Fitz Hugh Ludlow
Encyclopedia
The Hasheesh Eater
The Hasheesh Eater is an autobiographical book by Fitz Hugh Ludlow describing the author's altered states of consciousness and philosophical flights of fancy while he was using a cannabis extract....
(1857).
The explorations of altered states of consciousness in The Hasheesh Eater are at the same time eloquent descriptions of elusive subjective phenomena and surreal, bizarre, and beautiful literature.
Ludlow also wrote about his travels across America on the overland stage to San Francisco, Yosemite and the forests of California and Oregon, in his second book, The Heart of the Continent. An appendix to that book provides his impressions of the recently-founded Mormon
Mormon
The term Mormon most commonly denotes an adherent, practitioner, follower, or constituent of Mormonism, which is the largest branch of the Latter Day Saint movement in restorationist Christianity...
settlement in Utah
Utah
Utah is a state in the Western United States. It was the 45th state to join the Union, on January 4, 1896. Approximately 80% of Utah's 2,763,885 people live along the Wasatch Front, centering on Salt Lake City. This leaves vast expanses of the state nearly uninhabited, making the population the...
.
He was also the author of many works of short fiction, essays, science reporting and art criticism. He devoted many of the last years of his life to attempts to improve the treatment of opiate addicts.
Early life
Fitz Hugh Ludlow was born September 11, 1836 in New York CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. His father, the Rev. Henry G. Ludlow
Henry G. Ludlow
Henry G. Ludlow was an American minister and abolitionist, and one of those who worked with the New York Amistad Committee.He was a divinity student at Yale and then minister of the First Congregational Church in Oswego. From 1828-1837 he was the minister of the Spring Street Presbyterian Church...
, was an outspoken abolitionist minister at a time when anti-slavery enthusiasm was not popular, even in the urban North. Only months before his birth, Fitz Hugh later wrote, “my father, mother, and sister were driven from their house in New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
by a furious mob. When they came cautiously back, their home was quiet as a fortress the day after it has been blown up. The front-parlor was full of paving-stones; the carpets were cut to pieces; the pictures, the furniture, and the chandelier lay in one common wreck; and the walls were covered with inscriptions of mingled insult and glory. Over the mantel-piece had been charcoaled ‘Rascal’; over the pier-table, ‘Abolitionist.’”
His father was also a “ticket-agency on the Underground Railroad
Underground Railroad
The Underground Railroad was an informal network of secret routes and safe houses used by 19th-century black slaves in the United States to escape to free states and Canada with the aid of abolitionists and allies who were sympathetic to their cause. The term is also applied to the abolitionists,...
,” as Fitz Hugh discovered when he was four — although, misunderstanding the term in his youth, Fitz Hugh remembered “going down cellar and watching behind old hogsheads by the hour to see where the cars came in.”
The moral lessons learned at home were principles hard to maintain among his peers, especially when expressed with his father’s exuberance.
Among the large crowd of young Southerners sent to [my] school, I began preaching emancipation in my pinafore. Mounted upon a window-seat in an alcove of the great play-hall, I passed recess after recess in haranguing a multitude upon the subject of Freedom, with as little success as most apostles, and with only less than their crowd of martyrdom, because, though small boys are more malicious than men, they cannot hit so hard.
Experiences like these may have inspired Fitz Hugh in his first published work that has survived to this day. The poem, Truth on His Travels has “Truth” personified and wandering the earth, trying in vain to find some band of people who will respect him.
The pages of The Hasheesh Eater
The Hasheesh Eater
The Hasheesh Eater is an autobiographical book by Fitz Hugh Ludlow describing the author's altered states of consciousness and philosophical flights of fancy while he was using a cannabis extract....
introduce a bookish and near-sighted young Fitz Hugh: “into books, ill health, and musing I settled down when I should have been playing cricket, hunting, or riding. The younger thirst for adventure was quenched by rapid degrees as I found it possible to ascend Chimborazo
Chimborazo (volcano)
Chimborazo is a currently inactive stratovolcano located in the Cordillera Occidental range of the Andes. Its last known eruption is believed to have occurred around 550 AD....
with Humboldt
Alexander von Humboldt
Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander Freiherr von Humboldt was a German naturalist and explorer, and the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt...
lying on a sofa, or chase harte-beests with Cumming over muffins and coffee.”
A family legend, later used to explain his attraction for intoxicants, is that when Fitz Hugh was two years old he “would climb upon the breakfast table and eat Cayenne pepper from the castor!”
Henry Ludlow
Henry G. Ludlow
Henry G. Ludlow was an American minister and abolitionist, and one of those who worked with the New York Amistad Committee.He was a divinity student at Yale and then minister of the First Congregational Church in Oswego. From 1828-1837 he was the minister of the Spring Street Presbyterian Church...
’s father was a pioneer temperance
Temperance movement
A temperance movement is a social movement urging reduced use of alcoholic beverages. Temperance movements may criticize excessive alcohol use, promote complete abstinence , or pressure the government to enact anti-alcohol legislation or complete prohibition of alcohol.-Temperance movement by...
advocate, according to one source “adopting and advocating its principles before any general and organized effort for them.” Henry himself, in one of his few preserved sermons, attacked Great Britain
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...
for “her cruel oppression of her East India
East India
East India is a region of India consisting of the states of West Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand, and Orissa. The states of Orissa and West Bengal share some cultural and linguistic characteristics with Bangladesh and with the state of Assam. Together with Bangladesh, West Bengal formed the...
subjects, often starving... and forced to cultivate opium on land they need to supply themselves with bread...” and defended China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
“for resisting a traffick which was sapping, by its terrible effects upon her citizens, the very foundation of her empire...”
Fitz Hugh’s father had obvious and enormous influence on him, but his mother played a more marginal role in his life. Abigail Woolsey Wells died a few months after Fitz Hugh’s twelfth birthday. At her funeral, the presiding minister said that “[f]or many years she has scarcely known what physical ease and comfort were. She labored with a body prostrated and suffering; and laid herself down to sleep in pain.”
His mother’s suffering may have brought out in Fitz Hugh an obsession with mortality and the connection between the spiritual and animal in man. It was observed that “through all her life [she] had a constitutional and indescribable dread of death; not so much the fear of being dead, as of dying itself. An appalling sense of the fearful struggle which separates the soul from the body.”
The college and the man
Fitz Hugh’s college life started at the College of New Jersey (now known as Princeton UniversityPrinceton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
) in 1854. There, he joined the Cliosophic Society
American Whig-Cliosophic Society
The American Whig–Cliosophic Society is a political, literary, and debating society at Princeton University and the oldest debate union in the United States...
. When Nassau Hall
Nassau Hall
Nassau Hall is the oldest building at Princeton University in the borough of Princeton, New Jersey . At the time it was built in 1754, Nassau Hall was the largest building in colonial New Jersey. Designed originally by Robert Smith, the building was subsequently remodeled by notable American...
, the University’s main building, was gutted by an accidental fire in March 1855, Fitz Hugh left Princeton and transferred to Union College
Union College
Union College is a private, non-denominational liberal arts college located in Schenectady, New York, United States. Founded in 1795, it was the first institution of higher learning chartered by the New York State Board of Regents. In the 19th century, it became the "Mother of Fraternities", as...
in Schenectady, joining the Kappa Alpha Society
Kappa Alpha Society
The Kappa Alpha Society , founded in 1825, was the progenitor of the modern fraternity system in North America. It was the first of the fraternities which would eventually become known as the Union Triad...
and living with other members of the fraternity.
Among the classes Ludlow took at Union must have been some intensive courses in medicine. As early as 1857, he writes of having been an anesthesiologist during minor surgery, and being asked by surgeons for his opinions on the actions of various courses of anesthesia
Anesthesia
Anesthesia, or anaesthesia , traditionally meant the condition of having sensation blocked or temporarily taken away...
.
A class in which Fitz Hugh always got the highest marks was one taught by university president Eliphalet Nott
Eliphalet Nott
Eliphalet Nott , was a famed Presbyterian minister, inventor, educational pioneer, and long-term president of Union College, Schenectady, New York.-Life:...
and based on Lord Kames’ Elements of Criticism, although it essentially became a course on the philosophy of Eliphalet Nott. Nott’s philosophy would have an influence on Ludlow, but perhaps more immediately his assertion that “[i]f I had it in my power to direct the making of songs in any country, I could do just as I pleased with the people.”
It may be a testimony to Nott’s feelings toward Ludlow — both toward his philosophy and his writing talent — that he asked Fitz Hugh to write a song for the commencement ceremony of his 1856 class. College legend holds that Ludlow, having finished writing the lyrics to the tune of a drinking song (Sparkling and Bright) late at night, was so unhappy with what he had written that he threw away the manuscript and it would have been lost had not his roommate discovered it and brought it to Rev. Nott’s attention. Song to Old Union
Song to Old Union
"Song to Old Union" is the alma mater of Union College in Schenectady, New York. It was written by Fitz Hugh Ludlow for Union's 1856 commencement ceremonies...
became the alma mater
Alma mater
Alma mater , pronounced ), was used in ancient Rome as a title for various mother goddesses, especially Ceres or Cybele, and in Christianity for the Virgin Mary.-General term:...
, and is sung at commencement to this day.
Ludlow wrote several college songs, two of which were even fifty years later considered the two most popular Union College songs. In The Hasheesh Eater
The Hasheesh Eater
The Hasheesh Eater is an autobiographical book by Fitz Hugh Ludlow describing the author's altered states of consciousness and philosophical flights of fancy while he was using a cannabis extract....
he says that “[h]e who should collect the college carols of our country... would be adding no mean department to the national literature... [T]hey are frequently both excellent poetry and music... [T]hey are always inspiring, always heart-blending, and always, I may add, well sung.”
The Hasheesh Eater
When, in the Song to Old UnionSong to Old Union
"Song to Old Union" is the alma mater of Union College in Schenectady, New York. It was written by Fitz Hugh Ludlow for Union's 1856 commencement ceremonies...
, today’s graduates sing that “the brook that bounds through Union’s grounds / Gleams bright as the Delphi
Delphi
Delphi is both an archaeological site and a modern town in Greece on the south-western spur of Mount Parnassus in the valley of Phocis.In Greek mythology, Delphi was the site of the Delphic oracle, the most important oracle in the classical Greek world, and a major site for the worship of the god...
c water...” most probably do not realize that they may be commemorating drug-induced states of vision, in which this bounding brook became alternatingly the Nile
Nile
The Nile is a major north-flowing river in North Africa, generally regarded as the longest river in the world. It is long. It runs through the ten countries of Sudan, South Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda and Egypt.The Nile has two major...
and the Styx
Styx (mythology)
The Styx is a river in Greek mythology that formed the boundary between Earth and the Underworld . It circles the Underworld nine times...
.
Early in his college years, probably during the spring of 1854, Fitz Hugh’s medical curiosity drew him to visit his “friend Anderson the apothecary
Apothecary
Apothecary is a historical name for a medical professional who formulates and dispenses materia medica to physicians, surgeons and patients — a role now served by a pharmacist and some caregivers....
” regularly. During these visits, Ludlow “made upon myself the trial of the effects of every strange drug and chemical which the laboratory could produce.” A few months before, Bayard Taylor
Bayard Taylor
Bayard Taylor was an American poet, literary critic, translator, and travel author.-Life and work:...
’s Putnam’s Magazine
Putnam's Magazine
Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art was a monthly periodical published by G. P. Putnam's Sons featuring American literature and articles on science, art, and politics...
article The Vision of Hasheesh had been devoured by Ludlow, and so when the cannabis
Cannabis
Cannabis is a genus of flowering plants that includes three putative species, Cannabis sativa, Cannabis indica, and Cannabis ruderalis. These three taxa are indigenous to Central Asia, and South Asia. Cannabis has long been used for fibre , for seed and seed oils, for medicinal purposes, and as a...
-based tetanus
Tetanus
Tetanus is a medical condition characterized by a prolonged contraction of skeletal muscle fibers. The primary symptoms are caused by tetanospasmin, a neurotoxin produced by the Gram-positive, rod-shaped, obligate anaerobic bacterium Clostridium tetani...
remedy called Tilden’s extract
Tilden's Extract
Tilden’s Extract was a 19th century medicinal cannabis extract, first formulated by James Edward Smith of Edinburgh. In the United States, the laboratory of Tilden & Co. manufactured and sold the extract under its own name, advertising the drug as:...
came out he had to try some.
Ludlow became a “hasheesh eater,” ingesting large doses of this cannabis extract regularly throughout his college years. Just as in his youth he found to his delight that he could from the comfort of his couch adventure along with the words of authors, he found that with hasheesh “[t]he whole East, from Greece
Greece
Greece , officially the Hellenic Republic , and historically Hellas or the Republic of Greece in English, is a country in southeastern Europe....
to farthest China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
, lay within the compass of a township; no outlay was necessary for the journey. For the humble sum of six cents I might purchase an excursion ticket over all the earth; ships and dromedaries, tents and hospices were all contained in a box of Tilden’s extract.”
He found the drug to be a boon to his creativity: “[M]y pen glanced presently like lightning in the effort to keep neck and neck with my ideas,” he writes at one point, although, “[a]t last, thought ran with such terrific speed that I could no longer write at all.”
Although he later grew to think of cannabis as “the very witch-plant of hell, the weed of madness” and his involvement with it as unwise, “[w]herein I was wrong I was invited by a mother’s voice.... The motives for the hasheesh-indulgence were of the most exalted ideal nature, for of this nature are all its ecstasies and its revelations — yes, and a thousand-fold more terrible, for this very reason, its unutterable pangs.”
For a time he seemed never to be out from under the influence of hashish. “[L]ife became with me one prolonged state of hasheesh exaltation...” he wrote, and noted that “the effect of every successive indulgence grows more perduring until the hitherto isolated experiences become tangent to each other; then the links of the delirium intersect, and at last so blend that the chain has become a continuous band.... The final months... are passed in one unbroken yet checkered dream.” He concluded:
Hasheesh is indeed an accursed drug, and the soul at last pays a most bitter price for all its ecstasies; moreover, the use of it is not the proper means of gaining any insight, yet who shall say that at that season of exaltation I did not know things as they are more truly than ever in the ordinary state?.... In the jubilance of hashish, we have only arrived by an improper pathway at the secret of that infinity of beauty which shall be beheld in heaven and earth when the veil of the corporeal drops off, and we know as we are known.
Ludlow’s endeavor to end his “addiction
Substance dependence
The section about substance dependence in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders does not use the word addiction at all. It explains:...
” to cannabis is puzzling. The intoxicating chemicals in marijuana and hashish are not considered addictive in the strict sense of the word, and are only thought to be habit-forming
Substance dependence
The section about substance dependence in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders does not use the word addiction at all. It explains:...
in the same way as tennis
Tennis
Tennis is a sport usually played between two players or between two teams of two players each . Each player uses a racket that is strung to strike a hollow rubber ball covered with felt over a net into the opponent's court. Tennis is an Olympic sport and is played at all levels of society at all...
, ice cream
Ice cream
Ice cream is a frozen dessert usually made from dairy products, such as milk and cream, and often combined with fruits or other ingredients and flavours. Most varieties contain sugar, although some are made with other sweeteners...
, or soap opera
Soap opera
A soap opera, sometimes called "soap" for short, is an ongoing, episodic work of dramatic fiction presented in serial format on radio or as television programming. The name soap opera stems from the original dramatic serials broadcast on radio that had soap manufacturers, such as Procter & Gamble,...
s. Yet Ludlow was earnest in his description of the horrors of withdrawal, adding that “[i]f, from a human distaste of dwelling too long upon the horrible, I have been led to speak so lightly of the facts of this part of my experience that any man may think the returning way of ascent an easy one, and dare the downward road of ingress, I would repair the fault with whatever of painfully-elaborated prophecy of wretchedness may be in my power, for through all this time I was indeed a greater sufferer than any bodily pain could possibly make me.”
Ludlow’s account was probably flavored by the tale of opium addiction which formed the model for his book: Thomas DeQuincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is an autobiographical account written by Thomas De Quincey, about his laudanum addiction and its effect on his life...
. But Ludlow’s “addiction” is curiously missing signs of physical withdrawal
Withdrawal
Withdrawal can refer to any sort of separation, but is most commonly used to describe the group of symptoms that occurs upon the abrupt discontinuation/separation or a decrease in dosage of the intake of medications, recreational drugs, and alcohol...
symptoms — terrible nightmares are about the worst symptom he specifies. He takes up tobacco
Tobacco
Tobacco is an agricultural product processed from the leaves of plants in the genus Nicotiana. It can be consumed, used as a pesticide and, in the form of nicotine tartrate, used in some medicines...
smoking to help him through his “suffering,” but this suffering seems mostly to be from disappointment at the dreary colors and unfantastic drudgery of sober life, rather than from any physical pain (ironically, his incipient nicotine
Nicotine
Nicotine is an alkaloid found in the nightshade family of plants that constitutes approximately 0.6–3.0% of the dry weight of tobacco, with biosynthesis taking place in the roots and accumulation occurring in the leaves...
addiction may have been the real source of any physical suffering he experienced; he writes at one point that “to defer for an hour the nicotine indulgence was to bring on a longing for the cannabine which was actual pain.”):
The very existence of the outer world seemed a base mockery, a cruel sham of some remembered possibility which had been glorious with a speechless beauty. I hated flowers, for I had seen the enameled meads of Paradise; I cursed the rocks because they were mute stone, the sky because it rang with no music; and the earth and sky seemed to throw back my curse....
It was not the ecstasy of the drug which so much attracted me, as its power of disenthrallment from an apathy which no human aid could utterly take away.
He says in The Hasheesh Eater
The Hasheesh Eater
The Hasheesh Eater is an autobiographical book by Fitz Hugh Ludlow describing the author's altered states of consciousness and philosophical flights of fancy while he was using a cannabis extract....
that through the drug, “I had caught a glimpse through the chinks of my earthly prison of the immeasurable sky which should one day overarch me with unconceived sublimity of view, and resound in my ear with unutterable music.” This glimpse would haunt him for the rest of his days. A poem, preserved in his sister’s notebook, reads in part: “I stand as one who from a dungeon dream / Of open air and the free arch of stars / Waking to things that be from things that seem / Beats madly on the bars. // I am not yet quite used to be aware / That all my labor & my hope had birth / Only to freeze me with the coffined share / Of void & soulless earth.”
The Hasheesh Eater was written on the advice of his physician during his withdrawal. Ludlow had difficulty in finding words to describe his experiences: “In the hasheesh-eater a virtual change of worlds has taken place... Truth has not become expanded, but his vision has grown telescopic; that which others see only as the dim nebula, or do not see at all, he looks into with a penetrating scrutiny which distance, to a great extent, can not evade.... To his neighbor in the natural state he turns to give expression to his visions, but finds that to him the symbols which convey the apocalypse to his own mind are meaningless, because, in our ordinary life, the thoughts which they convey have no existence; their two planes are utterly different.”
Still, he made the attempt, trying on the one hand to make a moral or practical point that “the soul withers and sinks from its growth toward the true end of its being beneath the dominance of any sensual indulgence” and on the other to map out the hashish high like an explorer of a new continent: “If I shall seem to have fixed the comparative positions of even a few outposts of a strange and rarely-visited realm, I shall think myself happy.”
Entering the New York literary scene
The Hasheesh Eater was published when Ludlow was twenty-one years old. The book was a success, going through a few printings in short order, and Ludlow, although he published both the book and his earlier article The Apocalypse of Hasheesh anonymously, was able to take advantage of the book’s notoriety.For a time he studied law under William Curtis Noyes
William Curtis Noyes
William Curtis Noyes, jurist, born in Schodack, Rensselaer County, New York, 19 August 1805; died in New York City, 25 December 1864.-Biography:...
(himself a lawyer who had begun his legal studies at the age of fourteen in the offices of Fitz Hugh’s uncle Samuel
Samuel Ludlow
Samuel B. Ludlow was an American jurist. He was one of the first lawyers in Nassau, New York, and was a corporation officer when Nassau was chartered, and was town clerk in 1835...
). Ludlow passed the bar exam in New York in 1859, but never practiced law, instead deciding to pursue a literary career.
The late 1850s marked a changing of the guard in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
literature. Old guard literary magazines like The Knickerbocker
The Knickerbocker
The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, was a literary magazine of New York City, founded by Charles Fenno Hoffman in 1833, and published until 1865 under various titles, including:...
and Putnam’s Monthly were fading away, and upstarts like the Atlantic Monthly, The Saturday Press
The Saturday Press (literary newspaper)
The Saturday Press was the name of a literary weekly newspaper, published in New York from 1858 to 1860 and again from 1865 to 1866, edited by Henry Clapp, Jr....
, and Vanity Fair were starting up. Ludlow took on a position as an associate editor at Vanity Fair, a magazine which at the time resembled Punch in tone. It was probably through the Vanity Fair staff that Ludlow was introduced to the New York City bohemian
Bohemianism
Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, with few permanent ties, involving musical, artistic or literary pursuits...
and literary culture, centered around Pfaff’s beer cellar
Pfaff's beer cellar
The vault at Pfaffs where the drinkers and laughers meet to eat and drink and carouseWhile on the walk immediately overhead pass the myriad feet of Broadway...
on Broadway
Broadway (New York City)
Broadway is a prominent avenue in New York City, United States, which runs through the full length of the borough of Manhattan and continues northward through the Bronx borough before terminating in Westchester County, New York. It is the oldest north–south main thoroughfare in the city, dating to...
and Saturday night gatherings at Richard Henry Stoddard
Richard Henry Stoddard
Richard Henry Stoddard was an American critic and poet.-Biography:Richard Henry Stoddard was born on July 2, 1825, in Hingham, Massachusetts. His father, a sea-captain, was wrecked and lost on one of his voyages while Richard was a child, and the lad went in 1835 to New York City with his mother,...
’s home. This scene attracted the likes of Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman
Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...
, Fitz James O’Brien
Fitz James O'Brien
Fitz James O'Brien was an Irish-born American writer, some of whose work is often considered one of the forerunners of today's science fiction.-Biography:...
, Bayard Taylor, Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Thomas Bailey Aldrich was an American poet, novelist, travel writer and editor.-Early life and education:...
, Edmund Clarence Stedman
Edmund Clarence Stedman
Edmund Clarence Stedman , American poet, critic, and essayist was born at Hartford, Connecticut, United States.-Biography:...
, and Artemus Ward.
New York City’s vibrant literary scene and cosmopolitan attitudes were a boon to Ludlow. “It is a bath of other souls,” he wrote. “It will not let a man harden inside his own epidermis. He must affect and be affected by multitudinous varieties of temperament, race, character.”
New York was tolerant of iconoclasts and of people with just the sort of notoriety Ludlow had cultivated. “No amount of eccentricity surprises a New-Yorker, or makes him uncourteous. It is difficult to attract even a crowd of boys on Broadway by an odd figure, face, manner, or costume. This has the result of making New York an asylum for all who love their neighbor as themselves, but would a little rather not have him looking through the key-hole.”
The late 1850s and early 1860s found Ludlow in just about every literary quarter of New York. He wrote for, among many others, the Harper’s publications (Weekly, Monthly and Bazar), the New York World
New York World
The New York World was a newspaper published in New York City from 1860 until 1931. The paper played a major role in the history of American newspapers...
, Commercial Advertiser
Commercial Advertiser
The New-York Commercial Advertiser was an evening American newspaper.It was published, with slight name variations, from 1797-1904, though it originated as the American Minerva founded in 1793.-History:...
, Evening Post
Evening Post
Evening Post may refer to:Newspapers:* Bristol Evening Post* Evening Post, Charleston; now The Post and Courier* New Evening Post * Jersey Evening Post* Lancashire Evening Post* London Evening Post...
, and Home Journal, and for Appleton’s, Vanity Fair, Knickerbocker, Northern Lights, The Saturday Press, and the Atlantic Monthly.
George William Curtis
George William Curtis
George William Curtis was an American writer and public speaker, born in Providence, Rhode Island, of old New England stock.-Biography:...
, the editor of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine
Harper's Magazine
Harper's Magazine is a monthly magazine of literature, politics, culture, finance, and the arts, with a generally left-wing perspective. It is the second-oldest continuously published monthly magazine in the U.S. . The current editor is Ellen Rosenbush, who replaced Roger Hodge in January 2010...
, remembered Ludlow as “a slight, bright-eyed, alert young man, who seemed scarcely more than a boy,” when he came in for a visit. Curtis introduced Ludlow to the princes of the Harper publishing family as an upcoming literary talent who, before his twenty-fifth birthday, would have his first book go through several printings and would place more than ten stories in Harper’s publications, some of which were printed serially and spanned several issues.
Rosalie
Ludlow’s fictional stories often mirror with fair accuracy the events of his life. One can suppose that the child-like eighteen-year-old with brown hair and eyes and “a complexion, marble struck through with rose flush” who falls for the narrator of Our Queer Papa, a young magazine sub-editor described as a “good-looking gentleman with brains, who had published,” is the fictionalized Rosalie Osborne, who follows that description, and whom he would marry the year after the story’s publication.Rosalie was eighteen when she married, not particularly young by the standards of the day, but young enough in character that it would later be remembered that “she was... but a little girl when she was married.” Memoirs written by members of the New York literary circle in which the Ludlows were an active part universally paint Rosalie as both very beautiful and very flirtatious. The wife of Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Thomas Bailey Aldrich was an American poet, novelist, travel writer and editor.-Early life and education:...
, for instance, remembered Mrs. Ludlow as “the Dulcinea
Dulcinea
"Dulcinea del Toboso" is a fictional character who is referred to in Miguel de Cervantes' novel Don Quixote. Seeking the traditions of the knights-errant of old, Don Quixote finds a true love whom he calls Dulcinea. She is a simple peasant in his home town, but Quixote imagines her to be the most...
who had entangled [Aldrich] in the meshes of her brown hair.”
The couple spent the first half of 1859 in Florida
Florida
Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...
, where Fitz Hugh wrote a series of articles, “Due South Sketches,” describing what he later recalled as “the climate of Utopia, the scenery of Paradise, and the social system of Hell.” He noted that while apologists for slavery
Slavery
Slavery is a system under which people are treated as property to be bought and sold, and are forced to work. Slaves can be held against their will from the time of their capture, purchase or birth, and deprived of the right to leave, to refuse to work, or to demand compensation...
condemned abolitionists for condoning miscegenation
Miscegenation
Miscegenation is the mixing of different racial groups through marriage, cohabitation, sexual relations, and procreation....
, “[t]he most open relations of concubinage existed between white chevaliers and black servants in the town of Jacksonville. I was not surprised at the fact, but was surprised at its openness.... not even the pious shrugged their shoulders or seemed to care.”
From Florida, the couple moved to New York City, staying in a boarding house and diving rapidly back into the literary social life.
The Heart of the Continent
In 1863 Albert BierstadtAlbert Bierstadt
Albert Bierstadt was a German-American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. In obtaining the subject matter for these works, Bierstadt joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion...
was at the peak of a career that would make him America
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
’s top landscape artist. Ludlow considered Bierstadt’s landscapes representative of the best American art of the era and used his position as art critic at the New York Evening Post to praise them.
Bierstadt wanted to return West, where in 1859 he had found scenes for some of his recently successful paintings. He asked Ludlow to accompany him. Ludlow’s writings about the trip, published in the Post, San Francisco's The Golden Era, the Atlantic Monthly and then later compiled into book form, according to one biographer of Bierstadt, “proved to be among the most effective vehicles in firmly establishing Bierstadt as the preeminent artist-interpreter of the western landscape in the 1860s.”
During the overland journey, they stopped at Salt Lake City, where Ludlow found an industrious and sincere group of settlers. He brought to the city prejudice and misgiving about the Mormons, and a squeamishness about polygamy which embarrassed him almost as much as his first view of a household of multiple wives. “I, a cosmopolitan, a man of the world, liberal to other people’s habits and opinions to a degree which had often subjected me to censure among strictarians in the Eastern States, blushed to my very temples,” he writes.
He couldn’t believe that a pair of co-wives “could sit there so demurely looking at their own and each others’ babies without jumping up to tear each others’ hair and scratch each others’ eyes out... It would have relieved my mind... to have seen that happy family clawing each other like tigers.”
His impressions of the Mormons
Mormons
The Mormons are a religious and cultural group related to Mormonism, a religion started by Joseph Smith during the American Second Great Awakening. A vast majority of Mormons are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints while a minority are members of other independent churches....
came when Utah was seen by many of his readers back home as rebellious and dangerous as those states in the Confederacy
Confederate States of America
The Confederate States of America was a government set up from 1861 to 1865 by 11 Southern slave states of the United States of America that had declared their secession from the U.S...
. Ludlow encountered frequent snide comments about the disintegration of the Union
Union (American Civil War)
During the American Civil War, the Union was a name used to refer to the federal government of the United States, which was supported by the twenty free states and five border slave states. It was opposed by 11 southern slave states that had declared a secession to join together to form the...
, with some Mormons under the impression that with the flood of immigrants to Utah
Utah
Utah is a state in the Western United States. It was the 45th state to join the Union, on January 4, 1896. Approximately 80% of Utah's 2,763,885 people live along the Wasatch Front, centering on Salt Lake City. This leaves vast expanses of the state nearly uninhabited, making the population the...
fleeing the draft, and with the decimation of the male population in war time making polygamy seem more practical, the Mormon state would come out of the American Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
stronger than either the Union or the Confederacy. Ludlow’s opinions were read with interest back East, and would constitute an appendix to the book he would later write about his travels.
“The Mormon system,” wrote Ludlow, “owns its believers — they are for it, not it for them. I could not help regarding this ‘Church’ as a colossal steam engine which had suddenly realized its superiority over its engineers and... had declared once for all not only its independence but its despotism.” Furthermore, “[i]t is very well known in Salt Lake City that no man lives there who would not be dead tomorrow if Brigham
Brigham Young
Brigham Young was an American leader in the Latter Day Saint movement and a settler of the Western United States. He was the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1847 until his death in 1877, he founded Salt Lake City, and he served as the first governor of the Utah...
willed it so.” Ludlow spent considerable time with Orrin Porter Rockwell, who had been dubbed the “Destroying Angel” for his supposed role as Brigham Young’s assassin of choice. Ludlow wrote a sketch of the man which Rockwell’s biographer, Harold Schindler
Harold Schindler
Harold Moroni "Hal" Schindler was an American journalist and historian, known for his articles and books on the American west...
, called “the best of those left behind by writers who observed the Mormon first-hand.” Ludlow said, in part, that he “found him one of the pleasantest murderers I ever met.”
Ludlow wrote that “[i]n their insane error, [the Mormons] are sincere, as I fully believe, to a much greater extent than is generally supposed. Even their leaders, for the most part, I regard not as hypocrites, but as fanatics.” For instance, “Brigham Young is the farthest remove on earth from a hypocrite; he is that grand, yet awful sight in human nature, a man who has brought the loftiest Christian self-devotion to the altar of the Devil...” A warning that must have seemed especially poignant was this: “[T]he Mormon enemies of our American Idea should be plainly understood as far more dangerous antagonists than hypocrites or idiots can ever hope to be. Let us not twice commit the blunder of underrating our foes.”
Racist opinions
Ludlow occasionally expressed the racial bigotry of his day in his writings. Contrary to his progressive nature, inquiring mind, and abolitionist politics, we find him describing a “motherly mulatto woman” as possessing “the passive obedience of her race;” or Mexicans in CaliforniaCalifornia
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
described as originating from “a nation of beggars-on-horseback... the Spaniards, Greasers, and Mixed-Breeds...;” or Chinese immigrants in “a kennel of straggling houses” with Ludlow imagining them “finally... swept away from San Francisco, and that strange Semitic
Semitic
In linguistics and ethnology, Semitic was first used to refer to a language family of largely Middle Eastern origin, now called the Semitic languages...
race... either exiled or swallowed up in our civilization...;” or “the natural, ingrained laziness of the Indians.”
Native Americans were a particular target of his bigotry. “The copper-faced devils” he called them, and he looked with scorn on “the pretty, sentimental, philanthropic prayers” that constituted much of the contemporary literature about the “noble savage
Noble savage
The term noble savage , expresses the concept an idealized indigene, outsider , and refers to the literary stock character of the same...
.” Ludlow believed the “Indian” was subhuman — an “inconceivable devil, whom statesmen and fools treat with, but whom brave and practical men shoot and scalp.”
San Francisco
During his stay in San Francisco, Ludlow was a guest of Thomas Starr KingThomas Starr King
Thomas Starr King was an American Unitarian and Universalist minister, influential in California politics during the American Civil War. Starr King spoke zealously in favor of the Union and was credited by Abraham Lincoln with preventing California from becoming a separate republic...
, the youthful California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...
preacher and passionate public speaker.
There, Ludlow again found himself in a vibrant literary community, this time centered around the Golden Era, which published Mark Twain
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...
, Joaquin Miller
Joaquin Miller
Joaquin Miller was the pen name of the colorful American poet Cincinnatus Heine Miller , nicknamed the "Poet of the Sierras".-Early years and family:...
and Bret Harte
Bret Harte
Francis Bret Harte was an American author and poet, best remembered for his accounts of pioneering life in California.- Life and career :...
. Twain was at the time still a virtual unknown (he had first used the pen name “Mark Twain” in a published piece a few months before). Ludlow wrote that “[i]n funny literature, that Irresistable [sic] Washoe Giant, Mark Twain, takes quite a unique position.... He imitates nobody. He is a school by himself.” Twain reciprocated by asking Ludlow to preview some of his work, and wrote to his mother, “if Fitz Hugh Ludlow, (author of ‘The Hasheesh Eater’) comes your way, treat him well.... He published a high encomium upon Mark Twain, (the same being eminently just & truthful, I beseech you to believe) in a San Francisco paper. Artemus Ward said that when my gorgeous talents were publicly acknowledged by such high authority, I ought to appreciate them myself...”
Ludlow also observed the ravages of opium
Opium
Opium is the dried latex obtained from the opium poppy . Opium contains up to 12% morphine, an alkaloid, which is frequently processed chemically to produce heroin for the illegal drug trade. The latex also includes codeine and non-narcotic alkaloids such as papaverine, thebaine and noscapine...
addiction among the Chinese immigrant population in San Francisco:
I shall never forget till my dying day that awful Chinese face which actually made me rein my horse at the door of the opium hong where it appeared, after a night’s debauch, at six o’clock one morning.... It spoke of such a nameless horror in its owner’s soul that I made the sign for a pipe and proposed, in “pigeonPidginA pidgin , or pidgin language, is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the...
English,” to furnish the necessary coin. The Chinaman sank down on the steps of the hong, like a man hearing medicine proposed to him when he was gangrened from head to foot, and made a gesture, palms downward, toward the ground, as one who said, “It has done its last for me — I am paying the matured bills of penalty.”
From San Francisco, Bierstadt and Ludlow ventured to Yosemite, then to Mount Shasta
Mount Shasta
Mount Shasta is located at the southern end of the Cascade Range in Siskiyou County, California and at is the second highest peak in the Cascades and the fifth highest in California...
, and then into Oregon
Oregon
Oregon is a state in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States. It is located on the Pacific coast, with Washington to the north, California to the south, Nevada on the southeast and Idaho to the east. The Columbia and Snake rivers delineate much of Oregon's northern and eastern...
, where Ludlow was struck “by a violent attack of pneumonia, which came near terminating my earthly with my Oregon pilgrimage” and which stopped their wandering for the better part of a week.
By late in 1864, after Ludlow’s return to New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, his marriage was in trouble. The reasons for the strife are unknown, but surviving letters suggest a mutual and scandal-provoking flood of infidelity. Rosalie obtained a divorce in May 1866. She would, a few months later, marry Albert Bierstadt
Albert Bierstadt
Albert Bierstadt was a German-American painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes of the American West. In obtaining the subject matter for these works, Bierstadt joined several journeys of the Westward Expansion...
.
Fitz Hugh meanwhile was again trying to kick a drug addiction, but he quickly started up a relationship with Maria O. Milliken, of whom little is known except that she was ten years his senior. They were married shortly after Rosalie’s marriage to Bierstadt.
New York stories
There was little in the field of literature that Ludlow did not feel qualified to attempt. He wrote stories for the magazines of his day, poetry, political commentary, art-, music-, drama-, and literary-criticism, and science and medical writing. As a newspaper writer, he also translated articles from foreign newspapers.Most of his stories were light-hearted romances, sprinkled with characters like “Mr. W. Dubbleyew,” or “Major Highjinks,” and generally concerning some semi-ridiculous obstacle that comes between the narrator and a beautiful young woman he’s fallen in love with. Occasional stories break from this pattern:
The Phial of Dread
The Phial of Dread was one of his earliest, published in October 1859. It is written as the journal of a chemist who is visited in his laboratory by the insane daughter of an acquaintance, who felt herself pursued by Death. When she got to the lab, she immediately sought out some chemical with which she could kill herself:We were alone together among the strange poisons, each one of whom, with a quicker or a slower death-devil in his eye, sat in his glass or porcelain sentry-box, a living force of bale. Should it be Hemp? No, that was too slow, uncertain, painful. Morphine? Too many antidotes — too much commonness, ostentation in that. Daturin? I did not like to ask how much of that was certain...
She finally stabs herself in the heart with a knife she finds in the lab. The author of the journal, Edgar Sands, panics, fearing that he will be blamed for the death, and attempts to destroy the body,
...he went calmly to work, with an awful despair in his eyes, and cut the shell of me — the husk I had left — to pieces; as a surgeon would, on a table in the laboratory. These fragments he screwed down into a large retort, and placed in the fiercest of flames, fed with pure oxygen.... I knew that all of me that had been seen on earth was reducing there to its ultimates — I was distilled there by degrees.
Her soul becomes trapped in the vial in which he pours the last drops of this substance, and he in turn is tormented by the presence he sees as a small, tortured woman within the vial. She is, however, able to take over his body with her soul long enough to write the confession from which the above excerpts come. This saves Mr. Sands from capital punishment, but he notes that the last pages of his journal were “written... after I was discharged from Bloomingdale Insane Asylum.”
The Music Essence
The Music Essence, printed in 1861 by The Commercial Advertiser, featured a man who composes a symphony for his deaf wife by translating the musical notes into light and colors. This story was certainly inspired by the synesthesiaSynesthesia
Synesthesia , from the ancient Greek , "together," and , "sensation," is a neurologically based condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway...
Ludlow experienced during his hashish experiences, of which he wrote that:
The soul is sometimes plainly perceived to be but one in its own sensorium, while the body is understood to be all that so variously modifies impressions as to make them in the one instance smell, in another taste, another sight, and thus on, ad finem. Thus the hasheesh-eater knows what it is to be burned by salt fire, to smell colors, to see sounds, and, much more frequently, to see feelings.
John Heathburn's Title
John Heathburn’s Title (1864) concerns an opium and alcohol addict who is cured through the patience of a concerned physician, and through a substitution therapy utilizing a cannabis extract. It represents Ludlow’s first published discussion of his role as a physician treating opium addicts.The Household Angel
The Household Angel was published over a series of thirteen issues of Harper’s BazaarHarper's Bazaar
Harper’s Bazaar is an American fashion magazine, first published in 1867. Harper’s Bazaar is published by Hearst and, as a magazine, considers itself to be the style resource for “women who are the first to buy the best, from casual to couture.”...
in 1868, and is a soap opera of betrayal, deceit, and the descent of a likable protagonist into alcoholism and despair.
Cinderella
Ludlow’s sole foray into drama was an adaptation of CinderellaCinderella
"Cinderella; or, The Little Glass Slipper" is a folk tale embodying a myth-element of unjust oppression/triumphant reward. Thousands of variants are known throughout the world. The title character is a young woman living in unfortunate circumstances that are suddenly changed to remarkable fortune...
which he wrote for the New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
Sanitary Fair in 1864, an enormous affair to benefit the National Sanitary Commission
United States Sanitary Commission
The United States Sanitary Commission was a private relief agency created by federal legislation on June 18, 1861, to support sick and wounded soldiers of the U.S. Army during the American Civil War. It operated across the North, raised its own funds, and enlisted thousands of volunteers...
in their war-relief efforts. The play was performed by children, under the direction of the wife of General John C. Fremont
John C. Frémont
John Charles Frémont , was an American military officer, explorer, and the first candidate of the anti-slavery Republican Party for the office of President of the United States. During the 1840s, that era's penny press accorded Frémont the sobriquet The Pathfinder...
(and starring their son), and included two shetland ponies.
“E Pluribus Unum”
Among the more interesting of Ludlow’s articles was “E Pluribus Unum”, published in The Galaxy in November 1866. It reviews attempts by pre-relativistic physicists to unify the known forces into a single force. It is occasionally anachronistic, as when Ludlow reviews failed attempts to explain the enormous energy radiated from the sun using classical physics, eventually settling on the heat given off by incoming meteor collisions as the most likely explanation.And it is occasionally visionary, as when Ludlow, decades before Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics and one of the most prolific intellects in human history...
would do the same, abandons the idea of the æther
Luminiferous aether
In the late 19th century, luminiferous aether or ether, meaning light-bearing aether, was the term used to describe a medium for the propagation of light....
and muses that “[w]e might be allowed to... assert that because our only cognitions of matter are cognitions of force, matter in the scientific sense is force.” He does not elaborate, and evidently the article was altered and cut for publication substantially, so we are left to wonder how far he pursued this idea of the equivalency of matter and energy.
Homes for the Friendless
One of the last published pieces by Ludlow was written for the New York TribuneNew York Tribune
The New York Tribune was an American newspaper, first established by Horace Greeley in 1841, which was long considered one of the leading newspapers in the United States...
, and published early in the year of his death. Probably prompted by his work with destitute opiate addicts, the article, “Homes for the Friendless,” advocated the establishment of homeless shelters in New York City, particularly for alcoholics and other drug addicts, noting that the existing shelters served women and children only, and that there was a growing class of homeless men in need of assistance. The idea was enthusiastically endorsed in an editorial by Tribune editor Horace Greeley
Horace Greeley
Horace Greeley was an American newspaper editor, a founder of the Liberal Republican Party, a reformer, a politician, and an outspoken opponent of slavery...
.
Final years
The last years of Ludlow’s life seem to have been a constant struggle with addiction. Family letters, when they mention him, usually either hopefully discuss his latest release from habit or mourn his latest relapse. His cousin wrote in March 1870, that “Dr. Smith has been treating him for a while but he said to a lady the other day — that there was no use in his wasting his strength [treating] Mr. Ludlow, for he took a teaspoonful of morphineMorphine
Morphine is a potent opiate analgesic medication and is considered to be the prototypical opioid. It was first isolated in 1804 by Friedrich Sertürner, first distributed by same in 1817, and first commercially sold by Merck in 1827, which at the time was a single small chemists' shop. It was more...
in a glass of whisky
Whisky
Whisky or whiskey is a type of distilled alcoholic beverage made from fermented grain mash. Different grains are used for different varieties, including barley, malted barley, rye, malted rye, wheat, and corn...
every day — and while he persisted in doing that it was only time & strength thrown away...”
His writing focus, as well as the focus of his life, turned to the problem of opium addiction. He described this as “one of my life’s ruling passions — a very agony of seeking to find — any means of bringing the habituated opium-eater out of his horrible bondage, without, or comparatively without, pain.” His essay What Shall They Do to be Saved from Harper’s was included in the 1868 book (written by Horace Day, himself a recovering addict) The Opium Habit, one of the first books to deal in a medical way with opium addiction, which had become a national crisis in the wake of the Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
. Ludlow expanded on his original essay with Outlines of the Opium Cure, a portrait in words of an ideal, perhaps utopian, drug addiction treatment clinic.
The opium addict, according to Ludlow (in a view which even today seems progressive), “is a proper subject, not for reproof, but for medical treatment. The problem of his case need embarrass nobody. It is as purely physical as one of small-pox
Smallpox
Smallpox was an infectious disease unique to humans, caused by either of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor. The disease is also known by the Latin names Variola or Variola vera, which is a derivative of the Latin varius, meaning "spotted", or varus, meaning "pimple"...
.... [He] is suffering under a disease of the very machinery of volition; and no more to be judged harshly for his acts than a wound for suppurating or the bowels for continuing the peristaltic motion
Peristalsis
Peristalsis is a radially symmetrical contraction and relaxation of muscles which propagates in a wave down the muscular tube, in an anterograde fashion. In humans, peristalsis is found in the contraction of smooth muscles to propel contents through the digestive tract. Earthworms use a similar...
.”
Ludlow’s writings led addicts from all over the country to write for advice, and he spent a great deal of time in his last years answering this correspondence. He also treated addicts as a physician, and one friend said that “I have known him to go for three weeks at a time without taking off his clothing for sleep, in attendance upon the sick. His face was a familiar one in many a hospital ward.... During the last weeks of his residence in New York, he supported, out of his scanty means, a family of which one of the members had been a victim to opium. This family had no claim upon him whatever excepting that of the sympathy which such misfortunes always excited in him. The medicines and money he furnished this single family in the course of the several weeks that I knew about them, could not have amounted to less than one hundred dollars, and this case was only one of many.”
But Ludlow himself was unable to break the habit. The same friend writes,
Alas, with what sadness his friends came to know that while he was doing so much to warn and restore others from the effects of this fearful habit, he himself was still under its bondage. Again and again he seemed to have broken it. Only those most intimate with him knew how he suffered at such periods... I recall a night he passed with me some months after the publication of [What Shall They Do to Be Saved?]. He was in an excited state, and we took a long walk together, during which he spoke freely of his varied trials, and he finally went to my house to sleep. I went directly to bed, but he was a long time making his preparations, and I at length suspected he was indulging his old craving. For the first and only time in my life I spoke harshly to him, and characterized his abuse of himself and of the confidence of his friends as shameful. He replied depreciatingly, and turning down the gas-lightGas lightingGas lighting is production of artificial light from combustion of a gaseous fuel, including hydrogen, methane, carbon monoxide, propane, butane, acetylene, ethylene, or natural gas. Before electricity became sufficiently widespread and economical to allow for general public use, gas was the most...
came around and crept into bed beside me. We both lay a moment in silence, and feeling reproved for my harshness, I said: “Think, Fitz, of your warnings on the subject, and of your effort, in behalf of other victims.” In a tone and with a pathos I can never forget, he answered — “He saved others, himself he could not save.”
Ludlow left for Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
in June 1870 in an attempt to recover, both from his addictions and from tuberculosis
Tuberculosis
Tuberculosis, MTB, or TB is a common, and in many cases lethal, infectious disease caused by various strains of mycobacteria, usually Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Tuberculosis usually attacks the lungs but can also affect other parts of the body...
. He travelled from New York with his sister Helen, who had been a constant source of support, and his wife and one of her sons. They stayed for a month and a half in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, then left for Geneva
Geneva
Geneva In the national languages of Switzerland the city is known as Genf , Ginevra and Genevra is the second-most-populous city in Switzerland and is the most populous city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of Switzerland...
, Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
when his health again took a downturn.
He died the morning after his thirty-fourth birthday, and, perhaps as he meant to predict in this passage in What Shall They Do to Be Saved?: “Over the opium-eater’s coffin at least, thank God! a wife and a sister can stop weeping and say, ‘He’s free.’”
Main source
- A Brief Biography of Fitz Hugh Ludlow © 1995 David Gross
Further reading material
- Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography: Fitz Hugh Ludlow
- Pioneer of Inner Space: The Life of Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Hasheesh Eater by Donald P. Dulchinos
- The Annotated Hasheesh Eater (ISBN 1434809862)
External links
- The Annotated Hasheesh Eater
- “Among the Mormons” by Fitz Hugh Ludlow, The Atlantic Monthly April 1864