The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted: Volume V, The California Frontier, 1863-1865 (review)

274CIVIL WAR HISTORY a foothold in California. Thompson's belief that a "Confederate Manifest Destiny" could have ever become reality is tenuous at best. Nevertheless, this is a useful book for anyone interested in Confederate Brig. Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley's New Mexico campaign. The actual text of the diary is only sixty-five pages, covering the period from April 1861 until July 1862, and many of Private Howell's entries only inform the reader how far the command went on any given day. Even the battle of Glorieta, where the Texans were buried in a mass grave, consists of a six sentence entry. Thompson has compensated for the lack of substance in the diary by using the first fifty-one pages to summarize the campaign and write a historiographical essay describing lesser-known works, including diaries, letters, memoirs, and newspapers that relate to it. Unfortunately , many of these tantalizing sources are unpublished and accessible only to the most diligent researcher. Still, this is a useful work and would be valuable to anyone with an interest in Sibley's New Mexico campaign. Anne J. Bailey Georgia Southern University The Papers ofFrederick Law Olmsted: Volume V, The California Frontier, 1863-1865. Edited by Victoria Post Ranney. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Pp. xxvi, 848. $48.50.) The fifth of twelve projected volumes in this fine series finds Olmsted in California, away from his New York home and his wartime work at the Sanitary Commission. In August 1863, Olmsted was offered the superintendency of the Mariposa estate gold mines in California and at such a salary that he thought his financial security would be permanently assured. The paradox of this volume of the Olmsted papers is that although a business interest took Olmsted out of the war effort, he nonetheless found the time to think and write most carefully about some of the great issues of the war. The correspondence and manuscript fragments in this volume show Olmsted writing about the relationship between three of the great social dramas of nineteenth-century America: immigration and urbanization; the frontier and the westward movement; and the struggle between slavery and freedom. Editor Victoria Post Ranney and her colleagues have produced a volume in which Olmsted's concern for the fate of American civilization outweighed his narrow pecuniary considerations. Specifically, Olmsted wrestled in the later years of the war with the following question: Could a democratic republic produce a form of civilization higher than that of a monarchy or slaveholding oligarchy, or was democracy destined to produce a mudsill society? In his earlier writings Olmsted faced this BOOK REVIEWS275 problem, but never so squarely as in the writings contained in Volume V. The contents of this volume show the range of Olmsted's wartime interests. In addition to correspondence about the workings of the gold mines at Mariposa, Olmsted undertook several landscape design projects in California, including a plan for the Berkeley campus of the University of California and a plan for opening public access to Yosemite Valley. He continued to correspond with New York friends at the Sanitary Commission and also maintained a lengthy correspondence with Calvert Vaux about Central Park affairs and about the design of Brooklyn's Prospect Park. Some of the most interesting correspondence is with E. L. Godkin, mainly about the launching of the Nation magazine, but also about Olmsted's interest in heading the Freedmen's Bureau. Editor Ranney and her associates saved the best item for last: heretofore unpublished manuscript fragments of a book Olmsted intended to write on the civilization question, "The Pioneer Condition and the Drift of Civilization in America," written mainly in 1865 when the Mariposa estate had gone bankrupt. The "Pioneering Condition" amounts to a sort of frontier thesis, but one that scarcely anticipated Turner. Quite to the contrary, Olmsted wrote in the New England tradition of seeing the frontier as a source of disorder, even barbarism. The violent racial and class antagonisms of Mariposa represented the worst of the frontier. His pre-war southern trips convinced him that slavery perpetuated the frontier stage of civilization , and Olmsted linked the violence of the mining frontier to the violence of the Old South...