But Hosack’s situation was untenable. In June 1811, he resigned from Columbia and moved to the College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he was appointed to teach courses on the theory and practice of medicine—and on botany, using the garden. With Romayne gone and the supportive Bard in charge, the College of Physicians and Surgeons soon proved a hospitable home for Elgin. Hosack’s new colleagues quickly appropriated funds to repair the many cracked glass panes on the hothouses. At a faculty meeting in May 1811, they had officially praised Hosack’s “zeal for the propagation of botanical knowledge” and pledged to take care of the garden.
It was a bittersweet moment. For the first time since he had founded Elgin in 1801, Hosack stood shoulder to shoulder with a group of his peers in its ownership and management. On June 3, he invited his colleagues to his house to discuss the garden’s immediate future. His drawing room was a pleasant place for a faculty meeting, much more comfortable than the classroom at the college’s temporary quarters on Pearl Street. They had a problem that urgently needed solving. The state had agreed only to buy the garden from Hosack—not to pay for its upkeep. The college certainly couldn’t afford to pay, so the professors had devised a plan to raise the required funds by leasing the property to a competent, biddable gardener. It appeared, however, that there was little appetite for the job among the city’s few nurserymen. The professors had just two applications on the table. The first was from a man named William Tough, who proposed leasing the garden for five years and promised to “keep at all times healthy at least three of each species of plants” and to preserve the grounds in as “clean and handsome a state” as Hosack had left them. In return, Tough asked that he be permitted to cultivate plants at the garden and sell them for his own profit. The other application was from Elgin’s current head gardener, Michael Dennison, who proposed almost identical terms. The professors settled on Dennison, but Hosack probably should have noticed that Dennison’s application didn’t mention anything about keeping the plants alive and well.
The college would now need a complete inventory of the specimens Dennison was to inherit with his lease. Hosack took charge of this task, going up to Elgin a few weeks later. June was turning out to be ferociously hot and arid. Not only in the garden but all over the island, plants were suffering from the drought and in some places were “altogether destroyed.” He went walking through the greenhouse and hothouses with a little notebook in hand, jotting down the names of the dozens of species he had acquired even in the few months since the Hortus Elginensis had gone to press. Elgin now contained more than two thousand species, but when he turned in the inventory he asked the college that just one rare and beautiful flower be set aside for him. He was leaving four Camellia japonica plants at the garden, but only temporarily. They were very precious, and absolutely “not to be sold” by Dennison. At the end of June, the searing heat gave way to a strange cold snap, and New Yorkers began rummaging in their wardrobes and trunks for winter clothes. Hosack found he needed blankets at night. If Dennison didn’t see to the cracked panes on the hothouses immediately, the tropical plants might perish.
Soon after Dennison took over the garden lease, Pursh returned from the West Indies. He discovered that the city was roiling with anxiety over an anticipated British attack, a situation he quickly concluded was “very unfavorable to the publication of scientific works.” He packed up his worldly possessions—including his Lewis and Clark specimens, drawings, and descriptions—and sailed for London. War or no war, the stalwart old Linnean Society would keep the banners of botany flying. In the United States, however, shoring up forts and training soldiers took precedence over funding the arts and sciences. Writing from Monticello in the spring of 1812, Jefferson made this point bluntly to his friend John Bradbury, a British naturalist. Bradbury had written to Jefferson from Washington to say he had learned that the federal government was on the verge of founding a public botanical garden, but Jefferson replied that “it is an idea without the least foundation.” He conceded that it would probably be within President Madison’s power to allot public land for a botanical garden, but its organizers would have to overcome the “suspicion that it would be converted into a mere kitchen garden, for the supply of the town & market.”
Anyway, observed Jefferson, the national mood hardly favored such projects. Botanical gardens might be “desired by every friend of science”—but not by a nation preparing for enemy attack.
* The Horace inscription on the Weehawken monument recorded by Ellen Sharples in her diary contains an error (quidem for bonis) that Hosack also made when quoting these lines in his August 1804 account to William Coleman about the duel.
† William Hosack was still in Germany, where he accidentally shot a man while on a hunting trip. Burr made light of the episode in his journal, writing that William “went a shooting, and, in shooting at a hare, shot a man; not dead, but wounded him badly, which cost him money and gave him much trouble.” William fled the vicinity after this incident, but Burr didn’t know where he had gone.
‡ Isaac Roosevelt would not live long enough to meet his grandson Franklin Delano Roosevelt, born two decades after Isaac’s death. The young FDR often visited his uncle John A. Roosevelt at Rosedale, the Italianate villa at Hyde Park his grandfather Isaac had built in 1832.
Chapter 14
“INSTEAD OF CREEPING ALONG THE EARTH”
BURR DESPERATELY CRAVED A CIGAR. HE HAD LEFT SIX BEHIND in London, “all which I would gladly smoke this evening.” But Captain Potter of the Aurora refused to go ashore for such trifles. They had only just set sail for America.
Burr had decided he could finally show his face in New York again. For now, he was taking the precaution of traveling under an assumed name, his true identity known only to Captain Potter. It was early April 1812, and they were bound for Boston, where Burr planned to board a smaller vessel for New York. The voyage began on rough seas in a freezing rain that was soon followed by hail and snow. The ship was heaving so violently, Burr noted in his journal, “that we don’t attempt to put anything on the table, but eat off the floor.” As he struggled to write legibly, the ink blotched and spread on the damp paper. He spent his first week at sea sleeping, reading, and reorganizing his book-filled trunks (in one of which he discovered seven cigars). On April 9, “though half sick all day,” he managed to enjoy a volume by Humboldt so much that he raced through and finished it the next day—when the ship was at “Lat. 49° 29,” he noted in a Humboldtian flourish.
As the Aurora entered the open Atlantic, Captain Potter kept watch for British ships. He confided to Burr that he was worried President Madison might declare war while they were at sea, putting the Aurora at risk of capture as a war prize. Burr scoffed at these fears; he thought that “J. Madison & Co.” were far too cowardly to take on the British Empire. “I treat their war-prattle as I should that of a bevy of boarding-school misses who should talk of making war; show them a bayonet or a sword, and they run and hide.” When the Aurora reached Boston safely in early May, Burr found that he was right. Madison had not declared war.
Burr was forced to wait several weeks for passage from Boston to New York, but he finally embarked on the sloop Rose. He sailed along the Connecticut coast through Long Island Sound, arriving on June 8 at Rikers Island, at the northern end of the East River. Although Burr was hoping to travel down the river that night and slip unnoticed into New York City, the captain of the Rose decided to wait until morning to navigate the tricky strait known as Hell Gate. Annoyed at the delay, Burr hailed a passing sailboat and asked its occupants—two farmers from Long Island—to drop him in Manhattan. They agreed, but when their boat was blown off course toward Long Island, Burr jumped ship again, this time paying “two vagabonds in a skiff” a dollar to take him to shore. He went to Water Street to look for a friend.
Had Burr arrived during the day instead of sneaking across the harbor in the dark, he could not have missed the colossal evidence that New York officials did not share his dismis
sive attitude toward the possibility of war. Several new forts had sprung up on the southern shores of Manhattan, and another had risen on the Governors Island site of the old Fort Jay, which had fallen into ruins. According to Diedrich Knickerbocker, Washington Irving’s alter ego, Governors Island had once been a “smiling garden” but now looked like “a fierce little warrior in a big cocked hat, breathing gunpowder and defiance to the world!” The new fort on the island had been completed in 1810, and by the time Burr came home, officials had also erected a broad, squat stone tower called Castle Williams. When the castle was finished, American frigates fired practice rounds of cannonballs at its walls, after which military inspectors concluded that “no apprehension need be entertained of their being battered down.”
They were just in time. Ten days after Burr arrived home, the United States declared war on Great Britain. Proponents of war had found fuel in the ongoing practice of naval impressment as well as in reports of Native Americans emboldened by the British to attack US citizens in the frontier territories. New Yorkers went into a frenzy of fear and recrimination. On June 20, 1812, two days after the war vote in Congress, a newspaper published the names of prowar delegates from New York who had decided “to plunge this State into a tremendous scene of suffering, devastation and carnage.” The most outspoken antiwar New Yorker was DeWitt Clinton, who had been consolidating his control in the city and state since regaining the mayoralty in February 1811. Now he was lieutenant governor. Clinton had amassed so much power through so many different offices that a sarcastic open letter published in a New York paper in May 1812 addressed him as “Lieutenant Governor of the state, (and every once and a-while) Mayor of the city of New York, Judge of the Court of Sessions and of the Mayor’s Court, Commissioner of Lock and Canal navigation from Lake Erie to the Hudson, Commissioner of fortifications in and near the city of New York, exoff[i]cio director of the bank, &c.” In the months running up to the declaration of war in June 1812, Clinton had been cultivating his position at the head of a coalition of Federalists and anti-Madison Democratic-Republicans. The Great Apollo had decided to run for president. He would lose to Madison that fall.
While New York girded itself for a British attack, Burr set about reestablishing as much of a law practice as he could muster and hoping for news from Theo in South Carolina. He had written her on May 9, announcing his return to the United States and asking her to send his grandson to New York so he could oversee his studies. But on July 12—the eighth anniversary of Hamilton’s death—Theo wrote to Burr with heartrending news. “There is no more joy for me; the world is a blank. I have lost my boy. My child is gone forever. He expired on the 30th of June.” Burr tried to console Theo as she sank into a bewildering fog of pain. Longing to see her father, she made plans to travel to New York as soon as her husband’s affairs allowed her to steal away. Finally, on the last day of 1812, Theo set sail from South Carolina on the ship Patriot. She never arrived in New York. The Patriot was lost at sea.
Burr had kept up a constant conversation with his darling girl in his mind and on paper throughout his European travels. Now he would never pull a chair close to hers and laugh with her about the fascinating, maddening people he had met in Europe. He would never dazzle her with stories of the palaces, the landscapes, and the gardens he had seen. He would never get to take her little hand in his again, or that of his only grandchild. Theo’s disappearance from the world set Burr permanently adrift. He would spend the rest of his life honoring his matchless love for her by surrounding himself with young people.
THE ERA OF POST-REVOLUTIONARY PEACE—however tenuous it had sometimes seemed—was over. Support for Elgin now waned further. In 1812, the year following Hosack’s promising move to the College of Physicians and Surgeons, a handful of his colleagues issued a statement arguing that the garden was a financial burden to the college. With gratuitous cruelty, they noted that the most faithful garden visitors seemed to be the two dozen or so cattle Dennison was pasturing on the property. “These animals, to the number of 20 or 30 attend the Botanical Garden, and excite the ridicule of travellers passing the [Middle] Road.”
There were at least a few human visitors to the garden that autumn, however. During a spell of mild days at the heart of October, a small team of men appeared. The one in charge was a dark-haired young man who carried a leather notebook in his hand and a new world in his head. He and his men surveyed the Elgin property with their instruments. Later, they came back and placed marble slabs at regular intervals along the Middle Road. Each slab bore a different number on its south-facing side: 47, 48, 49, 50, 51. On their west-facing sides, they all bore one number: 5.
The young man was John Randel Jr., civil servant and sorcerer. He had been hired by the city to map a grid of new streets onto the island. In his wake, boulders shattered and streams went underground. Where he and his team planted their rows of marble, flat ribbons of pavement slowly began to unfurl over hard-packed dirt lanes and across farmers’ fields. Speculators snapped up land and sheared it into narrow strips. Villages began to melt together, the memories of old borders fading. The Middle Road was to be renamed: the Fifth Avenue.
IN MAY 1813, THOMAS JEFFERSON wrote to John Adams with sad tidings. The two men had fallen out after Adams had left the presidency, and it had taken Benjamin Rush’s ministrations to heal their wounded friendship. Now Rush had died in Philadelphia of a pulmonary illness. “Another of our friends of 76. is gone, my dear Sir,” Jefferson wrote Adams. “A better man, than Rush, could not have left us.” Rush’s son James, knowing Hosack’s profound attachment to Rush, wrote to him three days later, but Hosack had already heard the news. “To your family, it is an afflicting bereavement and on this occasion I feel myself one of its members,” he wrote to James.
Rush’s paternal warmth toward Hosack had persisted through two decades of intense medical debates, particularly over the causes of yellow fever. While other physicians who joined in the fray left blood on the floor, Hosack and Rush had stayed extremely close. The previous summer, Rush had sent Hosack a typically generous letter affirming their friendship in the face of professional pressure to fall out. “Let us show the world that a difference of opinion upon medical subjects is not incompatible with medical friendships; and in so doing, let us throw the whole odium of the hostility of physicians to each other upon their competition for business and money.” When Hosack received this letter, he was, in fact, arranging his own tribute to their friendship—he had asked the artist Thomas Sully to paint a portrait of Rush. Although Hosack already owned a sketch of Rush by James Sharples, he told Sully that it didn’t do Rush justice. Hosack wanted a painting that would perfectly capture “the mind which animates the face of my friend.” He also ventured an idea to Sully about the composition: “Would it improve the picture by throwing into the background a distant view of your city Hospital or University to which Dr. Rush’s labours have been so much devoted?” When Sully completed his portrait the following year, it showed Rush sitting before an open window with the Pennsylvania Hospital visible in the distance.
For the first few weeks after Rush died, Hosack found it too painful to write to his widow, Julia. He finally sent her a heartfelt letter expressing how stricken he and Mary were; every time the mail coach had left New York, Hosack confessed to Julia, he had felt awful about not having written her yet. Later, when he felt more equal to the task, Hosack wrote a long eulogy for Rush, praising the qualities he had admired in his mentor for decades: the devotion to medicine, the energetic self-discipline, the eloquence, and above all the generosity. Hosack noted that Rush’s dying words to his son were, “Be indulgent to the poor.” Hosack sent a copy of the eulogy to Rush’s family, telling them that Washington Irving had requested it for publication in a new periodical. The eulogy soon appeared there along with an engraving of Sully’s portrait of Rush. When Sully painted Hosack’s own portrait the following year, he depicted Hosack seated near a bust of Rush, so that mentor and student looked as though they we
re continuing their decades-long conversation.
THE WAR WAS RUINING all Hosack’s plans for Elgin. First Pursh had left for London, and now James Inderwick, the artist Hosack needed for the Flora, had enlisted in the US Navy. Inderwick had signed up as a surgeon and boarded a brig in New York Harbor in May 1813. Many other medical students and recent graduates had left for the service after the declaration of war, including Hosack’s nephew and chief plant collector Caspar Wistar Eddy, who had graduated from Columbia in 1811. The classrooms at both the Columbia medical faculty and the College of Physicians and Surgeons were emptying so fast that the professors had begun to worry they might have to close down until the war was over. John Francis, now a lecturer at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, observed drily that all the ill-equipped young medical students who were being rushed into posts as military physicians would soon be able to “do as much execution in a nautical way as most of the legalized murderers with which our city abounds.”
Hosack was feeling ever more anxious that spring. There was the war, of course, and Rush’s death, but something else was gnawing at him. Only part of the lottery had been drawn, which meant he hadn’t been paid in full by the state for the garden. He was in debt to ten different friends, among them Brockholst Livingston, Nathaniel Pendleton, and a wealthy merchant named Henry Coster. All of these men had lent him money while he waited for the state to complete its end of the Elgin deal. He was hemorrhaging interest payments, and now Coster was pressuring him for repayment of his loan. Although he had had no choice, Hosack was wracked with regret about his decision to relinquish control of Elgin.
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