Read Online Genius of Place by Justin Martin - Free Book Online Page B

habit of supposing.”
    At one point, Olmsted happened to run into Elizabeth Baldwin in Hartford, on the street right outside his father’s store. She had traveled from New Haven to visit some friends. Olmsted went on a walk with her, which left him downright giddy. “Governor’s daughter. Excellent princess,” he wrote to Brace. “She’s a dove. Whew! I shall fill up my letter with her.”
    Later in her visit, they took a long carriage ride together, under a heavy blanket, and engaged in a “thick talk,” as he put it. The experience emboldened Olmsted. He wrote a letter to John that begins by requesting that his brother mention to Miss B. that another such “private opportunity” would be possible, when next he visited New Haven. But Olmsted recognized that he needed to be careful. In the very next sentence,
thinking as he wrote, he scrawled his concern that Baldwin might take this the wrong way. He then retracted his request in the same letter. Under no circumstances was John to tell Miss B. about a private opportunity. Olmsted was all over the place. He just couldn’t help it. He was “right smack & square on dead in love with her,” he confessed to his brother, “beached & broken backed.”
    As for why Olmsted included these various sentiments in letters, well, that has everything to do with the times. Olmsted, his brother, and the other friends had ample opportunity to see one another. It certainly was possible to discuss these matters in person, and they did. But letters provided a formal means of composing one’s thoughts and feelings, as well as a way to demonstrate verbal dexterity and wit. Consequently, letters were constantly exchanged among Olmsted and the other members of the “uncommon set.”
    Â 
    Meanwhile, Connecticut was swept up in one of the frequent paroxysms of faith that rolled across the nation in the first half of the nineteenth century. By this time, America was at the tail end of the so-called Second Great Awakening. The first awakening began in the 1730s and launched into prominence such firebrand preachers as Jonathan Edwards, famed for his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon. These awakenings were rooted in the notion that America provided an opportunity to cleanse Christianity, thanks to its unique circumstances. In Europe, the religion was weighted down by centuries of tradition and corruption. But America—it was a new nation. Why, even the landscape itself was pristine, Edenic. In New England, the push for a newer, purer faith also helped spur such movements as abolitionism, temperance, and calls for rights for the mentally ill.
    Responses to the Second Great Awakening varied from region to region across the United States. In the South, for example, a tradition grew up of camp meetings, woolly, free-form events full of proselytizing and mass baptisms. New Englanders, by contrast, favored a more dour approach. Among Connecticut Congregationalists (an offshoot of the original Puritans), the practice was to listen silently to sermons, all the while scouring one’s soul for a sign of being “under conviction.” Had a person
legitimately and authentically accepted Christ?—that was the question. These could be agonizing events for participants.
    As mentioned earlier, Charlotte Olmsted, Fred’s mother, had participated in a revival in New Haven in 1826, just three weeks before her death from an overdose of laudanum. That same revival was attended by Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose son later characterized the event as an instance where “self-examination was carried to an extreme that was calculated to drive a nervous and sensitive mind well-nigh distracted.” The bar for genuine faith was set punishingly high, he added, because “there might be something wrong in the case of a lamb that had come into the fold without being first chased all over the lot by the