Reminders of Hamilton were all around Hosack. When he left 65 Broadway to go to Columbia or up to Elgin, he could now see a stately monument looming over the slim headstones in the Trinity churchyard, just steps from his front door. It had been completed in the fall of 1806, more than two years after Hamilton’s death. On the front wall of the tomb’s rectangular base, an inscription had been chiseled:
Atop the rectangular base of the tomb, anchored by four funeral urns, a thick obelisk rose skyward. Beneath all the heavy marble lay Hamilton’s body, with its shattered spine.
As for Aaron Burr, by the summer of 1808 he was on a ship bound for Europe. After leaving the vice presidency in 1805, Burr had involved himself in a plot whose goal—depending on whom you asked—was to conquer Spanish-held territory and claim it for the United States or to lead a rebellion against the nation and crown himself emperor of Mexico. After months of deliberation, Jefferson had secured congressional approval to arrest Burr, who was captured in the Mississippi Territory in February 1807. The news was “as afflicting as unexpected,” Burr’s daughter, Theo, later wrote. When word of the sensational event reached Philadelphia, Peale congratulated himself on never having painted Burr’s portrait. “Amongst a collection of about 80 Portraits there is none to disgrace the Gallery as yet,” he told a friend.
Burr went on trial for treason in Richmond, Virginia, and Theo and her husband, Joseph Alston, traveled from South Carolina to offer their support. At the end of the summer of 1807, Burr was acquitted, but he was no longer safe in the United States, so he made plans to leave the country. The following May, Theo went to New York to see her father before he sailed. She also wanted to consult with Hosack about her poor health. In the aftermath of the duel, Hosack had defended Hamilton’s character by lending support to the theory that the latter had fired his pistol involuntarily. Yet Hosack’s bond with the Burrs, forged during his early years as the medical partner of their family physician, Samuel Bard, had survived even Hamilton’s death at Burr’s hands. It was the most striking possible illustration of Hosack’s maxim that doctors should remain above party politics.
When Theo arrived to see Hosack, he fussed over her with affectionate anxiety. She had been ill almost without pause since the spring of 1802, when she had suffered a prolapsed uterus during the birth of her son. In 1806, she had seemed to regain her health, only to fall ill again after the shock of her father’s arrest in February 1807. The first doctor Theo consulted proved “to be a blockhead, & would have killed her,” but she “got clear of him.” By the time she arrived in New York in the spring of 1808, she had not menstruated for more than a year. She was regularly gripped by “various colours & flashes [of] light before the eyes, figures passing round her bed, strange noises, low spirits, & . . . periods of inconceivable irritability & impatience.” She thought she was going mad. Her skin was so sensitive that she couldn’t stand the touch even of her own hands, and she had “shooting pains through all her joints, particularly those of her hands & feet.” Her head ached and she had a constant “taste of blood in the mouth, sometimes a little bleeding at the nose.”
Theodosia Burr as a young woman
Hosack examined Theo in May 1808, shortly before Burr’s departure. He persuaded her to give up the all-vegetable diet she had been on for the past four months, and he prescribed a stimulating tincture of aloe, saffron, and myrrh—all of which he was growing at Elgin—as well as a course of bottled water from a popular mineral spring at Ballston Spa, north of Albany. Hosack wrote Theo’s husband to say that he hoped these initial steps would restore the “general state of her health.” After that, he planned to try to address her specific complaints. Burr seconded Theo’s reliance on Hosack, as he wrote her in a note before sailing, and he also approved of the mineral-water treatment. “The spring waters of Ballston or Saratoga are the best. . . . Have faith, and you shall be saved.”
As he prepared to leave for Europe, Burr packed a portrait of Theo in his luggage. It was later reported that Hosack lent Burr money for his ocean passage. On June 9, Burr set sail for Nova Scotia and from there crossed the Atlantic to England. He made for London, where he initially booked a room at an inn. Soon, however, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham extended Burr the extraordinary hospitality of inviting him to stay with his family. Burr proudly showed Bentham the portrait of Theo he had brought with him from New York, and Bentham pronounced her a “dear little creature.” At some point after Burr had gotten himself settled in London, he met up with one of Hosack’s younger brothers, William. William Hosack was tall and swarthy, according to a letter Burr later wrote. The two men began socializing regularly; Burr would come to prize William above all for the latter’s willingness to play chess with him as they whiled away many long hours of travel across Europe.
Immediately after her father left the country, Theo went to spend a few weeks at Ballston Spa. She had previously told Hosack that the bottled mineral water agreed with her, and he had therefore urged her to go to the spa so she could bathe in the water as well as drink it. As the summer wore on, the city grew stifling and humid, and Hosack began to worry that yellow fever would return. “Our atmosphere never was in a condition more adapted to the diffusion of poison of this nature,” he wrote to a doctor in Philadelphia. Hosack still believed, erroneously, that yellow fever was contagious, but he was correct in thinking that the standing water left by the rains in roadside ditches, on barrelheads, and in the marshy lowlands created prime conditions for the fever to flourish. It was a blessing that Theo was up the Hudson, out of harm’s way. From the city, Hosack was still trying to keep in touch with her, sending her letters, medicine, and dietary advice. By August, he was nudging her to “let me have the pleasure of hearing from you occasionally.”
Hosack didn’t know that Theo had already turned elsewhere for help. She had begun her stay at Ballston Spa by writing a brave, cheerful letter to her father on June 21, her twenty-fifth birthday. But one month later, she wrote a despairing letter to Dr. William Eustis, an old friend of her father from the Revolutionary War, who lived in Boston. When she returned to New York late that summer, Theo was still waiting to hear back from Eustis—and still keeping Hosack in the dark. She was disconsolate in New York. Intitially, she had been welcomed by some of her old friends, but after the first frisson of hosting the daughter of the most infamous of all Americans, they seemed to lose interest in her. One woman, Theo later wrote her father, even had “the cruelty to tell me that I had been so long ill and so long friendless, that I could not feel as keenly as others would.” She missed her father terribly.
In London that autumn, Burr fretted about Theo even while he tried to settle into his new life, telling a confidante that her health was a “constant source of distress to me.” When he received a letter from Theo saying she had found no relief at the Ballston springs, Burr decided to consult an eminent London physician named John Coakley Lettsom.† Lettsom urged Burr to summon Theo to England for a change of climate. Burr wrote to Hosack, entreating him to persuade her to make the journey immediately. “Show this letter to Theodosia, and act in concert with her,” he directed Hosack. “You are aware that this is the most interesting concern of my life. Do by me as I should by you.” In the same letter, Burr asked Hosack’s advice on a pressing matter of his own. “Favour me also with your opinion as to the policy of my returning to the United States, and the most suitable time.”
It was an uneasy autumn and winter of 1808 for Burr. In addition to his anxiety about Theo, he was finding the doors of many fashionable Londoners closed to him for his political sins. But in a detailed journal he was keeping with Theo in mind, as well as in his many letters to her, he focused on more cheerful topics. He saw the Tower of London and London Bridge. He bought a pair of boots and then took them back. He bought a wig because he didn’t have time to have his hair dressed properly while traveling, and he lost an umbrella, which was returned to him by a coachman. When Theo learned Burr was keeping the journal for her, she was to
uched. “What a feast it shall be for me. How sensible I am to your goodness and attention in writing it.”
Confident that Theo would soon be boarding a ship in New York, Burr asked her to pack some botanical specimens in her luggage. “My amiable friend [Jeremy] Bentham is a botanist,” he told her, requesting that she bring “one very large and handsome ear of Indian corn,” and “a handful of the Pecan or Illinois nut; of the butternut, the black walnut, the hickory nut.” Then he thought better of his instructions. “A handful, indeed! why, your little paw could not possibly hold more than two black walnuts or butternuts. Bring, then, forty or fifty of each.” Burr also told Theo it might interest Bentham to see some English walnuts that had grown in American soil. The encounter between the New World and the Old World was a theme he often sounded in his letters and journal. In a letter to a Swedish friend, Burr jokingly described William Hosack and another companion, Thomas Robinson, as “the two American savages,” adding that “they are so far tamed as not to bite, unless greatly angered by some strong passion, as love or anger.” When he went to Edinburgh in January 1809 for a visit, he attended a dinner party filled with doctors, lawyers, and their wives; he described himself afterward in a letter to Bentham as the only “Moheigungk”—Mohegan—at the table.
While Burr was enjoying Edinburgh, Theo was enduring a miserable New York winter. Neither she nor Hosack knew of Burr’s desire that she travel to England, because they hadn’t yet received the letters he had written on this subject the previous November. Theo was now so ill that Hosack had taken to visiting her every day. For all her optimism, Eustis’s medical advice, when it finally arrived, had proved fruitless, and she had reluctantly agreed to take Hosack’s mercury. She soon rebelled, however, declaring in a letter to her father, “I will not take any more mercury. It . . . ruins my teeth, and will destroy my constitution.” Burr was of the same mind, writing to her once he found out, “I condemn utterly the use of mercury.” In spite of the mercury treatments—perhaps Hosack’s other measures were offsetting them—Theo seemed gradually to be regaining her health. By late January 1809, when Hosack and Theo finally received Burr’s request that she come to England, she was feeling “so much improved” that Hosack’s first words were, as she later reported to Burr, “I presume you will not go.” Theo wrote to Burr on February 1 saying she would not travel to England and reminding him that Hosack was still “ignorant of my application to Eustis (so let him remain, I entreat).” Her strength back, Theo finally felt well enough to turn her attention to Burr’s botanical request for his friend Bentham. She wrote her father a few weeks later to say that although she would not be bringing any specimens in person, she thought she could get some to Bentham by an acquaintance who would soon depart for Europe. Although Theo was still in New York, her married years in South Carolina seem to have put Southern plants foremost in her mind. She proposed sending Bentham okra seeds and also some seeds of benne, a grain from Africa that was widely cultivated in kitchen gardens in the South. When Burr eventually received Theo’s letter, he was displeased with her choice of plant specimens. “Pray show a little more sensibility to the attention of Jeremy Bentham. Of seeds, search for the beautiful or curious rather than useful.”
IN ADDITION TO TRYING to care for Theo, Hosack spent that winter of 1808 to 1809 collecting—but not just plant specimens. He was going around the city gathering pledges of support for Elgin. His colleagues at Columbia, at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, at the New-York Hospital, at the new Medical Society of the City and County of New York—they were all willing to help. The testimonial that Hosack secured from some of his former colleagues at the College of Physicians and Surgeons was especially useful. It alluded to the upsetting situation in which the state found itself, thanks to Jefferson’s ruinous trade policies. “Many medicinal articles, belonging to the vegetable class, which are of indispensable use in diseases, and which might be readily produced in this country, have become so scarce, and so exceedingly enhanced in price, as to create apprehensions with respect to the sufficiency of future supplies.”
Hosack submitted his sheaf of written testimonials and a new petition to the legislature. It was “with pain” that he informed them he was on the brink of abandoning the garden. He felt it was unfair to his family to keep spending money on it. The medical students who were Elgin’s most direct beneficiaries could hardly be asked to pay for its upkeep, and the colleges and hospital were themselves strapped for cash. The only real alternative organizational model—a subscription society of the sort that funded the Academy of Fine Arts—was a hard sell in a city where botany enthusiasts were still thin on the ground. The garden’s future was now handed over to a select committee of five assemblymen, who took just one day to make up their minds. They reported back to their colleagues that the Elgin Botanic Garden was “the first establishment of the kind ever attempted in the United States.” Given that most European governments supported botanical gardens, the State of New York should certainly buy the garden from Hosack. As for the economic wisdom of such a purchase, they noted, “the land will probably increase in value.”
Now the committee members introduced a bill they called “An act for promoting medical science in the state of New-York.” It was an inspired title. Even people who didn’t care about botany cared about living and dying. When the State Assembly voted, the bill passed, sixty to twenty. Three legislators were appointed to spearhead the appraisal process. One of them was Hosack’s dearest friend in the world, DeWitt Clinton. Elgin’s future was being placed in the hands of the man he trusted most.
The next day, though, everything began to go wrong. One assemblyman was apparently upset by the idea of spending public money on a garden, and he successfully moved to reopen debate on the bill. Politicians who knew nothing about botany began opining on the monetary value of Hosack’s plant collections, charging the estimates were wildly inflated. Hosack lamented afterward that “these erroneous impressions had the effect, of changing the sentiments of a few.” The bill was rejected on March 14. He had lost by only six votes. Nicholas Romayne later said that it wasn’t surprising that lawmakers should have balked at funding a garden. These were men who traveled to Albany from their hometowns across the state through landscapes of wild meadows, cultivated crops, and deep woods. “In a country where every farm and forest affords a variety of plants sufficient to illustrate the principles of Botany, public animosity may be aroused,” Romayne sniped.
Few people noticed, and even fewer cared. By March 4, 1809, while the assemblymen were arguing over Elgin, Congress had lifted the embargo. A ban on trade with Britain and France was put right in the embargo’s place, but New York’s merchants could anticipate at least a partial recovery. Another distraction was the event that took place that same day in Washington, where crowds gathered to watch the new president, James Madison, take the oath of office. Jefferson was watching, too—and relishing the prospect of walking the grounds of Monticello within days. Hosack, meanwhile, returned to his own garden. His beloved New York had disappointed him, but he refused to give up.
* In the early 1940s, Gracie’s mansion was turned into the official residence of New York City’s mayors; Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was the first to move in.
† As it happened, Hosack had studied with Lettsom during his year in London and kept up a warm correspondence with him; when Lettsom died in 1815, there was an oil portrait of Hosack among his possessions.
Chapter 12
“SUCH A PIECE OF DOWNRIGHT IMPOSTURE”
IN APRIL 1809, A FEW WEEKS AFTER HOSACK’S LATEST DISAPPOINTMENT in Albany, things began to brighten. Samuel Latham Mitchill ran a piece in the Medical Repository praising Elgin as “that ornament of Manhattan isle.” That same month, Frederick Pursh, fresh from working on the Lewis and Clark specimens in Philadelphia, arrived at Elgin.
No one could blame Pursh that the natural history volume from the Lewis and Clark expedition hadn’t yet appeared. Pursh had stayed in Philadelphia all thr
ough 1808, working as far as he could on the drawings and descriptions while he waited for Lewis to return from St. Louis with his crucial firsthand knowledge of the specimens. Pursh was scrimping by boarding with Bernard McMahon, but he wasn’t being paid as long as Lewis was away. In January 1809 McMahon had dispatched an anxious letter to Jefferson asking for news of Lewis, but by April the latter still had not returned. McMahon felt he couldn’t keep Pursh in Philadelphia any longer, and he sent him to New York with a letter of introduction for Hosack. Although Andrew Gentle was a fine plantsman, Hosack felt he couldn’t pass up the chance to put Pursh’s expertise on American plants to work. Elgin now had a new head gardener.
Six months later Meriwether Lewis committed suicide in a cabin in Tennessee. When Charles Willson Peale heard the news, he wrote to his son Rembrandt, reporting that Lewis had been “on his way to Washington, when at a tavern he shot himself by 2 shots. This not being effectual he . . . compleated the rash work with a Razor.” Peale speculated that Lewis had been devastated by the refusal of the federal government to honor debts Lewis had incurred on behalf of the expedition after he and his men had returned to St. Louis. “This mortification compleated his despair,” Peale told Rembrandt.
McMahon wrote to Jefferson about the shocking event. “I am extremely sorry for the death of that worthy and valuable man Govr Lewis, and the more so, for the manner of it.” McMahon assured Jefferson that he had kept all of the expedition’s specimens safe in Philadelphia, because Lewis himself had hinted darkly that some grasping naturalist might steal them. “I never yet parted with [on]e of the plants raised from his seeds, nor with a single seed . . . ,” McMahon told Jefferson, “for fear they should make their way into the hands of any Botanist, either in America, or Europe, who might rob Mr Lewis of the right he had to first describe and name his own discoveries, in his intended publication.”
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