By way of thanks for Hosack’s trouble, Burr said he was requesting that a botanist at the Jardin des Plantes package up some specimens, including one of Burr’s own choosing: “that precious herb estragore, which you will have the honor of introducing into our country.” This herb (Artemisia dracunculus) was actually called estragon by the French, as Burr indicated elsewhere in his journal; in English, it is called tarragon. Burr was wrong that Hosack would be introducing it. Already during the French Revolution, a French merchant who had emigrated to New York was selling estragon at his shop on William Street, and Hosack himself was growing it at Elgin by 1806. At any rate, Hosack seems to have assisted Burr with his request, because soon a collection of three hundred seeds arrived at Elgin from André Thouin, the director of the Jardin des Plantes. Hosack was ecstatic over Thouin’s shipment, as his student John Francis could still recall vividly decades later.
When Hosack received these treasures from Paris, he was frantically busy trying to get his second Elgin catalogue into print. His goal was to facilitate specimen exchange with other botanists, so it would include the Latin and common names of the garden’s two thousand species, with countries of origin provided but no pictures. In a bold announcement of his botanical aspirations for the United States, Hosack entitled his catalogue Hortus Elginensis (Elgin Garden). He told friends that the Hortus Elginensis was modeled on the Hortus Kewensis, a recent catalogue from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. When it was fresh from the printer, Hosack sent copies of the Hortus Elginensis to all his botanical and medical friends and correspondents, among them Jussieu, Thouin, Delile, and Michaux in Paris, and James Edward Smith in London. He directed another copy to Bernard McMahon, who was building his own garden outside Philadelphia, named the Upsal Botanic Garden in honor of Linnaeus. Hosack also sent a copy of the Hortus Elginensis to Burr’s friend Carl Peter Thunberg at Linnaeus’s original Uppsala garden.
Hosack was on firm ground at last. He could now launch his most ambitious project of all: his flora of North America, modeled on William Curtis’s Flora Londinensis and James Edward Smith’s English Botany. Hosack envisioned a series of illustrated volumes that would eventually encompass every plant on the continent. With his customary self-confidence, he was undeterred by the fact that it would undoubtedly be decades before all the species of North America had been collected and identified. He brushed aside any memory of Curtis’s frustrations with the Flora Londinensis and imagined the day he would present the very first copy of the first volume of his Flora of North America, as he took to calling it, to the legislature in Albany. The state’s payment for the garden would be critical to the project, when it eventually came in. He couldn’t hasten that hour, but in the meantime he assembled a team of botanists and artists to begin work.
Leading the project would be Frederick Pursh, with his expertise in American plants, gained through long months of work on the Lewis and Clark specimens. John Francis would join Pursh, as would Hosack’s nephews Caspar and John Eddy. Amos Eaton, another former student of Hosack’s, had moved back to the Catskills, but Hosack didn’t mind because Eaton had just founded a school there that was devoted entirely to botany. “To your pupils and their teacher, as first on the field, much praise is due,” Hosack wrote to Eaton, pledging his unconditional support. Pursh, Francis, and the Eddy boys would be joined on the Flora by John Eatton Le Conte, a Columbia graduate in his midtwenties, as well as by Isaac Roosevelt, a twenty-year-old medical student from the village of Hyde Park, near Samuel Bard’s estate up the Hudson.‡ Hosack also hired James Inderwick, “a young gentleman of great genius and taste,” whose job would be to draw and hand-color the engravings of the plant specimens that would go with the written descriptions.
Hosack excitedly began planning for a second publication, a magazine modeled on Curtis’s Botanical Magazine. Pursh agreed to edit this, too. Applause for these new projects soon reached Hosack from Britain, where the editors of the London Medical and Physical Journal praised his “ardent perseverance.” Hosack’s selflessness contrasted sharply with “the cold, calculating, trading spirit of the public body.” They hoped he would not lose heart but would instead “make the whole of the American continent his GARDEN.”
HOSACK URGENTLY NEEDED his nephew John Eddy for the Flora, but he would have to be patient. In late June 1810 John had gone upstate with DeWitt Clinton, Gouverneur Morris, and a few other prominent New Yorkers, including his own father, Thomas Eddy. The men were members of a state commission appointed to explore the course of the Mohawk River, in search of the best route for a possible canal linking the Hudson with the Great Lakes. Hosack had packaged up medicines for the men to take with them, including emetics and Peruvian bark. Clinton had extra time on his hands for the trip, having recently been removed from the post of mayor in a political shuffle. Morris had invited the artist James Sharples to go along—thus making him miss the Elgin visit—and Ellen Sharples joked in her journal about the fact that Morris and her husband would be traveling by carriage to meet the other men upstate; Morris had put his “French cook and other servants” in a second carriage.
John Eddy was going on the trip mainly in order to botanize along the Mohawk River. He traveled to Albany by steamboat, departing on a lovely summer afternoon with his father and Clinton. By the Fourth of July, they were all settling into a flat-bottomed boat outfitted with awnings, curtains, and benches. They christened the boat the Eddy, in honor of John’s father, calling the baggage boat the Morris. They had invented these names as a joke, but then the boatmen had painted them on the vessels. Some of the men in the party had brought along books to while away the languid summer hours as they floated along the Mohawk. They agreed to consolidate these in a single trunk, giving John the key and appointing him librarian. Clinton soon decided that the most interesting volume in their little lending library was a treatise disproving the existence of magic and magicians. Like Clinton, John was keeping a travel diary, and he noted in it that he was “appointed Segar Keeper general, and received 2 boxes containing 2000 Segars.”
In his own diary, Clinton mentioned that John was deaf, and that he and the other men could communicate with John only by signing or by writing things down. Clinton soon decided John was extremely well read and had an impressive memory, but he also found his “temper bad.” If John was feeling out of sorts, however, he didn’t reveal it in his diary. The views from the Eddy completely mesmerized him. “The richly cultivated country” and the “high Hills cloathed with wood among which we had winded this afternoon, had presented us with many rural and romantic views.” Near the town of German Flatts, he admired the fertile bottomland that stretched into the distance on both sides of the river. The local Dutch farmers cultivated their farms so beautifully that they looked to John more like gardens than fields of crops.
Clinton got one thing right about John—he loved books. They suffused the quiet world around him with layers of meaning. The Dutch settlers in Schenectady who were sweeping the streets for a Fourth of July parade, for example, made John think of an anecdote from Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker Tales. A waterfall on the Mohawk reminded him of passages in Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia about the Shenandoah and the Potomac. John was also a gifted writer, possessing an almost alchemical power to turn images into words. One evening, he witnessed a scene so magnificently American he thought it could never have “entered into the imagination of an european painter.” On a glassy lake, a Native American man stood in a canoe poised to spear a fish, his figure illuminated by the red glow of a campfire on the shore. In the distance beyond him, the towering forest faded into the misty darkness.
Whenever the barge pulled to the shore to allow the men to pick up supplies or investigate a new town, John jumped off to go plant hunting. He marveled at the riot of species “growing wild with a luxuriance that can scarcely be imagined by those who have not seen the banks of the Mohawk.” On July 9 he was excited to find a specimen of what he noted as Hypericum pentagyna (a speci
es of St. John’s wort) in bright-yellow bloom. He looked for seeds to take back to Elgin but had to content himself with gathering some of the other plants growing in great masses on the riverbank. He was upset with himself for not bringing any botany books on the trip—he had decided against it for fear they might prove too heavy to lug around. He did his best to jot down accurate accounts of where he had found the various plants growing and what they looked like in the wild. When he got back to Elgin, he could check these descriptions against the volumes in Hosack’s library and try to identify his new specimens.
Clinton, too, was tramping along the shoreline in search of plants. He found wild hemp, mandrakes, and a “beautiful wild flower, whose botanical name is Ocsis.” He spotted Hosack’s favorite plant, boneset, growing wild and noted in his diary that it was “useful in medicine.” Clinton also kept track of the fish, birds, and other fauna he saw as the team floated along the Mohawk and walked its banks. Inside the dried stalks of a mullein plant, he found a nest of “young bees in a chrysalis state, deposited there by the old ones.” Clinton lamented the overfishing of the Mohawk River, which had once teemed with trout but now seemed to have none. Still, birds of all kinds chattered in the trees around him, and he was very pleased to see “great numbers of bitterns, blackbirds, robins, and bank swallows, which perforate the banks of the river. Also, some wood-ducks, gulls, sheldrakes, bob-linklins, king-birds, crows, kildares, small snipe, woodpeckers, woodcock, wrens, yellow birds, phebes, blue jays, high-holes, pigeons, thrushes, and larks.” But it was geology that truly made Clinton’s heart pound. He was electrified by the drama inscribed in the rocks near Little Falls, where all around him he saw piles of giant boulders scattered and sculpted by the “violence of the waves.”
Clinton and his companions returned to New York City later that summer and reported to the public on the main question assigned to them by the state. Yes, it looked feasible to run a canal from Albany to Lake Erie. With enough political will, New York could have the glory of linking the Atlantic Ocean to the very heart of the continent.
Hosack was impressed with Clinton’s scientific research on this trip. When Hosack learned of his own election to the American Philosophical Society not long afterward, his first reaction was to nominate his friend. “I wish you would make DeWitt Clinton a member of your society,” he wrote the secretary, adding wishfully that science “knows not party politics.”
STARTING IN JULY 1810, while Clinton and his travel companions were still upstate, it began raining almost every day. Along the river, cellars began to fill up and water lapped at the tops of the docks. This deluge was followed by a stretch of steamy weather. Rotting animals and vegetables littered the streets. Hosack wrote to a friend in Philadelphia that he couldn’t remember the city ever having smelled quite so awful, but he also felt perversely cheerful about the stench for medical reasons. Those of his misguided colleagues who thought yellow fever was of domestic origin generally argued that it emanated from putrefying organic matter. Yet as of September—prime yellow-fever season—no cases of the disease had been reported, to his knowledge.
The rain and heat may not have brought fever, but Hosack was in for a miserable autumn nonetheless. The first dark hint was a June 1810 letter that had appeared in the Albany paper, assailing the state’s plan to pay $100,000 for the “frippery of a botanic garden!” The anonymous author raged that it was enough money to build roads all over Manhattan, or found a university, or arm ten thousand militiamen, or finish fortifying the harbor against a British attack. The next bad news came in August, when Hosack heard a rumor that his perennial foe Nicholas Romayne was making a “vile attempt”—Hosack’s words—to intervene in the Elgin appraisal process.
Hosack thought he knew why. Romayne was worried that if the state purchased the garden at such great expense, it would consider its duties to medical education fulfilled, and Romayne’s fledgling College of Physicians and Surgeons, a rival to Columbia’s medical faculty, would have no prospect of seeing state funds anytime soon. Hosack told Bard privately that Romayne was the sort of man who enjoyed “blowing [on] coals.” But he was shocked to learn that Romayne had managed to wrangle some sort of supportive letter out of Samuel Latham Mitchill. Hosack told a friend he thought Romayne must have duped Mitchill. “Otherwise, I shall hereafter entertain a very despicable opinion of human nature.” Mitchill immediately reassured Hosack that he had known nothing about Romayne’s true intentions and was “much disgusted.” Before long, however, Hosack had to conclude that Mitchill was being disingenuous, as he wrote to another friend. “When I may see you, I have some precious things to lay before you relative to Romayne and Mitchill.”
The mounting opposition to the appraisal alarmed Hosack. He had to make sure the deal didn’t fall apart at this delicate stage. He was sure the estimate was fair, because both he and the team of appraisers had solicited estimates from landowners all around Elgin and on comparable tracts elsewhere on the island. The Kip brothers, who lived near the East River on their Kip’s Bay estate, had told Hosack they thought the Elgin land was worth $3,000 per acre, while a man named Theodorus Bailey said he had recently bought land a mile south of Elgin for $5,000 per acre. The state’s Elgin estimate, at $3,700 an acre, was perfectly reasonable. In any case, the land would only increase in value over the coming years, as Hosack confidently predicted to a friend: “N. York cannot under any circumstances fail to become the metropolis of this country.”
All that autumn of 1810 Hosack juggled his Columbia lectures, clinical rounds, and work on the Flora of North America with meetings about the land deal. On his side, he had District Attorney Cadwallader D. Colden, Governor Daniel Tompkins, and DeWitt Clinton. Hosack also had steadfast allies on the Common Council, men who didn’t hesitate to praise his “patriotic contributions of time, talents, and labour” and who insisted on the “immense importance of a botanic garden.” They also pointed out that if the city and the state didn’t save Hosack’s garden, it would be years before anyone else would try to found a New York botanical garden.
At this precarious moment, Frederick Pursh set down his gardening tools and left for the West Indies. He had been ill with some sort of stubborn fever and had finally decided that a change of climate was his best hope for recovery. He planned to return to New York when he was well again, but in the meantime, Elgin had no head gardener. Hosack filled the position as soon as he could. Acting on a tip from the proprietors of a well-known nursery near the Brompton Botanic Garden, he hired a plantsman named Michael Dennison, who had recently settled in New York with plans to open a seed store. Still, no one in the world could stand in for Pursh on Hosack’s planned Flora of North America.
In early September 1810, only a week after he hired Dennison, Hosack received terrible news from the state land office. They had decided to slash the appraisers’ original estimate by nearly $29,000 (around half a million in today’s dollars). If Hosack accepted the deal, he would lose every penny he had spent on the conservatory buildings and on all the other improvements he had made to the land. He would also be unable to pay the botanists and artists working on the Flora of North America, and the project would collapse. Yet his friends had worked so generously to drum up support for Elgin in the state legislature and the Common Council. Hosack felt cornered. In October, he accepted the lower appraisal.
That winter, while he waited for the state to draw the lottery, Hosack kept himself as busy as ever. He spent time with Mary and the children, taught his Columbia courses, visited his patients, wrote his medical essays—and tried to keep the Elgin plants alive. In January 1811, the state officially took possession of the garden, and Hosack assumed he would now be consulted about its future. But in March, to his shock, the state suddenly handed the garden to the College of Physicians and Surgeons. It was beginnning to dawn on the legislators that “to imitate the garden of plants in Paris or another botanical institution of Europe would require too great an annual expenditure.”
Hosack moved
quickly. When Nicholas Romayne, his bête noire at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, resigned in April from its presidency over an unrelated matter, Hosack seized the opportunity to persuade his mentor Samuel Bard to take Romayne’s place. Then he took a bold measure—he joined the faculty of the College of Physicians and Surgeons himself, while continuing to teach at Columbia. The income from the two positions would help fund the Flora, and his foothold at the College of Physicians and Surgeons would let him stand guard over Elgin. Although Hosack’s motives were honorable, his Columbia colleagues were incensed. In early May he had a disagreeable conversation with James Stringham, one of five professors who had just sent a vituperative letter to the trustees demanding that Hosack resign from Columbia. Hosack’s decision to teach at the city’s rival medical school was “totally incompatible with the duties he owes to Columbia College.” Worse still—from his Columbia colleagues’ point of view—Hosack had thrown his support behind a new state initiative to merge the College of Physicians and Surgeons with Columbia’s medical faculty.
Years later, Hosack would give a speech to a group of medical students in which he described his most disputatious fellow physicians as being “like tigers concealed in their jungles, [who] lie crouching for their prey.” Hosack’s conversation with Stringham left him feeling similarly ambushed and aggrieved. His Columbia colleagues had offered him tepid moral support and no financial support throughout the years he had labored on Elgin. Now they were willfully misconstruing his motives for supporting a merger between the two medical faculties. The idea had come from Albany, not from Hosack; he had simply volunteered to present it to his Columbia colleagues. As he insisted to Stringham, his sole desire in doing so had been to improve medical education in New York. “If that be an offense, I have indeed offended, and shall continue to offend.”
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