One bright spot did flicker. His student Andrew Anderson completed a dissertation on boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum). Anderson had conducted the research at Elgin, and he dedicated his work to Hosack and his assistant John Francis. In twenty-six experiments, Anderson had subjected decoctions and infusions of the leaves, flowers, and roots to ammonia, sulphuric acid, silver nitrate, and dozens of other chemical preparations. He concluded that the medicinal properties of boneset closely matched those of Peruvian bark, the imported emetic and sudorific that was especially prized for fighting yellow fever. Peruvian bark was in far shorter supply than the native boneset, and this discovery was quickly picked up and disseminated by other doctors, with appreciative mentions of Hosack himself. The garden was beginning to make its mark on American medicine, out in the world beyond his circle of young men.
Hosack sorely needed the validation. His colleagues had just taken the upsetting step of replacing him with Mitchill on the committee in charge of the garden. Perhaps Hosack had been too controlling, in the time-honored tradition of founders. His relations with Mitchill were already strained because of Mitchill’s behavior during the Elgin appraisal process. One of Hosack’s students later recalled Hosack’s shock the day Mitchill barged in during a lecture and began rifling around in the classroom cabinets for a specimen he needed. Hosack sputtered, “Dr. Mitchill, I am engaged,” the student later recalled. Mitchill reportedly bowed with cool impudence and replied, “So am I, sir.” Hosack was so offended he dismissed class on the spot.
Now sidelined from the Elgin committee entirely, Hosack listened with mounting concern at the faculty meetings to updates on the garden. In July 1813, Michael Dennison, Elgin’s current tenant, informed the college that he could no longer afford to honor his lease unless the college helped him with the debt of $2,000 he had incurred while trying to maintain the conservatory and the collections. Dennison complained that because of the garden he was “sinking the funds of my friends and exhausting my youth instead of saving for hereafter.” He was spending all his time on the Elgin property, and still it wasn’t enough. Dennison pleaded with the professors for help. “As it is with a man drowning, I am ready to catch at a straw.” Hosack knew better than anyone else what Dennison was going through, but he was more worried about the irreplaceable plant collections. During a rainy week in late August, Hosack went by carriage to the garden. He took along two colleagues as witnesses.
The moment the carriage rolled in through the south gate, Hosack saw something had gone terribly wrong on Dennison’s watch. Here and there, the fences and walls around the edge of the property were falling down. Hosack had always insisted that his men keep the garden pathways rolled out and smooth, but now he felt the carriage jarring and bumping over a bed of rocks. The path running from the gate up the hill to the conservatory looked awful. He saw that grass from the once-neat lawn to either side was rooting promiscuously in the dirt. Another path that traced a winding route alongside his forest trees was almost invisible in a welter of weeds.
Hosack was a man who esteemed all plants, no matter how humble. He had cultivated and celebrated the most obscure American flora—the secret mosses, the dullest sedges—but this was unbridled chaos, imparting delight to neither the eye nor the mind. As he reached the conservatory, the shrubbery plantings in front of the buildings came into view. He saw they were splattered with yellow sunflowers. His Helianthus had escaped. He had acquired six species that he classified in this genus over the years, two of them all the way from New Holland (today’s Australia). Looking around the garden, he realized that sunflowers had established colonies in other places as well.
Bedraggled potted plants sat on the ground in front of the greenhouse. Dennison had been right to bring them outside for fresh air and sunshine, but Hosack could tell from their state that it had been done only recently, when any competent gardener knew it should have been done months ago, in May. Now he entered one of the hothouses and saw that many of his most precious specimens were gone. He had gathered them from around the globe, from the most intrepid scientific explorers, the most learned botanists, the most admired friends—Thouin, Curtis, Smith, Banks, Michaux, Delile, Jefferson, and so many others. Now these treasures had been heaved onto some farm cart and taken away to be sold like common produce. Hosack reined in his outrage, went back down to the city, and composed a terse statement to his colleagues at the College of Physicians and Surgeons describing what he had seen at Elgin that day.
The trustees rallied to Hosack’s side. They put him back on the garden committee and drew up a list of charges against Dennison, who responded a few days later with a defensive letter. Because the hothouse flues were broken, he protested, the missing exotic plants wouldn’t have survived anyway. He had dramatically improved the “barren” grounds “by dint of hardship and manure!”—to be specific, two hundred forty wagonloads of manure, purchased at his own expense. He was doing his level best to maintain the garden, but his debts kept dragging him under; his own brother had lured him into a bad loan “under the mask of friendship.” Dennison closed his rambling defense with an anxious postscript: “I would thank the College to inform me if they authorized Dr. Hosack to enter a prosecution against me or not.” But Hosack was focused on one thing. He had to find a way to get Elgin back.
Not long after Hosack delivered his report to his colleagues about the state of the garden, Dennison sent John Francis—who was still boarding with the Hosacks—a brazen note. Would Francis kindly inform the faculty of the College of Physicians and Surgeons that they could find specimens of the rare Camellia japonica in full bloom and for sale at his store on Chatham Street? It was the one species Hosack had requested not be sold.
ON DECEMBER 6, 1813, Thomas Jefferson wrote a moody letter to Alexander von Humboldt. “You will find it inconceivable that Lewis’s journey to the Pacific should not yet have appeared, nor is it in my power to tell you the reason.” Seven years had passed since the expedition had returned, four years since Lewis’s suicide. With Jefferson’s blessing, two volumes containing a narrative of the expedition were finally in preparation in Philadelphia. He promised to ship them to Humboldt, along with some tobacco seed the latter had requested—“if it be possible for them to escape the thousand ships of our enemies spread over the ocean.”
The third volume, however—the one containing Lewis and Clark’s natural history findings—was hopelessly stalled. Benjamin Smith Barton was chronically ill; Pursh had gone to Britain. Jefferson fretted to Humboldt that Lewis and Clark’s discoveries would “become known to the world thro other channels.” Two weeks later, in London, Pursh presented the Linnean Society with an advance copy of his major new work: Flora Americae Septentrionalis—the plants of North America. Pursh noted in its preface that his book contained almost double the number of species that André Michaux had been able to include in his 1803 Flora Boreali-Americana. He acknowledged his profitable association with Lewis and Clark, Hosack, Barton, the Bartrams, McMahon, William Hamilton of The Woodlands, and another Philadelphia-based naturalist, Henry Muhlenberg. But Pursh didn’t mention that he was scooping Barton by publishing many of the Lewis and Clark plants.
When Hosack learned of Pursh’s Flora, he seemed not to mind that his former head gardener had published a book on plant species gathered in part while Pursh was employed at Elgin. He didn’t even mind that Pursh had beaten him to publishing a North American Flora. The “almost untrodden field” of American botany about which Hosack had written excitedly to Rush in 1794 was becoming crowded. Yet since then, Hosack had firmly established his own botanical reputation with Elgin, and he had also grown attuned to how much collaborative research was still needed to collect and identify all the flora of North America. Each Flora that appeared, Hosack realized, was destined to be superseded by a new one. Just a year after Pursh published his Flora Americae Septentrionalis, Hosack confided in James Edward Smith about his undimmed dreams for his own Flora of North America. “I only want from the state my rem
uneration for my garden viz. 75.000 Dolls to enable me to employ the best artists to execute it upon the scale I wish.” For now, Hosack wrote Smith, Pursh’s Flora was “unquestionably the best work of its kind that has yet appeared.” It was a generous and fair assessment of a work that would end up preserving Lewis and Clark’s botanical discoveries for future generations of scientists. As was so often the case during his lifetime, Hosack’s first love—before vanity, pride, or politics—was the work.
HOSACK’S GUESTS WERE WAITING for him at his house one winter’s night early in 1814. He was late to his own party, having been detained by a meeting. In spite of a difficult wartime winter, Hosack was throwing his energy into a new project—or perhaps it was because of the war, a defiant show of optimism despite a constant fear of British attack. Two decades after Hosack had sailed home from London with his head full of bold ideas, New York would finally have its own version of the Royal Society. He was one of the chief instigators, as usual, along with DeWitt Clinton and John Pintard. They were calling it the Literary and Philosophical Society of New-York, and Clinton, who was still mayor, agreed to be the new society’s first president. Hosack would be one of three vice presidents.
When he rushed in from the cold and joined his guests, Hosack was apologetic for his delay but pleased about the cause. John Francis was watching as Hosack greeted the venerable old Gouverneur Morris. “I have been detained with some friends, who together this evening have founded a Philosophical Society,” Hosack told Morris, as Francis later recalled the scene. Morris replied, “Indeed!” Hosack took the bait, saying, “Yes, sir, we have indeed this evening founded a Philosophical Society.” Morris then asked Hosack innocently, “But pray, Doctor, where are the philosophers?” It was obvious to Francis that Hosack felt embarrassed in front of his guests. But Morris was playing dumb for the sheer pleasure of needling Hosack. He immediately joined the new society—as did Bard, Mitchill, Post, Francis, Cadwallader D. Colden, Brockholst Livingston, Robert Fulton, Hosack’s nephew John Eddy, and dozens more New York lawyers, doctors, professors, and statesmen. Even the eternally skeptical Washington Irving joined.
Two months later, Clinton delivered the inaugural presidential address to the assembled members of the Literary and Philosophical Society. Hosack and Clinton were as close these days as they had ever been. They breakfasted and dined together frequently—sometimes alone, other times with their families. They talked about plants, politics, and the future of New York. Hosack wrote to a mutual friend about Clinton, “You will see him our next Governor or I will be much deceived and as much disappointed.” In the meantime, Hosack joked, “our friend Mr. Clinton will be appointed at the next meeting our Baron Humboldt to explore the state and to make a statistical report.”
In his inaugural address to the society in May 1814, Clinton unleashed an attack on the old “degeneracy” myth, reminding his listeners that inaccurate theories about American inferiority in every regard still had a foothold among European men of letters. Clinton complained that when Americans took steps to improve themselves, then “the master spirits who preside over transatlantic literature view us with a sneer of supercilious contempt.” As hotly as he defended the United States, however, Clinton conceded in his speech that European critics were correct with regard to Americans’ intellectual accomplishments. Americans had shown so much commercial initiative that their “enterprising spirit” was now admired the world over. Clinton lamented that if this famous spirit “had soared to the heavens in pursuit of knowledge, instead of creeping along the earth in the chase of riches,” the United States would be as respected for its cultural achievements as were the greatest European nations—which it certainly wasn’t.
The Literary and Philosophical Society was New York’s optimistic answer to this failure. Even as it became clear that the earliest chapter of the nation’s history was drawing to a close, the next generation of its leaders looked toward the future. There was so much still to be done in every field: history, literature, art, medicine, archaeology, mineralogy, zoology—here Clinton approvingly mentioned Charles Willson Peale’s mastodon—geology, geography, animal husbandry, and botany. And now, in front of New York’s most powerful citizens, the mayor paused to praise Hosack for his tireless work at Elgin, which “contains seven hundred and thirty-three genera, and two thousand four hundred species of plants.” Clinton also noted that young Americans were being trained at Elgin for the critical task of identifying native plants and their medicinal, commercial, and agricultural uses before the continent was completely overrun by invasive species. “It has already become difficult to discriminate between our native and naturalized plants,” Clinton warned. “With the progress of time the difficulty will increase.”
BY THE SPRING OF 1814, Hosack was the patriarch of a large young family at 65 Broadway. He enjoyed domestic life but never slowed his breakneck professional pace. “He was indefatigable,” one of his sons would later recall. “He always spent hours in his study after the labors of the day, and seldom retired to rest until after midnight, either devoting himself to medical study, reading over the lecture he was to deliver the following morning, or answering letters to his numerous correspondents.” He sometimes went back out into the city late at night to check on a patient whose condition was worrying him. One of his favorite sayings, John Francis later recalled, was “the more a man has to do the better he does it.”
Distracted as Hosack was by his medical and civic commitments, he loved his children and in turn inspired affection and reverence in them. He and Mary now had eight children. In 1812, after a frightening pregnancy that had confined her to bed for weeks, she was safely delivered of a healthy boy whom they named after his father, referring to him for clarity’s sake as “little David.” He was their fourth surviving boy, given the 1801 death of first-born Samuel Bard Hosack. The next baby, their fifth boy, had arrived in November 1813, and they had named him Thomas Eddy Hosack, in honor of John Eddy’s father. But they had realized immediately that something was not right with the baby. He often started suddenly, as if frightened by something no one else could see. His breathing was labored, and he seemed to be in pain each time he urinated. He was constantly ravenous, even after he had eaten as much as the older children. Hosack was completely mystified by Thomas’s condition, as was his medical colleague Dr. Wright Post, who examined the baby at Hosack’s request.
Thomas died when he was six months old, in May 1814. Hosack wrote to Samuel Bard with the news, in a letter mingling paternal anguish with clinical candor. “The day after you left town our dear little babe continued ill . . . the whole nervous system became affected showing itself in a fixed state of the eyes, irregular contractions of the muscles of the face, and occasional strabismus.” Hosack faulted himself for not being able to save the baby, and he made the difficult decision of asking Post to conduct an autopsy. In an age when autopsies were the surest way to decipher the physical sources of human misery, an autopsy on one’s own child was an act of supreme altruism. Hosack bravely remained in the room as Post prepared the body for dissection. “Upon opening the abdomen,” Hosack wrote to Bard, “we were instantly surprised at the great size of the stomach, which was as large as that of most adults—and what was remarkable—the spleen grew exclusively upon the stomach, having no connexion whatever beside.” The autopsy results brought Hosack and Mary a sliver of solace. Hosack told Bard that, had Thomas survived, he would “have been a constant sufferer.”
Hosack’s favorite medicinal plant, boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum)
THE NEWS WAS RELENTLESSLY grim outside 65 Broadway, too. The war had wrecked New York’s commerce and shipping; food was now scarce and exorbitantly priced. The charitable institutions founded by Hosack and his friends teemed with out-of-work laborers and their families. The almshouse behind the new City Hall reported that it had twelve hundred residents, including five hundred fifty children. So many people had sought refuge there over the past few years that the city was now on the verge of
building a larger almshouse out near the Bellevue quarantine hospital on the East River.
It was a terrifying spring and summer. On April 8, 1814, British forces made landfall at Essex, a shipbuilding town on the Connecticut River, where they burned twenty-eight ships. Soon after this news reached New York, a seventy-four-gun British frigate was sighted off New Jersey. Then, in late August, the British burned Washington. The New York papers sounded the alarm: “CITIZENS! TO ARMS!!” Militiamen drilled as volunteers worked feverishly to erect new fortifications. Members of the New-York Historical Society hastily boxed up their library, so that they would be ready—if the British torched New York—to spirit the city’s past to safety.
But when enemy forces invaded in September 1814, they chose to do it upstate, near Plattsburgh. The Americans repelled the British at the Battle of Lake Champlain. The Madison administration, however, still faced the specter of a foe reinvigorated by the defeat of Napoleon in the spring of 1814. On Christmas Eve, American representatives in Belgium signed a treaty with the British that gained little for the United States besides officially ending the hostilities. When news of the Treaty of Ghent reached New York in February 1815, the city celebrated with parades, parties, fireworks, and the energetic resumption of commerce. Laborers put down their muskets and took up their hammers, paintbrushes, wheelbarrows, and pails. Captains began inspecting their dry-docked ships for seaworthiness. Gradually, cargo piled up on the docks again and shelves filled with goods.
The men in Hosack’s circle greeted the peace with as much renewed vigor as anyone in New York, and not only because so many of them had commercial interests. Perhaps now the public would finally look more favorably on expenditures for the arts and sciences. In May 1815, however, Hosack, Pintard, and the other members of the New-York Historical Society were evicted from their rooms in the Government House, a building they shared with the Academy of Fine Arts, which was also ordered to pack up its paintings and sculptures. The building had just been sold at auction. Pintard wrote to John Francis to ask for his help with the move and suggested he temporarily stash the books at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. “Let me intreat you to get our Historical Soc[iety] Library out of the way. There will be the very devil to pay after tomorrow. & let the gods and goddesses take care of themselves.”
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