Outbreak in Washington, D. C. by Kerry Walters

Author:Kerry Walters
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2014-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

THE POISON HYPOTHESIS

Given the acrimonious political climate, as well as the fact that presidentelect Buchanan and several of his cronies were stricken, it was only natural that some would suspect the National Hotel disease was actually a dastardly attempt to poison the Democrat from Pennsylvania and put an end to his administration before it could get under way. The Baltimore Sun was one of the first newspapers to suggest a plot to kill Buchanan. On April 1, 1857, it ran this chilling notice: “A post mortem examination of the remains of a gentleman who died in Pennsylvania from disease contracted at the National Hotel shows a deposit of arsenic in the stomach. A patient here now suffers an enlargement of the abdomen from some cause, and with marked symptoms of being poisoned.” It’s not at all clear who the Pennsylvania gentleman was. Quite possibly, he was Elliot Eskridge Lane, but there’s no evidence to suggest that Lane’s corpse was autopsied. So the “deposit of arsenic in the stomach” is most likely purple speculation. Likewise, the patient in Baltimore suffering from “an enlargement of the abdomen” remains anonymous. Was his illness connected with the National Hotel in any way? Why was a distention of the belly immediately assumed to be a symptom of poisoning rather than some natural malady? The Baltimore Sun’s short piece, picked up by the New York Daily Times three days later and subsequently reprinted in a number of other papers, was entirely absent of any substantiation. But it set in motion frightened whispers of sinister conspirators.

Less than a month after young Lane’s death, another dignitary who had lodged at the National Hotel during Buchanan’s inauguration died. His symptoms, like Lane’s, were intestinal: violent diarrhea, frothy stool, vomiting, extreme thirst from dehydration and lassitude. The victim this time was no less than a United States representative, John G. Montgomery from Pennsylvania’s Thirty-Fifth District. One of Buchanan’s fellow Democrats, Montgomery had taken his seat in Congress less than two months before his death. Immediately following the inauguration, too ill to perform his duties, he returned to his home in Danville, a small town in central Pennsylvania, where he languished and died. On April 27, 1857, three days after Montgomery’s death, the Pennsylvanian announced his demise in terms that left no doubt as to the cause of death. “Every feature in his disease,” the obituary ran, “indicated the presence of arsenic in his system.”

Like the Baltimore Sun’s accusation of poison a month earlier, this one was likewise widely reprinted. The New York Daily Herald picked up the story three days later, and by May 9, it had traveled westward far enough to be paraphrased and elaborated upon in the Weekly Wisconsin Patriot. Under the headline “Attempt to Poison the President,” the Patriot reported that “there were certain coincidences” in Montgomery’s death “suggestive of the most horrible suspicions. Mr. Buchanan arrived at the Hotel on the 25th [sic] of January, and on the next day the first case of this disease occurred; and in a few days there were about forty cases.

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