The Last True Whig

 So here’s what happens Poe in real life seemed more to the right but politically more northern he tired to get appointed to the US Customs House but missed a meeting and never got the appointment. In this reality he gets to the meeting with John Tyler’s son and is appointed to the US Customs House where he flies under the radar but is relatively effective despite all the drinking he is popular within the administration for his aggressive leadership style & deep attention to detail. 

 he makes a curious choice to be effectively the only Whig member of the administration not to abandon Tyler except for maybe Charles A. Wickliffe but Poe tells the press “My duties to America are greater then my duties to the Whig Party or President Tyler”. Daniel Webster immediately begins courting him to challenge Tyler if he runs for a full term.

Tyler who sees Poe accurately as his only ally quickly sends him far up the ladder of the cabinet beginning with being promoted to the position of deputy Treasury Secretary then all the way to the position of Secretary of War. Poe who considers himself a civilian administrator sees this as an insult and quickly reveals private embarrassing details of the administration to Congress.

Poe in 1845 believing his political career to be over takes a cushy and rather easy job that he surprisingly enjoys editing a newspaper in Richmond the city which he considers home. He watches growing more and more concerned about the nation’s divides over slavery & publishes multiple stirring Unionist essays in his paper the Richmond Herald. After waving away an offer from Daniel Webster to wrangle him a senate seat in Maryland he continues to write his paper. In 1848 he attends the Whig convention as a delegate from Virginia he supports his friend Daniel Webster & does some campaigning for Taylor as surrogate when he is nominated. 

But then in 1849 trouble arises he is found in Baltimore in someone else’s coat rambling incoherently he is quickly rushed to a hospital though by a wealthy man who recognized Poe from the previous year’s campaign. Doctors have no idea what is going on with him until one doctor examines him and claims he has Diabetes they try many things they sedate him and they starve him for 5 days  but finally he seems to become lucid again when his wife brings him cheese a cracker and a bit of wine. Poe was in diabetic shock but this time he found a good hospital which just barely and mostly accidentally saved him. The doctor later goes on to write a paper speculating on the role of food in diabetes that would become a foundation to diabetes research. 

Now Poe was extremely rattled by his condition returning to Richmond he became very paranoid about his diet refusing most anything with sugar & refusing to eat meals instead he eats small things throughout the day which he keeps in his coat. Poe also becomes more aggressive with his paper releasing articles personally shaming prominent Richmond figures sympathetic to secession. Webster still though seeing Poe as his strongest supporter invites him back to Whig Party Convention as a delegate he of course supports his very good friend Daniel Webster again but when he loses he becomes enraged at the Whigs printing in the Tribune that Winfield Scott is a “Fat, aggressive and self important man who does not support any specific ideology and will surely be ineffective in combating secession”. He supports multiple minor parties nominating Webster something Webster himself tacitly supports. But as the campaign is in full swing Webster dies which shakes Poe to his core as Webster was his best friend and mentor in politics . Poe reluctantly accepts the nomination of the Union Whigs as a replacement to Webster & wins 2,000 votes in Virginia.

So Poe lives for a few more years he rules out reentering politics he instead expands the Richmond Herald across Virginia renaming it the Unionist Herald a rather on the nose description of Poe’s political views. The paper becomes very popular especially in the future state of West Virginia. In 1856 Poe becomes ill he attempts to work through it though sending his wife as an alternate to the last ever Whig convention she votes for Millard Fillmore a directive straight from Poe as he thought he was the only choice to preserve the Union. But when she returns to Richmond she learns Poe had died of a stroke while she was away. When she arrived to their home all she found on his desk was a note written in very shaky and uneven handwriting “It is only right that I would die as you worked for the Union to live. Do not cry I have done far too much of it and there are no tears left in any of the cabinets in the kitchen”

Poe had a strange legacy in many ways he was one of the more liberal Whigs of the south but he never supported abolition. He was deeply committed to the Union in 1860 it was even a joke in the south that John Bell was Poe’s womanly uncle because he held similar views to Poe but was very mild mannered. Virginia lived until 1860 when she caught tuberculosis for a second time right around Christmas her last act being a letter to Lincoln urging him to fire Hannibal Hamlin as she had become a minor figure in Richmond politics. 

The Union Herald went on 2 more years before merging with the Farmer's Advocate in West Virginia to form the Virginia Advocate which became the most influential unionist and anti CSA paper in Virginia before it was banned and its editors arrested by the military eventually reappearing in 1866 as a shorter paper writing columns against reconstruction & against racism they campaigned for Horatio Seymour pushing the story of General Order No. 11 to undercut Grant.