American Eden

by Victoria Johnson

  Lewis took McMahon’s advice and met with Pursh, and within a month he had hired him to produce drawings and descriptions of the expedition’s specimens. Pursh was in botanical heaven. He suddenly had in front of him around one hundred fifty specimens from across the North American continent, only about a dozen of which he had ever before encountered. Among the specimens were plants whose names today honor the explorers who had set out in May 1804—for example, Lewisia rediviva (bitterroot), Linum lewisii (Lewis flax), and Clarkia pulchella (ragged robin). Another of the expedition’s finds, a plant called antelope bitterbrush, today honors Pursh himself with the name Purshia tridentata.

  All through 1807 and into 1808, Pursh sat with seeds, sprigs, and roots spread out around him, choosing the best angles for sketching the Lewis and Clark specimens and the right words to describe them. But he kept running into obstacles. People found Pursh warm, brilliant, and cheerful—the naturalist Benjamin Silliman described him some years later as “frank and generous” and “full of fire, point, and energy”—but he also seems to have been an alcoholic. In April 1806, Barton wrote to his brother in the Shenandoah Valley to say that Pursh was on his way to botanize there, “if he dont die drunk on the way.”

  Barton himself posed another obstacle—he was a cranky perfectionist and also had chronic health problems that slowed most of his projects to a glacial pace. Finally, there was Lewis. In February 1807, Jefferson had nominated Lewis to be governor of the Louisiana Territory—who knew the region better?—but the appointment was to prove a terrible distraction to the work of getting the expedition volumes done and published. After Lewis left Philadelphia to take up his post, Pursh found it impossible to make steady progress on his plant descriptions. He kept running into questions he needed to ask Lewis about the specimens he was supposed to be cataloguing.

  McMahon soon saw that Pursh was growing unhappy, and he fired off a volley of anxious letters to Lewis and Jefferson asking when Lewis would be returning to Philadelphia to help with the plants. Pursh, however, began yearning for a more secure position somewhere. He thought he might inquire at Dr. Hosack’s garden in New York.

  * The New-York Historical Society still holds an annual strawberry festival, which some historians have suggested may be a legacy of Hosack’s strawberry festivals at Elgin.

  Chapter 11

  “STRANGE NOISES, LOW SPIRITS”

  HOSACK’S ENTHUSIASM FOR NEW YORK WAS INFECTIOUS. MARY, his Philadelphia-born wife, had come to adore her adopted city. In April 1807 she wrote her foster sister, Catharine Wistar Bache, “I feel so much interested in everything that concerns New York, that I shall not be surprised to hear you ask where I was born.” Catharine and her daughters were about to pay a visit to the Hosacks, and Mary told Catharine that she was excited about showing them around. She proposed a sea-bathing excursion, and she also wanted them to see the paintings and sculptures at the Academy of Fine Arts, “as well as a great many other things which I think will be gratifying to you.”

  Mary belonged to a circle of New York women who were as devoted to improving New York as their husbands were. She was the secretary of the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children, which was run by Susan Pendleton and Maria Clinton. Eliza Hamilton had recently helped this society to found the city’s first orphanage, which she codirected. (An organizational descendant of this orphanage is still in existence today.) These energetic and compassionate women were helping turn New York into a proper metropolis—not merely the country’s chief commercial port, but a hotbed of philanthropy as well.

  Observing all this activity, Hosack’s friend Samuel Latham Mitchill had decided New York deserved a guidebook, so he had just written one himself. He called it The Picture of New-York and published it in April 1807, the same month Mary wrote Catharine about her upcoming visit. It laid out all the city had to offer—its banks, markets, insurance companies, parks, theater, library, schools, colleges, newspapers, bookshops, and more than thirty fraternal and benevolent institutions. It also sketched itineraries that crisscrossed the Manhattan countryside to the north of the city. Mitchill advised visitors to stop at a “picturesque and romantic spot” on the East River where “porpoises are often seen sporting among the foam and eddies,” although he noted that the lobster population wasn’t what it had once been. He thought this stretch of the East River was best viewed from near Archibald Gracie’s mansion, designed in 1799 by Mangin and McComb, the duo who had gone on to design the new City Hall, still under construction in the park.* Mitchill suggested longer tours to scenic locales on Long Island such as Cobble Hill, Jamaica, Rockaway, and Islip, and also to New Jersey. The road to Newark—“one of the most beautiful and thriving villages in the United States”—was flanked by meadows covered in native species “with which the florist and botanist will be delighted.” In the late summer and early autumn, Mitchill wrote, “the andromeda and hibiscus on each side of the road are sometimes very frequent and beautiful.”

  Mitchill, Hosack, and their friends were serious about their work on behalf of New York’s national and international reputation, but a young lawyer on Wall Street was watching them with amusement. Washington Irving, together with his brother William and William’s brother-in-law, had just launched a literary magazine that made fun of these ambitious New Yorkers and their dreams of greatness. It was in these pages that Irving first applied the name Gotham to New York City and the name Gothamites to its inhabitants, borrowing from an old English legend about a town named Gotham whose citizens acted like fools on purpose to avoid taxation. Irving and his friends found it entertaining that men with no proven literary or artistic talent gathered to pass judgment on cultural works. They lambasted Mitchill’s Picture of New-York in a takedown also targeting the Academy of Fine Arts, whose statues were in temporary storage in the old City Hall basement, a “poor place for the gods and goddesses—after Olympus.” Irving was working on a full-length satire of Mitchill’s Picture of New-York, which he would publish in 1809 under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker, thus giving New Yorkers another of their most enduring nicknames.

  Irving and his friends could make fun of men like Hosack, but it was thanks largely to the latter and his circle that Europeans were starting to take New York more seriously in science and culture. The decision of the French imperial botanist Alire Raffeneau Delile to pursue his study of plants and medicine in New York was a clear indication of this change. Delile had stayed in town specifically to study with Hosack at Columbia and Elgin. In early May 1807, he completed his medical degree with his thesis on medical botany and the treatment of consumption. He dedicated the work to Hosack, for “devoting the earnings of your profession to the establishment of a Botanic Garden, which being the first that has been instituted in the United States, does you infinite honour.” Five days later Delile sent a copy of his thesis to Jefferson, along with a piece on Egyptian plants he had written while sailing home from Egypt to France. Delile informed Jefferson he would be returning to France by order of the emperor to work on the Egyptian natural history volumes. He included his current address for Jefferson—“at Dr. Hosack’s, N.Y.”—and the president replied within two weeks, telling Delile that “the objects which will employ [him] on his return to Paris will be some indemnification for the short stay he makes with us.”

  Hosack was very proud to call Napoleon’s botanist his student and friend. But it bothered him that Delile was one of only two students who received a Columbia medical degree in 1807. The city needed more doctors, yet the top medical school in New York had never managed to recover its pre-Revolution stature and was now graduating just one or two students most years—and some years none. By Hosack’s estimate, around sixty had graduated from the medical school in Philadelphia in 1807. Columbia was a hidebound kind of place, moldering away in its antiquated hall. So Hosack was pleased to learn that year that his Columbia colleague Nicholas Romayne, with whom Hosack himself had studied chemistry in 1790, was launching a new medical school that w
ould surely take a botanical garden more seriously than Columbia had. As Delile was finishing his thesis that spring, Hosack joined the campaign to secure a state charter for the new school. Samuel Bard and Mitchill were both involved, as was Hosack’s younger brother Alexander, who was now a doctor, too. Dozens of physicians attended organizational meetings and signed petitions lobbying for a school charter. The groundswell was tremendous, the future of medicine clear: uniform statewide standards and increased clinical specialization.

  On March 12, 1807, Governor Morgan Lewis signed a charter creating a new College of Physicians and Surgeons. Gratifyingly for Hosack, the charter pointed out the necessity of a botanical garden for medical students. To help fill the ranks of the faculty while the new college was getting itself organized, he signed up as a professor of botany and materia medica and as a lecturer in surgery and midwifery. But he still held his position at Columbia. He needed the money, for his family and to pay his men at the garden. In June, Hosack also had Andrew Gentle place a notice in the Commercial Advertiser. “ELGIN BOTANIC GARDEN,” it read. “Our citizens are now informed that they can be supplied with Medicinal Herbs and Plants, and a large assortment of Green and Hot House Plants, &c—Application to be made at the Garden.”

  MITCHILL WAS SENDING SEEDS and plants from Washington to Elgin. He may have been a busy senator, but he still found time for natural history. In the fall of 1807, he wrote his wife to say that the explorer Zebulon Pike had recently brought a pair of young “grisly Bears” from the Rio Grande as a present for the president. It was now “quite the style to visit the Bears after the manner of going to see the Lions in the Tower at London.” But they were already starting to outgrow their cage, and Jefferson decided they should move to more suitable quarters. He sent them to Charles Willson Peale, who added them to the little zoo at his museum. The grizzlies quickly drew fascinated crowds, but after one of them ripped off the arm of a monkey and escaped into the family’s kitchen, Peale shot it. Not long afterward, the second bear went the way of the first, and he stuffed and mounted their bodies for display in the museum.

  Jefferson had more pressing matters than grizzly bears to deal with that autumn. Tensions with the British were on the rise. The previous year, in the spring of 1806, a British cannonball had spilled American blood in New York Harbor. HMS Leander had been sailing off Sandy Hook in search of Royal Navy deserters when she encountered an American sloop named the Richard. According to the Richard’s captain, Jesse Pierce, who swore a deposition before Mayor Clinton the next day, it had been around five in the evening of the twenty-fifth when the Leander fired three shots in his direction. The third shot decapitated his brother John, who was at the Richard’s helm. John Pierce’s corpse was brought ashore and displayed at the Tontine Coffee House. New Yorkers were so rattled by the attack, Clinton observed, that “even the news of the death of Washington did not produce a more solemn effect” than the “electrical shock” of Pierce’s murder.

  The Leander incident had underscored just how vulnerable New York City was to a full-scale invasion—an event many New Yorkers feared was imminent, given the rapidly deteriorating relations between the United States and Great Britain. Suddenly Fort Jay, which had been erected on Governors Island while Hosack was in London, seemed like a flimsy defense against a fleet of British frigates. Men flocked to join the existing US Army regiments, while additional ones were quickly organized. Hosack signed up as a surgeon with the Sixth Regiment. Some of the men who practiced drills on the Parade Ground—located north of the city, on the way to Elgin—had, like Hosack, been born in the colonies and could remember the first great struggle against the British. As for the younger men, they were preparing for battle against a foreign menace that threatened the only nation they had ever known. In the summer of 1807, a British warship chasing Royal Navy deserters fired on the American frigate Chesapeake in the waters near Norfolk, Virginia, killing three of her crew and wounding eighteen. By December Jefferson was asking Congress to pass a drastic measure to protect American ships and goods from the depredations of the British: a ban on the departure of all ships from American ports.

  The Embargo Act went into effect on December 22, 1807. It quickly knocked the wind out of New York City. Exports came to a near halt early in 1808, with imports also plummeting. In April, an English visitor was shocked by how desolate the city looked: “Not a box, bale, cask, barrel, or package, was to be seen upon the wharfs.” Hosack was lucky. He had amassed the core of his Elgin collections well before the embargo. It would now be nearly impossible to ship specimens to his botanical correspondents and thus also unreasonable to expect to receive shipments in exchange. Yet even as the embargo threatened to sever Elgin from the world, Hosack realized he could turn it to his advantage. For the previous six years, he had labored to create a local source for foreign plant-based medicines and a clearinghouse for known native medicinals. He and his students were also trying to identify new native substitutes for foreign medicines. Now, with imports dried up, Hosack looked prescient. His work at Elgin seemed more urgent than ever, and it wasn’t only his medicinal plants that mattered. Hosack had assembled hundreds of agricultural specimens at Elgin, among them species of oats, barley, wheat, rice, sorghum, and sunflowers. He also had dozens of grasses and clovers that were valuable for feeding livestock or restoring exhausted soil.

  Hosack saw yet another advantage as he walked the Elgin grounds. “Our embargo,” Jefferson wrote Lafayette, “has produced one very happy, and permanent effect. It has set us all on domestic manufacture, and will I verily believe reduce our future demands on England fully one half.” Elgin was bursting with plants indispensable to the manufacture of clothes, furniture, and houses. For weaving Hosack had cotton (Gossypium herbaceum) from the West Indies and flax (Linum usitatissimum) from Europe. For dyeing finished cloth he had native plants such as bastard indigo (Amorpha fruticosa). From Europe, he had dyers’ chamomile (Anthemis tinctoria); from Egypt, safflower (Carthamus tinctorius). For making baskets he had European basket willow (Salix viminalis). For candles he had candleberry myrtle (Myrica cerifera), a Southern shrub whose boiled berries produce wax. Among his trees were dozens of species useful in the construction of furniture and houses—and ships, should the nation’s shipyards ever come back to life. Hosack thought he ought to be able to convince the State of New York to buy the garden and make it a public establishment. Then it would have been worth it—all the years of toil and expense, the scores of letters written, the horses worn out going up and down the Middle Road. Hadn’t he labored all along not for his own glory but for the public good? He would bestow upon the people of New York a scientific institution worthy of any great city in Europe.

  In the meantime, however, he needed more money. Hosack now applied for the vacant professorship of surgery and midwifery at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. His qualifications were impeccable, and he would earn more than from his current post as a mere lecturer in surgery and midwifery. But then he heard a rumor that Nicholas Romayne planned to snub him. In February 1808, Hosack drafted an irate letter. “I will not be neglected,” he warned Romayne. “If so, I have only to remark, that I abandon the Institution in toto. I do not choose to be Botanist, or Midwife to it, if unaccompanied with a more respectable appointment.” Romayne appointed Mitchill instead. Hosack resigned from the College of Physicians and Surgeons and went back to Columbia.

  He confided in DeWitt Clinton about his woes—he was beginning to fear he would have to abandon the garden. Only a rich man could finance such an ambitious project with his own money for years on end. Clinton knew Elgin intimately from his many conversations with Hosack and from his own walks and picnics there. He now lobbied other powerful New Yorkers on Hosack’s behalf, declaring it “mortifying” that Elgin might collapse for lack of public support. In April 1808 Hosack submitted an appeal to the State Assembly asking the government to buy Elgin. A committee was formed, and its members reported back two days later that they believed the garden
was “highly honourable” to Hosack and a boon to New York. But the legislative session was almost over. They recommended that Hosack try again the next year.

  On June 22 Hosack wrote a generous, wistful letter to John Warren, a doctor in Boston who was working with William Peck to build the new Cambridge Botanic Garden. “I anticipate a great medical school at Boston,” Hosack told Warren. “I hope you will immediately proceed to complete your botanical establishment in such manner as will . . . bear honourable testimony of that liberality which has been manifested by the people of Boston upon this as upon all other subjects which call for public spirit.” Hosack made a rash pledge to Warren. “I shall gladly part with my collection if the state of New York remains inactive another season.”

  He dropped the pretense of good cheer completely a few days later in a slump-shouldered letter to a Pennsylvania doctor named William Darlington. Darlington had recently brought a collection of seeds and specimens all the way back from the Calcutta Botanic Garden and had then kindly directed some to Elgin. Now Hosack sent him an appreciative note. He included a copy of the Elgin catalogue, in case Darlington wanted to request any plants in exchange. “I wish every gentleman in similar pursuits with yourself would follow your example,” Hosack sighed. “We should in a short time have no occasion to resort to the Botanic Gardens and Museums of Nat. History in foreign countries for our instruction upon these subjects.” Hosack confided to Darlington his hopes that the state would buy Elgin from him. “But in that expectation I have been disappointed.”

  ON JUNE 23, 1808, the day after Hosack wrote to John Warren, Mary gave birth to another healthy daughter. They named her Eliza Bard Hosack, after one of Samuel Bard’s daughters. Eliza was their fifth child, not counting the deceased Samuel Bard Hosack. There were also Mary, James, Alexander, and a boy born in December 1806 whom they had named Nathaniel Pendleton Hosack, for Hosack’s comrade at the Hamilton–Burr duel.