Authors:
Historic Era: Era 6: The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
May/June 1994 | Volume 45, Issue 3
Whispering Sammy
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
Sushi and sashimi are being brought out in Shuji’s Restaurant in New Lebanon, New York, around twenty-five miles from Albany, with the sliced ginger and that boiling-hot green pastelike stuff you mash into the soy sauce. We are in the stone and wood and bigverandah former residence of a longdead man called Samuel Jones Tilden. He is quite unknown to history. But some fifty yards across the street once stood the birthplace of another Samuel Jones Tilden, the uncle of the first one, and this Mr. Tilden, on the testimony of his best friend and authorized biographer, was deprived of the presidency of the United States purely and simply because of a weak stomach, a very poor digestive system. As a television commercial of a few years ago put it, you can’t make this stuff up.
The Tilden we are concerned with was born in 1814. His troubles began in 1814, he believed. But perhaps this was not an accurate assessment and they actually commenced with a conception installing in him the genes of a hypochondriac. For his father, Elam, was a renowned worrier over illnesses who embraced his life’s main interests to become a purveyor of medical nostrums and drugs. When little Samuel was three, he was afflicted by a malady that caused him relentlessly to claw at his mouth. A physician gave him laudanum for relief, and this, he later decided, undid his stomach forever. Derivative from that, he came into his own as his father’s son and in time believed himself the victim, it was said, of every disorder known save for housemaid’s knee. He and his father made their illnesses the main component of their close relationship. “They relished these indispositions, and discovered infinite variety in them, like travelers in a strange and wonderful land,” wrote the historian Alexander Flick. In any letter the son wrote the father, said Tilden’s authorized biographer, John Bigelow, “health and medication were pretty sure to constitute one of the leading topics.”
The boy had no childhood, played no games, did not hunt or swim. Utterly charmless, he nevertheless at a very young age displayed remarkable logic in his thinking and held his own in discussions with grown men, including the family friend Martin Van Buren. He went to a preparatory school for Williams College, left because of his health, tried Yale, where he found it impossible to eat the bread because it was too freshly baked—"Yesterday it was scarcely cold,” he complained in a letter home—quit, went to New York University, withdrew. Eventually, through private study, he became a lawyer and swiftly rose to be the country’s richest member of that profession. His practice involved railroad and corporate mergers and ironore concerns. He had brilliantly analytic investment instincts and amassed colossal sums.
Dealing with real or imagined afflictions of the throat, lungs, and teeth and with colds, neuralgia, swellings, lameness, chills and fever, rheumatism, hoarseness, corrugated tongue, catarrh, arthritis, palsy, headaches, tremulous hands,