It is not often that my research on the history of Capitol Hill ends up leading to the possible identity of Jack the Ripper, so I will certainly milk this connection for all its worth.
It starts with Francesco Maria Scala, the Italian-born leader of the Marine Band for many years. Scala was born about 1819 in Naples, Italy. In 1841, he there went aboard the USS Brandywine, and enlisted as a musician. Unfortunately, he turned out to be terribly prone to seasickness, and had to resign from the life as a naval musician. Fortunately, this meant that he could become a member of the Marine Band, and, the following year, he joined this august outfit, which he would continue to be a part of, and to lead, for the next thirty years. He would become its leader in 1854, and would drastically change its composition, essentially changing it from a fife-and-drum corps to the full band that we know it today.
One of the people who encouraged him in this was none other than Abraham Lincoln, whom he would serenade the day he arrived as President-elect in Washington. Scala would later write about this day:
The night he arrived in Washington, the band serenaded him at the National Hotel and I see him now as he stood at a window and addressed the great crowd on the street below.
Scala at this time also suffered from some unknown disease of the throat, which sent him on a quest to find a cure. This quest eventually found him taking herbs from one Francis Tumblety, who, in spite of having been born in Ireland, became famous all through the United States and Canada as an Indian Herb doctor. After a brief stint as a cleaner in a hospital in Rochester, New York, where he had emigrated as a young boy with his family, Tumblety had set out on his own, and, by the time he moved to Baltimore some time in the early 1860s, had become quite wealthy selling his herbal medicines. In an advertisement that ran in the April 14, 1862, Washington Evening Star, a long list of Washingtonians attest to the wide variety of diseases – from cancer to Scrofula to blindness to ‘a disease peculiar to [the female] sex’ – that his nostrums have cured, including Scala’s ‘disease of the throat.’
The Marine Band in 1864, with Francesco Scala as its leader (wikipedia)
While Tumblety [pic] was generally considered a quack, it seems that whatever disease that Scala had was also cleared up through the application of the former’s herbs. Scala continued to lead the Marine band until 1871. Along the way, he became the first to play Jacques Offenbach’s “Potpourri-Fantasie of Geneviève de Brabant,” which we know better today as the Marine Hymn. Scala died in 1903 and was buried in Congressional Cemetery.
Tumblety’s life took a much less salubrious turn. While he was able to survive being arrested after the Lincoln assassination as an accomplice of David Herold, he was arrested in the late 1880s in England for ‘gross indecency.’ He managed to flee before his trial, but was much later accused of having been none other than Jack the Ripper. While there are some who vehemently deny this possibility, others point out that nobody had ever been proved to be the killer of the five women in Whitechapel in the late 1880s, so why not this quack doctor?
Tumblety, after having returned to the United States, died in 1903 just like Scala, and was buried in Rochester, New York.