A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States, with Remarks on Their Economy.

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This copy bears the dual New York and London imprints, but has “Miller & Company” stamped at the foot of the spine. (Miller & Holman were the printers of the first edition.)  The top of the title-page has an early pencil autograph of “L.F. Olmsted” —this individual’s connection to Frederick Law Olmsted, if any, is unknown to us.

Widely-known as a prominent landscape architect, and the designer of New York’s Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted also wrote three books on his impressions of the south. Commissioned by the editor of the New York Times, Journey in the Seaboard Slave States is the first of these three travels. Olmsted’s trip began in Washington D.C. and proceeded through Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

Clark III-482: “Olmsted was a sharp observer, and the book contains a great variety of detail on agriculture, the inefficiency of slave labor ... Dismal Swamp and other physical features, Creoles and wildlife ... Olmsted believed that slaves were not as well fed as American free laborers, and he devoted considerable space to one of his favorite theories, namely, that slavery was a destroyer of self-respect and initiative .... A social thinker as well as a journalist, he worked out and described an interesting plan whereby slaves, through a system of debits and credits, might be given an opportunity to buy their freedom from their masters.”

Price: $350.00