October, 2025
Washington — What with the controversy over portraying the history of slavery and the Civil War correctly in our museums, parks, history texts, and scholarly literature, I offer two revisions myself. They are linked to confusion over Frederick Law Olmsted's reports of his travels through the slave states in the early 1850s.
The University of North Carolina, in its work by DocSouth, UNC Libraries, states as fact that Richard Strother Taylor — son of President Zachary Taylor, Louisiana slaveowner, and Confederate army general — studied and traveled in Scotland and France in the early 1840s. No primary source has ever surfaced to verify this. UNC appears to rely on Fleming's 1909 biographical sketch of Taylor for which there are no citations. Taylor never mentions it in his own writings.*
More likely, Taylor has been conflated with his cousin David Hunter Strother, the popular Harper's writer and later Union army general, whose presence in Britain and France from 1840-43 is well-documented. When Olmsted visited and described Taylor's sugar plantation in Louisiana in 1853, he disguised its owner and location (as he did for all his research, for security reasons) by referring to Taylor as "Strather," a variation on his middle name. Hence confusion over the two cousins.
However, David Hunter Strother, known to Harper's readers as Porte Crayon, is indeed connected to his cousin Taylor's plantation, named Fashion. West Virginia University's Strother Collection holds an illustration from 1857 of slave housing that uncannily matches Olmsted's written description. Strother was on assignment from Harper's that year and writes from the area in which Fashion was actually located, despite Olmsted's disguise. Unfortunately, WVU dates the illustration from 1839, despite 1857 being written on the illustration itself, by Strother. See below.
UNC and WVU should take action to correct their records, or at least signal readers the information they present is in doubt.
Why is this important? Olmsted, Taylor, and Strother are three of the most consequential witnesses and writers of the era. What they wrote before, during, and after the war shaped public opinion immensely. It's important that we understand who they were, why they thought as they did, and why they wrote critically and candidly, even of their own efforts.
Take Taylor, for example, whom Lost Cause advocates have attempted to turn into the same kind of slaveowner and Confederate general as some of his peers. It is a bad fit, trying as they do to link statesmanship with secession in a roadside marker at the site of the old Fashion plantation, in Hahnville, Louisiana, erected in 1961. See below.
Taylor's operation of the plantation was a rebuke to other planters, which is one reason for Olmsted's disguises. Taylor provided health care and housing, did not use the lash, and at war's end, when his family was destitute, was offered financial assistance from some of his former slaves. Also, he had fought hard against secession before succumbing to it, as he explained in his bitter memoir, in which he ridiculed the idea that the South could win the war. None of that's on the marker, unfortunately and misleadingly.
And consider Strother, the Southern aristocrat who, after three years in abolitionist-leaning Britain and France, fought for the Union. Had that been Taylor rather than Strother, there might not have been Taylor's rescue of Stonewall Jackson's Valley Campaign, or his victory over Banks late in the war, or perhaps even a war at all. That's total speculation, but no less that the fiction spun by the Lost Cause. We all need to get back to the facts.
