FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted (review)

book reviews367 Morris has focused on the efforts within the five states of New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin to employ various common law guarantees, as well as positive law, to protect free Negroes against enslavement. Through the several stages of the escalating sectional conflict, we find the familiar story of the moderates, trapped between their earnest wish to abide by federal law and Supreme Court judgments and a growing antislavery constituency whose extreme spokesmen were demanding that the personal liberty laws actually be used to liberate slaves. As with other aspects of the sectional conflict, in the end there was no room for maneuver. The passage and attempted enforcement of the fugitive slave law of 1850 succeeded only in creating several celebrated cases and enlarging the antislavery constituency ; it delivered up virtually no runaways to slaveholders. Following Lincoln's election, a movement at compromise briefly surfaced during which conservative Northerners sought, unsuccessfully, the repeal of the personal liberty laws as a propitiatory offering to Southerners. At that point, however, those who controlled the South's destiny had no interest in compromise. Morris' research has been prodigious and the product here represents as comprehensive a treatment of such a subject as one is apt to find. But we might as well face it: debates, laws, judicial rulings, and writs do not comprise the subject matter an average reader can take in large doses, and obviously many historians, either for lack of interest, or the inability to work in legal history, have shied away from it as well. Otherwise , why would we have had to wait this long for so essential a chapter of the pre-Civil War story. Kenneth B. Shover The University of Texas at El Paso FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted. By Laura Wood Roper. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1973. Pp. xx, 555. $15.00.) Laura Wood Roper's biography of Frederick Law Olmsted has been more than a quarter century in the making. Mrs. Roper plumbed both the extensive Olmsted manuscript collections and the knowledge of Olmsted heirs. The result is the definitive biography of Olmsted's architectural career, a book that is not likely to be soon superseded. Mrs. Roper makes it clear that she sees Olmsted, Fred, as she calls him in the book, as a heroic figure who has been denied his due place in the pantheon of American heroes. It is in order to restore him to his proper place as the herald and architect of a humane social environment that she chronicles his success—from Central and Prospect Parks in New York City to Yosemite in California. Mrs. Roper devotes only two of her thirty-five chapters to the subject of Olmsted's travels in the South. Here her efforts are less than comprehensive and this is unfortunate for historians because from 368CIVIL WAR history Cairnes and Marx to Franklin and Genovese historians have relied heavily on Olmsted as the compiler of the most complete and accurate travel account of the South. It is no wonder then, that in attempting to rewrite the history of slavery, Fogel and Engerman, while praising Olmsted, have taken pains to question his accuracy and objectivity. They suggest that Olmsted's highly negative assessment of the slave economy was a function of two distorting factors: his racism and the timing of his visits. But insofar as Olmsted was a racist, Mrs. Roper's biography makes it clear it was a racism of the mildest sort and hardly commensurate with the gravity of errors attributed to him. Olmsted clearly believed that the degraded condition of the Negro was a function of enslavement and he expected that with freedom Negroes would be capable of successfully taking up the role of citizen. Throughout her book, Mrs. Roper shows that the essence of Olmsted's thinking was environmental. Indeed, whether he was concerned with the problems of the slaves, the urban poor, or the caste of sailors, Olmsted saw the possibilities of creative solutions. His entire career as a landscape architect was predicated on the notion that a more humane urban environment would have an important effect on the people exposed to it. Fogel and Engerman's second...