John H. Mackenzie, Poe’s Lifelong Friend

I’d long known about John H. Mackenzie (1806–1875) from Susan Archer Weiss’s 1907 book The Home Life of Poe and later biographies, but I really got to know him by reading about “Cousin John” in the letters of his stepdaughter Flora Lapham Mack to her distant relative William Lanier Washington. I’d like to tell briefly the story of John H. Mackenzie, Edgar Allan Poe’s lifelong friend, both for the period of Poe’s life, covered in my book Edgar Allan Poe: A Life, and for the twenty-six years after Poe’s death.John was born to Jane Scott Mackenzie and merchant William Mackenzie in Richmond, Virginia, on March 28, 1806. After actress Eliza Poe died in Richmond on December 8, 1811, her baby daughter Rosalie was taken in by the Mackenzies even as her nearly three-year-old son Edgar was taken in by John and Frances Allan. Weeks later, on December 26, five-year-old John H. Mackenzie injured his arm while jumping on his new bed, so his parents did not go to the theater, as they had planned. Tragically, that night the Richmond Theatre burned, and seventy-two people died. The Allans were away at the time. Edgar would later visit John as the injured boy recovered at home, and the two competed in telling fairy tales. The younger boy won the competition. And the two became very good friends (Richard Kopley, Edgar Allan Poe: A Life [University of Virginia Press, 2025], 16–19).John and Edgar went to different schools but the same church—Monumental Church, built on the site of the Richmond Theatre. The two boys were separated during the Allans’ five-year stay in London but were reunited on the Allans’ return in August 1820 (Edgar Allan Poe [hereafter EAP], 36–37, 41). John later told of their various exploits, with other boys, by the river and in the woods (EAP, 43–44). And he stated that by taking part in these exploits Edgar was risking punishment from his foster father, who, when in a temper, would remind his sometimes-wayward foster son of his utter reliance on him and would threaten him with expulsion (EAP, 44, 50).When he finished his schooling, John worked at his father’s counting house and remained friends with Edgar, witnessing the boy’s sadness after Jane Stith Stanard’s death and the boy’s delivery to his coterie of a satirical poem, “Oh, Tempora! Oh, Mores!,” the manuscript of which Edgar gave to him. It became for John a cherished treasure. He was to become a businessman, but he did value literature—he knew his Robert Burns, James Russell Lowell, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Thomas Moore—and his Poe (EAP, 57–58, 63–65).1Edgar and John would visit pretty Elmira Royster, with whom the younger boy developed a romantic relationship (EAP, 65). And after Edgar returned from the University of Virginia, John would clearly have known of his gambling. After the climactic rupture with his foster father, Edgar traveled to Boston—but John knew where he was then and in the coming years. John married Louisa Lanier on October 9, 1827, and they lived in Mount Erin, a house overlooking Richmond from the south (EAP, 75–77, 78–80, 88).John was Edgar’s intermediary with difficult foster father John Allan—evidently successful with regard to Edgar’s resigning from the army and seeking a cadetship at West Point but unsuccessful with regard to Edgar’s resigning from West Point. Edgar probably visited John and Louisa at Mount Erin in 1829, when his foster mother Frances Allan died, and perhaps again in 1830. And in 1831, Mount Erin was Edgar’s refuge as he tried to recover from John Allan’s rebuffing him (which clearly suggested that there was no possibility of inheritance). John and Louisa collected funds for him to begin life anew in Baltimore. The couple had had one child, who died in infancy—he was named Edgar Poe Mackenzie (EAP, 93–94, 105–8, 117–21).2John corresponded with Edgar in Baltimore and in other cities. There may have been a break in 1832 and 1833, when John and Louisa traveled by prairie schooner to western Kentucky to reclaim lost family land, but the effort was not a success. Returning to Richmond, John took up the dray business and the tobacco business. And he and Louisa took in three daughters of her lately deceased cousin Susan Simmons Mattox—the girls were Anne, Mary, and Eliza. At the request of Louisa and her mother, John arranged for his family to move to a 193-acre farm, Darby Town, a few miles south of Richmond (EAP, 137–39). It was run by Louisa and her mother and their overseer. John Allan died in 1834, hostile to Edgar to the end. The struggling writer reentered John’s life when he returned to Richmond to edit the monthly magazine the Southern Literary Messenger in August 1835 (EAP, 152, 162, 163).The two friends were especially close then. After Edgar married his cousin Virginia Clemm in May 1836, John invited Virginia and her mother Maria and Edgar to Darby Town, and they frequently did visit. Edgar and Virginia enjoyed traipsing through the woods during the day (accompanied by Anne, Mary, and Eliza), with Edgar climbing trees and gathering nuts and carrying Virginia over streams, and Virginia and John would sing sentimental songs with the family in the evening. Virginia played the piano. Jane Scott Mackenzie later thought that these times with Edgar at Darby Town had been the happiest times in Virginia’s life (EAP, 175–77, 179–80, 185–86, 187–90).But in Richmond, Edgar was indulging in occasional sprees. John chastised him, and Edgar vowed to reform, but he did not. John concluded that Edgar could not help himself. John and Mrs. Clemm commiserated about Edgar’s susceptibility and agreed that they must love him as he was (EAP, 182–85). When Edgar was let go from the Southern Literary Magazine for his drinking, he took his family to New York City, and John provided financial support through Maria Clemm (EAP, 192–93).Louisa’s brother William Lewis Lanier married Lucy Armistead in the fall of 1837, and John and Louisa would later bring up their three daughters, Jane, Martha, and Mary (EAP, 202). Mary Mattox, whom John and Louisa had earlier brought up, married Benjamin Byrene Lapham in 1840. One of their daughters would be Flora Lapham.3John visited Edgar in Philadelphia in 1841 with Edgar’s sister Rosalie. Later John and Rosalie would surprisingly convert from Episcopalianism to Methodism (EAP, 241–42, 260, 272). Virginia, sick with tuberculosis since 1842, died in early 1847. Edgar wrote the haunting memorial poem “Ulalume” and later the cosmology Eureka and then made his way back, in July 1848, to Richmond to see his “last hope,” “a distant connexion near Richmond, Va”—presumably John H. Mackenzie. Edgar wrote to his mother-in-law about John and Louisa from Darby Town and about John’s mother Jane Scott Mackenzie, who was living at Duncan Lodge (EAP, 368, 379–82, 390, 391–92, 394–95, 396, 398, 404).Edgar’s 1848 romantic interlude with Sarah Helen Whitman in Providence, Rhode Island, was a failure, and his romantic connection with the married Annie Richmond in Lowell, Massachusetts, an impossibility. He would visit Richmond for the last time in August 1849, returning to John and Louisa in Darby Town and meeting the three new daughters of the house, Louisa’s nieces Jane, Martha, and Mary. As a grown woman, Jane remembered sitting on Edgar’s knee when she was a girl and stroking his hair. She would later marry James Barroll Washington; their son would be William Lanier Washington, the correspondent of Flora Lapham Mack (EAP, 411–14, 414–15, 416–21, 430–31, 435–36, 449–50).Edgar lectured successfully in Richmond and Norfolk and courted successfully his former girlfriend, the wealthy widow Elmira Royster Shelton. But John was outraged at Edgar’s mercenary motive and said so, and the two friends parted at odds with one another. They never saw each another again. John warned Elmira herself, but she resisted his realistic assessment because of her love for Edgar (EAP, 446–47, 453–54, 454–57, 461–62, 462–63, 464–65). Of course, the marriage never took place since Edgar, after a spree in Baltimore, died on October 7, 1849.When Rufus Wilmot Griswold’s nefarious “Memoir” of Poe was published in 1850, John was so angry that no one could bring it up. Earlier in that year, on March 9, 1850, Mary Mattox Lapham had a daughter, Flora. It was she to whom John became close and to whom he told his tales of Poe (EAP, 467–71, 476). Flora sometimes resided at Darby Town and later at the smaller farm Sedgemore, attending Miss Brockenborough’s School, keeping the now invalid Louisa company, and learning more from John about his old friend Edgar. She shared a room with John’s foster sister—Edgar’s actual sister—Rosalie Poe Mackenzie. (Rosalie’s previous home, with Jane Scott Mackenzie, Duncan Lodge, had been sold in 1853.) Rosalie called John “brother John” and Louisa “sister Louisa.” And Rosalie used to tell Flora scary stories about wild animals and fantastic creatures. At one point, she sold images of her brother on the street—successfully in Richmond but unsuccessfully in Petersburg, where her claim to be Edgar’s sister was not believed.4During the Civil War, John became a Confederate quartermaster, serving the Louisiana troops stationed in Richmond. He was proud that, on horseback, he was sometimes mistaken for Robert E. Lee. He frequently wrote to his former ward Mary Mattox Lapham and encouraged her son—Flora’s brother, Middleton Page Lapham—to enlist in the Second Company Battalion of the Washington Artillery of Louisiana. Page, a bookkeeper in the New Orleans store of Louisa’s brother William Lewis Lanier, did enlist. During the war, he sent two dolls to his sisters Flora and Annie. He was injured in the Battle of Drewry’s Bluff and died soon thereafter, on May 23, 1864. John’s brother Tom (“Dr. Tom”) became a Confederate surgeon. Tom’s great library, including his unique manuscript Poe collection (relocated from Duncan Lodge to his Richmond office) and his manuscript biography of Poe, was destroyed in the Evacuation Fire of April 3, 1865. At the end of the war, those whom John had enslaved were freed, his house was ransacked, his horses and mules were stolen, and he was incarcerated for two weeks in Libby Prison.5Rosalie stole hams, jewelry, and clothing from her foster brother, and she gave her acquisitions to recently emancipated people, sometimes staying overnight in their cabins. She thus infuriated John—and did so again when she stole from his desk his manuscript of Edgar’s poem “Oh, Tempora! Oh, Mores!” and sold it to newspaper editor Henry Pollard for five dollars. The work appeared in Pollard’s periodical Southern Opinion on March 7, 1868, and in No Name Magazine in October 1889. Having antagonized John, Rosalie would sometimes go to Jane Scott Mackenzie’s home in Powhatan; later, after the war, she visited relatives in Baltimore. John’s brother Dr. Tom died in July 1867; John’s wife Louisa died in February 1870.6At sixty-four, later in 1870, John moved to Danville, Virginia, where the widow Mary Mattox Lapham lived. He wrote his “Last Will and Testament,” leaving his estate to Mary, and he married her. Thus, Flora became his stepdaughter. John sold feed with H. B. Mead—the company was called Mackenzie & Mead. He was described by Dun and Company as “doing well and prompt,” “prompt and reliable,” “stands well in the community,” and “said to be worth 6m$, doing very well and quite prompt.” Mackenzie and Mead dissolved in December 1873.7On January 7, 1874, at the Baptist Church in Danville, John gave Flora Lapham in marriage to newspaperman John Graeme Mack. Shortly before he died, John tried to write out “Oh, Tempora! Oh, Mores” from memory, but this attempt was incomplete, perhaps because of the time that had passed and the opiates that he was then taking to help him sleep. On November 10, 1875, Susan Archer Weiss, future author of The Home Life of Poe, wrote to John for information about Edgar, but John did not—or could not—reply. On November 30, having suffered for months with cardiac asthma, John H. Mackenzie died, holding Flora’s hand. Flora wrote that John was “one of nature’s noble men,” “my dear honorable high-minded chivalric old stepfather.”8John wished to be buried beside his wife Mary’s son Middleton Page Lapham, and so he was, in Old Grove Street Cemetery in Danville, Virginia. And John’s stories about Edgar Allan Poe did not die with him. He had told them to Flora, she retold them in letters to William Lanier Washington in 1908 and 1909, and I drew on them for Edgar Allan Poe: A Life. Flora died on December 17, 1920, and she is buried in Green Hill Cemetery in Danville.9We may—and should—fault John H. Mackenzie as a slaveholder and a supporter of the Confederacy. But we also may—and should—admire John as a devoted family man and a devoted friend of Edgar Allan Poe. His telling tales of Edgar to Flora was an act of love that now significantly illuminates the writer’s life.