American Eden Page 2

  Hosack died in 1835, less than a year before Ralph Waldo Emerson published his essay Nature and cofounded the Transcendental Club in Boston, among whose members was Emerson’s young friend Henry David Thoreau. Emerson and Thoreau both wrote so compellingly about the spiritual and material meanings of the natural world to humans, and with such resonance for modern American environmentalism, that they have obscured our view of the generation of American naturalists who preceded them. When Emerson was born in 1803, Hosack was already tending the Elgin Botanic Garden and teaching young Americans there how to decipher the healing powers of nature hidden in the plainest plant. To Hosack and his students, botany was a heroic pursuit that took them into meadows and forests but also into the minute internal structures of each specimen. As they labored to name and classify their discoveries, they felt themselves peering into the globe-spanning, dizzying complexity of the natural world.

  What Hosack loved about botany, Emerson discovered in Paris in 1833. It was a botanical garden—not a ramble in the woods—that propelled Emerson to his great celebration of the natural world as the site and the source of our highest intellectual and spiritual development. In the Jardin des Plantes, he had an epiphany about nature that helped give birth to American Transcendentalism. He saw the “grammar of botany” laid out all around him, “this natural alphabet, this green and yellow and crimson dictionary on which the sun shines.” In that moment Emerson glimpsed a new way of understanding the relation of humans to nature. Nature did more than provide the farmer with crops and the poet with beauty. Nature, Emerson realized as he surveyed the organized beds of plant specimens, also reveals our quintessentially human drive to discover unifying principles and purpose in the world around us. Emerson’s ideas, and Thoreau’s, became an inheritance that many nature-lovers embrace today. Yet if earlier generations of Americans had had enough vision to support Hosack’s garden, Emerson might not have had to cross the Atlantic for his epiphany. By the time Emerson visited Paris in 1833, the Elgin Botanic Garden had collapsed for lack of public and private funding—but only after Hosack had trained a generation of naturalists and doctors there.

  After Hosack’s death, his botany students continued his work against all odds, relying on dried specimens and botanizing trips to train still more young botanists—Hosack’s intellectual grandchildren—some of whom went on to found botanical gardens in cities across the country. Gradually these gardens transformed the physical and cultural landscapes of places far beyond New York, fulfilling Hosack’s century-old dream of a national network of botanical gardens that shared their research with one another. Today, there are hundreds of these institutions in the United States. They are beautiful places to stroll, yes, but they also conduct botanical and environmental research and education. They can be found in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and every borough of New York City—except one. The farmland Hosack tilled on Manhattan Island in the first decade of the nineteenth century now lies dormant beneath the limestone and steel of Rockefeller Center.

  HOSACK’S LIFE SPANNED the precise moment when New York hovered between a bucolic past that unfurled over rolling fields and a cosmopolitan future spiked with tightly packed skyscrapers. In Hosack’s New York, cows wandered the Bowery, Greenwich Village was out of town, and the meadows of Harlem were filled with medicinal plants. At the same time, the tensions that governed city life in his era are familiar to many of us today, as old ways of interacting with the natural world are transformed by human activity. Hosack was an urban pioneer who sought to learn from and celebrate nature in the face of skepticism and sometimes ridicule. He invited citizen-scientists to help map our native plant species before they were overrun by invasives. He called for a national system of agricultural stations eighty years before one was actually established. He advocated citywide tree planting for beauty and public health even as his fellow citizens were razing forests to the ground. He experimented with crops and medicinal plants just beyond the city’s border. Today, people across the country and around the world are similarly reinventing what it means to be a city dweller. People are keeping bees in Brooklyn and farming in Detroit. Hosack was the original urban gardener, experimenting with fruits and vegetables by day and mingling with his cosmopolitan friends at night.

  His life tells the story of how Americans learned to think about both the natural world and their own bodies, but it is also the story of how one of the world’s greatest cities became just that. During Hosack’s childhood, Philadelphia—not New York—was the undisputed center of American culture and learning. New York was most famous for its shameless commercialism. By the 1820s, when Hosack was in his fifties, even the men in charge of Philadelphia’s great institutions were conceding that New York had become the first city in the nation for the arts, sciences, and philanthropy. Hosack was one of the main forces in this change. In addition to creating the Elgin Botanic Garden, which drew international attention and praise, he founded or helped found many other civic institutions: the New-York Historical Society, the city’s first museum of natural history, its first art museum, its first literary society, its first school for the deaf and mute, its first mental hospital, its first public schools, its first subsidized pharmacy for the poor, its first obstetrics hospital, and a homegrown version of the Royal Society of London.

  The doctor who went down in history as a shadowy figure at the edge of the Hamilton–Burr duel was in fact one of the most influential Americans of his day. When he stood chatting with an acquaintance on a street corner in lower Manhattan, a surprising number of passersby would greet him by name. He was the kind of man who could save a dying child in the morning, deliver a riveting anatomy lecture in the afternoon, and throw a lavish party that night. His talent and ambition brought him face-to-face with some of the most interesting figures of his time. He socialized not only with Hamilton and Burr but also with Washington Irving, Thomas Cole, Clement Clarke Moore, Sir Joseph Banks, and the Marquis de Lafayette. He shared his research on the American prison system with Alexis de Tocqueville during the latter’s visit to the United States, and he mentored a young medical student from Hyde Park named Isaac Roosevelt—Franklin D. Roosevelt’s grandfather—at the Elgin Botanic Garden. By the time Hosack retired to his stunning Hudson River estate at Hyde Park (adjacent to the Roosevelt estate), he had been elected to the Royal Society and was being sought out in letters and visits by princes, presidents, and famous artists and scientists.

  Even in retirement Hosack continued to shape the way Americans thought about nature. He was a champion of the Hudson River School of painters, who did so much to romanticize the American landscape and inspire generations of conservationists right down to this day. The landscape design Hosack implemented at his Hyde Park estate inspired the first professional landscape architect in American history, Andrew Jackson Downing, who helped launch the careers of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the designers of Central Park. Hosack is a lost link between eighteenth-century naturalists’ formal, classificatory approach to nature and the artfully lush landscapes bequeathed to us by Olmsted and Vaux and their heirs.

  Hosack’s work influenced the way generations of younger Americans thought about nature, but his life also alters our inherited picture of the two elder statesmen who were his friends and his most famous patients—Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Thanks to the painstaking work of historians, we now know a great deal about how passionate Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison were about botany (the study of plants) and horticulture (the art and science of cultivating plants). Hosack’s relationships with Hamilton and Burr reveal that these two rivals—men whom we regard above all as political animals—were also fascinated by the natural world in general and plants in particular.

  Burr shared Hosack’s interest in medical botany, considering it so critical to the education of his young daughter, Theodosia, that he mailed her study questions on the topic while he was serving in the Senate in the 1790s. Like Hosack, Burr sensed that American progr
ess in identifying and conquering specific diseases would come through sustained inquiry into the medical properties of plants. Hamilton, too, was interested in botany and horticulture. When he was laying out his country estate near Harlem in the first few years of the nineteenth century, he stopped at the Elgin Botanic Garden to talk with Hosack, who gave him plant cuttings and gardening advice. Burr’s and Hamilton’s shared interest in the study of the natural world allied them in support of an effort to found a museum of natural history in New York City, a campaign that unfolded from May to early July 1804—thus during the weeks of heated dispute that culminated in the infamous July 11 duel. Hamilton’s life story ended with that duel, but Hosack’s relationship with Burr continued. As Burr retreated from the national political stage, his interest in botany and natural history blossomed further. After he fled to Europe in 1808, he made stops at many of the continent’s great gardens and arranged for specimens to be sent to Hosack for the Elgin Botanic Garden.

  Seeing the world of the early Republic through Hosack’s eyes changes the way we see the infancy of our nation. It shows us that nature was a constant and vivid presence not only for wealthy Virginia planters and homespun New England farmers. In the very heart of New York City, even gentlemen unmoved by the thought of striding in high summer through a sea of goldenrod could lapse happily into the minute examination of a single specimen on a library table. Through Hosack’s eyes, we see Americans turning to nature for food, beauty, and the raw materials of commerce—but now we also see them placing in the natural world their best hopes for the discovery of lifesaving medicines. For Hosack and his circle, nature meant not only the continent’s forests and prairies but also the humblest weed plucked from a ditch along Broadway and shoved in the pocket of an errant child.

  Chapter 1

  “TEAR IN PIECES THE DOCTORS”

  DAVID HOSACK WAS BORN IN NEW YORK CITY IN 1769. HE entered the world of British colonial America via his maternal grandparents’ house at 44 Frankfort Street, very near today’s City Hall. His father, Alexander, was a Scotsman who had left his country in the mid-eighteenth century to fight in the French and Indian War, then set up shop as a cloth merchant on William Street in New York. As a child Hosack learned the importance of supporting civic institutions from his father, who served as a volunteer fireman and was a booklover who borrowed piles of volumes from the local subscription library, the New York Society Library (founded in 1754 and still in existence today), including British novels, imperial histories, and adventure travelogues about Captain James Cook’s voyages around the globe.

  Hosack was a handsome boy with an upturned nose and large, dark eyes. In the fashion of the day, he tied his long black curls in a ribbon at the nape of his neck and wore a fluffy white cravat at his throat. Just after his seventh birthday, the American rebellion of 1776 brought redcoated soldiers marching into New York. Hosack spent the rest of his childhood in an occupied city. British ships anchored in the East River served as hellish prisons for captured patriots. A few blocks from Hosack’s house soldiers pounded along the cobblestones bearing their wounded to the impromptu field hospital in the main building of King’s College, on Church Street near the Hudson River. The orchards and forests of Manhattan were razed for firewood during the frigid winters.

  When Hosack was twelve, General George Washington and his forces defeated the British at Yorktown with the help of the French; a year and a half later, the war was officially declared over. As New Yorkers celebrated in the spring of 1783, a son was born to a family called the Irvings, who lived on the same street as the Hosacks, and the baby’s parents named him in honor of the victorious general. On November 25 of that same year, the British evacuated New York City. General Washington, accompanied by a contingent of officers, soldiers, and political leaders, rode his gray horse down the Boston Post Road and onto the Bowery with happy crowds swarming around him. As the British sailed out of the harbor, New Yorkers who had been away fighting in the war or had fled for calmer climes began to return and take stock of their homes. Two devastating fires had raged through New York during the war, leaving a quarter of the city in ruins. All across the tip of Manhattan Island, new houses and shops clattered together under pounding hammers. At the East River piers, dockhands heaved crates onto sailing ships as captains huddled over maps with their merchant masters. The raw materials of a continent—cotton, rice, flax, flour, furs—sailed out over the Atlantic again. King’s College was renamed Columbia College, and its grand College Hall, now emptied of wounded British soldiers, was readied to receive the sons of the Sons of Liberty.

  Hosack enrolled at Columbia in 1786 at the age of seventeen. He focused on classics, learning Greek and Latin, and also studied French. He would later tell his children that he had felt “naturally very dull” as a student and had to drive himself ferociously to complete even mundane tasks. He struggled with bouts of depression but discovered he could conquer his “gloomy reflections” as long as he kept his mind absorbed in learning new ideas. His self-discipline paid off, and he unearthed new strengths and talents. He won three awards in his college years, including one for public speaking.

  At Columbia he also made new friends. His favorite was DeWitt Clinton, a young man of six feet three who loomed over almost everyone he met, including Hosack. DeWitt’s uncle, George Clinton, was governor of New York and had been for almost as long as Hosack could remember. DeWitt’s natural aura of dignity and his pride in his family connections made him seem stiff and haughty to some people, but Hosack detected a rare kindred spirit behind the off-putting façade—here was another teenage boy who took his education more seriously than anything else in his life. In fact, Clinton studied so singlemindedly that his mother wrote in exasperation, “Is my son Dewitt Dead or is he alive or has he forgot he has a mother.” Thirty years later Clinton would write a letter to one of Hosack’s own young sons telling him to “study—study—study—night and day.”

  Hosack and Clinton did differ in two important respects. While Hosack was acquiring a reputation for oratorical brilliance at Columbia, Clinton was perfecting the thudding monotone for which his public addresses would later become famous. And while Clinton was developing a passion for the law, Hosack was falling in love with medicine. He was electrified by the notion that a man could devote himself to learning how to save another person’s life—maybe hundreds or even thousands of lives. The more he thought about it, the stronger his conviction grew that he could find no higher calling. It was obvious that New York needed more doctors. Although the war was over, the eighteenth century’s regular armies of disease, accident, and death continued their assaults. Mothers died in childbirth, or survived only to lose their infants soon thereafter. Men rowed over to Weehawken or Paulus Hook (in today’s Jersey City) to defend their honor on the dueling ground. If they didn’t perish on the spot, they were carried back ashen-faced and faint from gunshot wounds. Sailors suffered by the hundreds from syphilis. Paupers watched their fingers turn black from frostbite as they wintered in unheated quarters or under the open sky. Bodies of the drowned bobbed up against the wharves and came to rest on river beaches after drunken missteps or deliberate farewells. “How just is yr observation that in the midst of life we are in death,” John Jay’s wife, Sarah, mused to her mother in the spring of 1788.

  Columbia’s College Hall

  Hosack longed to ease the illness and grief he saw everywhere he turned. Now his hard-won knowledge of ancient languages proved useful, for it gave him access to the most important treatises—not just those by American and British doctors but also the many medical works of the past and present in Greek and Latin. He learned that most doctors in Europe and America still relied on the idea that the human body was governed by substances and fluids known collectively as humors. The humoral framework had originated in the ancient world, had been refined by the Greek physicians Hippocrates and Galen, and then had persisted, despite periodic amendments, for two millennia. In the late eighteenth century, human health
was widely believed to be affected by the ebb and flow of bodily substances such as blood, bile, phlegm, sweat, and saliva. Most doctors, even those who eschewed the old term humors, remained convinced that a person’s health depended on keeping bodily substances in a careful balance—a balance that was in constant danger. Each breath of air, for example, sustained life but could also chill or overheat the body. Each mouthful of food brought nourishment but could increase or decrease the acidity of the stomach. The symptoms of illness—headaches, sores, tumors, and so on—were so many signals that the total bodily system was out of balance. It fell to doctors to try to restore equilibrium and with it health. One typical example from Hosack’s studies found a doctor in New York attributing a young woman’s inability to menstruate to the fact that she had once been forced to wade through a deep puddle during a rainstorm.

  Doctors chose surgical and medicinal treatments that would regulate the flow of bodily substances. Bloodletting, for example, helped a patient thought to be suffering from an excess of blood, a common diagnosis when fever was present. Doctors sliced the skin with a lancet, catching the red gush in a waiting bowl—or instead of a lancet some doctors used a scarificator, a device with a spring-loaded row of blades that raked through the skin at lightning speed. There were many other surgical interventions doctors could choose from as they tried to restore equilibrium, and Hosack’s medical books also discussed hundreds of medicinal remedies directed toward the same end. For example, some medicines voided a patient’s bowels and were classed as cathartics or purgatives. A group of drugs known as emetics induced vomiting. If a doctor wanted his patient to sweat, he prescribed a diaphoretic or a sudorific, while a sialogogue would trigger saliva, an emmenagogue would promote menstruation, and so on. As the teenage Hosack learned about these medicines, he saw with mounting excitement how much remained unknown about their properties, both individually and in combination. He also learned that some doctors were trying to identify medicines they referred to as “specifics”—medicines that would target specific illnesses rather than overall equilibrium.