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The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations On Cotton And Slavery In The American Slave States, 1853-1861
In 1853, Frederick Law Olmsted was working for the New York Times when he journeyed to the southern slave states of the U.S. and wrote one of the most important pro-abolition discourses.
The Cotton Kingdom recounts his daily observations of the curse of slavery: the poverty it brought to both black and white people; the inadequacies of the plantation system; and the economic consequences and problems associated with America’s most “peculiar institution”.
Disproving the opinion that “Cotton is king”, Olmsted examined the huge differences between the economies of the northern and southern states, contrasting the more successful, wealthy and progressive north with the stubborn south, convinced of the necessity of slavery.
Hailed as one of the most convincing and influential anti-slavery arguments, Olmsted’s work was widely praised with London’s Westminster Review declaring, “it is impossible to resist his accumulated evidence.”
Frederick Law Olmsted was an American landscape architect, journalist, social critic, and public administrator. He is popularly considered to be the father of American landscape architecture. Through his work as a journalist for the New York Daily Times (New York Times), he became interested in the adverse economic effects of slavery and The Cotton Kingdom is a result of this. He died in 1903.
The Cotton Kingdom recounts his daily observations of the curse of slavery: the poverty it brought to both black and white people; the inadequacies of the plantation system; and the economic consequences and problems associated with America’s most “peculiar institution”.
Disproving the opinion that “Cotton is king”, Olmsted examined the huge differences between the economies of the northern and southern states, contrasting the more successful, wealthy and progressive north with the stubborn south, convinced of the necessity of slavery.
Hailed as one of the most convincing and influential anti-slavery arguments, Olmsted’s work was widely praised with London’s Westminster Review declaring, “it is impossible to resist his accumulated evidence.”
Frederick Law Olmsted was an American landscape architect, journalist, social critic, and public administrator. He is popularly considered to be the father of American landscape architecture. Through his work as a journalist for the New York Daily Times (New York Times), he became interested in the adverse economic effects of slavery and The Cotton Kingdom is a result of this. He died in 1903.
540 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1861
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November 18, 2014
Even if I had accompanied Olmsted on his journey through the antebellum South, I would have missed the majority of his observations. He has an excellent eye for many factors I would be blind to, from the wasteful management of natural resources, to what institutions ought to be present in a community of a given size (but are not).
While authors such as Frederick Douglass amply document the horrors visited on the slaves themselves, Olmsted's experiences reveal the deleterious effect that slavery has on white Southerners, both morally and economically. He faithfully records how the violence meted out to slaves seeps into the relationships among whites, citing a duel where the victor took pleasure in hacking his downed opponent. The sons of a plantation owner he stays with, including boys as young as fourteen, spend all night in the cabins of female slaves.
The shabby plantations described resemble those in "Huckleberry Finn" much more than the grand mansions in "Gone with the Wind" (with the possible exception of Virginia). The South is depicted here free of the glamor it would be painted with in later works. Rather than a dreamy Arcadia of older, aristocratic ways, it is a vast rural backwater far behind the North in its development. Every other household still uses a spinning wheel and handloom, technology obsolete in the North, and a plow with a moldboard is regarded as a recent innovation. Many grown men have never seen a dollar, but barter for all their needs.
The vast majority of white Southerners are poorer than Northerners, both in material wealth and in intellectual capital. Rarely does Olmsted see a piano, a painting, or a book of Shakespeare in even the homes of the well-to-do. He compares the South to a permanent frontier environment. Schools, churches, printing presses and the like are few and far between, as they are on the western frontier, but this is only a temporary condition on the frontier. As the population presses westward, all these advantages are eventually brought to what was once a frontier town, which is thus civilized within a decade or so. Olmsted finds such progress much more glacial in the South.
Even the vaunted "Southern hospitality" turns out to be largely a myth. Innkeepers, coach drivers, and even the railroad routinely take advantage of Olmsted, and when he begs for a night's accommodation in a prosperous home, he is charged for the privilege.
Some of this underdevelopment stems from an attitude toward work that is almost medieval. Even poor whites consider work to be degrading, engaged in only by necessity. Physical jobs that require independent judgment are entrusted to laborers from the North, and to specially picked slaves who are motivated not by whippings but by cash payments for exceeding quotas.
Some might think his narratives overlong, relating every turn and fork of a ride through the woods, or every time someone walks in and out of a room while recounting an evening spent in a slave owner's home. Not me, as I'm fascinated by the routine incidents of lives so remote in both time and attitude. I did, however, wonder whether Olmsted had a photographic memory, was taking surreptitious notes, or was just inventing details.
While today we have no need of arguments against slavery, it's still interesting to read the approaches Olmsted takes. In one chapter he asks if Southern blacks are inferior to whites, as claimed, why are there no attempts to rehabilitate and educate them, as is done with white criminals, or with the inmates of insane asylums?
While authors such as Frederick Douglass amply document the horrors visited on the slaves themselves, Olmsted's experiences reveal the deleterious effect that slavery has on white Southerners, both morally and economically. He faithfully records how the violence meted out to slaves seeps into the relationships among whites, citing a duel where the victor took pleasure in hacking his downed opponent. The sons of a plantation owner he stays with, including boys as young as fourteen, spend all night in the cabins of female slaves.
The shabby plantations described resemble those in "Huckleberry Finn" much more than the grand mansions in "Gone with the Wind" (with the possible exception of Virginia). The South is depicted here free of the glamor it would be painted with in later works. Rather than a dreamy Arcadia of older, aristocratic ways, it is a vast rural backwater far behind the North in its development. Every other household still uses a spinning wheel and handloom, technology obsolete in the North, and a plow with a moldboard is regarded as a recent innovation. Many grown men have never seen a dollar, but barter for all their needs.
The vast majority of white Southerners are poorer than Northerners, both in material wealth and in intellectual capital. Rarely does Olmsted see a piano, a painting, or a book of Shakespeare in even the homes of the well-to-do. He compares the South to a permanent frontier environment. Schools, churches, printing presses and the like are few and far between, as they are on the western frontier, but this is only a temporary condition on the frontier. As the population presses westward, all these advantages are eventually brought to what was once a frontier town, which is thus civilized within a decade or so. Olmsted finds such progress much more glacial in the South.
Even the vaunted "Southern hospitality" turns out to be largely a myth. Innkeepers, coach drivers, and even the railroad routinely take advantage of Olmsted, and when he begs for a night's accommodation in a prosperous home, he is charged for the privilege.
Some of this underdevelopment stems from an attitude toward work that is almost medieval. Even poor whites consider work to be degrading, engaged in only by necessity. Physical jobs that require independent judgment are entrusted to laborers from the North, and to specially picked slaves who are motivated not by whippings but by cash payments for exceeding quotas.
Some might think his narratives overlong, relating every turn and fork of a ride through the woods, or every time someone walks in and out of a room while recounting an evening spent in a slave owner's home. Not me, as I'm fascinated by the routine incidents of lives so remote in both time and attitude. I did, however, wonder whether Olmsted had a photographic memory, was taking surreptitious notes, or was just inventing details.
While today we have no need of arguments against slavery, it's still interesting to read the approaches Olmsted takes. In one chapter he asks if Southern blacks are inferior to whites, as claimed, why are there no attempts to rehabilitate and educate them, as is done with white criminals, or with the inmates of insane asylums?
Want to read
August 2, 2020************************
*Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted by Justin Martin 5 stars
Books by Olmsted:
*The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, 1853-1861 TBR
*A Journey through Texas: Or a Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier TBR
*Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted by Justin Martin 5 stars
Books by Olmsted:
*The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, 1853-1861 TBR
*A Journey through Texas: Or a Saddle-Trip on the Southwestern Frontier TBR
August 13, 2018
It took me MONTHS to get through this book. Parts of it were so mundane and boring that I would stop reading it for weeks and months on end; sometimes I thought I was going to end up abandoning it. But the parts of it that are on point? They are searing and they make the entire book worth it. It is fascinating how many of the observations Olmsted made in the 1850s could be plopped right down in 2018 and still be relevant. I will probably go back and re-read the things I highlighted whenever I want a refresher.
I would only recommend this book for SERIOUS history buffs who are interested in racism, slavery and how Southern society upheld slavery around the time of the Civil War.
I would only recommend this book for SERIOUS history buffs who are interested in racism, slavery and how Southern society upheld slavery around the time of the Civil War.
October 3, 2012
This was an accidental discovery for me; it came from a deceased friend's library and I wish I could thank him for it. I thumbed through the section on North Carolina and was immediately hooked. The landscape architect was a remarkably good writer and this contemporaneous account of the peculiar institution is fascinating and well worth seeking out. The book is a series of dispatches written for the New York Times, then edited for book form. Olmsted examined slavery through an economic lens, recording prices of slaves at auction, their value over time and at various specialties. He observed that slave owners measured their wealth largely through the slaves' value, which did not seem to be realistically pegged to their economic output. In most cases it seemed that an enterprise could more profitable with hired labor, thus hobbling the South and preventing the region from reaching its economic potential. This was not an abstract notion; the cost and productivity of various labor pools was recorded and compared. Olmsted was criticized by abolitionists for ignoring the moral aspects of slavery, but he described daily life in detail, letting the reader draw his own conclusions, which seem obvious. He related conversations with slaves, free laborers, slave owners, overseers and many others that an inquisitive traveler would meet. He described taverns, inns, roads, public buildings, available food and drink and overall provided a vivid picture of life in the South. The paucity of infrastructure was mind-boggling. My libertarian friends would do well to study what life was like before central government got around to maintaining roads and providing security to our citizens.
September 27, 2022
Frederick Law Olmsted, later to gain fame as the designer of Central Park and other outdoor venues, spent several years in the 1850s traveling the South principally to learn about the slave economy. Most of this book is a travelogue, describing his journeys, his accommodations, and his conversations in considerable detail. He's a good writer and a good observer, and apparently reports what he sees and hears with considerable objectivity. It's a fascinating portrait of the South just before the Civil War.
May 23, 2025
This book is by the United State’s famous landscape architect before he entered the profession. It consist of a travel log of a series of trips he took from the northeast down through the south to examine plantations and the subject of slavery. I tired of his many long passages examining the economics of the profitability of a slave versus using freeman labor. He seems obsessed with proving slavery as being uneconomic as compared with hiring the immigrant laborers of the day, the Irish and the Germans. He only occasionally mentions the morality of the concept of slavery.
The author obviously had many preconceived conceptions that he was trying to prove through his travels and this book was also a window into the attitude and prejudices
Hof an upper class New Yorker of the day. He is fixated on the ethnicity everyone he comments on, often disparagingly so. I was amazed that he would take refuge in a southerner’s home and refuse to make his room’s fire and sits in the cold for hours because he expected servants to make his fire and when they didn’t, he just fumed. One example of the expectations of the upper class of the day.
This is a book worth picking up and reading parts of it. Olmsted fills it with a very detailed descriptions of his experiences. It seems that almost everything was different than now in those days.
The author obviously had many preconceived conceptions that he was trying to prove through his travels and this book was also a window into the attitude and prejudices
Hof an upper class New Yorker of the day. He is fixated on the ethnicity everyone he comments on, often disparagingly so. I was amazed that he would take refuge in a southerner’s home and refuse to make his room’s fire and sits in the cold for hours because he expected servants to make his fire and when they didn’t, he just fumed. One example of the expectations of the upper class of the day.
This is a book worth picking up and reading parts of it. Olmsted fills it with a very detailed descriptions of his experiences. It seems that almost everything was different than now in those days.
February 11, 2020
This is a detailed, lengthy account of a Connecticut professional (landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted) traveling 4,000 miles around the antebellum South and basically shitting all over it. He complains about everything from the trains running too slowly to the people being uneducated and "morally impoverished." The central premise is both a moral and economic argument against the institution of slavery, but it doesn't feel super organized; it's just a string of anecdotes as he goes from place to place, recounting what happens to him. I learned a lot about daily life in the 1850s, things you don't necessarily pick up from other books and movies (e.g., how much a train ticket or a night's lodging cost), and I certainly sympathize with the overarching point, but at times it felt like a bit of a slog.
December 30, 2017
Assigned by my history professor to read selected passages from this book and I ended up reading the whole thing. This is a book that I think every single person should read. It will make you extremely angry and sad but a reminder of a not-so-distant era in American history that is too easily revised or forgotten.
November 9, 2019
Exceptionally detailed. Olmsted travelled the south long before Holiday Inn and has produced multiple intimate portraits. It is very long, reporting conversations in great and (for this reader) rather tedious detail. It could be indispensable reading for a historian of the subject and era. Not so for today's general reader.
August 19, 2019
Not bad for a travel book written by an abolitionist landscape architect in 1861! Olmstead travelled slave states in the South as the Civil war started, reporting on living conditions of slaves. Very detailed description of the pre-Civil War South!
September 17, 2019
Although much of the book is taken up with familiar complaints about traveling (the author had to ring the bell three times to get more coal in his grate; the food at the hotel was filthy and hastily served; the train was three hours late in arriving, and it caused him to miss his steamship), there are few books that would give one a better view of what the American South looked like on the eve of the Civil War.
Frederick Law Olmsted was a world-famous landscape architect (he would soon design Central Park), and noted journalist who was paid by the New York Times to travel through the South and offer his reports to the paper. As the son of a nature-loving merchant from Connecticut and a Yale College attendee (until sumac poisoning caused his eye-sight to give out), he was a true blue believer in Yankeedom, and to his mind almost everything about the South spoke of its backwardness and lethargy, which he traced to the aftereffects of slavery. Even his poor accommodations and spotty transit service he saw as indicators of slavery's failures.
Yet the book is not a jeremiad. Olmsted is not adverse to pointing out kindness and prosperity when he finds it, and overall tries to account closely for the economics of Southern slavery. He estimates that labor costs were twice as much in the South in the North (which coincides with Gavin Wright's estimates that slave labor was not "cheap," even if it is higher than Wright's estimates). He noted that hiring out slaves for a year cost about $150, the same price as free labor, while the "lessee" had to pay for the board, clothes, and any injuries, and usually did not get as much work as a free laborer. He basically estimates that only the high price of cotton allows slavery to "work" in the South, but at the same time describes how slavery excludes all other types of work from those territories. He shows how that explains why roads, churches, and towns are neglected, while hay is imported from the North. He also shows how land gets cheaper the more slaves are employed on it, from $20 an acre in the North, to less than five in the most densely populated slave areas. But Olmsted also shows how slaves negotiated for certain fixed "tasks" in many areas, often doable before the end of the day, and kept their own earnings, chickens, gardens, charcoal, and so on, and sold much to their owners, even though those owners technically owned everything. Mores shaped the institution of slavery, which was a constant, if lopsided, negotiation.
The book is filled with little vignettes about the shingle cutters of the Great Dismal Swamp, the turpentine farmers of the Carolinas, the giant sugar plantation and manufacturers of Louisiana (which could cost up to $100,000 to construct, with the newest machinery) and every part of everyday life in the South. It's an unparalleled and unsettling window onto a different, and lost, world.
Frederick Law Olmsted was a world-famous landscape architect (he would soon design Central Park), and noted journalist who was paid by the New York Times to travel through the South and offer his reports to the paper. As the son of a nature-loving merchant from Connecticut and a Yale College attendee (until sumac poisoning caused his eye-sight to give out), he was a true blue believer in Yankeedom, and to his mind almost everything about the South spoke of its backwardness and lethargy, which he traced to the aftereffects of slavery. Even his poor accommodations and spotty transit service he saw as indicators of slavery's failures.
Yet the book is not a jeremiad. Olmsted is not adverse to pointing out kindness and prosperity when he finds it, and overall tries to account closely for the economics of Southern slavery. He estimates that labor costs were twice as much in the South in the North (which coincides with Gavin Wright's estimates that slave labor was not "cheap," even if it is higher than Wright's estimates). He noted that hiring out slaves for a year cost about $150, the same price as free labor, while the "lessee" had to pay for the board, clothes, and any injuries, and usually did not get as much work as a free laborer. He basically estimates that only the high price of cotton allows slavery to "work" in the South, but at the same time describes how slavery excludes all other types of work from those territories. He shows how that explains why roads, churches, and towns are neglected, while hay is imported from the North. He also shows how land gets cheaper the more slaves are employed on it, from $20 an acre in the North, to less than five in the most densely populated slave areas. But Olmsted also shows how slaves negotiated for certain fixed "tasks" in many areas, often doable before the end of the day, and kept their own earnings, chickens, gardens, charcoal, and so on, and sold much to their owners, even though those owners technically owned everything. Mores shaped the institution of slavery, which was a constant, if lopsided, negotiation.
The book is filled with little vignettes about the shingle cutters of the Great Dismal Swamp, the turpentine farmers of the Carolinas, the giant sugar plantation and manufacturers of Louisiana (which could cost up to $100,000 to construct, with the newest machinery) and every part of everyday life in the South. It's an unparalleled and unsettling window onto a different, and lost, world.
January 18, 2019
Premier landscape architect Olmstead toured the South extensively before the Civil War and spent a great deal of time with Southerners of every social class; from wealthy planters to dirt-poor farmers in isolated homesteads. His view of slavery was that it is inefficient and that slaves were treated much more poorly than poor laborers in the North in spite of Southern propaganda to the contrary. He cites known facts and published information in the South and the North to make his point that American racial slavery was not merely inhumane but was horribly inefficient and left much land idle and an entire region of the country impoverished for the average person meaning, to him, the average white person. Many of his conclusions and suggestions would be unacceptable to us today but one thing he talked about really stuck out to me. He was criticizing the upper crust who would condemn slaves as being stupid, witless, and incapable of helping themselves and then regularly he would hear about a slave who was the plantation bookkeeper, or manager, or how the planter couldn’t run his plantation without the slave who made everything happen. Some were master carpenters, mechanics, and experts in agriculture who, some planters said, they could not run their plantation without their direction. He was confused. Both things cannot be true. Perhaps if opportunities were more even then more slaves might prove their intelligence and ability. It is really an interesting book if you can get past the anachronistic language and racist attitudes of the author, some of which presage the eugenics movement of the early 1920s in its barbarity and racist/classist oppression. The North and the South before the Civil War were really two different countries. One wanted to move forward and grow and expand and make money and the other wanted to stew in its own corruption, willfully ignorant, proud and backwards. The war was inevitable. I don’t think you’ll find any statues of him in any Southern cities now.
September 20, 2019
Searing story of Frederick Law Olmstead’s travels in The Cotton Kingdom in the 1850s. His accounts are still shocking and well worth reading. Olmstead felt that planters in the South, who were few and far between, while on the books, far wealthier than Northern counterparts, had homes in far worse circumstances in housing and lifestyle. The costs of farming with slaves and less technology caused a lower standard of living. The whole of the South seemed to be anti-education and knowledge. Even planters seemed willfully ignorant and their ability to lord over others without restraint made the men violent and unable to think much. Availability of books were scare and learning was limited. Southern whites often lived on object poverty and hunger. The planters obsession with manners and gentility chafed against the brutality and treatment of slaves. Yet Olmstead points out that Southerners loved their manners, they had little to talk or think about. He found people of all walks of life unable to give directions to the nearest town or city and often claimed never to have been there. Talk was vague and obtuse. There is a lot more I. This book which looks at life’s of white southerners and their slaves and II isn’t pretty.
June 25, 2019
Overall this is a valuable and thought provoking book that deals with a slice leading up to the darkest history of the United States. Olmsted, a contemporary of John Muir and Richard Dana in several ways struck out into the South prior to the Civil War to learn what people (white and black) thought about their living and working conditions, and of course slavery. Olmsted has a good eye for detail and the skills of a journalist and diplomat. My one minor complaint has to do with word usage, the N-word seems to have been common in both the South and North at the time but it is comes across as shocking today. There also were other words used in cotton and farm economies early in the 19th Century that are not immediately understandable today. Finally, there are several published versions of Olmsted's treks throughout the South. The version I bought from Amazon is a 300+ page edition that covers several trips and was assembled for the British Market. I was not aware of the variety of volumes to choose from, some as much as 150 pages longer. Look for the subtitles to make your decision.
June 26, 2019
This was a fascinating read written by a northerner traveling for the first time in the south in the 1850's. He was tasked by the fledgling NY Times to determine whether or not slavery was as important to the south's economy as its wealthy elite claimed. His experiences and observations made it clear that it was actually detrimental to the south. Don't mistake me, Frederick Law Olmstead, later to become the progenitor of American landscape architecture and designer of Central Park in NYC, was racist. He made assumptions about the inferiority of African Americans that are unacceptable. Still, he thought that human beings deserve to learn to read and write and choose their own paths. Where southerners saw congenitally lazy, scheming and slow slaves, Olmstead saw people unmotivated to be anything else. Why hurry to be efficient when it only benefits white people and might very well shorten their own lives? I read this in preparation for reading "Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide" by the late Tony Horwitz.
November 7, 2019
A book about true evil.
An amazing, horrifying trip through the antebellum south. Before Frederick Law Olmsted became famous for creating Central Park he was a dedicated abolitionist. This is the factual compilation of three trips he made through the slave states in the years just preceding the Civil War.
The language is of the period, but well written, reading it you can hear the voices of Mark Twain's characters but with none of the humor. It is not an easy read, (I would compare it to reading accounts of Nazi atrocities), and when, and if, you finish you will never believe in the myth of the genteel culture of the pre-war south. The book will dispel the mythology of elegant plantations and elite culture and will lay bare the dysfunction, viciousness, pain, and depravity of the slave holding south. This book should not have been forgotten!
I will never see the Confederate flag again without it bringing to my mind the Swastika.
An amazing, horrifying trip through the antebellum south. Before Frederick Law Olmsted became famous for creating Central Park he was a dedicated abolitionist. This is the factual compilation of three trips he made through the slave states in the years just preceding the Civil War.
The language is of the period, but well written, reading it you can hear the voices of Mark Twain's characters but with none of the humor. It is not an easy read, (I would compare it to reading accounts of Nazi atrocities), and when, and if, you finish you will never believe in the myth of the genteel culture of the pre-war south. The book will dispel the mythology of elegant plantations and elite culture and will lay bare the dysfunction, viciousness, pain, and depravity of the slave holding south. This book should not have been forgotten!
I will never see the Confederate flag again without it bringing to my mind the Swastika.
March 29, 2022
I enjoyed it but buy this book instead of "A Journey In The Seaboard Slave States" because all the same text is part of this book. Yes slavery had a bad effect on the blacks of the South but also on the white population that were small farmers. Large landowners reinvested their capital on slaves and land but nothing else to help the region. The poor white land owner missed out by lack of opportunity in schools, stores, business, manufacturing, etc. because these things were not profitable to supply for small groups of whites, while the large land owner bought what they needed from the North at high prices because the items were not made in the South. Therefore poverty and ignorance abounded so the slaves and the poor whites were the big losers. Slavery was only a benefit for the very large landowners so the whole South's growth was hindered.
June 19, 2023
What is incredibly compelling is the time travel, the sense of being “there” In some ways it is a TripAdvisor from the past, demonstrating the limits and mythology of Southern hospitality in a place where transportation is behind the times, the standard of living for most people is low, the brutality and horror of slavery is evident and most of land is dedicated to growing one cash crop. The account shows us the evils and cruelties of slavery up close and also how, from a society-wide view, it was the wealth associated with the ownership and trade in human beings, the overwhelming valuable property of the Old South, traded and mortgaged, that really solidified the situation, creating a regional economy that wasted land and human life; along with a lack of investment or even disinvestment in everything else that might contribute to human progress, the lack of which is evident in this telling.
September 6, 2021
I had re-read this after 20 years. It is good for rehabilitating your ability to comprehend long sentences. The sentences can get ridiculously long, even for the standards of the time in which they were written.
After re-reading the book I gained a greater appreciation for what progress America has made. You may even draw the conclusion that much our success as a nation is from Dumb Luck. Exceptional Dumb Luck.
this book was written in the 1850s. What is clear is that a permanently independent southern confederacy would have gone on to be even poorer and more wretched than Mexico. but at least Mexico had better food and prettier women.
After re-reading the book I gained a greater appreciation for what progress America has made. You may even draw the conclusion that much our success as a nation is from Dumb Luck. Exceptional Dumb Luck.
this book was written in the 1850s. What is clear is that a permanently independent southern confederacy would have gone on to be even poorer and more wretched than Mexico. but at least Mexico had better food and prettier women.
April 6, 2021
This is a microeconomic look at the pre-Civil War south seen on the ground as the author walked and rode through the south over two years. The amount of detail on the day to day economy of the plantations and farms tells an incredible story- slavery was a losing proposition financially for all but a very, very few. And those few would have earned much more money without it than they did with it. The scope of the problems it caused everyone associated with it is described in detailed example by example.
There is much more here than you would ever find in the history textbooks.
There is much more here than you would ever find in the history textbooks.
November 5, 2025
The author's opinion of the evil, horror, corruption, cruelty of slavery is so true! I cannot even imagine working for drunk lecherous greedy overseers.
He was also inerested in food grown and eaten. He says peaches and other trees grew wild from incredible soil, but fruit is rarely grown on plantations because most were focused on cotton and tobacco. They shipped those products to England to buy ridiculous luxuries like racing horses, opulent carriages, chandeliers, etc.
WOW. Did these wanna-be-dukes ever try a peach.
He was also inerested in food grown and eaten. He says peaches and other trees grew wild from incredible soil, but fruit is rarely grown on plantations because most were focused on cotton and tobacco. They shipped those products to England to buy ridiculous luxuries like racing horses, opulent carriages, chandeliers, etc.
WOW. Did these wanna-be-dukes ever try a peach.
November 15, 2021
Great historical read
American slavery was an evil institution which benefited very few while condemning the vast majority of southerners to squalor. This book defines that aspect of slavery well but doesn't recognize the defiance of Black people. If Black people hadn't resisted so fiercely, so cunningly, slavery may simply been reinvented. I enjoyed reading from the perspective of someone who lived it.
American slavery was an evil institution which benefited very few while condemning the vast majority of southerners to squalor. This book defines that aspect of slavery well but doesn't recognize the defiance of Black people. If Black people hadn't resisted so fiercely, so cunningly, slavery may simply been reinvented. I enjoyed reading from the perspective of someone who lived it.
September 10, 2021
Totally unexpected lively travelogue through the antebellum south. The best view into what it was like in the towns and farms of the southern states from a perspective not given in typical retrospectives. Olmsted’s trip anecdotes draw a vivid picture that only comes from the first hand experience of a primary source!
August 18, 2025
The book is a worthwhile read. I heard about the book when I read Tony Horwitz's Spying on the South. The book gives us insights not only about the South in 1850's but also into the polarization of America. The old adage is if we don't learn about past history we are bound to repeat it.
September 16, 2019
I’m going to be thinking about all that happened in this book for a very long time.
May 17, 2020
Great Antebellum South Resource!
November 27, 2023
Occasionally one encounters a person or a book that changes how I see and understand the world.
This is one of those rare, rare books for me.
Read as a companion to American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, by Colin Woodard, it adds immeasurable context to my entire identity as a citizen of the United States.
This 1859 book by Frederick Law Olmsted, before he became Frederick Law Olmsted, Landscape Architect of Central Park in New York City, is a key to understanding the political and social life in early 21st century America.
This is one of those rare, rare books for me.
Read as a companion to American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, by Colin Woodard, it adds immeasurable context to my entire identity as a citizen of the United States.
This 1859 book by Frederick Law Olmsted, before he became Frederick Law Olmsted, Landscape Architect of Central Park in New York City, is a key to understanding the political and social life in early 21st century America.
March 11, 2011
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in Ivan Denisovitch, wrote: "There are two ends to a stick, and there's more than one way of working. If it's for human beings - make sure and do it properly. If it's for the big man - just make it look good." He was speaking of life in the Soviet gulag, but something of the same dynamic was at work, as Olmsted makes clear, in the slave societies of the South.
Olmsted has a taste for incident, an active mind, and is continually querulous over the lack of comfort and poor treatment he endures as a traveler in the south. There are many enjoyable and poignant scenes, although I never felt that he managed true communication with the Southerners he met. He remained an outsider, and his analysis is thereby somewhat constrained.
That said, there is a great deal to learn from this book.
Olmsted has a taste for incident, an active mind, and is continually querulous over the lack of comfort and poor treatment he endures as a traveler in the south. There are many enjoyable and poignant scenes, although I never felt that he managed true communication with the Southerners he met. He remained an outsider, and his analysis is thereby somewhat constrained.
That said, there is a great deal to learn from this book.
August 9, 2021
Every single American, but especially those of us from the South should read the 1st Chapter. It is amazing and depressing how much Olmsted's 1861 resembles today. It is also interesting to read how slavery and the economy of the south results in what we have as civic infrastructure today. Enlightening.
March 24, 2014
As noted by Edmund Wilson in "Patriotic Gore," Olmsted is a very good writer whose accounts of his travels(published originally by the New York Times)provide graphic imagery and potent insight into the antebellum South. (It's not the world imagined in "Gone With the Wind," by any stretch.)
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