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The mysterious illness that plagued a presidential inauguration

The inaugural parade of 1857, on a March day that was surprisingly warm, celebrated President-elect James Buchanan with something new to Washington parades: floats.

There was the “Goddess of Liberty Car” drawn by six horses, complete with a woman dressed as a goddess, and a 50-foot flagpole.

Then a massive replica of the frigate USS Constitution, built at the Washington Navy Yard, rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue with sailors dangling from the ship’s faux rigging.

But Buchanan, smiling tightly amid all the pomp, was hiding a roiling sickness.

He was staying at Washington’s posh National Hotel. And he and most of his entourage that slept there the night before were in various stages of gastrointestinal distress, shaking and pallid. Within days, hundreds of people gathered for the inauguration of the 15th president would have the same symptoms. At least 30 of them would die of it.

“We were somewhat fearful that Mr. Buchanan might be seriously embarrassed during the inaugural ceremonies from the effects of what was then known as the National Hotel disease,” his nephew James Buchanan Henry wrote years later.

The president-elect was so unsure that he would be able to make it through his inaugural address that day that he asked for a naval surgeon to stay by his side.

He had no idea what was happening to his body. But political Washington had its suspicions.

“The opinion is becoming very general that the sickness at the National Hotel in Washington, which commenced about the date of the inauguration of President Buchanan, was the result of a deliberate and fiendish attempt to poison the President and his nearest friends!” the Pittsfield Sun concluded in a May 7 article.

We were a divided nation on the brink of Civil War. Buchanan had eked out a victory after a rancorous election. Not widely beloved, a Northerner who was deeply sympathetic to the South and to slavery, Buchanan was an enigma who confounded and frustrated abolitionists.

It wasn’t preposterous to surmise the crippling illness that felled him and his inner circle was an assassination attempt.

“Some people were absolutely convinced that Buchanan had been poisoned,” said Kerry Walters, a retired Gettysburg College philosophy professor who wrote a compelling account of the illness and the months of speculation it generated: “Outbreak in Washington, D.C.: The 1857 Mystery of the National Hotel Disease.

Everything pointed to the National Hotel, a grand building at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and 6th Street NW, designed by a British architect and known for terrapin dinners, rare wines and a prestigious clientele.

Buchanan and his entourage had it booked for the inauguration, and it was to host one of the preinaugural balls.

He had stayed at the hotel in January 1857 and become sick then, too. The D.C. Board of Health was invited to visit.

“The members of the Board of Health from the Fourth Ward, and the Commissioner of Health, visited the National Hotel, and examined thoroughly all parts of the building, and they are happy to state that they can discover at present no cause that can produce disease, and that there is no need of apprehension among the guests or strangers,” the commissioner told the Evening Star in February.

Buchanan decided to return to the hotel for his inauguration. The general manager was an old acquaintance from back home in Pennsylvania, and Buchanan wanted to give him a vote of confidence — even though he suspected it was the hotel’s soup that made him sick. He was careful to eat nothing but crackers this time, Walters wrote.

Still, the president-elect’s symptoms returned — with a vengeance. His entourage also got sick again. Within days, members of Congress, journalists and VIPs in town for the inauguration were consumed by the same mysterious illness.

It became a hot story that newspapers chased. They called it “The Buchanan Grip.”

Buchanan’s nephew and personal secretary, Elliot Eskridge Lane, was also “seized by the demon,” the National Era wrote.

He was also one of the first who died, and he “had been suffering slightly with the symptoms which have marked all the cases of disease contracted at the National,” his obituary said.

The next day, the Baltimore Sun reported that a “gentleman who died in Pennsylvania from disease contracted at the National Hotel shows a deposit of arsenic in the stomach.”

Walters said he couldn’t find any evidence substantiating the arsenic claim, that it was “most likely purple speculation.” But that fired up the conspiracy theorists.

Walters said he was struck by the parallels today.

“I’m amazed at the prevalence, not only in 1857, but really throughout all of American history of conspiracy-thinking, conspiracy-mongering,” he said.

There were inquiries and investigations. The victims were almost all male. Was it in the wine? The ladies weren’t drinking wine.

Many guests reported an odious stench of sewage in the hotel’s lower floors. That wasn’t an unusual smell in 1857 Washington.

“When James Buchanan took the oath of office, there was no sewage network, no centralized garbage collection and only the initial stages of a public system of running water,” Walters wrote in his book. “The privies of homes, hotels and government buildings discharged their contents into open fields or stagnant ponds, many of which were immediately adjacent to the structures themselves.”

Slaughterhouses dumped offal in the open, residents threw slop into alleys, pigs and cattle roamed the streets. Horses — and their manure — were everywhere.

But other hotels and buildings had raw sewage problems, so that couldn’t be the cause of the illness felling the guests at the National.

The hotel hired Thomas Antisell, a Smithsonian Institution chemist, to investigate. He analyzed the soup, the milk and the water, according to the Alexandria Gazette.

An editor from the New York Day Book whose entire family was sickened speculated that poisoned rats got into the hotel’s water tanks. He thought they were eating food “cooked in water impregnated with poisoned rats,” according to a March 17 story in the Detroit Free Press.

A Washington City subcommittee investigated and concluded that there was no way that rats could have squeezed into the water tanks.

By March, investigators came to another conclusion — it was “miasma,” a disease that was transferred through the air via gas or vapors coming from the sewage. The hotel began throwing out some of its luxe furnishings, worried they had absorbed the nasty vapors.

None of the theories panned out.

What they didn’t know before the groundbreaking research later that century of Louis Pasteur and others was that the source of the illness was microscopic particles — germs, Walters wrote.

The Scientific American was probably the closest in guessing what plagued Washington that year: cholera, delivered through the sewage.

“It is impossible to prove the sewage hypothesis beyond any shadow of doubt,” Walters wrote. “The die-hard conspiracy buff might still object that it’s impossible to prove that the National Hotel disease was caused by backed-up sewage instead of a plot to murder Buchanan.”

Buchanan recovered but was dogged by health issues for years. Walters said he was intrigued by the story because he believed the illness altered Buchanan, who was “temperamentally timid and kind of a backbencher,” pushing him to a calamitous leadership that made him one of America’s worst presidents.

The National Hotel remodeled and recovered from the illness, with ads in late December 1857 welcoming visitors back.

One of the visitors who checked in eight years after that ill-fated inauguration season put the hotel back in the news. His name was John Wilkes Booth.

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