Fitz Hugh Ludlow

Early life

Ludlow was born September 11, 1836, in New York City, where his family made their home. His father, the Rev. Henry G. Ludlow, was an outspoken abolitionist minister at a time when anti-slavery enthusiasm was not popular 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 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-agent on the Underground Railroad," as Ludlow discovered when he was four — although, misunderstanding the term in his youth, Ludlow 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 Ludlow 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 introduce a bookish and near-sighted young Ludlow: "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 with Humboldt lying on a sofa, or chase harte-beests with Cumming over muffins and coffee."

The college man

Ludlow began his studies at the College of New Jersey, today's Princeton University. Entering in 1854, he joined the Cliosophic Society, a literary and debating club. When a fire gutted Nassau Hall, the College of New Jersey's main building, a year later he transferred to Union College. There he joined the Kappa Alpha Society, the nation's first purely social collegiate fraternity, and lived with its members.

Ludlow evidently took some intensive courses in medicine at Union. 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.

A class in which Ludlow always got the highest marks was one taught by famed Union College president Eliphalet Nott based on Lord Kames' seminal 1762 literary work, Elements of Criticism – although it essentially became a course on Nott's own philosophy. The eccentric polymath Nott 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."

In a testimony to Nott's feelings towards Ludlow's philosophy and writing talent, he asked the young man to write a song for the commencement ceremony of the Class of 1856. College legend holds that Ludlow was so unhappy with the late night lyrics he composed to the tune of the drinking song Sparkling and Bright he threw away the manuscript. Fortuitously, his roommate discovered it and brought the work to Rev. Nott's attention. Song to Old Union became the school's alma mater, and is sung at commencement to this day.

Ludlow wrote several college songs, two of which were considered the most popular Union College songs even fifty years later. In The Hasheesh Eater 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

Ludlow is best known for his groundbreaking work The Hasheesh Eater, published in 1857. When, in the Song to Old Union, today's graduates sing that "the brook that bounds through Union's grounds / Gleams bright as the Delphic 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 and the Styx.

Early in his college years, probably during the spring of 1854 while Ludlow was still at Princeton, his medical curiosity drew him to visit his "friend Anderson the apothecary" 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's Putnam's Magazine article The Vision of Hasheesh had been devoured by Ludlow, and so when the cannabis-based tetanus remedy called Tilden's extract 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 to farthest China, 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."

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 (himself a lawyer who had begun his legal studies at the age of fourteen in the offices of Ludlow's uncle Samuel). Ludlow passed the bar exam in New York in 1859, but he never practiced law, instead deciding to pursue a literary career.

The late 1850s marked a changing of the guard in New York City literature. Old guard literary magazines like The Knickerbocker and Putnam's Monthly were fading away, and upstarts like the Atlantic Monthly, The Saturday Press, 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 and literary culture, centered around Pfaff's beer cellar on Broadway and Saturday night gatherings at Richard Henry Stoddard's home. This scene attracted the likes of Walt Whitman, Fitz James O'Brien, Bayard Taylor, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Edmund Clarence Stedman, 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, Commercial Advertiser, Evening Post, and Home Journal, and for Appleton's, Vanity Fair, Knickerbocker, Northern Lights, The Saturday Press, and the Atlantic Monthly.

Rosalie

Ludlow's fictional stories often mirror with fair accuracy the events of his life. One can suppose that the childlike 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, for instance, remembered Mrs. Ludlow as "the Dulcinea who had entangled [Aldrich] in the meshes of her brown hair."

The couple spent the first half of 1859 in Florida, where Ludlow 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 condemned abolitionists for condoning miscegenation, "[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 Bierstadt was at the peak of a career that would make him America'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 other's babies without jumping up to tear each other's hair and scratch each other's eyes out… It would have relieved my mind… to have seen that happy family clawing each other like tigers."

His impressions of the Mormons came when Utah was seen by many of his readers back home as rebellious and dangerous as those states in the Confederacy, with which the Union was then involved in the American Civil War. Ludlow encountered frequent snide comments about the disintegration of the Union, with some Mormons under the impression that with the flood of immigrants to Utah 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 war stronger than either side. Ludlow's opinions were read with interest back East, and would constitute an appendix to the book he would later write about his travels.

Racist opinions

Ludlow occasionally expressed the racial bigotry rampant throughout his day in his writings. Contrary to his progressive nature, inquiring mind, and abolitionist politics, he describes a "motherly mulatto woman" as possessing "the passive obedience of her race"; Mexicans in California as originating from "a nation of beggars-on-horseback," a melting pot of "Spaniards, Greasers, and Mixed-Breeds…;" and Chinese immigrants in "a kennel of straggling houses" which he envisions "finally… swept away from San Francisco, and that strange Semitic race… either exiled or swallowed up in our civilization…;" and deplores "the natural, ingrained laziness of the Indians."

Native Americans were a particular target of Ludlow's. He disparaged them as "copper-faced devils" and poured scorn on "the pretty, sentimental, philanthropic prayers" of contemporary literature that depicted Native Americans as "noble savages." 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 King, the California preacher and public speaker.

There, Ludlow again found himself in a vibrant literary community, this time centred around the Golden Era, which published Mark Twain, Joaquin Miller and Bret Harte. 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 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 "pigeon 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, and then into Oregon, 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 City, 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.

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 Ludlow's earliest magazine stories, 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 synesthesia 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 Bazaar 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 Cinderella which he wrote for the Metropolitan Fair, New York City's Sanitary Fair of 1864. It was an enormous affair to benefit the National Sanitary Commission in their war-relief efforts. The play was performed by children, under the direction of Jessie Benton Frémont, the wife of General John C. Fremont, (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 would do the same, abandons the idea of the æther 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 Tribune, 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.

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 morphine in a glass of whisky 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. 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 smallpox… [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."

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."