Christmas Bells

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  September–December 1863

  Mosby’s Raiders proved maddeningly elusive, and in his letters home Charley’s mood oscillated between proud resolve and fuming exasperation. The hottest summer in memory seared and exhausted the First Massachusetts Cavalry as they chased phantoms through the woods and fields of Virginia, their horses’ hooves churning up clouds of choking dust as they rode. Once verdant meadows turned brown and brittle beneath the unrelenting sun, and with grazing limited the horses grew thin and tired. At night, bands of rebels stealthily crossed the Union picket lines to capture a sutler’s wagon or to cut down an unsuspecting sentry before vanishing without a trace, keeping the federal soldiers constantly on edge.

  From late August to the middle of September, the regiment bivouacked at Waterloo and Orleans, to the rear of Plum Run, setting up pickets along the creek and sending frequent patrols into Flint Hill. Though the heat lingered, Charley reported, the weather was otherwise delightful, the scenery beautiful, and food plentiful, although foraging soldiers tempted by farmhouses too far from the road often found themselves betrayed by resentful Confederate sympathizers and captured or killed by partisan rangers.

  Autumn brought relief from the enervating heat and humidity but not from danger. On September 13, General George Meade sent the army across the Rappahannock, the cavalry taking the advance. While the Second Massachusetts crossed the Rixeyville Ford, Charley and the First engaged General Lee’s cavalry near Culpepper, eventually forcing them down to the Rapidan River, but not before the rebel troops dug in and made a stand. “Here our regiment was ordered up to support a battery,” Charley wrote a few days later. “The shot and shell were flying over our heads, by this time pretty lively, and the first thing I knew I saw a 12 lb shot coming bounding along it made two jumps in front of us and then went zip close by my leg and hit Sergeant Reed, my quartermaster sergeant below the knee taking his leg off, he was the next man to me.”

  Shaking, heart pounding, Henry put the letter aside and went out to the garden, but his awareness of his son’s narrow escape followed him. He sat on a bench, planted his hands on his knees, and took deep breaths to steady his nerves, forcing the horrifying, all-too-vivid images from his mind’s eye. The unfortunate sergeant had been the next man to Charley. The difference between survival and life-shattering injury had been a matter of only a few inches, a minuscule alteration to the angle of the cannon.

  Before long, curiosity and concern for his son overcame his dread, and he returned to his study and the letter. For weeks the family had wondered anxiously where Charley was and what he was doing. The papers reported that the entire army was in motion, which seemed unlikely, but they offered little specific news of the First Massachusetts Cavalry. Charley’s letters, as alarming or vague as they could sometimes be, were a far better source of information—and they assured Henry that, at least on the day his son had written them, he had been safe and unharmed.

  As the rebel shot had flown thick and fast over their heads, Charley’s letter continued, the men had not shown much courage at first, ducking and flinching whenever any shells burst near them. Even so, they did not falter but stuck to the task, driving the rebels back all afternoon and into the evening. The next day the First Massachusetts Cavalry was in the advance, and Charley had charge of his company. “We met the rebs at Cedar Mt. but they retired to the Rapidan,” he wrote, his haphazard grammar and spelling revealing the lingering thrill of danger survived. “There we got into it as thick as I ever want to. They had seen pieces of artillery playing into us (the 1st Mass 1st R. I. and 6th Ohio) we had to manoeuvre under this fire it was not over jolly. Our squadron dashed across a field where we were peppered finely but we got behind a hill where they could not hit us. Our men were sent out to skirmish and one regiment of rebs charged them but were driven back by our men they try to frighten our boys by yelling and howling but it is no go.”

  Charley and his men dug in behind a fence, where they stayed up all night under arms. The next morning they were at last relieved, having had nothing to eat for more than twenty-four hours. As they had been in the saddle nearly all of that time, their horses were dreadfully spent as well.

  “I had several narrow escapes being covered with dirt from shells several times,” Charley reflected somberly, “one bursting so close to my face as to make me feel the blast of hot air but thank God none of our officers are hurt. I don’t know yet how many men are killed. They may talk about the gaiety of a soldiers life but it strikes me as pretty earnest work when shells are ripping and tearing your men to pieces.”

  The First was resting that day while the remainder of the brigade engaged the enemy, hoping to provoke them into revealing their strength. “I shall write again and more fully as soon as I get a chance,” Charley promised. “Don’t be anxious. God bless you all at home.”

  Henry choked out a laugh. “‘Don’t be anxious’?” he echoed, a second laugh escaping his throat as a sob. “What a cold and stoic father I would be if I were not anxious!”

  When he had composed himself, he read aloud selected excerpts to Alice, Edith, and Anne, but let Ernest read the letter in its entirety. Ernest should know what horrors awaited him should he decide to enroll at West Point and follow his brother into war.

  “My Dear Charley,” Henry wrote in reply a few days later. “Your letter of the 16th relieved our minds; and we are very thankful that you are safe, and have escaped thus far, without harm, from so many dangers, and so much exposure. I cannot help wishing, that you were still acting as Adjutant, but perhaps you know best. You do not tell me how your health and strength hold out; nor whether you have coats and blankets enough. You must guard against chills in the cold nights.” Then, since he knew his eldest son would tolerate only so much fatherly advice, he shared the news from home, hoping that fond reminders of family and friends would hearten his young soldier.

  The weeks passed in an exchange of letters between Craigie House and the regiment’s encampment, in work and in the sweeter distraction of playful moments with his daughters, in prayer and in anxious reflection. Henry frequently sent parcels of supplies to the front—beaver gloves and silk handkerchiefs, cigars and brandy for medicinal purposes, seed cakes and gingersnaps, tinned bologna and syrup—but more than one shipment mysteriously vanished along the way until Henry, thoroughly exasperated, learned to circumvent would-be thieves by sending Charley’s packages directly to the regimental sutler in Washington, an honest and reliable fellow who could be trusted to carry them safely to their intended recipient.

  Letters, at least, traveled fairly reliably through the mails, and helped raise the morale of the young cavalryman in the field and his anxious family back home. Charley told of early-morning skirmishes, of foraging patrols, of nuisance raids intended to provoke a more significant confrontation between the two armies, which seemed almost permanently fixed along the Rappahannock and the Rapidan. He seemed eager to move, to exchange tedium and discomfort for action, but beneath his son’s yearning for battle and glory, Henry discerned an emerging maturity forged in the kiln of hardship and danger. After weeks of sleeping through the night in the saddle, awaiting the alarm of a rebel raid; of days when water, hardtack, and a bit of salt pork were his only sustenance; of exposure to the deafening roar of artillery and rifle fire, the chilling wail of the rebel yell, and the gruesome sight of dead and wounded men, Charley had become a reliable patrol leader, an adept skirmisher. Experience had spoiled his boyhood fancies of the glamour and glory of war, all flashing sabers and wind-tossed banners and gallant cavalry charges, but it had not lessened his enthusiasm for military life or his commitment to the Union.

  For all his worry, for all his longtime pacifism, for all his regret that Charley had enlisted without permission, Henry found himself increasingly proud of him.

  • • •

  In the first week of October, President Lincoln had issued a Proclamation of
Thanksgiving, noting that despite the destruction of war, the year 1863 had been bountiful, with fruitful fields, steady industry, widening national borders, increasing population, and plenteous mines. Even in the midst of a civil war of unprecedented magnitude and severity, peace had been preserved with foreign nations, order had been maintained everywhere except the theater of war, and laws had been made, respected, and obeyed. It seemed fit and proper, the president declared, that these blessings “should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”

  Massachusetts had long celebrated Thanksgiving as a state holiday, and Henry approved of the president’s wish to unite the country in a national day of gratitude and prayer on one particular, common date. He decided to mark the occasion with a feast at Craigie House, and he invited his brother-in-law Tom Appleton, and Harriott Appleton, Fanny’s widowed stepmother, to celebrate with him and the children.

  Thanksgiving Day dawned with heartening news from Tennessee, where General Ulysses S. Grant had broken the Confederate siege of Chattanooga with decisive victories at Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge.

  “It will not be long now until the war is over and Charley will come home,” Mrs. Appleton said as the family lingered at the table, warmed by the company and the fire and renewed hope for victory, peace, and reunion.

  Henry wanted to agree, but the war had already dragged on more than two and a half years, and despite General Grant’s victories in the west, he could not foresee an end to it anytime soon. “Let us drink to the health of all the lieutenants in the Army of the Potomac,” he proposed, raising his glass.

  The others lifted their glasses and joined him in the toast, their voices solemn and prayerful, ever mindful of the absent loved ones whose presence would have made their holiday complete, of the empty places at other families’ tables, North and South alike, the empty arms of grieving wives and mothers, the empty hopes of bereft fathers and children.

  The next day, Henry wrote a short letter to Charley, to wish him well as always, to describe their Thanksgiving feast and to say how much they had longed to have him among them. He sent off the letter and turned his thoughts again to his work; he had begun to have his translation of Dante put in type, in order to have a clear copy to work upon while making his notes. On Saturday he hoped for a letter from Charley, but the only news from the front he received that day came via the papers, which announced that the Army of the Potomac was advancing on General Lee’s position at Mine Run.

  Three days later, on the first of December, Henry had just sat down to supper with his children when he was summoned to the door to receive a telegram. A sudden hush fell over the dining room. The last time he had received a telegram, a thunderous knock upon the front door had awakened the household at midnight and Henry had learned of the death of the good and generous Reverend Richardson, who had so kindly taken Charley into his home the previous summer while he was stricken with camp fever.

  But this was not the middle of the night, and Henry would not have his children learn to jump in fear at every knock upon the door. “You may begin without me, children,” he said calmly as he pushed back his chair and rose. Edith and Annie happily complied, but Ernest and Alice exchanged guarded looks across the table.

  Henry hurried to the front door. “Who sent it?” he asked as he took the folded paper from the messenger.

  “I don’t know, sir,” the lad replied. “I only carry them. Another fellow takes them off the wire.”

  Henry knew that, just as he knew he was delaying the inevitable. It could be news from Washington, he thought, Sumner announcing some bold new measure passed by the Senate, or better yet, arrangements for a long-overdue visit. It could be word from his publishers, news about the recently published Tales of a Wayside Inn or an editorial note about the forthcoming Dante. Nevertheless, he steeled himself and opened the telegram.

  The first glance told him that it had indeed come from Washington; the second, that it was not from his friend Sumner but from the Department of War: “Our dispatches state that Lieut Longfellow of First Mass Cavalry was severly wounded in the Face at Mount Hope Church on Friday Nov 27th. No chance of any wounded being sent in at present.”

  A strange, distant roaring filled his ears, and as he stood staring at the slip of paper, he felt his vision going gray around the edges, his hands and feet going tingling and numb as if from too lengthy exposure to cold.

  “Sir?” an urgent voice prompted him. “Mr. Longfellow, sir?”

  With a start, Henry glanced up to find the messenger regarding him curiously. “Yes?”

  “Do you wish to send a reply, sir?”

  “No—no, thank you.” Henry fumbled for the doorknob. “Not at present. Good evening.”

  “That’ll be three dollars and fifty-three cents, sir,” the messenger blurted before he could close the door.

  Henry kept his anguish in check as he paid the lad and sent him on his way, his thoughts racing with plans and with the inescapable imagery the telegram evoked in his mind’s eye. Then he returned to the dining room, where Ernest and Alice were finishing their soup and conversing in murmurs while the little girls happily discussed a Christmas tea party they were planning for their dolls.

  “I’m afraid I must depart for Washington City immediately,” he interrupted, his voice miraculously steady. “Charley has—I’m quite sorry to say that he has been rather badly injured. I must get to the capital at once, so that I may be there to receive him when he is brought to the hospital.”

  Anne let out a muffled shriek and seized Edith’s arm, while Alice nodded gravely, her stricken gaze fixed on his. Ernest bolted to his feet and blurted, “I’ll come with you.”

  Henry was about to refuse, but then he realized how useful his steady, sensible son would be to him in such a time. “Of course. We’ll leave at once.”

  The girls would be well looked after by their governess in his absence, Henry knew, but he hastily sent off notes to trusted neighbors to inform them of his unexpected journey and where they could reach him in Washington. He and Ernest quickly packed their bags, and after the girls saw them off in a flurry of tearful embraces, promises to pray for Charley, and earnest pleas for them to write as soon as they had word of their dear brother, they raced to the wharf, where they caught the five o’clock Fall River steamer for New York.

  There were no staterooms to be had, so Henry and Ernest retired to the saloon, where they settled into uncomfortable armchairs, which would serve as their beds for the night. “We must not imagine the worst,” Henry said, as much to inspirit himself as to comfort his son. “The telegram said it was a severe wound, not mortal.”

  “Of course, Papa,” Ernest murmured, pale and quiet.

  The night was stormy and a severe gale rocked the ship in the Sound, so although Henry and Ernest tried to sleep, they managed no better than a fitful doze. The storm delayed their arrival in New York City, and moments after they raced down the gangplank to the pier, they realized they had just missed the first train to Washington. They waited impatiently for the next, endured what felt like an interminable journey by rail, and at long last arrived in the capital at ten o’clock in the evening of December 2. They took rooms at the Willard Hotel, checked with the clerk for telegrams from home or the War Department—there were none—and dispatched a messenger to Sumner’s residence to inform him of their arrival in Washington and the dreadful circumstances that had brought them there.

  After a restless night, Henry and Ernest awoke to the dismaying realization that they had received no news of Charley overnight, nothing regarding his condition or his
whereabouts. Nevertheless, in expectation of his arrival, they quit the Willard and took a more spacious suite at Ebbitt House, three doors down the street from Sumner’s home. Then they began their urgent search for Charley, not knowing in which of the many official and makeshift hospitals scattered throughout the city he could be, desperate to see for themselves that he lived, that he was being given every attention. To their dismay, an officer of the Sanitary Commission informed them that Charley had not yet arrived from the front, and worse yet, that no one could tell them where he was or when he might arrive.

  After signing an oath of allegiance, Henry managed to secure a military pass that allowed them to cross military lines. He and Ernest immediately boarded a steamer that carried them across the Potomac, past several ships of the Russian fleet, and on to Alexandria, Virginia, where they sought out Colonel John H. Devereux, the superintendent of military railroads.

  “I’m searching for my son,” Henry explained, breathless from exhaustion, haste, and worry. “Two days ago I received word that he was severely injured, but I’ve heard nothing of him since, and of course—” Ernest rested a hand upon his shoulder, lending him his strength. “As his father, I will imagine the worst. You understand.”

  “Certainly I do,” the colonel replied kindly, and he offered to telegraph stations along the railroad line to ask for news. Gratified, Henry thanked him, and after the message was sent down the wire, he and Ernest settled down to wait in the seats the colonel offered them in his office.

  All afternoon, Henry and Ernest waited for a reply, starting at every first click of an incoming message, sinking back into their chairs again when the operator glanced their way and shook his head in regret. With each passing hour they grew more dispirited, until eventually, reluctantly, they departed on the last steamer of the day back to Washington.

  “What could this bewildering silence mean?” Ernest asked as they made their weary way back to Ebbitt House.