The following texts represent Olmsted’s most comprehensive attempt to analyze the forces at work in American society and to determine the level of civilization achieved by the people of the United States. He never brought his projected study to completion, and it is published here for the first time.

The newspaper articles and books Olmsted had written between 1852 and 1860 concerning the slaveholding South marked the first stage of his ambitious investigation of American society. Even during these years, the theme of the frontier formed an important element of his studies. During his Southern travels he had been struck by the absence of physical community and the lack of institutions of popular education that he, with his New England upbringing, saw as necessary elements of the good society. He failed to find, even in the homes of prosperous planters, objects of art and other domestic amenities appropriate to the economic status of their owners. These shortcomings of Southern society were due to the influence of slavery, he concluded, observing that “slavery prolongs, in a young community, the evils which properly belong only to a frontier.”

In his discussion of the frontier, Olmsted echoed a view that had been widely held in his native state of Connecticut from the early years of settlement. The unfortunate effects of emigration, rending the fabric of old settlements and subjecting the emigrants to deprivation and isolation on the frontier, had long been a theme of writings and sermons in the towns where he spent his youth. Olmsted’s views closely resembled those. of the Congregational minister Horace Bushnell, who in fact directly influenced them. In 1863 Olmsted stated that he had for some time been accumulating notes and materials for a book which, if he could ever “put six month’s of library work upon it,” would be worth more to the world than “Bushnell’s sermon on the Tendency of emigration to Barbarism” (that is, Horace Bushnell’s sermon Barbarism the First Danger: A Plea for Home Missions, published in 1847).

While the influence of the frontier had been an important issue for Olmsted since the early 1850s, the question of the extent to which democracy was responsible for the social characteristics of the United States assumed new importance with the onset of the Civil War. That conflict led to increased European interest in the United States, including the publication of several books by English travelers that attributed many of the country’s shortcomings to “democracy.”

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The seriousness of the misconceptions of foreign travelers became apparent to Olmsted at the beginning of the Civil War. Many Europeans assumed that few men in the North would be willing to fight to sustain the Union. When events proved them wrong, confirming Olmsted’s predictions to William Howard Russell, reporter for the Times of London, Olmsted pondered why European observers had so miscalculated the situation. The bias of many Europeans against democracy, and their tendency to attribute all that they disliked in America to the operation of democratic forces, seemed the most likely explanation. They could not conceive that there was a sufficient basis in American government for the development of a sense of loyalty among its citizens. But Olmsted saw in the response of the Union volunteers a confirmation of his understanding of American society. Nevertheless, the unfavorable commentary of English travelers, in particular, continued to rankle. Olmsted had devoted much time and energy in the antebellum years to answering attacks on the republican government and free-labor economy of the North—attacks that came both from monarchist commentators in Europe and from proslavery apologists in the American South. Testimony by travelers, that many Americans believed their government to be a failure and felt little loyalty toward it, gave new support to the views of those old antagonists.

As the war progressed, Olmsted continued to record his observation of events. He outlined two treatises that would draw from his experiences while serving as general secretary of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. In one of these, entitled “Contributions to the History of Civilization, consisting of observations made during the war-time of 1861,” he planned to deal with issues raised by English travelers concerning the difference between American and English society. In the other, entitled “Sojourn in Washington,” he planned to record his experiences with politicians, bureaucrats, and officers both in Washington and in the field. Olmsted never wrote the books that he outlined during his last year with the Sanitary Commission, but he did begin to write about English travelers before leaving for California in the fall of 1863. One of the sections on that subject in the introductory material below was written on the back of a draft of a report to the U.S. Sanitary Commission. Moreover, two recently published travel accounts by Englishmen were fresh in Olmsted’s mind as he toured the Mississippi Valley on Sanitary Commission business in the spring of 1863. One was Anthony Trollope’s North America, published in the fall of 1862, and the other was William Howard Russell’s My Diary North and South, published in early 1863. Many of Olmsted’s observations during his “Journey in the West” of early 1863 were made with the comments of those two Englishmen in mind. His response to their observations anticipates themes that he developed more fully in the texts presented below. He was troubled by their descriptions of the un-communicativeness [579]of Americans and their suggestion that Americans were lacking in manners and domestic graces. Olmsted believed the contrary, as his writings on American civilization in this volume show. He was convinced that the mass of Americans had fundamentally better manners than their English counterparts. He was also convinced that family ties and affection constituted a special strength of American society. For Olmsted, these qualities represented ways in which the people of the United States were more civilized in their daily life than the common folk—and even the privileged classes—of the Old World, and denial of them by travelers like Russell and Trollope seems to have stung him deeply.

Olmsted took his various notes on British travelers with him to California, apparently with the intent of incorporating that material into the writing he hoped to do there. The press of business responsibilities and recurring “pen sickness” limited his writing activities for some time, but publication of E. L. Godkin’s article “Aristocratic Opinions of Democracy” in the January 1865 issue of the North American Review spurred Olmsted to resume his own study. Godkin’s article contained material that he and Olmsted had discussed before 1863. Many of the themes in that article appear in the writings of Olmsted that are published in this volume; indeed, Olmsted commented in one letter to Godkin that “it is particularly agreeable to me to find my crude unassorted knowledge neatly and snugly built into clear propositions and logical statements, as you can and I can’t do it.”

Accordingly, Olmsted set out in the spring of 1865 to write the treatise about civilization in America that had been on his mind for several years. The previous fall he had told Godkin, “I am cogitating a heavy sort of book on Society in the United States—the influence of pioneer-life—& of Democracy.” As he began to write he summarized the more recent sources for his study, saying: “During the last year and a half I have been living among the California Sierras, and as circumstances have brought them to mind have written many suggestions which, in a period of comparative liberty from other duties now before me, I propose to collate, embody, and extend into a book.” By that time he had available for reference not simply the observations he had made in California but a “whole casefull of notes” gathered during the five years since completion of his last book of Southern travels, A Journey in the Back Country.

Conscious of the struggle between the forces of barbarism and the forces of civilization in the America of his time, and spurred by an intense desire to strengthen the civilizing impulse, Olmsted sought to identify which forces were gaining strength in his time. To accomplish this, it was necessary to gather reliable information and develop a method for interpreting the data.

Olmsted accomplished part of his goal during his sojourn in Bear [580]Valley, as he watched the men and women around him and calculated what kinds of allies they would be in his effort to civilize that frontier settlement. Those observations strengthened his belief that the essence of civilization lay in the characteristics of community and mutual service that he had imbibed from his youth in the Puritan-founded towns of Connecticut and that he had used as a measure by which to judge the society of the antebellum South. While in California, he supplemented his reading on this subject with Henry Buckle’s History of Civilization in England and Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.

At the same time, Olmsted began to devise a method for identifying the “antecedent conditions” of those who formed American society. English travelers should not simply comment on how far Americans fell below the standard of gentlemen, he pointed out; the crucial issue was how much Americans had risen above the level of their peasant forebears, and how their progress compared with that of the descendants of those same forebears who had remained in the Old World. For Olmsted, this was the only valid basis for comparison, the touchstone that would reveal in what ways civilization was advancing or regressing in America. This concern reflected an attitude of long standing. During the mid-1840s, the period of his intellectual growth and questioning, he had often displayed a suspicion of broad generalizations. On one occasion, for instance, he had warned his brother: “Limit your genl rules. It’s hard to make general rules—to trace with certainty . . . the consequences to the proper definite peculiar causes.”

The most ambitious element of Olmsted’s effort to find an adequate basis for calculating the quality of American civilization was his continuing effort to gather precise and accurate information. He had closely observed the lives of many people during his travels and his work for Central Park and the U.S. Sanitary Commission. He had also read widely in the spare time that he could glean during long days and nights of work. Still, he wanted statistical material as well. Not finding the necessary data in what he read, Olmsted set out as early as 1859 to gather his own statistics. By June of that year he had made a listing of the height, weight, and nationality of 1,000 workers on Central Park. This was to be the first step in a systematic investigation using the park’s work force to study the influence of conditions of life in America on the physical characteristics of its inhabitants.

Two years later, Olmsted’s position with the U.S. Sanitary Commission gave him a much larger group from which to gather statistical information—the volunteer soldiers of the Union army. He arranged that as part of their investigations the Sanitary Commission inspectors should fill out a questionnaire on the physical characteristics of each soldier. At the same time, Olmsted arranged for the inspectors to fill out a second questionnaire, on ”social” matters. He paid the costs for this investigation, [581]except for the time spent by the inspectors in interviewing the soldiers. The returns were to be for his own use. In all, the inspectors filled out nearly eight thousand of these forms in detail, two thousand of which were drawn from Confederate prisoners.

The interviewers first established the country of birth of each soldier’s parents and grandparents and determined whether the soldier was “of American stock of three generations.” Then came questions concerning marital status, occupation, extent of education, and the subject’s use of tobacco and alcohol. The most comprehensive series of questions dealt with the importance of family and domestic relations in the person’s life and, in particular, his use of leisure time. Olmsted stated in his instructions that the completed forms would answer the question:

How do Americans of different generations after immigration, and of different parts of the land, compare with each other and with Europeans in regard to maturation of body and of intellect at different ages? From which deductions may be suggested as to effects of climate, laws, and social influences ....

Olmsted wanted the completed forms shipped to him in California since, as he wrote Frederick N. Knapp, “ I have a quantity of material here with which I wish the social Returns to be associated.” Due to a misunderstanding, however, the forms were not sent, and he attempted to fill out his study of California with statistics on immigrants gathered from the San Francisco custom house. It was not until December 1867 that Olmsted finally examined the Sanitary Commission social questionnaires in detail. He still hoped to use them for his treatise on civilization in America, which he then described as “a trunk-full of mss. & mem° in a certain stage of preparation for a large book on the general topics to which these returns relate,” adding, “if I should be moderately successful in business, it is my hope to complete this book . . . . ” He anticipated that the chief value of the statistical returns “would rest in the light they would throw upon the problem of the general drift of society under American conditions.” In particular, he believed they would be valuable in answering these questions:

What are the habits, & what is the mental & moral condition of men in the United States whose character & habits have been chiefly influenced by European conditions, & what of those whose character & habits have been much affected by American conditions?

He asked Knapp to look at a few of the returns in order to determine their usefulness, and was ready to pay him $200 during the next two years to begin a tabulation of the information in them. The tabulations apparently were never carried out, however.

Even though in California he had little statistical information, Olmsted made some progress on his book during the spring and summer [582]of 1865. Material in several folders of the manuscript as it now exists was written on Mariposa Company stationery, and it is clear that Olmsted wrote several passages while still in Bear Valley. His writing at this stage appears primarily to have been description and analysis of the California frontier.

Olmsted continued to work on the book until at least the end of 1868, as references in the manuscript to published articles indicate. Moreover, a number of pages were written on the stationery of Olmsted, Vaux & Company, and on the back of draft reports for the firm from the period 1866–68. References to the project occur in Olmsted’s correspondence as well. Charles Eliot Norton, in particular, took an interest in Olmsted’s undertaking. In July 1866, anticipating a visit from Olmsted, Norton asked, “Cannot you come for a number of days sufficient to make it worthwhile to bring up your manuscript,—of which I heard only the beginning,—that I may have the pleasure of hearing the rest & talking over the various topics with you?” At that time Norton was taking notes from his reading that he thought would be useful to Olmsted. As late as January 1867, Norton was still copying information for Olmsted concerning early settlers in America.

By the end of 1867, Olmsted was examining the Sanitary Commission statistical returns, looking toward a two-year analysis of them by Frederick Knapp. Then, in March 1868, he made a new set of chapter outlines, as well as additional plans for the description of Bear Valley in chapter I. In June 1868 he was attempting to secure a volume on early settlers from Charles Eliot Norton. “I have an intention to take that matter up again in my summer vacation this year,” he explained, “though I do not feel that I can do much with it.”

How much Olmsted accomplished during his vacation, or even if he found time for one, is not known. He wrote some passages either during the latter part of 1868 or early in 1869, but no evidence exists that he managed thereafter to bring the book closer to completion. Nor did he publish any part of it in the form of an article, although both Godkin and Norton had urged him during 1864 to provide them with essays on California for, respectively, the Nation and the North American Review. Thereafter, judging from the many pages of undated drafts in Olmsted’s papers, his recognition of the need for an explanation of the art of landscape design and of its history led him to turn in spare moments to preparing writings on that subject. Like this history of the pioneer condition and American civilization, many of those works were still in fragmentary form at the time of his death.