Philadelphia rushed past New York to seize the opportunity. On June 5, 1801, Charles Willson Peale set out by stagecoach for the farm of John Masten, about seventy miles up the Hudson from New York City, near the Shawangunk Mountains. He hoped to find there the remains of a mastodon—known to Peale and his contemporaries as a mammoth. If he did, he might in one fell swoop strike a blow against degeneracy claims and stun the public with an utterly novel exhibit for his natural history museum in Philadelphia.
American stagecoaches, the French traveler Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville had observed in the 1780s, were “true political carriages” that could throw a congressman together with “the shoemaker who elected him.” When Peale climbed into the crowded coach, he found that on this trip politics would be taking the form of an obnoxious Englishman who passed the hours slandering President Jefferson and railing against Napoleon as a Corsican “boy” who should not be in charge of a country. Peale steamed in silence as he listened to the man “slobber his venum” and “pison the minds” of the other travelers. Finally he lost his temper, arguing with the Englishman most of the way to the next inn. The following day, Peale observed with satisfaction that the man was as silent and “sullen as any hog to this end of our Journey”—New York City. After a stop here with his wealthy in-laws to secure financial backing for his adventure, he arrived at the Masten farm in late June.
Peale immediately recognized the significance of the bones but tried to squelch his excitement and feign indifference. After successful negotiations, he bundled the available bones into hogshead barrels, making plans to return later in the summer to retrieve the rest of the bones from the swamp where they lay buried. He carted the barrels down the Hudson to New York City, where, as he wrote in his journal, the news of his booty “flew like wild fire.” Dozens of people crowded into his lodgings on his first night in town, hoping to see the bones. “Every body seemed rejoiced that the bones had fallen into my hands . . . with me they would be preserved, and saved to this Country.” Among the visitors were many prominent New Yorkers, including Vice President Burr.
Hosack was as curious as anyone else about Peale’s find. After inspecting the bones that evening, he invited Peale to dine with him the next day, but Peale arrived to find his host in a bad mood. Hosack failed even to greet him, snapping instead that he rued the day Peale had gotten hold of the bones. Peale was flabbergasted. Hosack was stricken with a potent bout of professional jealousy and regional pride. The bones, he told Peale, should not leave the state of New York. Peale defended himself hotly. “Do you know any man that would put these bones togather if they had them, but myself?” Hosack had to concede that he did not, but he remained deeply annoyed. Before leaving New York, Peale recounted the tense scene in a letter he sent to a friend in Newburgh, and he also confided it to his journal. Hosack was the only person in all of New York who had “uttered a contrary sentiment.” In a celebratory letter to President Jefferson the same day, Peale did not mention Hosack at all.
In August 1801, Peale traveled back up to Newburgh with his son Rembrandt, who helped him design a giant contraption to scoop water out of the morass as they dug for more bones. They enlisted local boys to run inside a huge wooden wheel that powered a system of ropes and buckets. With the help of two dozen men, the Peales retrieved as many of the remaining bones of the skeleton as possible and then moved to other bone sites to try to supplement the gaps. They ended up with nearly enough material to put together a second skeleton. Back in Philadelphia that fall, the Peales assembled the Masten mammoth—which was in fact a mastodon (Mammut americanum)—and also cobbled together the second skeleton out of the remaining bones and a set of wooden pieces that Rembrandt carved to mimic the missing parts. When Peale was ready to welcome visitors, he whipped up a hyperbolic handbill. “Ten thousand moons ago . . . a race of animals were in being, huge as the frowning Precipice, cruel as the bloody Panther, swift as the descending Eagle, and terrible as the Angel of the Night. The Pines crashed beneath their feet; and the Lake shrunk when they slaked their thirst.” The public ate it up, even at fifty cents a visit, double the price of regular entry to the rest of the museum. Peale made plans for his sons Rembrandt and Rubens to take the second skeleton on a European tour. They would sail from New York in the spring of 1802.
The Peales’ mastodon, drawn by Titian Peale
MEANWHILE, HOSACK STEWED. He had been waiting more than three years for someone with sufficient power and money to back his proposal for a botanical garden. After his testy exchange with Peale, he reached the end of his tether. It had been exquisitely painful watching New Yorkers fall over themselves to praise a Philadelphia naturalist for whisking their own scientific treasure out of the state. Would it be foolhardy of him, or simply enterprising, if he set out alone on his garden plans? Hosack decided on the latter. He felt certain that once his benighted fellow citizens understood what a botanical garden actually was, they would come to their senses and support him. For now, though, they could not seem to grasp what they had never seen for themselves.
He would need a suitable piece of land. He turned his attention to the frenzied Manhattan real estate market—booming for more than a decade, ever since the New York state legislature had passed a law in 1784 facilitating the sale of the vast spreads confiscated from hastily departed Loyalists to the British crown. Among the first properties that had been snapped up by speculators was a ninety-acre estate stretching from the Bowery all the way to the East River. It had once been home to James De Lancey, the exiled son of a former British lieutenant governor of New York.* On the west side of the island, too, the city was edging inexorably beyond its old border, toward the village of Greenwich and Burr’s Richmond Hill estate. The Common Council had hastened all this growth by laying down new streets and selling the Hudson riverfront to merchants who built new piers and markets. Enterprising landowners in the area sold off lots, built and rented out new houses, and moved their own families to the country, far from the scourge of city filth and yellow fever. Absentee landlords began their reign over the city’s shopkeepers and artisans.
Not everyone smiled upon these changes in the landscape. In the 1780s, Chancellor Robert R. Livingston had angrily called upon Mayor James Duane to “put a stop to your improvements (as they are falsely called) upon the north [Hudson] river.” Manhattan Island, Livingston predicted, “contains a sufficient quantity of ground for a much larger city than New York will ever be.” In the summer of 1801, though, the city did not yet extend much past Chambers Street. As Hosack rode north from 65 Broadway in search of property for sale, he passed the familiar landmarks of his busy days—Trinity Church, St. Paul’s, Columbia, then the almshouse, where he now worked part-time as a physician to the poor. A few blocks farther, he passed the New-York Hospital, and then he crossed the lovely stretch of land known as Lispenard’s Meadow. On its north side Hosack forded a creek and passed the towering, grass-tufted bluff New Yorkers called Bayard’s Mount. And then he rode off the city map.
Pastoral Manhattan. “Nothing is more magnificent than the situation of this town—between two majestic rivers, the north and the east,” Brissot had marveled in the 1780s. The deep forests of Manhattan had largely disappeared, but here and there the fields of crops were punctuated by little groves of woodland trees and shrubs. At the edges of the island, where fresh breezes and river views prevailed, lay the estates of wealthy New York families who maintained residences far from the dense, dirty web of city streets. As Hosack rode deeper into the countryside, Broadway became the Bloomingdale Road. From here he turned right onto the Boston Post Road, which shuttled him over to the origin point of a lane that ran up the spine of the island. This was the Middle Road. Farmhouses, barns, ponds, fields rolled past. Then he found what he was looking for, nestled among the surrounding farms.
The city government—the Corporation of the City of New York—owned the land. Hosack bought it in several parcels with his own money, beginning on September 1, 1801, the day after his t
hirty-second birthday.* That whole month was filled with glorious blue skies, and from a rocky bluff on the western edge of his new property, Hosack reveled in his sweeping views. When he turned and stood to look up the island, the East River lay to his right, with skinny Blackwell’s Island (today’s Roosevelt Island) pointing southwest toward the harbor and northeast toward Connecticut. Across the East River he could see “the fruitful fields of Long-Island,” while to his left lay the wide Hudson, dotted with the sloops and packet boats that carried politicians back and forth to Albany and farm produce down to the city. The cliffs known as the Palisades rose directly across the Hudson from where he stood. Atop them sat the village of Weehawken.
Hosack loved that he could see both rivers from his property, but it was the earth beneath his feet that thrilled him most: his Manhattan in miniature, with its glacial rocks, its green fields, its moist bottomlands. It was already home to some of the island’s native species, such as viburnum shrubs (Viburnum prunifolium) and hollow-leaved violets (Viola cucullata). The hills to the north were thick with mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia). Because Hosack’s new land already contained a variety of soils, it would be well suited for a garden where he planned to cultivate every single species he possibly could. Later on, after he had struggled to get all the rocks removed, he grumpily admitted that the tract had been “exceedingly rough” when he bought it.
Two weeks after Hosack purchased the first parcel of land, he received word that the brig Rambler had arrived from Edinburgh. He made his way down to the harbor in the brilliant late-summer sunshine, signed a bill of lading proffered by a port officer, and took possession of his goods—plants, or perhaps books? His library of medical and botanical volumes at 65 Broadway had been growing as rapidly as a coddled hothouse specimen. In 1794, the year he had returned to New York, he had taken out a subscription to Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, and he now owned every volume that Curtis had managed to publish before his death in 1799. Sometime in 1801, Samuel Bard asked Hosack if he could borrow these volumes of the Botanical Magazine, along with six volumes of James Edward Smith’s English Botany. Hosack kept careful track of these treasured tomes. It wasn’t only that they were written by his two most important British mentors—he needed to consult them as he planned his new garden. Bard returned them all before the year was out.
ON A CHILLY, OVERCAST AFTERNOON toward the end of November 1801, Alexander Hamilton appeared on the doorstep at 65 Broadway. He had learned that his son Philip had rowed across the Hudson to Paulus Hook to fight a duel, and he had rushed to fetch Hosack, who was in fact already on his way to help. Hamilton was so distraught that he reportedly fainted at Hosack’s house.
The affair had begun three nights earlier at the Park Theatre on Chatham (now Park) Row. Evenings at the Park Theatre, which seated two thousand, often treated audiences to a lengthy comedy or drama set off by music-infused one-acts and pantomimes. Among the theatergoers, as Washington Irving described them in a satirical piece the following year, were “the beaus of the present day, who meet here to lounge away an idle hour, and to play off their little impertinences for the entertainment of the public.” The advertisement in the Mercantile Advertiser for the performance of Friday, November 20, carried the usual warning that theatergoers were not to “carry a lighted Segar into any part of the Theatre, or to attempt to renew the dangerous practice of smoking, either in the Lobbies or the presence of the Audience.” That night, words alone proved combustible enough to set young men ablaze.
Nineteen-year-old Philip Hamilton was justifiably proud of his father and bristled at criticism of his policies as secretary of the treasury. In 1801, with Jefferson in the White House and local Republicans puffed up by their recent political gains, Philip had frequent chances to read attacks on Hamilton and his fellow Federalists and hear them verbally abused in person. One scathing treatment proved too provocative for him to ignore. In June 1801, the American Citizen and General Advertiser had announced that New York’s upcoming Fourth of July celebrations would feature a patriotic speech by “George I. Eacker, Esq., one of our Republican Young Men.” In his speech, Eacker lionized Jefferson as “the man of the people” and exulted over his election to the White House. He concluded by proclaiming that “no more shall personal virulence, disguised under the protecting mantle of Federalism, destroy the happiness of the persecuted patriot.” For months afterward, Philip boiled with indignation at Eacker’s many pointed attacks on his father’s politics. When he crossed paths with Eacker at the Park Theatre on the night of November 20, the two men exchanged angry words. Three days later, they faced each other down on a dueling ground directly across the Hudson from lower Manhattan. Dueling was illegal in both New York and New Jersey but less stringently prosecuted in New Jersey.
Eacker fired first, piercing Philip in his right side. Philip fired, then collapsed. Eacker was unharmed. Philip’s companions rowed him across the river and carried him to the home of his aunt and uncle, Angelica and John Barker Church. Meanwhile, Alexander Hamilton arrived at 65 Broadway too late to find Hosack—he had already gone to the Churches’ house. Four years after saving Philip from fever, Hosack now saw there was nothing he could do. First Alexander and then Eliza joined him at the bedside as Philip writhed in pain and delirium. Hosack later described the heartrending scene to another of Hamilton’s sons. “As soon as your Father ascertained the direction of the wound . . . and felt the pulse of your brother, he instantly turned from the bed, and taking me by the hand, which he pressed with all the agony of grief, he exclaimed in tones and manner that can never be effaced from my memory, ‘Doctor, I despair.’” Eliza and her husband lay down on the bed, one on each side of their son. Philip died the next morning.
Philip Hamilton
Alexander and Eliza Hamilton had lost the bright light of their lives. At the funeral, one mourner reported afterward to a friend, Hamilton “was with difficulty supported to the grave of his hopes!” On December 5, Hamilton’s friend Robert Troup wrote to Rufus King, the American ambassador to the British royal court, that “for twelve days past the city has been much agitated” over the duel. As friends and acquaintances in other cities learned of the loss, condolences poured in. From Philadelphia, Benjamin Rush sent a mournful letter to Hamilton, begging him to “permit a whole family to mingle their tears with yours upon the late distressing event. . . . You do not weep alone. Many, many tears have been Shed in our city upon your Account.” When Hamilton replied to Rush after a long delay, he conveyed the depth of his loss in simple, searing terms by asking for a copy of a letter Philip had written to the Rushes after a visit to their house. “You will easily imagine that every memorial of the goodness of his heart must be precious to me.” Hamilton closed his letter with thanks from Eliza, who “has drank deeply of the cup of sorrow.”
Hamilton struggled to regain his footing, but he eventually returned to the affairs of his law practice. His friend Troup observed in early December that “Hamilton is more composed and is able again to attend to business.” Grieving fathers had little choice.
Hosack, anguished but helpless, turned back to his teaching and his land. It was an awful practice, dueling. He strove to remain aloof from the vicious quarrels that his friends and acquaintances seemed to enter with such gusto. His medical experience gave him too vivid a display of the potential consequences, and his success as a physician depended on his neutrality. Now the success of the garden did, too.
* Today, Delancey Street runs right across the old De Lancey property as it heads from the Bowery to the East River, where it funnels drivers onto the Williamsburg Bridge.
† The final deed to Hosack’s twenty-acre property would be executed in 1804 by Mayor DeWitt Clinton. The cost was about $4,800 (about $100,000 today), plus a yearly “quit rent” of sixteen bushels of grain.
Chapter 7
“THERE ARE NO INFORMED PEOPLE HERE”
HOSACK, HAVING CHOSEN A SITE FOR THE GARDEN, FINALLY permitted his pent-up enthusiasm to spill over.
He went into a frenzy of spending on livestock, tools, and building materials. He bought a pair of oxen, a horse, a dog, two sows, a wheelbarrow, a plow, a sledge, a harrow, a horsecart, a millstone, spades, rakes, hoes, flowerpots, hay, potatoes, corn, clover, piles of lumber, hundreds of bricks, and endless shipments of dung.
Nothing in his thirty-two years had prepared Hosack for the physical intensity of launching the garden. Thus far, he had spent most of his days hunched over medical and botanical volumes, examining patients, and attending and delivering lectures. His genteel botanizing excursions with Curtis in the fields near London hardly counted as life on the farm. Now he began to encounter the hardscrabble rural lives that kept the city clothed and fed. “Wanted: A Sober, industrious MAN, to manage a Farm on the island of New-York,” ran a job offer in the local press. “An Amer’can Farmer, who has no family, will have a preference. Application to be made at the last house on the Bloomingdale Road.” The island was swarming with men and women desperate for work, both American-born and recent immigrants. Some of them had come from Ireland, fleeing the aftermath of the failed 1798 rebellion inspired by the French Revolution. Many more had crossed from war-torn England and France to a city bubbling with opportunity but also marred by stark inequality.
Recent immigrants and out-of-work native New Yorkers—these were the men who turned up at the property to ask Hosack for jobs. He hired them gratefully, writing out their last names—Power, Duffie, Flynn, Kelly, Doyle, McGregor, and others—in a bulky leather-bound notebook, along with details about their contracts. At night, the men would have trudged off to sleep in rented rooms at nearby farms or made the long trek down the Middle Road back to boardinghouses in the city. What did they think of the young doctor who was spending so much of his own income on a garden? These laborers likely sympathized with the anti-elitist causes of New York’s Democratic-Republicans. Whatever their private opinions about Hosack and his project, they returned each day to help him turn his soggy, rock-strewn patch of Manhattan into an American Eden.
American Eden Page 14