamphlet titled Warning Signs of Crystal Meth Use. With lots of beer thrown in, to soften the buzz. When I mentioned this to Andrew, he buried his face in his hands. “Hunting swamp creatures at night,” he moaned. “In a little boat. With a crossbow. And a meth-head at the helm. What could possibly go wrong?”
• He also warned that military victory for the Union would not vanquish “leaders and desperate men” in the South, who would fight on by other means: paramilitary bands, assassination, electoral intrigue, “and all manner of underhanded annoyance and obstruction.” The nation must be prepared for a protracted and uncompromising campaign, “for years,” to wear down and eliminate revanchist elements and their support from the mass of “nominally submissive” whites. Olmsted, in essence, foresaw postwar Reconstruction and the undermining of it by white terror, resistance, and the faltering will and effort of a war-weary North.
• In all, the one-day killing at Colfax constituted the worst single slaughter in the South during the bloody decade following the Civil War, a period in which more than two thousand blacks were murdered in Louisiana alone... Federal authorities were able to round up and try only nine of the posse, on charges of murder and conspiracy “to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate” blacks in the exercise of their rights. Three were found guilty but their convictions were overturned. Appeal to the Supreme Court resulted in a death blow to the legal basis and dwindling powers of Reconstruction. Justices ruled that enforcement of civil and voting rights, in cases of individual or mob action like Colfax, was a state rather than a federal matter. This effectively stripped blacks of protection against terror.
• Willie Calhoun narrowly survived the violence... But Willie couldn’t charm or pay his way out of trouble as Reconstruction and his fortunes unraveled. He was ostracized by whites, beset by debt, and stripped of property by seizures and sheriffs’ sales. One lot was sold at auction to the commander of the white posse in 1873, a man who’d never been tried and had gone on to serve as a local official.
• This prompted a highly technical discussion of the cost and labor that went into the monster vehicles. The basics involved mounting the chassis of a pickup truck on military-surplus axles and massive tires, some of them seven feet tall. The engines were likewise supersized, up to nine hundred horsepower—roughly the power of a Formula One racecar. Exhaust and air pipes rose snorkel-like from the hood and roof, so they wouldn’t get clogged with mud. The other details I scrawled in my muddy notebook made little sense on later inspection. “Front transfer case 2.71 to 1 . . . nitrogen shocks . . . driveshaft upgrade . .
• Andrew had also struggled to extract much from the conversation, which he rendered in Mudfest dialect. “I’m drivin’ my big truck into that big hole,” he drawled. “Now I’m stuck.” “Now I’m pullin’ out.” “Now I’m goin’ in again.” This struck him as a mad liturgy or metaphor for sex. “It’s all about drive shafts and mechanical cojones,” he said, as a truck called Coming in Hott! plunged into the pit. “Funny you don’t see any trucks with squishy names. We should call the monster Kia Remembrance of Things Pissed.”
• The mudders we’d met couldn’t have been more open and hospitable. They’d generously shared their beverages, hobby, and attitudes—which together comprised a garish stereotype of the rural white South. Unlike Olmsted, I wasn’t undercover. But I still felt like an infiltrator. When I confessed these qualms to Andrew, he diagnosed “a bad case of liberal guilt.” Raised Catholic, with Jewish lineage on his father’s side, Andrew judged himself “guilty of everything, all the time.” But he didn’t feel so as a visitor to America, on a moral holiday from the sins and conflicts of his own homeland.
• Colfax, just around the river bend, had conformed to Faulkner’s famous observation, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” But here, on a plantation where countless slaves toiled in cotton and cane fields, the past not only seemed dead, it lay buried beneath tons of toxic sludge and vehicular shrapnel.

• In the early 1800s, Mexico sought to buffer its sparsely inhabited frontera against Indians and the expansionist US by contracting with empresarios, or agents, granting them land and other privileges in exchange for settling and developing Tejas. On paper, the empresarios, and those they imported, pledged fealty to Mexico and the Catholic Church. In practice, the overwhelmingly Anglo-Protestant immigrants inhabited a legal and social netherworld, outside the US and a thousand miles from central authority in Mexico City. Stephen Austin, the first and most famous empresario to arrive, was a skilled diplomat
• And while Sam Houston was a fine and brave commander, badly wounded in the fight, his foe was no Napoleon. At San Jacinto, Santa Anna was caught napping, allegedly with a mulatto woman named Emily West. He fled the attack and dressed as a common soldier, although some accounts say as a woman. Among other bizarre ventures, Santa Anna later lived in New York and tried to market a rubbery tree extract called chicle, which his inventor partner turned into chewing gum. Hence, Chiclets.
• Leaving Crockett, I felt as Olmsted had after his testy encounter with slave masters in Nashville. “Very melancholy” and pessimistically wondering “what is to become of us . . . this great country & this cursedly little people.”
• A philosophy grad in his early thirties, he described Austin as “ground zero for monetizing a certain demographic—young, white, well educated, seeking a counterculture that’s not counter anymore, it’s a mainstream product.”
• Olmsted had a special relationship to trees. His mother sewed beneath one in Fred’s sole memory of her, when he was not yet four. Seven decades later, during his last great work as a landscape architect, he proposed “a museum of living trees” along the entrance to the Biltmore Estate and urged its owner to preserve the nearby mountain woodlands in their wild state.
• In later writing, Olmsted noted that observers of scenery tend to focus on the most dramatic features, such as waterfalls or peaks. But he believed the true power of landscape lay in the dynamic interplay of trees, sky, water, and topography. All combined, like the human face, to create a whole larger than “a measured account” of its parts. ... This was especially so in places where the tree’s “distorted roots” clung to rocky ledges. The oaks also stood “alone or in picturesque groups,” dotting the prairie, which “rolled in long waves that took, on their various slopes, bright light or half shadows from the afternoon sun.” In all, the gnarled trees, “clean sward” of grassland, and other features created an effect that was fresh and striking to Olmsted, “like a happy new melody.”
• Or so he felt upon first entering this landscape, lingering just beyond Austin to sketch “a superb old tree” and the vista beyond. “Had we known that this was the first one of a thousand similar scenes,” he added, “we should have perhaps, spared ourselves the pains.”
• Except the real thing looked so . . . puny. Like Plymouth Rock, which towered in American imagination and turned out to be a cracked little boulder. I’d read enough to know the Alamo wasn’t a grand cathedral. But at first glance, the shrine’s size and shape wasn’t much different from the Mexican restaurant where I’d lunched.
• the Alamo’s longtime historian and curator noted an ironic twist. The first man to buy up property around the Alamo was Samuel Maverick, who escaped death at the Alamo by riding off as a courier a few days before its fall. “So it’s an Alamo survivor who gets rich from developing this area,” Bruce Winders said. He also noted that the Texas revolutionaries were fighting, in part, for economic opportunity.
• In reality, only eleven of the Alamo defenders were Texas born, and nine of those were men of Mexican or Spanish descent who opposed Santa Anna’s regime. One of the garrison’s leaders, Jim Bowie, had Mexican citizenship and a Tejano wife. Over twenty of the defenders came from Denmark, Wales, and elsewhere abroad. In addition, Crockett and other new arrivals to Texas “were effectively illegal immigrants,” Winders said, since Mexico had barred further immigration from the US in 1830 and sought the expulsion of squatters. Meanwhile, Santa Anna’s army included European officers and mestizos of mixed Spanish and Indian descent, conscripted for up to ten years. “So who exactly were ‘the Mexicans’ and who were ‘the Texans,’ and why were they here?” Winders asked.
• Except that in part, it was. Mexico had abolished slavery and attempted to restrict its spread in Texas, inciting many Anglos to take up arms.
• The priests required Indians to learn Spanish and Latin and worship three times a day, while being taught carpentry, blacksmithing, and other trades. Even in ruins, Olmsted wrote, the missions impressed upon him “the strangely patient courage and zeal of the old Spanish fathers,” who “persuaded and compelled” natives to construct these striking testaments to “the glory of the faith.”
• the Mexicans charged the Styrofoam walls, accompanied by fife and drum. “Levante sus armas!” Santa Anna shouted. “Apuntar! Fuego!” The soldiers fired their muskets, which were loaded with powder blanks and aimed above the heads of their foes. The Texans bit at paper cartridges, poured powder down their musket barrels, and returned fire. “Give ’em hell, boys!” Travis shouted. “Make every shot count!” The two sides exchanged repeated volleys from about thirty yards apart, filling the street with smoke and the acrid smell of gunpowder, but not with bodies. It had been agreed beforehand that no one would risk flopping onto the hard pavement.
• But he did enjoy expressing Santa Anna’s position “that this was Mexico and he had to defend it against illegal invaders pouring into Texas.” He also hoped this perspective resonated in the present. “The problem Mexico had with Americans then,” he observed, “is what Americans are having now, with undocumented Hispanics.”
• Near San Antonio, Olmsted encountered pockets of Alsatians and what he called “a sort of religious colony of Silesian Poles.” At the city’s Institute of Texan Cultures, I also learned about groups entirely unfamiliar to me, such as French Icarians, who believed in “perfect democracy and universal suffrage,” and the Wends, a Slavic people so dour in their beliefs that brides wore black wedding gowns, “to symbolize the end of a carefree childhood and the approaching hardships of married life.”
• Also exotic to modern eyes—and much more consequential for Texas and Olmsted—was the Adelsverein, a league of petty German nobles that dreamed of “bringing new crowns to old glory” by planting a second fatherland in Texas. They sponsored mass migration of peasants and artisans but lacked the acumen for their grandiose project and were duped by land speculators. The group’s semifeudal leader, Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels, founded a town named for one of his ancestral castles and decamped to Europe.
• Olmsted may have misapprehended what he called its “universal repugnance” to slavery. “Germans liked doing things themselves, and never thought anyone could do it as well as them,” she said. “Farming on their own, rather than with slave labor, was a kind of quality control.” Most Germans in antebellum Texas also lacked the large landholdings or capital needed to make slave labor practicable.
• Olmsted was a man of varied enthusiasms and talents, in an era before rigid professions and specialization. But at heart, he was a master planner, seeking to landscape society as he did public spaces... Olmsted was also exceptionally far-sighted, and dogged in pursuit of visions that others couldn’t imagine or dismissed as harebrained. “I have all my life been considering distant effects,” he wrote, in another late-career letter, “and always sacrificing immediate success & applause to that of the future.” Western Texas was just such a project: a grandiose scheme, germinated in secret, and unlikely to bear fruit for years. As laid out in private correspondence with Adolf Douai and other co-conspirators in Texas, the plan called for the “immigration of one or two thousand staunch and steadfast northern men, supporters of Freedom.” These infiltrators should come quietly and in small groups at first, forming a “nucleus” in alliance with
• Olmsted kept refining and expanding on this plan, long after his return from Texas. It became, in effect, a dry run for his career as a landscape architect, including blueprints for a string of planned communities across the frontier of the Cotton Kingdom. “I have a private grand political hobby which I must display to you,” he disclosed to a Northern ally, in a letter filled with geometric shapes, lines, and arrows. The sketch was nothing less than a sweeping design for winning what Olmsted called the “war between the power of Slavery and of Freedom on this continent.”
• In 1854, when the Sisterdale cell won approval of an anti-slavery manifesto at a German convention in San Antonio, the backlash was swift and furious. Foes damned the plank as a thinly veiled call for abolition, abetted by the federal government—tantamount to sedition in a Southern state, at a time when the nation was fracturing over slavery. Anti-immigrant fervor was also on the rise, stoked by the Know-Nothings, a national movement also known as the American Party, which cast native-born Protestants as besieged
• But fury over Douai’s advocacy for a free state in Texas became so intense that he took to sleeping in his office with a gun. Deep in debt, and fearing for the safety of his large family, Douai left San Antonio, ultimately finding work as an educator in Boston and becoming a pioneer of the kindergarten system in the US.
• To Anne Stewart, this was “history repeating itself.” In her view, “the early freethinkers rejected dogma, but were too dogmatic to win over others, and got crushed.” She believed Olmsted’s allies in the Hill Country “made a huge mistake” by publicizing their anti-slavery platform and putting a target on their backs. Then they picked another fight they couldn’t win, against the Confederacy in Texas.
• The anti-Confederate underground the Degeners joined, behind Southern lines, so alarmed Texas authorities that in 1862 they declared martial law in the Hill Country. Soldiers were dispatched to “remove” all “disloyal persons,” register white males above the age of sixteen, and to force “aliens” to swear allegiance to the Confederacy. Those who refused were summarily hanged. “Civil war is on the eve of breaking out,” Edward Degener wrote in a letter to family and friends in Germany. Young Unionists had taken to “the Mountains & ravines” and were being “chased by Confederate troops, like Indians,” while their families suffered from the deprivations wrought by war and martial rule. ... According to other accounts, the fight at the Nueces was more massacre than battle. At least seven wounded captives were executed after the fight ended. Of those who escaped the slaughter, seventeen were hunted down and slain: shot while swimming the Rio Grande, hanged, maimed, or “used as shooting targets.” Many more Unionists were shot or lynched during a reign of terror in the Hill Country that lasted for two years.
• Many in the Hill Country had done so from the start of the conflict. At Comfort’s small museum and archives, Brenda Seidensticker showed me documents that made the 1860s Hill Country sound like occupied France during World War II. There were resisters, active collaborators, and those caught between, serving as Confederate teamsters, mail carriers, or in militias, if only to avoid persecution and spare their families harm. “Some Germans were upset at these young and excited guys who made life hard for people who wanted to lay low,” Brenda said, and “bad feelings” lingered for generations between Unionist families and those that had served the Confederacy.
• These practical and aesthetic considerations were intertwined. Intrinsic to beauty, Olmsted stated in his address, was the “quality of ease” that flowed from the gratification of basic human needs: shelter, shade, prospect, and economy of effort.
• I resisted a cruel urge to quote Buck, “The animal is never wrong,” and instead mocked myself. “I think I’ve set his training back a year.” “That’s perceptive,” Buck observed. We said little more until the mules and gear were loaded and we reached the Sisterdale store, where I’d asked to be dropped off. I shook hands with Doc and thrust my hand at Buck, struggling to find words that wouldn’t seem ludicrously insincere. “Well, it’s been an experience,” I finally mustered. “That it has,” he replied.
• He also deflated fearful tales about “the peculiar venomous insects of Texas,” describing the tarantula as “very rare” and the scorpion as “a minute flattened crawling lobster” with a sting no worse than a hornet’s. Much more intriguing was the horned frog, which seemed a weird hybrid of lizard and toad. The Olmsteds captured two of the frogs and later mailed them in a box to John’s wife and young children in New York. Miraculously, the reptiles arrived “in good spirits and flesh”
• It was also an immediate sensation, drawing one hundred thousand people on some days, with little friction (the most common crime: speeding, on horseback, punishable with a ten-dollar fine). “Park” entered an American encyclopedia for the first time, the entry written by Olmsted. “Both in conception and execution,” the Atlantic Monthly declared, Central Park represented “the beau-ideal of a people’s pleasure-ground” and “the most striking evidence of the sovereignty of the people yet afforded in the history of free institutions,—the best answer yet given to the doubts and fears which have frowned on the theory of self-government.” This was exactly as Olmsted had hoped, but too late to serve as a reproach to the South. A few weeks after the Atlantic article appeared, Confederates bombarded Fort Sumter, and Lincoln called for volunteers.
• The Ramble also bore traces of Olmsted’s Southern travels. Its lush and aromatic density felt more like Louisiana or the Carolina Low Country than the mid-Atlantic, and the plantings included swamp magnolia, a tree he’d admired on his journey. The rustic benches and bridges were made of Alabama cedar. Elsewhere in the park, the lagoon-like water features felt Southern, too, as did the elms arching over the Mall in the cathedral-like fashion of live oak allées on grand plantations. Olmsted and Vaux introduced many non-native elements, in part because large stretches of the park site bore little trace of its native state, having been stripped and disfigured by loggers, bone-boilers, and others.
• As Yeoman, Olmsted’s essential subject had been freedom, or the absence of it. Slaves yearning to be free; slave owners whose thoughts were not; an entire society chained to a system that inhibited free labor, free expression, and the flourishing of free enterprise and free institutions. Olmsted may have turned away from the South and its iniquities after the Civil War. But the central quest of his travels and writings endured in his landscape design. As the Brooklyn park essay stated: “A sense of enlarged freedom is to all, at all times, the most certain and the most valuable gratification afforded by a park.”