American Eden

by Victoria Johnson

  The more Peale saw of New York, the more the city impressed him—with its natural beauty as well as with its civic progress. One day he went to the edge of the Hudson and sketched a picture of the New Jersey Palisades. He went to the East River and admired the views of Long Island, which lay covered with thick green groves that were punctuated by white farmhouses. Another day he positioned himself at the southern end of City Hall Park and made a quick pencil sketch that showed the grand allée of Lombardy poplars along Broadway. When he climbed the stairs to the cupola atop City Hall, he looked out over “a great City with its many Churches & Elegant buildings.” He began to think Boudinot had been right about New York.

  On June 2 Peale toured the Lyceum of Natural History, recently founded by Mitchill for the purpose of collecting and studying natural history books and specimens. Mitchill was extremely pleased to see Peale and insisted that he attend a Lyceum meeting, at which he praised Peale as “the father of Natural History in America.” The Lyceum’s most precious specimen was a partial set of mastodon bones from the same area near the Shawangunk Mountains where Peale had acquired his own set years earlier. Knowing what an arduous task the Lyceum members would face in completing the skeleton, he donated $5.

  Peale next went to see the rooms of the New-York Historical Society. Here he met John Pintard and walked through the society’s four rooms with him. Two of them were lined with glass cases filled with natural history specimens from each state in the Union. Peale was amazed at the luxury of the society’s rooms. He chalked it up to the fact that the members were by and large rich men. In the main meeting room, he was shown a chair that had belonged to Marie Antoinette and had been brought by Gouverneur Morris from France along with other “Rich furniture that had belonged to the unfortunate Lewis 16th.” Depending on how Peale looked at it, this was either a patriotic display—the spoils of a toppled monarchy repurposed for a democracy—or just pretentious. He kept his opinions to himself.

  The following week Peale was invited to attend a meeting of the New-York Historical Society. Hosack, its vice president, was presiding that day—presumably in Marie Antoinette’s chair at the front of the room—and he insisted that Peale sit next to him. Partway through the meeting, Hosack leaned over and whispered to Peale that he wanted to nominate him for membership. Peale protested that he would be useless to them. He was nearly deaf and had trouble following meetings, and he lived so far from New York anyway. But Hosack prevailed. Peale was escorted out of the room while the members elected him. He then offered some brief remarks, thanking them for the honor. Afterward, Hosack and Pintard took Peale out for coffee.

  The next day, June 11, the new president of the United States arrived in New York. After James Monroe’s inauguration the previous March, James and Dolley Madison had returned to Montpelier, their country estate in Virginia, where they lived “like Adam and eve in Paradise”—as a friend of Dolley put it—although they did so only with the help of slave labor. President Monroe had embarked on a tour to inspect the nation’s military defenses and to learn firsthand about the concerns of its citizens. He arrived at Manhattan on a steamboat from Staten Island. The cannon thundered on Governors Island and the city’s flags fluttered in a strong wind. Thousands of citizens jammed Broadway, with many others leaning out the windows as they strained to catch a glimpse of the president.

  Peale went back to the New-York Institution the day after the celebrations, having heard that President Monroe was scheduled to take a tour. Discovering that the event had been postponed, he decided to go ahead with his planned return to Philadelphia the next morning. He bought six mackerel at the fish market to preserve for his museum, and then he left town with Hannah. At Trenton, the Peales ran into a widow named Rebecca Blodget, who was well known as one of Burr’s lovers. She made clear to them that she was on her way to New York to see Burr, joking to Peale that he ought to put her on display in his museum “as a curiosity” because of her complete disregard for public opinion. In his diary, he observed that if he did put her in the museum, it would not be for “her extraordinary virtue.”

  That same afternoon, President Monroe arrived at the New-York Institution for his tour. Accompanied by Clinton—the incoming governor of New York—and other dignitaries, Monroe strolled through the Academy of Fine Arts, the Literary and Philosophical Society, the New-York Historical Society, and the Lyceum of Natural History. These last three organizations had voted to make Monroe an honorary member, and the New-York Historical Society had entrusted Hosack with the honor of presenting the president with his certificate. Before Monroe left town, he also visited the prison, the hospital, and Eliza Hamilton’s orphanage. As he toured all these institutions, the president repeatedly praised New York’s intense commitment to science, the arts, and charity. From Philadelphia, Peale wrote Hosack a gracious letter expressing similar sentiments. Thanks to the pile of pamphlets Hosack had given him and his own visits to the New-York Institution, Peale had to admit that “New York is already more advanced in learning, arts & science than Philad[elphi]a.” Hosack and his friends were bringing “honor and fame to your fortunate city.” Between Peale’s visit and President Monroe’s, Hosack had passed a highly gratifying month. For twenty years he had been laboring with his friends and rivals to make New York the greatest city in the nation. Now, in the space of a few weeks, their work had been praised by the foremost living American naturalist and the president of the United States.

  Neither Peale nor Monroe, however, seems to have visited Elgin. It was just as well. Hosack’s masterpiece was now a wreck, as the French naturalist Jacques Milbert discovered when he went to see the garden around this time. Milbert noted in his travel journal that “the conservatory alone bears witness to its original location.”

  IN EARLY APRIL 1817, two months before Monroe’s visit, Clinton had written Hosack a brief note from Albany. “In politics all is calm,” he reported. “I shall be detained here some days by the new Canal bill which I think will pass.” He was right—the bill passed on April 15, and Clinton won the race for governor a few weeks later. On Independence Day, a groundbreaking ceremony for the Erie Canal was held in the town of Rome, about a hundred miles west of Albany.

  Two weeks later, on July 18, Clinton wrote Hosack a long letter about an interesting species of wheat he had seen in Rome, where it grew wild in the swamps and was now being cultivated by a local farmer who had told Clinton about it. Clinton enclosed some specimens that had been gathered only the day before, saying he thought this might be a native species—one hardier than the wheat New York’s farmers usually planted, which was often damaged by frosts. He complained to Hosack that too many indigenous American plants were being misidentified as exotic. Hoping that this wild wheat did not yet have an official botanical name, Clinton proposed a patriotic binomial: Triticum americanum. “The opinion on this subject of such an eminent Botanist as yourself will be very acceptable,” he told Hosack. In four and a half pages, Clinton never once mentioned the canal.

  At Elgin, Hosack was growing many species of Triticum. But whatever he told Clinton about his specimen—Hosack’s reply has not survived—his immediate response was to write a generous letter about Clinton to Sir James Edward Smith. Hosack informed Smith of Clinton’s election as governor and his progress on the canal, and he predicted that Clinton would be the next president. Hosack thought the nation would be in excellent hands. Few American men were as learned as Clinton, who upon Hosack’s nomination had been elected to the American Philosophical Society. Hosack was now hoping to secure a higher honor still for Clinton. “It would be highly gratifying to me to see that gentleman elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Linnean Society,” he told Smith, pointing to Clinton’s expertise in geology and adding that “Mr. Clinton’s botanical collections are also extensive.”

  Hosack also reported that with the blessing of the other members of the New-York Historical Society, he had just placed a bust of Smith himself atop the herbarium cabinets holding the
Linnaean specimens Smith had given him in London in 1794. The bust of Smith was a concrete expression of the transatlantic botanical exchange Hosack had worked so hard to keep open over the previous quarter century. Smith, taking up Hosack’s idea, soon wrote Banks about the idea of electing Clinton to the Royal Society, but the response wasn’t positive. “With Every degree of Respect for our American Friends I have many doubts about Electing Govr de Witte Clinton into the R.S.,” Banks replied. Banks thought Hosack’s “Talents and his Progress in Science” appeared to have justified his election, but he doubted Clinton was “as much a man of Science.”

  Hosack had earned this scientific renown above all through his work at Elgin. These days, although the garden had slipped from his grasp, some of his most important scientific contributions were alive and well and walking around New York. One was Jacob Dyckman, who had come to the city from his family’s farm in northern Manhattan in 1810 to study medicine and botany with Hosack. In 1818, Dyckman published the first American edition of the Edinburgh New Dispensatory. He preserved the original European entries but interspersed them with many plant-based remedies native to North America, which he had learned about at Hosack’s side. It was a milestone in American medicine, and Dyckman dedicated the book to David Hosack and his assistant John Francis.

  Of all Hosack’s students, it was John Torrey who was destined to have the greatest impact on American science. Hosack referred to him as “the young man with an old head.” Torrey’s father was the governor of the prison overlooking the Hudson at Greenwich, where Hosack had long been an attending physician. As a boy Torrey had loved exploring the countryside between Greenwich and New York City with his brother William, who later recalled that they would scour “the hills on each side of Broadway for garnets, which we found in considerable numbers.” Like so many other young men Hosack trained, Torrey was studying medicine and botany simultaneously. In March 1818 he received his medical degree from the College of Physicians and Surgeons, joking to the botanist Amos Eaton, “I have now got my Sheepskin & have full powers granted to kill & destroy in any part of the earth.” Torrey could be just as biting about botanists as about doctors, describing Frederick Pursh to Eaton as “such a notorious liar & plagiarist that we can put no confidence in his assertions.” He also heaped scorn on an émigré French botanist named Constantine Rafinesque, thinking him too quick to take credit for the discovery of new plants. “I expect that he will soon issue proposals for publishing the botany of the moon with figures of all the new species!”

  John Torrey, one of Hosack’s botanical protégés

  Now liberated from the classroom, Torrey spent the spring and summer of 1818 collecting plants all over Manhattan, along the Hudson, on Staten Island, and on Long Island. He went out almost daily, bringing home piles of native and naturalized species and taking careful notes on when and where he had found them. He botanized everywhere—including in the streets of New York, where he cut specimens from Lombardy poplars. In Lispenard’s Meadow, he harvested rock cress (Arabis reptans). He went up the new Eighth Avenue to a field three miles north of the city and found a medicinal plant called elecampane (Inula helenium). He went to a swamp near the old Elgin land and collected nodding lizard’s tail (Saururus cernuus) and arrow arum (Arum virginicum). He wandered along a brook that wound through Bloomingdale, a swath of lovely countryside whose name came from an old Dutch name meaning “valley of flowers.” Here he gathered sweet white violets (Viola blanda), white milkweed (Asclepias variegata), tall thimbleweed (Anemone virginiana), and many more species. Today this is the Upper West Side.

  Hosack admired Torrey’s obsession with plants and soon invited him to take charge of the old Elgin herbarium, now housed at the New-York Historical Society. But Torrey confessed to Eaton that he found Hosack overbearing. Eaton wrote back sternly, “You ought by all means to listen to Hosack. . . . do not slight his attentions.” Torrey relented and agreed to organize the herbarium. Soon Hosack was sending a package of specimens prepared by Torrey to Sir James Edward Smith, who wrote Torrey a very kind letter in reply and helped him with some plant queries. Hosack loved forging these links between great European naturalists and the rising generation of Americans, and he invited the talented Torrey to serve as his assistant in a new course of botany lectures. Torrey told Eaton privately that he felt competitive with Hosack, because he dreamed of writing a Flora of North America one day—although Hosack, stymied by the war, his many duties, his lack of funds, and the crushing loss of Elgin, had never managed to publish his own Flora. Eaton unfairly blamed this failure on procrastination, which he thought was “an essential characteristic of N. York writers. They seem to think that if a book is but announced, it will grow up itself without any labor.” He told Torrey, “If you ever begin the work, you must calculate to finish it.”

  If anyone was procrastinating, it was the State of New York. It took until Valentine’s Day of 1818—seven years—for state officials to settle their debt to Hosack for Elgin. The years of work on the garden and the doomed Flora had bled him so dry that he had signed over the state’s funds in advance to his creditors, one of whom warned him around this time that “it will be greatly and cruelly injurious if I do not get the 8000 dollars tomorrow. Your credit will also suffer.”

  Receiving the final payment from the state did nothing to quell Hosack’s desire to rebuild the garden. But the Columbia trustees, meanwhile, had been devising a plan to earn income from the property. First they would need to wriggle out of the state’s order that they move the college up to the Elgin property. Then they would be able to lease out the land in small parcels to many different tenants, thus drawing far more income than they could ever hope to earn from a single tenant like the gardener Andrew Gentle. In February 1818, the trustees submitted a petition to the legislature, cagily warning of the “Evil Consequences” that would arise if the students were forced to live so far away from their parents in town. At the same time, the trustees argued that the garden had come to them in a “state of Dilapidation and Decay” and would cost thousands of dollars a year to maintain as a research and teaching facility. They acknowledged that the state had meant to do them a favor by giving them the land, but they insisted that “the real Value of the Property was probably over-rated.” For a full year, the trustees lobbied the state. In February 1819, the legislature finally removed the conditions on the Elgin land grant. Columbia would not have to turn the property into its new campus. The trustees could lease the land without concern for the remains of Hosack’s garden. Gentle, Hosack’s ally, was to be evicted from the grounds.

  When Hosack learned that Columbia would be leasing the Elgin property to a new bidder, he made his move. Together with the other members of yet another new society he had helped organize—the New-York Agricultural Society—he submitted an application in June 1819. The society would be needing a large plot of land on which to plant experimental crops, test new farm machinery, and pasture livestock. Columbia rejected the application. They preferred to hold out for a more reliable tenant than a society of gentlemen who planned to dabble in farming. By now, the trustees were allowing the greenhouse to be stripped of its plants. They were also laying plans to uproot “such ornamental trees and shrubs as might be removed without injury to the place.”

  Hosack’s trees and shrubs were to be carted up the Bloomingdale Road to a new site about four miles north of Elgin. There, on a beautiful spot high above the Hudson, the officials of the New-York Hospital were building a new kind of institution: an insane asylum. Hosack was involved in the project, but it was the Columbia trustees who had decided to pillage Elgin’s collections to beautify the asylum grounds. Soon the architect in charge of the asylum project applied to Columbia for permission to strip one of the Elgin hothouses of its remaining glass and tiles. His request was granted.

  IN DECEMBER 1819, GOVERNOR CLINTON informed the New-York Historical Society that he had decided not to run for re-election as the society’s president. Mitchill and Hosack bot
h launched campaigns to replace him. Hosack won, and just before his installation as president in early February 1820, one of Mitchill’s allies, Gulian C. Verplanck, exacted a cruel revenge. Verplanck, a state assemblyman and essayist, was a great admirer of Washington Irving’s satires of gentlemanly stuffiness. In late January, the newspapers announced that a bookshop directly across Broadway from the New-York Institution was now selling a pamphlet outlining the procedures for the ceremony.

  Verplanck published it anonymously, but word got out about its authorship. The insults to Hosack began right on the first page: “Ceremony of the Installation of David Hosack, M.D. L.L.D. F.R.S. London, Edinburgh, Hayti, and Pekin; First Vice-President of the New-York Society of Conchology and Indian Earthen-Ware.” After a few preliminaries, the pamphlet explained, there would be speeches in honor of Clinton and Hosack in Greek, Italian, French, Dutch, Swedish, Irish, Chinese, and Hebrew. (The Italian speech was to be delivered by Lorenzo Da Ponte, a former librettist for Mozart who was now a language professor at Columbia.) After the speeches, a chariot borrowed from the theater just across City Hall Park would roll into the room. It was actually a prop from a play depicting “the triumphal entry of Alexander the Great into Babylon.” But now, according to Verplanck, it would be filled with Hosack’s certificates of membership in the Royal Society, the Linnean Society, the American Philosophical Society, and all the other societies to which he belonged. Next, following some chants in pig Latin—including an insult about Hosack’s intellectual inferiority to Alexander von Humboldt—Hosack was to be draped in robes by officials representing the fields of medicine, law, and divinity, taking care that each robe left a little of the previous layer visible. Verplanck went on to describe another series of chants, ending with: