Christmas Bells Read online

  “You’re torn,” Fanny said soothingly. “I am too. All peaceable abolitionists are. We want slavery to end, but is war too great a price to pay? We want to avoid bloodshed and destruction, but if war is the only way to end slavery, should we not be willing to make that sacrifice for the sake of the long-suffering people held in bondage? These are the great questions of our time.”

  “We may yet avoid war.”

  “Perhaps.” Fanny stared into the fire, pensive and beautiful in profile. He reached out to stroke her hair, and she turned to smile wistfully at him. “Another question for our times: How long will Major Anderson and his men be able to hold out on that little island in the harbor?”

  Henry had posed the same question to his friend Sumner, who by virtue of his position in the Senate knew more than he could share even with his closest friend. What Sumner could entrust to the mails was deeply troubling. Fort Sumter had been planned about forty years earlier as a bulwark to defend the shipping channels of Charleston Harbor. Its large, octagonal structure could accommodate 650 troops and 135 guns, but construction had never been completed, and scaffolding, stone, and piles of other building materials littered the interior. Only fifteen cannons had been installed, and the brick-and-mortar walls, though five feet thick and satisfactory to the standards of the 1820s when the fort had been designed, could not long withstand bombardment by modern artillery. Major Anderson’s garrison was comprised of only eighty-seven officers and enlisted men, insufficient to fully staff the defenses, but too many for their limited supplies of food, beds, and blankets. Isolated by the same deep waters that protected his garrison from an infantry attack, the major was limited to only sporadic communications with military headquarters. In his reports, he emphasized that he and his men were determined to hold the fort, but they would eventually need reinforcements and supplies.

  While Anderson’s commander in chief, President Buchanan, dithered in Washington, Southern militiamen eager to wrest Fort Sumter from federal control poured into Charleston. Before long 3,000 armed men were organized under the command of General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, a vain, fastidious Louisianan who had resigned as the superintendent of West Point to join the rebellion. Henry found it both ironic and ominous when he learned that, years before, Beauregard had been one of Anderson’s students at the military academy.

  “Major Anderson will hold out longer than his enemies would ever expect,” Henry told Fanny, recalling certain telling phrases from Sumner’s letters. “He won’t surrender unless he sincerely believes he has no other choice.”

  “Imminent starvation may compel him to,” said Fanny, “unless President Buchanan summons the courage to act before it comes to that.”

  Henry could not disagree, and he worried that starvation was the likelier outcome, for the president seemed content to wait out the rest of his term twirling his thumbs in the White House rather than take measures to resolve the crisis.

  Henry had lost all faith in the hesitant, immobile commander in chief, so he was astonished a few days later to read in the Boston Daily Advertiser that Buchanan had authorized a civilian steamer to carry provisions to Major Anderson and his men. The Star of the West had sailed from New York the previous Saturday afternoon with a cargo of beef, pork, and pilot bread, enough to sustain the beleaguered garrison for several weeks. “But yesterday the rumor gained ground in New York,” the report continued, “and is doubtless true, that she stopped in the lower harbor and received 200 or 300 troops (marines, according to one account), after which she went to sea.”

  In subsequent reports, other newspapers confirmed the story, noting when and where the Star of the West had been spotted as it traveled south along the coast. Henry’s astonishment that President Buchanan had finally taken action was tempered by grave concerns about the frequent accounts of the steamer’s journey. Editors customarily studied one another’s papers and reprinted stories of particular interest to their own readers, and if anything, secession had augmented the practice. Surely the citizens of Charleston knew that the Star of the West was on the way, and their military forces would be ready and waiting when she arrived.

  A few days later, his concerns were proven justified by shocking headlines in the morning papers. The previous day, the Star of the West had sailed into Charleston Harbor and had been fired upon by militia and young military cadets positioned on the shores. Struck in the mast but not seriously damaged, the steamer nonetheless had been forced up the channel and back into the open sea.

  Major Anderson and his men had not been harmed in the firefight, but the departing steamer had carried off any hope that they would be resupplied and reinforced anytime soon.

  Even as the South Carolina militia and cadets were driving away the Star of the West, delegates in Mississippi were voting in favor of secession. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery,” they declared in a statement explaining why they were obliged to leave the Union, which was published in papers throughout the North soon thereafter. “There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.”

  The next day Florida seceded from the Union, and the next, Alabama.

  One after another they broke off, like the edges of a sandy bluff that had withstood years of steady pounding of the surf only to crumble into the sea at the strike of a single, long-expected but overpowering tempest.

  “Does no voice of reason and prudence remain in the South?” Fanny asked, pushing the papers and their dreadful reports aside. As if in response to her plea, former president John Tyler, writing from Richmond, Virginia, called for a peace convention in Washington where both sides could make one last attempt to resolve the crisis. Privately, Sumner told Henry that he had no hope for its success.

  Two days after John Tyler published his call for a summit, Georgia seceded, as if in contempt of the former president’s plan. Two days after that, five senators from Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi—some defiantly, others in sorrow—rose to offer farewell speeches before resigning from the Senate and departing Washington for their Southern homes. The papers somberly described how Senator Jefferson Davis, the last to speak, had declared that states did have the constitutional right to leave the Union, and that his home state of Mississippi had justifiable cause for doing so. Even so, he regretted the conflict that had divided them. “I am sure I feel no hostility toward you, senators from the North,” he had said. “I am sure there is not one of you, whatever sharp discussion there may have been between us, to whom I cannot now say, in the presence of my God, I wish you well; and such, I feel, is the feeling of the people whom I represent toward those whom you represent.” He expressed hope that their separate governments would eventually enjoy cordial diplomatic relations, and he apologized for any pain he might have inflicted upon any other senator in the heat of debate.

  There was something very ludicrous, Henry thought, when seen from a distance, about the theatrical strut of the Southern senators as they quit the Union. “Our future Molière will have a fine field for comedy,” he wrote to Sumner, who had witnessed the spectacle, “and the Southern Planter will figure as funnily as any of his farcical characters.”

  In truth—and Sumner knew him well enough to understand this—Henry was not at all amused, but outraged and apprehensive. He felt powerless to do anything but observe and record his impressions as the dissolution of the Union wore on, slowly and inexorably. Behind it all he imagined he heard the low murmur of the slaves, like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, prophesying woe.

  Five days after Jefferson Davis and his compatriots made their farewell speeches in the Senate, Louisiana seceded. Nevertheless, and in what increasingly seemed to be a futile effort, delegates from both sides of the conflict scrambled to arrange the peace conference. Soon it was agreed that the summit would open at the Willard Hotel in Washington City on Februar
y 4, with former president John Tyler himself serving as chairman.

  Three days before the conference opened, Texas seceded from the Union, as if to mock any lingering, vain hopes for peace. “Perhaps some good may yet come of the summit,” said Fanny, but her expression betrayed her doubt, which Henry shared.

  They were disappointed, but not surprised, when the papers declared the conference a failure from the outset. Only twenty-five of the thirty-four states had answered the opening roll call; none of the seven seceded states had sent delegates, nor had Arkansas, nor five western states. Meanwhile, on the same day far to the south in Montgomery, Alabama, representatives from the seceded states met to organize a unified Confederate government. John Tyler’s own granddaughter raised the Confederate flag at the opening ceremonies.

  As February passed, gray and cold and bleak, the conference proceeded doggedly on. President-elect Abraham Lincoln departed his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, to embark on a long, winding journey to Washington City for his inauguration. Cheering crowds greeted him at cities and train stations along the way, and his eloquent speeches won praise for their brevity and moderate tone, but threats upon his life had been made as well. Throughout the North, tensions soared as his train drew ever closer to the capital.

  Early one morning in the last week of February, the pealing of bells beckoned Henry, still in his dressing gown, to the window. The world outside seemed strangely still, the eastern sky glowing crimson with the sunrise. On the snow-dusted sidewalk a laundress bustled past, a heavy, covered basket on her hip; then a grocer’s wagon rumbled over the cobblestones, its driver slouched wearily upon the seat, the reins clasped in one gloved hand. It seemed an ordinary morning. Nothing except the tolling of the bells—no distant rumble of cannon, no panicked citizens thronging the streets—indicated that anything was amiss.

  He heard the rustle of Fanny’s nightgown before he felt the touch of her gentle hand upon his back. “It’s the twenty-second,” she murmured. “They’re ringing the bells in honor of George Washington’s birthday.”

  “Of course.” Henry put his arm around his wife’s shoulders and drew her close, his gaze fixed on the street outside. To him, the bells ringing in celebration of the great national hero had a melancholy sound, reminding him of the wretched treason in the land. What would Washington, triumphant general and first president, think if he had lived to see the nation he had helped establish splintering into contentious fragments?

  For several months, Washington had fought the war for independence from within the same walls that now sheltered Henry, Fanny, and their children. When the Revolution commenced, the house’s original owner had remained loyal to King George, and when he had fled Boston in fear for his life, his property had been confiscated, his estate occupied by the colonial Marblehead Regiment. In July of 1775, during the Siege of Boston, General Washington had made the residence his headquarters, and for nine months he had commanded the Cambridge Common of the Colonial Army from the gracious residence on Brattle Street. In December his wife, Martha, her son, and her daughter-in-law had joined him; the family had chosen the two eastern rooms on the second floor for their private quarters, while the southeast room on the lower level became the general’s study and dining room, the adjacent room a parlor for his wife, and a chamber in back an office for his staff. Henry often wondered in which room Washington had received the news that General Henry Knox, a Boston bookseller, had succeeded in bringing the cannon from Fort Ticonderoga over the mountains and through the snow to the heights of Dorchester south of the city, where they forced the astonished British to evacuate in haste or risk the destruction of their fleet.

  George Washington had once looked out upon the view Henry now regarded, had surely contemplated the future of his fledgling nation as Henry was doing. Henry could only hope that the Illinois lawyer and onetime congressman who would soon succeed him would prove to be as capable a leader. The nation’s very survival depended upon it.

  Less than a fortnight later, and only a few days after the Washington peace conference sputtered to an ignominious end after resolving nothing, Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office on the East Portico of the Capitol and became the sixteenth president of the United States. His inaugural address appeared in the evening papers, and Henry was pleased by the simple eloquence of his words, the clarity and compassion of his thought. His foremost duty was to preserve the Union, the new president had told a crowd of 30,000 massed on the muddy Capitol grounds on a raw, blustery day that had miraculously given way to sunshine just as he began to speak. Yet Mr. Lincoln had also addressed the fears of the Southern people, emphatically stating that he had no intention of interfering with slavery where it existed, and that even though the Fugitive Slave Law was offensive to many, he felt bound by the Constitution to enforce it.

  That position, Henry and Fanny agreed, would not play well in progressive Boston, but her citizens would cheer his assertion that despite the claims of certain factions, according to the Constitution and the law, the Union was not and could not be broken. “‘We are not enemies, but friends,’” Henry read aloud to Fanny in their chairs by the fireside while Charley and Alice paused in a game of checkers to listen. “‘We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, 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.’”

  “Our new president has something of the poet in him,” remarked Fanny, smiling.

  “That can only be to the benefit of us all,” Henry replied, “just as any poet who writes for the world beyond his own threshold should have something in his nature of the statesman.”

  • • •

  As spring came to Massachusetts, newly elected governor John Andrew, who had taken office in January, began preparing the state militia for whatever conflict might come. Men who were no longer fit for active service were replaced by stronger, more vigorous men capable of responding swiftly to an emergency call, like their Minutemen forefathers. The state legislature procured $100,000 to outfit the troops with new overcoats, blankets, and knapsacks, and the men’s training was redoubled.

  Though no enemy ventured near the borders of the Commonwealth, Governor Andrew’s preparations seemed warranted when word came to Washington, and from thence spread throughout the North, that Major Anderson had informed his superiors that his garrison must be supplied with provisions by April 15, or they must be withdrawn.

  Henry did not envy Mr. Lincoln his high office, for even King Solomon would have been stymied by the choice the new president then faced. If he withdrew the federal garrison from Fort Sumter, he would tacitly acknowledge that Major Anderson’s men occupied foreign soil, and that the Confederacy had become a separate, sovereign nation. If Mr. Lincoln defied South Carolina’s demands and dispatched supplies to the starving soldiers, the South would view it as an act of aggression tantamount to a declaration of war.

  While people throughout the divided land waited for Mr. Lincoln to decide, a hint that secret diplomatic efforts were going on at a frantic pace came to the Longfellows from a most unexpected source. One evening, after they dined with Fanny’s parents at their elegant home in Beacon Hill, her father waited until the youngsters had been excused from the table before informing their parents that he had received a letter from his first cousin, William Appleton, still serving proudly in Congress at age seventy-five. “My cousin departed from New York on the afternoon of the ninth aboard the steamer Nashville,” Nathan said. “He is, at this moment, en route to Charleston.”

  “Charleston,” exclaimed Fanny, exchanging an astonished glance with Henry. “Whatever for?”

  “His exact words as he wrote them,” her father said, raising his eyebrows and casting a significant glance around the table, �
��were, ‘I give the purpose for my excursion as reasons of health.’”

  “An intriguing turn of phrase,” said Henry. “How likely is it that the purpose he gives is not his true purpose, or at least not his only one?”

  “If he has any other impetus for undertaking this journey,” said Nathan, “he didn’t wish to entrust it to a letter.”

  “And yet, we can but wonder,” said Fanny’s stepmother. “William has been dreadfully unhappy since his wife passed last year, and lately he’s been afflicted by a painful, persistent cough. It may very well be that he does travel for the sake of his constitution, not the Constitution.”

  “If that’s so, why go to Charleston, of all places?” asked Fanny. “Isn’t it terribly dangerous to sail there now?”

  “If he is indeed on some clandestine mission to secure peace,” said Henry, “it may be far more dangerous if he does not go.”

  The following day, Nathan sent word to Craigie House that he had received a telegram from his cousin noting that the Nashville had arrived off the Charleston Bar and was awaiting high tide so the ship could enter the harbor. Though apprehensive of what dire news it might contain, Henry looked forward to William Appleton’s next telegram, and the lengthier accounts he would be able to provide upon his return to Boston. Henry trusted the eyewitness impressions of a man he knew more than anonymous accounts in the press, which too often were frustratingly inaccurate and overwrought.

  But before Nathan heard from his cousin again, the Boston papers blazed with terrible news: At half past four o’clock on the morning of Friday, April 12, Confederate batteries had opened fire on Fort Sumter. “The War Begun!” the headlines in the Boston Daily Advertiser raged. “The South Strikes the First Blow! The Southern Confederacy Authorizes Hostilities!” Major Anderson had returned fire, but the federal fleet had not responded, though three war steamers had arrived off the Bar.