After their wedding in December 1797, Hosack and Mary settled into a townhouse at 65 Broadway, on the most fashionable street in the city. Members of the powerful Livingston clan lived both next door and across the way. Dr. Bayley lived at 44 Broadway, Dr. Charlton at 34 Broadway, and the Hamiltons at 26 Broadway. Hosack’s medical practice was thriving, and Mary may have brought still more money to the marriage. Their new household soon included servants, a coachman, horses, and at least one milk cow.
Their household also included enslaved people.
Hosack had grown up with slaves. When the first-ever United States census counted the members of Hosack’s father’s household in 1790, the latter had owned two of the city’s approximately two thousand enslaved men and women. Some of the most powerful men in New York were agitating to end slavery, but Hosack seems not to have joined these efforts, in spite of the fact that he counted antislavery advocates among his friends and knew Rush’s strong opinions on the issue. As a physician, naturalist, and civic leader, Hosack would spend most of his life racing ahead of his fellow Americans, but when it came to slavery, he apparently lacked compassion and imagination. The 1800 census, conducted three years after his marriage to Mary, shows he had five enslaved people in his household at 65 Broadway; as of 1810, he would still have one. Like other botanical and horticultural enthusiasts of the early Republic—including Washington, Jefferson, and Madison—Hosack may have put enslaved people to work in his garden. No record survives of whether or not he did so.
ON A WARM, CLEAR EVENING in the middle of September 1798, Elihu Hubbard Smith called in at 65 Broadway to check on the Hosacks. Mary was pregnant with her first child, and just when Hosack should have been marshaling his energies and his medical skills to make sure she didn’t die in childbirth as Kitty had, he had fallen seriously ill with yellow fever.
All over the city, New Yorkers were again feeling fatigued and feverish. Dozens had died in the previous three weeks. Smith felt so listless he could barely bring himself to go out. His eyes and nose gushed with what felt like “perpetual tears, & perpetual drizzling,” and his nights were “tormented with musquitoes & incongruous dreams.” For weeks, the papers had maintained a conspiratorial silence about the insistent signs that yellow fever had returned to New York. Then they had turned to ridicule. “Our country friends,” the New-York Gazette had written in late August, are claiming the city is so eerily empty that “the grass is three feet high in the streets.” These naïve alarmists, the paper said, had all but recommended that the authorities burn the whole city down and “then introduce the North [Hudson] and East River through the Streets” to flush out the fever. Yet many New Yorkers had in fact already hastened up the Boston Post Road into the countryside, and frightened farmers no longer dared to bring their produce to the city’s markets. Thomas Greenleaf, the editor of Greenleaf’s New York Journal, complained that he was having a terrible time getting his paper published, because four of his apprentices had fled. “These boys are hereby charged to return immediately,” he warned in his paper. “If they do not do it, we shall . . .”—here he trailed off ominously.
Greenleaf died ten days later, on September 14, the day that Smith stopped in to see the Hosacks. On September 18, Charles Willson Peale’s son Titian died, having been in town while his father painted portraits of well-to-do New Yorkers. Peale was inconsolable, confessing to a friend almost a year later that he was still crying such “floods of tears” he feared that “this cankerworm, Grief, will prey on my Vitals, and shorten my days.” (In true Peale fashion, Titian’s brother Rembrandt wrote a poem about him, while his brother Raphaelle painted a miniature of him in watercolor on ivory.) Hosack’s friend Elihu Hubbard Smith died the day after Titian. A few days later, the Common Council finally acknowledged the fever’s return with a series of emergency measures, including an increase in the number of city watchmen to protect deserted properties from robbers.
Until Hosack contracted the fever himself, he had been ministering to his wealthier patients in their homes and to the poor at the hospital and the almshouse. Just as he had done during the 1795 fever season, he was again shying away from inflicting mercury and bleeding on his patients. Hosack noted that some doctors thought of mercury as the “Sampson of the materia medica” for its great purgative power, but he was doubtful about the claim. “In the yellow fever it has truly proved a Sampson, for I verily believe it has slain its thousands.” Instead of mercury, therefore, Hosack prescribed milder purgatives such as castor oil, magnesia, and his favorite of all, Eupatorium perfoliatum, a plant that grew wild on the island of Manhattan. Local country people called the plant boneset, and they often drank a potent infusion made from its stem and leaves to provoke vomiting, an effect thought to be salutary in calming a fevered body. Hosack was using it for his yellow-fever patients with good results, and above all without the poisonous aftereffects of mercury.
In mid-September, after weeks of exhausting clinical rounds, the symptoms of the fever finally invaded Hosack’s own body: chills, aching muscles, the sickly yellow tint to the skin. Although he was right in thinking that yellow fever was not domestic in origin, he also still thought, incorrectly, that it was contagious and that he might infect Mary and her unborn baby. He made himself choke down bitter infusions of boneset until he vomited, and then he wrapped himself in blankets and sipped milder herb teas made from catmint, sage, and snakeroot, until he felt sure he had sweated out the fever. A few blocks away on Broad Street, Samuel Bard was following the same regimen. When Bard had first learned of the epidemic, he had been at his Hyde Park estate and had rushed down to the city to lend help, but soon he, too, had contracted yellow fever. He dispatched a pitiful letter to his wife, “without whose aid I can neither bear sorrow nor sickness.” When she arrived from Hyde Park at the Broad Street house, she reportedly found her husband lying on a sofa nearly unconscious, his skin yellow. Now Bard, like Hosack, was spending his days wrapped in heated blankets and swallowing infusions of boneset. Both men made complete recoveries.
Hosack emerged from the 1798 epidemic more certain than ever that New York and the nation desperately needed a botanical garden. If a humble native plant like boneset could prove its merit over mercury, he was convinced that other medicinal remedies were every minute being “trodden under foot as unworthy of regard.” Although he and Bard had survived the epidemic and managed to save at least some of their patients, hundreds of other New Yorkers had perished for lack of adequate clinical care and medicines.
As cooler weather arrived, the number of fever deaths waned. Mary was safely delivered of a baby boy in October. They named him Samuel Bard Hosack and commenced the vigil over his delicate infancy. Thirteen months later, in November 1799, Mary sent a fretful letter to her foster sister, Catharine Wistar Bache, in Philadelphia. “My little boy has not been very well for a few days,” she wrote, praying that his indisposition was simply a side effect of teething. Elsewhere in Philadelphia, Charles Willson Peale and his wife had just welcomed a baby boy over whom they, too, would be watching with anxiety. They named him Titian, for his dead brother.*
Alexander and Eliza Hamilton also celebrated the birth of a child that fall, a daughter whom they called Eliza. Unlike Hosack and Peale, Hamilton had not seen any of his children perish, but Philip’s brush with death in the fall of 1797 had been a frightening reminder of the constant threat. Even the most robust of men could be swiftly felled by illness. Three weeks after Eliza’s birth, Hamilton’s mentor and friend George Washington succumbed to a throat infection he had contracted after inspecting his Mount Vernon estate in wintry weather. He died after his doctors had bled him half-dry. “It is our painful duty, first to announce to our Country and the world, the death of their illustrious benefactor,” wrote the Alexandria Times two days later. As Washington’s body was prepared for burial in the family crypt at Mount Vernon, the newspapers began weeks of somber adieux and odes. “From Vernon’s Mount behold the HERO rise! Resplendent forms attend him thro�
� the skies!”†
In New York during the week immediately following Washington’s death, the air echoed daily with the tolling of the city’s church bells, muffled to sound mournful. On December 31, Hamilton, Hosack, and hundreds of other New Yorkers joined a memorial procession through lower Manhattan to St. Paul’s Chapel on Broadway. The focal point of the parade was a symbolic, empty coffin surmounted by a four-foot sculpture of an American eagle with “extended but drooping wings.” The coffin was carried by a group of Revolutionary War veterans, among them the incumbent mayor of New York, Richard Varick. The procession moved up Broadway between crowds of hushed onlookers as cannon were fired on the Battery.
Of all the disconsolate New Yorkers who turned out that day to honor the departed president, none grieved more than Alexander Hamilton. “My imagination is gloomy, my heart sad.”
AT EVERY TURN, Hosack saw premature death, fever, imperiled infancies—and still the Columbia trustees left him without the funds he needed to begin on the botanical garden. Columbia was struggling financially, with the state capital having moved to Albany in 1797 and the legislature’s annual grant to the college terminated. More than two years had passed since the trustees had greeted Hosack’s proposal with enthusiasm, but their finances had not permitted them to make good on their promise. Early in 1800, he finally gave up on Columbia and turned to his old college friend DeWitt Clinton, who had gone to work after graduation for his uncle, Governor George Clinton. When the latter had decided not to run for reelection in 1795, DeWitt Clinton had gone back to Columbia briefly to indulge his passion for natural history, studying chemistry and zoology with Samuel Latham Mitchill, and botany with Columbia’s newest professor—his friend Hosack.
More recently, however, Clinton had begun to make a name for himself in city and state politics. After marrying a wealthy and beautiful young woman named Maria Franklin in 1796, he was elected first to the State Assembly and then, in 1798, to the State Senate. Even as Clinton’s political fortunes rose, he retained his firm conviction that government should offer unstinting support to scientific inquiry. When he opened Hosack’s letter in Albany in February 1800, therefore, he was predisposed to find the contents intriguing. Did Clinton not agree, Hosack asked, that New York should have the honor of founding the first botanical garden in the new United States? The garden would be a powerful weapon against what Hosack called the “formidable and dangerous diseases” that plagued the nation each year, and it would also facilitate the introduction of useful new agricultural crops. Hosack told Clinton he had just submitted a written appeal to the legislature to fund his garden and was hoping that Clinton would “cheerfully lend your exertions in its favor.”
As it happened, DeWitt Clinton never got the chance to rise to his feet, stretch himself to his considerable height, and urge his fellow senators to fund the proposed garden, because Hosack’s petition was routed to the lower legislative house—the State Assembly. Nevertheless, Hosack’s idea for a garden grabbed legislative attention on its own merits, and a committee of three assemblymen recommended to their colleagues that he receive the funds he sought. So Hosack had done well to turn from Columbia to the state legislature. Now he would simply need to wait for a bill to be introduced and the money to be appropriated.
DeWitt Clinton, Hosack’s closest friend, as an elder statesman
Then, nothing. In the crush of a thousand matters from every county upstate and down, the assemblymen dropped the topic. The machinery of the state ground on. No further attention was paid to Hosack or his garden, and soon all eyes were on the impending end of President Adams’s first term. With New York State’s electoral votes likely to play a decisive role in the upcoming national election, Hamilton and Burr worked to shore up their respective political positions. Burr, hoping to improve the chances of a strong Democratic-Republican showing, forged a sweeping alliance with the Clintons and the Livingstons. On the evening of April 17, 1800, members of this coalition gathered at a house on William Street and agreed on a slate of candidates for the State Assembly that included George Clinton and Brockholst Livingston. They also endorsed Samuel Latham Mitchill, Hosack’s Columbia colleague, as their candidate for New York City’s congressional seat. Hamilton had seen his own slate of Federalist candidates approved at a meeting two nights earlier. Over the next ten days or so, Burr and Hamilton and their supporters hurried around town trying to mobilize voters. In the newspapers and in the streets, the two sides hurled insults back and forth. Federalists cautioned that a Republican victory would result in a Jefferson presidency—in other words, a complete catastrophe, since “Mr. Jefferson, and of course Jacobins at large, wish to destroy the Constitution of the United States.” Democratic-Republicans, meanwhile, piously urged all citizens to report Federalists for any instances of bribery or fraud, a directive that struck one Federalist as about as fair as “a prostitute revil[ing] an honest woman as a w——.”
The elections at the end of April proved an unmitigated triumph for Burr and a humiliation for Hamilton, an outcome at least partially attributable to the end of the French Revolution, long a useful scaremongering weapon for the Federalists. The Democratic-Republicans took every single State Assembly seat, and their congressional candidate, Mitchill, would be going to Washington. Everyone knew that in the upcoming presidential election Jefferson would be the most powerful Democratic-Republican, and now Burr’s resounding success in New York put him in the running for the presidency as well. Meanwhile, Hamilton was lobbying hard for his friend Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina to get a place on the Federalist ticket alongside President Adams, with whom Hamilton was at increasingly bitter odds that summer.
In August, Hamilton brought his frenzy of political activity to a standstill just long enough to transact some personal business. He was planning to create a quiet retreat for his family—away from the city and its fevers, yellow and political alike—and he now purchased a piece of land toward the northern end of Manhattan, past the village of Harlem. On a rolling spread of thirty-five acres, the architect John McComb Jr. began designing an elegant mansion for Hamilton.
That fall, the presidential election resulted in an electoral-college tie between Jefferson and Burr. With his friend Pinckney out of the running, Hamilton threw his support behind his longtime rival Jefferson, regarding Burr as a slippery character who was “wicked enough to scruple nothing.” It took until February 1801, and thirty-six rounds of balloting in the House of Representatives, before Jefferson was named the victor. Burr would become vice president, knowing full well that Hamilton had blocked his path to the presidency. On March 4, 1801, Jefferson donned a simple suit and walked from his boardinghouse to the Capitol for his inauguration. For Hosack, who played his political opinions so close to the vest, the most significant fact about the contest between Burr and Jefferson was that it had featured two powerful Americans who adored botany and horticulture. Now one of them was president.
* Bartram’s beautiful house and garden can still be visited today.
† Burr ended up not buying the estate, but he would move there thirty years later after marrying Eliza Jumel, a widow whose late husband had bought the estate in 1810. Today it is open to the public and is known as the Morris-Jumel Mansion.
‡ It was not until 1900 that United States Army Major Walter Reed and colleagues would prove through experiments conducted in Cuba that yellow fever was carried by the Aedes aegypti mosquito.
§ The second Titian would grow up, almost inevitably, to be an extraordinary painter and naturalist, and eventually a pioneer in the nascent art of photography.
¶ There were botanical tributes, too; Hosack would describe to a visiting Scottish botanist named David Douglas a “very delicious” plum whose color lay “somewhat between cream and sulphur.” Douglas noted in his diary that the plum was named for President Washington—as “every product in the United States that is great or good is called.”
Chapter 6
“DOCTOR, I DESPAIR”
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ALTHOUGH HOSACK HAD SPARED HAMILTON THE LOSS OF HIS son, once again he was unable to spare himself. Two-year-old Samuel Bard Hosack died of scarlet fever on March 22, 1801. He was the third child Hosack had lost in less than a decade. The only mercy was that Samuel’s death had not utterly emptied the house of children, because Mary had given birth to a girl—also called Mary—a year earlier. But it was still a terrible blow, and Hosack seemed raw and irritable that spring. Not long after Samuel’s death, he lashed out at a fellow naturalist, Charles Willson Peale—a man grappling with his own share of paternal sorrow after the death of his son Titian from yellow fever.
The spat between Hosack and Peale was ignited by news that had arrived from upstate New York the previous fall. A farmer near the town of Newburgh had discovered the buried bones of “an animal of uncommon magnitude.” When word of the find made its way south, the new president of the United States was among the happiest of all Americans. Since the 1780s, Jefferson had been on a near-constant lookout for physical proof to counter European claims of New World “degeneracy.” During his time as minister in Paris, he had spent untold hours trying to procure a giant moose carcass from correspondents back home. Even after he had managed to do so, European naturalists continued to belittle North American fauna, including its humans, as smaller and weaker. The discovery of giant bones in upstate New York might now lend the United States powerful new scientific ammunition.
American Eden Page 13