American Eden

by Victoria Johnson

  Pursh, meanwhile, settled in at Elgin. He managed Hosack’s men, tended the plants, and went on expeditions in New York and New Jersey to bring back more native species for the garden. Hosack was delighted to see the daily labor at Elgin in the hands of such a talented plantsman, in part because he now found more time to pursue his own medical and botanical research. He began writing dozens of letters to his contacts in the United States and the West Indies, trying to collect systematic data on whether yellow fever behaved differently in different climates. Hosack asked his correspondents for weather patterns, symptoms, mortality rates—anything they could think to share regarding epidemics they had witnessed or simply heard about. He debated his theories with everyone he could buttonhole in person or by post, among them Mitchill, Rush, and Noah Webster. His cherished mentor Rush was the most genial of these interlocutors, and Hosack predicted cheerfully that his own yellow-fever research would soon “bring us closer together in our views of this subject.”

  As Hosack badgered his friends and acquaintances for medical data, Elgin was always in his thoughts. He closed a typical letter on yellow fever to a doctor in Jamaica with a request for plant specimens. “If you can aid my Botanical Establishment by sending me some seeds from the Bot. Garden of Jamaica, or by procuring me the interest of its present superintendent, you will also do me a favor. I hope you will not fear a troublesome correspondent in me.” Hosack’s thinking on yellow fever was informed by his botanical experiments at Elgin. To a physician in Georgia, he recommended decreasing the fever risk from stagnant water by planting the rice fields with “grasses, trees, and shrubs at the same time intersecting [them] by drains.” This approach, Hosack advised, “will be the most effectual means of restoring the purity of the atmosphere as well as the health of your inhabitants.”

  On September 4, 1809, Hosack set aside his research and went to the old City Hall on Wall Street. Two hundred years earlier, Henry Hudson had sailed into the harbor, and the New-York Historical Society was celebrating the day with speeches and a dinner. Governor Daniel Tompkins, Mayor Marinus Willett, and State Senator Clinton participated in the events, along with many other distinguished and ordinary New Yorkers. After the speeches, at the City Hotel on Broadway, members of the New-York Historical Society dined on good local fare—wild pigeon, fish, and succotash. Mitchill was the toastmaster. When Hosack got the floor, he raised his glass to the settlers who had founded New Amsterdam. “May the virtuous habits and simple manners of our Dutch ancestors be not lost in the luxuries and refinements of the present times.” Then Nathaniel Pendleton toasted him. “May the same virtues and the same industry continue in our land which have converted an Indian cornfield into a Botanic Garden.”

  Hosack was feeling optimistic again. All over the city, his friends and colleagues were mobilizing on behalf of Elgin. His most recent failure to secure state aid had “created strong sensations of regret” among his friends and colleagues. Mitchill was urging him to lobby all the medical societies across the state to write to the legislature, and Hosack followed his advice. It soon bore fruit. In October 1809 James Tillary, president of the Medical Society of the City and County of New-York, gave a speech calculated to appeal to his members’ competitive streak. “Unless a botanic garden of dimensions befitting national views, be established near this city, and supported at the public expense, Pennsylvania will inevitably become, as it relates to the states, what she deserves to be, if we cannot rival her, the Edinburgh of America, the seat of science and chief nursery of the arts.” Tillary’s constituents promptly authorized him to sign and publish a statement of support. A month later Samuel Bard, president of the Medical Society of Dutchess County—the home county of his Hyde Park estate—gave a similarly helpful speech. “If we suffer this garden of Dr. Hosack’s to sink as sink it must, if left in the hands of an individual, we give a decided advantage to every medical school in the United States, as well as in almost every other country, over our own.” Eighty-four medical students signed a petition to save Elgin. Even the Common Council of New York City issued a unanimous statement of support. DeWitt Clinton, mayor of New York once again, signed it on behalf of the city.

  Hosack, floating on the wave of goodwill, permitted himself to daydream about a new project. Like Curtis before him with his Flora Londinensis, and James Edward Smith with his English Botany, he would bring native plants, glorious and humble alike, into the farthest-flung households. He thought he might pay tribute to both his teachers at once by calling it American Botany, or a Flora of the United States. Like theirs, it would be a multivolume work. The drawings and descriptions would be based on the American specimens in the Elgin collections. But in order to bankroll the volumes, he would need the proceeds from the sale of the garden to the state. “Till then,” he joked to a friend, “I must go on in my ordinary occupation of pulse feeling.”

  BY THE LATE SPRING OF 1809, Theo had returned to South Carolina in better health. She was perusing a newspaper one day when she came across a bulletin announcing that her father had been forced to leave England. It was reported that the pressure had come from the Spanish ambassador in London. Theo wrote to Burr that “for some minutes I remained stupified, as if stunned by the blow.”

  In early May, Burr and William Hosack sailed for Sweden. They spent most of the summer in Stockholm, but in August Burr indulged his love of botany with a trip to Uppsala, the town where Linnaeus had lived, taught, written, and gardened until his death in 1778. Burr took William Hosack with him, and they played chess on the river barge as a “perfectly wild and picturesque” landscape floated past. Burr found the Swedish countryside strangely familiar, as he wrote Theo—“the beauty of their roads being everywhere like that from New-York to Harlem.” In Uppsala, Burr met two of Linnaeus’s former students, now famous botanists themselves. One was Adam Afzelius, a friend of James Edward Smith and Sir Joseph Banks who had lived and botanized for years in Sierra Leone, eventually returning to Uppsala to become a demonstrator at the Botanical Garden there. The other was Carl Peter Thunberg, a professor of medicine and botany at the University of Uppsala who had once traveled through Ceylon, Africa, and Japan in search of plants. In 1807, the centennial of Linnaeus’s birth, Thunberg had presided over the inauguration of a neoclassical building at the Botanical Garden that was devoted to the study of natural history and christened Linneanum. Burr was pleased to meet this “man whose works I had read with pleasure,” and he planned to pepper Thunberg with questions about Japan, “a country which has always excited my curiosity.”

  Thunberg took Burr on a tour of the Botanical Garden, and Burr was astounded by the collections. He spent three joyful hours “examining the ten thousand things which are here,” as he wrote in his journal. He could hardly tear himself away to keep an evening engagement. “It requires a month to examine these collections with satisfaction,” he marveled, dropping his usual sardonic tone. “My head is still giddy with the number and variety. It would take more time and paper than I can now afford to enumerate the most striking.” Burr did make a note about one specimen that intrigued him: a black walnut tree from America that had been “grown from a nut planted here; the only tree of the kind which I have seen on this side of the Atlantic.”

  A few days later, on August 16, 1809, Burr made a botany-lover’s most significant pilgrimage—to the house and garden that had once belonged to Linnaeus himself. Here he saw the large hall in the greenhouse where Linnaeus had given his lectures and the chamber where he had drawn his last breath.

  These garden visits seem to have reminded Burr how much he loved reading on natural history. He addressed Theo in his journal about a fascinating French book on tree-grafting he had just discovered. “Where have I laid that book? Will find it to-morrow and give you the author’s name. It is a new discovery by which you give to any tree the sap and nourishment of another or of some branch of another, and by this means you may change and improve the colour, size, and flavour of any fruit. The results are curious and useful;
pray try it. You see, Madame, I have not been idle; now allow me to attempt sleeping.” Then, in early September, Burr procured a French translation of a new work by Alexander von Humboldt called Ansichten der Natur (in English, Views of Nature). The book changed Burr’s travel plans.

  In July 1804, when Humboldt had left Philadelphia—skipping the chance to go to New York to meet Burr, Hamilton, and Hosack—it was largely to work on Views of Nature. This was Humboldt’s tribute to the natural world as he had experienced and studied it on his travels in South America. Burr, as it happened, had hoped to meet with Humboldt in the summer of 1804 to learn about Mexico. Now, on the afternoon of September 8, 1809, after arriving home from William Hosack’s lodgings, Burr “threw off my coat and sat down near the window to read ‘Tableaux de la Nature’”—a French translation of Views of Nature. He quickly “got much engaged with my book” as he voyaged with Humboldt across oceans, up volcanoes, into rain forests, and through deserts. Two days later, Burr informed a friend that he had decided to go to Berlin to meet Humboldt in person. After that, he would visit Paris, “to see the people and the things of which all the world talk so much.”

  William Hosack and Thomas Robinson accompanied Burr as he traveled south into Germany that fall of 1809. At some point, Burr seems to have learned that Humboldt was now living in Paris, where he had settled at the end of 1807 after a brief interlude in Berlin. For political as well as intellectual reasons, Burr turned west toward the French border. At Weimar, he socialized with the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and with Humboldt’s older brother, Wilhelm von Humboldt. Burr arrived in Paris on February 16, 1810, in horrible weather. “I suffer and freeze,” he complained, but even the chilly drizzle couldn’t keep him from taking in the Paris sights.

  Two months of business affairs and social calls elapsed before Burr finally noted in his journal that he had seen Alexander von Humboldt at a dinner party. Humboldt was the toast of Paris as he made the rounds among the city’s great scientists—among them Hosack’s friend Alire Raffeneau Delile, who wrote Caspar Wistar in Philadelphia to say that he saw Humboldt as well as François André Michaux from time to time. Humboldt, Delile reported, was as talkative and entertaining as ever. The dinner party at which Burr encountered Humboldt was at the home of Helen Maria Williams, one of his translators. Burr didn’t editorialize on their interaction when he mentioned Humboldt in his journal, observing only that he had passed “a very pleasant day.” Whatever Burr’s personal impressions of the man, he remained captivated by Humboldt’s books, going to great lengths to procure copies of them in Paris.

  THE YEAR 1810 wheeled into New York City on a cloud bank of mild, wet days. In late January, however, the air suddenly turned frigid, as Hosack recorded in his weather journal. For the next five days the mercury refused to budge above zero, and “a constant gale” buffeted people and animals, houses and ships. Hosack couldn’t remember its being so cold for so long since his student days. Mercifully, the cruel weather lifted before the end of the month, when Mary gave birth to their sixth child, a daughter whom they named Emily.

  A few days later, Hosack put Mary and the baby in the care of his medical protégé John Francis and left for Albany on Elgin business. He probably took the steamboat, an innovation debuted in 1807 by one of his patients, Robert Fulton. The steamboat left from a wharf on the Hudson and churned up the river at a speedy five miles an hour. Hosack considered it a “perfect success,” although his nephew John Eddy thought passengers paid for the increased speed with a teeth-rattling ride. When John went by steamboat to Albany a few months later, he complained in his journal of the “never ceasing jar of the engine.” His deafness spared him the noise, but he still suffered for the entire trip. “I cannot by any means recommend it to my friends who intend to travel for pleasure.”

  In 1810, the beauty of the Hudson River Valley worked its magic on travelers just as it had on the Dutch settlers two centuries earlier. When Hosack traveled up the Hudson that February day, he saw long stretches of forested shores slipping past, punctuated here and there by pretty hamlets and thriving towns. There was the old Dutch village of Sleepy Hollow, and farther north they would pass the town of Hudson, where oceangoing ships like the Mohawk were built and then floated south to the Atlantic. The riverbanks between New York City and Albany were dotted with country estates, including Samuel Bard’s Hyde Park estate, with its white mansion poised high on a bluff above the river. Hosack knew the place well; he and his family frequently visited the Bards there, and his daughter Mary went for an annual summer stay. Across the river in the distance lay the Catskill Mountains, looking smooth and serene from the water but in fact filled with wild, secret places. Artists and writers were clambering through the Catskills with ever-greater enthusiasm these days as they tried to capture on canvas and paper the rocky crags, tumbling waterfalls, and twilight skies shot through with glowing streaks of orange. The most gifted of the artists were the British-born Thomas Cole and a New Jersey painter named Asher Brown Durand. Washington Irving was the prince among the writers.

  About one hundred fifty miles north of Manhattan, the steamboat approached Albany. When Linnaeus’s student Pehr Kalm had visited this town in 1749, he had found it almost entirely populated by Dutch-speaking people living in Dutch-gabled houses. He criticized them for being fussy about their immaculate floors when their streets were “very dirty, because the people leave their cattle in them, during the summer nights.”* By 1810, when Hosack arrived in Albany, there were still Dutch names everywhere—Schuyler, for example—but the Dutch-gabled houses had mostly given way to the straight rooflines of English-style townhouses. The steamboat pulled alongside the sloops at the river landing and sent merchants, lawmakers, and sightseers streaming up the hill into the city on foot or in carriages. The handsome new state Capitol, just completed in 1809, stood high above the Hudson at the top end of State Street, a steep avenue lined with shops and offices.

  On February 7, a few days after Hosack had left New York, John Francis sent him a happy update. “Mrs. Hosack is recovering her former state of health as rapidly as usual, and as to the little one, nothing can be more promising. The other members of your amiable family are in their usual good health and I am requested to present their most affectionate regards to you.” But by the time Hosack received Francis’s letter, he was in a nail-biting wait to learn the fate of another of his children—Elgin.

  He had worked feverishly up to the very last minute preparing his case. One day before the State Senate was scheduled to consider his appeal, he had managed to wrangle a statement of support from the Medical Society of the State of New York, the parent organization of all the county medical societies across the state. Its president was Hosack’s nemesis, Nicholas Romayne, who had earlier blocked his appointment to the surgery chair at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. Romayne later claimed he was coerced into signing the Medical Society’s statement. His sour attitude toward Hosack may also have been responsible for the damaging statement on Elgin that the board of the College of Physicians and Surgeons had recently drafted. Hosack had asked for a strong vote of confidence, and instead they had damned him and his flowers with faint praise. The college was “impressed with the advantages to be derived from the Botanical Garden,” but Hosack had built Elgin too far away from New York City to be of much use to their medical students. At any rate, the utility of a botanical garden was “far inferior to that derived from chemical apparatus [i.e., laboratory equipment], an anatomical museum, [and] a medical library”—all of which together would likely cost the state less than purchasing the garden. If the College of Physicians and Surgeons could choose anything to lobby for, they said, it would not be the Elgin Botanic Garden.

  These barbed remarks amounted to an about-face from the college’s earlier statements of support, and they were undeniably awkward for Hosack. But his pièce de résistance was so impressive that it didn’t really matter. He had come prepared with a petition to save Elgin signed by sixty-eight
prominent New Yorkers—Federalists and Democratic-Republicans alike. His principle of political aloofness had served him well. Among the signatories were men who had been governors, mayors, and city council members—men whose names would live on in the city’s streets, landmarks, and memories for centuries to come: Bayard, Beekman, Colden, Cutting, Fish, Gracie, Livingston, Pendleton, Remsen, Rikers, Rutgers, Schuyler, Van Rensselaer, Varick, and many more.

  It was probably on February 8, 1810, that Hosack climbed the fifteen steps of the Capitol and passed between the fluted columns of the towering front portico, for that was the day that the Senate was to consider his latest appeal. In the cavernous hall of the Capitol, legislators in dark suits strode across a diamond-checkered floor of gray-and-white Italian marble—some turning right to enter the Assembly chamber, others moving left toward the smaller Senate chamber. Visitors like Hosack had to climb a lobby staircase to watch the proceedings from the second-floor galleries, where they looked down at the backs of legislators’ heads but faced the speaker on his dais at the front of the room. The rooms were elegantly decorated with symbols of the nation, including the American eagle.

  The senators listened as the Elgin testimonials were read aloud. Then they appointed a bipartisan select committee to deliberate on Hosack’s appeal and report back. DeWitt Clinton and Edward P. Livingston were the most prominent among the Democratic-Republicans on the committee, while Jonas Platt, a former United States congressman, led the Federalists. On February 12, Livingston took the floor to speak for all his committee colleagues. “Your committee state[s] with pleasure, that this is the first establishment of this kind that has ever been attempted in the United States, and that this praise-worthy example has already been followed by several of our sister states, particularly, Massachusetts, Maryland, and South-Carolina.” To raise the funds to purchase the garden, the committee recommended organizing a lottery, a procedure often used at the time to fund roads, bridges, schools, and colleges. The next day, Livingston introduced a bill bearing the same title as the one that had almost passed the Assembly the previous year: “An act for promoting medical science in the state of New-York.”