The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveler's Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, 1853-1861

In 1853, Frederick Law Olmsted was working for the New York Times when he journeyed to the southern slave states and wrote one of the most important pro-abolition discourses.

The Cotton Kingdom recounts his daily observations of the curse of slavery: the poverty it brought to both black and white people, the inadequacies of the plantation system, and the economic consequences and problems associated with America's most “peculiar institution.”

Disproving the opinion that “cotton is king,” Olms...