Fitz Hugh Ludlow Fitz Hugh Ludlow was born September 11, 1836 in New York City. His father, the Rev. Henry G. Ludlow, was an outspoken abolitionist minister at a time when anti-slavery enthusiasm was not popular, even 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-agency on the Underground Railroad,” as Fitz Hugh discovered when he was four - although, misunderstanding the term in his youth, Fitz Hugh 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 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 Fitz Hugh 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 Fitz Hugh: “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 Fitz Hugh 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, but his mother played a more marginal role in his life. Abigail Woolsey Wells died a few months after Fitz Hugh’s twelfth birthday. At her funeral, the presiding minister said that “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.”
His mother’s suffering may have brought out in Fitz Hugh an obsession with mortality and the connection between the spiritual and animal in man. It was observed that “through all her life 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.”
