American Eden

by Victoria Johnson

  Pintard, meanwhile, was lobbying the Common Council for use of the old almshouse, now standing empty after its residents had been moved to the new site on the East River. But others had the same idea—more than half a dozen institutions were clamoring for space in the almshouse. Hosack was deeply involved with three of them: the Historical Society, the Academy of Fine Arts, and the Literary and Philosophical Society. In June 1815, a Common Council committee recommended that these three, along with several others, be gathered in the almshouse under one roof.

  Samuel Latham Mitchill, who was now in the Common Council, later bragged to Peale that he had been the councilman most instrumental in supporting the almshouse petitions. Mitchill himself was founding a society called the Lyceum of Natural History, and he hoped to get space for it in the almshouse. Whoever did write the committee’s report, it sounded two of Hosack’s favorite themes—civic competition and the lack of public funding for the arts and sciences. “The Citizens of New York have too long been stigmatized as phlegmatic, money making & plodding—Our Sister Cities deny we possess any taste for the sciences.” The report pointed out that even the Royal Society of London had begun as a casual circle of friends and had depended on government support to rise “to that splendid zenith at which a Halley was Secretary & a Newton President.”

  The Common Council hadn’t been able to resist the idea of a New York Newton. They handed over the almshouse keys, and the New-York Institution was born—a consortium of societies and museums fittingly located just north of what Pintard called “our magnificent new City Hall, the proudest Edifice in the U[nite]d States.” Hosack soon brought his herbarium down from Elgin, including the original Linnaean specimens that Smith had given him in 1794, to put in the New-York Historical Society’s new rooms, which they had leased for the token sum of “one peppercorn, if lawfully demanded.”

  THROUGHOUT THE SPRING and summer of 1815, men flooded back to the United States from the war. Peale’s son Linnaeus returned to Philadelphia after participating in a naval battle off New Jersey. In New York, fathers, sons, and brothers showed up suddenly at their own doorsteps, injured and exhausted but happy to be home. James Inderwick, Hosack’s artist for the planned Flora of North America, was not among them. About six months after the peace treaty was signed, his ship was lost at sea in the Straits of Gibraltar. Hosack had managed to publish just one plant engraving by Inderwick before the war took him away. It was a picture of the Canada thistle specimen Mitchill had given Hosack to identify in 1810.

  James Inderwick’s engraving of Canada thistle, done for Hosack

  Some men were coming home from the war; others seized on the return of peace to plan European tours. In May Hosack wrote to James Edward Smith that “my friend Mr. Washington Irving of this city proposes to pass some time in London. . . . He is among the finest belles lettres writers of our country.” Three months later Hosack wrote to Smith again, this time saying that John Francis would soon be in London: “His desire for an opportunity of seeing & knowing the great men of the Earth leads him across the Atlantic.” By now Smith was officially a great man. The previous summer, the Prince Regent had laid a sword on his shoulder and dubbed him Sir James Edward. “I really rejoice in the accession to your honors that of knighthood,” Hosack wrote graciously to Smith. While Smith had received a knighthood for his services to natural history, Hosack’s great botanical achievement for his own nation was being ridiculed as a cow pasture. He hadn’t even been fully paid for his land yet.

  JOHN FRANCIS REACHED LONDON that fall, and Hosack’s old circle at the Linnean Society welcomed him warmly. He soon wrote to Hosack to say that Smith was Hosack’s “most ardent” friend and had asked after his namesake, James Edward Smith Hosack. Francis spent that winter studying medicine and natural history in London, pausing long enough in his work to travel to Edinburgh, where he met some of Hosack’s acquaintances on the medical faculty. Soon after this, a friend of Francis from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, Peter Townsend, wrote to ask whether the medical professors in London and Edinburgh truly merited their international fame. Townsend told Francis he thought that no professor “during the last winter in any part of the globe” could have received more acclaim than Hosack. More than a hundred students were now enrolled at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and “I can assure you (privately) that Dr. H. is the great magnet of their attraction.”

  In May 1816, Francis wrote to Hosack to report a delightful remark Sir Joseph Banks had made to him over breakfast. “The reputations of the U.S. as a whole are more enlightened than that of any other country; they possess more enterprise than any other people under the canopy of Heaven; they are inferior to no people in regard to physical and intellectual capacity.” Banks had recently finished reading the two published volumes documenting the Lewis and Clark expedition. He expressed to Francis his astonishment at what the Corps of Discovery had endured and achieved. There would be no sneering about American efforts at self-improvement from this quarter. Banks felt that even his own accomplishments as a young explorer paled in comparison. He pronounced the expedition “a great performance,” a feat unparalleled in the annals of Western exploration. “Sir,” he told Francis, “the fatigues of a single day would have killed almost any European.”

  As far as Francis was concerned, however, the richest London gossip concerned Frederick Pursh. He was “his own worst enemy: drunk morning, noon & night.” He had been received warmly at first, but once rumors of his bad botanical citizenship concerning the publication of the Lewis and Clark specimens had reached the Linnean Society, Smith refused to be in the same room with him. Francis thought Pursh had treated Hosack himself very unfairly by taking credit for Hosack’s idea of publishing a Flora. Pursh had also failed to thank some of the younger botanists who had assisted him while he was collecting for Elgin, including Caspar and John Eddy.

  Pursh did make one generous and honorable gesture toward Hosack. He tried to name a plant for him—Hosackia Louisiana. But Francis told Hosack that Smith, one of the world’s chief arbiters in such matters, was rejecting the classification as “somehow or other a doubtful species.” Smith didn’t think the plant was worthy of Hosack anyway, he assured Francis, who reported the conversation to Hosack. “The plant is a very unimportant one,” Smith told Francis. “We must give our fine Dr. Hosack a garden Genus. We’ll find one out for him. He deserves a conspicuous plant.”

  In fact, Smith had been working for months to secure for Hosack another very conspicuous tribute. Francis wrote Hosack excitedly about the plans afoot in London. “They in this country think FRS the highest honour that can be conferred on any individual.” On May 23, 1816, with Banks presiding, Hosack was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society—not a Foreign Member, but a full-fledged Fellow. It was an extraordinary honor for an American. When Hosack received the news of his election later that summer, his friends showered him in congratulations. He reveled in the attention, confiding to Nathaniel Pendleton that “in some measure I must candidly own my pleasure is increased at the effect it has produced upon my professional brethren. Our friend Mitchill is teased at every corner that he has been omitted.” Sometime that summer, Hosack made a small alteration to the preprinted tickets that admitted his medical students into their courses. Below his name, he wrote three initials in florid script: F.R.S.

  A few weeks after Hosack had achieved his triumph, Bernard McMahon died at his Upsal Botanic Garden outside Philadelphia. William Hamilton of The Woodlands had died in 1813, around the same time as Benjamin Rush. Benjamin Smith Barton had died in December 1815 at the age of forty-nine, despite the best efforts of Hosack and other physicians to prolong his life. Barton had trained several very promising students, among them Jacob Bigelow, a young medical botanist who lived in Boston and had recently published a guide to the plants of the Boston area. But aside from William Bartram, there was now no living American who had done more than Hosack to teach the United States about the world’s flora. From Paris,
François André Michaux wrote Hosack, “Every learned man in Europe knows that you are one of the most zealous promoters of Sciences & arts in North America.”

  IN LATE JULY 1816, Hosack received a package of seeds from Monticello. It had been a decade since Jefferson had ignored his request for specimens from the Lewis and Clark expedition. In the intervening years, however, Hosack’s work at Elgin had earned Jefferson’s respect. Now, when André Thouin sent Jefferson a shipment of seeds from the Jardin des Plantes, Hosack was the first person he thought of. Jefferson was as enthusiastic about botany as ever. “Botany I rank with the most valuable sciences,” he had written to a friend in 1814, “whether we consider it’s subjects as furnishing the principal subsistence of life to man & beast, delicious varieties for our tables, refreshments from our orchards, the adornments of our flower-borders, shade and perfume of our groves, materials for our buildings, or medicaments for our bodies.”

  In a cover note to Hosack, Jefferson explained that he hadn’t even opened the package to inspect the seeds, “knowing I could not pack them so well again.” Hosack thanked Jefferson promptly, saying that it was too late in the season to sow the seeds but “with the aid of manganese most of them will probably grow the next year.” Certain that Jefferson would appreciate the praise, he also copied out Banks’s glowing remarks about the Lewis and Clark expedition. But when Hosack turned to the subject of the garden, he grew morose. “It gives me pain to state to you that altho New York has done herself great credit by the purchase of the Botanic Garden she has made no provision whatever for the support or the improvement of it.”

  Hosack’s misery about Elgin was deeper even than he confessed to Jefferson. In 1814, the state had wrenched Elgin away from the College of Physicians and Surgeons and handed it to Columbia in lieu of a badly needed government loan. This decision made little sense, because the state had recently transferred Columbia’s medical faculty to the College of Physicians and Surgeons. Hosack had strongly supported this merger. But it meant that, now, he and all the other professors with medical or botanical expertise were based at the new College of Physicians and Surgeons building on Barclay Street. At Columbia, there was no one left who was likely to fight for the garden with anything like Hosack’s energy and expertise. The state had made matters worse by burdening the grant of the Elgin property to Columbia with a contractual condition completely at odds with the preservation of the garden itself. Columbia was ordered to turn the property into its new campus within twelve years.

  Columbia’s trustees were as annoyed as Hosack by the state’s decision. They considered the garden a terrible substitute for a loan and complained to the legislature that, rather than bringing the college any profit, it would be “a Source of Expense.” They dragged their feet on taking possession of the land, while Hosack, from the College of Physicians and Surgeons, desperately tried to keep watch over the plant collections. Elgin was still in Michael Dennison’s clutches and now in even worse shape than the awful day in 1813 when Hosack had toured the garden with two colleagues as witnesses. Dennison himself was in such dire straits that he had taken a job at a glass and window store downtown. On a visit to the garden in the summer of 1815, Hosack found the pathways so “neglected and filled with stone . . . that a Carriage is in danger of being upset.” He also discovered that Dennison had ruined the tidy botanical ordering in which he had maintained his specimens—and of what pedagogical use was the garden without it? The plants that Dennison hadn’t already removed were dying, and the conservatory buildings were falling apart. Broken glass lay everywhere.

  Hosack longed to get his garden back. He told Jefferson that he was working on plans to do so, and that when he did he would relaunch work on the Flora of North America. Suddenly, however, the Columbia trustees decided to take possession of the land after all. When Dennison learned of the power transfer, he wrote to a member of the college’s new botanical garden committee, a classics and divinity scholar named Clement Clarke Moore.* Dennison alerted Moore to the repairs direly needed on the hothouses, warning that “there has been last night as severe a frost as to injure Cucumbers, [and] the tender plants of the tropical climates will not be any the better of it.” He also informed Moore that, although he wanted to renew his lease for the garden under Columbia’s ownership, he would have to have a friend sign it on his behalf, owing to “my Insolvency occasioned by the harsh treatments of an unnatural Brother.”

  To Elgin’s new owners, Dennison was an unappetizing tenant, and Hosack feared that he would adopt a scorched-earth policy toward the garden on his way out. It was likely at Hosack’s prodding—he was close to Moore—that Columbia’s garden committee chose Andrew Gentle, Elgin’s former head gardener, to take over the lease from Dennison. In October 1816, Hosack sent Gentle to scout out the situation. Gentle made an appointment to meet Dennison at the garden on a Saturday morning, but Dennison wasn’t there when he arrived. After a long wait, Gentle gave up. He then plotted a surprise attack, returning unannounced a few days later. This time he found Dennison at the garden, along with a wagon and some carts. It was obvious to Gentle that Dennison was planning to steal the remaining plants, and he commanded him to leave the property immediately. Dennison refused, saying he didn’t have the authority to turn the garden over to Columbia because he was employed by Matthew Hawkins, the proprietor of the downtown glass and window store where he now worked. This was an outrageous claim. Hawkins had nothing to do with the garden lease.

  Gentle left the premises. He immediately composed a letter to Moore about the situation and sent it to Hosack for his prior approval, along with a brief, elegiac message.

  Dr. Hosack

  Sir if you think proper you may hand the contents on the other side to C. C. Moore

  the Impression

  on my mind is

  that he means to

  strip the place as far

  as he can of any thing that is

  rare & valuable etc.

  I am sir yr obt

  Andrew Gentle

  Hosack forwarded Gentle’s letter to Moore at Chelsea, the family estate north of New York City, near the village of Greenwich. In a cover note, Hosack assured Moore that he stood ready to “unite with you in the preservation of the plants at the Botanic Garden.” Hosack wrote to a friend in Philadelphia about the situation at Elgin, declaring with grim determination, “I shall again get charge of it.”

  The Columbia trustees deputized the garden committee to oust Dennison, but he refused to leave the garden and wouldn’t let anyone else touch the plants. The garden committee made no headway in evicting him that winter. Then, in March 1817, Dennison’s employer, Matthew Hawkins, placed an advertisement in the National Advocate for his glass and window store at the corner of Murray and Broadway.

  * Moore would later be credited with the posthumously published poem “’Twas the Night before Christmas,” although the Livingstons insisted it had been written by a member of their family.

  Chapter 15

  “YOUR FORTUNATE CITY”

  EVEN AS HOSACK’S BELOVED ELGIN WAS BEING RIPPED UP AT the roots, New York City, with his help, was blossoming. His onetime rival Charles Willson Peale arrived in town, looked around, and praised Hosack for what he saw.

  It was on a sunny day in May 1817 that Peale boarded a northbound steamboat in Philadelphia with his wife, Hannah. He had some museum business to conduct in New York. Peale had never managed to secure state or federal funding, and he was hoping to find a possible solution to his quandary in Hosack’s New York circle. Peale and Hannah took their seats on a bench under a broad awning, and as the steamboat picked up speed he admired the way it slipped through the water “like magick.” He gave mental thanks for Robert Fulton.

  In New Jersey, Peale stopped to visit an old friend, Elias Boudinot, who advised him to sell his museum to the City of New York. Peale was annoyed at this suggestion, as he wrote in his diary. “I told him that I thought the City of Philad[elphi]a ought to keep it as being the
first City in the U. States in the advancement [of] arts & Science.” Boudinot insisted that with the recent founding of the New-York Institution, New York City had finally pulled ahead of Philadelphia. Peale was incredulous.

  Peale and Hannah took a stagecoach to Paulus Hook, where they caught the ferry to lower Manhattan. Peale was feeling sick to his stomach after a breakfast of oysters and toast, but the next day he felt well enough to investigate the New-York Institution. On the ground floor, he found a little museum of natural history run by a man named John Scudder. Peale was impressed with the preparation of the stuffed specimens; he especially admired a bald eagle poised to seize a snake with its beak. He went upstairs to tour the Academy of Fine Arts. Its members had knocked out the top story of the old almshouse building to create a soaring, light-filled space in which to hang their paintings and arrange their sculptures. Peale studied the paintings by John Trumbull and Benjamin West with an appreciative eye, but he decided that the best picture in the room was a portrait of Hosack’s mother-in-law by Samuel Lovett Waldo, a Connecticut-born artist.

  Over the next few weeks Peale and Hosack saw each other frequently, sometimes breakfasting at Hosack’s house and sometimes meeting at the New-York Institution, which Peale was now visiting almost daily. Their old quarrel over the New York mastodon was long since forgotten, perhaps eased by the fact that Hosack’s pioneering hydrocele surgery, performed on Peale in 1806 by Hosack’s brother-in-law, had rescued Peale from chronic pain. Hosack gave Peale a copy of a treatise he had written about the history of Elgin as well as piles of reports published by all the different New York societies. He encouraged Peale to write something in the Philadelphia press about “the improvement of N. York.” He also urged Peale to bring his museum to New York and put it in the New-York Institution. Peale demurred. He thought the whole building was too small for the great museum of natural history New York would surely one day have, and the same was true of the art museum.