Frederick Law Olmsted

“ In ten years’ time, how many mills, and bridges, and school-houses, and miles of railroad, will the Germans have built? And how much cloth and fish will they want from Massachusetts, iron from Pennsylvania, and tin from Banca, hemp from Russia, tea from China, and coffee from Brazil, fruit from Spain, wine from Ohio, and oil and gold from the Pacific, silk from France, sugar from Louisiana, cotton from Texas, and rags from Italy, lead from Illinois, notions from Connecticut, and machines from New Jersey, and intelligence from everywhere? ”

“ Throughout the city and its surroundings the one preëminent quality of an agreeable sort is the bold picturesqueness of the landscape—the deep ravines, the lofty hills, the precipitous declivities, the plunging prospects from hilltops into the river valleys—and a similar quality of forcefulness, activity, and bold, irregular adaptation of means to ends, is to be felt in all the more dominant and impressive works of man in the city—the steel works, the bridges and viaducts, the jagged sky-line of office buildings. ”

“ From the Homochitto to the suburbs of Natchez, a good half-day’s ride, I found the country beautiful; fewer hills than before, the soil very rich, and the land almost all inclosed in plantations, the roadside boundaries of which are old rose-hedges. The road is well constructed, and often, in passing through the hills, with high banks on each side, coped with thick and dark, but free and sportive hedges, out of which grow bending trees, brooding angle-like over the traveller, the sentiment of the most charming Herefordshire lanes is reproduced. ”

“ The great beauty and peculiarity of the English landscape is to be found in the frequent long, graceful lines of deep green hedges and hedge-row timber, crossing hill, valley, and plain, in every direction; and in the occasional large trees, dotting the broad fields, either singly or in small groups, left to their natural open growth, (for ship-timber, and, while they stand, for cattle shades,) therefore branching low and spreading wide, and more beautiful, much more beautiful, than we often allow our trees to make themselves. ”

“ If the walling up of the legitimate entrance has caused the impression, in a stranger, that he is being led to a prison or fortress, instead of the place for transacting the public business of a Free State by its chosen paid agents, it is not removed when on approaching this side door, he sees before it an armed sentinel—a meek-looking man in a livery of many colours, embarrassed with a bright-bayoneted firelock, which he hugs gently, as though the cold iron, this frosty day, chilled his arm. ”

“ I have no doubt that the number of men on each plantation, in any case, would, on an average, much nearer approach that which would be most economical, in a free-labour cotton-growing country than in a country on which the whole dependence of each proprietor was on slaves. Is not this conclusion irresistible when we consider that the planter, if he needs an additional slave hand to those he possesses, even if temporarily, for harvesting his crop, must, in most cases, employ at least a thousand dollars of capital to obtain it? ”

“ Considering the fact that Pittsburgh is a world capital in the steel bridge industry, that its busiest quarters are sundered by three of the world's big rivers, and that it is traversed in every direction by ravines which demand the construction of mighty viaducts, it is a striking and rather shameful thing that it does not possess a single bridge over its rivers that is notable among the bridges of the world either for its beauty, for its perfect engineering adaptation to its purpose, for its size, strength or amplitude. ”

“ Then I know that I shall have helped to educate in a good American school a capital body of young men for my profession,—all men of liberal education and cultivated minds. I know that in the minds of a large body of men of influence I have raised my calling from the rank of a trade, even of a handicraft, to that of a liberal profession, an art, an art of design. ”

“ No white people, however, were to be seen, but two negroes sat in the mouth of a wigwam, husking maize, and a couple of hungry hounds came bounding over the zig-zag, gateless fence, as if they had agreed with each other that they would wait no longer for the return of their master, but would straightway pull down the first traveller that passed, and have something to eat before they were quite famished. ”

“ And when we contemplate our field of labour, and the work we have done in it, we cannot but observe the sad contrast between capacity and achievement. With a wide-spread domain, with a kindly soil, with a climate whose sun radiates fertility, and whose very dews distil abundance, we find our inheritance so wasted that the eye aches to behold the prospect. ”

“ Trumpet creepers, grape-vines, green-briers, and in very rich soil, cane, grow up through the mat of roses, and add to its strength. It is not as pretty as a trimmer hedge, yet very agreeable, and the road being sometimes narrow, deep, and lane like, delightful memories of England were often brought to mind. ”

“ Those who seriously propose to stop all agitation on the subject of slavery, by causing the Abolitionists to refrain from proceedings which cause apprehension at the South, by silencing all who entertain sentiments the utterance of which is deemed a source of “danger to Southern institutions,” by refraining themselves from all proceedings which will be looked upon with alarm by their fellow-citizens of the Slave States, can know very little of what would be required before the South were satisfied. ”

“ This abominable practice of trading with slaves is not only taking our produce from us, but injuring our slave property. It is true the owner of slaves may lock, watch, and whip, as much as he pleases—the negroes will steal and trade as long as white persons hold out to them temptations to steal and bring to them. Three-fourths of the persons who are guilty, you can get no fine from; and, if they have some property, all they have to do is to confess a judgment to a friend, go to jail, and swear out. ”

“ In the few small fields of rank hay grasses and spindle-trunked trees, to which the name is sometimes applied, the custom of the promenade has never been established. Yet there is scarcely a town or thriving village in which there is not found some sort of inconvenient and questionable social exchange of this nature. Sometimes it is a graveyard, sometimes a beach or wharf, sometimes a certain part of a certain street; sometimes interest in a literary or a charitable, a military, or even a mercantile enterprise, is the ostensible object which brings people together. ”

“ Barton, of New Orleans:—
“The institution of slavery operates by contrast and comparison; it elevates the tone of the superior, adds to its refinement, allows more time to cultivate the mind, exalts the standard in morals, manners, and intellectual endowments; operates as a safety-valve for the evil disposed, leaving the upper race purer, while it really preserves from degradation, in the scale of civilization, the inferior, which we see is their uniform destiny when left to themselves. ”

“ Coming directly from my farm in New York to Eastern Virginia, I was satisfied, after a few weeks’ observation, that the most of the people lived very poorly; that the proportion of men improving their condition was much less than in any Northern community; and that the natural resources of the land were strangely unused, or were used with poor economy. It was “the hiring season,” and I had daily opportunities of talking with farmers, manufacturers, miners, and labourers, with whom the value of labour and of wages was then the handiest subject of conversation. ”

“ As there are no dark places at noon day, so education and culture—the true sunshine of the soul—will banish the plague spots of democracy; and the dread of the ignorant exclusive, who has no faith in the refinement of a republic, will stand abashed in the next century, before a whole people whose system of voluntary education embraces (combined with perfect individual freedom) , not only common schools of rudimentary knowledge, but common enjoyments for all classes in the higher realms of art, letters, science, social recreations, and enjoyments. ”

“ A man of his disposition cannot exist in the country without ladies, and ladies cannot exist in the country without flowers; and might I not hope for the refinement which decks even the table with them? and that the breakfast would be a meal as well as a feed—an institution of mental and moral sustenance as well as of palatable nourishment to the body? My horse I need hardly look after, if he be a sound brute;—good stables, litter, oats, hay, and water, grooming, and discretion in their use, will never be wanting in such a man’s house in the country. ”