The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American SlaveStates by Frederick Law Olmsted; Arthur M. SchlesingerReview by: Kenneth M. StamppThe American Historical Review, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Oct., 1953), pp. 141-142Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1844695 .

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Olmsted: The Cotton Kingdom I41

nearly right from the viewpoint of economic growth were neither the Bank advocates nor the hard money theorists but the soft money men of the West. American economic progress in this period would probably not have been nearly so rapid had it not been for the rapid expansion of the means of payment, brought about largely by the champions of uncontrolled banking. Thus the increase in the monetary supply from 69 million dollars in I820 to 93 million in I830 and 205 million in I836 came about largely as a result of banking practices which neither W. M. Gouge nor Professor Smith would have approved. Yet in this period, while prices rose by about seventeen per cent, national income rose by about two thirds. These figures strongly suggest that, without the expansion in monetary supply, there would have been a much lower rate of economic growth.

Harvard University ARTHUR SCHLESINGER, JR.

THE COTTON KINGDOM: A TRAVELLER'S OBSERVATIONS ON COTTON AND SLAVERY IN THE AMERICAN SLAVE STATES. Based upon Three Former Volumes of Journeys and Investigations by the Same Author. By Frederick Law Olmsted. Edited, with an Introduction by Arthur M. Schlesinger. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf. I953. Pp. lxiii, 626, xvi. $6.75.)

THE profusion of books about the antebellum South written by contemporary visitors reflected the curiosity of literate Northerners and Europeans about the social peculiarities of that region. These books, when written by competent observers who remained in the South long enough to avoid superficiality, collectively con- stitute a major primary source for the historian. Among the countless travelers who left published or unpublished records of their impressions, Frederick Law Olmsted was in a class by himself. Professor Schlesinger does not exaggerate the value of Olmsted's Cotton Kingdom, which is an abridgment of three earlier books, when he calls it "the nearest thing posterity has to an exact transcription of a civilization . . . an indispensable work in the process of recapturing the American past." For Olmsted wrote a classic comparable to those written by Arthur Young, Tocqueville, and Bryce.

When Olmsted visited the South in the I850's, he did not go as a mere casual observer. He was sent there with a commission from Henry J. Raymond of the New York Times to find out all he could and to give an honest report of his observations. He went equipped with a knowledge of agriculture and with ex- perience as a traveler, writer, and reporter. Olmsted devoted more than a year to his journeys through the slave states. He visited cities as well as rural areas, small farms as well as large plantations. His interest was not limited to slavery, for he also wrote about manners, morals, religion, dress, diet, housing, transportation- in short, nearly everything.

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I42 Reviews of Books

Olmsted composed his articles and books not from a fallible memory but from copious notes taken during his trips. He did a superb job of reporting. But this does not mean that he entered the South with an unbiased mind. Though far from an abolitionist, Olmsted was a mild critic of slavery as a social system and a doctrinaire critic of slavery as a labor system. These attitudes, and the mounting sectional tensions of the i850's, clearly affected the nature of his generalizations and conclusions. For example, he insisted that slave labor was almost uniformly wasteful, incompetent, and more expensive than free labor in spite of much contrary evidence found in his own writings. But this in itself is significant. It means that though his own convictions influenced his interpretations, they did not cause him to suppress evidence that failed to support his personal views. Olmsted reported what he saw and heard as accurately as it was humanly pos- sible to do.

Professor Schlesinger has discussed fully the problem of bias in an admirable introduction to this handsome new edition of the Cotton Kingdom, the first published since i862. The introduction also includes a brief biographical sketch, an account of Olmsted's journeys and how his books were written, and a record of their reception by contemporaries and by subsequent historians. In addition, Schlesinger has compiled a good analytical index.

Editor and publisher deserve the appreciation of the present generation of students and scholars for making it possible for them to have Olmsted on their shelves. University of California, Berkeley KENNETH M. STAMPP

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN. Edited by Roy P. Basler. Assistant Editors, Marion Dolores Pratt and Lloyd A. Dunlap. In nine

volumes. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press for the Abraham Lincoln Association, Springfidld, Ill. I953. PP. 519; 553; 555; 563; 554; 562; 551; 595. Index vol. to be published later. $II5.)

"IN times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men's reasoning," wrote John Dos Passos in The Ground We Stand On, "'a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present." It is the search for that continuity which has provided the major theme for American historical writing during the past two troubled decades. Avoiding both cynicism and adulation the new history combines a disciplined use of the soundest scholarly techniques with a fine sympathy for the American past. A chief characteristic of the new scholarship is its monumental scale. Such works as Douglas Southall Freeman's R. E. Lee, Allan Nevins' Ordeal of the Union, and Carl Van Doren's Benjamin Franklin represent what Alfred Kazin has characterized as an "attempt not to 'escape' into the past but to pack the whole of the past into the present."

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