practices, and other reasons (some to be explored later), often were not
neat, symmetrical, and aesthetically pleasing, especially to travelers from
outside the region. Most important of these sojourners, toward the end of
the antebellum period, was the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted,
who wrote hundreds of New York newspaper sketches about the rural South
during the mid-s that were shortly collected into widely read books.
A trained agronomist and ex-farmer himself, Olmsted opposed slavery not
so much on moral grounds but because it was inefficient and wasteful in
ways we might call anticonservationist. This he demonstrated repeatedly
in his travel writings, persuading many readers then and since that only
smart proprietors and free laborers do good work and save the land. Just
as important, Olmsted-the-aesthete found most of the South rather ugly.
Ugly here includes most architecture, city streets, and poorly maintained
farms; ugly also implies poor, unproductive, and perhaps exhausted. In this
reaction Olmsted joined legions of European visitors, who came and went
away despairing. Disaffected German Romantics had decried Americans’
Bodenlosigkeit, which Simon Schama translates as ‘‘a willed rootlessness,
embodied in the flimsy frame construction of [their] houses.’’^12 But Olm-
sted, I think, was mostly wrong, too.
Ugly and exhausted were doubtlessly actual, here and there, now and
again. But the terms, and persistent discourse centered on them, divert
us from what Ruffin and his reformer contemporaries wereactuallyen-
gaged in. This, simply and profoundly, was serious consideration of the
possibility of stable civic culture, community, and civilization, in a fron-
tier country. (No wonder they resonated with Frederick Jackson Turner and
Avery Craven.) John Taylor, then Ruffin, spoke for a part of the South Atlan-
tic. James Henry Hammond and especially William Gilmore Simms, the
worthy novelist, poet, essayist, historian, and Low Country South Carolina
planter, represented another. Yankees had their great worriers, improv-
ers, and spokesmen, too—notably Jesse Buel of Albany and John Lorain of
Philadelphia. All were easterners who perceived an eastern crisis, namely,
the region’s ruin and abandonment by youthful and talented populations.
Buel, Lorain, and other northeasterners essentially addressed those mi-
grating to the northwestern states and territories; Ruffin, Simms, and other
southern improvers tried to speak with actual and potential migrants to
Alabama, Mississippi, and the trans-Mississippi Southwest. If the discourse
were also a dialogue, would-be and actual westerners were relatively pas-
sive and indifferent. It was the East that was ardently voluble, its tone and
substance tensely shifting between imminent triumphalism and doom.