Hail to great Hosack—triple Doctor thou!
Of Law and Physic erst—of Sacred Letters now!
Thrice hail to Clinton—greater Doctor still!
Who wields the State—as Hosack wields the pill!
This section of the ceremony was “to conclude with a grand CRASH,” and now two generals would come forward—one of them Attorney General Cadwallader D. Colden—to attach epaulettes to Hosack’s robed shoulders and put the “hat worn by Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo” on his head. Hosack would be knighted, a band would play martial tunes, “and punch shall be handed to the ladies.” William P. Van Ness, accompanied by six other New Yorkers from old Dutch families whose names began with Van, would come up and present the scepter of the New-York Historical Society—the “gold-headed cane of Rip Van Dam” (a real-life eighteenth-century governor of New York). Finally, Hosack would give an inaugural address on “the comparative merits of the two patron Saints of the Institution,” Santa Claus and DeWitt Clinton. (The New-York Historical Society had for years celebrated St. Nicholas Day on December 6 in honor of the city’s Dutch origins.)
Hosack saw Verplanck’s satire in January along with everyone else, but John Pintard soon wrote Clinton in Albany to report that Hosack was shrugging off the attack. Clinton replied, “I am glad to find that our friend the Dr. feels himself above the little satire of literary buffoons. I am sure that they render nobody ridiculous but themselves.” On February 8, in the lavish meeting room of the New-York Historical Society, Hosack was installed as its fourth president. He spent most of his prepared remarks that day exhorting the assembled members to keep gathering every possible artifact relating to the history of the state and the nation. Hosack pointed out that in the course of human history whole civilizations had come and gone, their existence known to later peoples only through their material effects, especially their coins and medals. Coins and medals didn’t disintegrate like paper—or, for that matter, like plant specimens. “The march of nations is before us,” Hosack warned, “and the gloomy night of darkness and ignorance that obscures their paths, to the eyes of posterity, may one day envelope our own, however bright the sun of civilization may now beam upon us.” Even great republics like the United States were not invincible.
A few months later, Hosack proved he was a good sport about the satirical pamphlet by presiding over the election of Alexander von Humboldt to honorary membership in the New-York Historical Society.
SIR JOSEPH BANKS, the only possible rival to Humboldt’s scientific fame, died the following month in London. Until shortly before his death, Banks was still sending Hosack interesting new books from London, and the two men were exchanging letters about mutual friends and botany. In 1817, Hosack had been elected one of the first foreign members of the Horticultural Society of London, of which Banks had been a founder.* The following year, Hosack had shipped the Horticultural Society of London eighteen trees of an American pear species whose fruit he explained was “admitted by all, to be one of the most exquisitely and highly flavoured we possess.” Hosack’s specimens were distributed to nurserymen around London, and in 1819 the Horticultural Society awarded Hosack a gold medal for introducing the Seckel pear to Britain.
Banks died just as the guard was starting to change in Hosack’s New York circle as well. In the summer of 1821, Samuel Bard’s wife of fifty years passed away, and Bard, who was already very ill, didn’t last a full day without her in the world. Not long before this Bard had confided to Mitchill that he knew “he had become a weak and crazy vessel, and could not hold together much longer.” Of Hosack’s old mentors—Bard, Rush, Curtis, Banks, and Sir James Edward Smith—only Smith was still alive.
Hosack’s world was shifting on its foundations. Even the island around him was disappearing as the grid of avenues and cross streets rolled northward from the former edge of the city. In the summer of 1818, laborers had begun laying a road—the Ninth Avenue—through Clement Clarke Moore’s Chelsea estate. Moore was livid, and not only about the loss of his fruit orchard. He and many other New Yorkers were watching in helpless fury as the island’s lovely hills were sliced away and its green valleys filled up with dirt—all to make the city more convenient for commercial traffic. Moore published a pamphlet blasting the city officials in charge of the grid as men “who would have cut down the seven hills of Rome.” Some people’s houses were suddenly submerged in earth, while others now dangled in the air above a low new street bed. Along the edges of burial grounds, exposed coffins stuck out like rows of rotting teeth. Moore worried that as the earthworks disrupted the natural courses of the island’s streams, the risk of fever epidemics would rise, and he reproduced in his pamphlet a letter from Hosack praising the underground sewer system of Philadelphia for its public health benefits.
All the uncertainty about what Manhattan’s landscape would look like from one day to the next began to creep into Columbia’s attitudes toward the Elgin property. The trustees had been thinking about selling the land and using the proceeds to pay off some of the college’s debt, but in the chaos unleashed by the new streets and avenues, they suspected that a sale wouldn’t “bring more than six or seven thousand dollars.” They decided to hold on to their property a bit longer. Hosack, meanwhile, was still waiting for his chance. He continued to collect seeds and specimens in anticipation of the moment he could plant them at the garden. From Monticello, Jefferson continued to forward shipments he received from the Jardin des Plantes. As the rain came pelting through the shattered roof of the one remaining hothouse, Hosack kept hammering home the importance of plants to human health and happiness whenever and wherever he could. In the fall of 1820, to a captive audience of medical students, he gave a lecture arguing that the city’s polluted air and water could be purified through a citywide campaign to plant forest trees. He particularly recommended plane trees, horse chestnuts, elms, lindens, black walnuts, and catalpas.† Up the new Fifth Avenue, his magnificent arboretum was being torn out and transferred to the Bloomingdale insane asylum.
Yet as Hosack brooded over the destruction of the garden, he was discovering more and more kindred spirits in the growing city. In 1818, a group of local seedsmen and gardeners—Andrew Gentle among them—had begun gathering informally to share ideas about horticulture over drinks at a hotel on Broadway. They were soon joined by some of their wealthy employers—gentlemen with country estates who loved rearranging meadows and forests whenever they could flee their affairs in the city. Hosack had no country house, but when he officially joined the New-York Horticultural Society in 1822, he brought a more comprehensive knowledge of the world’s flora than any other member. He also brought his genius for organizing and his access to a global network of plantsmen. In return, he found a congenial group of men who liked nothing better than clustering around a tavern table to marvel at such horticultural curiosities as “three heads of Celery measured 20 inches in length” or the seeds of “chocklate corn” sent in by Cadwallader D. Colden.
As word of these gatherings spread, the membership rolls grew longer. It was an unusual kind of society for New York, where gardeners and shopkeepers could hobnob with men like John Jacob Astor’s son William—whom Hosack himself put up for membership. Some of the humbler members later acknowledged their gratitude to Hosack for inviting them into his house to meet with his distinguished scientific friends and for letting them browse his peerless botanical and horticultural library whenever they wanted. One of the society’s most active nurserymen, Michael Floy, expressed his appreciation by naming a camellia for Hosack: Camellia hosackia. With Hosack involved, the New-York Horticultural Society quickly grew the customary organizational carapace—charter, constitution, bylaws—and began meeting at the New-York Institution. Before long, the society started a journal called The New-York Farmer, and Horticultural Repository, which they packed with reviews of botany and horticulture books and answers to such practical questions as “What is the simplest, cheapest, and most sightly mode of guarding single trees
planted in parks or lawns from the depredations of deer or other animals?”
Hosack connected the New-York Horticultural Society with the Horticultural Society of London. The latter enthusiastically embraced the idea of a transatlantic exchange by sending over a botanist—a Scot named David Douglas. As he sailed into New York Harbor in early August 1823 after a difficult Atlantic crossing, Douglas was enchanted by the natural beauty of the city’s setting. “This morning can never be effaced,” he recorded in his journal. He saw “the fine orchards of Long Island on the one side, and the variety of soil and vegetation of Staten [Island] on the other. I once more thought myself happy.” That same day, Douglas visited Hosack and his student Torrey and found both men very welcoming. One week later, Douglas went up the Middle Road to see the famous Elgin Botanic Garden and was dismayed to find it “in ruins.” He noted that Hosack had chosen a wonderful site for the garden, with its hills, bottomlands, and soil variety, but he found the only remarkable specimens left were two Southern magnolia species (Magnolia cordata and Magnolia macrophylla). One hothouse was completely torn down. The other was a mere frame, all its glass panes gone. The grand central greenhouse was barely hanging together and contained no plants.
In addition to visiting Elgin, Douglas made several other botanical pilgrimages during his stay in the United States. He went to Philadelphia to see the late Bernard McMahon’s Upsal Botanic Garden and the Bartrams’ legendary garden, where he missed William Bartram by one month—the latter had died on July 22. Douglas next took a steamboat up the Hudson to botanize in the footsteps of Linnaeus’s student Pehr Kalm, but when he arrived in Albany on October 8, he found the place “all in an uproar.” Crowds packed the streets, church bells pealed, and cannon boomed from a hill outside town. Douglas had accidentally arrived on the day the first boat ever was scheduled to pass into the Erie Canal, a portion of which had recently been completed. A huge deputation from New York City had come up to celebrate. Douglas soon ran into Hosack, whose dear friend Clinton, though out of public office now, was the undisputed man of the hour. Even the inaugural canal barge was named the DeWitt Clinton.
Hosack was proud of Clinton, but it may well have nettled him that Mitchill had been awarded the second most prominent role in the festivities. Once the DeWitt Clinton had borne the canal commissioners past the crowds, Mitchill poured two bottles of water into the canal—one from the Atlantic Ocean and one from the Indian Ocean. Then he gave a speech in which he purported to speak for Neptune himself. The “Sovereign of the Deep” had sent “these samples of his saline element from the latitude of 36 degrees South, and from 40 degrees North.” He informed the crowd that a mingling of waters was the way the Doge of Venice annually celebrated the marriage of the city to the Adriatic Sea. Then the chemistry professor in Mitchill won out over the poet, and he concluded by noting that a report on the chemical composition of the water would be filed along with the official documentation of the day’s proceedings.
Back in New York City after the canal celebrations, Douglas saw Hosack for breakfast almost daily. By the time Douglas left the United States that fall, he had decided that Hosack was his favorite American, the one who treated him with the most unflagging generosity and warmth. He was also impressed with Hosack’s work at the New-York Horticultural Society, which Douglas thought was in “a state of perfection.” By now, many men close to Hosack had joined, including his son James Edward Smith Hosack and his former student John Francis. Even the ubiquitous Mitchill was involved; around this time he sent Hosack a long letter on the question of whether Americans would ever be able to make good wine. (Mitchill was optimistic.) Absent from the membership rolls was the plant-loving Aaron Burr, who had settled permanently in New York but remained unwelcome in many organizations and drawing rooms, thanks both to the duel and to his subsequent political and romantic intrigues.
THE FOLLOWING SPRING, Hosack took out the family Bible and wrote a mournful inscription. “Mary Hosack died on the 19th day of April, 1824, after a long and painful illness which she sustained with pious resignation and that equanimity of mind which characterized her through life and endeared her to every member of her family and an extensive circle of friends.” She had left seven children behind—three girls and four boys. The oldest, Mary, was now a young woman of twenty-four, while the youngest, David, was just twelve. Jefferson wrote to Hosack from Monticello with his condolences. “On the subject of your recent affliction, experience in every bereavement which can rend the human heart has enabled me to sympathise sincerly with those who are suffering as I have suffered . . . time, silence & occupation are the only remedies. Of the last you have so much that much may be hoped from it’s salutary operation.”
Jefferson had been following Hosack’s career from Monticello. The previous October, when Jefferson’s son-in-law, Thomas Mann Randolph Jr., was planning a visit to New York City, Jefferson wrote to Hosack that Randolph “naturally wishes to be made known to some of it’s prominent characters, and to no one with more desire than to yourself.” In August 1824, three months after Jefferson’s condolence letter on Mary’s death, he wrote again from Monticello and noted in his letter that Hosack is “so justly esteemed there and here.” Still another letter had Jefferson assuring Hosack of “my sense of your eminence in useful science.”
Jefferson was right about Hosack’s response to grief—after Mary’s death, Hosack threw himself into his work again, especially at the historical society and the horticultural society. Late in the summer of 1824, Hosack was awarded a great honor on behalf of the entire New-York Institution. The Marquis de Lafayette, hero of both the American and the French Revolutions, sailed into New York Harbor in August to begin a tour of the United States with his son, George Washington Lafayette. Hosack was chosen to lead the two guests and a deputation of municipal officials from City Hall to the New-York Institution. When they entered the building, the New-York Historical Society rooms were filled with waiting men and women. They rose to their feet and bowed to Lafayette and his son as the two men walked with Hosack to the front of the society’s meeting room. Here, the newspapers reported, Lafayette was shown to a seat at Hosack’s side. Perhaps on this occasion Hosack ceded Marie Antoinette’s chair to his guest, a man who had known the queen personally and had helped restore order in Paris in the bloody days immediately following the storming of the Bastille.
Hosack spoke first, addressing his remarks to Lafayette. “I have the gratification to announce to you your election, as an honorary member of this institution.” Hosack reminded those present that the point of the society was to preserve the history of New York and the nation, especially the history of the great struggles that had given birth to the United States. “Every heart in this assembly throbs with inexpressible emotions at the sight of the hero who this day enters their hall.” Lafayette now rose to his feet and spoke to Hosack in accented English. “With the most lively gratitude I receive the honour which the Historical Society of New-York have conferred by electing me one of their members,” he said, going on to praise the citizens of the United States for showing the world how to create a stable democracy. Hosack bestowed a certificate of membership on George Washington Lafayette, and then he took the two guests on a tour of the Academy of Fine Arts and the Lyceum of Natural History. Afterward, Hosack climbed into a carriage with Lafayette and his son and rolled a short distance down Broadway to the City Hotel. Lafayette seems to have enjoyed meeting Hosack; in a letter he later wrote to Hosack from France, he called himself “your affectionate friend.”
After Lafayette and his son left town on their tour of the United States, Hosack refocused his attention on the New-York Horticultural Society. On August 24, 1824, one week after the Lafayettes’ visit, he nominated Adams, Jefferson, and Madison as honorary members of the horticultural society, and it was very likely Hosack who was also behind Sir James Edward Smith’s election as an honorary member. Then, on August 31, at the horticultural society’s annual dinner, Hosack was installed as its ne
w president. It was his fifty-fifth birthday. The ceremony was held at William Sykes’s new coffeehouse on William Street, where about a hundred members and their guests sat down to tables decorated with bouquets. Garlands of flowers festooned the walls all around them.
At three o’clock, Hosack stood up and looked out over the sea of faces. He had sailed into New York Harbor thirty years and five days earlier, with his head full of botany and with Linnaeus’s specimens in his luggage. Ever since, he had labored to share his passion for plants with his fellow Americans. He had built Elgin and introduced New Yorkers to species from every part of the globe. Drawing on his British education, he had taught pioneering remedies and procedures to a new generation of American doctors. He had done more than any other citizen of the United States to call into being a generation of professional botanists where there had been almost no one. All the while, he had been helping turn his city into a national treasure in the arts and sciences.
Hosack began speaking. Horticulture encompassed three great endeavours, he told the audience: the cultivation of edible plants, the cultivation of ornamental plants, and the art of landscaping. These were among the noblest and oldest of human pastimes. Had he more time, he would begin the story from the very beginning. “But even the charms that Milton has attached to the blissful abode of the first happy pair” would not prevent him, Hosack told his listeners, from getting to his main point. “It is obvious that a garden should be established in the vicinity of this city.”
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