Longfellow - Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site ⓘ

Explore stories of 1700s-era slavery and freedom, wealth and politics, architecture, and a changing landscape.

Present-day Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site has a deep and complex history, rooted in the lands of the Massachusett Tribe. After European land claims and settlement, the Marrett family first developed the property during the British colonial era, building a home along what is now Brattle Street.

The grand Georgian mansion that stands today was constructed in 1759 for John Vassall Jr., a British subject and wealthy sugar plantation owner who enslaved hundreds of people in Jamaica and at least ten people on his Cambridge estate: Cuba, Dinah, Malcolm, William, James (a teenager), infants Darby and Cyrus, a “baby boy,” and likely two others whose names are unconfirmed.

The vast wealth of the Vassall family—and that of their neighbors—shaped the Cambridge landscape. When the loyalist Vassalls fled their home ahead of the American Revolution, the people they enslaved there seized their freedom.

Explore revolutionary-era stories of nation-building, leadership, and the contradictions at the heart of America’s founding.

In July 1775, General George Washington arrived in Cambridge to lead the Continental Army. Established by the Second Continental Congress in the wake of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the Continental Army brought the individual state militias into a new national force.

The grand Georgian mansion along Brattle Street vacated by the Vassall family before the Revolutionary War became General Washington’s first long-term headquarters of the war. From his Cambridge headquarters, he directed the successful outcome of the Siege of Boston, ultimately forcing British troops to evacuate the city in March 1776.

Washington’s time in Cambridge was a defining period in his rise to national prominence, marked by both decisive action and personal contradictions. Before he became the "father of his country," he was a lifelong enslaver, a Virginia delegate to the Second Continental Congress, and an uncertain military leader. These experiences shaped his leadership and reveal the complex legacy of an enslaver who was also "the asserter of liberty.”

After the Revolutionary War, the Vassall house was declared abandoned and passed through several owners, including privateer Nathaniel Tracy , merchant Thomas Russell , and former Apothecary General Andrew Craigie.

Explore Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poetic legacy, along with the home, family, and events that shaped his life and work in the 1800s.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the most celebrated American poet of the 1800s. A New England native, he traveled extensively throughout Europe, mastering several languages before moving into the Vassall-Craigie-Longfellow House in 1837 after his appointment to the Smith Professorship of Modern Languages at Harvard College.

Longfellow lived in the house from age 30 until his death at 75, making it the center of his rich family and social life. He made a home with his wife Fanny , raised five children, and hosted visitors drawn by his celebrity, from local children to international leaders. His work engaged with contemporary events, including the Civil War and the abolitionist movement, offering reflections that resonated across generations.

As America’s first professional poet, Longfellow achieved an extraordinary level of admiration and shaped the nation’s historical memory—particularly of its founding era—through iconic poems such as “ Paul Revere’s Ride ,” The Song of Hiawatha , and “A Psalm of Life.” Today, his poetry remains a cornerstone of American literary history and continues to inspire scholars and readers alike.

Explore the history of the poet’s descendants and their family’s legacy of preservation, activism, and cultural change in the 1900s.

Before the Vassall-Craigie-Longfellow House became a national historic site in 1972, the Longfellow family and the Longfellow House Trust carefully preserved the site, along with the stories and artifacts connected to its legacies.

Longfellow’s descendants both shaped and were shaped by their times, navigating two world wars and rapid modernization. Their life experiences reflect broader histories of preservation, activism, and cultural change. The poet's brother Samuel Longfellow , daughter Alice Longfellow , and grandson Harry Dana offer insight into three generations of queer lives, spanning a period of shifting cultural attitudes toward same-sex relationships.

The site’s history comes full circle in Alice Longfellow’s role as Vice Regent of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, where she helped preserve George Washington’s home and plantation in Virginia, and through her philanthropic support for women’s, Black, and Indigenous higher education.

Beyond the extended Longfellow family’s 113-year residency and George Washington’s nine-month stay, the Vassall-Craigie-Longfellow House holds a rich and layered history, shaped by many people who lived, worked, and visited over the centuries.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the greatest and best-known American poets of the nineteenth century.

Longfellow’s massive appeal during his lifetime can be partially explained by a line from one of his poems, “The Singers”: “I gave a various gift to each, To charm, to strengthen, and to teach.” There’s a Longfellow poem for almost every mood and situation, from enjoying the sun on a beautiful spring day to being gloomy on a rainy day. Overall, Longfellow’s poetry is approachable.

Longfellow also set the precedent for someone living entirely on their writing. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, writing was not a viable way to make a living. Poetry, especially, was a pastime idly taken up by genteel people. Longfellow changed that. He did have some financial help - namely his father-in-law's gift of a grand house - but he was a savvy businessman in addition to being a talented writer. The business decisions he made about his writing resulted in his ability to live comfortably (and support his family) even after he was no longer receiving a salary from Harvard University.

The Maine Historical Society hosts a full-text searchable database of Longfellow's original poems .

The Longfellow house has served researchers for almost 100 years. The poet's grandson, H.W.L. Dana, carefully collected and organized family papers and encouraged their use by scholars. The rich archival and museum collections at Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters NHS span pre-contact archeology, colonial history, and modern resource management records. The archival collections—particularly rich in nineteenth century women's papers—complement the papers of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow held by Houghton Library, Harvard University . Regular internal research by park staff informs preservation, public programs, and publications . The collections today are actively used by academics, students, genealogists, and preservationists studying topics including literary criticism, art history, abolition, education, LGB history, and more.

Research in the archives and museum collections is by appointment. Please call (617) 491-1054 or email curatorial staff to make arrangements for research sessions. We will respond to remote research inquiries as quickly as possible, but please be aware it may take up to three weeks. Please consult our access policies before visiting the site.

Researchers are encouraged to start their search by consulting finding aids to the archival collections . Selected digitized content from these archival collections is available on our NPGallery Digital Archives website .

The park maintains a reference library of published primary and secondary sources, including rare books without Longfellow family provenance. (This collection is managed separately from the Longfellows' historic library .) Find a catalog of the LONG reference library in the NPS LIBRIS Discovery Portal .

The breadth of subject matter represented in the collection is reflected in the wide range of topics addressed by researchers. A selection of works based in part on research conducted in the site's collections includes:

Marshall Hicks, ed. “ Individual Census Record: C086 Longfellow Family / House Library Copy .” In Rosetta Stone Bibliographical Census . 2026.

Rajesh Parsotam Haridas. "Frances Longfellow and Etherization." Anesthesia & Analgesia Practice. International Anesthesia Research Society. 20, no. 7-8 (July-August 2026).

Damien Delille. "La carpe et le kimono: Porter l'habit de l'autre." Dits. Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art, 18 June 2026. French.

Christopher R. Mathias. "Thomas Gold Appleton: Celebrated Art Patron, Collector, Bon Vivant and 'Boston Wit'." Nineteenth Century. Victorian Society of America. 46, no. 1 (Spring 2026) , 20-29.

Patricia Hills and Abigael MacGibeny. " Collection: National Park Service, Longfellow House - Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site. " In Eastman Johnson Catalogue Raisonné.

Lukas Etter. " The Laughing Mrs. Churchill: Longfellow’s Kavanagh (1849) and the Earliest Anglo-American Mathematics Journals " Anglia 143, no. 1 (2025): 79-100.

Jaqueline Musacchio. The Art and Life of Francesca Alexander (1837-1917) . London: Lund Humphries, February 2025.

Stefan Aguirre Quiroga. " From Brazil to Brattle street: the transnational history of emperor Dom Pedro II’s dinner with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ." American Nineteenth Century History , 1–19. (17 Sep 2024)

Samuel Kidder, ed. Our First Glimpse of Japan: Prominent American Visitors to Japan in the 1870s . Portsmouth, NH: Piscataqua Press, 2024.

David W. Granston III. “Like it Growed There”: Resort Architecture and the New England Landscape 1875-1915 . Dissertation for PhD in History of Architecture, Boston University. 2024.

American Folk Art Museum. Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in the Early American North . 2023.

Joel Silveira Ávila. “The Dabneys on Pico - A Forgotten Heritage.” Boletim do Nucleo Cultural da Horta . No. 32. 2023. Pages 125-137.

Jacqueline Marie Musacchio. "Carrying Home Renaissance Florence in Extra-Illustrated Copies of George Eliot’s Romola.” Chapter in Italy for Sale: Alternative Objects – Alternative Markets . Boston: Brill, 2023.

Oa Sjoblom and Marieka Kaye. “Conservation and Study of Simon Pokagon’s Birch Bark Books.” Book and Paper Group Annual 41, 2022. p. 105-121.

Jeffrey Hotz. Longfellow’s Imaginative Engagement: The Works of His Late Career . March 2022.

Yoshimi Yamamoto. “Japanese Tattooing as Souvenirs for Foreign Travelers in the Late 19th and Early 20th Century.” Japanese Studies , Vol. 63. 2021. ( 「日本みやげ」としてのイレズミ : 十九世紀から二十世紀初頭における外国人観光と彫師 43-83 山本 芳美)

Anne Strachan Cross. "‘The Pictures Which We Publish To-Day Are Fearful to Look Upon’: The Circulation of Images of Atrocity During the American Civil War." History of Photography . 2021.

M. M. Gudkov. "An American on the 100th anniversary of Leo Tolstoy in the USSR." Rossica. Literary connections and contacts . No. 1. pp. 19-54. 2021. Russian.

Elisabeth Gitter. "Fanny Appleton's Change of Heart" in The Massachusetts Historical Review. 2020.

Hilary Iris Lowe. "The Queerest House in Cambridge." The Public Historian . 2019, 41 (2): 44–69.

Angela Shpolberg. "On the 'Russo-American Fever': Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana and the Gorki Fund." The New England Quarterly. Vol. 88, No. 3 (September 2015), pp. 509-526

David Haven Blake. "Among the English Worthies: Longfellow and the Campaign for Poets' Corner." Critical Survey 27, no. 3 (Winter, 2015): 82-104.

John Hebble. The Vassall-Craigie-Longfellow House of 1759: From Colonial America to the Colonial Revival and Beyond. MA Thesis. 2014.

Based on site-specific research, these reports document the cultural resources, historical structures, landscapes, and history of Longfellow House–Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site.

The Vassall-Craigie-Longfellow House, built in 1759, is an outstanding example of Georgian architecture . The many rooms inside contain collections that tell stories of the house's residents over a two hundred year span. This virtual tour invites you to look into twelve of its rooms and explore its furnishings and stories.

The first floor can be divided into two main sections. The front portion of the house contains the structure of the original Georgian mansion and holds the public, formal rooms, including the front entry , parlor , dining room , study , and library . The blue entry marks the beginning of the 1790s ell and serves as a connecting and transition space. At the back of the house is the service ell , largely built in the 1790s as part of Andrew Craigie's expansion, containing the kitchen, pantry, and laundry areas.

The seven chambers on the second floor are private family spaces. Over the house's two hundred years of occupancy, many people have lived in each room. As furnished today, the front, south-facing rooms reflect their use as Alice Longfellow's bedroom and study in the early twentieth century. The northeastern chamber is the "blue room" or guest bedroom. The northwestern chamber, called the " Gold Ring Room ," preserves its furnishing as Henry Longfellow's bedroom. Charley Longfellow created the Japan Room in the back ell as his sitting room in the 1870s.

The third floor, reached by the back stairway in the main house, contains storage areas and several small bedrooms. Although there is little documentation of room usage on this floor, it was probably used for unmarried female servants' sleeping quarters for much of the house's history. The Longfellow family also stored trunks, unused furniture, and household items here.

Boarders from the 1940s to 1970s periodically occupied the bedrooms, including a group of Radcliffe students who called themselves "The Atticans."

The rooms have decorative finishes, like patterned flooring and wallpaper, as well as exposed structural elements, including hand-hewn roof beams. Six windows, facing north and south, provided the only ventilation for the third floor.

The original house was built in 1759 for the wealthy enslaver John Vassall . He had his grand home designed in the modern style, Georgian, popular in England among the upper class. This structure consisted of four identical rooms on each floor, with a central staircase and hallway bisecting them. Its main exterior features included symmetrical windows, classically-inspired pilasters, and a pediment crowning the large entryway. The mansion sat on top of a raised terrace and commanded a view down to the Charles River. The house served as a conspicuous statement of Vassall’s wealth and position in colonial society.

Among the most intact architectural features from the initial construction is a fireplace in an upstairs front bedroom. The iron fireback includes the date 1759 along with the Vassall emblem of a sun. With a single exception, (the blue tile is later eighteenth-century Dutch tile) the tiles surrounding the fireplace were made between 1756-1757 - making them older than the house itself. Though their manufacturer, John Sadler, got his start printing books and newspapers and these tiles are from the “woodblock period,” it is unlikely these relief prints were actually made using a woodblock. Instead, Sadler likely used a metal such as zinc. However, the “woodblock period” is notable because it was before Sadler began making tiles using the conventional copper plates. The tiles have a 'Louis XV' border rather than the standard '88 border' which Sadler used after 1765. No known fireplace group of this type survived in England, making this fireplace collection extremely rare. In addition to the completeness of the grouping, a few individual tiles are unusual in themselves. While most of the tiles are the standard rococo pair scenes, there is also a tile depicting a Chinoiserie fishing scene.

After the Loyalist Vassall family fled Boston in anticipation of conflict, the vacant house was used by the Continental Army and was the first headquarters for General George Washington from July 1775 to April 1776.

During the Federal period following the Revolution, Andrew Craigie expanded on the already grand structure. He had a large ell addition placed on the back of the house, as well as two symmetrical verandas on either side. These elements contained a blend of the old and the new. While still trying to complement the Georgian details, Craigie updated the house according the tastes of the Federal style – a style for a new century and a new country. The current footprint and appearance of the house largely dates to this period.

The home was purchased for the Longfellows in 1843 as a wedding gift from the poet’s father-in-law. The couple was interested in the house because of its historic associations, even though Longfellow considered its style “decidedly conservative.” His new wife, Fanny, put it best when she explained:

“We are full of plans and projects with no desire, however, to change a feature of the old countenance which Washington has rendered sacred.”

The poet and his family saw to the upkeep of the home. During the Longfellow family’s ownership of the house, from 1843-1872, little changed externally on the house: a billiard room at the back was built and later changed, and a second floor balcony was added.

In the late 19 th century, the house became an icon of the Colonial Revival movement and was widely depicted in popular images and imitated in residential architecture across the country. One of the earliest replicas was created for the 1895 Cotton States and International Expositions In Atlanta, Georgia. Even today, the house endures as a symbol of American style and as an important site of American history.

The Continental Congress having now taken all the Troops of the several Colonies, which have been raised, or which may be hereafter raised, for the support and defence of the Liberties of America; into their Pay and Service: They are now the Troops of the United Provinces of North America; and it is hoped that all Distinctions of Colonies will be laid aside; so that one and the same spirit may animate the whole, and the only Contest be, who shall render, on this great and trying occasion, the most essential service to the great and common cause in which we are all engaged. - General Orders, July 4, 1775

With these words, General George Washington introduced himself to his new army. Washington had arrived in Cambridge on July 2. That evening, he formally took command from Massachusetts General Artemas Ward, met with some of the army’s high-ranking officers, and went to work—joining his temporary housemate and third in command Charles Lee, a professional soldier with a career of military service far exceeding that of any American-born commander, for a ride to examine some of the siege lines around Cambridge. Within two weeks, Washington moved west along the Road to Watertown to the grand Georgian mansion of the evacuated John Vassall. From there he would direct a siege and begin working to shape an army to match his vision.

George Washington was born on February 22, 1732 on the Northern Neck of Virginia into a family of middling, but striving, gentry. Although he was the first child of the marriage of Augustine Washington and Mary Ball, George had two older brothers and a sister from his father’s first marriage, and would later be joined by four surviving full siblings. His prospects were abruptly altered in 1743 when Augustine died at just 48 years of age, continuing a family trend of early male deaths that eventually aided George’s rise, placing him in charge of Mount Vernon and its enslaved workers by 1754. In the immediate aftermath, his father’s death meant that 11 year old George would not have the benefit of education in England like his older brothers, a deficit which caused him some degree of embarrassment for the rest of his life. Instead of further development in the classroom, Washington would learn in the real world, traveling throughout the Virginia backcountry as a surveyor. Despite a lack of formal education, the young man did not lack benefactors, notably through his brother Lawrence’s marriage into the vaunted Fairfax family. These connections enabled Washington to embark on a provincial military career which saw him elevated to Colonel of the Virginia Regiment and commander-in-chief of the colony’s forces before his 34 th birthday. During the French and Indian War, Col. Washington gained valuable experience as a leader of men and became relatively famous for exploits both good and bad.

The biggest break in George Washington’s life came when he married a 27 year old widow named Martha Dandridge Custis on January 6, 1759. The combination of his own wealth with her estate moved Washington in the elite of colonial Virginia society and roughly tripled the number of enslaved people under his control. The next fifteen years were spent running and expanding Mount Vernon, taking care of his new family, and carrying out the civic roles expected of a gentleman of his stature, including election to the House of Burgesses. Throughout the politically turbulent 1760s and 1770s, Washington was present, albeit often silently, for the great debates and resolutions of colonial resistance. By 1774, he was recognized enough to be one of Virginia’s delegates to the Continental Congress alongside the more famous Patrick Henry.

Washington returned to Philadelphia the following May as one of Virginia’s delegation to a renewed Continental Congress. Shortly after convening, Congress’s agenda quickly became dominated by military matters as word spread of hostilities between colonists and Redcoats along the road between Boston and Concord on April 18-19. Washington’s military expertise was unmatched amongst his colleagues and he quickly was put onto key committees as Congress struggled to chart a course in these dangerous new waters. By the middle of June, at the request of Massachusetts officials, Congress assumed responsibility for the defense of the colonies. On June 14, it created the Continental Army from the New England forces surrounding Boston. The following day it selected George Washington, conveniently the only delegate in a military uniform, to take command.

Washington, still just 43 years old, was to spend nearly nine months in Cambridge. The task awaiting him was immense: turning a loosely trained collection of fiercely independent New Englanders from a very different military culture into a disciplined fighting force in the image of the very forces he was opposing. Expecting to find a thriving army, he instead found one full of “Boys, Deserters, & Negroes,” people in his mind unsuited to be soldiers, leading him to question the ability of the Revolutionary Cause to sustain an army on its own. At times, he appears to have been driven to despair, writing Joseph Reed in January 1776:

“The reflection upon my Situation, & that of this Army, produces many an uneasy hour when all around me are wrapped in Sleep. Few People know the Predicament we are In, on a thousand Accts—fewer still will beleive, if any disaster happens to these Lines, from what causes it flows—I have often thought, how much happier I should have been, if, instead of accepting of a command under such Circumstances I had taken my Musket upon my Shoulder & enterd the Ranks, or, if I could have justified the Measure to Posterity, & my own Conscience, had retir’d to the back Country, & livd in a Wig-wam…”

Despite the obstacles, Washington drew upon great reservoirs of strength and dedication to hold the army together. The efforts here in Cambridge to organize the army and to convince soldiers with elapsing enlistments to stay enabled the Revolution to survive its first winter and set precedents it would follow throughout the long war. In March 1776, cannons transported from captured forts in New York by Henry Knox were emplaced on the high ground south of Boston. From there, they could threaten the shipping lanes which were the only means of supply and escape for the British Army in Boston. A British attempt to displace those cannons was cancelled by a storm, leading to the evacuation of the town on March 17, a date still celebrated as Evacuation Day in the area. The Siege of Boston was over.

All of these events were, and are, important. Yet, it was the personal experiences Washington had, and the changes they exerted upon him, which would take on the greatest historical importance. For the first time, Washington experienced the frustrations of dealing with the faulty political structures which developed to replace British colonial institutions. Not only did he report to Congress in Philadelphia, but he was forced to interact with, and often beg for assistance from, politicians on the colony, and then state, level where the real power rested. This would hone his political skills and reinforce his nationalist instincts, positions which were well known when he was called from retirement to attend the Philadelphia Convention which produced the Constitution and when he took on the lead role in that new government. For the first time, Washington, an owner of enslaved people since age 11, witnessed men of color functioning as effective and dedicated soldiers. This combined with a correspondence with the talented poetess Phillis Wheatley to cause Washington to accelerate the growth of his uneasiness with the institution of slavery. The frustrations the commander-in-chief felt in the nine months he spent in Cambridge over the inability of his army to carry out an aggressive strategy of attack and the failures of that army in New York required him to adopt a strategy of survival which was completely foreign to his instincts. All of these things combined to spur growth and development in Washington—as a leader, a commander, a politician, and as a person. In the long-term, however, it was the emergence of George Washington as a national leader, in charge of the first national institution in what became the United States, which had the greatest effects. While in this Cambridge Headquarters, he began his transformation from a Virginia gentleman to the key nationalizing figure of the Revolution and the Early Republic.

Longfellow is one of the monumental cultural figures of nineteenth-century America, the nation's preeminent poet in his era, whose verse is notable for its lyric beauty, its gentle moralizing, and its immense popularity. A New Englander through and through who traveled widely in Europe and knew a dozen languages, a Harvard professor, and the country's first professional poet, Longfellow heralded a new spirit in American letters. His fame grew until it took on a life of its own, and he was revered and beloved to a degree few poets have been before or since.

When Longfellow began his literary career in the 1820s, poetry often seemed a needless luxury to the practical-minded citizens of the still-young American republic. Along with such other genteel poets as William Cullen Bryant, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, Longfellow played an important role not just in helping make poetry respectable, but more broadly in refining and cultivating middle-class readers.

In the gentle hands of Longfellow, readers could be introduced to the finer things in life – domestic sympathies, noble aspirations, spiritual consolations, the glories of high culture – without ever being made to feel intimidated or inadequate. A peculiarly American mixture, Longfellow was both a patrician and a populist, an artist of elite social background whose writing reverberated with the masses. One reader, a Mrs. Julia Willard, captured the experience of many when she wrote Longfellow, late in his life, "Your beautiful poems have been a rest, a blessing, a sweet, pure, calming benediction to me ever since I learned to read them in my childhood years."

Over and above his poetry's success and influence, Longfellow became himself a living icon who filled a central niche on the American scene. Americans read his poetry by firesides, in schools, at public occasions; they heard musical renditions sung in parlors and concert-halls; their children celebrated his birthday in school and memorized and recited his poems. Because of his singularly large reputation, a result not only of the place he carved out for himself but also of sustained promotional efforts on the part of his publishers and defenders, Longfellow became a looming presence, an important symbol for his fellow Americans, representing a set of values and meanings that changed as the country did through the century. Although his reputation declined precipitously after his death in 1882, a Longfellow revival of kinds may now be under way as it becomes possible to see afresh his considerable poetic achievements and historical significance.

The nature of Longfellow's poetic genius is elusive, hard to pin down, though it may help to recall that first and foremost he was a public poet. That is to say, he always wrote with his audience in mind, paternally consoling and uplifting them in lyrics, ballads, odes, sonnets, verse dramas, and the long narrative poems whose characters became hallmarks of American culture: Evangeline, Hiawatha, the Puritan maiden Priscilla, the midnight-riding Paul Revere. The essential note of his poetry, its sweet and settling mildness, its serene reassurance, was perfectly modulated to appeal to the reading public. This was socially responsible poetry, poetry with purpose, whose often explicit message urged such virtues as patience, resignation, and hard work.

Given these themes, it seems fitting that as a poetical craftsman he was not boldly original or radically experimental, as were his contemporaries Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Rather, Longfellow fashioned his poems out of tried-and-true materials: accessible ideas and language, pleasing stories and rhyme, familiar feelings and form.

In a well-known lyric from 1844, "The Day Is Done," Longfellow voiced what may be thought of as his poetic intentions; in this poem about poetry – a favorite subject of his – he celebrates poems that "have power to quiet/The restless pulse of care,/And come like the benediction/That follows after prayer." In these direct, clear, and mellifluous lines, one can see how Longfellow is content to speak simply and softly. Indeed, he adopted as a personal motto a Latin phrase, Non clamor sed amor, borrowed from an anonymous poem he himself translated: "Not loudness but love." The great American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, a friend and college classmate of Longfellow's, praised just this understated quality: "No one but you would have dared to write so quiet a book," he wrote in an 1850 letter to Longfellow. The remark highlights the way Longfellow's literary strength lies not in breaking rules, but in following them, not in transgressing, but in staying within bounds. Longfellow always felt himself dutifully answerable to his readers – he was a poet, quite literally, with a known address – and this sense of public obligation shaped his poetry and his life in fundamental ways.

Though Longfellow was hardly a poet of the startlingly new, he undeniably did break new ground in American poetry, and this was in large part due to the way that, in him, expressive poetic genius met and battled with the stolid forces of New England repression. The result was a strange kind of poetry, shuttling between America and Europe, between Puritan reticence and Romantic feeling, between pious instruction and aesthetic pleasure, between aristocratic ideals and egalitarian principle. Longfellow held these oppositions together by keeping his poetry's energies oriented toward his readers. In other words, the popular success of this often self-contradictory poet may have been possible only because the United States in the mid-to-late nineteenth century was such a conflicted place. Longfellow managed to speak to the conflicts and at the same time to seem a safe haven, an anchor in the storm.

Longfellow's benign poetic temperament owes much to his full and fortunate life. Born in Portland in 1807, when that bustling port city was still part of Massachusetts, Longfellow came from an old, established family of lawyers, judges, and generals. Enrolled at Bowdoin College by the age of fourteen, during his senior year Longfellow published no less than sixteen poems in a leading literary journal, the United States Literary Gazette. Upon his graduation the Bowdoin trustees (his father conveniently happened to be one!) appointed him to a provisional professorship, sending him off to Europe for three years of preparatory study.

He stayed for four, returning to Maine to start his teaching career in 1829. His next years were productive ones, and his ambition, hard work, and social connections paid off when in 1835, at the age of 28, he was offered the most prestigious position in his field (what we would now call "Comparative Literature") that the country had to offer: the Smith Professorship of Modern Languages at Harvard. Granted a year to travel in Europe before taking up his duties, Longfellow was in Rotterdam with his wife Mary Potter Longfellow when she suffered a miscarriage and died from its complications. Distraught, he continued to drift through Europe for the rest of the year. Installed at last in Cambridge in the fall of 1836, the major, most productive and important phase of his life was about to begin.

This phase was marked by his return, after an almost ten year interruption, to writing poetry. His breakthrough poem, "A Psalm of Life," published in the Knickerbocker magazine out of New York and reprinted in newspapers across the country, stirred a generation of readers with its heady exhortations:

Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul. Not enjoyment, and not sorrow, Is our destined end or way; But to act, that each to-morrow Find us farther than today.

With the publication in 1839 of his first collection of poems, Voices of the Night, and that same year of his novel Hyperion, Longfellow established himself as one of America's leading authors.

Still in his early thirties, a well-dressed, cosmopolitan figure in small-town Cambridge, Longfellow formed close friendships with other young men of patrician backgrounds and promising futures, and turned his attention to the daughter of a prosperous Boston industrialist, Fanny Appleton , whom he had met for the first time in Switzerland in the summer of 1836. Unusually determined as a suitor, Longfellow waited seven long years before she relented, and the two were married in 1843.

As a wedding present her father, Nathan Appleton, bought the couple the historic Craigie House on Brattle Street, a short walk from Harvard Square (Longfellow had been renting rooms there since 1837, and the house came on the market at a fortuitous moment). Henry and Fanny raised five children in Craigie House, and lived among friends and family in great comfort, happiness, and privilege. It is revealing of the Longfellows' elite social position, for instance, that in 1847 Fanny became the first woman in America to be given anesthesia during childbirth. Moderate in politics, liberal in religion, Professor Longfellow and his wife surrounded themselves with art, music, and books. They had dinner parties, kept up wide-ranging correspondences, and spent their summers by the shore in Nahant.

Meanwhile, Longfellow's literary career prospered and his fame spread. In this matter of his career, Longfellow must never be confused for a private citizen, a solitary scrivener, alone in his attic pouring forth his soul. Rather, throughout his writing life Longfellow had behind him the powerful New England establishment, of which as a Harvard professor and world-famous author, he became a leading representative. He counted among his friends the influential figures of the day in culture, politics, and society, and he in turn could be counted on to voice irreproachably respectable ideals grounded in moral decency and concern for the public good. As an avatar of the emerging Boston culture industry, Longfellow was not just a moral emblem but a profitable venture: his books sold extraordinarily well. He wrote prolifically, and his publishers – first Ticknor and Fields, later Houghton Mifflin – were constantly bringing out new volumes and new editions of his collected poems, at all different price points for different segments of the expanding book trade.

Longfellow was frequently profiled in newspapers and magazines, and the release of poems like The Song of Hiawatha in 1854 and The Courtship of Miles Standish in 1858 were "events" shrewdly orchestrated to maximize sales. Even in his own lifetime, therefore, Longfellow was larger than life, an institution associated with an array of ideological, social, and commercial interests. Longfellow was often happiest when paying least attention to such matters, but his public aura forms a scrim against which his private self must be seen.

Longfellow's domestic happiness was shattered in 1861, when his wife Fanny died of burns after fire engulfed her from a candle accidentally knocked over as she was melting wax to seal locks of her children's hair. A widower once again, never to remarry, Longfellow continued to raise the children – the oldest was fourteen, the youngest five at the time of the tragedy – and, perhaps to drown his grief, continued to write: lyric poems, the narrative poems collected in Tales of a Wayside Inn, verse dramas, and his landmark three-volume translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. His impressive output never slowing down, in the last decade of his life Longfellow published five new collections of poems, as well as assorted other writings. By the time he died, aged 75, in March 1882, at his home in Cambridge, he had become a national elder, a white-bearded eminence whose Jove-like image was widely circulated in lithographs and photographs.

Sarah Orne Jewett captured something of the importance of Longfellow in the national imagination when she wrote in eulogy, "It is a grander thing than we can wholly grasp, that life of his, a wonderful life . . . . This world could hardly ask any more from him: he has done so much for it, and the news of his death takes away from most people nothing of his life. His work stands like a great cathedral in which the world may worship and be taught to pray, long after its tired architect goes home to rest."

Jewett could refer so knowingly to "[t]hat life of his, a wonderful life" because its basic outlines were a point of public fascination, an indispensable part of the Longfellow legend. The patrician ancestry, the European travels, the early loss of his first wife, the Harvard professorship, the long courtship of Fanny Appleton, the five children, the historic old house in which they peaceably lived, the steadily mounting fame – these items hardly bore repeating in the popular press, so great was Longfellow's celebrity, and yet were repeated nonetheless. Craigie House (named for a former owner, Andrew Craigie, apothecary general under George Washington during the American Revolution) became a focal point of Longfellow's fame, which rested to some large extent on his life and even his lifestyle.

This was a period when private life and the private home took on new public importance, and Longfellow's prestige and authority as a kind of national father figure could seem all the greater by dint of his owning such a place.

The house itself, an imposing late-Georgian mansion painted a proper yellow with white trim and black shutters, bespoke affluence, dignity, and tradition. Early in the Revolutionary War it had served as Washington's military headquarters, and hence came down to Longfellow as a patriotic treasure; images of it were frequently reproduced in editions of Longfellow's works, as well as in pictorial magazines, postcards, advertisements, and such other popular media of the times as stereopticon cards. No other author's home, with the possible exception of Washington Irving's Sunnyside, could rival Craigie House in fame. With the emergence of the Colonial Revival movement in American architecture, many replica Craigie Houses appeared around the country— the first built in 1883 in Maine, the second in 1887 outside Chicago.

Craigie House appeared in Longfellow's poetry too, where it comes across as a place of familial contentment. In poems like "To a Child" and "Children," Longfellow seemed to invite readers into his home, opening the door (just a crack!) onto his family life. Such glimpses gave readers the illusion that they knew the illustrious Professor Longfellow in his intimate domestic moments. In "The Children's Hour," for instance, Longfellow imagines his well-behaved daughters, "Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra, / And Edith with golden hair," granted leave to come into his famous study to play with him at the end of his work day. The father's affection is palpable.

Longfellow earned the love and respect, the tenderness and reverence of his readers, then, not just as a poet but as a model husband and father, a father figure, with a privileged home life that could be glimpsed, at times, in his writing. The success of this self-representation may be judged from an 1880 letter written by the novelist Henry James to his mother; James, in London, wrote of a British lord who one day over lunch came out with the thought that "his ideal of the happy life was that of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 'living like Longfellow.'"

Longfellow's reputation grew so large that the reputation itself became a legend, subject to all the falsehoods of the legendary. Contrary to the popular wisdom that Longfellow was almost unanimously adored in the nineteenth-century, with a few grumpy exceptions like Edgar Allan Poe and Margaret Fuller, the truth is that he was always controversial, always contested. Reviewers and editors in the newspapers and magazines took sides, often not merely on literary but on ideological grounds.

The questions that concerned the critics—was Longfellow original or derivative, was he "American" enough or too European, was he "in touch" or was he too cloistered, were his metrical choices fitting? – masked deeper rifts in the country over regional influence, the ascendancy of bourgeois manners, the moral responsibilities of art and artists, and the distribution of cultural power. At the beginning of his career, for instance, Longfellow signified to many readers a welcome relaxation of the famously severe New England outlook, while for others he introduced an unwelcome note of European cosmopolitanism. By his career's end, in Victorian America, he seemed to many a stable, authoritative bulwark against accelerating change, while for others he was a staid emblem of an outmoded era.

While the critics were battling it out, the public took Longfellow into their hearts. To his middleclass readers Longfellow meant not only social prestige, intellectual distinction, and moral authority, but the three together filtered through a noble but at the same time somehow approachable life, and contributing to a radiant personal aura inseparable from his poems. When the best-selling anthologist Thomas Bulfinch, for instance, wrote to Longfellow in 1855 seeking permission to dedicate his Age of Fable to him "as a sort of guarantee to the public that nothing worthless or mischievous is offered to them," he was paying homage to the way Longfellow had become not just an author but an icon, embodying impeccable honor and uprightness.

Similarly, the writer Mary Austin, growing up on the prairies of Illinois, recalled later that her parents treasured their volume of Longfellow's poetry for "the notion of mannerliness, of the gesture they missed and meant on behalf of their children, to resume"; for these transplanted New Englanders who had settled in the West, Longfellow represented a sought-after ideal of civility and civilization. Still, there were those who interpreted Longfellow more darkly: the South, especially in the years before the Civil War, tended to see in Longfellow an example of New England snobbery and hypocrisy. But even so, a "Longfellow Debating Society" was established in Clarksville, Tennessee in 1861, and a "Longfellow Dramatic Association" was founded in Baltimore in 1865.

Other such Longfellow-inspired literary organizations proliferated in the decades following the Civil War, in such far-flung places as Cumberland County, Kentucky; Wheeling, West Virginia; and San Francisco. Despite (or perhaps as a result of) such expressions of Longfellow's sanctioning authority, he increasingly seemed a symbol of an oppressive cultural conservatism. The American poet Sidney Lanier left upon his death in 1885 numerous fragments and sketches for poems, one of which reads in its entirety, "Do you think the 19th century is past? It is but two years since Boston burnt me for witchcraft. I wrote a poem which was not orthodox: that is, not like Mr. Longfellow's."

The rise of Modernist poets and theorists like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound in the first decades of the twentieth century finally did Longfellow in. The country had changed and so had its literary aesthetics, and Longfellow now seemed naive, sentimental, and out of touch with the hard facts of life. Opening a new chapter in his meta-life as a symbol, in the twentieth century Longfellow came to seem, in fact, not just an author whose star had waned but the very embodiment of facile, flaccid nineteenth-century poetizing; his poetry was a disaster, in this view, and his former popularity an embarrassment. Within the space of a couple decades, that is, Longfellow had gone from one of the most lauded poets who ever lived to one of the most disparaged. Suddenly now he seemed to stand for everything wrong with nineteenth-century American genteel poetry and "respectable" culture. Such a reversal in reputation, in retrospect, may be seen as yet further evidence of Longfellow's immense purity and power as a symbol, with a constantly evolving value and meaning, as if Longfellow himself and his poetry were peculiarly open to widely divergent cultural interpretation and reinterpretation.

After decades of relative neglect, a new reinterpretation of Longfellow is currently taking place among poets, critics, and the general public. It seems especially noteworthy that among Longfellow's recent defenders are poets like Howard Nemerov, Dana Gioia, John Hollander, and J.D. McClatchey. McClatchey's Library of America edition of Longfellow, published in 2000, suggests that Longfellow has the power to attract a new generation of readers. Literary critics, too, have been taking a new look at Longfellow in his social and historical context, finding ways to rescue his poetry from the critical oblivion in which it languished for much of the twentieth century. Longfellow is now the subject of scholarly articles, biographies, and even historical novels, and such activity – if history is any guide – betokens the arrival of yet another phase in Longfellow's always contested fame.

Frances “Fanny” Elizabeth Appleton was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on 6 October 1817, the fourth child of Nathan Appleton (1779-1861) and Maria Theresa Gold Appleton (1786-1833). Her father was a prosperous merchant, manufacturer, and congressman who was among the founders of the city of Lowell, Massachusetts, and was a leader in the Industrial Revolution. Appleton had a privileged childhood, growing up in her parents’ elegant townhouse at 39 Beacon Street in the midst of fashionable Boston society. She had a close relationship with her older siblings – Tom (b. 1812), Mary (b. 1813), and Charles (b. 1815) – reflected in their lifelong correspondence when apart.

As a child, Appleton was educated at several schools, most notably those of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and George Barrell Emerson in Boston. In addition to grammar, geography, and arithmetic, she studied history, French, and Latin. She studied drawing with Francis Graeter and N. Vautin and took dancing lessons at Papanti’s Hall. As a young woman, her wide reading included Shakespeare, Shelley, Coleridge, Fenelon, Goethe, and Mary Wollestonecraft.

Appleton experienced a series of losses as a young woman, beginning with the death of her seven-month-old brother George William Appleton in 1827. Consumption, or tuberculosis, took a heavy toll on her family: Fanny’s mother Maria Theresa Appleton died in 1833, followed by her older brother Charles Sedgewick Appleton in 1835, and her cousin William Sullivan Appleton in 1836.

After the death of his son Charles, Nathan Appleton took his family on a “Grand Tour” of Europe which lasted over a year and a half. The travelling party was made up of Nathan Appleton’s children – Thomas (23), Mary (22), and Fanny (19) – and two of their cousins, William Sullivan Appleton (20) and Isaac Appleton Jewett (26). They spent several months in Paris and then traveled to Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Holland, and Britain. Appleton documented her European experiences in six manuscript journals, describing museum visits, Parisian opera, and presentations to royalty.

In Florence in the spring of 1836, she posed for a marble bust by Lorenzo Bartolini, while he entertained her with anecdotes of other sitters and philosophy of art. Mary and Fanny Appleton had their portrait painted by Jean Baptiste Isabey in a watercolor miniature, which they visited on exhibit at the Louvre, where it had “a conspicuous place at the entrance.”

While in Switzerland, the Appletons met a young Harvard professor and author, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow . He traveled with the Appleton party from Thun to Schaffhausen. Longfellow, Mary, and Fanny Appleton passed the time taking walks, discussing literature, and studying German. By early 1837, Longfellow’s attention to Appleton was obvious. Her aunt wrote her from Boston, “I am sure his company must have been missed when he left you in Switzerland He is my beau Ideal For a husband!” On the Appletons’ return from Europe, Longfellow continued courting her with poetry, writing and sending her “Flowers” along with a bouquet in October 1837. Longfellow’s efforts had little success; as he wrote to a friend, “she lends no favorable ear to my passion and for my love gives me only friendship. Good friends are we – but she says she loves me not.”

1839 marked a year of transitions for the Appleton family. Nathan Appleton remarried in January; Harriot Sumner Appleton was only fifteen years older than her new stepdaughter Fanny. Fanny and Mary Appleton spent the summer living independently in Stockbridge near property their father had purchased for them. In July, Henry Longfellow published Hyperion: A Romance . In December, Mary Appleton married Scotsman Robert James Mackintosh, leaving Fanny feeling abandoned at home with her father and stepmother, now anticipating the birth of their first child.

Hyperion , meant as a grand romantic gesture, somewhat backfired for Longfellow when Appleton received it as a public humiliation. The novel featured Longfellow and Appleton thinly disguised as the main characters, Paul Fleming and Mary Ashburton. Appleton recognized herself in the book, and reported to a friend:

The heroine is wooed (like some persons I know have been) by the reading of German ballads in her unwilling ears & the result is equally natural in both cases! The adventures have not the same zest of novelty to us as to other people – as we have had the misfortune to have been behind the scenes - & seen the decorations without the advantages of foot-lights.

She assessed the book overall as “desultory, objectless, a thing of shreds and patches like the Author's mind.” After her rejection, Henry Longfellow attempted to put his passion behind him, telling a friend, “We now move wholly in separate orbs, and hardly see each others faces once a year.… For though I feel deeply what it is not to have gained the love of such a woman, -- I have long ceased to think of it.” This state of affairs persisted for several years, each moving in largely separate social circles, and each traveling to England for extended periods.

Their reconciliation in 1843 was sudden and mysterious. They met at a party at the Nortons’ on April 13th and “began once more to draw near unto each other,” and by May 10th, Appleton sent a note, telling Longfellow “I cannot write— oh come & let me tell thee how wholly I am thine.” Longfellow walked to Appleton’s Beacon Street home, where they became engaged. Understandably, this reversal surprised their family, friends, and Boston society. “This news will astonish you doubtless,” Fanny told an aunt, “but it is nevertheless true – to me a true dream… My heart has always been made of tenderer stuff than anybody believed.” The couple was married on 13 July 1843 in the front parlor of the Appleton home at 39 Beacon Street. Fanny wore a white muslin dress, with a veil and orange blossoms in her hair.

As a wedding present for his daughter and new son-in-law, Nathan Appleton purchased the Craigie House at 105 Brattle Street in Cambridge. Henry Longfellow had rented rooms there from Elizabeth Craigie while a professor of modern languages at Harvard. The home, well-known even then as George Washington's headquarters during the early days of the American Revolution, would be their residence for the rest of their lives.

The Longfellows’ relationship was rooted in intellectual pursuits. Fanny Longfellow acted as her husband’s scribe while he struggled with his eyesight. She often read aloud for the family, ranging from current literature to religious works to classics. Longfellow claimed to have inspired imagery in several of her husband’s poems, notably “The Arsenal at Springfield” (1844) and “The Old Clock on the Stairs” (1845). Writing to her mother-in-law, she noted,” I am a pretty active spur upon his Pegasus.” She was also the muse for his only love poem, “The Evening Star” (1845).

The couple had six children: Charles Appleton (1844-1893), Ernest Wadsworth (1845-1921), Fanny (1847-1848), Alice Mary (1850-1928), Edith (1853-1915), and Anne Allegra (1855-1934). The birth of Fanny in 1847 was an historic one, since it reportedly marked the first time in the western hemisphere that ether was used to ease the pain of childbirth. Motherhood became the defining role of Longfellow’s adult life. Her personal journal was replaced by the “Chronicles of the Children of Castle Craigie,” in which she recorded anecdotes and milestones of her young children. Fanny Longfellow was her children’s first teacher, teaching geography, reading, and religious lessons. In 1856 she wryly noted, “I feel really growing to be a venerable Banyan tree with all these young shoots spring up round me & they seem to root me more & more to one spot.” Longfellow carried on an extensive correspondence, which reflects her active interests in literature, art, travel, and national and international politics. She served as the primary family correspondent during her married life, exchanging letters full of family and Boston news with her mother- and sister-in-law in Portland, Maine and her sister in England and the West Indies.

On the afternoon of 9 July 1861, Longfellow suffered severe burns due to an accidental fire. Her husband attempted to extinguish the flames, but she died of her injuries the next morning. He sustained serious burns, and was unable to attend her funeral on 13 July 1861 – their eighteenth wedding anniversary. She was laid to rest in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. A month after his wife’s death, Henry Longfellow wrote that “she never came into a room where I was without my heart beating quicker, nor went out without my feeling that something of the light went with her.” Her death affected his work; for several years his focus turned to a translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy rather than composing original poetry. An unpublished sonnet, “The Cross of Snow,” written eighteen years after his wife’s death speaks to the void she left behind:

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.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere, On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five; Hardly a man is now alive Who remembers that famous day and year.

The opening lines of "Paul Revere’s Ride" are perhaps the best-known words today of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poem, with its galloping measure and steady rhyme, take the reader through Paul Revere’s urgent ride on the eve of the battle of Lexington and Concord. When it was published in Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863), the poem became "The Landlord’s Tale," with the proprietor of the old inn in Sudbury telling the local history.

"Paul Revere's Ride," 1923-1949, Research, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Poems and Prose, in the H.W.L. Dana Papers (LONG 17314)

Longfellow’s poem was inspired by local places and historic events, though he took significant poetic license with the historic facts. The triggering event seems to have been a tour of Boston on 5 April 1860, which he recorded in his journal:

Go with [George] Sumner to Mr. Having, of the North End, who acts as our guide to the "Little Britian" of Boston. Go to the Copp's Hill burial ground and see the tomb of Cotton Mather, his father and his son; then to the old North Church, which looks like a parish church in London. Climb the tower to the Chime of Bells, now the home of innumerable pigeons. From this tower were hung the lanterns as a signal that the British troops had left Boston for Concord.

Longfellow began writing the poem the next day. The signal lanterns were immortalized in his phrase, "One, if by land, and two, if by sea." He used his trip up the Old North Church tower to paint a vivid picture of Revere’s friend preparing to hold up the lanterns:

Then he climbed the tower of the Old North Church, By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread, To the belfry-chamber overhead, And startled the pigeons from their perch On the sombre rafters, that round him made Masses and moving shapes of shade

Longfellow continued work on the poem over the next several months – noting particularly writing a few lines on April 19, "this being the day of that achievement." The poem was published in the Boston Evening Transcript and Atlantic Monthly in December 1860; three years later it was included in Longfellow’s book Tales of a Wayside Inn .

Though based on historic events, the poem should be read as a myth or tale, not as a historical account. Many historians have dissected the poem since 1860 and compared it to Revere's account of the ride in his own words and other historic evidence. Of the several inaccuracies, three stand out:

The omission of other riders was a particularly sore point for some. Henry Ware Holland, a descendant of William Dawes, self-published a history in 1878 titled William Dawes and His Ride with Paul Revere . He sent a copy to Longfellow, who wryly remarked that it was "a very handsome book… in which he convicts me of high historic crimes and misdemeanors."

Longfellow owned the 1832 New England Magazine featuring a biography of Paul Revere with an account of his ride, and was able to provide it as a reference to a correspondent in 1877. It is less certain whether he had read Revere's account before writing the poem. The fact that one of Longfellow's poems was published in the same 1832 New England Magazine presents circumstantial evidence for his earlier awareness. Looking at his other historically-based works, including Evangeline and The New England Tragedies , it fits his method to have conducted extensive research in preparation, but not be bound to the historic truth when shaping his message.

Longfellow wrote "Paul Revere's Ride" in 1860, in the midst of a national crisis that would break out into war a year later. He was a pacifist and an abolitionist, though quiet compared to his friend Senator Charles Sumner. In earlier decades, he had used his poetry to speak out against slavery in seven Poems on Slavery (1842), against war in "The Arsenal at Springfield" (1845), and for the strength of the union in "The Building of the Ship" (1850).

Taking poetic license, Longfellow turned the singular character of Paul Revere into an icon of a unified patriotic past with resonance in the current political moment:

So through the night rode Paul Revere; And so through the night went his cry of alarm To every Middlesex village and farm,-- A cry of defiance and not of fear, A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door, And a word that shall echo forevermore! For, borne on the night-wind of the Past, Through all our history, to the last, In the hour of darkness and peril and need, The people will waken and listen to hear The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed, And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

In March 1861, only three months after the poem's publication, Abraham Lincoln made a similar appeal in his inaugural address: "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

Because of Longfellow’s portrayal, Paul Revere and his ride became icons of patriotism and the American Revolution. Even Longfellow's critic Holland admitted that the scene of Revere waiting for the signal lights was "one of the finest in our colonial annals," though he added that it "is pure fiction."

The fame from the poem led to the preservation of the Paul Revere House in 1901 and the erection of an equestrian statue of Revere in the shadow of the Old North Church . In 1967, Martin Luther King summoned Longfellow’s iconic messenger, saying, "We still need some Paul Revere of conscience to alert every hamlet and every village of America that revolution is still at hand." Thus, the "midnight message" of Paul Revere and Henry Longfellow echoes to this day.

Before beginning his career as a respected college professor, and long before he became “America’s poet,” Longfellow traveled extensively in Europe. Through the languages and literature he absorbed, he came to feel that any nation’s identity should be one with its written word. This fueled his hope for a distinct national literature for the United States, still a relatively young nation seeking cultural independence from its estranged parent country. Longfellow was not alone in this desire. From 1795 until the publication of Hiawatha in 1855, at least nineteen American epic poems were published. 1 The collective goal was to fortify America’s identity through the establishment of a national mythology, comprised of the grand heroes and events inherent to epic poetry. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a friend of Longfellow’s, expressed eagerness to write about America with a local focus, shunning descriptions of what could only be found overseas. 2 These same principles informed Longfellow’s choice of a Native American subject matter when he endeavored to create a national epic. In 1901, Longfellow’s daughter, Alice, reflected that, “an interest in the Indians had long been felt by Mr. Longfellow, and in his early prose sketches, tales about the Indians had a place.” 3 Six years before writing, Longfellow made the acquaintance of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, an Ojibwe academic, advocate and writer, who would provide some insight for the future work. Seemingly, it was an undertaking Longfellow pondered for a long time, wanting to do it justice. He wrote in his journal, “I pored over [Henry] Schoolcraft’s writings for nearly three years before I resolved to appropriate something of them to my own use.…” While writing, Longfellow wrote in his journal, “I must put a live, beating heart into it [the poem]." While his earnest cross-cultural interest was undoubtable, it must be mentioned that Longfellow likely sensed the popular desire for a particular factor in a national epic: that it could grant Americans a link to the ancient history of the land they lived on even if his predominantly white audience had dubious claims to this heritage. As Europe looked back to the Ancient Greeks and Romans for a sense of distinction, America could look back to ancient Native American stories in the same way. Today, however, we recognize the unfairness inherent in that idea.

The most popular and contemporary literary critiques of The Song of Hiawatha were focused on its poetic meter (tetrameter, or eight syllables in each line), and the accusation that some of its myths were lifted from a Finnish epic, The Kalevala . To the assertions that he used tetrameter in imitation of The Kalevala , Longfellow defended his decision and stated that the style was not exclusively Finnish. In light of his reliance on scholar Henry Schoolcraft, it is of little surprise that Longfellow would choose the form. In the introduction to one of his own poems, Schoolcraft suggested, “The measure (tetrameter) is thought to be not ill-adapted to the Indian mode of enunciation. Nothing is more characteristic of their harangues (aggressive lectures) and public speeches.” 4 It has, in fact, been determined that the majority of Native American narrative poems from 1790 to 1849 contained mostly tetrameter. 5 Longfellow sidestepped the claims that some of the legends in Hiawatha were stolen from The Kalevala . To Longfellow, what actually mattered were the similarities between his epic poem and the work of his scholarly informant, Schoolcraft. Scholars have indeed tracked down a Schoolcraft reference for almost every detail the poem paints. 6 But while Longfellow may have been true to his main source, there are issues to be found with Schoolcraft. Schoolcraft’s interactions with the Ojibwe began when he was appointed as an “Indian agent,” or American government delegate to Native American tribes. He learned the Ojibwe language and culture from his wife, Jane, and her Ojibwe mother, Susan (Ozhaguscodaywayquay). Although Schoolcraft lived among various Native American tribes for almost twenty-four years, 7 he does not seem to have taken the most open-eyed approach when it cames to the accuracy of what he recorded. He “had returned with many volumes of undigested material, material that was sometimes inaccurate but always rich with the poetic lore of the tribal mythologies.” 8 It is understandable that Longfellow would have turned to a source whose work highlighted the culturally-rich literature he sought inspiration from, and who could boast of abundant firsthand experience. Nevertheless, Schoolcraft’s inaccuracies are permanently etched into Longfellow’s most ambitious poem.

However, not all the divergences between Hiawatha and Ojibwe legend can be chalked up to Schoolcraft. Some plot points were wholly invented by Longfellow. One prominent example is the romance between Hiawatha and Minnehaha. Not only was there no such point in Schoolcraft, nor indeed in any Anishinaabe legends, but it was at odds with the structure of Anishinaabe familial life. Anishinaabe families relied on commonly recognized relationships, akin to common-law marriages, rather than formal, licensed marriages. This was regularly a cause of angst for white Americans seeking to Anglicize Native American groups, whether they were official government “Indian” offices or missionaries. The formal wooing and wedding plot in Hiawatha was a thoroughly European story dressed in the costumes of Native Americans.

Another mistake of Longfellow’s concerns the central character, Hiawatha. Longfellow noted in his journal in June of 1854 that he began “Manabozho's first adventure.” 9 Manabozho, or Nanabozho, a trickster spirit who was a cultural hero in Ojibwe legend, was Longfellow’s basis for his hero. By the very next day, though, Longfellow wrote that he was working on “’Manflbozho;’ [sic] or, as I think I shall call it, ‘Hiawatha,’-- that being another name for the same Manito.” 10 This is a mistake. Hiawatha was not another name for the Ojibwe trickster, but rather a 16th century Iroquois leader, renowned in his own right. The true Hiawatha, who aided peace and cooperation among the Iroquois tribes, has had his identity overshadowed by the renown of Longfellow’s poem. Longfellow’s editorial discretion goes beyond his naming mix-up. Ojibwe writer and academic Gerald Vizenor explains that Manabozho “represents a spiritual balance in a comic drama rather than the romantic elimination of human contradictions and evil." Longfellow sanitized the essential “trickster” nature of Manabozho, transforming him into an “isolated and sentimental tragic hero” rather than the complex figure of Ojibwe legend. 11

This is perhaps most evident in the closing of the poem. Hiawatha welcomes the white missionaries who arrive, and urges his people not only to welcome them, but to follow their lead:

Listen to their words of wisdom, Listen to the truth they tell you, For the Master of Life has sent them From the land of light and morning!

This scene is not from Schoolcraft, and instead is entirely Longfellow’s creation. By attaching the Anishinaabe legends to the arrival of white settlers, Longfellow built a seamless lineage connecting his American cultural hero to the expansion of white settlements in the country.

The Song of Hiawatha was an instant success for Longfellow, becoming one of his most successful published works and arguably one of the most influential poems of the century. This was an era of the “vanishing Indian” stereotype – the idea that Native Americans would inevitably disappear where legislation and education were actively eradicating Indigenous culture. However, Hiawatha sparked widespread interest in Indigenous culture. Shortly after the publication of Hiawatha , numerous artists began to create music, sculptures, lithographs, and more inspired by Longfellow’s story, depicting Indigenous people culture. Most of these creative works were ultimately very European in nature, but still signify the cultural significance that Hiawatha had on the general public.

Shortly after the publication of Hiawatha, the composer Robert August Stoepel worked directly with Longfellow to produce Hiawatha: A Romantic Symphony . In his journal, Longfellow wrote that the music was, “beautiful and striking; particularly the wilder parts.” From 1898-1900, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor composed the three-part cantata, Hiawatha’s Wedding, The Death of Minnehaha, and Hiawatha’s Departure . This interest in Hiawatha-inspired music continued into the 20th century and into popular music as well with Neil Moret’s “Hiawatha" published in 1901. While composed in a manner traditional to European customs, features of Hiawatha had a significant impact on music, and future generations would continue to use this as a foundation to continue experimenting with Indigenous influence. 12

Hiawatha was also a significant inspiration for the fine arts. One notable collection is the sculptures created by Edmonia Lewis , a woman of Black and Indigenous descent who spoke of her mother being Ojibwe. Lewis’s works, like others, were created in a European, neoclassical style. She created two busts (one of Hiawatha and one of Minnehaha) and three other sculptures depicting scenes from the poem. In 1872 the famed sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens created Hiawatha, a full-body sculpture of Hiawatha thinking in the forest. Other artists who created paintings inspired by Hiawatha include Thomas Eakins, Thomas Moran, and Albert Bierstadt. Furthermore, Currier & Ives, known for their picturesque wintery scenes, also created and sold lithographs depicting scenes from Hiawatha despite it being uncommon for them to sell scenes from literature. 13

When examining the impact that the poem has had on Native Americans as a whole, it is important to look at both the past and the present, the positive and the negative. Longfellow wrote in his journal, “I have at length hit upon a plan for a poem on the American Indians... It is to weave together their beautiful traditions into a whole.” In another statement, he again showed reverence, but it was accompanied by acceptance of the prevailing narrative of a dying Native American culture. For him, it was a hallowed heritage:

When our native Indians, who are fast-perishing from the earth, shall have left forever the borders of our wide lakes... the dim light of tradition will rest upon those places, which have seen the glory of their battles, and heard the voice of their eloquence;---and our land will become, indeed, a classic ground. 14

This relegation to the past served the poem’s main purpose: creating a classic American hero. But while the Hiawatha of the poem became a beloved character for nineteenth century white Americans, he also encourages his people to embrace the white missionaries’ message just before he leaves to travel west at the end of the poem.

Despite this problematic message, the culture surrounding native reenactments of The Song of Hiawatha enabled the Anishinaabe to reclaim their customs represented in the poem and benefit financially from it. While adaptations by white casts were popular for decades after publication, the 1880s brought all-Native casts onto the scene. In 1899, Ketegaunseebee Anishinaabe actors in Ontario, Canada were funded by the Canadian Pacific Railroad to put on a Hiawatha performance that began a tradition of annual performances (pageants). In 1901, the surviving Longfellow children were invited to Ontario to experience the Hiawatha pageant inspired by their father’s creation. The Longfellows received an invitation written on birch bark inscribed with the following:

LADIES: We loved your father. The memory of our people will never die as long as your father’s song lives, and that will live forever. Will you and your husbands and Miss Longfellow come and see us and stay in our royal wigwams on an island in Hiawatha’s playground, in the land of the Ojibways? We want you to see us live over again the life of Hiawatha in his own country.

Despite the Railroad’s intention to profit off of Indigenous efforts, these pageants provided a unique opportunity for the Anishinaabe people to literally rewrite The Song of Hiawatha to better represent their culture and traditions. For the Ketegaunseebee Anishinaabe, they published their script and titled it, Hiawatha, or Nanabozho: An Ojibway Indian Play , to pay homage to the original character that inspired Longfellow’s Hiawatha. 16 In addition, performing these pageants often allowed Anishinaabe actors to skirt government regulations surrounding their drumming and singing, serving as an important cultural connector within Anishinaabe communities. Across different Anishinaabe peoples, the practice also boosted local Indigenous economies. The prevalence of these pageants has waned in recent years.

While Hiawatha pageants proved to have a positive impact on the Ojibwe people, the “vanishing Indian” stereotype demonstrated at the end of The Song of Hiawatha was utilized by American society to justify the eradication of Indigenous culture. No place demonstrated this aspect of Hiawatha's legacy more obviously than Indian boarding schools where "playing Indian" in school plays was among the methods of assimilation utilized to strip young Native Americans of their culture. Boarding schools would put on plays such as “Hiawatha” or “Pocahontas,” or stories created by staff, that demonstrated Indigenous people supporting assimilation. 17

Furthermore, the role of Indian boarding schools in making the “vanishing Indian” stereotype a reality goes beyond Hiawatha in the Longfellow family’s history. Alice Longfellow actively contributed funds to the Indian School at Hampton Institute which educated Native American youth. Alice would receive letters from the youth enrolled at the school, often writing about their lives and their thoughts on Indian schools and Anglicization. Many students spoke highly of receiving an education, however, others, such as Pierrepont Alford, spoke of the difficulties. Once, Alford wrote to Alice about his father, saying that “when he [Thomas Alford] first left Hampton. The Indians did not have any thing to do with him. They said that he was not loyal to the tribe.” The letters Alice received reflect the complex legacy of institutions like the Indian School at Hampton Institute and the Longfellows' patronage to them.

Today, The Song of Hiawatha is valuable for both its strengths and weaknesses. There has been much valid criticism over the fact that the poem contributed to the idea that Native American culture would, and should, soon vanish. Instead, Indigenous cultures endure and thrive. At the same time, Longfellow created the first major piece of popular culture in which Native Americans were portrayed in a heroic light, rather than a patronizing or outright negative one. At least one hundred places names inspired by the poem are in the languages of Algonquian and Siouan, 18 a small form of preservation. Most contemporary critique and praise for the poem stems from Longfellow’s success at his goal of assimilating Native American culture into a great American epic. Longfellow’s attempts to include Anishinaabe legend in American literary canon was an attempt at inclusivity and one that allowed Anishinaabe peoples to preserve and celebrate their culture, while reaping economic benefits from pageants. On the other hand, Longfellow’s poem played directly into the attempts of many missionaries and government Indian agents to assimilate Native American people, at the expense of their own cultural practices and communities. Reading this poem today, modern readers must to be wary of stereotypes; Hiawatha demonstrates the necessity of involving people in representing their own cultures in literature, art, and popular culture.

Rather than placing The Song of Hiawatha into a single binary category of “good” or “bad,” the poem merits a nuanced evaluation mirroring the Anishinaabe trickster Manabozho: “holding both good and bad, sacred and profane, mischief and honor, in tension.” 19

The full text of The Song of Hiawatha is available on the Maine Historical Society's Longfellow poetry database.

Although known primarily as a poet and scholar, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) was also an abolitionist who used his poetry, and his money, to further the cause of the anti-slavery movement in the mid-nineteenth century.

In 1842 Longfellow wrote Poems on Slavery to help draw attention to the cruel and inhumane nature of slavery. The publication of these poems helped establish Longfellow as a known figure in the abolitionist cause.

Longfellow also maintained an extensive network of contacts with prominent abolitionists. Many of these people knew Longfellow personally, were his friends, and often visited his house at 105 Brattle Street in Cambridge. Others he knew through correspondence. He even helped support the abolitionist cause financially through contributions to organizations and individuals.

The archives at Longfellow House - Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site hold many items related to the issues of slavery and abolition in the United States. Collected or created by different Longfellow family members, these items help paint a picture of the Longfellow family's perceptions of slavery and their roles as supporters of abolitionism.

Samuel Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine on 18 June 1819. The youngest child of lawyer and Congressman Stephen Longfellow and his wife Zilpah Wadsworth Longfellow, Samuel was educated at the Portland Academy, which his elder brothers and sisters attended, and his childhood letters and journal show a precocious aptitude for literature, art, and foreign languages.

Samuel went to Harvard College, where older brother Henry was teaching. He took Henry’s German class translating Faust as well as core courses like Rhetoric and Mathematics. His other languages included French and Italian.

After a short stint teaching at a small home school near Elkridge, Maryland, Samuel entered the Harvard Divinity School in 1839, an epicenter for the Transcendental movement that would have a deep impact upon his approach to religion. During a break from his studies at Harvard, he served as a tutor to the children of American Consul Charles Dabney on the island of Fayal in the Azores from 1843 to 1844.

Upon his return to the U.S., Longfellow resumed his divinity studies and made his home from 1845 to the beginning of 1847 with his brother Henry, Henry’s wife Fanny, and their growing family at the Craigie House on Brattle Street.

Samuel’s first position as a clergyman was at West Cambridge (now Arlington) for three months, followed by positions in Fall River, Massachusetts, and then in 1853 in Brooklyn, New York. Initially he appreciated the intellectual sympathy of his Brooklyn parishioners who encouraged him in his “free” religious thought that de-emphasized the role of formal religion. He did not hide his abolitionist views, but his sermons portraying John Brown as a courageous martyr after the Harper’s Ferry raid drew dissent. Samuel was also a pacifist, and a supporter of women’s rights. He left his position in Brooklyn in 1860 to travel again to Europe.

Longfellow spent much of the 1860s and 1870s giving sermons at various New England parishes while the regular clergyman was away. His brother Henry’s house in Cambridge served as his home base. The Quaker-leaning parish of Germantown, Pennsylvania welcomed Samuel as their pastor in 1878. He reluctantly left his duties there in 1882 to start the biography of his late brother Henry. Much of the biography, The Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow , is quoted from the journals and correspondence, which were stored in Henry’s study. Samuel drew together reminiscences and additional excerpts for Final Memorials published in 1887, and both works were arranged to form the three-volume Life .

Longfellow, both in cooperation with his colleague Samuel Johnson and independently, published several books of hymns, many of which were adaptations of others' work. Among these were A Book of Hymns for Public and Private Devotion , Vespers , and Hymns of the Spirit .

While on a visit to Portland, Samuel fell ill and was admitted to the Maine General Hospital. He died on October 3, 1892.

Alice Mary Longfellow was born 22 September 1850, the fourth child and eldest surviving daughter of Henry Wadsworth and Frances Appleton Longfellow. Immortalized as "Grave Alice" in her father's poem "The Children's Hour," she led a life characterized by a love of travel and a strong interest in education and American history.

As a child, Alice Longfellow attended Miss C. S. Lyman's School, and later Professor Williston's School. In 1878, she served on a committee to consider the establishment of classes for women taught by Harvard professors. The Harvard Annex, later named the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women, formed in 1879 and Alice entered with the first class as a special student. An early commencement of the Society, eventually to become Radcliffe College, was held in the Craigie House library. Alice Longfellow's affiliation with the school continued throughout her life. She attended classes there until 1890, with a year long interlude spent at Newnham College in Cambridge, England, in 1883-1884. Alice functioned as a Radcliffe administrator by serving on the executive committee, the Board of Trustees, and as treasurer from 1883 to 1891.

Miss Longfellow's concern for education led to charitable and volunteer activities. Alice was a member of the Cambridge School Committee from 1887 to 1892. She provided scholarship funds for Black and Indigenous students at Hampton and Tuskegee Institutes . She also donated money and time to schools for the blind.

Alice traveled extensively throughout her life. She spent many summers camping and boating in Maine with family and friends. Her many European trips began with a grand tour taken by the extended Longfellow family in 1868 and 1869. Miss Longfellow returned often to Europe and was particularly fond of France and Italy. Received by Benito Mussolini in 1927, Alice presented him with a copy of her father's translation of Dante's The Divine Comedy . In 1900, Alice traveled to Ontario, Canada and was made an honorary member of the Ojibway Indian tribe.

Alice's interest in American history was perhaps sparked by the history of her own home, for Craigie House had served as headquarters for General George Washington from July 1775 to April 1776. Miss Longfellow was active in preservation efforts at Mount Vernon and served as Massachusetts vice-regent of the Mount Vernon Ladies Association for forty-eight years. She was well versed in the history of Craigie House, and often read a paper she had written on the subject to local historical societies.

Alice lived her entire life in Craigie House, where she was born. She passed away in 1928.

Born in 1844, "Charley" Longfellow was the beloved first child of Henry and Fanny Longfellow . As a young child he was keenly interested in the comings and goings on Brattle Street and his mother observed "[he] promises to be a man of action." From the age of 18 he spent most of his life traveling in distant places. He and his brother Ernest attended Miss Jennison's school at the corner of Garden and Mason Streets and both enjoyed drawing. His journals from his early travels include drawings he made to record his impressions.

Always a risk taker, Charley lost his left thumb after a gun accident at the age of 11. Seven years later in 1863, he ran off to enlist as a private in the Union Army during the Civil War , and eventually received a commission as a lieutenant in a cavalry regiment. Miraculously, he survived a bout with malaria and what could have been a mortal wound in his back, which he received while on campaign in Virginia.

After his wounding, Charley's doctors recommended a change of scenery, so he turned to yachting. His 1866 voyage to England on his uncle's yacht the "Alice" set a new record for a transatlantic crossing. Yachting and boats would remain one of Charley's passions for the rest of his life. From there he traveled on to Paris, and then to Russia and back.

A large family entourage acompanied brother Ernest to Europe on his honeymoon in 1868-1869. Charley soon lost interest in completing the Grand Tour with them, and accepted an invitation to go to India. He stayed there for 15 months, traveling around northern India and the Himalayas. He returned home via the newly opened Suez Canal. His Indian experiences are documented in some of the many photograph albums he assembled.

In 1871 Charley set off for Asia on what was to be his longest sojourn abroad. Japan held a particular fascination for Charley, and he lived in the Tokyo area for almost two years, regaling friends in a remodeled samurai dwelling and enjoying local diversions such as kabuki. He was part of an exploratory expedition through the interior of Hokkaido and Honshu that was organized by the American consul. Letters home to Cambridge indicate Charley accomplished this feat with stamina and courage, along with his ever-present sense of humor. The furniture, works of art, porcelain, textiles and books he sent back to 105 Brattle Street were early contributions to what became a "Japan Craze" in the United States.

From Japan, Charley went to China and also managed to visit the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand before returning home in 1874. Thereafter his trips tended to be shorter and were interspersed with many yachting voyages. Between 1875 and 1891 he went to Cuba, Mexico, Scotland, Ireland, the Canary Islands, Madeira, Italy, North Africa, Turkey, France, the West Indies, Egypt, Scandinavia, Spain, Portugal, Wales, Colombia, Australia, and returned several times to England and Japan.

Though his journals reveal a disregard for conventional spelling and punctuation, they do reveal a deep interest in the customs and beliefs of different cultures. Unlike other gentlemen travelers of his era, Charley wanted to experience his surroundings, rather than merely observe them.

Charley led a bachelor existence that perhaps was inspired by his peripatetic uncle, Thomas Gold Appleton. Charley never built a residence on the Brattle Street land he inherited, as did his brother Ernest and sisters Edith and Anne Allegra. He maintained an apartment on Beacon Hill in Boston to which he returned between journeys. The last months of his life, before his death of pneumonia in 1893, were spent in the Brattle Street house with his sister Alice . He is buried in the family plot at Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge.

Ernest Wadsworth Longfellow was born November 23, 1845, the second son of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Frances Appleton Longfellow . Ernest, or Erny, as he was called in his youth, was regarded by his parents as the less adventurous and more even tempered of their two boys. His mother once referred to him as “an angelic little child, so gentle & good always.” In addition to his older brother Charles , Ernest had three younger sisters, Alice , Edith , and Anne Allegra .

Having demonstrated some skill in mathematics and mechanical drawing, Ernest professed an interest in engineering and hoped to gain appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point. When this proved unsuccessful, he entered the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard. At this time, his brother Charles was fighting in the Civil War as a cavalryman and Ernest hoped to follow him into the army and serve as a military engineer. The war ended before Ernest graduated in 1865, and he decided upon a career as an artist instead.

Ernest traveled to London and Paris to study before opening his own studio in Boston in 1869. A year earlier, he married Harriet Spelman, an amateur artist herself, and the couple traveled to France and Italy where Ernest continued his studies with artists such as Leon Bonnat and G.P.A. Healy. A third trip to France from 1876-1878 enabled Ernest to study under Thomas Couture, after which he returned to Boston and was elected a vice-president of the Boston Art Club.

Ernest achieved some renown as a painter, being called “one of our rising young artists” by The Art Journal in July 1877. An exhibition of his work in 1876 resulted in the sale of over one hundred paintings. Many of his works of art hang in the Longfellow House, among them a portrait of his famous father painted in 1876 that the Longfellow family regarded as “the best portrait of him ever taken.”

Ernest was not dependent upon his art for income, as in 1866 he inherited a sizable fortune left for him by his mother, who died in a tragic accident when he was fifteen. For much of the remainder of his life, Ernest and his wife Hattie continued to travel abroad, wintering in New York and spending summers in Massachusetts in the north shore community of Magnolia. They did not have any children, and Ernest died in 1921 in Boston. He willed his paintings and $200,000 to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Edith Longfellow (later Dana) was born on October 22, 1853. Affectionately called “Boz,” by her sisters, the rest of the world knew her as “Edith with the golden-hair” from her father’s poem “The Children’s Hour.” As the middle daughter of Frances (Fanny) Elizabeth Appleton Longfellow and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow , she nonetheless demonstrated a strong personality with her mother writing that four-year-old Edith, “tho’ lovely as an angel, [wa]s rather obstinate & willful.” 1 After Fanny’s death in 1861, Edith shared her childhood lessons with her sisters, Alice and Anne Allegra under Hannah Davie and following her year-long trip to Europe with family in 1868-9, she studied outside the home. In 1872, when Alice left to travel in Europe, Edith assumed Alice’s duties managing the household here at 105 Brattle.

She and her father enjoyed a close relationship. They attended art and science lectures together before her marriage to Richard Henry Dana III, the son of their neighbor, the writer and abolitionist lawyer Richard Henry Dana Jr. Edith’s father mourned her absence from 105 Brattle – “Weddings leave vacant chairs as well as funerals; and she is lost to me.” 2 She, however, returned to her 105 Brattle where she gave birth to Henry’s first grandchild in 1879.

After her father’s death, she and Richard built their primary home next at 113 Brattle Street right next door to her childhood home, where her unmarried siblings still lived. Richard and Edith also built a summer home in Manchester on Dana Beach. She continued to be close with her sisters Alice and Anne Allegra , who remained her neighbors, and with her sister-in-law Elizabeth (“Lily”) Ellery Dana throughout her life. She, like them, participated in events honoring their father such as the 1914 dedication of Longfellow Park opposite 105 Brattle.

Edith was a devoted mother in raising her six children: Richard Henry IV, Henry W.L. (“Harry”) , Frances Appleton, Allston, Edmund Trowbridge (“Ned”), and Delia Farley. She also participated in civic activities, namely the Cambridge Historical Society, the Humane Society, and the Holy Ghost Hospital for Incurables. Inspired by her husband, she joined the Woman’s Auxiliary to the Civil Service Reform Society. Like much of her family, she was fascinated by history, particularly the history of her childhood home and its connection to George Washington . She marveled that here at 105 Brattle, “all day long I can walk the floors this greatest of men to us Americans trod .” 3

Her husband and family searched in vain for a cure for the cancerous tumor that eventually killed her. She died July 21, 1915 at home in Manchester.

Anne Allegra, the last child of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Frances (Fanny) Elizabeth Appleton Longfellow , was born November 8, 1855. Though her parents named her for Henry’s sister Anne Longfellow Pierce, combined with the Italian word for “happy,” she was often called “Annie.” After her mother’s death in 1861, her sisters began to affectionately call her “Pansy” derived from the Italian word for pensive ( penserosa ), a play on “Allegra” (happy). They would use this name for the rest of her life.

She was under six years of age when her mother died. Hannah Davie, the governess who took over the care of the family’s younger children in 1862, taught her as well as her sister Edith . Her father, faced with raising the girls as a single parent, took special care of the girls, and they grew exceptionally close to him: when faced with his departure to Niagara Falls in May of 1862, Annie “cries about it, and clings round my neck and begs me not to go so pathetically, that if I could I would give up the journey and stay quietly at home.” 1 As in the case of her sister Edith, she probably took classes outside the home as a teenager.

She and her sister Alice attended the Harvard Annex in 1879, the first year in its existence. Annie assisted her father with dictation in literary and legal matters during his periods of poor health until his death on March 24, 1882. In 1882 she oversaw publication of poems about horses she had compiled, In the Saddle . From 1883 to 1884, she and Alice undertook another educational adventure by studying at Cambridge University’s Newnham College, one of the first women’s colleges at England.

In 1884 she became engaged to Joseph Gilbert Thorp, Jr. during a trip to Norway with his family and Alice. Annie’s uncle, Reverend Samuel Longfellow performed their 1885 wedding ceremony which was follow by a reception at Craigie House hosted by her sister Alice. Annie and Joseph commissioned her cousin, Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow, Jr. to design their home at 115 Brattle Street, two houses down from her childhood home of 105 Brattle. The couple raised five daughters in this home: Alice Allegra, Amelia Chapman, Erica, Anne Longfellow, and Priscilla Alden.

The family spent summers at “Ravensthorp,” their home on an island off Mount Desert Island in Maine. Annie maintained a strong interest in the Craigie House and helped entertain at public events there. In 1900, Annie traveled to Ontario, Canada with her sister Alice and nephew Harry Dana as a guest of the Ojibway Indian tribe .

She and her husband “always headed every list of those to be ‘counted on’ in any movement” for the public good in Cambridge. 2 Her causes included Temperance and education for the underprivileged. Annie traveled to the Southern Educational Conferences in 1903 to 1905 with visits to African American schools.

She cared for her husband Joseph in the last years of his life until his death in 1931. An acquaintance remembers her in her last illness: “Lying in bed she still had that look of distinction, and she was so alert, filled with interest in all that concerned the world of which she was still an active member.” Annie outlived all of her siblings, passing away on 28 February 1934.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the Vassall-Craigie-Longfellow House was at the heart of an estate of 90 to 120 acres. The majority of this land was used as farmland. A 1775 map indicates a garden complex behind Colonel Vassall's house and barns, though by the end of the war little was left. Andrew Craigie had an interest in horticulture, adding greenhouses, orchards, a picturesque pond, and hundreds of trees to his estate in the early nineteenth century.

The Longfellow gardens consisted mainly of decorative flower gardens and, at the north of the property, a "woodland walk." Henry Longfellow described their initial landscaping as "a small garden in the form of a lyre." Fanny Longfellow cultivated the garden, with help from a gardener and her brother-in-law Samuel Longfellow; her letters describe the early garden as a mix of asters, petunias, pansies, dahlias, and roses. They planted flowers from seed and distributed sunken pots, which could be taken inside for the winter.

In 1847, the Longfellows hired English landscaper Richard Dolben to design a formal garden. The result was an Italian Renaissance garden with a Gothic "rose window" or "St Catherine's wheel" in the center and an overall Persian carpet pattern; remnants of this design can still be seen today.

After her father's death, Alice Longfellow worked with two landscape architects, Martha Brookes Hutcheson (1903-05) and Ellen Biddle Shipman (1923-1925) to restore the family garden. She also added a pergola and a sundial to the garden and had a small garden with an arbor planted just to the south of the formal garden's entrance.

Alice Longfellow hired a young female landscape architect, Martha Brookes Hutcheson, to restore her father's garden in 1903. Though Alice wanted to retain elements of her father's garden, there was no existing plan. Hutcheseon observed,

I added all arbors, gates, etc., but based the flower beds on the ghost of those which existed as Miss Longfellow told me that her father, a poet, had laid out the original plan, taking the flower bed shapes from a Persian pattern. Though I thought it an ugly idea, it was nevertheless so in keeping with the way things were done at the period that I felt it was interesting to reset the box borders in the original flower bed pattern so long as Longfellow, himself, had done it originally. I felt that it was a way in which one of my generation could pay him homage. That pleased Miss Longfellow very much.

In this "restoration," Alice added a sundial to the center of the garden in 1903, bearing a line from Dante’s Purgatory , xii, 84: “Pensa che questo di mai non raggiorna.” Her father had translated this as: “Think that this day will never dawn again.”

In 1924, Alice hired Ellen Biddle Shipman to rejuvenate the space. She was known for her painterly design, enclosed spaces, and for emphasizing the relationship between garden and house. Shipman planted the rectangular borders with heirloom roses and added evergreens and ornamental fruit trees to give the garden height. Just as importantly, Shipman made detailed planting diagrams and cultivar lists for future maintenance.

Henry Longfellow’s grandson and family historian Henry W. Longfellow Dana left notes for a lecture he gave in 1940 called "The Negro in Literature: The Last Hundred Years in America." Dana began by citing his grandfather’s "desire from the age of 17 to do something ‘for the great cause of Negro Emancipation.’" This desire was "rekindled by Freiligrath in Germany and Dickens in England."

Following an extended correspondence, Longfellow met Ferdinand Freiligrath, the German revolutionary poet and translator of many of Longfellow’s works into German, on his six-month European tour in 1842. Freiligrath vociferously opposed slavery and expressed his radical political views in his poetry.

Charles Dickens, the British novelist renowned for exposing social injustices, began his tour of America in Boston in late January 1842. During his two weeks in Boston, Dickens spent time with Henry Longfellow and dined with him at the house. Later that year, Longfellow visited Dickens in London.

After reading Dickens’s manuscript of American Notes , Longfellow wrote to his friend Charles Sumner from Dickens’s study on October 16, 1842: "I have read Dickens’ book. It is jovial and good natured, and at times very severe. You will read it with delight and, for the most part, approbation. He has a grand chapter on Slavery. Spitting and politics at Washington are the other topics of centure [sic]. Both you and I centure them with equal severity, to say the least."

At Sumner’s request, Henry agreed to write and publish a set of anti-slavery poems: "Write some stirring words that shall move the whole land. Send them home and we will publish them."

During a violent storm at sea on his return to America, Longfellow wrote seven poems, including " The Quadroon Girl ," " The Slave Singing at Midnight ," and " The Witnesses ." In a letter to Freiligrath, January 6, 1843, he described the event:

...thus ‘cribbed, cabined and confined’ I passed fifteen days. During this time I wrote seven poems on slavery. I meditated them in the stormy, sleepless nights, and wrote them down with a pencil in the morning. A small window in the side of the vessel admitted light into my berth; and there I lay on my back, and soothed my soul with songs.

Upon their publication in December 1842, Longfellow received impassioned reviews, both positive and negative. Despite the outcry among some segments of the population, Longfellow stood behind his poems. Within a few weeks of publication he wrote to his father: "Some persons regret that I should have written them, but for my own part I am glad of what I have done. My feelings prompted me, and my judgment approved and still approves." Longfellow allowed the New England Anti-Slavery Tract Society to reprint and distribute these poems for free, for which they expressed much gratitude.

W. Ware’s review of Poems on Slavery in the Christian Examiner , January 1843, was among the favorable: "Especially happy are we to be able to count one of Mr. Longfellow’s genius and celebrity among those friends of universal liberty, who are willing to speak their word in its behalf. In this little book of poems he has spoken with feeling, with truth, and eminent poetic beauty."

Poet and abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier felt Poems on Slavery had "been an important service to the Liberty movement" and inquired as to whether Longfellow would be a candidate for Congress on the Liberty Party ticket. "Our friends think they could throw for thee one thousand more votes than any other man."

It is impossible for me to accept the Congressional nomination you propose…. Though a strong anti-slavery man, I am not a member of any society, and fight under no single banner. I am much gratified that the Poems on Slavery should have exercised some salutary influence; and thank you for your good opinion of them. At all times I shall rejoice in the progress of true liberty, and in freedom from slavery of all kinds; but I cannot for a moment think of entering the political arena. Partisan warfare becomes too violent, too vindictive, for my taste; and I should be found a weak and unworthy champion in public debate.

H.W.L. Dana observed that there had been "Indignation in the South and in the conservative North against these poems" and that they were "Omitted from the Philadelphia edition of Longfellow." A letter from Rufus Wilmot Griswold, editor of Graham’s Magazine, to Henry W. Longfellow, January 7, 1843, explained this: "I thank you for the Poems on Slavery. That last word never is seen in a Philadelphia magazine. You will understand therefore the reason of the brief notice I have made of it. Mr. Graham objected even to publishing the title of the work!"

The mail brings me an Anti-Slavery Standard, with a long and violent tirade against me for publishing the Poems on Slavery in the cheap edition,– taken from a South Carolina paper. How impatient they are, those hot Southrons. But this piece of violence is quite ridiculous….

By 1862, during the Civil War, the editors of the Evening Post reflected on Longfellow’s Poems on Slavery , written two decades earlier, and characterized it as “The Poet’s Warning.” They wrote:

The poet of the people often becomes the seer—prophesying that which will come…. Our popular and much beloved American poet Longfellow is no exception to this rule, for though he wrote little upon the subject of slavery, what he wrote is full of the pathos of genuine feeling and pregnant with prophetic truth. In 1842—twenty years ago—his discerning eye foresaw the inevitable result of that institution of American slavery which was the black spot on the escutcheon of our republican government, and which he felt would in time, if not erased, be the instrument of final decay. His words, clothed in harmonious and appealing melody, were, however, unheeded, until the black spot spread into a cloud of portentous dimensions, and broke over the land in a storm of blood and desolation. It may not be inappropriate at this time to recall to our memory one of his most touching and emphatic poems [“The Warning”].

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic…

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow began writing the “idyl in hexameters” which would become Evangeline in November of 1845, shortly after the birth of his second child. He was a respected professor who had been teaching foreign languages at Harvard for almost ten years, and a published author and translator fluent in many European languages, classical Greek, and Latin. He had recently married his second wife, the wealthy and beautiful Fanny Appleton, and the two were living in the impressive Cambridge mansion known locally as the Craigie House.

Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie tells the story, in unrhymed verse, of the young and beautiful Evangeline and the noble Gabriel Lajeunesse, childhood friends living in Grand-Pré, Nova Scotia. The two are members of a peaceful farming community that embodies all the values of virtuous rural life held dear by the Victorian audience for whom the poem was written. They are engaged to be married, but are almost immediately separated when their entire community is forced into exile. Following the harrowing scene of their ejection, Evangeline spends the rest of her life traveling throughout North America, hoping to be reunited with her one true love. Only after many years of fruitless searching does Evangeline find Gabriel, on his deathbed. After a moment of mutual recognition, Gabriel dies, held by Evangeline as she thanks God for bringing them together one last time. The poem concludes with the assurance that the two lovers, are buried side by side, together for eternity, with Evangeline’s devotion to be celebrated in the land of their birth forever.

The fictional Evangeline and Gabriel’s story of thwarted love is told against the backdrop of a real historical event: the expulsion of the French-speaking Acadian people from Nova Scotia by the British. As a life-long New Englander, it is likely that Longfellow had some familiarity with this history, although the extent of his early knowledge is unclear. By the time he began writing Evangeline, he had read much of the available information about the incident, in particular historical accounts by Judge Thomas Chandler Halliburton and Abbe Raynal, who painted a picture of an idyllic pre-exile Acadian life that greatly influenced Longfellow’s own depiction.

Nova Scotia was part of a larger French-speaking region known as Acadia that also included Quebec, New Brunswick, and the region that would become the state of Maine. The expulsion, known to the French speaking Acadians as le grand dérangement , began in 1755 when British officials decided to tighten their grip on the territory. The British entered towns in the region, asked the local Acadians to swear allegiance to the British crown, and forcibly removed them when they refused to do so. While some of these displaced people eventually found their way back to Nova Scotia, most settled in various locations in North America. The most well-known of the resulting communities are the Cajuns of Louisiana.

Longfellow credited Nathaniel Hawthorne and “his friend from Salem” (letter from HWL to James Fields, 1870) with giving him the inspiration for the story of Evangeline. Longfellow and Hawthorne, former college classmates, became close friends after their college days. They met frequently, as the always sociable Longfellow included Hawthorne in his circle of literary and academic companions. On one such occasion, probably in 1840 or 1841, Hawthorne brought his friend, Reverend Horace L. Conolly, to dinner at Longfellow’s house. Conolly spoke of a legend that one of his parishioners had told him about a displaced Acadian woman spending her entire life traveling in search of her lost lover. Longfellow was intrigued by Conolly’s narrative and a bit incredulous to hear that Hawthorne was disinterested in it as a story topic. When Hawthorne insisted of Conolly’s legend “It is not in my vein,” Longfellow asked if he could use it himself. Hawthorne consented. However, several years followed before Longfellow actually commenced writing.

Evangeline is a poem with an epic scope. Its protagonist spends decades searching for her lost lover, traveling a route created by Longfellow that encompasses a large part of what was the United States and its territories. Longfellow initially planned to write a shorter poem, to include an expansive description of the idyllic, pre-expulsion life in Acadia, segueing into the tragic closing death-bed scene with Gabriel in Philadelphia. But by the time he had finished writing the final scene, Longfellow decided to expand the range of Evangeline’s travels and added details of her trek down the Mississippi, through Louisiana and across the western prairies in search of Gabriel.

Longfellow saw this story in terms of an heroic odyssey, even before including the details of Evangeline’s decades-long journey. He is quoted as saying that this story was “the best illustration of faithfulness and constancy of woman that I ever heard of” according to Horace Conolly. As a student of world literatures, Longfellow was well aware of the traditions of epic narratives in other languages and of the perception that the United States, not yet one hundred years old as a country, had not produced any truly worthwhile literature of its own. Perhaps this influenced him in his conception of Evangeline as an epic saga. He knew he wanted to tell this story using dactylic hexameters, a form of meter in poetry most often associated with Greek and Latin epics such as Homer’s Illiad . While many others – including his wife Fanny and his close friend Charles Sumner - questioned his choice to use a meter with which many English speaking readers would not be familiar, Longfellow never deviated from his own opinion. As he wrote in his journal, “To me it seems the only one for such a poem.”

Longfellow competed his first draft of Evangeline on his fortieth birthday, February 27, 1847. The poem underwent several months of review and revision before being published on November 1st. While Longfellow did his writing alone, he welcomed collaboration in this final polishing stage, relying upon local friends whose opinion he valued and whom he felt understood what he was trying to achieve with the poem. Future U.S. Senator Charles Sumner, Professor Cornelius Felton, and librarian and scholar Charles Folsom all received “proofs” of the poem as it was being readied for publication. Felton and Folsom, in particular, had a great deal of input into the final draft. Felton was a classical scholar who made sure that every line of Evangeline was a true hexameter. Folsom was a detail oriented perfectionist who challenged descriptions of weather, topography, foliage, and characterization with a zeal that would have annoyed a less collegially-minded author. But Longfellow appears to have welcomed the input. By the end of the summer of 1847 Evangeline was ready for publication.

Longfellow was already a well-regarded poet when Evangeline was published and the public embraced the poem almost immediately. Critics were not always as kind; some reviews were very favorable while others criticized the form, finding hexameter pretentious, awkward, and inappropriate for an English poem. Some critics questioned the originality of the story or found the character of Evangeline to be banal or unrealistic.

Regardless of the critics, Longfellow’s Evangeline resonated with many readers. The poem was reprinted continually throughout the nineteenth century and translated into many other languages. With its publication, Longfellow became America’s most beloved poet of the nineteenth century.

Evangeline was a sensation when it was published and it remained popular for decades. Enthralled fans were still asking Longfellow twenty-five years after the poem’s first publication, “Will you please tell me who was Evangeline?” Others sent him artifacts that they saw as connected in some way to the story. Books were written purporting to be the story of the “real” Evangeline and movies were made, the most popular starring Delores Del Rio in 1929.

Perhaps most significantly, the culture of the Acadian people experienced a renaissance as they identified with and felt vindicated by the public’s new-found sympathy with their under-appreciated tragic history. Acadians who had returned to Nova Scotia felt a newborn ethnic pride, as did the Cajun people of Louisiana. Evangeline became a popular name for locations, businesses and products. Statues of Evangeline were erected in St. Martinville, Louisiana and Grand-Pré, Nova Scotia. Travel brochures and postcards proudly cited their real or imagined connection to Evangeline, hoping to profit from an association with the Acadian heroine.

Many of these names remain, evoking a poem and a heroine that people outside of the Acadian diaspora have forgotten. Research continues into the history of le grand dérangement and scholars still disagree as to how Longfellow’s poem should be understood in terms of the historical events. But there is no denying that Longfellow’s poem gave a voice and a popular narrative to a people who had been essentially forgotten. Evangeline memorialized an event of notable significance to the Acadian people. In turn, Acadians have given Evangeline an enduring pride of place in their culture, ensuring that Longfellow’s work will not be forgotten.

The fine art collection numbers about 2,000 works on exhibit and in storage. It includes paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture that range in date from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century.

The collection showcases the tastes and interests of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, his wife Fanny, their children, and other family members and friends. Much of the collection is personal in nature, including gifts from artists the Longfellows met or knew, portraits of family members and close friends, and purchases made during the family's travels.

The wealthy Appleton family commissioned portraits by well-known artists, including several paintings by G.P.A. Healy, a pair by Gilbert Stuart, and a miniature by Jean Baptiste Isabey. Ninteen-year-old Fanny Appleton sat for a marble bust by Lorenzo Bartolini in 1836. Her father's marble bust was sculpted by James Wyatt, and her uncle Samuel Appleton's by Benjamin Paul Akers.

The Wadsworths and Longfellows of Maine had their portraits done in paper silhouettes by artists including W. King, Master Hubbard, and Auguste Edouard.

As Henry Longfellow gained wealth and prominence, he and his family were captured by painters and sculptors. Of particular note for their fine quality are ten crayon portraits by Eastman Johnson . Beginning in September 1846, Henry Longfellow commissioned this series of portraits of his sisters and close friends. In 1848, Eastman drew a double portrait of Longfellow's sons.

Other portraits of Henry Longfellow by Cephas Giovanni Thompson, Francis Alexander, and Samuel Lawrence hang in the house. Three busts of Longfellow decorate the Blue Entry, sculpted by Edward Augustus Brackett in 1844, Benjamin Paul Akers in 1851, and Samuel Kitson in 1879. Samuel Worcester Rowse drew Fanny Longfellow and two of her daughters in the 1850s; the three girls were painted together in 1859 by Thomas Buchanan Read.

Fanny Longfellow's brother Thomas Gold Appleton had ambitions as an artist, but became a collector and patron of the arts instead. Many of the works in the house by notable artists were originally part of his collection, willed to his nieces and nephews in 1884, including works by Jean Baptiste Camille Corot, Winckworth Allan Gay, and John Frederick Kensett.

Family friend Charles Sumner likewise bequeathed his collection of bronzes and marble statues to the Longfellow children upon his death in 1874.

The Longfellows' grandson H.W.L. Dana served as a trustee for the Washington Allston Trust. During his lifetime, many paintings by Allston temporarily resided at his house; these were distributed to other public collections in 1956, but twenty original studies and drawings remain here.

Professional and amateur works done by family members figure prominently in the collection, and are linked to family papers in the archives.

Fanny Longfellow was a gifted amateur artist. Her six sketchbooks and about 100 loose drawings contain largely pencil drawings of her European tour, the Berkshires, and Woolwich, England.

Ernest W. Longfellow trained professionally as an artist in London and Paris; his wife Harriet Spelman Longfellow was an amateur artist as well. In his will, Ernest left many of his paintings to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The house collection includes about 30 of his finished oil paintings - notably a portrait of his father at 69 - as well as watercolors and sketchbooks.

Henry Longfellow's niece Mary King Longfellow was a professional artist as well, known in Portland, Maine, for her watercolor seascapes. Her brother, Alexander W. Longfellow Jr., was a professional architect and an amateur artist.

In addition, there are approximately 600 drawings and watercolors done by the Longfellow children in the 1850s and 1860s. The children copied from drawing books, took portraits of each other, friends, and family, and drew landscapes of their homes in Cambridge and Nahant. Many of these are annotated by Henry or Fanny Longfellow as to date, artist, and location.

I heard the bells on Christmas Day Their old, familiar carols play, And wild and sweet The words repeat Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

After “ Paul Revere’s Ride ,” “Christmas Bells” is probably Longfellow’s best-known poem today. Set to music early on, the poem became part of the Christmas carol canon. The words have been paired with both traditional melodies and new compositions too numerous to list, in styles ranging from sacred to pop. Two tunes are most familiar today: the hymnal version set to “Waltham,” first used in the 1870s, and the popular version written by Johnny Marks in the 1950s and recorded by artists from Bing Crosby to Harry Belafonte to The Carpenters (amongst many others). If you’re familiar with the carol, there’s a good chance reading the first stanza triggers one of those tunes in your head .

And thought how, as the day had come, The belfries of all Christendom Had rolled along The unbroken song Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Till, ringing, singing on its way, The world revolved from night to day, A voice, a chime, A chant sublime Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

The church bells ringing to mark the holiday are the central image of the poem. In the last line of each stanza, the bells speak to the poet of peace and good-will. His choice of meter echoes the “ringing, singing” tones of the bells.

Longfellow used the image of bells in several poems. In the last poem he wrote, “Bells of San Blas,” he calls bells, “the voice of the church,” noting that in hearing, each individual “Lends a meaning to their speech / And the meaning is manifold.” The imagery is open to interpretation – what do you hear in the sound of the bells?

Then from each black, accursed mouth The cannon thundered in the South, And with the sound The carols drowned Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent The hearth-stones of a continent, And made forlorn The households born Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

These two stanzas, usually left out of the carol version, evoke the context of sorrow in which the poem was written, and the experience of its audience when it was first published in February 1865. The American Civil War was a national tragedy on a staggering scale. Modern scholars estimate that at least 750,000 men died in the four years of war. Many thousands more were wounded and the effects were felt in households far removed from the front lines.

Longfellow wrote “Christmas Bells” in 1864. 1 However, he had begun finding the phrases to capture his outlook on the war long before sitting down to write this poem. In September 1862, on hearing of the battle at Second Manassas , he reflected in his journal: “Every shell from the cannon’s mouth bursts not only on the battle-field, but in far-away homes, North or South, carrying Dismay and death. What an infernal thing war is!”

The Civil War touched Longfellow’s family when in March 1863 his oldest son Charley ran away to join the Union Army. That November, Charley coolly commented in his journal that he “got pluged [sic]” in the Mine Run campaign – actually a severe gunshot wound through his back. Henry Longfellow went to Washington, D.C. and escorted his son home for his long convalescence.

And in despair I bowed my head; "There is no peace on earth," I said: "For hate is strong, And mocks the song Of peace on earth, good-will to men!"

The trauma of Charley’s injury occurred on top of the pain of the loss of Fanny Longfellow, who died in an accidental fire in July 1861. On the first Christmas day after her death, Longfellow reflected: “How inexpressibly sad are all holidays! But the dear little girls had their Christmas-tree last night; and an unseen presence blessed the scene.” The loss of his wife marked Longfellow for the rest of his life.

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep: "God is not dead; nor doth he sleep! The Wrong shall fail, The Right prevail, With peace on earth, good-will to men!"

Both the poem and carol end with an uplifting resolution of peace on earth, heard in the ringing of the bells. This message continued to resonate over the next century, particularly in times of national crisis. Longfellow’s granddaughter Erica Thorp, writing home from war-torn France at the close of World War I, consciously or unconsciously echoed the poet’s phrases:

The Happiest of all the Christmases that have ever been known to you, and a heart overflowing with Christmas love and joy!! To have Peace on Earth all over the world and the dawning of a new good will that must endure — Can it really all be true — We have been so dazed by it here. It is all a dream of church bells which will ring forever in one’s ears… 2

In December 1943, during another world war, a letter to the editor in a New Bedford newspaper used the poem as a touchstone for “The Christmas Spirit In a World at War,” opening: “’Peace on earth, good-will to men.’ With the pall of war hanging over the world it seems almost sacrilegious to speak these beautiful words today.” 3 Five years later, after the close of World War II’s hostilities and the onset of the Cold War, another newspaper published the poem and a piece on its Civil War context, reflecting, “Just as so many in our time are wondering if ever again we will dwell in a world of concord, Longfellow voiced the doubt and fear of that era…” 4

In the modern era, the carol version of Longfellow’s poem has become part of the Christmas carol canon. Recordings by Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby remain holiday classics, and modern artists continue to record covers of the song every year. The tension between Longfellow’s despair at the state of the world around him and hope for the future that breaths from this poem rings true to people in every generation – from Longfellow’s to our own.

The historic furnishings and decorative arts in the museum collections date from the mid eighteenth to early twentieth century. The majority of the furnishings came into the house between 1837 and 1928, and were acquired by the Longfellow family by purchase, inheritance, or gift.

The Longfellows possessed a reverence for the past. For them, having antique objects and furniture stimulated their awareness of America's past and their house's association with George Washington and the American Revolution. The family's cosmopolitan interests are also reflected by many items from around the world within the rooms.

All of the exhibited pieces of furniture are from the house, and are placed in their historical locations within the rooms. There are over 450 items ranging from utilitarian to high-style pieces. The collection serves as a history of decorative styles over the years, beginning with the William and Mary Transitional style to the Arts and Crafts style of the 1920s.

Major rooms in the house have original furniture made in the United States by Aaron Willard, Adam Hains, and Thomas Seymour. There are also pieces from England, Germany, Holland, France, China, and Japan.

The silver collection includes approximately 150 pieces that belonged to the Appleton and Longfellow families, and dates from the late 1780s to the late 1860s. In the collection are coffee and tea services, pitchers, flatware, and other pieces. Notable manufacturers include:

The collection holds over 250 ceramic and glass objects, both utilitarian and decorative, dating from the mid eighteenth through the early twentieth century. Pieces are made by American, European, and Asian manufacturers, including Meissen, Sevres, Delft, Staffordshire, Arita, and Sato.

Of special interest are a tea service from the 1806 wedding of Fanny Appleton Longfellow's parents, a Bloor Derby bowl from the 1830s, and 135 eighteenth century ceramic tiles installed around three bedroom fireplaces.

The museum collections reveal Alice Longfellow's keen interest in the Arts and Crafts movement in England and the Boston area, as reflected in books, pottery, jewelry, and furnishings.

In 1897, Alice's cousin Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow Jr. was one of the founding members of the Society of Arts and Crafts, Boston. Alice became a member of the Society in 1901.

The house retains most of its original 1852 ceiling light fixtures that were installed as gasoliers. In 1924, electricity was installed in the house and some light fixtures were converted over from gas to the new power source. Many of the second and third floor fixtures date from the 1890s to the 1920s, and most have a more austere appearance with a few having a distinct colonial revival design.

Most of the rooms retain their historic wallpaper, dating from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century.

Fifty additional wallpaper examples have been uncovered throughout the house. This layering of wallpaper allows for the study of the rooms' decoration from the 1790s to the 1920s. These samples are preserved in a study collection.

In all places, then, and in all seasons, Flowers expand their light and soul-like wings, Teaching us, by most persuasive reasons, How akin they are to human things.

The Longfellow garden that you see today is the result of over 250 years of land cultivation and rehabilitation. This land, with its close proximity to the Charles River, has been inhabited for over 4,500 years. When the home was built in 1759, the area was used as farmland. Over the years, it has seen orchards blossom and wither away, brooks disappear, and houses pop up around it.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow would not have known the garden as we see it today. Though it sits in the location of his garden, it has changed dramatically over time. Longfellow did walk its shady paths, though, searching for solace and inspiration like numerous visitors do today.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Longfellow's oldest daughter, Alice, became the home's caretaker. From 1905-1925, she hired two female landscape architects, Martha Brookes Hutcheson and Ellen Biddle Shipman, to restore the garden in a way that would preserve what her father had known, as well as blend its design with the Colonial architecture of the house. During this time, the pattern of the modern garden was created.

Henry Longfellow paid great attention to the placement and care of trees on his nine-acre property. Trees shaded the walks behind the garden, now off the northern border of the site. In 1843, Fanny Longfellow imagined the new planting growing to become "a linden avenue in which my poet intends to pace in his old age & compose under its shade."

Longfellow's account book documents his many attempts to establish an allée of elms in the front forecourt. He struggled with keeping the trees healthy, replanting trees from 1843 to at least 1850. The elms in the forecourt today are placed based on his records.

Dominating the East Lawn is a linden tree , which was a mature tree with "flowing skirts" of limbs when the Longfellows acquired the house in 1843. It is estimated to have been planted around the turn of the nineteenth century.

Abuntant lilac hedges surround the Vassall-Craigie-Longfellow house: they surround the forecourt, line the front fence and wall, continue up the driveway, and frame the laundry yard on the west side. In May 1861, Henry Longfellow noted their blooming in his journal, as he often did: "The purple buds of the lilacs tip the hedges; and the flowery tide of spring sweeps on." The fragrant scent of the blooming lilacs is still a marker of spring at the site today.