It’s really Sunday, 9th, but as your note of Friday 7th., which I have this moment received, needs to be answered “within twenty four hours”, I date back, and hope this will answer your purpose. (Messenger leaves office of the Board, Bank of Commerce, every day at 4 o’clock & comes direct. Post Office takes its time.)

I will give the titles & dates below.

It is not yet time to fully estimate the merit of the park as a work of Art. There were great difficulties both essential and political (or social). The former consisted in the heterogeneous, barren and immobile qualities of the ground to be dealt with. I believe that they have been overcome very successfully and that the park will not only be more convenient for exercise than any existing metropolitan pleasure-ground, its details more studied, more varied & substantial in character, but that there will be greater unity of composition, details being subordinated to general effects, than in any other. In anything you say of the design, remember that Vaux is to be associated. There were 34 plans in competition before the Commissioners, some of them coming from Europe.

As to the organization & management of the work, I think it more creditable to me than anything I have done publicly. It was within a fortnight of a most exciting election (when Wood was defeated) and during the prevalence of bread-riots, a larger number of men being out of employment than at [any] previous period of the city’s history, that the Common Council voted money to go on with the work & I was unexpectedly ordered to organize a large force for the purpose. It was a general impression that the pretence of work was merely a form of distributing the public money to the poor, and my office was for several days regularly surrounded by an organized mob carrying a banner inscribed Bread or Blood. This mob sent in to me a list of 10,000 names of men alleged to have starving families, demanding that they should be immediately put at work.

I had almost no assistance, but within a week I had a thousand men economically employed, & rigidly discharged any man who failed to work industriously & to behave in a quiet & orderly manner. Since the plan was adopted, from two to four thousand men have been generally at work besides those employed by contractors. With a single exception, when a thousand workmen on an adjoining work struck for higher wages & two gangs in the park joined them & were immediately discharged, there has been the most perfect order, peace & good feeling preserved, notwithstanding the fact that the laborers are mainly from the poorest or what is generally considered the most dangerous class of the great city’s population.

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Mr. Kellersberger, an experienced Swiss engineer, appointed by the Senate Investigating Committee last spring, to make a detailed inspection of the work, & who made his inspection very faithfully, without communicating with me at all & as respects the management with[out] consulting any of us, reported the other day that the organization and superintendence [of] it was most excellent & much better than on any other public work in the United States.

I think it important to me that the public should know this & that I should have the credit of it. I am anxious to remain Superintendent of the Park, that is.

I went to Boston after Mary. Thanksgiving at Hartford with all our kids. A Sunday with Fred Kingsbury & back safely, but with a deal of anxiety & trouble. Wouldn’t do it again. My leg does not get perceptibly stronger since you were here.

I would like to see you again, are you in town? I hardly leave the house now, the roads are so rough.

We intend to have two republics, peaceably if we can, fighting, if we must, don’t we? But my mind is made up for a fight. The sooner we get used to the idea, the better, I think.