Their father was away at Congress, where he served seven terms as a Federalist representative from 1792 to 1806. The notion of public service and patient sacrifice, of the mother holding the family together, was to be a powerful one, and subject to some testing, in Zilpah’s own marriage to Stephen Longfellow.
In their later lives, both Zilpah and Stephen were subject to such long periods of invalidism, it is difficult to imagine them young—dancing, singing, sleigh riding, exchanging glances during services in the meeting house, playing blind man’s bluff, reading poetry aloud. Portland was a prosperous and growing city, but in the 1790s it did not offer the urban diversions of Boston or New York. The life of its leading families was intensely social, however, and based on extended family ties and genteel rituals of courtship. Dancing was a particular passion among the young—a warming activity in a cold climate. The image of Zilpah that survives in her many letters to her Boston cousin Nancy Doane is of a vividly social, unusually self-possessed young woman, not in the least hurry to find a husband. Young men—the “beaux”—had to be taken seriously, but they, too, could be judged on their physical merits; her letters are full of sharp observations on male beauty and with mocking names—“Adonis,” “Narcissus,” “Dispairing Pyramus,” “Beauty Boyd”—assigned to the eligible suitors, including the occasional “Boston buck” who came to town. Stephen was not one of Zilpah’s beaux, although as a promising young Harvard-educated lawyer, he was becoming well known to the family. She was pleased to note, in the fall of 1800, that he was increasingly attentive to her older sister Betsy, visiting the house two or three times a day during her illnesses, and being one of the few young gentlemen allowed upstairs in her sickroom. Betsy’s health fluctuated—at one point, she seemed near death, then quickly rallied—and the attachment deepened. Stephen became a regular. On the last day of the year 1801, Zilpah described the three of them sitting in the small back parlor overlooking the garden (the “rainy day room” of the present house museum)—“the room in which we used to read, to digress, to return but to digress again.” The view is not so pleasant as in summer, she notes, but they make the room so by the company of their friends. Betsy has her honey for her cough, and her laudanum syrup for her pain; Stephen takes her pulse.
FIGURE I: Stephen and Zilpah Longfellow, c. 1805.
Courtesy Maine Historical Society.
In September of 1802, Betsy, lying in the front room, with an affectionate smile “playing around the mouth [as] at the approach of a friend,” died of consumption. “I presume you know of which I room I speak,” Zilpah wrote Nancy. “It is the largest parlor, unfrequented by the family, excepting such as retire for meditation. Hours and hours have I walked here, frequently with Stephen. I have had a great deal of conversation with him on serious subjects. Nancy he is very good, I was convinced of it when Betsy approved him, but I knew it not so fully until this severe trial; his purity of mind, his goodness, his resignation and his fortitude are unequalled, excepting by that dear friend whose death called these virtues into action . . . ‘You will still be my sisters.’ He said to Lucia and me after the funeral. And is it strange that I love him as a dear brother?”
For her sister Lucia, fraternal affection sufficed. She had no interest in marriage, found comfort in the friendship of several other women, knew she would be adequately provided for by her father, and spent most of her long life managing the house and helping raise four nieces and four nephews. But Zilpah—who, at least in her letters to Nancy, had suggested that growing old unmarried among “the smiles & approbation of our friends” was not so deplorable a fate—began to feel differently. So did Stephen, and on New Year’s Day 1804 they were married, before what one hopes was a roaring fire, in the same parlor in which Betsy had died. Their first son, the fifth Stephen in the line, was born in 1805. Henry in 1807 was followed by Elizabeth in 1808, Anne in 1810, Alexander Wadsworth in 1814, Mary in 1816, Ellen in 1818, and Samuel in 1819.
Compared to the Wadsworths, the Longfellows might have seemed a dull lot. They did have deeper roots in Maine. For three generations, Longfellows—all named Stephen—had been loyal servants of the commonwealth. Zilpah’s husband was to continue this tradition and expected his eldest son to do likewise. The family was descended from William Longfellow, a Yorkshireman who had settled in Byfield Parish, Newbury, in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, in 1678, and who had married into the powerful Sewall clan. From early on, the family name had provoked mirth: Anne Sewall, after the death of William, married Henry Short; “and, as Savage says in his Genealogical Dictionary, ‘had both Longfellows and Shorts’ “ (Shipton, New England Life in the Eighteenth Century, 1996). The first Stephen in the long line, a prosperous farmer and artisan and a lieutenant in the Indian wars, was almost illiterate but was to be memorialized by his great-great-grandson in 1839 in “The Village Blacksmith.”
The second Stephen (1722/3–1790) was a member of the Harvard class of 1742, suggesting the respect for learning that permeated even the middling folk of the Massachusetts Bay Colony—and the clout of a Sewall connection. He became a schoolmaster in York, in the District of Maine, moving in 1744 to teach in Falmouth (modern Portland), at a time when its people still felt the danger of being so close to the French in Canada and their Indian allies. Men of learning were scarce on the Maine frontier, and Longfellow soon rose to serve as parish clerk, town clerk, notary public, clerk of courts, register of probate, and finally justice of the peace of the quorum (a job in which he did well, despite lack of any formal legal training). Among his many other public services (in the eyes of his compatriots), he helped finance a scalping expedition—expecting a profit from the bounties paid for dead Indians—and helped care for Maine’s quota of Acadian exiles after their expulsion from Nova Scotia in 1755. He does not seem to have been an ardent patriot, however, and was even suspected of loyalist sentiments, but this did not prevent his house on Fore Street and other property from being burned by the British in the shelling of Portland in 1775. He took refuge at his farm at Gorham and stayed there. He was known for his good humor and for weighing 245 pounds. As Clifford Shipton dryly notes, “His interleaved almanacs for 1768–1790 . . . are one of the most disappointing of historical documents. They are concerned almost entirely with the management of the farm, and dismiss the burning of Falmouth in five words.”
The third Stephen (1750–1824) was the leading citizen of Gorham. In early life, like so many ambitious young men on the Maine frontier, he had perfected his skills as a surveyor, a valuable talent in a region where so many land titles were subject to dispute. He was elected nine times to represent Gorham in the General Court at Boston, was a founding Overseer of Bowdoin College, and served as Judge of the Court of Common Pleas from 1797 to 1811. His substantial two-story, yellow-clapboard farmhouse, with its center chimney and dog-leg staircase, still stands as Longfellow Farm, a few miles from Gorham village.
The fourth Stephen (1776–1849) followed the family pattern of a Harvard education, class of 1798 and Phi Beta Kappa. He was considered unusually mature for his age—or, as a classmate less charitably put it, his mind “was not rapid in its movement, nor brilliant in its course, but its conclusions were sound and correct.” This impression of him as solid but slightly plodding—it comes through in the portrait he sat for during his one term as a Congressman—was to be confirmed throughout his life. At the same time, he was considered “a born gentleman” (Phi Beta Kappa at that time being as much a social distinction as an intellectual one), well mannered, and good company. He liked to point out that his classmates had included such luminaries as the jurist Joseph Story and the liberal theologian William Ellery Channing. He studied law with Salmon Chase and was admitted to the Cumberland County Bar in 1801, the eighth lawyer in a town of 3,800.
Like many well-brought-up young men of his generation, he could not depend on the degree of deference his father and grandfather had taken as their due, yet he proved less successful than some of his peers in adapting to the more
democratic world of post-Revolutionary New England. Like most others of his social class in Maine, he identified with the Federalist Party and feared the excesses of democracy and its tendency toward leveling. Like many others of his Harvard generation, his religious sympathies were Unitarian, though he came to this stance gradually. The church of his youth had proudly traced its Calvinism back to the founding generation of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. But its theology had mellowed, under the influence of the rationalism of eighteenth-century transatlantic thought, and his Portland congregation had, in cautious steps, abandoned its Trinitarian doctrines and its conviction of the depravity of mankind. Stephen’s combination of political conservatism and theological liberalism may strike a modern reader as incongruous, but it was at the very heart of the worldview of the educated lawyers, ministers, and merchants of eastern Massachusetts.
At the same time, Stephen could point to his childhood on the Longfellow farm at Gorham as evidence of his solid roots in the soil. As William Willis writes in his history of the law in Maine, “Sometimes, in his addresses to the jury, he adroitly drew illustrations from his farmer’s apprenticeship, to point his argument or secure their favorable attention.” In the boomtown atmosphere of post-Revolutionary Portland, there was money to be made, especially by lawyers engaged in the fierce litigation over property claims in the poorly surveyed wilderness lands along Maine’s great river valleys. The rights of absentee proprietors, many of them Boston merchants tracing their title to conflicting royal land grants, were angrily—even violently—contested by the squatters, many of them Revolutionary veterans who had actually settled and cleared the land. The legal work was hard—it was necessary to travel on circuit with the judges, over bad roads, often in miserable weather—but the District’s small, mutually supportive community of lawyers and judges was not an unpleasant circle in which to build a career, at least until party politics began to dominate the scene.
FIGURE 2: The house (now demolished) on the Portland, Maine, waterfront in which Henry Longfellow was born, on February 27, 1807.
Courtesy Maine Historical Society.
By the time of his second son Henry’s birth in 1807, Stephen Longfellow was regarded as a rising star in the eastern skies. He was sent to the General Court in Boston in 1814, served as a presidential elector in 1816, served in the Eighteenth Congress in 1822–24, represented Portland in the Maine legislature in 1826, was president of the Maine Historical Society in 1834, and for nineteen years served on the governing boards of Bowdoin College. On the question of Maine’s statehood, he took the Federalist position in favor of separation in the early stages of the debate (when Maine’s coastal elite of the 1790s sought fiscal independence from distant Boston) and followed his party to the other side, and to dignified defeat, in 1816–19, when the propertied class sought to maintain its ties to Boston out of a justified fear that the Jeffersonian Republicans—uneducated backcountry Baptists or Methodists or worse—would dominate the new state. Yet for all the esteem he enjoyed among his peers (and he had married up a degree or two in linking himself with the Wadsworth clan), there is a shadow of failure over his career. Most obviously, he never obtained a judgeship, unlike his own father and his two older sons’ fathers-in-law, Judges Preble and Potter.
In particular, Stephen Longfellow’s participation in the controversial Hartford Convention of 1814 darkened his public reputation. Modern historians have concluded that the discussions among New England Federalists at the convention were far more moderate than their enemies claimed—were, indeed, an attempt by the more responsible leaders to tone down separationist talk. Yet anger at the national government and President Madison’s war with Britain was so widespread in coastal New England that some adjustment in the nature of the federal union was widely assumed to be overdue. A delegation from Hartford was about to leave for Washington when news exploded throughout the country of Andrew Jackson’s brilliant victory over the British at New Orleans, some weeks after the otherwise embarrassing War of 1812 had been officially ended. For years to come, deeply wounded Federalists protested that no political event in American life had “ever been the theme of more gross representation, or more constant reproach” than the Hartford Convention (in the words of their apologist Theodore Dwight in 1833). But the Federalist Party never recovered, and soon disappeared, among lingering charges that its delegates at Hartford had been disloyal to their country. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s nationalist stance in his poetry of the 1840s and 1850s had many sources, his father’s political misjudgment in 1814 perhaps among them.
Stephen Longfellow’s problems were not simply political or professional; as we shall see, he suffered from debilitating ailments, including what were diagnosed as epileptic attacks, and in midcareer he seems to have suffered a major failure of confidence in himself. He remained well regarded among his peers, however, and was given the great honor in 1824 of officially welcoming the Marquis de Lafayette to Portland on the general’s triumphal American tour. Stephen is not as immediately likable a person as Zilpah, but he was a conscientious father, and, once he recognized that his second son had exceptional gifts, he did everything possible, in his cautious way, to bring them to fruition.
Young Henry started with an enormous advantage: he did not have to be a Stephen. If anything, the challenge was to carve out an alternative mode of being a Longfellow. He seems to have begun by making a great deal of noise. “Do you not want to kiss Henry?” Zilpah wrote her husband from her parents’ house in October of 1809. “A charming little fellow he is. Nothing will do for him but jumping and dancing He fatigues every one in the house with tending him.” In one of her infrequent letters, his aunt Lucia reported in May of 1812, amid the excitements of war with Britain, that five-year-old “Henry is ready to march, he had his tin gun prepared and his head powdered a week ago.” Writing amid his legislative duties in Boston in 1814, Stephen praised Henry for having composed a letter, and promised him “a very pretty drum with an eagle painted on it.” He offered Stephen Jr. a gun and sword, but warned both boys not to expect the gifts soon. “You know the Embargo stops all the vessels from going from Boston to Portland.” If this early lesson in the evils of the Madison administration was not clear enough, he added to Stephen, “And so you see, my Son, that the Embargo is troublesome to little boys as well as men.”
The second war with Britain was more than a hindrance to New England commerce; it terrified the residents of coastal Maine who remembered the destruction of Portland in the previous war and who noted the ease with which the British had occupied the eastern half of the District, down to the Penobscot. Only southern Maine’s relative military insignificance saved it from a similar fate; farther Down East (to travel north along the Maine coast was to sail with the prevailing winds “Down East” from Boston), many respectable citizens were so busy smuggling goods to and from Canada, they would not have cared which side prevailed. But for an imaginative young boy living within sight of Casco Bay, those were thrilling days. Talk of invasion of Canada was always in the air, if only as a diversion from the inactivity in the harbor. And there was the forty-five-minute battle off Monhegan Island in 1813 between the American brig Enterprise and the British brig Boxer. Both captains were killed and brought ashore for burial, but the Enterprise had prevailed and brought the Boxer into harbor. Longfellow was later to write, in his great Portland ode, “My Lost Youth,” of hearing “the sea-fight far away” as it “thundered o’er the tide!”—poetic license, since the battle was well out of earshot—and seeing the young captains’ graves. Elsewhere at sea, another of Zilpah’s brothers, Alexander Scammell Wadsworth (1790–1851), won fame as second in command of the U.S.S. Constitution in the defeat of H.M.S. Guerriere.
The family’s holidays in Gorham and Hiram during their father’s frequent absences, on circuit or at the legislature, were intended as a healthful diversion, but Henry’s closest brush with serious injury befell him at Wadsworth Hall in July of 1815, when an infected foot began to swell desp
ite the alum curds his mother put upon it. He seemed to get better and on August 6 asked his father to send him “two or three little books of riddles if you can find any.” Four days later, his heel worsened, bringing fever and great pain; his mother feared he would lose the use of his ankle, even his leg. She resorted to poultices (the verdigris salve the doctor had recommended had only inflamed the wound), and by late August he was on both feet again. Two years later, he had another painful accident: amusing himself after school by turning “heels over head,” he severely wrenched his elbow. Bound up in a sling and dressed with wormwood and vinegar, his arm slowly healed, and he was able to write again.
Despite this evidence of physical exuberance, Henry was settling down. He had been sent to “Ma’am” Fellows’s school at age three to learn the alphabet, and to the town-supported school at age five. According to his brother Samuel, writing more than eighty years later, Henry found the local roughs “distasteful” and moved to a private school run by a Mr. Wright. The next year, his education began in earnest with N. H. Carter at the estimable Portland Academy. By 1817, he was still earning good reports, with an occasional minor lapse: “This certifies,” wrote Bezaleel Cushman, “that the bearer, Henry W. Longfellow, has, during this week, distinguished himself by his good deportment and close application to study; monday morning’s lesson & occasional levity excepted.“ The charge of “levity” supports the impression that one of his most distinctive qualities from early on was his sociability. When Longfellow was about to enter college in 1822, he thought some friendly gesture to his former teacher was in order. “I remember,” he wrote later, “the Schoolmaster at the Academy; and the mingled odor that hovered about him of tobacco, india-rubber, and lead-pencil. A nervous, excitable man. . . . I went with a schoolmate to take leave of him and thank him for his patience with us. He thought we were in jest: and gave us a stern lecture on good behavior and the trials of a teacher’s life.”
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