CHAPTER V
POLITICS AND THE PARK

1861

The Central Theme of Olmsted’s letters during the first half of 1861 is his frustration over Andrew H. Green’s increasing control of the process of construction and maintenance of Central Park. Green’s authority concerning expenditures and his reluctance to spend any more money than absolutely necessary greatly hampered Olmsted’s independence of action at just the time when considerations of art, rather than those of construction and engineering, were coming to the fore. At the same time, Olmsted was being harried by the park commissioners, who ordered him to calculate the past and future cost of park construction but refused to hire the assistants he felt he needed to carry out the task.

In early 1861 Olmsted decided that he could not continue as park superintendent unless the commissioners gave him greater authority to direct the work. His impassioned resignation letter of January 22 expresses his dissatisfaction with the policies of the park board and outlines in detail the way that Green’s reluctance to authorize expenditures had hampered the construction process. In his letter of resignation, Olmsted assumes for the first time the role of an artist whose work as administrator is to realize an artistic conception born of his own imagination. The letter to John Bigelow of February 9 and that to the park board of March 28 fill out the picture of Olmsted’s difficult relations with the commissioners and his determination to gain more control or resign.

Other letters in the chapter reflect the resurgence of Olmsted’s concern with slavery and the South. His letter to Charles Francis Adams, Jr., revives the theme of combatting slavery in the South by circulating antislavery literature in that region. The letters to John Olmsted describe how Olmsted undertook to [296] compile The Cotton Kingdom from the three volumes on his travels in the South. They also show how, by mid-April 1861, secession and the sectional crisis had begun to overshadow his own “deferred crisis” on Central Park.