I have received your letter. It makes me sick and sad but I know that I have but one feeling towards you, which is and always has been sweet and pure. My error seems to have arisen thus. When we went into the competition I knew you were superintendent but did not attach the meaning to the word that you did; When we recd the premium & divided it at my office at Appleton’s Building I told you that a time had arrived at which our connection might be properly severed and that you were at liberty to proceed to carry out the design without my taking further part in it, provided that our joint names were duly recognized in the plan as it then stood. You replied that you did not feel at all able to undertake individually the execution of the design and requested me to continue to act with you. I acceded. Shortly afterwards on receiving from the Commrs an offer of the title of A in C, my claims being wholly unrecognised, you consulted me before sending in your reply, not on the advisability or otherwise of accepting it but merely on the form of words you should use. I felt that was not what I should have done to you. I could have protested but assumed that it was a temporary expedient to get the work started. I certainly then felt that I had full right and title to be considered on a thorough equality with you, not with regard to superintendence X’ or merely organization of labor but with regard to what we had agreed to devote our attention to for the next five years probably.

In the course of the next day or two the question was discussed in so far as there was any discussion and I became convinced that you had a very different immediate intention with regard to our partnership, as I supposed it was, to what I had. I also became fully aware that you [178]were “as innocent as a child of perception of any wrong to me in the neglect of the Commrs to associate me with you” and were looking at the matter not from my professional point of view at all. I could have readily gained your attention but I perceived instinctively that it would be impossible as you were then constituted to make you feel that it would be better otherwise than it was and I felt that if I carried my point it would be at a great sacrifice of your working efficiency in so far as it was dependent on my cooperation. I therefore determined to postpone indefinitely the discussion of the whole question involved, not because I thought there would be any difficulty in inducing the Commrs to associate us together or because I believed the course you pursued the most judicious for the ultimate success of the scheme, not out of regard to your feelings in any way, not out of respect to your previous history but simply because I had the most absolute trust in your purity of aim and intention and saw that we must work together and that you must have the title. I made then as I considered it a sacrifice of my professional rights for the good of the common cause, not our common cause but the common cause of the park and all it meant in its best sense. I judged that it was better to co-operate cheerfully with you, although convinced that another course would have been better in every way.

I did not consider it desirable to be more frank at that time. If there had been the slightest feeling in the matter it would have been, because otherwise hearty practical cooperation would not have resulted for an hour. There was not any feeling, however, but a latent difference of opinion.

I knew I should have the opportunity of working out our plan and felt that I could at any moment talk this or anything else over with you. I was as you say responsible and was fully aware of it—and I acted straight through with firmness, and without looking back and with no lack of frankness except in this particular. I thought you recognised our equality and so you did, so far as it existed, and I supposed you would some day see the propriety of changing the title. I distinguished the superintendence X’ always as a matter in which I had no share and did not see its intimate relation to X. I did not attach any particular importance to it, as I included in X a great deal of it but not probably the most important part and thought you overrated it. It was your affair however, not mine.

So the work was gone on with. I felt that it would be time enough to talk about titles when the work was well advanced. I was absorbed in my part of the work and in our simple, friendly, actual, bona fide relation which I all the while believed meant equality in your eyes as absolutely as it did in mine (except as to a certain slight superiority which would have been expressed by your name being first on the firm.) I could see no reason why it should not, and as I thought this was the case whenever [179]I thought about it at all, which was not as often as perhaps I may have led you to suppose, it did not trouble my pride or sense of absolute right in the matter.

When the time came I did not understand your reluctance to change the title to be traceable to your X’ hopes. That you were reluctant was evident, that the change was not expressive of your convictions was certain. I did not understand why, but knew that to you it was proper and best that you should think so and I respected your idea without understanding it, that is I knew it was entirely an intellectual question in which you had as much right to your opinion as I had to mine. I was not vexed or irritated or annoyed, or filled with mean thoughts but I was disappointed—it was not easy for me to comprehend as we were situated. It made me feel sure however that you did not consider we were equally entitled to X in any extended sense, and I now perceive that you did not and never did; but I could not, at that time see it so. I knew your opinion must be right to you, to me it seemed that I brought as much as you to the park, that I brought education, special fitness to take up new problems, a love of the race, a love of the park and all it meant intellectually and that I had worked faithfully and fraternally with you throughout. It seemed to me you must be wrong in not accepting me as an equal partner in X heartily. However, as it was not in accordance with your conviction, it was entirely useless to me intellectually. It was a disappointment, I could not see why you saw the matter so differently to what I did. I thought however that perhaps it would come to me in time, and bored on as I best could in duty to the work.

When the paragraphs you referred to appeared, I became aware that you conveyed to everyone the impression that our positions were not nearly as equal in your mind as I thought they ought to be. I knew that you were an intimate friend of Godkin’s & Godwin’s and knew that you had defended my rights as you understood them, but what was the total result? You had not convinced the men, not as I should have convinced them speaking of you and therefore you were not convinced yourself, never would be to all appearances. We had a joint title that you did not believe in and I was here to speak and act for you and for me for years to come. I became convinced that our estimates of each other’s value differed as regarded X in its usual extended sense, not X’ which I considered yours wholly. I supposed then we must diverge at this point, so far as our entire one-ness of action in park matters was concerned & that you must state your case so that I might know it and do justice to it and that I must be free to state mine as I of course could not be until I had spoken to you. All this not in respect to any definite action but as a guide to me in every word or intonation of a word that I might hereafter use in connection with our relation. I therefore wrote an ill conceived statement which plainly enough conveyed the idea that I felt you wronged [180]me, as I thought you did, not morally but intellectually. I felt that you ought so far as regards a liberal interpretation of X, to have regarded me from first to last as an equal (but whether this was acknowledged or unacknowledged by the public was a matter of very secondary moment) and that you had not and did not. It actually did not occur to me that you could read in it that I had a feeling that you had morally wronged me. This was not in my mind at all or I must have guarded against it by acknowledging my co responsibility in all the acts that had been done with regard to defining our respective claims to the property we held in the Park—this however was what I meant by saying that I was not at liberty to express my individual views.

I have your reply—and what is the result? It shows me that you did not and that it was right you should not. You have been aware all along as I have not been that my services to X have been valuable. Yours have been invaluable and have at all times, consciously or unconsciously, conveyed that idea. You conveyed it to me in the beginning of the work but I thought this was merely deficiency on your part in professional training. I did not see the intimate relation between the early stages of X’ to X, merely even as a paper plan, till now. I did not know much about your early superintendent history and I did not allow that you were justly the representative man of the park including my share in it. I do now. If I had seen it before, I would have allowed it before. I see now that you are architect in chief both in X and X’. Henceforward I take my true position in my own mind call it by what name you will and am glad to have got to understand it at my sacrifice. My perception of your real relations to the work have been incomplete hitherto as you are aware and my professional habits of thought have stood in the way of my more rapid comprehending of it. I have divided X from X’. Henceforward they are as indivisible in my mind as in yours. On the whole on reviewing the affair from first to last I find that my want of frankness in the first instance has fortunately not injured you. I have spoken and acted throughout in accordance with the absolutely right view, not as freely as I shall hereafter do—being no longer silent as I often have been when our relation has been discussed—but because I had accepted you as an actual representative of our affairs without protest in the first instance. The A in C resignation must be excepted. I asked you to resign for the reasons I stated. I thought it was more business like and better for you whether you thought so or not. I certainly wanted you to change the title to an ordinary partnership one on my account but only when you became convinced of the propriety of so doing without being asked or on my choosing to ask you to do so on personal grounds. If I were to be in the same position again I should now act differently, fully believing in your superior claims to X and understanding its relations to X’.

I think the last analysis would show that after all I have a share [181]in X’, having included it in my estimate of X and that in both together, that is in the Park not as a work of the arts of architecture and landscape gardening only but of the art of administration and good government in its extended sense, we stand as co-workers—you being preeminently the representative man, and I hope that the time may come when you will carry forward your whole idea to its completion. And now I have said all I can say on this or any other point at this time.

I shall like at some time to hear more of your experiences. Poor Mrs Schuyler you will have heard is dead. Daniels also has died lately. I saw Mrs Olmsted a day or two since, we are working on the “Marion House.” I have elaborated your idea and think it a good one. My impression is that the plans had better be adapted on the spot as to material & dimensions. The drawings sent will enable Pieper or any other draftsman to work your plan out under your own directions, taking the local circumstances into consideration. Mrs Vaux and the children are well. She sends love.