National Hotel disease

National Hotel Disease was an outbreak of virulent dysentery that afflicted guests staying at Washington D.C.'s National Hotel on the eve of James Buchanan's inauguration as president of the United States in February of 1857. The National Hotel, at the time, was Washington's largest and was quite popular with Southerners.

Buchanan himself became sick, as did several of his closest friends and associates. This led conspiracy theorists at the time to suggest that National Hotel Disease was actually poison slipped into the hotel's food supply by abolitionists bitter over the election of the pro-slavery Buchanan over Republican John C. Frémont. Alternative theories suggested that in fact pro-slavery partisans had been responsible as Vice President John C. Breckinridge, a pro-slavery Southerner, would assume Buchanan's duties were he to die. However, the more likely explanation is that the disease was caused by unsanitary conditions present in the nation's capital. In fact, the frigid winter that year had caused the hotel plumbing to freeze, leading to a sewage backup that overflowed into and contaminated the hotel's kitchen.

Whatever strain or strains of bacteria were involved must have been particularly virulent, because many of the guests remained sick for months or even years after, and several died from the disease. Buchanan himself was bed-ridden for the first six weeks of his presidency and among the people who ultimately died of the illness were Mississippi congressman John Quitman and Pennsylvania congressman John Gallagher Montgomery. Massachusetts congressman Jonathan Edwards Field and New Hampshire Senator John Parker Hale also became sick from the disease and lived with the effects for several years.