Rosa Vertner's Hashish Dinner Party

Vertner depicted in A Woman of the Century

Jumping off from a CBS news report about cannabis dinner parties in Maryland, cannabis author Isaac Campos's recent Substack newsletter recalls a newspaper item describing such a party in the 1860s. At the center of the story was the poet Rosa Vertner, “in the hey day of her youth and beauty, and at her father’s magnificent home in Lexington, which was the resort of all the cultured and brilliant men who visited Kentucky.” 

According to Campos, on the occasion of Vertner’s wedding to Claude Johnston, Kentucky’s Secretary of State, “there was a grand dinner party to which thirty guests sat down,” among them various prominent citizens. 

As described in a news account: 

Mrs. Vertner Johnston conceived the idea of having [hashish] served as a cordial at the dinner party, thinking that its effect, of which she had but the vaguest idea, might entertain and amuse the guests. Everybody drank of the peculiar greenish liquid, and many who found the taste pleasant drank more than they had any idea of. Within an hour the laughter and wit was running high. Then the excitement began to grow. Handsome matrons and beautiful young girls snatched the floral pieces from the table and pelted with flowers and [fruit gravy] dignified statesmen and lawyers who stood upon the chairs grinning and gesticulating like mountebanks. The host and hostess were themselves as much under the influence of the insidious drug as any of their guests, and could do nothing to quell the excitement, which now raged fast and furious. 

Things went downhill from there, Campos writes. "Physicians were called in, various guests ended up laid out in death-like stupors, and so forth. But Vertner wound up with plenty of material for her poem “Hasheesh Visions.”

That long, flowery and fantastical poem begins: 

Fiery fetters fiercely bound me

Globes of golden fire rolled around me

Jets of violet-colored flame

From ruby-crested mountains came

And floating upward breathed on high

Like gorgeous serpents through the sky

To whose rich coils the stars of night

Clung and became like scales of light....

Rosa Vertner Griffith was born in Natchez, Mississippi in 1828. Her father, John Griffith, was a writer of prose and verse and her maternal grandfather, Rev. Dr. James Abercrombie of Philadelphia, was an Episcopal minister. Rosa's mother died when her child was nine months of age, and Rosa's maternal aunt, Mrs. Elizabeth Vertner, adopted her. 

A friend of hers from childhood said: "Rosa was one of the most beautiful women, physically, that I ever knew; her head and face were perfect as a Greek Hebe [the cup bearer]. She is large and full, with magnificent bust and arms; eyes, real violet-blue; mouth, exquisite, with the reddest lips; and perfect features; her hair, dark-brown, glossy, curling and waving over a nobly proportioned brow. She is bright, gay, joyous, and perfectly unaffected in manner, full of fun and even practical jokes, and with the merriest laugh." 

At the age of 15, this Southern belle wrote her well-known poem, "Legend of the Opal," published under the signature of "Rosa" in the Louisville Journal, to which she continued to contribute, along with other literary journals. In 1845, Rosa was married at the age of 17 to Claude M. Johnson, a wealthy citizen of Lexington, Kentucky, with whom she had six children. After Johnson's death, Rosa and her four surviving children moved to Rochester, New York, where she met and married Alexander Jeffrey of Edinburgh, Scotland. They had three children. After the American Civil War, she moved back to Lexington.

It's been said  that Rosa was the first southern woman whose literary work attracted attention throughout the US. In 1857, a book of her poems were published in a volume by Ticknor & Fields, Boston. She published her first novel, Woodburn, in 1864. Her volume of poems, Daisy Dare and Baby Power, was published in Philadelphia, in 1871 and her third volume of poetry, The Crimson Hand, and Other Poems, was published in 1881. Her novel, Marsh, was brought out in 1884.