early leaders of the United States, including George Washington and Benedict Arnold. Lippard particularly admired Washington and devoted more pages to him than any other writer of fiction up to that time, though his stories are often sensationalized and immersed in Gothic elements. In one of his later stories Lippard relates that George Washington rises from his tomb at Mount Vernon to take pilgrimage of nineteenth-century America accompanied by an immortal Roman named Adonai. The pair travel to Valley Forge where they see a strange, huge building and hear chaotic, frightening noises. The building turns out to be a factory. George Lippard married Rose Newman on May 15, 1847. In an unconventional ceremony they were married outdoors in the evening of a new moon while standing on Mom Rinker's Rock above the Wissahickon Creek. That year, Lippard moved to 965 North Sixth Street, a home in which Poe had used as his final home in Philadelphia before moving to New York. His friendship with Edgar Allan Poe is notable. Poe gave Lippard credit for rescuing him from the streets on several occasions. He was more reserved about Lippard's artistic merits; possibly Poe's own artistic standards were too high to admit praise of Lippard's writing. This is ironic, because everything we generally associate with Poe was even more intense in Lippard's style. Lippard wrote an effusive obituary after Poe's death. Final years George Lippard's wife died on May 21, 1851, shortly after the March death of their infant son. Their daughter had died in 1850 at the age of 18 months. In 1852, Lippard spoke in Philadelphia on the 115th birthday of Thomas Paine, attempting to redeem his political legacy and reputation, which had faltered somewhat due to his book The Age of Reason. In his version of Paine's life, Paine was responsible for convincing John Adams, Benjamin Rush, and Benjamin Franklin to seek American independence. He was also caught in a controversy with Philadelphia publisher, who incorrectly claimed that Lippard had agreed to publish exclusively with him. Other distributors suffered as a result and Lippard referred to Peterson as a "mercenary creature" who had "made his thousands of dollars off of me". Death Always frail, Lippard suffered from tuberculosis for the last years of his life. Confined to his house with the disease, Lippard spent the final months of his life writing a newspaper story protesting against the Fugitive Slave