Lincoln's First Environmental Law

On June thirtieth, eighteen sixty-four, Abraham Lincoln signed a piece of legislation that had nothing to do with the Civil War and everything to do with what kind of country the United States wanted to become. The Yosemite Valley Grant Act ceded Yosemite Valley and the grove of giant sequoias you are standing near to the state of California, to be held, in the language of the bill, inalienable for all time as public recreation land.

It was the first act of federal land preservation in American history. Eight years before Yellowstone, which usually gets credit for the idea.

The bill's sponsor was Senator John Conness of California, who described it to his colleagues as a piece of legislation costing the government nothing. The key intellectual architect was Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed Central Park, who argued before the California commissioners that a democratic republic had a civic duty to preserve scenery for public use. Not for the wealthy. Not for the landed. For everyone who would ever come.

Lincoln signed it three days after the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, where Confederate forces repelled the Union assault. The country was still counting its dead. And yet someone found time to write, and pass, and sign a law that said: this particular piece of the American landscape will not be sold.

There is a shadow in that act. The land that was set aside in eighteen sixty-four had been violently seized from the Ahwahneechee people thirteen years earlier. The grant formalized the seizure, giving federal blessing to what the Mariposa Battalion had taken by force. But the legal framework it created, the idea that some landscapes belong to everyone and to no one, would eventually grow into the national park system, into the Wilderness Act, into a hundred years of conservation law.

The sequoias in this grove are approximately two thousand years old. They predated Lincoln's law by twenty-two centuries and will likely outlast whatever conservation framework succeeds it.