Fitz Hugh Ludlow, sometimes seen as Fitzhugh Ludlow (September 11, 1836 – September 12, 1870), was an American author, journalist, and explorer; best known for his autobiographical book The Hasheesh Eater (1857).
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 it provides his impressions of the recently founded Mormon settlement in Utah.
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, becoming a pioneer in both progressive approaches dealing with addiction and the public portrayal of its sufferers. Though of modest means, he was imprudently generous in aiding those unable to cope with drug-induced life struggles.
Ludlow died prematurely at the age of 34 from the accumulated effect of his lifelong addictions, the ravages of pneumonia and tuberculosis, and overwork.
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."
A family legend, later used to explain his attraction for intoxicants, is that when Ludlow was two years old he "would climb upon the breakfast table and eat Cayenne pepper from the castor!"
Henry Ludlow's father was a pioneer temperance 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 for "her cruel oppression of her East India subjects, often starving… and forced to cultivate opium on land they need to supply themselves with bread…" and defended China "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, with his mother playing a more marginal role in his life. Abigail Woolsey Wells died a few months after Ludlow'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." (Sermon preached on 2 March 1849)
His mother's suffering may have brought out in Ludlow 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 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.“Union’s ‘Alma Mater’ Song 100 Years Old This Spring” Union College News Release, 9 April 1956, p. 2 Song to Old Union became the school's alma mater, and is sung at commencement to this day.Union College commencement pamphlet, 23 July 1856
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."
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 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. Ludlow's description of his physical withdrawal symptoms included terrible nightmares. He takes up tobacco 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 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."):