CHAPTER VIII
DEBATING THE FUTURE

This chapter records Olmsted’s reactions to the end of both the Civil War and his personal supervision of the Mariposa Estate. Alone in San Francisco at the time of Lee’s surrender and Lincoln’s assassination, Olmsted felt keenly his separation from family and friends. To his close friend Frederick Knapp he pours out his heart—his self-doubt, sense of personal failure, and longing for his dead brother.

Soon after, he reached an agreement with Dodge Brothers for settling the debts of the Mariposa Company and returned to Bear Valley. To his father on April 29 he reports details of the agreement and his uncertainty about the future.

In several letters Olmsted turns his attention to the future of the nation. His letter of April 4, responding to Godkin’s recently published article “Aristocratic Opinions of Democracy,” describes the unfinished state of his own book on the subject of emigration and the frontier in American society, and analyzes the process of social and moral growth on the frontier. On May 14 he outlines to Godkin a national system of military education that he envisions being implemented in peacetime. On June 10 he congratulates Godkin on the launching of the Nation and sets forth his views on the increased power the federal government should have to protect civil rights and override state legislation such as California’s racially discriminatory laws.

From the other side of the country, Calvert Vaux describes to Olmsted his efforts to defend their Central Park plan, and emphasizes the national importance of their work together on the park. On May 10 Vaux discusses his public campaign against the architect Richard Morris [341]Hunt’s plans for formal new entrances to the park. Other letters from Vaux to Olmsted discuss the park as a work of art. They analyze Olmsted’s skill as an artist, and contain some of Vaux’s most acerbic comments on Olmsted’s qualities as an administrator. The chapter includes Vaux’s eloquent letter of June 3, which reminds Olmsted that Central Park is “the big art work of the Republic” and challenges him to return to his work there.