CHAPTER II
JULY 1866–JANUARY 1867

The second half of 1866 was an unusually busy period of professional activity and intense interest in politics for Olmsted. The letters to Charles Eliot Norton presented in this chapter define Olmsted’s position on Reconstruction and national politics. That of September 12, 1866, castigates President Andrew Johnson for his “essential barbarism of character”; a week later Olmsted argues that while the former Confederate states should be speedily readmitted to the Union, ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment would be essential as a guarantee of the civil rights of freedmen. These letters also indicate Olmsted’s dismay over factionalism in the Republican party and his hope that Reconstruction would bring about the “abolition of class and caste before the law.”

A similar optimism about education and its potential for uplifting and improving American life can be found in many of Olmsted’s writings of this period. His plans and reports for the new land-grant colleges in Massachusetts and Maine and for the Columbia Institution for the Deaf and Dumb (now Gallaudet University) stress how the design of the campus and provisions for housing would meet the special needs of students. The Massachusetts and Maine reports also reveal Olmsted’s belief that a well-designed campus would help improve rural life by instilling the values he associated with domesticity and community. His letter to Frederick Knapp and the plan for the Maine college call for training students to be citizen-soldiers.

Other documents further indicate the vision that imbued Olmsted’s work on public and private landscape design. His letter to Richard Grant White defends Central Park against large gateways designed by Richard Morris Hunt, while his and Vaux’s 1867 report to the Prospect Park commission [92] presents their rationale for acquiring additional land for that park. The fragmentary draft about “Blythe Beach Park” demonstrates that even in designing a subdivision for vacation homes, Olmsted and Vaux emphasized the need for common land that would make the development attractive and promote among residents a sense of community.