LONGFELLOW Papers Presented at the Longfellow Commemorative Conference April 1-3, 1982

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Dr. Tucker is the author of a number of publications, mostly in the field of Southern Literature. His article, "Longfellow's Bowdoin Dialogue," will be published in the 1983 issue of Studies in the American Renaissance. He is currently Associate Professor of English, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, Virginia.

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If I could see Mr. Longfellow for just one moment and could speak to him face to face, I think I know precisely what I would say, and it is this: "Mr. Longfellow, I am a scholar whose special delight is finding original manuscripts, some of them unpublished; transcribing them; and adding notes. And, Mr. Longfellow, there is one way in which you excel, that makes me very grateful to you. And that is the clarity of your handwriting."

Longfellow died in Cambridge one hundred years ago (on March 24, 1882), and we are here now honoring his memory. At this time may I speak directly to a future Longfellow scholar: "You may be uncertain about what path to take in your studies. May I suggest the following possibility: find a work by Longfellow that interests you; go to the original manuscript (and in all probability it is available), notice the alterations that he made as he revised the work; then look at the first and later editions published during his lifetime. If you keep a detailed record of all revisions and alterations, I believe that you will gain an insight into the way that this American artist was working. And please remember that, as you study the history of the composition and the publication of this work, Longfellow, so far as any original manuscript material is concerned, is there to help you: you can read what he has written."

For the past three years I have had the pleasure of studying the history of one specific work—the play John Endicott. Because Longfellow wrote many varied selections, the impression might be that he seldom had sufficient time for revisions or alterations. But such is not the case with my play. The period that he worked on it was a time of revision, revision, revision—of finding the correct words, of keeping the best passages, of eliminating much dear to his heart.

The original suggestion for John Endicott came from Professor Emmanuel Vitalis Scherb, from Switzerland originally, who had been teaching foreign languages in this country and who became one of Longfellow's friends. In an entry in his Journal for March 16, 1856, Longfellow wrote: "Scherb wants me now to write a poem on the Puritans and Quakers. Promise to think of it. A good subject for a Tragedy." And so he began work on the project in 1856; the play was in its final form, sixteen years later, in 1872.

What were the different stages in the composition? After much research, Longfellow first produced a play written in prose, which he called The New England Tragedy, after discarding other titles such as The Old Colony and Scourged in Three Towns. This prose play, available in a holograph manuscript, has never been published, though Longfellow did have ten copies of it printed in 1860. And then in 1868, he made a drastic change: he converted this prose play into one written in verse. This holograph manuscript, which he called Wenlock Christison, has never been published, though again he had a few copies of it printed. In the same year, 1868, he finally published the play about the clash between the Puritans and the Quakers, but this time he used the title John Endicott, and he combined this work with a play about the Salem witchcraft trials entitled Giles Corey of the Salem Farms. The title of this published volume—consisting of the two plays about Puritan New England—was The New England Tragedies.

But there was also a final stage. In 1872 he made The New England Tragedies the third part of a trilogy which he called Christus, the other two parts being The Divine Tragedy and The Golden Legend.

Now let's go back to 1856. Put yourself in Longfellow's place. If you wanted to act on Scherb's suggestion but, unfortunately, knew little about the struggle between the Puritans and the Quakers, how in the world would you get your information for a play? Longfellow's solution was to go to books available: to Caleb Snow's A History of Boston, to Charles W. Elliott's The New England History, to Samuel Gardner Drake's The History and Antiquities of Boston. And then he turned to books centering on the Quaker sect—by George Fox, by John Lilburne, by William Dewsbury. One book in particular, however, caught his attention, and he recorded in his Journal for March 25, 1856: "Looking over books on Puritans and Quakers: particularly Besse's 'Sufferings of the Quakers'; a strange record of violent persecution for merest trifles."

The full title of this work by Joseph Besse is: A Collection of the Sufferings of the People Called Quakers for the Testimony of a Good Conscience from the Time of Their Being First Distinguished by That Name in the Year 1650, to the Time of the Act, Commonly Called the Act of Toleration, Granted to Protestant Dissenters in the First Year of the Reign of King William the Third and Queen Mary, in the Year 1689. The year 1650 in that long title refers to the time when members of the Society of Friends in England were being called "Quakers" in derision, probably an allusion to the admonition of George Fox, founder of the Society, for them "to tremble (or quake) at the word of the Lord." Longfellow's special concern was Chapter V of Book II, the section entitled "New England."

And the picture that he found there of the persecution of the Quakers was not a pretty one. The first Quakers who arrived in Boston in 1656—two women—had their possessions seized and their books burned publicly; they were put in prison, stripped, searched, put on a ship, and sent away. But when other Quakers continued to arrive at Boston and other places in New England, Massachusetts took definite steps: a law of 1656 stated they would be arrested and whipped; a second law of 1657 said they would be banished—if they returned, they would have their ears cropped and their tongues bored with a hot iron; a third law of 1658 stated that if they returned after banishment, they would be executed. And there was a later law, the Cart and Whip Act of 1661, which said that condemned Quakers, either men or women, were to be stripped naked from the waist up, tied to the tail of a cart, and whipped through three towns; then they were to be banished and left in the wilderness among wild animals.

Many Quakers did receive these punishments. Some were kept for long periods of time in unheated prisons; some were beaten with three-cord knotted whips; some were chained to logs; two sympathizers with the Quakers, the Southwicks of Salem, were fined and banished, and two of their children were ordered to be sold into slavery; some lost an ear; some were tied to carts and beaten in at least three towns.

And four people—three men (William Robinson, Marmaduke Stephenson, William Leddra) and one woman (Mary Dyer)—were executed from an elm tree on Boston Common. Longfellow felt it essential to record their deaths in his play as follows: (the passage is spoken by a Quaker, one of their associates)

William and Marmaduke, our martyred brothers,
Sleep in untimely graves, . . .
I saw their noble death. They to the scaffold
Walked hand in hand. Two hundred armed men
And many horsemen guarded them, for fear
Of rescue by the crowd, whose hearts were stirred . . .
When they tried to speak,
Their voices by the roll of drums were drowned.
When they were dead they still looked fresh and fair,
The terror of death was not upon their faces.
Our sister Mary, likewise, the meek woman,
Has passed through martyrdom to her reward;
Exclaiming, as they led her to her death,
"These many days I've been in Paradise.'
And, when she died, Priest Wilson threw the hangman
His handkerchief, to cover the pale face
He dared not look upon . . .
And Leddra, too, is dead. But from his prison,
The day before his death, he sent these words
Unto the little flock of Christ: 'Whatever
May come upon the followers of the Light, . . .
I am persuaded that God's armor of Light,
As it is loved and lived in, will preserve you.

The above passage comes from the published verse version of the play of 1868. By that date Longfellow had arrived at a very simple plot: Governor John Endicott condemns the Quaker, Wenlock Christison, to death, and he also condemns the man's daughter, Edith to be beaten in three towns and left in the wilderness. But the son of the Governor, also named John, aids Edith, falls in love with her, and in turn is denounced by his father. Before Christison can be executed, an order arrives from King Charles II of England, who has been informed about what has been taking place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony; this communication demands that there be no further persecutions of the Quakers. At the end of the play, Governor Endicott, broken in spirit because of the missive and also because of the loss of his son, dies a sorrowful man.

The simplicity of this plot is deceptive, and gives no hint of the problems that Longfellow faced during the composition. The rest of this paper presents some of these problems. We know that they existed because we have not only the prose manuscript of the play, written in pencil, and the printer's copy of the verse version, also in pencil, but also two manuscripts of working notes. All of these are in the Houghton Library.

The first problem was: Who would be the central figures in the play, especially those representing the two sides—that of the Quakers and that of the Puritans? For the Quaker side, Longfellow finally decided on Wenlock Christison, a fiery spirit who bitterly condemned the Puritans in passages in Besse. This man also was historically important because of the five people condemned to death, he alone was saved just in time. His daughter, called Edith in the 1868 verse version, who is not historical, had several earlier names in the working notes and the prose play: Angelica, Patience, Cassandra, Theophila. She became a synthesis of many Quaker women (and their punishments).

Three characters that Longfellow wanted to use were the Priest John Wilson, an Indian Corbitant, and the Priest John Cotton. The latter, John Cotton, was his special favorite to represent the Puritan side, but unfortunately this minister of the First Church in Boston lived a few years too early for the conflict.

The two that Longfellow finally chose were Governor John Endicott and the Priest John Norton; they would present the Puritan viewpoint. Norton, installed in 1656 at the First Church in Boston shortly after the death of John Cotton, became distinguished because of the fluency of his speeches and writings. According to Besse, he was "a principal Exciter of the Magistrates to persecute the Innocent and put them to death." In the play he urges Endicott on in the persecutions. Norton appears in only two scenes in the 1868 version, but they are vivid. Here is a passage in which an old man, Nicholas Upsall, who sympathizes with the Quakers, and John Norton discuss the treatment of a Quaker named William Brand:

Norton. What is this gathering here?

Upsall. One William Brand,
An old man like ourselves, and weak in body,
Has been so cruelly tortured in his prison,
The people are excited, and they threaten
To tear the prison down.

Norton. What has been done?

Upsall. He has been put in irons, with his neck
And heels tied close together, and so left
From five in the morning until nine at night.

Norton. What more was done?

Upsall. He has been kept five days
In prison without food, and cruelly beaten,
So that his limbs were cold, his senses stopped.

Norton. What more?

Upsall. And is this not enough?

Norton. Now hear me.
This William Brand of yours has tried to beat
Our Gospel Ordinances black and blue;
And, if he has been beaten in like manner,
It is but justice, and I will appear
In his behalf that did so. I suppose
That he refused to work.

Upsall. He was too weak.
How could an old man work, when he was starving?

Norton. And what is this placard?

Upsall. The Magistrates,
To appease the people and prevent a tumult,
Have put up these placards throughout the town,
Declaring that the jailer shall be dealt with
Impartially and sternly by the Court.

Norton. (tearing down the placard)
Down with this weak and cowardly concession,
This flag of truce with Satan and with Sin!
I fling it in his face! I trample it
Under my feet! It is his cunning craft,
The masterpiece of his diplomacy,
To cry and plead for boundless toleration.
But toleration is the first-born child
Of all abominations and deceits.
There is no room in Christ's triumphant army
For tolerationists. And if an Angel
Preach any other gospel unto you
Than that ye have received, God's malediction
Descend upon him! Let him be accursed!

A second problem was how to make the background realistic. Longfellow kept numerous notes from the histories mentioned earlier that might make his play seem authentic. For example, he needed a tavern. He jotted down the following names of taverns of the time:

"The Three Mariners (Dock Square). The Admiral Vernon (King Street). The Anchor. The Blue Anchor. The Bunch of Grapes. The Castle Tavern. The George Tavern. The Green Dragon. The King's Head. The Lamb Tavern. The Lighthouse Tavern. The Red Lion Tavern. The Ship in Distress." The one that he finally selected was The Three Mariners of Dock Square.

A third problem was the setting. The place was to be Boston, but what would be the time? He finally decided on the year 1665, the date of Governor John Endicott's death. But if he selected 1665, he had to give the appearance that the following events happened in this year when actually they did not: the first law against the Quakers (actually 1656); the second law (1657); William Brand's punishment and John Norton's Reply (1658); the third law against the Quakers (1658); the return of Charles II to the throne (1660); the order for the execution of Wenlock Christison (1660-1661); the arrival of the King's Mandamus (1661).

And then there were three deaths, two of them a few years before that of Endicott, which claimed attention because many, especially the Quakers, thought they were judgments against the Puritans as a result of their harsh decisions. In the play, these deaths are recorded by Deputy-Governor Richard Bellingham. First there was the death of John Norton:

Bellingham. By his own fireside, in the afternoon
A faintness and a giddiness came o'er him;
And, leaning on the chimney-piece, he cried,
'The hand of God is on me!' and fell dead.

Next there was the death of Humphrey Atherton, one of the judges:

He is gone, and by a death as sudden,
Returning home one evening, at the place
Where usually the Quakers have been scourged,
His horse took fright, and threw him to the ground,
So that his brains were dashed about the street . ..

Endicott. I tremble lest it may have been
A judgment on him.

Bellingham. So the people think.
They say his horse saw standing in the way
The ghost of William Leddra, and was frightened.
And furthermore, brave Richard Davenport,
The captain of the Castle, in the storm
Has been struck dead by lightning.

This third man, Davenport, captain of a fortification called the Castle, strongly supported the persecution of the Quakers.

These deaths—actually in 1663, 1661, 1665—Longfellow allowed to happen—in addition to the other events listed above—in the year 1665. But the poet justified his method in the "Prologue" to the play:

Nor let the Historian blame the Poet here,
If he perchance misdate the day or year,
And group events together, by his art,
That in the Chronicles lie far apart;
For as the double stars, though sundered far,
Seem to the naked eye a single star,
So facts of history, at a distance seen,
Into one common point of light convene.

A fourth problem was the play's unrelieved gloom. To be certain, there is the attractive love of Edith and the young John Endicott. And in the 1868 version, a sea captain, named Kempthorn, adds a bit of humor by using nautical expressions and by telling Edward Butter, the Treasurer of the Commonwealth, to "spread" himself upon a chair. But for the most part, the play of 1868 is starkly serious. The prose version of 1860 has at least another light passage, an extended speech by a stern Puritan, Walter Merry, who is walking along a street on the Sabbath and who is planning to read a book written by the Priest John Norton:

All is quiet as a graveyard! Not a man, woman or child visible anywhere. Not a footfall up or down the street. It is perfectly beautiful. By punishment and perseverance and perseverance and punishment I have brought this disorderly town to a proper sense of the day. No gadding about now; no lounging at the corners; no smoking in the streets; not a barber's shop open. If it were not for those noisy pigeons on the roof, it would be perfectly silent. Ah, how I should like to wring your necks up there! I'd stop your billing and cooing! Well, it is almost sundown; and I will go home and read my book. "The Heart of New England Rent at the Blasphemies of the Present Generation, or a Brief Tractate Concerning the Doctrine of the Quakers." I cannot comprehend how they ever had the impudence to come back again, after having such a book written against them! It must be the Devil's doing. Hark! what's that? Somebody is pumping water at the town-pump. I'll pump you! [He cries as he runs out..]

But Longfellow decided to eliminate this scene from the 1868 version.

A final problem was the central character in the play. An earlier title was Wenlock Christison, after the Quaker who often shouts denunciations, many based on Biblical passages, such as:

Woe to the city of blood! The stone shall cry
Out of the wall: the beam from out the timber
Shall answer it! Woe unto him that buildeth
A town with blood, and stablisheth a city
By his iniquity!

Or:

Listen, ye Magistrates, for the Lord hath said it!
The day ye put his servitors to death,
That day the Day of your own Visitation,
The Day of Wrath, shall pass above your heads,
And ye shall be accursed forevermore!

The prose version of 1860 ends as Christison and his daughter Edith are waiting to be sold into slavery.

But by 1868 Longfellow had changed the emphasis from Christison to John Endicott. At times Longfellow shows the stern, unyielding side of this man. For him being a Quaker is "a heresy" that comes "from holding parley / With the delusions and deceits of Satan." He condemns the Friends to be banished, even to be executed. Here is a passage in which he bitterly confronts Edith Christison:

Endicott. What is your name?

Edith. 'Tis to the world unknown,
But written in the Book of Life.

Endicott. Take heed
It be not written in the Book of Death!
What is it?

Edith. Edith Christison.

Endicott (with eagerness). The daughter
Of Wenlock Christison?

Edith. I am his daughter.

Endicott. Your father hath given us trouble many times.
A bold man and a violent, who sets
At naught the authority of our Church and State,
And is in banishment on pain of death.
Where are you living?

Edith. In the Lord.

Endicott. Make answer
Without evasion. Where?

Edith. My outward being
Is in Barbadoes.

Endicott. Then why come you here?

Edith. I come upon an errand of the Lord.

Endicott. 'Tis not the business of the Lord you're doing;
It is the Devil's. Will you take the oath?
Give her the book. (MERRY offers the Book.)

Edith. You offer me this Book
To swear on; and it saith, 'Swear not at all,
Neither by heaven, because it is God's Throne,
Nor by the earth, because it is his footstool!'
I dare not swear.

Endicott. You dare not? Yet you Quakers
Deny this Book of Holy Writ, the Bible,
To be the Word of God.

Edith (reverentially). Christ is the Word,
The everlasting oath of God. I dare not.

Endicott. You own yourself a Quaker,—do you not?

Edith. I own that in derision and reproach
I am so called.

Endicott. Then you deny the Scripture
To be the rule of life.

Edith. Yea, I believe
The Inner Light, and not the Written Word,
To be the rule of life.

Endicott. And you deny
That the Lord's Day is holy.

Edith. Every day
Is the Lord's Day. It runs through all our lives,
As through the pages of the Holy Bible
'Thus saith the Lord.' . . .

Endicott. Are you a Prophetess?

Edith. Is it not written,
'Upon my handmaidens will I pour out
My spirit, and they shall prophesy'?

Endicott. Enough;
For out of your own mouth are you condemned!
Edith Christison,
The sentence of the Court is, that you be
Scourged in three towns, with forty stripes save one,
Then banished upon pain of death!

Joseph Besse had absolutely no sympathy for Governor Endicott. But for Longfellow this picture of a blood-thirsty, cruel man was too one-sided. The poet knew that Endicott had been important in the history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Born in England, he had come to America in 1628 on the Abigail to prepare the way for others. After being assistant and deputy-governor, he was governor in 1644, 1649, 1651-1653, and then during the crucial Quaker period of 1655-1665. Though his years in office had a few sensational events, such as his destroying a maypole established by fun-lovers and his cutting out of a cross on the English ensign (as speaking of too much popery), his rule was a dedicated but monotonous routine of doing the best he could for the colony. Interested in education, he wanted a free school at Salem and was one of the overseers of Harvard. He was honest and capable and devoted to the good of the public as he interpreted that good. Longfellow felt that he must present this other, very human side.

One way to show Endicott's humanity was through his attitude toward his son. The governor says to the boy:

For when I hear your footsteps come or go,
See in your features your dead mother's face,
And in your voice detect some tone of hers,
All anger vanishes, and I remember
The days that are no more, and come no more,
When as a child you sat upon my knee,
And prattled of your playthings, and the games
You played among the pear-trees in the orchard!

And just before his death, he is grief-stricken as he reflects:

How many men are dragged into their graves
By their rebellious children! I now feel
The agony of a father's breaking heart
In David's cry, "O Absalom, my son!"

Another way to show his humanity was to have him question his actions. Early in the play he says to the Priest John Norton:

I shrink
From shedding of more blood. The people murmur
At our severity.

And as his death approaches, he tries to rationalize what he has done:

I did not put those wretched men to death.
I did but guard the passage with the sword
Pointed towards them, and they rushed upon it!
Yet now I would that I had taken no part
In all that bloody work . . .
Ah, Richard Bellingham! I greatly fear
That in my righteous zeal I have been led
To doing many things which, left undone,
My mind would now be easier.

Even the old Nicholas Upsall has sympathy as he tries to console the young John Endicott in the following passage:

You know your father only as a father;
I know him better as a Magistrate.
He is a man both loving and severe;
A tender heart; a will inflexible.
None ever loved him more than I have loved him.
He is an upright man and just man
In all things save the treatment of the Quakers.

And at the end of the play in its final form, Endicott has died and Richard Bellingham delivers an appropriate epitaph for this troubled governor—so important in the history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but caught up in an intense emotional experience:

How bright this signet-ring
Glitters upon his hand, where he has worn it
Through such long years of trouble, as if Death
Had given him this memento of affection,
And whispered in his ear, 'Remember me!'
How placid and how quiet is his face,
Now that the struggle and the strife are ended!
Only the acrid spirit of the times
Corroded this true steel. O, rest in peace,
Courageous heart! Forever rest in peace!