American Eden

by Victoria Johnson

  By the end of 1803, New York had a new mayor: DeWitt Clinton. Clinton had sorely missed New York while living in Washington, but his return to the city was also a piece of political strategy. He had come to the conclusion that he could wield greater influence—even on the national scene—as mayor of New York than as a senator. Since Clinton would not be able to move into the future City Hall anytime soon, he set up his office in the old City Hall on Wall Street. Hosack was fortunate. Having his best friend in the mayor’s office might well prove useful for the garden.

  NEW PLANTS WERE ARRIVING all the time. In response to Hosack’s written requests, his correspondents continued sending him specimens they had collected themselves on their world travels, as well as others they had received at their own botanical gardens in Europe and South America. Some sent paper packets that spilled out mysterious seeds when Hosack opened them. Others sent wooden cases lined with earth in which seedlings grew—except when they arrived dead, casualties of the ocean voyage.

  Even as he accumulated these plants from around the world, however, most of Hosack’s own continent lay tantalizingly beyond the reach of his eager pen. He knew from the works of naturalists like John and William Bartram that the native peoples of North America were adept in the use of medicinal plants, and he suspected—just as Franklin had, half a century earlier—that there must be thousands of species unknown to European settlers. In his recent public lecture at Columbia, Hosack had spoken of his dream of amassing and studying the native plants of North America. But he was a doctor, not an explorer. Privately, he was forming another plan. In Philadelphia, his mentor Benjamin Rush had just been meeting with a young captain named Meriwether Lewis. At President Jefferson’s request, Rush was helping Lewis prepare for a journey across the continent.

  This wasn’t the first expedition Jefferson had backed. In 1793, he had helped the American Philosophical Society organize a western expedition for André Michaux, but then Jefferson himself had accidentally sabotaged it by involving the French minister to the United States, Edmond-Charles Genêt, who wanted to use Michaux as a French spy. Michaux’s expedition was abandoned. Then, in 1802, Jefferson read an account of a recent British expedition to the Pacific Northwest that made him more anxious than ever to secure a route to the Pacific Ocean for the United States—preferably an all-water route via rivers and lakes, for ease of future travel and transport.

  This time, Jefferson placed an American in charge of his expedition, which would be called the Corps of Discovery: Meriwether Lewis, who as a young man had lobbied Jefferson unsuccessfully to allow him to join what had become André Michaux’s aborted trip in 1793. Since those days, Lewis had risen to the rank of captain in the United States Army before moving to Washington in April 1801 to take up a post as Jefferson’s personal secretary. The two men lived and worked side by side in the cavernous President’s House. Lewis worshiped Jefferson, telling a friend how thrilled he was to be serving a man “whose virtue and talents I have ever adored, and always conceived second to none.” For his part, Jefferson began to feel certain that Lewis was the right man to assemble a corps of explorers bound for the Pacific, and also to oversee the complicated preparations for their expedition.

  So it was that in the fall of 1802, the days became a blur of maps, treatises, debates, meetings, and errands, as Lewis and Jefferson tried to prepare for a voyage whose precise route and duration were unpredictable. They knew that Lewis would depart with his team from St. Louis and travel up the Missouri River to the villages of the Mandan people in what is today North Dakota. After that, the map went blank. They could only speculate about the hardships, the threats, and the friends and foes Lewis and his men might encounter. Lewis did his best to calculate which items to purchase and in what quantities, and how to pack them for transport on the boats—or on the backs of his horses and his men, should an all-water route prove elusive. They would need enormous stores of food, of course, and weapons, ammunition, camp supplies, and gifts for the native peoples he and his men would meet as they floated along the Missouri and hunted on its banks. He also stockpiled pens, ink, pencils, and paper, because Jefferson wanted him to describe and draw the animal, vegetable, and mineral curiosities he encountered on the voyage. They agreed that Lewis would bring back what specimens he could manage to preserve and carry, so that Jefferson and his fellow naturalists back east could see for themselves at least some of the treasures of the American West.

  Although Lewis had learned a good deal about agriculture while managing his family’s Virginia plantation, he had little to no formal training in botany. Jefferson, by contrast, had amassed a very considerable stock of botanical knowledge over his decades as a devoted gardener and scholar of natural history. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, written twenty years earlier, he had reflected at erudite length on the medicinal, edible, ornamental, and commercially useful plants of his state. Of the pecan nut, for example, Jefferson had written, “Were I to venture to describe this, speaking of the fruit from memory, and of the leaf from plants of two years growth, I should specify it as the Juglans alba, foliolis lanceolatis, acuminatis, serratis, tomentosis, fructu minore, ovato, compresso, vix insculpto, dulci, putamine, tenerrimo. It grows on the Illinois, Wabash, Ohio, and Mississippi.” Now, in the halls of the President’s House and the gardens of Monticello, Jefferson taught Lewis the fundamentals of Linnaeus’s succinct system of naming and classification, and he urged him to keep careful track on his travels of “the dates at which particular plants put forth or lose their flower, or leaf.”

  In May 1803, Jefferson sent Lewis to Philadelphia for advanced scientific study with members of the American Philosophical Society. It would likely have surprised Jefferson to learn that New York was home to one of the finest young Linnaean botanists in the United States; at any rate, Philadelphia’s concentration of scientific expertise across all fields was unmatched. Jefferson directed Lewis to Benjamin Smith Barton, who had just published the nation’s first botany textbook. Barton further acquainted Lewis with botanical nomenclature and showed him how to prepare and label plant and animal specimens. As they talked, Barton became so excited about the expedition that he invited himself along, although at the last minute he changed his mind and stayed home. He was a sickly man and not at all cut out for a wilderness trek. But between them, Barton and Jefferson produced a fine botanist in Lewis.

  Rush met with Lewis to give him medical advice on how to treat fever and other ailments. He also sold him six hundred of his purgative “Thunderclapper” pills (which contained mercury) and hundreds of doses of various other medications. Rush gave Lewis a list of questions about the medical and cultural practices of native peoples and implored him to keep track of what he learned. Finally, before leaving Philadelphia, Lewis sought out another doctor whom Jefferson had recommended: Caspar Wistar, Hosack’s brother-in-law. Wistar was a professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania, but he was also the country’s leading expert on fossils. He and Jefferson enjoyed an affectionate friendship anchored in their shared fascination with the fossil evidence of the continent’s extinct—or perhaps simply undiscovered?—creatures. In January 1802, Wistar had sent Jefferson a minute description of the mastodon that Peale had just put on display at his museum, to which Jefferson replied with his own reflections on what Peale had recently told him about the condition of the skeleton. It was Wistar, in fact, who had alerted Jefferson to the publication of the British Pacific expeditionary account, thus spurring the president to organize the American expedition led by Lewis. When Lewis met with Wistar in May 1803, they discussed fossils and mastodons.

  By late June, Lewis had settled on a fellow officer for the expedition: William Clark, a trusted old US Army friend. In a great stroke of luck, Jefferson received word in early July of Livingston’s and Monroe’s successful conclusion of the Louisiana Purchase in France, which meant that for a good stretch of their journey westward, Lewis and Clark would be traversing territory newly in the possession of the United
States. After several more months of advance work, Lewis finally met up with Clark in the Indiana Territory in October. They traveled together to St. Louis and wintered there with their men. On May 22, 1804, they all pushed off in their canoes, bound for the Pacific Ocean. Two volumes on Linnaean botany, stowed in Lewis’s luggage, went floating along the Missouri with them. In Washington, Jefferson began the long wait for news and specimens, as did Barton, Rush, Wistar, and the other members of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. In New York, Hosack was waiting, too.

  Chapter 8

  “H—K IS ENOUGH, AND EVEN THAT UNNECESSARY”

  IN MAY 1804, A LIVE OSTRICH LANDED ON MANHATTAN ISLAND. It was a young male more than six feet tall, with enormous eyes, long lashes, and taloned legs that might kill a man with one kick. An émigré Frenchman named Monsieur Delacoste (his first name has not survived) had gone to great expense to procure the ostrich from Africa. He was displaying it at 38 William Street. For a small fee, New Yorkers could inspect the ostrich, which could itself probably inspect some uncomfortably familiar feathers swaying on the hats of wealthier ladies.

  The ostrich exhibit was part of a bigger plan. Delacoste was founding the city’s first scientific museum of natural history. Aside from the ostrich, his animal specimens were dead and stuffed, but many had shock value nonetheless. They were alien creatures hinting of wild lands far from the tame island of Manhattan: a jaguar, a seven-foot-long viper, a toucan, an anteater, a three-toed sloth with its baby. Like Peale, however, Delacoste was a completist when it came to collecting from nature and was therefore displaying items such as a “hair-ball found in the stomach of an Ox.” As committed to plants as to animals, Delacoste had assembled exotic botanical specimens most New Yorkers had never seen before—banana, cacao, guava, papaya, and dozens more. Perhaps it took a Hosack to delight in the extensive collection of varieties of wood.

  Hosack warmly welcomed Delacoste’s initiative. In London, Hosack had frequented the Leverian Museum, a breathtaking private collection of animals, plants, and gemstones. Thus far, the closest thing the United States boasted was Peale’s Museum, but with Delacoste’s help New Yorkers could now dream of surpassing Philadelphia in natural history. On June 4, along with two Columbia colleagues, Hosack signed an open letter in support of Delacoste’s museum, the Cabinet of Natural History. “We cheerfully express our approbation of the establishment which you contemplate,” they wrote. “It is the first institution of this nature which has been established in this city.” Delacoste paid for the letter to run regularly in the local papers for weeks to come.

  FOR THE MOMENT, HOWEVER, Peale’s reputation as the premier American curator was as tightly intact as a sealed display case. In fact, the day Hosack and his colleagues signed the Delacoste letter in New York, Peale was attending a jolly meal in Washington with President Jefferson and the world’s greatest explorer. Baron Alexander von Humboldt was the very model of the dashing adventurer—brilliant, vivacious, handsome, and rich. He was thirty-four years old, two weeks younger than Hosack. After five years exploring South America, the celebrated Prussian naturalist had arrived in Philadelphia in May 1804 with two friends in tow: a handsome young man from Quito (in today’s Ecuador) named Carlos Montúfar and a French botanist named Aimé Bonpland. The men quickly made the acquaintance of Hosack’s brother-in-law, Caspar Wistar, and they also found their way to Peale’s Museum.

  Peale was smitten. Humboldt was “without exception the most extraordinary traveller” he had ever met. The man could hold forth with ease in multiple languages on astronomy, botany, mineralogy, natural history, philosophy, and more. Peale struggled to find adequate praise for his new friend: “He is the fountain of knowledge which flows in copious streams—to drop this metaphor to take another, he is a great luminary defusing light on every branch of science.” Peale went with Humboldt to Washington to meet Jefferson. They left Philadelphia on May 29, and as the stagecoach bounced south Humboldt entertained Peale, Bonpland, and Montúfar in rapid-fire, heavily accented English, Spanish, and French. He told Peale about a miraculous warmth-inducing plant that saved men’s lives in the snow-capped South American mountains (later Peale could not recall the plant’s name). “The native Indians when traveling and benighted, take the leaves and make a bed & covering themselves with some bowes [boughs] they sleep comfortably warm amidst the Snows.”

  Peale was excited to take Humboldt up to the cupola of the grand new Capitol in Washington, where they could look out over the growing city. When they met with President Jefferson, Peale gave him a novel gadget that he had lugged along on the stagecoach. This was a polygraph, invented by a business partner of Peale’s named John Hawkins. A person holding a pen attached to this contraption could write out a document while another pen moved in concert, thus producing a faithful copy. Peale had been collaborating with Hawkins on improving its mechanics, and he now presented Jefferson with the new prototype. The president loved it. “I only lament that it had not been invented 30 years sooner,” he wrote Peale afterward.

  A few days later, the party of travelers gathered at the White House for dinner. Jefferson and Humboldt traded stories about their explorations of natural history and human cultures. The president had dispatched the Corps of Discovery into the North American continent only weeks earlier. As Lewis and Clark were paddling their canoes away from the only civilization they knew, the returned explorer leaned over Jefferson’s table and described the miraculous sights he had seen in South America—electric eels, steaming volcanoes, ancient monuments with intricate calendars carved into their surfaces, and more. Peale was delighted that the dinner guests offered a toast not to party politics but to natural history.

  The next night Peale and his party joined Secretary of State Madison and his wife, Dolley, for a “sumtious” dinner paired with wonderful wines. During the meal Peale’s dentures broke, so while Humboldt entranced the Madisons with his stories, Peale raced to a gunsmith and got them repaired. He was back at the table in less than half an hour. Rattled by the mishap, he took to keeping a spare set in his pocket and often “changed my Teeth while at Table without the Company Observing what I was about by holding a handkerchief before my mouth.” He was under the impression that the process looked to other people like he was simply “picking something from my teeth that might be troublesome.”

  After dinner, Humboldt came to Peale’s room to report that he had been conversing privately with Jefferson about the museum. Humboldt said he had asked why the federal government hadn’t purchased Peale’s collection yet; in Europe, such institutions were funded by the state. According to Humboldt, Jefferson had said “it was his ardent wish.” Peale was over the moon that a naturalist of Humboldt’s stature had been privately lobbying the president on his behalf. When they returned to Philadelphia on June 21, Peale felt that the three weeks they had spent together had passed as quickly as three days. Humboldt began to plan a trip to New York. Peale felt tempted to tag along.

  HAMILTON’S NEW LANDSCAPES at the Grange were filling out beautifully. From Philadelphia, his friend Richard Peters had congratulated him on the estate. “I am glad you have this little Syren to seduce you from public Anxieties.” Peters also had a word of warning for Hamilton. “Make your little Farm your Plaything—but see that you have other Business, that you may afford to pay for the Rattle.” Hamilton’s law practice was humming, but he still managed to stay involved with the most mundane garden tasks. In October 1803, when the edge of autumn was tinting the hardwood forests of upstate New York, he had written to Eliza from the hamlet of Claverack, forty miles south of Albany, with detailed instructions for a new compost bed. It should “consist of 3 barrels full of the clay which I bought 6 barrels of black mould 2 waggon loads of the best clay on the Hill opposite the Quakers place this side of Mrs. Verplancks (the Gardener must go for it himself) and one waggon load of pure cow-dung.”

  Hamilton’s country refuge absorbed and delighted him. “You see I do not forget the Grange . . .
nor anyone that inhabits it,” he told Eliza. “Accept yourself my tenderest affection.” When he came home from his trips, the house rang with laughter. Hamilton’s son James later recalled that his “gentle nature rendered his house a most joyous one to his children and friends.” The handsome, vivacious father sat beside his delicate daughter Angelica at the piano, accompanying her while she sang. As early summer 1804 enveloped Manhattan in clouds of greenery, Hamilton savored peaceful days at the Grange with his family. He invited friends to dine and dance at the mansion, and as he held court on his piazza, he was silhouetted against “the distant outlines of the variegated landscape of hill & dale, oceans & rivers,” one of his sons would later recall. These were, his son wrote, “the last sunny days.” On June 27, 1804, Aaron Burr challenged Alexander Hamilton to a duel.

  The angry exchange of letters leading to the challenge had begun ten days earlier, after Burr learned that Hamilton had criticized him at an Albany dinner party held in March. At the time of the party, Burr had been running for governor of New York against Morgan Lewis, and the conversation that night turned to politics. According to a dinner guest named Charles Cooper, Hamilton had spoken scathingly of Burr. Cooper, challenged publicly by Hamilton’s father-in-law, Philip Schuyler, to back up his claims, protested in print that he could “detail to you a still more despicable opinion which General Hamilton has expressed of Mr. Burr.” By early summer, Burr had seen the Cooper allegations for himself, and on June 18 he asked his friend William P. Van Ness to deliver a copy to Hamilton, along with a personal note in which Burr demanded “a prompt and unqualified acknowledgment or denial” of Cooper’s claim about Hamilton’s abusive remarks. The exact content of those remarks remained murky to those who had not been at the dinner party. Over the next week and a half, Hamilton and Burr traded letters via Van Ness and a lawyer close to Hamilton, Nathaniel Pendleton. Pendleton also had strong ties to Hosack. Hosack’s younger brother William had joined Pendleton’s law practice at 62 William Street by 1803, and in August of that year they announced that they would be moving their offices to 65 Broadway—in other words, to Hosack’s townhouse.* Pendleton and Van Ness raced back and forth trying to stave off a duel, but Hamilton refused to confirm or deny the allegations.