Back home in late spring, Charley was soon packed off with his friend Willy Fay for a European tour, which his father doubtless hoped would outlast the war. It did not, and by fall he was again in Cambridge, feeling more restless and striving to be more independent than ever. On March 14, 1863, Longfellow received a letter postmarked in Portland. Its contents did not surprise him—the postmark was a ruse—but they distressed him perhaps more severely than anything that had occurred since Fanny’s death twenty months earlier.
Dear Papa
You know for how long a time I have been wanting to go to war I have tried hard to resist the temptation of going without your leave but I cannot any longer, I feel it to be my first duty to do what I can for my country and I would willingly lay down my life for it if it would be of any good God bless you all.
Yours affectionately,
Charley
The letter had been sent to a friend, George Rand, to be posted in Maine, to give Charley a few days’ head start toward reaching the Union front lines, where he intended to volunteer in the first Massachusetts regiment he could find. His motives went beyond mere adventurism or even the patriotism expressed in his note. Like many other privileged young men in New England, he saw the war as the great proving ground of his manhood and courage, a justification of his right to live in a position of honor, respect, and authority in his community. He would struggle for the rest of his not-very-long life to carve out an identity for himself as something other than Longfellow’s son. And it is quite likely that he wanted to get out of that house of tears in Cambridge and deal with his own grief for his mother by way of some bold and heroic gesture.
As things turned out, Charley had a short but “good” war, ending with a commission and an honorable, though dicey, wound that could easily have killed him. If Charley succeeded at nothing else, he managed to get his depressed father out of the house and to give him two unanticipated experiences of Washington in wartime. Considering how sedentary in his mourning Longfellow had become, this was no mean accomplishment.
The immediate task was to find the eighteen-year-old and persuade him to come home. On the same day Charley’s note arrived, Longfellow wrote to Rand, hoping he knew his son’s plans and would forward the letter:
My dear Charley,
Your letter this morning did not surprise me very much, as I thought it probable you had gone on some such mad-cap expedition. Still you have done very wrong; and I hope you will so see it and come home again at once.
Your motive is a noble one; but you are too precipitate. I have always thought you, and still think you, too young to go into the army. It can be no reproach to you, and no disgrace, to wait a little longer; though I can very well understand your impatience.
As soon as you receive this, let me know where you are, and what you have done, and are doing.
All join in much love to you. . . .
Ever affectionately
H.W.L.
Two days earlier Charley had reached Washington, where a considerate artillery captain not only recognized him but took him into his battery (the infantry had rejected him because of the childhood loss of his thumb). The captain immediately wrote Longfellow, who was gratified by the news that his son was safe but alarmed at the thought he would soon be on the Rappahannock. Yet he finally accepted the fact that Charley was not going to come home. He immediately wrote asking Sumner to intervene in any way he could on the boy’s behalf, but Charley was sharp enough to put off the senator’s invitation to visit by promising to do so after the war was over or his three years were out. Longfellow sought Governor Andrew’s help in obtaining a commission, but Charley’s “half-aunt” Harriet Appleton seems to have beaten him to it. Charley was not only the poet’s son, he was an Appleton, a member of a rich and powerful New England dynasty. It would be unseemly for such a young man to serve with the troops. This was more than a matter of maintaining social status; it was brutally practical, for Civil War armies reflected the class structure of the societies from which they were raised, and in terms of both creature comforts and medical care, even the most junior officers were treated significantly better than enlisted men. Judging by his enthusiastic letters home, Charley loved being in the artillery battery, where mingling with the ranks seemed to gratify his urge to escape the gentility of Boston and Cambridge, but thanks to his family’s pull, he soon found himself a lieutenant in the First Massachusetts Cavalry. His father was astonished at the cost of outfitting him, including horse, tack, and servant, but felt so obliged to the artillery captain who had kept an eye on him, that he asked Sumner to have him sent a basket of Champagne.
Life as a cavalry officer proved even more agreeable to Charley, whose jaunty letters home were welcome in one sense but did little to allay his father’s fears that the boy was reckless, even foolhardy. To the family’s relief, his unit missed the great Union defeat at Chancellorsville, but by early June disaster of another sort had struck. While on a visit with the girls to their Aunt Anne in Portland, Longfellow learned that Charley had a severe case of “camp fever”—a term that covered a range of infectious diseases, from the curable to the quickly lethal. Fortunately—and again the family’s influence seems to have eased Charley’s way—he was sent to convalesce not in a crowded hospital but in the Washington home of a member of the Sanitary Commission who was a friend of Longfellow’s brother Samuel. Longfellow rushed to his bedside and nursed him through his fever for several weeks with beef tea, blancmange, and ice cream. A stream of distinguished visitors called, eager to meet the famous poet even in the sticky heat of the Washington summer. A month amid the cool breezes of Nahant successfully concluded the treatment. That sojourn, incidentally, led to one of the great comic moments in the early history of New England summer resorts. Like most males of all ages at that time, Charley was accustomed to swimming on secluded beaches in the nude. Nahant was not quite as secluded as perhaps he remembered, for the formidable wife of General John C. Fremont, a recent presidential candidate, had taken a nearby cottage. She had Charley and a fellow swimmer arrested for indecency. At trial, however, Charley’s lawyer won the case—when he forced Mrs. Fremont to admit that she had been unable to recognize the young men from her house until she turned her opera glasses on them.
Just as we begin to think we understand the Victorians, they surprise us. Despite his own grief, Longfellow was determined to keep the household’s spirits up. He had a distinctive talent as a caricaturist, as the “Peter Quince” drawings he made for his children in the 1850s suggest. They portray the picaresque adventures at home and abroad of a Longfellow-like traveler. Even more remarkable is a small bundle of stories and drawings, thirty-two sheets of paper sewn together, entitled “Little Merrythought. An Autobiography with a Portrait.” They are not dated, but Civil War souvenirs pasted in suggest completion in 1863 or 1864, and there is a watercolor of a young Massachusetts cavalry officer on horseback who is clearly Charley. But the story must have been begun as much as a decade earlier, and added to from year to year, incorporating as it does the sagas (largely tragic) of the various family dogs and tales of various childhood scrapes. Originally intended to amuse the two boys, the book survived to help the daughters through the family tragedy.
The story starts with the “Birth and Parentage” of its title character. “I was born on Christmas day; on which occasion my mother was invited to dinner, not as a guest but as meat. She was roasted; and brought to table with her gizzard under her wing. When I was taken from her breast she was quite dead. I was immediately put naked into the hands of a little brown-eyed boy, named Erny.” Wrapped up in a napkin, the wishbone is taken home to the Craigie House, where he is given a red waistcoat, like Papa’s, black shoes made of sealing wax, and a white feather for his cap. He stands “on the green meadow of the table cloth.”
This extraordinary foreshadowing of Fanny’s death might strike a modern reader as something not to be shown to the children after the events of 1861. Yet Longfellow did not destr
oy it but rather wove it into a playful series of episodes, many of them illustrated, drawn from Craigie House life. He clearly had one of the most blessed of human gifts, the ability to take the simplest events of everyday life and make them amusing and worth retelling.
Edie’s French Lesson
Little Edie was at the head of her class in French, because she was the only one in it!
“Ma mere,” said her Papa.
“My Mother,” said little Edie.
“Est aimable,” said her Papa.
“Ate a marble,” said little Edie. “Why! How could she eat a marble?”
You have to know how a Bostonian pronounces “marble” to appreciate that episode.
There is at least one passage that suggests “Little Merrythought” was intended for Papa as well as the children. Erny would have the occasional rage (though not as often as Charley, who is known in the story as the “Infant Terrible”). But Erny finally asks his father to help him be good.
Ah yes! help him to be good! That is what children must need. Not so much chiding and lecturing; but a little more sympathy, a little help to be good. You can see through their transparent faces, the struggle that is going on within. A soft, gentle word often decides the victory!
By August, the leave was over, and a grimmer stage of Charley’s Civil War began. Although in his absence the North had won the Battle of Gettysburg, the war dragged on. Charley had still not seen a major battle, though he had frequently been under enemy fire in the course of patrols and skirmishes in the rolling countryside around Culpeper, Virginia. On November 27, riding out of a thicket at New Hope Church, he was struck in the back by a bullet that nicked his spine before exiting on his other side. The bullet just missed his heart and lungs, but he was bleeding profusely by the time he had been carried into the church and laid on the altar. He survived.
On December 1, the telegram reached the Craigie House, where Longfellow had just sat down to dinner. The report was inaccurate but alarming, and Longfellow and eighteen-year-old Ernest quickly packed and spent an uncomfortable night on the Fall River steamer to New York. After aggravating delays, they reached Willard’s Hotel in Washington the next night, and moved the next day to the Ebbitt House, only three doors from Sumner. What followed was the closest Longfellow came to the wartime experiences of his fellow poet Walt Whitman among the wounded and dying. Communications with the army were erratic and unreliable, so Longfellow and his son went again and again to the train station in expectation of finding Charley among those being unloaded from the foul hospital cars. On December 5, much the worse for wear but in good spirits, Charley emerged. He was whisked off to the hotel, where every high-ranking surgeon in the army seemed to want to examine him. Once again, word of Longfellow’s presence in the capital had spread. He went with Sumner to attend the opening of the Thirty-Eighth Congress, stopping to greet the man who, nearly forty years earlier, had almost become his brother-in-law, the now influential Senator William Pitt Fessenden of Maine. He was persuaded by another admirer to pose with Sumner for a portrait by Alexander Gardner, now regarded as perhaps the greatest of the Civil War photographers. Gardner published the image over the title “The Politics and Poetry of New England.” There they sit—two weathered monuments.
On December 8, the Longfellow party left on the evening train for New York, and Charley’s eventful nine months in the Army of the Potomac came to a safe and comfortable end. He completed his convalescence at home and would always have a room there, but the cord had been broken. Charley had inherited a sizable fortune from his mother and grandfather, and he would spend the rest of his far-flung life spending it at a pace that once more alarmed his father. There were many adventures ahead—at sea, in the Himalayas, in Meiji Japan. While Charley in 1866 helped sail his Uncle Tom Appleton’s fifty-foot sloop Alice across the Atlantic, his father sat in his Cambridge study immersed in his difficult translation of Dante. Longfellow had lived through his own version of Hell, in the tragic events of 1861, and in the alarms and anxieties of 1863. Yet these experiences seemed not to touch his poetry, at least directly, which is perhaps the thing that most puzzles a modern student of his life and work.
There is one exception, although it was never published in his lifetime. In 1879, recalling the photograph he had seen of a famous mountainside in the Rockies, Longfellow wrote “The Cross of Snow.” The sonnet evokes Dante’s Purgatorio in its play of light and shadow, and links this with the still uncharted grandeur of the American continent, in a great arc of meaning that triumphantly completes his half-century as a poet. There is no doubt who his Beatrice had been.
In the long, sleepless watches of the night,
A gentle face—the face of one long dead—
Looks at me from the wall, where round its head
The night-lamp casts a halo of pale light.
Here in this room she died; and soul more white
Never through martyrdom of fire was led
To its repose; nor can in books be read
The legend of a life more benedight.
There is a mountain in the distant West
That sun-defying, in its deep ravines
Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
And seasons, changeless since the day she died.
At his lowest moment, Longfellow produced his sprightliest work. Few readers today know more than its opening charge—the resounding verbal hoof-beats of “Paul Revere’s Ride.” Doubtless, they would be surprised to discover that the most famous of his poems is merely the first of twenty-two linked narratives in a great variety of meter and tone, several of them delightfully comic. Long narrative poems are in fact so much out of fashion, that this aspect of Longfellow’s accomplishment is virtually overlooked; modern readers prefer his short lyrics. When noticed at all, Tales of a Wayside Inn (published in three parts between 1863 and 1873) is often dismissed as watered-down Chaucer, though in truth it owes more to Boccaccio. Yet there is no other work that better demonstrates Longfellow’s breadth of poetic interests, his ability to produce highly finished work amid difficult personal circumstances, and his absolute mastery of English prosody. Probably only two of the tales can be said to be original in conception, although saying so does not give the poet the credit he deserves for the long and fluent connective passages that link the tales and their various tellers. Longfellow’s sources range from medieval sagas to Renaissance romances to colonial American history. It is not the tale, he would have argued, but how it is told that counts.
“Paul Revere’s Ride,” originally published in The Atlantic in 1860 amid the gathering gloom of the secession movement in the South, is a Carlylean plea for a great hero to come save the union. Its Revolutionary War details are fictionalized, the real Paul Revere having been only one of many patriots involved in spreading the word “to every Middlesex village and farm.” (By a curiosity of literary history, the real Paul Revere was one of the Massachusetts officers who botched the Penobscot Expedition, the Down East debacle in which the Royal Navy destroyed the American fleet in 1779. Longfellow’s grandfather, Peleg Wadsworth, was one of the few patriots to emerge with any credit from the episode; he later testified in Revere’s pro forma court-martial.) Had it not been for the poem, Revere would probably be remembered today only for his skill as a silversmith, but Longfellow single-handedly elevated him to the Revolutionary pantheon. As Matthew Gartner has pointed out, this development did not really take place until well after the Civil War, when Revere’s story became a central myth in the Colonial Revivalism of the late 1870s and afterwards. That the poem is so seductively easy to memorize helped anchor it in the American school curriculum for more than a century. Thanks to the talent of its many illustrators, the poem (or versions of it) survives in the children’s book market—the only work by Longfellow that is still widely read, occasionally even learned by heart.
T
he Civil War context of the whole of Tales of a Wayside Inn comes through even more interestingly in the structure Longfellow chose: a long series of loosely linked stories related by a representative sampling of Americans. The most strikingly original thing about this work is whom Longfellow saw as representative: a Yankee innkeeper, a college student, a theologian, a poet, a musician, a Sicilian, and a Spanish Jew. This is not a collection of people you would have found fraternizing in many American inns of the 1860s. The gathering, although presented as fortuitous, serves to convey not only Longfellow’s personal sense of toleration but his affirmation of the union of his country’s varied peoples. It is not truly representative, to be sure—no woman, no African American, no Native American. But that would have been straining verisimilitude in the 1860s. The strength of the poem arises from its demonstration of the power of storytelling to imagine a nation.
Tales of a Wayside Inn has a solid ground in biographical fact. As Longfellow explained in a letter, the Wayside Inn is based on the actual Red-Horse Inn in Sudbury, a stagecoach stop about twenty miles from Cambridge. (The title The Sudbury Tales was among those considered but rejected.) In colonial times, a prominent family, the Howes, had built a large house there and, falling upon hard times, a later generation had begun taking in guests. Longfellow had visited it briefly, but he knew more about it as a result of the frequent sojourns there of his colleague and protégé, Luigi Monti, who taught Italian at Harvard in the 1850s. Monti was among a group of friends who escaped in summer from Boston and Cambridge to the rather sleepy but idyllic village, and there must have been many such evenings of swapping stories after the ladies had retired. Monti—who had had a colorful career at Palermo in the Italian revolution of 1848 before escaping to America as a young political refugee—is the model for the Sicilian. The Student is based on Henry Ware Wales, a Harvard bibliophile who died young; the Theologian, on Daniel Treadwell, a Harvard physicist who combined an interest in munitions with an interest in theology; the Poet, on Thomas W. Parsons, a fellow translator of Dante; the Musician, on Ole Bull, an internationally famous Norwegian violin virtuoso and close friend of Longfellow’s; and the Spanish Jew, on Isaac Edrehi, a Dutch émigré who had translated various Hebrew texts. The Landlord is a sketch of Lyman Howe, the actual innkeeper and direct descendant of the family that had built the house; his taproom, redolent of the Colonial Revivalism to come, is the locus that pulls together these three foreigners and three rather bookish Americans. (The inn literally became a Colonial Revival artifact when it was bought by Henry Ford in 1923 and renovated into a hotel and restaurant still in business in Sudbury.)
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