American Eden

by Victoria Johnson

  For many people, these bleak days of mourning recalled the national depression that had gripped the country upon the death of George Washington, with whom Hamilton had been so closely linked. Many Americans had viewed Hamilton as the only man truly worthy of Washington’s mantle, and his early death sharpened the sense of tragedy. His life took on an epic glow. “Our Troy has lost her Hector,” someone wrote in a Boston paper.

  New Yorkers awoke on July 14 to the mournful tolling of muffled bells. Across the city, people poured into the streets, leaned out upper-story windows, and clambered onto rooftops to watch the funeral procession. Men and women wept openly as the procession departed at ten o’clock from the Robinson Street home of John and Angelica Church. At its head, uniformed militiamen marched in orderly rows. Behind them, members of the Society of the Cincinnati carried their standard, which was covered in a black shroud. Next came the clergy, and then, as a trumpet sounded, soldiers of the Sixth Regiment hoisted Hamilton’s casket to their shoulders and followed them. His riderless horse swayed along before members of his stricken family. Hosack probably walked behind the Hamiltons with the next group of designated mourners—the physicians. Behind them came wave after wave of people: city officials, foreign dignitaries, military officers, merchants, tradesmen, and more. “The Citizens in general” brought up the rear of the procession.

  AT HIS LODGINGS, Peale was conducting an autopsy of his own. His room smelled of vinegar and the sea. By the day of the funeral, he had preserved sixteen species of fish for his museum. He was particularly excited about a live sheepshead fish he had found at the market. It was eight and a half pounds, with bold stripes wrapping around its body.

  The Hamilton hysteria left Peale cold. His political allegiances lay so squarely with Jefferson that he could not bring himself to feel any grief. While people gathered by the hundreds in the streets, he spent the early morning preserving three species for his new fish collection. “Today Alexr. Hambleton will be buried,” he observed in his diary. “It is to be an uncommon parade of every class of Citizens.” When Peale finally left the house, he found Pearl Street jammed as far as the eye could see. He decided to go look for Delacoste and began to fight his way through the crowds up Chapel Street. On Beekman Street, however, Peale suddenly caught sight of some of his relatives, who were watching the scene from the windows of a townhouse. He gave up on his original plan of finding Delacoste and joined them, insisting to himself that he merely craved the company. Platoons of uniformed troops passed before him. A band played the funeral march from Handel’s Saul. Peale’s stiff reserve finally softened, and he conceded that the organizers of the funeral had put together a “well digested plan.”

  For two hours, the procession flowed like a dark glacier through the streets of lower Manhattan. As Hosack marched up Broadway toward Trinity Church, he passed his own front door. The boom of cannon fire ricocheted off the buildings around him—soldiers stationed in the park and at the Battery were firing their weapons at one-minute intervals, and he could hear the cannonade from British and French ships out in the harbor. They continued firing for forty-eight minutes straight.

  The procession came to a halt in front of the church. Under its portico, the elder statesman Gouverneur Morris gathered his thoughts. He had been asked to deliver the eulogy, and he was worried that the wrong choice of words could turn Hamilton’s funeral into a riot. Morris decided to divert attention from the violent circumstances of Hamilton’s death by dwelling on his youth. Addressing the students in the crowd, he reminded them that Hamilton had been a Columbia student when the American Revolution broke out. “It seemed as if God had called him suddenly into existence, that he might assist to save a world.” Morris held up this brief, heroic life as a shining model of wisdom and probity. When judging the conduct of one’s fellow citizens, one should ask oneself, “Would Hamilton have done this thing?” Morris concluded his remarks. The pallbearers lifted the mahogany coffin from the bier and carried it to Hamilton’s final resting place in the Trinity graveyard, around the corner from Hosack’s house.

  AFTER THE FUNERAL, Hosack forced himself to focus on his medical practice and the garden, but there were several melancholy interruptions to his work. On August 11, before Hamilton’s friends had removed the black mourning bands from their arms—and before Burr was indicted by the State of New York for “unlawfully wilfully wickedly and designedly” firing a pistol at Hamilton—Hosack stood before city authorities and swore on a Bible. He confirmed that Hamilton had died at William Bayard’s house in July 1804. “I attended him as his Physician and was with him when he died.” One week later, sick at heart, Hosack sat down to compose an account of what he had seen, heard, and done at Weehawken and then at Bayard’s house. He closed his account with Latin lines by Horace, written on the death of a beloved friend, that translated thus:

  When will incorruptible Faith and naked Truth

  Find another his equal?

  He has died wept by many.

  Hamilton had also died in debt. Very quietly, his friends began to pool their funds in support of Eliza and the children. Two days after the funeral, Oliver Wolcott Jr. wrote another of Hamilton’s friends about the fundraising campaign. “The design is, that a select number of Gentlemen of easy Fortunes, shall, without much eclat & publicity, subscribe what may be sufficient.” Four hundred certificates of $200 each were sold. John Jacob Astor purchased the first three shares, William Bayard the next ten. Hosack bought shares No. 132 and No. 133.

  The fund, kept secret from Hamilton’s children, helped ease his widow’s financial woes, but grief dogged her every step. Six weeks after Hamilton died, an Albany newspaper reported a scene from Eliza’s lonely new life. Dressed in a flowing black gown and veils, she had attended a church service in her hometown. By her side were her three youngest sons: John Church Hamilton, age twelve; seven-year-old William Stephen Hamilton; and Philip, who was just two. During the service, John suddenly collapsed, landing face-down and still as a corpse. Eliza sank to the floor by his side “uttering such heart-rending groans” that “even Burr himself” would have been moved. Affliction had become so relentless a presence in her life that she was sure her son was dead, but he had only fainted. Two men helped John to his feet as he revived, and the family left the church. On the steps, Eliza clung to her son, laying her head on his shoulder. For having unleashed such suffering, the newspaper wrote, justice surely demanded Burr be “held up to the view of future ages—[as] a MONSTER, and an ASSASSIN.”

  Although in the end the murder charge would be dropped, the vice president was not safe in New York. He made plans to sell his Richmond Hill house, and John Jacob Astor stepped forward to snap it up. By late July 1804, Burr was in Philadelphia; there he sent Benjamin Rush a note asking for a package of assorted medicines to take with him as he fled into the Deep South, where he had staunch friends. He left it to Rush to decide which medicines he should have on his journey, specifying only that a “lancet might be useful.” When Burr arrived in Georgia later that summer, he wrote to Theo and recommended that she get hold of a copy of William Bartram’s 1791 account of his travels through the South. “Procure and read it, and you will better understand what I may write you.” He was running for his life, but Burr’s interest in botany never flagged.

  THE AFRICAN OSTRICH DIED the same summer as Hamilton. Delacoste cut out its gizzard, heart, and lungs and put them on display. Within months, the Cabinet of Natural History itself was at death’s door. Peale had been right—Delacoste’s private subscription fund had proved insufficient to sustain New York’s first museum of natural history. Hosack and Peale exchanged letters railing against the shortsightedness of American politicians who consistently failed to support the arts and sciences. Peale moaned to Hosack, “Must one or a few individuals bear all the cost and trouble of such important undertaking[s]?” Hosack tried to persuade Peale himself to buy Delacoste’s collection, but Peale replied that he could not possibly afford it. Besides, he was already worr
ied about what would happen to his own collection. “None of us think we will die,” Peale told Hosack, “yet we ought to be prepaired.”

  * It is not clear how long this arrangement lasted. By the time the 1804 city directory was published, Pendleton was listed at 17 Wall Street and William Hosack was not listed at all.

  Chapter 9

  “THIS DELICIOUS BANQUET”

  IN SEPTEMBER 1804, ONE-YEAR-OLD JAMES EDWARD SMITH HOSACK fell ill, possibly with yellow fever, which had returned to the city that summer. Hosack’s lingering sadness at Hamilton’s death was now folded into what Mary described to her foster sister Catharine as their “great anxiety” for the life of their only son. For weeks, she and Hosack watched James being “reduced to skin & Bone.” He finally began to recover in October, and Hosack, mercifully spared, turned back to his affairs in the city.

  In a way, New York felt like the capital of something again—not of the state or the nation, of course, but of the emotion-packed political saga of the duel. The newspapers didn’t have enough pages to print all the poems and speeches that continued to pour forth about Hamilton’s greatness. People were sculpting waxwork tableaux in his honor and drawing blueprints for monuments that would never be built.

  One November evening about four months after the duel, Hosack settled into Mayor Clinton’s office at City Hall for a conversation with some mutual friends about the current state of the city. The animating spirit that night was a merchant named John Pintard, who had decided it was time for New York to sit down in the attic of its accumulating artifacts and do some sifting and sorting. When they were all dead and gone, what would—what should—the next Americans know of the city’s history, of its place in the nation and the world? These men had seen the crimson and flash of British soldiers in the streets, had heard the French Revolution debated in the coffeehouses, had dined in fine homes erected where meadows and thickets had once played host to songbirds and field mice. With the death of Washington in 1799, these men had begun to mark and mourn the passing of the figures who had helped create the United States. At the same time, a brilliant future seemed to beckon. Hosack and his friends could see their own efforts slowly beginning to lift New York out of its muddy ditches toward a place among the world’s great cities.

  The men sat talking that night under a portrait of George Washington by John Trumbull, and just steps from the balcony where Washington had taken the oath of office in 1789. Together, they decided to form a society to celebrate the history of New York and the nation—the New-York Historical Society. It was the kind of project that set Hosack’s blood coursing, and he plunged in enthusiastically. Mayor Clinton promised the rent-free use of a room in City Hall for the society’s meetings and its collection of art and artifacts.* One week later, the city council commissioned Trumbull to produce half-length portraits of all New York’s mayors since the Revolution and a full-length portrait of Hamilton. Around this time, Hosack also seems to have commissioned Trumbull to paint a half-length portrait of Hamilton to hang in his own house.

  In Washington, DC, earlier that same month, the man many people thought of as Hamilton’s cold-blooded killer had slipped out of the wilds of the American South, after more than three months away, and back into the Senate chamber. On November 5, 1804, Burr wrote to Theo, “I was in Senate to Day, but only 15 members appearing, no business could be done—Being unsetled I have seen Nobody whom you know.” When Samuel Latham Mitchill and his fellow senators began trickling in to take their seats for the new congressional session, they found Burr on the dais at the front of the room. Murderer or not, he still held the post of vice president of the United States, and thus also that of president of the Senate. It was in this latter capacity that he would be presiding over the impeachment trial of a Federalist Supreme Court justice named Samuel Chase.

  In March 1805, after the conclusion of the Chase trial, Burr gave an impassioned speech before the senators to mark the end of his term as vice president. The Senate, he told them, was “a citadel of law, of order, and of liberty.” In that dignified chamber, “if anywhere, will resistance be made to the storms of political phrenzy and the silent arts of corruption.” Mitchill still admired Burr’s political talents, and he watched sadly as the vice president stepped down from the dais, walked to the door, and exited the Senate forever. Mitchill wrote to his wife the same day, saying that when the door slammed behind Burr, “the firmness and resolution of many of the senators gave way, and they burst into tears . . . weeping for perhaps five minutes.” Two days later, President Jefferson was sworn in for his second term. His new vice president was DeWitt Clinton’s uncle, George Clinton.

  THAT SAME WEEK, the New York state senators lounged in their seats in Albany, listening, or perhaps not, as a petition was read aloud to them. It had been sent in by Dr. Hosack of New York City, who was pleading for funds to support a botanical garden. Three senators were tasked with considering Hosack’s request, and they reported back ten days later that they had learned from a “respectable authority” that Hosack was a solid man who had launched his garden project “with a zeal and ability which leaves no room to doubt of his ultimate success.” The three senators were so firmly convinced of the garden’s future medical and agricultural significance, in fact, that they introduced a bill meant to fund it.

  But then it happened again—something, or someone, gummed up the legislative works. That year’s session ended without a vote on the garden bill. Hosack was deeply disappointed. He found Albany opaque and infuriating. He felt certain the Elgin Botanic Garden was destined to become an irresistible draw for young American doctors and naturalists, a place where they could study specimens of the whole planet’s flora and experiment with medicines and crops. After the gratifying praise he had received from the internationally revered Alexander von Humboldt, Hosack had every reason to feel confident that other foreign dignitaries and naturalists who visited the United States would soon be flocking to this unique American institution. Once there, as they strolled past the medicinal beds conversing with Hosack and his students, they would surely share their valuable scientific and cultural experience with New York and the United States. But Hosack was teetering on a knife-edge. After the bad news from Albany, he realized that he could shake loose public funds only if he brought the garden to a state of obvious utility. To do that, he would have to spend much more of his own money, even at the risk of ruining himself and his family.

  That spring, therefore, Hosack squared his shoulders and hired additional men. He also bought more plants and supplies—a thousand asparagus plants, six bushels of white sand, heaps of plaster of Paris, a pile of lead pipes, and two cows. In mid-March, he hired a head gardener, a British nurseryman named Andrew Gentle who had arrived in New York only three days earlier, probably with a recommendation from someone in England whom Hosack trusted in horticultural matters. All that spring and summer of 1805, while Hosack continued to write cajoling letters to scientific gentlemen around the world and to organize the seeds and specimens he had already received, Gentle laid out the medicinal, kitchen, and agricultural beds and oversaw the planting of the forest tree species around the perimeter of the property.

  Hosack and Gentle were immersed in these projects when a distinguished visitor arrived for a tour of the garden. It was Governor Morgan Lewis, who had defeated Burr in the recent gubernatorial contest to replace George Clinton. Half of the Elgin Botanic Garden was still trapped inside Hosack’s head, and the other half was a mess of clay pots and manure, but as the governor strolled along the garden paths under a summer sky, it began to dawn on him that he was in the presence of an extraordinary American. Hosack had yoked his dreams for the health and prosperity of the young Republic to a venerable Old World institution. Every bit of medical, agricultural, and botanical knowledge this young doctor had absorbed in British gardens he was now plowing into the soil of his own nation with his own funds and for the good of his fellow citizens.

  A page from Hosack’s memorandum book, wh
ere he recorded his progress on the garden

  Governor Lewis found there was so much to learn and absorb at the garden that he soon visited a second time. He grew especially intrigued when he learned of Hosack’s plans to make the garden a bustling hub for plant exchanges between the northern and southern United States. Hosack’s correspondents in the South had already begun sending him seeds of crops such as cotton and yams, which he and his gardeners were planting at Elgin to test which ones might survive the New York climate. At the same time Hosack was sending his Southern friends specimens of plants native to the Northeast, so that they could conduct their own similar experiments. Each time Hosack’s packages went sailing out of the harbor and down the coast to botanists and planters in Wilmington, Charleston, and New Orleans, he was inking in New York’s spot on the scientific map of the United States a little more boldly. Each time a Southern gentleman folded up a letter, sealed it, and scrawled “Dr. Hosack, New York” on the front, the city gained a little more in the way of national stature.

  Governor Lewis left Hosack’s garden convinced that these twenty acres would make New York shine—while at the same time benefiting the entire country. Hosack himself was a new species of American, one who devoted most of his waking hours to inventing and organizing the civic institutions that would guide his city, state, and nation through the fractious post-Revolutionary years. While he worked tirelessly on the botanical garden, Hosack was also a member of at least half a dozen other charitable, cultural, and scientific enterprises, and he was playing a leading role in the education of the country’s next generation of doctors in his Columbia courses and his private practice. The man deserved to be showered with public praise, to see his image struck on a medal, to hear the scratch of the governor’s pen as he signed a bill that protected the Elgin Botanic Garden for generations to come. When Governor Lewis traveled back to Albany, his mind was bursting with botanical terminology and visions of robust crops tended by prosperous, healthy citizens. He resolved to see what he could do for Hosack.