Update: Today is election day, and although most people are focusing more on the Presidential election next year, there are many important state and local decisions to be made. In honor of Election Day I am re-posting this blog about the death of Edgar Allan Poe that I wrote a couple of years ago.
On the eve of the election I am sure you’re as weary as I am of voter intimidation stories, suspiciously long early voting waiting lines, and Super-PAC-funded negative advertising. But nineteenth century political campaigns make these things look tame by comparison. Today’s blog is about certain 19th century election practices, and how they might relate to the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of the author Edgar Allan Poe.
When I was a teenager I went through a major Poe phase, but it wasn’t until recently that I learned that the cause of his death, in 1849, was almost as mysterious and eerie as some of his stories. The three prevailing theories to explain the cause of his death are alcohol, rabies, and cooping. I’ll explain.
Here’s what we know: Poe struggled with alcohol for much of his adult life, and also with money problems. At the end of June, 1849, he began a lecture tour to raise money for a new magazine. He traveled to Philadelphia, Richmond, and Norfolk, Virginia. On September 27th, he took a boat from Richmond to Baltimore, but his subsequent whereabouts over the next few days are shrouded in mystery. He resurfaced on October 3rd, when a man named Joseph Walker discovered him outside a tavern and sent a note to Doctor J.E. Snodgrass, reporting that a gentleman had been found “rather the worse for wear,” in evident distress. Poe was delirious, and presumed to be in a drunken state, and sent on to Washington College Hospital.
Over the next four days, he lapsed in and out of consciousness and delirium, incoherent and unable to explain what had happened to him. He died four days later. He was forty years old.
So one explanation, the prevailing one for many decades, is that he was intoxicated and died of some sort of alcohol poisoning, But where that doesn’t really hold up is that he remained in the state of hallucinatory incoherence for four days, and refused offers of alcohol in the hospital (yeah, that’s about the best thing hospitals had to offer to sick people back then). One reason to explain the extended delirium is that he might have ingested a combination of alcohol and laudanum (he’d almost died of that combination a year before, whether from accidental overdose or a suicide attempt).
The second explanation comes from a paper published in 1996, by Dr. Michael Benitez, a cardiologist at University of Maryland Medical center. He suggested rabies may have killed Poe. Symptoms of rabies can take up to a year to appear, but once they do, the patient dies within a few days. Benitez cited as support for the rabies theory the fact that Poe refused water in the hospital. Hydrophobia (fear of water) is a symptom of rabies. But other sources claim Poe did drink half a glass of water, so without evidence of hydrophobia, the rabies theory is pretty slim. Others who subscribe to the disease explanation say that Poe might have been ill from cholera or tuberculosis or epilepsy.
And finally, there’s the cooping theory. I had to research this term. Cooping was a tactic used by crooked officials to sway voting, and was especially notorious in Baltimore during the 1840s and 50s (smack-dab during the time of Poe’s death). Political thugs not only bribed judges and stole ballots to get their candidates elected. They also resorted to kidnapping, beating, and murder. “Coopers” were known to have kidnapped innocent bystanders (always white males—the only ones who could vote), and hold them in a room (or “a coop,”) where they were often drugged, plied with liquor, or physically beaten, and then forced to go from polling place to polling place, voting over and over again for a particular candidate. Often their clothes were changed to disguise them from being recognized at the polls.
I found several accounts in newspapers from 1849 and 1850 bemoaning the practice of cooping. Here’s just one, from the State Gazette (Trenton, October 14 1850):
The day Poe was found happened to be election day, and the tavern outside of which Poe was found was also a voting place. And according to some accounts, when Poe was found he was wearing someone else’s clothing. Could he have been seized by a gang, plied with liquor, made to vote over and over again, and then turned out into the street?
It’s a mystery.
Additional sources from the Poe Museum website: http://www.poemuseum.org/life.php
And from the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore website:http://www.eapoe.org