George L. Stearns to Mary Hall Stearns, July 26, 1863

I am still perplexed as to the mode in which I can best carry out the work intrusted to me. It is so difficult to attach my mode of rapid working to the slow routine of the Department that I sometimes almost despair of the task and want to abandon it. Indeed, yesterday I went to Olmstead and asked his advice. He was so clearly of opinion that I must continue to work in the hope of better times, that I abandoned the idea, and came here to see Colonel Birney. Birney is a son of the old abolitionist, an able man and sound to the core. He is raising a regiment here with good success, and is just the man for the work. My next work will be here, and when I get through it I trust my future sailing will be plain and rapid.

I have had a short interview with Mr. Chase, who was very gracious; too short for me to form an opinion of him. He is much interested in my work, for it aids his plans, and will see me again.

Hugh McCulloch, to whom I wrote my letters on currency, is very much pleased with them. He made an objection which I am at his request to answer. It will probably lead to a correspondence on that subject.

SOURCE: Preston Stearns, The Life and Public Services of George Luther Stearns, p. 306-7

Diary of William Howard Russell: July 7, 1861

Mr. Bigelow invited me to breakfast, to meet Mr. Senator King, Mr. Olmsted, Mr. Thurlow Weed, a Senator from Missouri, a West Point professor, and others. It was indicative of the serious difficulties which embarrass the action of the Government to hear Mr. Wilson, the Chairman of the Military Committee of the Senate, inveigh against the officers of the regular army, and attack West Point itself. Whilst the New York papers were lauding General Scott and his plans to the skies, the Washington politicians were speaking of him as obstructive, obstinate, and prejudiced — unfit for the times and the occasion.

General Scott refused to accept cavalry and artillery at the beginning of the levy, and said that they were not required; now he was calling for both arms most urgently. The officers of the regular army had followed suit. Although they were urgently pressed by the politicians to occupy Harper's Ferry and Manassas, they refused to do either, and the result is that the enemy have obtained invaluable supplies from the first place, and are now assembled in force in a most formidable position at the second. Everything as yet accomplished has been done by political generals — not by the officers of the regular army. Butler and Banks saved Baltimore in spite of General Scott. There was an attempt made to cry up Lyon in Missouri; but in fact it was Frank Blair, the brother of the Postmaster-General, who had been the soul and body of all the actions in that State. The first step taken by McClellan in Western Virginia was atrocious — he talked of slaves in a public document as property. Butler, at Monroe, had dealt with them in a very different spirit, and had used them for State purposes under the name of contraband. One man alone displayed powers of administrative ability, and that was Quartermaster Meigs; and unquestionably from all I heard, the praise was well bestowed. It is plain enough that the political leaders fear the consequences of delay, and that they are urging the military authorities to action, which the latter have too much professional knowledge to take with their present means. These Northern men know nothing of the South, and with them it is omne ignotum pro minimo. The West Point professor listened to them with a quiet smile, and exchanged glances with me now and then, as much as to say, "Did you ever hear such fools in your life?”

But the conviction of ultimate success is not less strong here than it is in the South. The difference between these gentlemen and the Southerners is, that in the South the leaders of the people, soldiers and civilians, are all actually under arms, and are ready to make good their words by exposing their bodies in battle.

I walked home with Mr. N. P. Willis, who is at Washington for the purpose of writing sketches to the little family journal of which he is editor, and giving war “anecdotes;” and with Mr. Olmsted, who is acting as a member of the New York Sanitary Commission, here authorized by the Government to take measures against the reign of dirt and disease in the Federal camp. The Republicans are very much afraid that there is, even at the present moment, a conspiracy against the Union in Washington — nay, in Congress itself; and regard Mr. Breckinridge, Mr. Bayard, Mr. Vallandigham, and others as most dangerous enemies, who should not be permitted to remain in the capital. I attended the Episcopal church and heard a very excellent discourse, free from any political allusion. The service differs little from our own, except that certain euphemisms are introduced in the Litany and elsewhere, and the prayers for Queen and Parliament are offered up nomine mutato for President and Congress.

SOURCE: William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, Vol. 1, p. 390-2

Charles Eliot Norton to Frederick Law Olmstead, January 24, 1864

Cambridge, Mass., 24 January, 1864.

My Dear Olmsted, — . . . Mr. Lincoln continues to gain the confidence of the people, and it looks now as if there would be little opposition to his reelection. You will find an able article by Lowell on the President's Policy in the “North American” for January, a copy of which I have sent to you. Lowell and I have undertaken the editing of this old Review.  . . . I trust that you will help us by writing for us, — and in asking you to do so I do not feel that I am asking as for a contribution for the amusement of the readers of a magazine, —but rather for a patriotic work. We must use the advantages which the times give us. There is an opportunity now to make the “North American” one of the means of developing the nation, of stimulating its better sense, of setting before it and holding up to it its own ideal, — at least of securing expression for its clearest thought and most accurate scholarship. I hope you will feel that it is an opportunity not to be thrown away. Whatever you may like to write we shall be glad to print. If you have anything to tell or say concerning life in California or the relations of the Pacific to the Atlantic States, or of the state of society in Bear Valley, or of the habits and characters of the miners, — pray put it into the form of an article, and send it to me. I wish you would send something of this kind to me before the summer. . . .

SOURCE: Sara Norton and  M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, Volume 1, p. 267-8

Charles Eliot Norton to George William Curtis, Monday Evening, September 21, 1863

Shady Hill

Monday evening, 21 September, 1863.

. . . I was glad to see Olmsted,¹ but I wish I had known him before he was just going to leave this quarter of the world. It is hard that he should have to give up the civilization that he likes for the barbarism that he does not like. All the lines of his face imply refinement and sensibility to such a degree that it is not till one has looked through them to what is underneath, that the force of his will and the reserved power of his character become evident. It is a pity that we cannot keep him here. Our society needs organizers almost as much as the Mariposa settlers, miners and squatters need one. However, thanks to the war, the Atlantic and the Pacific States have been bound far closer together than of old, and are every day drawn nearer and nearer. — A ring at the door bell is the occasion of that [ink spot], — and I hear William James's pleasant and manly voice in the other room from which the sound of my Mother's voice has been coming to me as she read aloud the Consular Experiences of the most original of consuls. To-night I am half annoyed, half amused at Hawthorne. He is nearly as bad as Carlyle. His dedication to F. Pierce, — the correspondent of Jefferson Davis, the flatterer of traitors, and the emissary of treason, — reads like the bitterest of satires; and in that I have my satisfaction. The public will laugh. “Praise undeserved” (say the copybooks) “is satire in disguise,” — and what a blow his friend has dealt to the weakest of ex-Presidents. . . .

_______________

¹ Frederick Law Olmsted, whose books on the South had already interested Norton deeply. Their immediate sympathy led to enduring bonds of friendship and cooperation in work for public good.

SOURCE: Sara Norton and  M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, Volume 1, p. 264-5

Diary of William Howard Russell: April 6, 1861

To-day I paid a second visit to General Scott, who received me very kindly, and made many inquiries respecting the events in the Crimea and the Indian mutiny and rebellion. He professed to have no apprehension for the safety of the capital; but in reality there are only some 700 or 800 regulars to protect it and the Navy Yard, and two field-batteries, commanded by an officer of very doubtful attachment to the Union. The head of the Navy Yard is openly accused of treasonable sympathies.

Mr. Seward has definitively refused to hold any intercourse whatever with the Southern Commissioners, and they will retire almost immediately from the capital. As matters look very threatening, I must go South and see with my own eyes how affairs stand there, before the two sections come to open rupture. Mr. Seward, the other day, in talking of the South, described them as being in every respect behind the age, with fashions, habits, level of thought, and modes of life, belonging to the worst part of the last century. But still he never has been there himself! The Southern men come up to the Northern cities and springs, but the Northerner rarely travels southwards. Indeed, I am informed, that if he were a well-known Abolitionist, it would not be safe for him to appear in a Southern city. I quite agree with my thoughtful and earnest friend, Olmsted, that the United States can never be considered as a free country till a man can speak as freely in Charleston as he can in New York or Boston.

I dined with Mr. Riggss, the banker, who had an agreeable party to meet me. Mr. Corcoran, his former partner, who was present, erected at his own cost, and presented to the city, a fine building, to be used as an art-gallery and museum; but as yet the arts which are to be found in Washington are political and feminine only. Mr. Corcoran has a private gallery of pictures, and a collection, in which is the much-praised Greek Slave of Hiram Powers. The gentry of Columbia are thoroughly Virginian in sentiment, and look rather south than north of the Potomac for political results. The President, I hear this evening, is alarmed lest Virginia should become hostile, and his policy, if he has any, is temporizing and timid. It is perfectly wonderful to hear people using the word “Government” at all, as applied to the President and his cabinet — a body which has no power “according to the constitution” to save the country governed or itself from destruction. In fact, from the circumstances under which the constitution was framed, it was natural that the principal point kept in view should be the exhibition of a strong front to foreign powers, combined with the least possible amount of constriction on the internal relations of the different States.

In the hotel the roar of office-seekers is unabated. Train after train adds to their numbers. They cumber the passages. The hall is crowded to such a degree that suffocation might describe the degree to which the pressure reaches, were it not that tobacco-smoke invigorates and sustains the constitution. As to the condition of the floor it is beyond description.

SOURCE: William Howard Russell, My Diary North and South, p. 66-7

John M. Forbes to Frederick Law Olmstead, December 23, 1861

Boston, December 23, 1861.

My Dear Sir, — I have not seen your bill. Would not this be a good time to provide in it for a statistical report upon the sanitary condition of the army — frequent enough to be of use for this war, as well as for future times? With a proper system, and one or two clerks at headquarters, the reports of sanitary measures of prevention, of medical and surgical cases, of deaths, etc., might be tabulated on a certain day in each month, and while laying the foundation for future statistics, would be a great check upon the regimental surgeons, and help reform many immediate abuses. It would also give the surgeons a chance to make suggestions, independently of their colonels. For instance, I hear of a surgeon saying, “I wanted the colonel to order so and so done as necessary or valuable for health,” but the colonel does not think it “worth while to harass the men,” etc. A well-organized medical board ought to have influence enough to procure general orders for any measures of clear sanitary reform, if they only have the disposition, and can insist upon certain detailed reports for each regiment at fixed times.

Truly yours,

J. M. Forbes.

SOURCE: Sarah Forbes Hughes, Letters and Recollections of John Murray Forbes, Volume 1, p. 273-4

John M. Forbes to Frederick Law Olmsted, December 21, 1861

Boston, December 21,1861.

I only received yours of the 13th yesterday, but to make up for the delay, it came indorsed by the Dr. with good news of your medical bill, and with a good story. I gave parts of it to our committee to-day, much to their edification, and it will help me in getting the right names to a petition which I have drawn up to Congress, and of which I will send you a copy on Monday. My idea is to attack, from this distance, the system of seniority rather than to make personal attacks upon individuals, and in this way we can get all the good names in Massachusetts. The real trouble is that so many of the bureaux of the government have degenerated into mere receptacles for files of red tape, that the moment you attack one, it becomes personal to all fossildom, and arrays it against changes.

Can I write personally to anybody to help the bill? I know of course our Massachusetts delegation, and can if necessary make some influence with Vermont, Maine, Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, possibly Missouri; but I don't want to waste my powder by stirring a hair beyond what is necessary, having my hands overfull. . . .

All our women are eager; it is only organization and direction that is wanted; and this is one of the best offices of the Sanitary Commission. . . .

SOURCE: Sarah Forbes Hughes, Letters and Recollections of John Murray Forbes, Volume 1, p. 269

Dr. Henry W. Bellows to John M. Forbes, December 19, 1861

New York, December 19, 1861.

My Dear Mr. Forbes, — Mr. Olmsted sends on his letter for approval, and it finds me flat on my back, which accounts for this delay. Since Dr. Van Buren sent on the memorial for signatures, things have taken on a much more active state of quarrel between the Sanitary Commission and the Medical Bureau. General McClellan sent for me and asked me to draw a bill for the reorganization of the Medical Bureau, which I did. He carefully considered and wholly approved the bill, and personally went with me to the President to ask his support; to the Secretary of War (not at home), to the Assistant Secretary of War (much the wiser man), who heartily approved. By their advice, the bill was brought forward in the Senate by Senator Wilson a week ago. Several of the leading senators warmly approve it. The bill strikes at all the senility and incompetency in the bureau and would put about eight first-class men, selected by the President out of the whole Medical Staff, into the control and management of affairs. It would lay on the shelf, on full pay, all the venerable do-nothings and senile obstructives that now vex the health and embarass the safety of our troops.  . . . The Medical Staff (that is, all but the Medical Bureau and the twenty men in right line of succession) must feel the bill to be a great boon to them, as it opens eight prizes for merit and competency, in their stupid seniority system, where folly at seventy was put in absolute control of no-matter-what-amount-of skill, knowledge, reputation, and fitness at forty! I told the President, who enjoys a joke, that the bureau system at Washington, in which one venerable noncompos succeeded another through successive ages, reminded me of the man who, on receiving a barrel of apples, eat every day only those on the point of spoiling, and so at the end of his experiment found that he had devoured a whole barrel of rotten apples. If there were any radical difficulties about obtaining signatures to our letter, they will all disappear when our report to the Secretary of War comes out, which will be in your hands in about a week.

We are very much delighted with your financial report, which will be louder still when we feel the silver bullets or golden balls pouring into our nearly exhausted exchequer.

Commend me to our active and disinterested friends, Mr. Ward, Mr. Norton, and the all-alive gentlemen of your monetary circle.

Yours gratefully and truly,

Henry W. Bellows.

[Enclosure: Frederick Law Olmsted to John M. Forbes, December 16, 1861]

SOURCE: Sarah Forbes Hughes, Letters and Recollections of John Murray Forbes, Volume 1, p. 267-8

Frederick Law Olmsted to John M. Forbes, December 16, 1861

U. S. Sanitary Commission,

Washington, D. C., December 16, 1861.

My Dear Sir, — I have just received your favor of the 12th, and am exceedingly glad there is so good a prospect of financial aid to the commission from Massachusetts. Your contributions of goods have astonished me and overrun all my calculations. You have done in a month nearly four times as much as the New York association — of which we had been quite proud — in six months! If the present rate of supply continues, I shall soon be in concern to know where to put it.

I shall refer that portion of your letter which relates to the surgeon-general to Dr. Bellows. The simplest statement of the case would be perhaps that with an army of 600,000 fresh men, with impromptu officers, it is criminal weakness to intrust such important responsibilities as those resting on the surgeon-general to a self-satisfied, supercilious, bigoted blockhead, merely because he is the oldest of the old mess-room doctors of the old frontier-guard of the country. He knows nothing and does nothing, and is capable of knowing nothing and doing nothing but quibble about matters of form and precedent, and sign his name to papers which require that ceremony to be performed before they can be admitted to eternal rest in the pigeonholes of the bureau. I write this personally rather than as the secretary, and from general report rather than personal knowledge, but if it were not true is it not certain that as secretary of the Sanitary Commission, after six months' dealings with these poor, green volunteer sawbones, I should have seen some evidence of life in and from their chief?

You may contradict the report to which you refer, that the contributions made to the Sanitary Commission for the benefit of the soldiers' sick have been diverted to the aid of the exiles of the rebellion. To this date no funds of the commission have been disbursed in St. Louis. Probably the local commission there has done something which has given rise to the report.

I have directed Dr. Ware, in visiting Fort Monroe, to ascertain the condition of the refugees there, and report, but to give them no aid except under advice or in an emergency.

Very respectfully yours,

Fred. Law Olmsted.

SOURCE: Sarah Forbes Hughes, Letters and Recollections of John Murray Forbes, Volume 1, p. 265-6