American Eden

by Victoria Johnson

  Hosack never mentioned Elgin by name, but everyone knew what he was driving at—and not just Mitchill, Gentle, Clement Clarke Moore, and all the other members who had had direct dealings with the garden. Elgin was so famous among New Yorkers that this advertisement had been running that very summer in the New-York Evening Post:

  Sea-bathing and Public Entertainment. Coney Island House, lately erected . . . is this day opened for the reception of company. . . . The merchant, the man of business, and all who are exposed to the debilitating effects of a hot summer’s day in New York, will find a tonic in sea bathing, and even in the sea air, which they may look for in vain among the drugs and medicines of the shops, the medical herbs and plants of the celebrated Elgin Garden, or the Materia Medica of the schools.

  Now, before this huge audience of plant-loving New Yorkers, including many of the most powerful men in town, the indefatigable Hosack laid out his vision once again. The New-York Horticultural Society, he said, needed a parcel of land ample enough to grow fruit trees, vegetables, medicinal plants, and plants useful in manufacturing. For the purpose of “exciting the attention of our youth of both sexes to botanical inquiries, and of contributing to the beauty and elegance of the establishment,” Hosack said, the horticultural society would need a vast collection of native and exotic plants. They would also need a conservatory, a library, a lecture hall, an herbarium, and a professor of drawing to teach plant illustration. New Yorkers enjoyed unparalleled access to the nation’s naval and commercial networks, Hosack pointed out, so in short order they could easily obtain plants from all over the world.

  Astonishingly, Hosack’s dream for Elgin remained undimmed. It burned even brighter, in fact, when he thought about the Erie Canal, which was opening the way to thrilling new American landscapes. “The secrets of nature are yet to be unfolded,” he told the audience. “Her hidden treasures, her countless varieties, and her unnumbered beauties are yet to be presented.”

  Hosack sat down, and Sykes’s staff bustled around the room, serving a lavish dinner. Later, after the plates had been cleared, guests began proposing toasts—to the late Sir Joseph Banks, to Sir James Edward Smith, to André Thouin at the Jardin des Plantes, to the three living ex-presidents of the United States. On and on they went. John Francis gave a toast to “Adam, who watered the first plant, and Eve, who plucked the first fruit.” James Edward Smith Hosack raised a glass to “Liberty—a plant indigenous to no soil—it flourishes wherever assiduously cultivated.” All the while, Hosack sat at the head table beneath an arbor made of flowers, looking like the president of the republic of botany.

  He plunged into his new plans for the horticultural society. At the next meeting, he nominated Lafayette, Delile, Michaux, and Thouin for honorary membership; a few weeks later, he wrote to Madison and Jefferson about their recent election as honorary members. Both former presidents wrote kind replies to Hosack, although Jefferson’s struck a wistful note: “I love the act, but age has taken from me the power of proving it by any services.” With all these nominations of eminent Americans and Europeans, Hosack was cannily linking the New-York Horticultural Society to the reputations of the greatest political and scientific figures of the day. Now he would try to get Elgin back.

  * Today this organization is called the Royal Horticultural Society.

  † Hosack thus predated by two centuries the city’s “Million Trees NYC” project, completed in 2015.

  Chapter 16

  “EXPULSION FROM THE GARDEN OF EDEN”

  ON FEBRUARY 26, 1825, HOSACK WALKED INTO GRACE CHURCH, at the corner of Broadway and Rector Street, leaving the noisy chaos of horsecarts and carriages behind him. He was about to marry again.

  His bride was Magdalena Coster, the widow of Henry Coster, one of the ten men who had lent Hosack money while he waited for payment from the Elgin lottery. Hosack had lost two wives and three children over the previous three decades. He now had four boys and three girls who were motherless. Magdalena Coster had seven children who were fatherless, and she had welcomed the marriage proposal from the sociable doctor who ministered to so many New Yorkers. As the congratulations poured in—Washington Irving even wrote from Paris—Hosack moved into the Coster townhouse on Chambers Street, along with most of his children. (His second-oldest son, Alexander, was studying medicine in Britain.) Hosack and Magdalena were soon presiding together over large family dinners. Their children sat in an alternating pattern around the table: Hosack, Coster, Hosack, Coster.

  Hosack was now fifty-five years old, but he still struck his friends as youthful and energetic. An American writer named Anne Royall met Hosack the winter he and Magdalena were married and found him attractive: “His complexion is dark, his hair and eyes of the deepest black; his face is oval, with a high retreating forehead, of the finest polish.” Hosack, she noted, was “manly and dignified” but also “affable and engaging.” Royall admired his devotion to natural history. “He ranks amongst the first of great men” and was “one of the greatest botanists of the age; to his labor and indefatigable industry may be ascribed the success of that study in New-York.” Royall also met Samuel Latham Mitchill that winter, and she thought that by comparison Hosack seemed “quite a young man,” although Mitchill was only five years older.

  Soon after the wedding, Princeton College commissioned a portrait of Hosack from Rembrandt Peale. The college had awarded Hosack an honorary degree in 1818 and wished to display his picture. Hosack was so busy these days, however, that Peale had trouble corralling him for sittings. He joked to a Princeton professor that Hosack “seemed disposed at first to think that I should create his Portrait chiefly by an effort of genius, rather than submit to the imprisonment of my room.” Peale eventually prevailed. In the finished portrait, Hosack looks confident and alert, his face framed by graying sideburns but crowned with the familiar black waves. Hosack was pleased enough with Peale’s work to hire the best gilder in New York to make a frame at his own expense.

  He could now indulge in such luxuries. Henry Coster had died a wealthy man, and Magdalena had brought his land and assets to her new marriage. A few weeks after the wedding, the newspapers reported with astonishment that a parcel on William Street belonging to the Coster estate had just sold for $93,000—the equivalent of more than $2 million today. Flush with funds for the first time in his life, Hosack began hosting glittering parties with Magdalena that quickly became the most fashionable social events in New York. After an evening at their townhouse, guests went home and wrote breathless letters and journal entries describing the packed library, salon, game room, and dining room. Silk curtains hung at the windows, Brussels carpets covered the floors, and glass chandeliers hung from the ceilings. There were paintings and sculptures everywhere, including a bust of Hamilton. Hosack was the consummate host. He circulated happily among his guests, who included Clinton, Francis, Mitchill, Pintard, the painters Asher Brown Durand and Thomas Cole, the writer James Fenimore Cooper, and many other old and new friends.

  He seemed to know all New York. An acquaintance observed that as he stood talking with Hosack on Wall Street one morning an “incredible” number of people greeted him—nearly everyone who passed. Hosack now tapped this vast network for the Chambers Street soirées. When the American writer William Cullen Bryant attended one night, he found “a crowd of literary men—citizens & strangers—in fine apartments splendidly furnished—hung with pictures.” Another distinguished guest described a party he attended at the Chambers Street townhouse as “one of the most brilliant assemblies I have ever witnessed.” Hosack and Magdalena served a sumptuous late-night supper that “embraced every available delicacy.” The “wines were of the best quality, [the] conversation animated.”

  At the Hosacks’ parties, European aristocrats mingled with American merchants, judges, doctors, writers, and artists. Around the time of Hosack’s marriage, he had befriended Prince Charles Bonaparte, a nephew of Napoleon who was in the United States studying ornithology. Hosack praised the young princ
e to Sir James Edward Smith as “zealously devoted to science”—their favorite kind of man. Another French nobleman who enjoyed Hosack’s hospitality was Alexis de Tocqueville, who spent six weeks in New York during his 1831 tour of the United States with his friend Gustave de Beaumont. A German duke who attended a party at the Chambers Street townhouse wrote in his journal that the “very famous” Hosack was a “learned and pleasing man” whose recent marriage was rumored to have brought him an annual income of $50,000 (more than a million dollars today).

  Magdalena had also brought Hosack his first country house. In 1805, the Dutch-born Henry Coster had built a mansion on a piece of land overlooking the East River at Kip’s Bay, about three miles northeast of the Chambers Street townhouse. All around the Coster mansion, flower gardens and groves of trees ornamented the grounds so beautifully that a later resident described the estate as a “remnant of paradise.” (Today this land is around Thirtieth Street.) Hosack began spending summers on the Kip’s Bay estate with Magdalena and the children, while also keeping up with his patients and attending meetings in town. Although his idyllic new situation in no way quelled his longing to wrest control of Elgin from Columbia, he was finally surrounded by plants again and could resume some of his botanical work. The first summer after his marriage, he contributed twelve bunches of white muscadine grapes from the Kip’s Bay estate to the annual banquet of the New-York Horticultural Society.

  HOSACK MISSED WORKING among his Elgin collections, but eight months after his wedding to Magdalena, he brightened at the possibility of thousands of novel specimens flowing to New York—a development he owed in large part to his friend Clinton. The Erie Canal was finished. It had taken eight years, but by dint of political will, brilliant engineering, and hard labor, New York had carved out a watery path approximately three hundred fifty miles long. Goods, crops, settlers, and soldiers could now glide on mule-drawn barges between the Atlantic Ocean and the Western states.

  By eight in the morning on November 4, 1825, all of New York seemed to be jammed into the park at the Battery, where the canal celebrations would begin with a boat procession from the East River to the edge of the ocean. It was a perfect autumn day, the air so still that the water reflected the lines and colors of the boats, as if they were floating on a lake rather than in a harbor bordering the choppy Atlantic. Bands played rousing tunes on the decks of vessels bearing the names of political heroes and historic events. Inevitably, the lead steamboat was called the Washington; she was followed by the Fulton, the Chancellor Livingston, and the Constitution, among others. But the sixteenth boat in the procession bore a different kind of name: Linnaeus—as clear a sign as any that Hosack’s circle was excited about the completion of the canal. The opening of the Western route held the promise of new species of plants and animals, just as the journey of Lewis and Clark had done two decades earlier. The flotilla moved away from Manhattan toward the edge of the Atlantic, where Clinton—governor once again—poured water from Lake Erie into the ocean and spoke a few words to mark the occasion.

  An estimated one hundred thousand spectators lined the city streets that day—an impressive showing, given that the most recent United States census, taken five years earlier, had put New York’s population at around 124,000, about twice that of Philadelphia. Just before eleven o’clock, four trumpeters on horseback set off from the Battery, with the parade’s Grand Marshal and his four aides riding behind them, serenaded by a band. Then came the main body of the parade. The New-York Horticultural Society held the signal honor of walking at the head of more than six thousand members of the city’s professions and occupations. It was a vivid testament to Hosack’s influence as well as to New Yorkers’ newly keen interest in their flora. Each member of the horticultural society wore a sprig of flowers pinned to his left breast. Some of them had woven garlands around their hats. The men marched up Greenwich Street carrying a banner of blue silk that symbolized the sky; an embroidered sun spread its rays over a lush landscape filled with trees, cascading waters, and ripening fruit.

  The men walked for hours, leading the procession on a circuit around a city that had in recent years spread so far north as to swallow the village of Greenwich. That night, more than two thousand candles and lamps lit up the façade of City Hall, and pillars of fireworks rocketed skyward from its rooftop. The most magical moment arrived when some of the rockets rained down “brilliant sparks in the form of a willow decorated with stars,” while others “resembled the poplar, each being accompanied with showers of gold and silver rain.” A forest of light was growing atop City Hall. Three miles north, the night obscured Hosack’s ruined garden.

  DEWITT CLINTON’S CANAL TRIUMPH signaled that the post-Revolutionary generation—Hosack’s generation—was confidently taking the reins from the nation’s elder statesmen. The deaths of Jefferson and Adams on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, sharpened the impression of a solemn passage. Hosack, who had so admired Jefferson’s dedication to botany, sent condolences to his family on behalf of the New-York Historical Society.

  It may well have been this sense of old figures fading and new possibilities emerging that spurred Hosack to visit Washington that same year. Magdalena accompanied him on a trip combining visits to friends with scientific business. A letter Hosack wrote to John Francis from the road suggests his intention was to sound out the possibility of congressional support for Elgin. In Washington, Hosack met with some of the men involved in the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of the Arts and Sciences, a society organized in 1816 in large part by Dr. Edward Cutbush, a former student of Benjamin Rush with whom Hosack had overlapped in his Philadelphia days. Another moving spirit in the Columbian Institute was Thomas Law, Hosack’s old acquaintance from the Mohawk voyage. In 1820, with the blessing of Congress and President Monroe, the institute had secured five acres at the boggy bottom of Capitol Hill for the creation of a botanical garden, although little progress had been made on the collections by the time Hosack visited in 1826. This benevolence may have encouraged Hosack to dream of securing federal funds to regain and restore Elgin. His Washington friends, however, had no interest in jeopardizing their own source of support, and they were quick to disabuse Hosack of the idea that Congress might take responsibility for New York projects.

  Before leaving town, Hosack and Magdalena paid a visit to President and Mrs. John Quincy Adams and also went to the Capitol to hear Senator Martin Van Buren of New York give a speech. Then they went to see Mount Vernon and pay their respects to George Washington’s memory. On their way back to New York, Hosack and Magdalena stopped to see friends in Philadelphia. Here Hosack paused in his social rounds long enough to send an update to John Francis in New York: “In Philadelphia we have seen everybody and everything.” They visited the Rush family, toured the ingenious waterworks on the Schuylkill River, and went out to The Woodlands—which was no longer in the glorious state of William Hamilton’s days but still lovely.

  All around Hosack on this trip was the bittersweet sense of long lives well lived, in the service of natural history, the arts, and the nation itself. Not only the towering Washington and Jefferson, but also men such as Rush, McMahon, and the Bartrams. His old friend Peale was still around and still painting the occasional portrait, but he was now in his mideighties and no longer running his museum, having placed it in the hands of his sons Rubens, Rembrandt, and Titian. As usual, the museum was not doing well financially, and Peale was spending a good deal of time in New York, making and selling false teeth on the strength of long personal success with his own set. A widower once again, he was also trying to court Mary Stansbury, a single woman in her fifties who taught at the New-York Deaf and Dumb Asylum (an institution that Hosack’s nephew John Eddy had helped found). Having no wife, Peale wrote in his diary, made him feel “like a fish out of water.”

  In May 1826, while on one of his New York visits, Peale was knocked to the ground by a horsecart near City Hall. Hosack happened to be riding
by and helped the old man into his carriage. Peale insisted to Hosack that he was absolutely fine, but his trips to New York were beginning to take their toll, as did Mary Stansbury’s eventual rejection. In February 1827, a grueling stagecoach journey back to Philadelphia left Peale bedridden with exhaustion and chest pains. Looking back at his life, he mused to Rubens, “Happiness is certinly a common Plant but the cultivation of it requires no little skill.” It was during this illness that Peale suddenly became so frightened for his life that he hammered on the bedroom floor with his cane to rouse his children. They summoned a doctor, who bled him. He lingered a few weeks, then died on February 22.

  Peale didn’t live long enough to learn of the bequest of James Smithson, a wealthy British naturalist who died little more than two years later, in 1829. In a sign of admiration for the American democratic experiment, Smithson had left instructions for the money to be used “to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” President Andrew Jackson sent Benjamin Rush’s son Richard to London to sail back with Smithson’s bequest, and in the autumn of 1838 Rush arrived in New York Harbor on a ship that carried more than a hundred thousand gold sovereigns. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Smithsonian Institution would fulfill Peale’s eighteenth-century dream of “a great National Museum” for the United States.