American Eden

by Victoria Johnson

  Hosack at the helm meant long hours, as his private medical students could have told the new hired hands. Each year, these students had to sign their names beneath a stringent set of regulations before he would agree to instruct them. They were required to report to his office by nine o’clock each morning, and there they remained for the next twelve hours—unless he released them to attend medical lectures at the college or took them on his rounds at the hospital. Idle chatter among the young men attending his medical practice bothered Hosack, and he explicitly forbade “conversation to be held upon any other than medical subjects.” Now he took these exacting standards up the Middle Road to the new garden property. When he found any of his laborers wanting, he docked their pay or sacked them outright.

  The men began to bring tentative signs of order to the property. They unloaded fifteen casks of gunpowder and blew up the boulders strewn across the land. They hacked at stumps, drove oxen and horses onward before plows, and spread manure over newly cleared fields. They pulled down an old barn and put up a new one for the livestock, and they dug several wells from which to haul buckets full of water for the fields, the animals, and their own parched throats.

  A stone wall more than seven feet high and two feet thick rose up to girdle the grounds. The men set two gates into this wall where it ran along the west side of the Middle Road—one at the southern end of the property and one at the northern end. During his year in London Hosack had passed through the Brompton Botanic Garden’s formal entrance dozens of times, and now he ordered his men to construct a snug little porter’s lodge much like Curtis’s at each of the two new gates. When he was further along with the landscaping and planting and New Yorkers began riding up from town to tour the garden, he would be able to receive them properly.

  IF HOSACK HAD HAD A CHANCE to read the epitaph engraved on Curtis’s tombstone across the sea, he would have found heartening words for the new chapter in his own life.

  While common herbs shall spring profusely wild,

  Or gardens cherish all that’s blithe and gay,

  So long thy works shall please, dear Nature’s child,

  So long thy mem’ry suffer no decay.

  Hosack could have used the encouragement. Aside from Bard, there were few people with whom he could converse in any detail about his garden plans. Burr was probably the best candidate, but he was a busy vice president, and if Hosack did speak with him about the garden at this early stage, he left no record of it. Hamilton knew a good deal about plant-based medicines but was not very knowledgeable about horticulture. Hosack’s friend DeWitt Clinton, who had briefly studied botany with Hosack at Columbia, had been in Washington since February 1802 as a senator. Samuel Latham Mitchill knew plenty about botany, but he, too, was serving in Congress. And the truth was that even if Clinton and Mitchill had been around for Hosack to talk to, neither of them nor anyone else in New York was even remotely as expert in Linnaean botany as Curtis, Smith, and Banks. No one in the United States was, except William Bartram in Philadelphia.

  Then, in the spring of 1802, on the island of Manhattan, Hosack came face-to-face with European botanical royalty. François André Michaux was one year younger than Hosack. He was very striking, with a Gallic nose and impressive cheekbones. His receding hairline was gradually leaving him with more than his fair share of forehead, but he had been partly compensated for this abandonment by his mass of fluffy curls. He even bore the scars of his devotion to botany; one of his eyes had been injured during a botanizing excursion a decade earlier when he accidentally stepped into a partridge hunter’s line of fire.

  François André’s father, André Michaux, was one of France’s most famous botanists. In 1785, Louis XVI had sent the elder Michaux to the wilds of North America. France had been sapped by repeated crop failures as well as by the recent fighting on the American side in the Revolutionary War, and the king had ordered André Michaux to establish a nursery for the collection and shipment of American plants and trees to France. “I imagine myself setting out to the conquest of the new world,” Michaux crowed to a friend. He took his teenage son, François André, with him on the voyage. They landed at New York City, bought an English dictionary for a dollar, and went out to botanize. Dismayed by the complete lack of botanical knowledge he encountered, the senior Michaux complained in a letter home, “There are no informed people here, not even amateurs.”

  François André Michaux

  André Michaux concentrated on sharing his love of plants with his young son. As they hiked the woods and meadows collecting for the French crown, they both fell in love with the “majestic” and “magnificent” trees of the American forests, especially the great oaks. They went south to visit the Bartram family’s garden near Philadelphia, where both father and son became friends of William Bartram. Within months of arriving in New York, the elder Michaux sent hundreds of tree specimens to the Jardin du Roi, mostly white cedar (Chamaecyparis thyoides). He also sent samples of a fruit he called “Cramberrie,” which the locals used for jam. André Michaux purchased twenty-nine acres of land on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, near the Hackensack River, and established a nursery for the French crown there. A local paper described Michaux’s new property as “naturally wild and romantic,” but a visitor from Connecticut found it “awful, gloomy, lonely, miserable.” Michaux seems to have agreed with the latter. In 1786 he left a French assistant in charge and moved with François André to sunny Charleston, South Carolina, where he established another garden that became his home base as he traipsed through the South collecting specimens for the French government.

  Their comfortable new arrangement was suddenly upended when, in June 1791, the king himself embarked on an expedition of sorts. Fearful of the French Revolution, Louis XVI fled in disguise with his family toward the border; within hours, however, they had been recognized, arrested, and returned to Paris. Royal interest in botany declined precipitously, as did Michaux’s funds. He soon returned to France, where he began several years of such feverish work that by 1800, when he sailed off to botanize for Napoleon in the South Seas, he had largely completed two pioneering books based on his American travels: the History of the American Oaks, in French, and the Flora Boreali-Americana—the first large-scale catalogue of American plants—in Latin. After Michaux left France on this new voyage, his son was dispatched by Napoleon’s minister of the interior with instructions to settle the affairs of the two American gardens his father had founded. The New Jersey garden in particular presented problems. Both Michaux men felt that the French gardener who had been left in charge for ten years had treated it as his own private farm. The gardener protested that he had acted patriotically when he refused multiple offers for its purchase, including one from Vice President Burr. François André set sail to appraise the situation for the French government.

  When André Michaux had arrived in New York City with the teenage François André in the 1780s, he had pronounced it a complete botanical backwater. But now, in the spring of 1802, when François André returned as a grown man, someone directed him to Hosack, who was “held in the highest reputation as a professor of botany,” as François André noted in his journal. Their meeting was momentous for Hosack. Michaux was up to date on the latest developments in European botany, and he had also traversed hundreds of miles of American wilderness studying the native flora Hosack was so eager to learn about. Best of all, Michaux was enthusiastic about his garden project. Hosack soon took his new French friend up the Middle Road to see the work underway there.

  The spirit of William Curtis accompanied the two men as they toured the land together. Hosack had mined his happy memories of Brompton in drawing up his plans. The most important plot, of course, would be the one devoted to medicinal plants. Although it would include foreign species, he was especially interested in medicinals that grew locally, such as boneset, Virginia snakeroot, and others yet undiscovered. Once the plants were mature, Hosack would bring his medical students to the garden and show them, as Cur
tis had once shown him, how to connect the botanical remedies described in their medical textbooks with the plants as they appeared under cultivation. Hosack also intended to organize several plots so that they would illustrate the differences between Linnaeus’s sexual system and Jussieu’s natural orders. Then the principles that tripped up his students in the classroom would lodge easily in their minds as they leaned over the beds of plants reading the Latin and English labels. They would see the links between species inscribed right on the land around them. Together he and his students could investigate the medicinal virtues of plants through structural and chemical analyses, and he would teach them how to prepare pills, powders, decoctions, and infusions from the plants. They would finally grasp the most important truth he had learned at Curtis’s side—that gardens restore both bodies and souls.

  Medical botany was Hosack’s first love, but he also dreamed of improving the agricultural fortunes of his state and nation. Not far from the medicinal plot, he planned to tinker with crops such as wheat, oats, barley, and sunflowers. He hoped to pinpoint the perfect conditions of sunlight, water, and soil for each species, and also to determine which new foreign species might usefully be introduced to American farms. He had lots of space for these crops, for the rural spaciousness of Manhattan had afforded him a property at least twice as large as the city-hemmed Brompton Botanic Garden. Hosack would be able to conduct agricultural experiments to his heart’s content. He was especially eager “to naturalize as soon as possible to our climate the productions of the southern states and of the tropics.” His edible crops might one day help farmers feed the United States. He also wanted to help clothe his fellow citizens. He had just planted a species of cotton (Gossypium herbaceum) he had acquired from the West Indies; it was originally native to Africa. If this species turned out to thrive on Manhattan, it might well lessen the northeastern states’ dependence for raw cotton on the West Indies and, increasingly, on the American South—and perhaps even lessen their dependence on Great Britain for finished cotton textiles.

  Hosack’s tributes to Brompton continued elsewhere on the property. Curtis had cultivated a healthy respect for poisonous plants, and Hosack frequently repeated Curtis’s remarks about how important it was that doctors and farmers be able to recognize these species in the wild. Hosack, too, planned to devote an instructional plot to plants that could poison humans and livestock, such as wolfsbane (Aconitum napellus) and nightshade (Nicandra physalodes). Eventually he would bring his herbarium up from the city, with the Linnaean duplicates from James Edward Smith as the crown jewels of the collection. Students inspired by the garden’s living plants would then be able to pore over specimens that the world’s most famous botanist had mounted and labeled with his own hands.

  Despite the enormous size of his property, Hosack was working to encircle it with forest trees and shrubs. This was another nod to Brompton, and of all the features of Hosack’s design, François André Michaux found this one the most personally exciting. When the younger Michaux published the most important work of his life, North American Sylva, a decade later, he recalled how intrigued he had been to find Hosack raising a pretty little tree that generally preferred a milder climate: loblolly bay (Gordonia lasianthus), which Michaux loved for “the luxuriance of its vegetation, the beauty of its flowers, and the richness of its evergreen foliage.” In the introduction to his book, Michaux issued one of the earliest pleas for American forests, helping to launch the forest conservation movement in this country; Thoreau would consult it as he wrote Walden.

  Michaux seconded Hosack’s enthusiasm about the garden property—it was indeed well suited to growing a great variety of species. Hosack, for his part, enjoyed his new friend’s company so much that he took him to see several of the other establishments to which he was devoting his energy. Michaux found the New-York Hospital spacious and clean but thought the thin beds looked horribly uncomfortable. They also toured the state prison on the banks of the Hudson near the village of Greenwich, just north of New York, where Hosack somehow found time in his packed schedule to serve as an attending physician. Michaux’s impression here was of a tranquil and shipshape establishment; he thought the prisoners seemed content to perform the various jobs assigned to them, such as making nails. (The occasional prison break suggests Michaux was off the mark.) Hosack bought some of the prison nails for his men to use on the new barn they were building at the garden.

  Loblolly bay from Michaux’s North American Sylva

  IN THE SPRING OF 1802, just around the time Hosack and Michaux met, Rembrandt Peale arrived in New York with the second set of mastodon bones the Peales had retrieved. He set them up for public exhibition practically on Hosack’s doorstep. A short walk up Broadway and a right on Wall Street took Hosack to the exhibition in the old assembly room at City Hall. The mastodon was finally back where Hosack thought it had always belonged, although he was surely irritated all over again that the Peales were basking in glory and fortune that should have gone to a New Yorker. No one else seemed to mind. Within two days, Rembrandt had raked in $340. Some visitors did complain about the number of wooden replacement bones in the incomplete skeleton, and reports began to circulate that the entire thing was a fraud. Rembrandt quickly published an ad to dispel the profit-killing rumor, quipping that the presence of a few wooden bones “can only be objectionable to those whose dullness of intellect cannot comprehend that this animal must have resembled all others in one circumstance at least, viz, that one half of him was the exact counterpart to the other.”

  As crowds continued to visit the mastodon, Rembrandt Peale kept postponing his departure for Europe with his brother Rubens. Finally, in June, he announced to the public that they had booked passage on a ship bound for England. By autumn the brothers were breakfasting with Hosack’s old mentor Sir Joseph Banks. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, their father, Charles Willson Peale, continued to collect specimens and mount them for display in his museum. That September, he took out a lost-and-found ad for a “Red and Blue Macaw that flew from the State House Garden last week.” Freedom appeared preferable to stuffed immortality. Peale announced that whoever captured his macaw and brought it back would “be entitled to a sight of that wonder of the western world; the skeleton of the Mammoth.”

  It was galling to Hosack that, at the late date of 1802, New Yorkers were still so dependent on Philadelphia for America’s scientific enlightenment and artistic achievement. When it came to creating charitable institutions, however, New York was probably busier than any other city in the United States. There was, for example, the Society for the Information and Assistance of Persons Emigrating from Foreign Countries, which had given aid to some of the Mohawk passengers in the autumn of 1794. Also in the works was a charity for the sailors who had spent their lives ferrying such travelers back and forth across the oceans. It had been the pet project of a retired seaman named Robert Richard Randall, the son of a well-to-do Caribbean pirate. In June 1801, weeks before his death, Randall had hired Alexander Hamilton to draw up a will that left a valuable bequest to fund a home for “aged, decrepit and worn out sailors.” People praising New York’s generous spirit could also point to the hospital, the almshouse, the Society for the Relief of Distressed Debtors, and the public pharmaceutical dispensary—all organizations in which Hosack was active. The counterfeiting of medicines, false claims about the efficacy of patent remedies, and highway-robbery prices were such a problem that the city’s doctors had banded together in 1791 to found a public dispensary to “keep the poor from being preyed on by merciless and unfeeling quacks.” At the dispensary, poor New Yorkers could buy physician-certified medicines at reasonable prices so they would not be forced to seek emergency help at the hospital or the almshouse.

  For women who could not afford a physician to deliver their babies at home, Hosack had recently helped found an obstetrics clinic—the Lying-In Hospital. He was also involved with a fever-quarantine hospital that had recently been created in a converted mansion on an East Ri
ver estate called Bellevue. Yet for all this frenetic compassion, New York still lacked most of the cultural and scientific institutions befitting a great city. To be sure, there was the Park Theatre on Park Row (formerly Chatham Row), and up the Middle Road Hosack was building his own answer to the Brompton Botanic Garden and the Linnean Society combined. But New York still had no equivalent to the Royal Society—or rather nothing like Philadelphia’s more suitably democratic American Philosophical Society. New York also had no museum of art, while Philadelphia, of course, had Peale’s Museum, where he displayed paintings along with his natural history specimens.

  Hosack belonged to a generation of New Yorkers attempting to give the city more to be proud of. In the summer of 1802, he was invited by friends to help found the city’s first museum of fine arts. The Livingston family was leading the effort. Robert R. Livingston, Jefferson’s minister to France, was joined there in 1803 by James Monroe, a presidential envoy sent to aid Livingston in negotiations over French-owned territories in North America. Even with the glories of Paris at his feet and a weighty ministerial portfolio on his desk, New York was never far from Livingston’s mind. When he was taken to see an astonishing collection of Greek and Roman sculptures looted from Italy by Napoleon, Livingston hatched an idea. He wrote to the mayor of New York City—his younger brother Edward. What if he were to ship home plaster casts of the most impressive sculptures in Napoleon’s collections? Then New Yorkers could see the world’s greatest art without having to spend six weeks at sea to do it. His brother was delighted with the idea, and in a public announcement of the plan for the new museum, Mayor Livingston slyly invoked the degeneracy debate that had sent Jefferson looking for a giant moose. The American “climate will not be less favorable” to the growth of the fine arts, the mayor said, “than that in which they have heretofore flourished”—Europe.