Daily Inspiration Quote by Frederick Law Olmsted

The sentence reads like a bureaucratic shrug, and that is precisely its force. Olmsted, remembered as the mind behind Central Park, is here working in another register: the mid-19th-century traveling observer who knows that moral outrage can be dismissed as Northern hysteria, so he reaches for the colder authority of report and record. “With regard to” and “in any way gratifying” are not the language of abolitionist fire; they’re the language of a man making a case that can survive polite company.

That restraint is the subtext. Olmsted is evaluating slavery not only as an economic system but as a spiritual and social one, puncturing a core pro-slavery claim: that bondage “civilizes” and Christianizes the enslaved. By stressing “either from what I observe, or from what is told me,” he triangulates evidence like an investigator, refusing to let defenders dismiss his conclusion as mere sentiment. The careful double-source phrasing also hints at the limits imposed on an outsider: what he can witness directly is partial, and what he hears is filtered through fear, surveillance, and the need to perform obedience.

Context matters: Olmsted traveled through the American South in the 1850s and published widely read accounts aimed at Northern audiences trying to understand what slavery actually produced on the ground. His target isn’t the enslaved but the institution’s apologists. The line’s quiet devastation is that it treats “moral and religious condition” as a measurable output of a society and finds the result damning, not dramatic: simply not “gratifying” enough to justify the cruelty.