The deadly disease at this luxury D.C. hotel fueled conspiracy theories around the slavery debate

In the weeks leading up to his inauguration, President-elect James Buchanan was confined at home, busy recuperating from a debilitating illness. His symptoms appeared shortly after a stay at the National Hotel, the largest in Washington and a favorite among politicians with a taste for luxury. But it wasn’t just Buchanan who’d contracted the mysterious ailment: dozens of other guests had fallen sick after staying at the National, including Pennsylvania congressman David F. Robison, who would later die from the disease.

First called “the Buchanan grip” after its most famous victim, the so-called National Hotel disease afflicted hundreds of hotel guests in the 1850s. Many of the victims were prominent legislators and statesmen, now poised to lead a country divided by the implications of Bleeding Kansas and the Missouri Compromise (which Buchanan opposed). Naturally, this fed the fires of gossip, suspicion, and conspiracy. It is hard to say for sure how many people caught the National Hotel disease, but one reliable estimate puts the number at 400. Around three dozen of them died, including three members of Congress.

Buchanan and eight others checked into the National Hotel on January 25, 1857. The group enjoyed a banquet and retired around 10 o’clock at night. Dr. Jonathan Foltz, a physician, was in the company that night, and awoke in visceral pain. He vomited violently. Soon, he was alerted that the president-elect had fallen ill and needed his assistance.

Buchanan and company felt a host of unpleasant symptoms, including abdominal pain, vomiting, dehydration, swollen tongues, and diarrhea. But luckily, by the end of the month, the illness seemed to have run its course.

President-elect Buchanan managed his affairs in the following month, taking visitors and appointing officials, until symptoms returned again. On February 26, reporters were told that the president-elect would no longer admit any visitors. Rumors abounded as to why.

Then the temperamental Buchanan made a bold, if misguided, choice: he was to stay at the National Hotel before moving into the Executive Mansion. He was familiar enough with the National’s surroundings and the management to successfully hide his illness and lay low. He would avoid the soup that Dr. Foltz located as the problem. Prominent figures and well-wishers joined in celebration of the country’s new chief executive.

The inauguration was held on March 4, 1857, and Buchanan made a healthy showing on the unseasonably warm day. James Buchanan, often ranked among the worst presidents in United States history, also made a rousing display of friendliness with Supreme Court chief justice Roger Taney, which which would prove ominous as the court handed down their decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford two days later. Buchanan, it would turn out, despite posturing as an indifferent party, corresponded with and sought to influence the justices as they reached a decision on a case that would determine the future of slavery in the country. Abolitionists and wary Northerners had as much reason as ever to oppose the slavery-supporting president.

The matter of the National Hotel disease first came to public light on March 31. Eliot Eskridge Lane, nephew and secretary to the president, had died at the mere age of 33, suffering from “inflammation of the stomach, tending to gangrene.” Newspapers spread gossipy stories about Lane’s sudden demise, scandalously linked to an illness many guests at the National Hotel had in common. Already, one Pennsylvania paper posited poison to be the cause.

Suggestions of conspiracy were invigorated by another National Hotel-related death less than a month later. John Montgomery had only been Pennsylvania representative for two months when he died on April 24, 1857. He spent much of his term at home, suffering under the vagaries of the mysterious illness.

The press wasted little time jumping to conclusions. “Every feature of his disease,” said the Pennsylvanian, “indicated the presence of arsenic in his system.” By May, newspapers like the Pittfield Sun refused to mince words concerning a nefarious plot at work: “The opinion is becoming very general that the sickness at the National Hotel in Washington, which commenced about the date of the presidential inauguration of James Buchanan, was the result of a deliberate and fiendish attempt to poison the President and his nearest friends!”

There was the matter of locating a motive. “Poisoning was the same work of the same reckless, bloodthirsty spirit that armed hordes of brigands to go forth and slay and murder in Kansas,” proclaimed the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in May 7, setting the blame on radical abolitionists. The theory, however, wasn’t exactly rigorous: Buchanan may have been a dough-faced slavery sympathizer, but to Northerners, he was still preferable to his vice-president, John C. Breckinridge, an ardent slaveholding Kentuckian with whom compromise would be even less likely.

The Cincinnati Commercial proffered a different culprit. “The negroes had been moved to this crime by the language of Democrats,” argued one writer, whose hypothesis rested on black assassins believing that Buchanan’s opponent, John Frémont, would become president, rather than his vice-president. What further complicated this theory was that there were no black servers or cooks at the National Hotel to do the poisoning.

In 19th-century Washington, mosquitoes, foul odors, dank air, and grime were par for the course, but the National Hotel harbored a squalor that even frequent visitors could not tolerate. Guests repeatedly reported the stench of sewage. The mayor of Washington called for an investigation of the hotel, and remarked on its haphazard design. “The hotel was not built on any pre-conceived or well-arranged plan,” he said, “but has been several times extended and otherwise altered, so that it has been impossible to adopt or carry out any regular system of ventilation.”

Ventilation was such a concern because of the pre-germ-theory hypothesis of miasma. Miasma, the idea went, was bad vapor that caused disease. One Scottish chemist interviewed guests who reported that “in one part of the hotel at least, a discharge of vitiated air from drains of so intense a character that it produced instantaneous vomiting on some occasions” and affected others with sickness later.

Though restricted by the false science of miasma, health officials were on the right trail when they began to ascribe blame to the fumes produced by sewage on the premises of the National Hotel. The winter of 1856–1857 was especially erratic, bringing cold snaps and thaws that were ripe for causing leakages in pipes, back-ups, or sudden rushes of effluvia. How sewage ended up in the food is uncertain, perhaps by having come in contact with utensils, but that the disease was food-and-drink-borne is almost definite.

In the year 1857, Scientific American proposed the best contemporary hypothesis: that the National Hotel disease was a “light cholera.” Historical consensus today suggests such a waterborne illness, if not cholera, perhaps dysentery, but almost certainly not poison.

Still, that did not stop people from assigning to the deadly, squalid episode a diabolical agenda. In 1933, The Washington Post ascribed the National Hotel disease as one of two assassination attempts President Buchanan survived. This is why historian Kerry Walters, who wrote Outbreak in Washington, D.C.: The 1857 Mystery of the National Hotel Disease, the episode is “an example of how eager people are to embrace rumors of conspiracy, often hanging on to suspicions of foul play long after it becomes clear that such suspicions simply aren’t supported by the facts.”

Today, the former site of the National Hotel is home to the Newseum, an institution dedicated to the preservation of the First Amendment and the freedom of the press.