I bet you didn’t know Edgar Allan Poe had an older brother
in the US Navy and that he also wrote poetry and stories. His name was William Henry Leonard Poe and
not much is commonly known about him or his poetry. In fact there has only been one book of his works published that
was the only collection of his works ever printed in 1926 and only in one
edition and only a thousand copies were printed [1]. The internet has opened up a window on this
obscure Poe, allowing access to articles and information only available to a
few researchers just a couple of decades ago.
With that said, stand by for my typical digressions and an interesting
back-story.
Last year for Veteran’s Day I posted about Edgar Allan Poe’smilitary service in the Virginia militia and later in the US Army as an
artillery sergeant and his service connection to his writing. Now I want to revisit the subject with
another Poe family member, William Henry Leonard Poe, who went by his second
name Henry to his friends.
Now, what brings up the reason for this post is some
serendipity and the fact that I visited Old Spanish Fort in Pascagoula,
Mississippi late last year. I went
there by appointment, with a friend to take photographs of this famous
structure for the 2016 Gulf Coast Spring Pilgrimage booklet. The structure of this nearly 300 year old
structure been badly damaged by Hurricane Katrina, and restoration was in
progress. I hadn’t visited the site
since the mid 1970s and it brought back a lot of memories. There are two cannons flanking the house,
but I didn’t pay much attention to them back then, as they were not original to
the 1730 structure.
This time when I visited Pascagoula’s Old Spanish Fort some
forty years later, I actually bothered to look more closely at these iron
cannons and was intrigued to find the royal cipher of King George and a broadarrow mark on the breech of the guns. That piqued
my interest and I looked further into their origin once I got back home. They were two cannons from the British
frigate, HMS Macedonian. According to
the plaques mounted on the guns, they were given to Old Spanish Fort by the US
Naval Academy in 1957. I was intrigued
as to why two cannons from a famous British War of 1812 warship would be at an
obscure, but architecturally important building on the Mississippi Gulf
Coast. In fact Old Spanish Fort the
oldest standing structure in the Mississippi Valley, but that’s another
story. The story here is actually about
these overlooked cannons and their link to history and the Poe family.
William Poe was generally known as Henry, so I’ll use that name throughout this post. Henry was born in Boston on 30 January 1807,
and died prematurely on 1 August 1831 – possibly of tuberculosis and
complications of alcohol. He was
Edgar’s older brother by several years.
It may be of note that Edgar and Henry’s mother, Eliza Poe [2]
also died of TB herself on 8 December 1811. Henry was at her deathbed and
received a parting lock of hair.
Henry himself was buried 1 August 1831 in the family plot at
the Westminster Burying Ground, Baltimore and the cemetery would receive his more famous younger
brother Edgar 20 years later, but Henry’s grave unfortunately unmarked. To heap even more indignity on Henry, in the
obituary notice in one newspaper, his name was misspelled as “Hope” rather than
Poe. [3]. Their famous
grandfather and Revolutionary war hero, General David Poe Sr had a lot in
Westminster where the David Poe Sr, Henry, and Edgar are all buried. I discussed Gen Poe in my previous Poe
article, so I won’t go into it here.
BTW the actor, David Poe Jr, is Henry, Edgar, and Rosalie’s father and
little is known about him. Here is a
link to the purported gravesite of Henry, but it’s a lot more complex than
that. http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=43790968
As a child, Henry
Poe was separated from his younger brother Edgar and sister Rosalie and lived
with his grandparents, the famous General David Poe Sr, of Revolutionary War
fame until the death of the general in 1816.
Henry was then shuttled off to live with his maternal grandmother, aunt
and cousin of the Clemm family. So far
this Poe narrative has proven a meandering path, forking and turning back on
itself, years later Edgar would marry his cousin Virginia Clemm, but before
that he would live briefly with Henry in the Clemm residence, where he would
meet Virginia.
Exactly when Henry became a seafaring man is somewhat
obscure but we know that in 1825 he was in the navy or merchant marine because he was
“in the uniform of a midshipman” as reported by his younger brother Edgar. However Henry Poe does not appear in the
Naval Register for 1826 which was reported to Congress 9 Jan 1826, listing USN
officers and midshipmen active in 1825, so he may have only been a seaman and
not a midshipman after all. Since the
Naval Academy was not founded until 1845, there is no hope of finding any Poe
midshipman records there. It is
possible that he was in the uniform of a civilian ship service. It’s one of the many mysteries surrounding
Henry Poe. At the end of this post
are some links that might be worth following up for a Poe scholar.
We do know that later in 1826 Henry served on board the US
Navy frigate, the USS Macedonian [4], which had a long and colorful
history well worth reading [5].
In 1826 Macedonian cruised the West Indies to suppress pirate activity. The USS Macedonian cruised to the
Mediterranean visiting Europe and the near East and possibly Russia as
well. More importantly he cruised South
America and certainly stopped in at Montevideo, which we know because of an
article he wrote and published in the Baltimore Minerva and Saturday Evening
Post in February 1827. Sorry I
don’t have a link to the Post article.
If I turn one up or a reader has one, I’ll post it here.
On 11 June 1826 the USS Macedonian left Gosport (later
renamed Norfolk) Virginia for a cruise in the Pacific, returning 30 October
1828 from its final voyage as the ship was decommissioned later that year at
Gosport as its timbers were in terrible shape. The Macedonian was broken up and the keel and figurehead were
recycled into the rebuilt USS Macedonian.
See the footnotes at the end of the article to find out the history and
final fate of this ship. We know that
two of the cannon ended up at Old Spanish Fort and the catalyst of this post.
Henry Poe mustered out in 1829 and took a job as a clerk
with Henry Didier, his godfather, who owned a counting house in Baltimore. Henry by this time is in frail health due to
tuberculosis and also the weakening effects of drink. Henry lives with Maria Clemm, his aunt along with his
grandmother, Mrs Elizabeth Cairnes Poe and Maria’s 10 year old son Henry Clemm
on Mechanics Row, Wilks Street (later called Eastern Ave) in Baltimore until
his death in 1831 or so it would appear.
However a perplexing gap which shows up as in the 1830
Baltimore census, as Henry Poe is not shown in the domicile, for he was
possibly at sea again, despite bad health.
Then again he may have made himself scarce due to large debts he had run
up. These debts were an embarrassment
to Edgar who tried to pay them off later.
Edgar wrote to Allan about these debts in a letter dated 18 November
1831, after Henry had died. Edgar
himself would be plagued by debts for much of his life.
Henry had literary influence on younger Edgar, but this article is
running long, so I’ll just give some links for those who are interested. For you Poe fans, it’s well worth
investigating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Henry_Leonard_Poe and https://www.poemuseum.org/blog/the-pirate/ and http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/poes-debut-hidden-in-plain-sight
Some of the slurs against Edgar in his later years and after
his death, may have been in part due to confusion with his older brother Henry’s
alcoholism and sickly consumptive constitution. For that matter, David Poe Jr, Edgar & Henry’s father, had a
bad life and the belief that “blood will out” may have also tainted Edgar’s
reputation. Since Henry’s biography
has become somewhat tangled up with Edgar’s bio, it’s not beyond debate to
think that both of them has been muddled by journalists and researchers.
Then again, Edgar’s sense of humor and need to hoax caused
him to pen a silly and over-the-top pseudoautobiography, which he sent (I don’t
have a date) to Rufus Griswold for an anthology he was putting together, The
Poets and Poetry of America, first published in 1842, which ran through
several editions over the years, probably didn’t help things either. Interestingly, the section about fighting
for Greek independence in for the memory of Lord Byron ended up in Edgar’s
obituary as factual and more oddly, ended up attached back to his brother Henry
in later years, muddying the water even further. A copy of this “biography” document can be seen here https://www.poemuseum.org/about-treasures.php
I’d give this a little more personal historical background
about my interest in cannons and the HMS/USS Macedonian. Starting in the mid 1970s, I became an avid
wargamer and played naval engagements with the old Avalon Hill boardgame, WoodenShips and Iron Men, with HMS Macedonian in one of the scenarios. Who would have known then that two cannon
from that famous ship would reside nearby.
Good reading,
CoastConFan
Footnotes
[1] Poe’s Brother: The Poems of William Henry Leonard Poe,
etc. New York: George H. Doran Co. 1926, edited by Allen, Hervey and Thomas O.
Mabbott.
William Henry Leonard Poe 1807-1831 wikipedia article
[2] Rosalie Poe was born 20 December 1810 (questionable) and
died 21 July 1874. Here’s some links to
Rosalie Poe’s story https://www.poemuseum.org/blog/tag/rosalie-poe/ and
http://worldofpoe.blogspot.com/2009/11/strange-case-of-rosalie-poe.html
Strangely enough her grave stone shows her being born in
1812, a year after her mother Elisabeth Poe died. Some suggest that 1812 was the year of her christening rather
than birth. http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=34007517
[3] About ten years ago I visited Baltimore and of course
went to the place(s) where Edgar was buried, not ever dreaming that his lesser
known brother was buried nearby. It’s a
shame really, but this article might make up for that oversight. I said places where EAP was buried because
there are two burial sites for Edgar there.
Henry Poe’s date of death and burial site it unknown at this time. If any enterprising reader could find proof
of Henry’s Poe’s date of death and location of his grave, I am sure that Poe
scholars would love that information.
Incidentally, there is no known original surviving letter written by
Henry Poe – were you to find one, it would be unique.
[4] The name Macedonian is a reference to Alexander the
Great and the ship had a figurehead of Alexander as well. The ship was decommissioned in 1828 and the
keel and ribs were reused to make another USS Macedonian. The famous figurehead was also used in the
new ship.
[5] The US Naval
Academy, Annapolis has a USS Macedonian monument as well as the original
figurehead. The USS Macedonian has a
really interesting history and I meticulously tracked down the ultimate fate of
the bones of the HMS/USS Macedonian and that was practically a post of it’s
own. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedoniann_Monument
[6] The Poe graves and a mystery: Were Edgar’s remains really moved and where is his brother really
buried? This link with a map only adds
to the mystery. http://www.eapoe.org/balt/poelotfc.htm and http://www.eapoe.org/papers/psbbooks/pb20061p.htm
The find a grave link to William Henry Poe, but who knows
for sure if it is correct. http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=43790968
Below is more (probably far more information than you
wanted) about the HMS/USS Macedonian and Henry’s association with the
ship. Since I researched it out of
curiosity, here are the fruits of that search.
For those of you with special access and a deep interest in
the USS Macedonian and/or in the naval career of Henry Poe, here are journals
kept by officers from 1818 through 1829.
They are a possible goldmine for Henry Poe researchers and are held by
the Naval History and Heritage Command listed here below
Item 38. Journals Kept by Lt.
Charles Gaunt on Board the USS Macedonian, Commanded by Comdr. John
Downes and Capt. James Biddle, and the U.S. Sloop of War Warren,
Commanded by Comdr. Lawrence Kearney.
July 29, 1818-June 5, 1829. 2 vols. 2 in. The first volume contains, in addition to the journal, a list of
officers of the Macedonian, a table of latitude and longitude and a
thermometrical table kept during the cruise, and a newspaper clipping
concerning Lima, Peru. It has been reproduced as NARA Microfilm Publication
M875, Journal of Lt. Charles Gauntt Aboard the U.S.S. Macedonian, 1818-1821. The second volume contains the journal kept on board the Macedonian
during another cruise, March 21-June 20, 1822, and a journal kept during a
cruise of the Warren, December 13, 1826-June 5, 1829. Item 39. Journal Kept by Captain's Clerk Charles J. Deblois on Board the USS Macedonian, Commanded by Comdr. John Downes. Nov. 10, 1818-July 8, 1819. 1 vol. 1 in. The journal was sent to the Office of Library and Naval War Records for review in 1888 by a Mr. Saltonstall and was presented to the Office of Naval Records and Library by Miss Louisa Huntington, May 1932. The volume containing the journal also contains newspaper clippings giving accounts of the hurricane of September 27, 1818, in which the Macedonian suffered extensive damages. The journal has been reproduced as NARA Microfilm Publication M876, Journal of Charles J. Deblois, Captain's Clerk Aboard the USS Macedonian, 1818-1819.
Also US Govt Archives has copies of US Navy Muster rolls, T829: Misc Records of the US Navy, 1789-1925, which might turn up Henry Poe. Check out the muster and pay rolls for the Macedonian which run from 1813 to 1829, which are on microfilm. http://www.archives.gov/research/alic/reference/military/navy-records-1789-to-1925.html
Note: Poe DOES NOT appear in the naval Register for 1826
which was reported to Congress 9 Jan 1826 a giving an accounting of US Navy
officers and midshipmen, so he may have only been a common seaman and not a
midshipman. http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/USN/1826/NavReg1826.html
An article about Macedonian https://www.nytimes.com/books/00/12/24/nnp/dekay-frigate.html and a book worth exploring for you
Macedonian/Poe researchers is Chronicles of the Frigate Macedonian, 1809-1922
by James Tertius de Kay, 336 pgs pub NY WW Norton & Co August 2000
HMS Macedonian was a Lively class frigate of the British
Navy. The keel and figurehead were
retained for the building of the USS Macedonian during the years 1832-1836, a
ship that accompanied Commodore Perry to Japan. The figurehead is at the US Naval Academy museum donated in 1875,
Annapolis MD atop the monument http://www.dcmemorials.com/index_indiv0003240.htm and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedoniann_Monument In 2014 the figurehead on the monument was replaced with a
new mahogany one and the original placed in the museum.
For you Civil War fans and historians interested in Gulf Coast history here is another link is the USS Macedonian was sent
to Pensacola in 1861 later stayed in the West Indies to hunt for Confederate
ships https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Macedoniann_%281836%29
Here is information about the illusive Macedonian Hotel and
the final fate of the USS Macedonian which is mentioned in the period book, The
Story of the Bronx, pub 1912 by Stephen Jenkins pgs 431-432 with an illustration
of the hotel on the facing (unnumbered page) across from page 430 download the
PDF of The Story of the Bronx here -- http://hpsbg.weebly.com/uploads/2/3/6/6/2366012/storyofbronxfrom1912jenk.pdf
Even more links of interest associated with this article
Poe’s brother Henry and his poetry http://www.eapoe.org/works/mabbott/tom1p115.htm
Downloadable PDF of the rule book for Avalon Hill’s wargame Wooden
Ships and Iron Men http://www.hasbro.com/common/instruct/7090001.PDF
Complete poems of EAP for free at this link https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/p/poe/edgar_allan/p74p/complete.html
Download a PDF of Griswold’s The Poets and Poetry of
America, 1855 edition https://archive.org/details/poetspoetryofame00gris
An early Poe biographer Susan Archer Talley Weiss was a
fountain of baseless tales, anecdotes and errors, all pretty much made up whole
cloth and uncorroborated in "The Home Life of Poe” pub 1907, see
download Weiss bio book
http://manybooks.net/titles/weisss3393033930-8.html
Download a PDF copy of the classic board game Wooden
Ships and Iron Men http://www.old-games.com/download/5709/wooden-ships-iron-men
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© 2015 text
by CoastConFan aka William Murphy.
Photos are copyright their respective copyright owner (if any).
