Jungle of Stone Read online

  The Prussian and his assistant, a French doctor and botanist named Aimé Bonpland, sailed for Venezuela in June 1799 carrying with them crates of instruments, every advanced turn-of-the-century tool for scientific measurement. Humboldt underwrote the expedition with a substantial inheritance that had come to him following his mother’s death. For the next several years, enduring hardships and danger, the two men roamed through interior regions of the southern continent in parts never before explored or recorded. At one point in 1802, the indefatigable Humboldt set a world altitude record—at least for a Westerner—climbing 19,700-foot Chimborazo, a dormant Ecuadoran volcano thought at the time to be the highest mountain in the world. During their five-year journey the two men collected thousands of specimens in the equatorial jungles and recorded an untold number of measurements.4 They added Mexico and Cuba to their itinerary before stopping in the United States on their way back to Europe.5

  Humboldt was an early-nineteenth-century prototype. Explorers arrived first, then the scientists. But few had fashioned a public image of the dashing explorer-scientist plunging into the unknown better than Humboldt, who in his time was nearly as famous as Napoleon. Vast regions of the globe still remained uncharted. Armed with the instruments of science, seemingly inexhaustible energy and daring, Humboldt became an awe-inspiring figure for the giants of natural science to come. “You might truly call him the parent of a grand progeny of scientific travelers,” wrote Charles Darwin, who took Humboldt’s account of his journey along with him thirty years later when he traveled to South America on HMS Beagle and uncovered the biological underpinnings of evolution.6

  With Jefferson, Humboldt could barely contain himself as he explained the details of his explorations.7 Jefferson soaked up every tidbit. Even before the Louisiana Purchase had passed Congress, the American president was already scheming to send an exploring expedition up the Missouri River and across unknown regions of the West to the Pacific Ocean. And just three weeks before Humboldt arrived in Philadelphia, two men left St. Louis under orders from Jefferson with a group of hardened frontier soldiers assembled under the name “Corps of Discovery.” Their commanders: U.S. Army captain Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

  More than a year after Humboldt returned to Europe, Lewis and Clark reached the Pacific at the mouth of the Columbia River. On November 28, 1805, the date the two men searched for a spot for their winter quarters, John Lloyd Stephens was born in Shrewsbury, a New Jersey farm town located a few dozen miles south of New York City. He was born into a new century whose advent was marked by two of the greatest explorations of the Americas, North and South. For Stephens and the rest of his generation, however, full knowledge of what Lewis, Clark, and Humboldt had accomplished would be slow in coming. Stephens was a one-year-old when the two American explorers arrived back in St. Louis but would be nine before their official narrative was finally published. On the expedition’s return, Lewis was assigned to prepare the account but he had not even started when he committed suicide in October 1809. It fell to Clark to take up the project but it was not until 1814 that the History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark was published.

  In Paris, Humboldt had also been struggling with his own long-delayed publications. In the same year that Lewis and Clark’s History appeared, Humboldt’s narrative account of his expedition was published for the first time in English.8 He was painstakingly putting together volume after volume of the expedition’s scientific findings. There would be thirty volumes, the last published in 1834, by which time the great Prussian had exhausted his entire fortune on the project.9

  Stephens, from his early school days to his practice as a lawyer, like so many of his contemporaries grew up with these two epic tales of discovery. They infused the ethos of his generation. They were thrilling and inspiring, and young John Stephens grew up in a place in America that readily lent itself to boyhood dreams of exploration. His family had left Shrewsbury for New York in 1806, which meant that by the age of one, young John was living in a city with ships sailing in and out of its harbor from every part of globe, offering as wide a view of the world as any place on earth.10 Though the world was shrinking, large regions of the planet still remained unexplored—and beckoning.

  New York was a small city in 1806, the equivalent of a good-size American town by today’s standards. It occupied a fraction of the long, narrow island of Manhattan, its seventy-five thousand citizens crowded into a few square miles on the island’s southern tip. Most of Manhattan was made up of farms and forest and one could still hunt in the meadows and hills above what is now Houston Street, then the city’s northern boundary. Philadelphia was more populous but New York’s population was doubling every twenty years. The early Dutch gabled houses along the narrow streets of the old town were giving way to more fashionable two-and three-story brick buildings in the Federal style. Nearby swamps were being filled and streets were being paved with cobblestones even as pigs still ran freely through some districts.

  The city held the distinction of serving as the United States’ first capital. But the government soon moved on to Philadelphia while the new federal city of Washington was being laid out in Maryland along the Potomac. Twenty years after George Washington’s inauguration in 1789, New Yorkers added another touch of grandeur. During John Stephens’s preschool years, a grand City Hall was under construction, a flamboyant and shimmering confection faced with white Massachusetts marble, and set in a park in the city’s northernmost section, known as the Commons. It would take nine years to complete, and by the time it was finished in 1812 it cost an astounding $500,000 (twice the amount originally budgeted).11

  A second and even greater sign of civic ambition was the appointment of a special commission in 1807 to lay out plans for the orderly development of the city as it marched northward up the island of Manhattan. It was a visionary act. When the city surveyors finally submitted their plan in 1811, the physical layout of a future New York was fixed, set in stone, literally (stone markers delineated every single corner).12 The map showed a rigid eight-mile grid of long parallel and short perpendicular streets over the mostly unoccupied island, a street system that remains in place today.13 The plan set off a frenzy of land speculation that did not cease until the city spread north so fast the entire island was built out in less than a hundred years.

  The first few years of Stephens’s life were boom times for New York, drawing hundreds of new merchants like his father, Benjamin Stephens. The Napoleonic Wars in Europe had created enormous demand for United States’ exports, mainly meat, grain, leather, and timber. From 1790 to 1806 the value of exports flowing out through the city’s docks increased tenfold.14 Equally large quantities of imported European manufactured goods poured in.

  Benjamin Stephens entered business as early as 1796, operating between Shrewsbury and New York.15 By 1806 he was working out of a building on lower Greenwich Street in a live-work arrangement common at the time. His growing family—there would eventually be five children—lived upstairs. Greenwich Street was paved several years earlier and was lined with upscale residences. Its south end terminated at the Battery, which served as John’s and his siblings’ playground. It was a large open space of mostly landfill, originally set aside by the Dutch and the British for defensive fortifications, overlooking the harbor. By the time the Stephens family arrived, it had evolved into a popular promenade lined with elm trees.

  Tensions were mounting, however, over Britain’s policy of impressing American sailors into the Royal Navy during its war with France, and the U.S. government wanted new defenses put in place in case of a conflict with England. But instead of lining the promenade with guns, the military began construction in 1808 of a circular sandstone fortress just offshore on a rock outcropping. The fort was fitted out with twenty-eight cannons and connected to the Battery by a two-hundred-foot wooden bridge. As a child, John Stephens watched wide-eyed from the Battery as the fort took shape and its cannons were periodically tested.


  From his earliest years, his world was almost entirely circumscribed by water. The masts and spars of sailing ships, thick as forests, filled the end of almost every street. His front yard was not only the parklike Battery but the red-brick sidewalks around Bowling Green at the foot of Broadway. He and his boyhood friends played ball near the green and climbed its iron railings to retrieve the ones that got away.16 They swam in the clear waters off the Battery in the summer and fished from the wooden bridge to the fort.

  The economic boom did not last. No sooner had Benjamin Stephens moved his family to New York than the trade on which he pinned his economic future came to an abrupt halt. In late 1807 President Jefferson ordered a total trade embargo to force England and France to respect American neutrality and the rights of U.S. sailors at sea. The embargo proved a blunder of monumental proportions.17 It plunged the country, and especially New York, into depression, throwing thousands out of work and bankrupting businesses.

  No records remain to indicate how the Stephens family survived, but with one foot still in nearby rural New Jersey, there were family connections to fall back on. Documents and promissory notes, however, show that the firm of “Stephens and Lippincott” survived to handle substantial business transactions in the years right after the embargo was finally lifted.18 Then war broke out in June 1812 and a British blockade brought New York to its knees again.

  Stephens was seven when the conflict started and for his elementary schooling he was under the charge of a teacher known only as Mr. Boyle. As the threat of a British invasion loomed, Stephens and his schoolwork were undoubtedly tested by the distraction. The danger became so palpable, by 1814 it drove New Yorkers into a frenzy of defensive preparations. Anticipating a British attack down the Hudson River from Canada, volunteers dug trenches and built breastworks across upper Manhattan and through Brooklyn. Thousands of militiamen swarmed into the city. Artillery units constantly tested their cannon from the surrounding forts.19 For a nine-year-old it must have been an anxious yet thrilling time. But the attack never came. The British burned Washington and landed at New Orleans instead. A peace treaty was signed in 1815, and the city’s economic fortunes rebounded.

  Benjamin Stephens’s business began to thrive. Shipments of tea, silks, and lacquered boxes came in from China. In 1816 an expensive china table service arrived from Liverpool for Mrs. Stephens, along with an even more expensive camel-hair shawl.20 Then, just as the good times returned, the family suffered a series of staggering personal losses. In early 1817, John’s grandfather, Judge John Lloyd, died, followed five months later by the death of Clemence, John’s mother, who was thirty-three years old. The loss of his mother must have been a devastating blow to eleven-year-old John, and it appears to have drawn him extremely close to his father, to whom he would remain deeply attached for the rest of his life.

  By the time of Clemence Stephens’s death, Benjamin Stephens had already settled on ambitious plans for his son. John was entering his final year in the school of Joseph Nelson, a blind scholar and expert in classics who later became a distinguished professor of languages at Rutgers College. Nelson appears to have been a calculated choice because entrance to nearby Columbia College, where Stephens was headed, required more than passing familiarity with Latin and Greek. To be admitted, candidates had to demonstrate mastery of Caesar’s Commentaries, the orations of Cicero, the books of Virgil, Livy, and Homer, the Gospel of St. Luke and St. John and Acts of the Apostles, as well as command of the rules of arithmetic, algebra, and modern geography. School under Nelson was a grueling six-day-a-week assignment with only a few weeks off each year. Stephens must have been a particularly bright and diligent student despite the distractions of war and the trauma of his mother’s death. He was able to pass the entrance exams and enter Columbia in 1818 at the age of thirteen, one of the youngest enrollees in school history.

  Columbia was housed at the time in a brick and stucco building on Park Place, a short walk from the Stephens home. It was founded by royal charter sixty-five years earlier as King’s College. Former students included Alexander Hamilton, later the nation’s first secretary of the Treasury; John Jay, the first Supreme Court chief justice; and Robert R. Livingston, who helped draft the Declaration of Independence. The school was closed during the Revolutionary War and reopened after the war as Columbia College.

  Columbia was known for producing practical men, mostly homegrown New Yorkers who went on to careers in business, law, and politics. Although the faculty included some excellent teachers, the college was no Harvard or Yale. One professor, however, proved a towering exception: Charles Anthon. A graduate himself of the school, Anthon was twenty-three when he was hired in 1820 to teach Greek and Latin. He was young and brilliant, and a serious influence on Stephens. During his time at Columbia, he published works on the classics that became standard textbooks as far away as Cambridge and Oxford. “This gentleman has done more for sound scholarship at home, and for our classical reputation abroad, than any other individual in America,” Edgar Allan Poe wrote in 1837.21 Stephens would come to deeply appreciate his time with Anthon when he traveled later through Greece and Turkey and wrote so confidently about their history and literature.

  During his time in college, Stephens’s gregarious nature emerged in full force. Sociable almost to a fault all his life, he became a favorite among his Columbia classmates.22 He joined both of the school’s literary societies, which was unusual since they were rivals. The societies were devoted to oratory and debate, and Stephens was often singled out as a prime speaker.23 He was a brilliant but generally lax student who nevertheless ably worked his way through the college’s tough four-year program of classics, rhetoric, literature, mathematics, geography, ancient antiquities, English grammar, composition and criticism, history, the science of fluxions, chemistry and astronomy, philosophy and political economy.

  When his college career was over, Stephens joined New York City’s educated elite.24 The school produced only twenty-three graduates in 1822, and Stephens ranked fourth in his class, a significant achievement given his unusually young age of sixteen. His senior class oration, “On the Oriental and Classical Superstitions as Affecting the Imagination and Feelings,” provided a clue to his future.25 It had cost his father eighty dollars a year in tuition, a handsome sum but readily within the budget of his father’s expanding business interests, which increasingly included New York real estate.

  Charles Anthon or no, these were practical times in hardheaded New York, and his father decided John would enter the law. Thus, shortly after graduation, John began an apprenticeship at the law offices of Daniel Lord, a twenty-six-year-old Yale graduate just establishing his practice. Lord’s former studies at a law school in Litchfield, Connecticut, inspired Stephens’s next move. After less than a year as a clerk, he was on his way in June 1823 to enroll at Litchfield Law School.

  Set in the green hills of western Connecticut, Litchfield was a primly countrified town with white picket fences and tidy houses, and was nothing at all like New York. Arriving by stagecoach, seventeen-year-old Stephens was enthralled. Litchfield was the nation’s first full-time law school. Legal education at the time was mostly conducted through apprenticeships in lawyers’ offices. But Litchfield Law School was founded in 1784 as a systematic course of lectures on the principles and practice of the law. Aaron Burr, the U.S. vice president infamous for killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel, was the school’s first pupil, instructed personally by Tapping Reeve, his brother-in-law and founder of the school. More than 1,100 young men from every state found their way on horseback or stagecoach to isolated, picturesque Litchfield. In Stephens’s class alone, seven of his forty-four classmates became congressmen and more than a third became state supreme court judges or legislators, including one Georgian who drafted the bill of secession for the southern states at the start of the Civil War.

  They were taught in a one-room wooden building located in the garden next to Tapping Reeve’s home, where daily lectures requ
ired detailed note taking and cases were presented weekly by the students in a moot court. It proved a wrenching experience for Stephens. Away from home for the first time and again the youngest member in his class, he was immediately and deeply homesick. He begged his father, brother, and sisters to write and visit him. He missed his family desperately and the New York newspapers—“bring the paper up with you”—but he was also so smitten with the open pastoral countryside around Litchfield that he wondered if he could ever again tolerate the grime, dirty air, and chaos of New York City. He wrote his father: “I would wish no handsomer legacy than that some unknown friend should bequeath to me some little spot within the vicinity of New York where I could place about a hundred and fifty acres of land with a good house on it.”26

  Over the course of the next year, Stephens would rise at four thirty in the morning six days a week to start his studies. He noted that at Columbia “we would take a sort of pride in showing a neglect of our studies. Here it is considered the best character to be considered a ‘hard student.’” Ever affable and outgoing, he enjoyed socializing with schoolmates in their rooms and attending local balls. Even New Year’s Day was spent at lectures, but that night he went to a ball, and wrote his father that while he did not know a single lady when he entered, “in a short time I was acquainted with all the belles in the room.”