Longfellow's Evangeline and Antebellum Politics

This is an author’s draft of an article published in LEAR:Literature of the Early American Republic 3 (2011): 1-33.

Accents Disconsolate: Longfellow’s Evangeline and

Antebellum Politics

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (1847)

was, from the moment of its publication until the early

twentieth century, a literary and cultural phenomenon: a

poem that made Longfellow ‘the most famous writer in

America’, that helped to redefine the national culture of

a people, that was endlessly recycled and reworked in

historical accounts, fiction, stage and film adaptations,

and that would have been familiar to most literate

Americans of the 1850s and far beyond.1 The story, written

in Longfellow’s distinctive hexameters, of how Evangeline

and her lover Gabriel were separated when the Acadian

people were forcibly exiled from Nova Scotia to America

in 1755, and of Evangeline’s futile quest to find him,

ending in a scene of deathbed recognition in old age, was

one of the defining sentimental narratives of the

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nineteenth century and helped to make Longfellow into an

internationally known household name. Yet from the mid

twentieth century onwards, Evangeline has sunk into near-

total neglect, critical as well as popular.

Excellent recent work by Christoph Irmscher, Matthew

Gartner and Virginia Jackson, among others, has

demonstrated that Longfellow’s exclusion from the

nineteenth-century American canon is limiting, that his

poetics are more complex and interesting than has often

been assumed, and that his role in shaping concepts of

national identity in this period cannot be ignored.2

Evangeline, however, still lingers on the margins of these

reassessments. With the exception of John Seelye’s fine

discussion from 1984, critical work on Evangeline has

focused entirely on its afterlives and adaptations.3 The

general consensus on the poem itself has been that it is

embarrassing, both for the ‘sweet sentimentality’ in

which Longfellow ‘saturates’ the story, and for his

dubious political take on the Acadian expulsion.4 Rosemary

Lyons, for example, argues that the poem now ‘seems

naïve’ in its displacement of Acadian suffering onto the

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‘figure of the sweet submissive virgin’. Renate Eigenbrod

observes that Evangeline, like Longfellow’s other poems on

displaced peoples, tends to ‘add further to their

displacement’ and Wayne O’Grady describes Longfellow’s

representation of the Acadians as ‘patronizing’ and

‘galling’, a dangerous falsification of history.5 Even

Seelye’s defence of the poem prefers hastily to pass over

its ‘perverse’ and ‘droning’ hexameters and reiterates

the commonplace that it represents ‘a retreat from the

world of affairs to poetry and dreams’.6 A critical

reassessment of Evangeline is long overdue, and, as this

article will argue, taking the poem on its own merits can

suggest not only that Evangeline should be vital to any

reconsideration of Longfellow’s place in American

literary history, but also that it is a crucial literary

work in terms of the interaction between poetry and

politics in the antebellum period. Neither the author of

Evangeline nor his readers were naïve, and to dismiss this

poem is to ignore a work that contains subtle and

significant commentary on the role that displaced peoples

might play in the formation of a distinctively American

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identity. The troubled politics of the 1840s and beyond

haunt both form and content of Evangeline, and by replacing

it in the contexts in which it was first written and

read, its intense and vexed relation to these contexts

becomes apparent.

In 1855 Emerson commented to Longfellow:

I have always one foremost satisfaction in reading

your books, – that I am safe. I am in variously

skilful hands, but first of all they are safe hands.7

This is echoed by Gartner, when he notes that

‘Longfellow’s poetry constructed safe places for women

and men seeking shelter.’8 The presumption in Emerson’s

(slightly patronizing) emphasis on safety is that not so

much that Longfellow is ‘safe’ in the sense that he is a

skilled poetic operator (note that ‘variously skilful’)

but that his poetry is reassuring, unchallenging and

perhaps predictable. Gartner’s comment on safety in

Longfellow’s poems emphasizes the sense that his works

offer a refuge from the lack of security in modern life.

But what I want to suggest is that Evangeline specifically

is a more ‘unsafe’ poem than comments like this might

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suggest. Founded on a significant historical trauma and

centred on violent separation, loss and missed

opportunities, the pious message of Christian resignation

to suffering does not entirely contain the more troubling

affects of the poem. Rather than being ‘distressingly

neat and lucid’, as Dana Gioia suggests, Evangeline’s

narrative and the hexameter form, which presented serious

obstacles for a poet writing in English, foreground

awkwardness and tension as inherent to the poem.9 When

Longfellow pointedly describes the Acadian expulsion as

‘Exile without an end, and without an example in story’

he draws into the poem both the notion that there is no

safe shelter for the Acadians, who will never recover

their idyllic homeland and their unity as a people, and

the question of whether this event is really unparalleled

in story – a question that, as we shall see, was

potentially awkward to pose in Boston in the late 1840s.10

The opening lines of Evangeline already foreground some

of the tensions that will run throughout the poem:

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and

the hemlocks,

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Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct

in the twilight,

Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and

prophetic,

Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on

their bosoms.

Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced

neighboring ocean

Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail

of the forest.

This is the forest primeval; but where are the

hearts that beneath it

Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland

the voice of the huntsman?

Where is the thatch-roofed village, the home of

Acadian farmers, -

Men whose lives glided on like rivers that water the

woodlands,

Darkened by shadows of earth, but reflecting an

image of heaven?

6

Waste are those pleasant farms, and the farmers

forever departed!

Scattered like dust and leaves, when the mighty

blasts of October

Seize them and whirl them aloft, and sprinkle them

far o’er the ocean. (57)

The first phrase – one of the most famous openings in the

history of American poetry – locates the reader in a

gloomy and ancient place, somewhere that resists vision

and interpretation. ‘Hemlocks’ indicate to the reader

that we are in the New World (since the hemlock in Europe

is not a tree but a plant), but the ‘Druids of eld’ and

‘harpers hoar’ situate this within an ancient Celtic

past. The Acadians are originally from Normandy, hence

references like this link them to their European heritage

and thus, perhaps, subtly highlight the fact that before

becoming forced immigrants to America they are already

immigrants from the Old World. These harpers and their

prophetic voices, to a literate reader in this period,

might also suggest Thomas Moore’s immensely popular ‘The

Harp That Once Through Tara’s Halls’, in which the

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silenced harp is indicative of the decay of the Irish

nation. By opening with the image of a Celtic harper,

Longfellow links his poem to tales of fallen or

persecuted civilizations. In the first lines, the

murmuring pines, forest and ocean give the impression

that no human voice is left to repeat the story of the

loss of Acadia, but druids and harpers also introduce the

important notion of oral transmission, which recurs at

the end of the poem as maidens recount Evangeline’s story

by the fireside. While the primeval forest seems to be

pre-civilization, it is actually, we discover in line 7,

post-apocalyptic: a landscape from which the human

figures have been removed. By comparing the Acadians to

deer in this first reference Longfellow emphasizes their

association with nature, but more importantly the fact

that they are prey for the hunter. Hearts leaping like

the roe incorporates two biblical references through the

pun on heart/hart, from Song of Solomon 2:9, ‘My beloved

is like a roe’, and Isaiah 35:6, ‘Then shall the lame man

leap as a hart’. These allusions associate the Acadians

with those beloved of God, and, in Isaiah’s prophecy,

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with the ‘ransomed of the Lord’, who ‘shall return, and

come to Zion’ (35:10) – perhaps a hint that the Acadians

will one day regain their lands, as well as the

suggestion that they will receive recompense in Heaven.

The image of the Acadians ‘scattered, like dust and

leaves’, which implies their lack of agency in their

dispersal and again links them to the natural world, also

contains an allusion to Dante and the souls flocking to 1I am grateful to the Friends of the Longfellow House and the Carnegie Trust for a research fellowship that enabled me to consult materials held by Harvard University and the Longfellow House.

? Charles C. Calhoun, Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004), 190. 2 Christoph Irmscher, Longfellow Redux (REF 2007). Matthew Gartner, ‘Becoming Longfellow: Work, Manhood and Poetry’, American Literature 72 (2000): 59-86. Virginia Jackson, ‘Longfellow’s Tradition, or, Picture-Writing a Nation’, MLQ 59 (1998): 471-96. 3 See John Seelye, ‘Attic Shape: Dusting Off Evangeline’, Virginia QuarterlyReview 60 (winter 1984): 21-44. The best account of Evangeline’s afterlives is Carl Brasseux, In Search of Evangeline: The Birth and Evolution of theEvangeline Myth (Thibodaux, Louisiana: Blue Heron Press, 1988). 4 Dana Gioia, ‘Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism’, in The Cambridge History of American Poetry, ed. Jay Parini and Brett C. Miller (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1993), 64-96, 87. 5 Rosemary Lyons, A Comparison of the Works of Antonine Maillet and Louise Erdrich with the Poems of Longfellow (Lampeter: Edwin Mellon, 2002), 4. Renate Eigenbrod, ‘Evangeline, Hiawatha and a Jewish Cemetery: His/tories ofInterconnected and Multiple Displacements’, World Literature Written in English 40 (2002-3): 101-114, 112. Wayne O’Grady, ‘Acadia, Acadia!’, Queen’s Quarterly 105 (1998): 382-91, 383.6 Seelye 31.7 Emerson to Longfellow, 25 November 1855, cited in Samuel Longfellow, Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 3 vols (London: Kegan Paul, 1886), 2:265. 8 Gartner 67. 9 Gioia 86.10 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie, in Poems and Other Writings, ed. J. D. McClatchy (New York: Library of America, 2000), 86.All further references given in the text.

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Charon’s boat in the underworld, which is itself a

reference to Virgil’s Aeneid VI and the dead souls ‘as many

as the leaves that fall in the woods at the first frost

of autumn’. These are relatively familiar but

sophisticated literary allusions, and they serve to bring

into the opening passage of Evangeline a sense of the epic

and a foreshadowing of death and destruction. Both the

withered leaves and the crucial word ‘disconsolate’ recur

later when Evangeline ponders the likely fate of her

people:

In the dead of the night she heard the disconsolate

rain fall

Loud on the withered leaves of the sycamore-tree by

the window. (79)

The image warns the reader that the scattering of

Evangeline’s countrymen is imminent, and the repetition

of ‘disconsolate’ similarly draws the reader back to the

gloom of the opening lines. ‘Disconsolate’, according to

its OED definition, can mean either ‘dismal, cheerless,

gloomy’ or ‘destitute of consolation and comfort’.

Longfellow incorporates both meanings, using it as a

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straightforward description of the misery induced by

hearing rain and wind, and as a presage of the imminent

absence of all consolation for Evangeline and her family.

The final fate of these people is to leave their native

land disconsolate and to be destitute of all comfort

themselves, and despite the religious message of patient

endurance that is reiterated by various characters at key

moments in the poem, the sense of an ‘accent

disconsolate’, a discordant note in Longfellow’s

sentimentality, persists.

This subtle use of allusion and foreshadowing occurs

throughout the poem, but the most striking feature of

these opening lines is of course the hexameter rhythm.

Both Longfellow’s contemporaries and recent critics have

observed that the hexameter, the metre of Greek epic,

sits uneasily with the rhythms of English. In an

excellent recent article, focusing primarily on Arthur

Hugh Clough’s experiments, Erik Gray notes that:

The dactylic hexameter is the vestige of a dead

language, and it fits awkwardly with English. The

reader is conscious of a sophisticated but

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anachronistic rhythm overlaid upon the idiomatic

vernacular.11

Gray observes that the hexameter has a tendency to veer

towards either prose or a four-beat, sing-song rhythm

familiar from ballads and limericks, the ‘native beat

that underlies its classical superstructure’.12 In effect

this tension between classical heritage and ‘native beat’

is what seems to have appealed to Longfellow. When his

close friend Cornelius Felton, Professor of Greek at

Harvard, praised the hexameters of Evangeline in a lengthy

review article, Longfellow quoted his comment that ‘The

ancient hexameter runs back into the mythical times’ in

his journal and added ‘I am more glad than ever, that I

chose this metre for my poem’.13 Like the references to

druids, the hexameter might convey the sense of a vaguely

mythical past, something archaic and lost. But Longfellow

also emphasised that the hexameter appealed because of

its potential familiarity, writing in 1848:

11 Erik Gray, ‘Clough and His Discontents: Amours de Voyage and the English Hexameter’, Literary Imagination 6 (summer 2004): 195-210.12 Ibid.,.13 C. C. Felton, ‘Longfellow’s Evangeline: The History of Acadie’, North American Review 66 (1848): 215-244, 237. See Longfellow’s journal, 3 January 1848, Life 2:107.

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To a great many readers the metre must be a

stumbling-block; but I could not avoid it. After

long deliberation I adopted it as the only one for

the kind of poem I wished to write; for it enabled

me to speak of familiar household things better than

the heroic measure, which some friends urged upon

me. Like the flight of the swallow the hexameter

soars and sinks at will; now grazing the ground in

its long sweep, now losing itself in the clouds.14

The hexameter seemed to fit Evangeline because it is capable

of both tragedy and bathos, in English it simultaneously

belongs to ‘high’ and ‘low’ poetry. As George Saintsbury

remarked somewhat snobbishly on the metre of Evangeline:

‘Its marked singsong is a quality which undoubtedly

appeals more to untrained ears’.15 Given his interest in

appealing to a wide readership and reaching the hearts of

the people en masse, Longfellow would have been inclined

to take this as compliment rather than criticism.

14 Longfellow to Robert Bigsby, 20 September 1848, The Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Andrew Hilen, 4 vols. (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1966-72), 3:180. 15 George Saintsbury, A History of English Prosody, 3 vols (London: Macmillan, 1910), 3:406.

13

Hexameters, as Gray notes, are also associated with

the great epic poems of displacement and exile, so the

form again hints at the content of Longfellow’s epic.

More than this, however, there is something about the

movement – or lack of movement – in English hexameters

that mirrors the stops and starts of Evangeline’s

wandering quest. Francis Lieber wrote to Longfellow in

October 1849 that English words were too heavy for the

hexameter, so that ‘you cannot by any possibility glide

over them…And you will admit that even the modern

hexameter consists of the two elements of resting or

dwelling and gliding.’ Longfellow did not deny this

suggestion, but replied that

What you say of weight in words is very true; but no

more proves English hexameters to be impossible than

it does all English versification to be impossible.

Don’t be unhappy on this point. Rather rejoice with

me…that the London Examiner says ‘The story is told

in unrhymed hexameters a style of versification happily adapted

to a narrative in which suspense and expectation are the predominant

emotions.’16

16 Letters 3:227n, 226.

14

Suspense and expectation, in the phrase Longfellow

highlighted from this review, both rely upon the

judicious use of pauses or rests rather than continuous

flowing motion. The caesura in the hexameter (notable,

for instance, in the opening line of the poem) often

creates this sense of a momentary stoppage. Lieber’s

identification of the oscillation between halts and

onward movements in the hexameter also fits very neatly

with the motions of the poem, where the smoothness of

Acadian life, ‘Men whose lives glided on like rivers that

water the woodland’, here indicated both by the assonance

and alliteration of the words and by the flow of the

metre, is interrupted by stops and starts as they become

exiles. Evangeline’s wanderings are also compared to the

motion of a river:

Let me essay, O Muse, to follow the wanderer’s

footsteps; -

Not through each devious path, each changeful year

of existence,

But as a traveller follows a streamlet’s course

through the valley:

15

Far from its margin at times, and seeing the gleam

of its water

Here and there, in some open space, and at intervals

only;

Then drawing nearer its banks, through sylvan glooms

that conceal it,

Though he behold it not, he can hear its continuous

murmur; (

The division of the fifth line here into three parts,

avoiding the usual division into two phrases separated by

the caesura and creating an extra pause, an open space,

plus the heavy emphases on ‘here and there’ and ‘open

space’, rhythmically mimics the traveller’s halts as he

strains after irregular glimpses of this stream, while in

contrast ‘continuing murmur’ hints at the regular

underlying hexameter beat. Although Evangeline’s course

is simultaneously ‘continuous’ and subject to such a

rhythm of stops and starts, as her continued journey

after Gabriel is delayed by a series of stoppages, from

her unconscious sleep on the Mississippi as Gabriel sails

past, to her year-long stay at the Spanish Mission, as

16

she rests and waits for him before becoming impatient and

resuming the quest.

In the reviews that Longfellow cut and pasted into

his scrap-book, several writers identified the

hexameter’s potential for flowing motion, including

Hawthorne, who borrowed Longfellow’s image in stating

that Evangeline’s narrative flows ‘as naturally as the

current of a stream’.17 Most critics, however, also

expressed some anxiety about the difficulty of this

measure and the way in which it threatened to ‘clog with

clumsiness the otherwise graceful and beautiful

promptings of [Longfellow’s] muse.’18 As early as 1842, in

a review article that Longfellow praised in his journal,

Felton had suggested that English hexameters were

problematic because ‘most of them are forced and awkward,

and painfully remind us of the “difficulties overcome”’.19

Reviewers of Evangeline were similarly anxious, although

most agreed that Longfellow had achieved a success. The

17 Hawthorne’s review is reprinted in Hubert H. Hoeltje, ‘Hawthorne’s Review of Evangeline’, New England Quarterly 23 (June 1950): 232-5, 234. 18 New York Express, in Scrapbook; criticisms 1839-1850. Houghton Library, Harvard. MS Am 13140 (221). Longfellow’s pasted entries usually give the name of the journal or newspaper, but with no further information. 19 Felton, ‘Longfellow’s Ballads and Other Poems’, North American Review 55 (1842): 114-144, 124.

17

Courier critic stressed that the poem was ‘a complete

triumph over the difficulties of the hexameter measure…

flowing onward as smooth and untrammelled as the light-

springing footstep of the lyric’, while the Times noted

that Longfellow had ‘triumphantly surmounted…obstacles’

posed by the metre, so that ‘his verse flows onward like

a melodious river’.20 These reviews assume that the

difficulty of the hexameter is a purely negative

attribute, other than its capacity for showing

Longfellow’s virtuosic skills. But again, in a poem that

deals with the difficulties repeatedly faced by its

heroine, and her effort to remain serene and unsullied

despite the glaring obstacles in her path, the

difficulties posed by the rhythm might be part of the

point. Longfellow himself described the hexameter in his

preface to Ballads and Other Poems (containing his

substantial translation of the Swedish hexameter poem

‘The Children of the Lord’s Supper’) as the ‘inexorable

hexameter, in which, it must be confessed, the motions of

the English Muse are not unlike those of a prisoner

dancing to the music of his chains.’21 In a narrative that

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receives its impetus from the literal imprisonment of the

Acadian men before their deportation, and the metaphoric

imprisonment of Evangeline by her past, the obvious

restraints imposed by this metre are another instance

where form reflects upon content. Both subject-matter and

form embrace potential constraints and awkwardness.

After this prologue Evangeline moves into a

description of the idyllic pastoral life of the Acadians,

emphasizing domestic peace, harmony, and the unity of the

community: ‘a hundred hearths, the homes of peace and

contentment’; ‘all things were held in common, and what

one had was another’s’; ‘all sounds were in harmony

blended’(59, 64). Yet hints of the disaster to come

repeatedly creep in. In his description of Evangeline’s

home, Longfellow lingers on the ‘meek and innocent

inmates’ of the dove-cot, ‘Murmuring ever of love’ –

emblems of his heroine – but observes that over their

heads, ‘Numberless noisy weathercocks rattled and sang of

mutation’, while at his comfortable hearth her father

watches how the flames ‘struggled together like foes in a

20 Scrap-Book, Criticisms 1839-50. 21 Longfellow, Ballads and Other Poems (Cambridge: John Owen, 1842), xxiv.

19

burning city’ (61, 65). These are presages of the end of

Part I when the Acadians are forced onto the English

ships and their village is burnt behind them:

There disorder prevailed, and the tumult and stir of

embarking.

Busily plied the freighted boats; and in the

confusion

Wives were torn from their husbands, and mothers,

too late, saw their children

Left on the land, extending their arms, with wildest

entreaties. (81)

‘Torn’ is an emotive and forceful word: one account known

to Longfellow, Charles Sealsfield’s Life in the New World,

does emphasize that the Acadians were ‘torn from their

homes, their firesides and their huts’, but none focus

this intensely on the separation of families, stating

simply that ‘parents were separated from children, and

husbands from wives’ or ‘households…were separated.’22

22 Charles Sealsfield, Life in the New World; or Sketches of American Society, trans. Gustavus C. Hebbe and James Mackay (New York: J. Winchester, 1844), 68. Thomas C. Haliburton, An Historical and Statistical Account of Nova Scotia, 2 vols (Halifax: Joseph Howe, 1829), 1:194. George Bancroft, ‘The Exiles of Acadia’, The Token and Atlantic Souvenir (Boston: David H. Williams, 1842), 288. Longfellow made significant use of Haliburton, and may have known Bancroft’s article since his poem ‘The Two Locks of Hair’ appeared in the same annual.

20

Earlier imagery emphasized the orderly, unifying rhythms

of Acadian life, as in the evening scene when the blended

harmonies of Evangeline’s spinning wheel and of her

father’s folk-song create a sanctified atmosphere:

While the monotonous drone of the wheel, like the

drone of a bagpipe,

Followed the old man’s song, and united the

fragments together.

As in a church, when the chant of the choir at

intervals ceases,

Footfalls are heard in the aisles, or words of

priest at the altar,

So, in each pause of the song, with measured motion

the clock clicked. (66)

Again, the emphasis on intervals, pauses and regular

beats mimetically references the movement of the

hexameter lines here. Now, as Evangeline sees Gabriel

carried aboard a ship and is left to witness the burning

of her village, the disruption of these rhythms is shown

in the description of her father’s face ‘E’en as the face

of a clock from which the hands have been taken’. (83)

21

Deprived of his household rhythms, he dies before

departure, leaving Evangeline desolate on the shore.

In the succeeding section, set several years

afterwards, Longfellow opens with a general picture of

the state of the Acadian immigrants:

Friendless, homeless, hopeless, they wandered from

city to city,

From the cold lakes of the North to sultry Southern

savannas, -

From the bleak shores of the sea to the lands where

the Father of Waters

Seizes the hills in his hands, and drags them down

to the ocean,

Deep in their sands to bury the scattered bones of

the mammoth.

Friends they sought and homes; and many, despairing,

heartbroken,

Asked of the earth but a grave, and no longer a

friend nor a fireside.

Written their history stands on tablets of stone in

the churchyards. (86)

22

The displacement of these immigrants is not ended once

they reach America, but is ongoing, as they fail to find

a resting-place despite crossings of the entire

continent, and both the reference to the mammoth and to

their gravestones strengthens the impression that this is

a people already doomed to extinction. The emphasis on

the impossibility of survival without a friend or a

fireside is typical of Longfellow, whose poems use the

domestic hearth as a vital image of community and

inclusion. In his ‘Dedication’ to The Seaside and the Fireside,

for instance, he imagines himself hoping for entrance

into the homes of his friends (and readers):

Therefore I hope, as no unwelcome guest,

At your warm fireside, when the lamps are

lighted,

To have my place reserved among the rest,

Nor stand as one unsought and uninvited!

This is a powerful vision of exclusion, of the horrors of

being ‘uninvited’ into the cosy domestic circle, which

this poem envisages as consisting of all the readers of

the volume. The self-conscious modesty of Longfellow’s

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request invites reassurance. His invocation of insecurity

is disarming at the same time as it is wholly

disingenuous – who would not welcome this most beloved of

poets into their home? Evangeline creates a similar effect

in that readers are both implicitly asked to imagine

themselves into the place of the Acadian exiles, and

assumed to long for the chance to offer them friendship

and a fireside.

The social message of inclusion as a specifically

American trait is highlighted at two points in the poem:

when Basil Lajeunesse, Gabriel’s father, celebrates the

happy settlement of the Acadians in Louisiana (95-100),

and when Evangeline is described as having found ‘a home

and a country’ in Quaker Philadelphia (110). But, as the

passage above suggests, there is a much heavier emphasis

on continued exile and loss, raising the question of the

ability of America (and Americans) to offer recuperation

to those who arrived as homeless wanderers. In 1847,

readers from Boston and elsewhere made to weep over the

plight of impoverished, desperate immigrants would have

had numerous examples of such on their own doorsteps, in

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the form of Irish immigrants fleeing the famine of 1845-

51, not to mention increasing numbers from Italy, Spain

and other European countries. M. Wynn Thomas, writing on

Hiawatha, notes that the rapid increase in immigration

lent impetus to Boston’s development into a huge

mercantile city and comments:

For someone of Longfellow’s privileged social

background and refined temperament, the ravening new

economic order may well have been most alarmingly

apparent in the form of the unruly immigrants

crowding into the slums of Boston and the North

End.23

Longfellow’s records of charitable giving, which survive

from the early 1850s, note payments to indigent Italian,

French, German, Hungarian, Polish and Irish people, many

of whom came to his home to appeal to him personally.24

Like the Acadians, it was significant that most of these

new arrivals were Roman Catholics, and thus subject to

23 M. Wynn Thomas, Transatlantic Connections: Whitman U.S./Whitman U.K. (Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press, 2005), 89. 24 These records of ‘Charities’ (1850-1858) are held at the LongfellowHouse.

25

strong anti-catholic prejudice, shown in events such as

the anti-immigration riots of 1844 in Philadelphia.

Several commentators in the 1840s perceived

parallels between current events and the Acadian

expulsion, perhaps most notably Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Hawthorne’s discussion of the Acadian exile in his

history of Massachusetts for children, Famous Old People

(1841), the second volume of Grandfather’s Old Chair, was known

to Longfellow, who had discussed the book with Hawthorne

and owned a presentation copy. Hawthorne’s narrative

follows the conceit of a grandfather narrating to his

grandchildren the historical exploits in which his old

chair featured. The story of the Acadians is recounted,

significantly, on Thanksgiving, and as an affecting tale

of desolation it is designed to shore up the family unit

by again creating a community centred round the fireside,

making the children ‘feel the blessing of a secure and

peaceful hearth’.25 Hawthorne deviates from earlier

sources on the expulsion by dwelling specifically on the

feelings of those Acadians who landed in Boston:

25 Nathaniel Hawthorne, Famous Old People (Boston: E. P. Peabody, 1841),135.

26

A sad day it was for the poor Acadians, when the

armed soldiers drove them, at the point of the

bayonet, down to the sea-shore…But, methinks, it

must have been sadder still, when they were landed

on the Long Wharf, in Boston, and left to

themselves, on a foreign strand.

Then, probably, they huddled together, and looked

into one another’s faces for the comfort which was

not there…Now, a desolate wife might be heard

calling for her husband. He, alas! had gone, she

knew not whither…Young men and maidens, whose hearts

had been torn asunder by separation, had hoped,

during the voyage, to meet their beloved ones at its

close. Now, they began to feel that they were

separated forever.26

The narrator continues by imagining the reactions of the

local inhabitants to this misery, and explicitly

introducing the notion of anti-catholic sentiment:

There were seen the New England women, too. They had

just come out of their warm, safe homes, where

everything was regular and comfortable…Surely, they 26 Ibid. 125-6.

27

could pity the wretched wives and mothers of Acadia!

Or, did the sign of the cross…exclude all pity?27

‘Pray Heaven, that no family in Boston turned one of

these poor exiles from their door!’, he concludes.28

Having reduced his granddaughters to floods of

sympathetic tears, and with even the eldest grandson

repressing his emotions with difficulty, the story has

had its desired effect, creating the valuable affects of

pity and identification. Hawthorne’s account

emphasizes not only the role of Massachusetts citizens in

succouring the Acadians, but their role in creating their

situation in the first place. While the command to

disperse the Acadians came from England, the troops sent

to carry out the order were from Massachusetts.

Longfellow does not highlight the origin of the soldiers

in Evangeline (nor are his Acadians described as landing in

Boston), but then he might justifiably have assumed that

local readers would be aware of their state’s complicity

in this event. Certainly when one reviewer of the poem

(in the Boston Journal) carelessly stated that it was set in

27 Ibid. 127-8.28 Ibid. 130.

28

Normandy, a writer in the Boston Courier expressed

astonishment that anyone in Boston could be ignorant of

‘one of the darkest passages in our history…which

happened only ninety years ago, and has left its traces

among the living generation of Massachusetts men and

women.’29 Similarly, in Felton’s article on the Acadians

and Evangeline, which was originally delivered as a lecture

in Boston in late 1847, he comments on the expulsion that

‘it is painful to know that citizens of Massachusetts…

were the principal agents by whom it was carried into

execution.’30 These writers assume that Evangeline, like

Hawthorne’s account, would make its Massachusetts readers

in particular profitably reflect upon their

responsibility for historical atrocities.

In 1847-8, moreover, Felton’s words would have been

read or heard as a highly specific reference to the

contemporary political situation. Immigration was an

ongoing issue throughout this decade, but the more

pressing concern during the two years in which Longfellow

composed and revised Evangeline, 1845-7, was the Mexican-

29 Reviews pasted into Scrapbook; criticisms 1839-1850. 30 Felton, ‘History of Acadie’, 233.

29

American War. In Felton’s version of history Acadian

suffering becomes a parallel to this dispute, in which

(according to the anti-war contingent), the United States

had seized land from Mexico for the unjustifiable and

selfish purpose of expansion, and while claiming that

Mexico was the aggressor – just as the British claimed

that the Acadians were in league with the French – had

invaded a small, peaceful, Catholic country, laughably

inferior in terms of military resources, and had driven

the native inhabitants from their homes. Northerners also

believed that this war and the annexation of Texas would

lead to the spread of slavery across the southern states,

a situation that many regarded as wholly untenable.31 When

Felton lambasts the citizens of Massachusetts for their

historical involvement in forcing a native people from

their territory, then, it is likely that he is

consciously referencing the controversy, a year earlier,

over Robert Winthrop’s vote in Congress to support

President Polk by providing funding for this deeply

unpopular war. Winthrop, the Whig representative for

31 For a good account of the events of this war and public opinion concerning it, see Joseph Wheelan, Invading Mexico: America’s Continental Dream and the Mexican War, 1846-1848 (New York: Cornell and Graf, 2007).

30

Massachusetts, was anti-war but had felt it his duty to

support the President when war was inevitable. Many

vehemently disagreed, including Felton and Longfellow’s

intimate mutual friend Charles Sumner, lawyer and future

senator, who had alienated Winthrop and many other

members of Boston society by speaking against him and

publishing a letter that denounced his decision in

vitriolic terms (‘Blood! blood! is on the hands of the

representative from Boston’).32 When Felton delivered his

lecture, the war and Masschusetts’ responsibility for it

were still very much on the political agenda. He opened

his piece on the Acadian expulsion by stating that it was

hard to believe how recently it had occurred, given that:

We feel that the details of blood and conflagration,

of midnight assault and desperate resistance, of a

struggle to the death among Christian men, are more

like the inventions of the fabulist then the sober

narrations of history…The party victorious by

superiority of brute force…dared to … insult the

Almighty by attributing to his sanction of their

32 Cited in David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner (New York: Da Capo, 1996), 146. Donald gives a full account of this controversy.

31

cause the triumph they had gained over their enemies

by a more consummate mastery of the art of

slaughter.33

This is strong language to apply to a historical

atrocity, and the references to slaughter, death and

blood seem out of place in relation to the 1755

expulsion, which according to historical authorities and

Longfellow’s poem was carried out uncontested. Few could

have doubted the actual referent of Felton’s words.

Indeed, an unidentified newspaper cutting in Longfellow’s

scrapbook, which gives a brief account of Felton’s

lecture, states that his ‘researches have attracted much

attention, as appears from Boston papers’, in part

because:

Some of the follies and atrocities, which he

describes, are said to find a parallel in recent

incidents of our disgraceful war with Mexico. But

the lecturer leaves it to his hearers to make the

comparison, and to determine by their easy judgement

of the past, the proper condemnation of the present.

33 Felton, ‘History of Acadie’, 216.

32

An unpublished comment in Longfellow’s journal reports

gossip that editors had initially refused to publish

Felton’s review (hard to imagine if it was a

straightforward literary assessment of a wildly

successful poem by a well-known critic), and that he had

performed it as a lecture because he was ‘determined to

make it public in one way or another’.34 Both Longfellow

and Bostonians in general were evidently aware of the

implications of Felton’s remarks.

Felton took Evangeline and demonstrated its

contemporary political relevance, and he did so with

Longfellow’s full approbation. The persistent myth that

Longfellow was detached from the world of politics and

affairs, devoted to poetry and literature, has continued

to linger on in critical accounts, largely because, as

Irmscher notes ‘although he was politically one of the

most tolerant of nineteenth-century American writers (an

abolitionist, pacifist Unitarian liberal and avowed

multiculturalist), he shunned all occasions on which he

would have had to declare his opinions publicly and

declined all invitations to give speeches.’35 Arguably, 34 3 January 1848, Journal 1847-1848. Houghton. MS Am 1340 (201).

33

however, Longfellow’s poems do declare his opinions

publicly, whether directly, as in Poems Against Slavery, or

more indirectly, as in Evangeline, and of course they

reached a much wider audience in doing so than the

political speeches of his contemporaries. Sumner

recognized this himself when he wrote to Longfellow in

1845, ‘I wish you would permit a dog-cheap edition of all

your works, that they may penetrate the common mind, and

common heart of the country.’36 With close friends like

Felton and Sumner, moreover, it is clear that even had

Longfellow wanted to remain entirely neutral and

withdrawn from contemporary disputes, he would still have

been viewed by his Boston contemporaries as partisan. In

particular, Sumner’s career as a political activist took

off during the mid to late 1840s, during the period when

he was a very regular overnight guest at Longfellow’s

house. In July 1845, for instance, Sumner delivered a

bombshell at the traditional Fourth of July oration in

Boston when he spoke passionately and ferociously about

the horrors of war in front of an audience containing

several contingents of military, stating that his topic

34

derived ‘a peculiar interest…from transactions in which

our country has been involved’, such as the ‘unjust

legislation’ and ‘ignorant and ignoble passion for new

territories’ that had endangered peace with both Mexico

and England.37 Longfellow not only highly admired Sumner’s

oration, defended him from critics, commented with

pleasure on the reception of the published version in

England, and was one of two recipients of the first

copies of the published pamphlet; he also featured in the

published speech when Sumner cited ‘The Arsenal at

Springfield’ to back up his message.38 Longfellow’s poem,

which suggests that:

Were half the power, that fills the world with

terror,

35 Irmscher 8. John Derbyshire, for example, claims that Longfellow ‘had only the feeblest interest in politics, and never stood for any office’ (‘Longfellow and the Fate of Modern Poetry’, New Criterion 19 (2000): 12-20). For a good contrasting view, see Robert A. Ferguson, ‘Longfellow’s Political Fears: Civic Authority and the Role of the Artist in Hiawatha and The Courtship of Miles Standish’, American Literature 50 (May 1978): 187-215. 36 Charles Sumner to Longfellow, n.d. [1845]. Houghton MS Am 1340.2 (5394).37 Sumner, The True Grandeur of Nations: An Oration (Boston: William Ticknor, 1845), 3. 38 Ibid. 56n. See Longfellow’s journal entries for 7 July 1845 (unpublished, Journal 1844-1845. Houghton MS Am 1340 (199)), 27 October 1845 and 19 June 1846 (Life 2:24, 46).

35

Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and

courts,

Given to redeem the human mind from error,

There were no need of arsenals and forts: (34)

makes precisely the same argument that Sumner made at

length in his speech, where he quoted detailed statistics

about the money spent on the warship sitting in Boston

harbour as opposed to that spent on Harvard and on

national education. It is therefore not surprising that

Evangeline can also be read as strongly supporting

pacifism, particularly in the dramatic scene when the

priest of Grand-Pré, Father Felician, persuades the

Acadian men (imprisoned in the church) not to profane

‘the house of the Prince of Peace’ by attacking the

English soldiers but to submit with the ‘meekness and

holy compassion’ of Christ (77).

Both Longfellow’s closest friends, then, read his

poems as potential interventions in the political

situation of the day, and Longfellow was perfectly happy

for them to do so. In fact, published and unpublished

remarks in Longfellow’s journals show significant

36

interest in the political events of this period. In March

1844, when the crisis was looming, Longfellow notes that

his friends were ‘excited on the subject of the

Annexation of Texas’ but commented that he did not fear

this because ‘Deliberately to embrace Slavery and War

with Mexico, is too much’.39 Unfortunately his hopeful

prediction was rapidly proved wrong, and his journal

continues to note discussion with Felton and Sumner about

Texas, as well as commenting on general public opinion.

Although when war was declared Longfellow observed that

‘little interest is felt here in this shabby and to us

disgraceful War with Mexico’, he himself remained

engaged, as did his friends and family – in June 1846,

for instance, his brother Samuel, a Unitarian minister,

preached his first sermons and prayed for ‘our country in

this hour of shame, and our rulers who have proved untrue

to their duties’, besides preaching ‘directly against the

“unrighteous Mexican war”’. Longfellow notes gleefully

that one of the opposition leaders ‘stalked out of

church’.40 In autumn and winter 1846/7, he was preoccupied

with the controversy between Sumner and Winthrop and 39 19 March 1844, Journal 1844 and 1845.

37

keenly following Sumner’s burgeoning career as an orator,

and while completing Evangeline in January and February 1847

he was also discussing ‘military matters’ with Felton and

reading political speeches with Fanny, including Thomas

Corwin’s widely circulated denunciation of the war.41

Corwin’s speech makes an interesting comparison with

Evangeline because, at its most emotive point, it stresses

that the war is an invasion of the domestic peace of

Mexico:

But we send regiments, storm towns, and our colonels

prate of liberty in the midst of the solitudes their

ravages have made. They proclaim the empty forms of

social contract to a people bleeding and maimed with

wounds received in defending their hearth-stones,

again the invasion of these very men who shoot them

down and then exhort them to be free.42

Corwin, the Senator for Ohio, viewed the war as an

exposure of the hypocrisy of the United States in its

claims of freedom and liberty, and as a dangerous example40 27 May 1846 and 7 June 1846, Life 2:39-40, 42. Expanded versions in Journal 1845-1847. Houghton MS Am 1340 (200). 41 See entry for 24 January 1847, Journal 1845-1847 and 17 February 1847,Life 2:80. 42 Thomas Corwin, Speech of Mr. Thomas Corwin, of Ohio, on the Mexican War Delivered in the Senate Feb. 11 1847. (Washington: J. & G. S. Gideon, 1847), 12.

38

of imperialist ambition. Longfellow’s poem may not dwell

on these political points, but it serves to make its

readers feel the suffering of people forced from their

hearth-stones by an arrogant, imperialist power.

The Acadian expulsion, then, had particular

relevance for contemporary American politics. But so too

did the second half of the poem, which is concerned with

the aftermath of separation, with Evangeline’s prolonged

and difficult journeying from the north down the

Mississippi to Louisiana, where she finds Gabriel’s

father, Basil but just misses her lover, and then across

the prairies to the Rocky Mountains and back to the

forests of the north. While some of her Acadian

companions settle in Louisiana, her exiled and unfruitful

wandering lasts for most of her life. Evangeline’s quest

calls to mind three groups of displaced people, all of

which loomed large in the American cultural imagination

in this period. Firstly, she is compared to a pioneer

travelling westwards. Secondly, there are comparisons

between Evangeline and displaced Indian tribes, and

finally, there are subtle suggestions that her situation

39

parallels that of slaves forced to migrate to the

plantations of the deep South. Charles Calhoun, in his

recent biography of Longfellow, argues that any such

parallels in Evangeline are unintentional and

retrospectively ironic, because ‘only a radical’ in 1847

would have perceived them.43 Given the predominance of

these groups in public debate and controversy of the

period, however, and Longfellow’s personal association

with relatively radical causes and characters, it seems

unlikely that contemporary readers would have been blind

to the implications of his work.

In their apparently aimless wandering, as described

above, the Acadians as a group do not appear to be

showing much pioneer spirit. But besides the fact that

some named individuals within the poem (such as Basil) do

eventually penetrate the dangers of the natural landscape

to carve out a new home, Longfellow includes several

reminders that the travels and travails of his characters

parallel those on the westward trails. For example, a

particularly notable moment of a heroic simile occurs

43 Calhoun 182.

40

even before the Acadian exile has commenced, when the

Acadians are huddled on the beach waiting to depart:

Then rose a sound of dread, such as startles the

sleeping encampments

Far in the western prairies or forests that skirt

the Nebraska,

When the wild horses affrighted sweep by with the

speed of the whirlwind,

Or the loud bellowing herds of buffaloes rush to the

river.

Such was the sound that arose on the night, as the

herds and the horses

Broke through their folds and fences, and madly

rushed o’er the meadows.(84)

Since the depiction of Grand-Pré emphasized the careful

management of the natural world by dykes and fences, and

the orderliness of the farming community, this moment

when the protecting ‘folds and fences’ are broken marks

the destruction of the community’s security. The simile

prophetically looks forward to Evangeline’s travels on

the prairies, and also suggests that from this moment on

41

the Acadians are equivalent to pioneers in a hostile

land: their destiny as immigrants is linked to the

development of the United States through westward

emigration and the pursuit of ‘manifest destiny’, a

phrase strongly associated with President Polk and his

policies of the 1840s. Evangeline’s lonely existence

after her emigration is also described in a simile

comparing her to a westward pioneer:

Fair was she and young, but alas! before her

extended

Dreary and vast and silent, the desert of life, with

its pathway

Marked by the graves of those who had sorrowed and

suffered before her,

Passions long extinguished, and hopes long dead and

abandoned,

As the emigrant’s way o’er the Western desert is

marked by

Camp-fires long consumed, and bones that bleach in

the sunshine.

42

Something there was in her life incomplete,

imperfect, unfinished; (86-7)

Longfellow revised this passage from an initial draft

that alluded to Exodus and the escape of the Israelites

from Egypt:

Marked by the graves of those who had sorrowed and

suffered before her

Even as the road o’er the desarts and from the Nile

to the Red Sea,

Has no mark save the bones, of camels that die on

the journey.44

Using Exodus here could have provided a link between the

Acadians and exile and slavery in the United States,

given that the flight from Egypt was a highly charged

symbol for escape from slavery. The final version,

however, allows more dramatic irony, because Evangeline’s

journey will later be literally marked by cold campfires

where Gabriel has been and departed. More importantly, in

converting a Biblical allusion into a specifically

American reference, Longfellow makes his heroine symbolic

of a national enterprise. Unlike the emigrants, however, 44 Evangeline, first manuscript draft, 1846-7. Houghton MS Am 1340 (78).

43

Evangeline does not reach the promised land of Oregon or

California; her journey remains fundamentally an

‘imperfect’ version of this particular destiny.

When Longfellow introduces the idea of sleeping

encampments on the Western prairies into a scene of soon-

to-be-outcast Acadians sleeping on the shores of Nova

Scotia, another set of exiled wanderers enter the poem by

the back door: American Indians. As Lucy Maddox has

convincingly demonstrated, the question of the removal of

American Indians and their displacement from their native

lands – including the famous incident of the expulsion of

the Cherokee nation from Georgia and their forced march

on the ‘Trail of Tears’ in 1838 – was hugely

controversial from the 1830s to the 1850s, and is

reflected upon in oblique forms in a number of novels

from this period. Her reading of Hawthorne’s fiction is

particularly relevant to Evangeline, given that she

perceives subtle links between his representations of

outcast, wandering women and of Indians.45 Many other

critics have commented on the huge literary presence of

45 Lucy Maddox, Removals: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Politics of Indian Affairs (Oxford: OUP, 1991).

44

the ‘Vanishing American’ in this period, encompassing,

for instance, forty novels between 1824 and 1834 and

thirty-five Indian dramas between 1829 and 1849.46 Lydia

Sigourney’s lines in ‘Pocahontas’:

Forgotten race, – farewell! Your haunts we tread, -

And ye, like troubled shadows, sink to rest

In unremembered tombs, unpitied and unblest.47

sum up the prevailing sentiments of this discourse,

particularly in relation to the common trope of

‘unremembered tombs’, which recurs in Evangeline when

Evangeline and Gabriel lie ‘unknown and unnoticed’ in

their graves in Philadelphia (114). Longfellow’s

participation in this narrative, his interest in and

sympathy with Indians, has been well documented in

relation to Hiawatha, but it is worth considering that

Hiawatha’s major predecessor might also be relevant to

these interests. Indeed, from the opening phrase

Longfellow’s poem hints at this popular literary

46 Lora Romero, ‘Vanishing Americans: Gender, Empire and New Historicism’, in The Culture of Sentiment, ed. Shirley Samuels (Oxford: OUP, 1992), 115-27, 115 and Gordon M. Sayre, The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero: Native Resistance and the Literatures of America, from Montezuma to Tecumseh (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2005), 2. 47 Lydia H. Sigourney, from ‘Pocahontas’, in Pocahontas and Other Poems (London: Robert Tyas, 1841), 23.

45

tradition. O’Grady comments: ‘Annapolis wasn’t the forest

primeval in 1755, it was well cleared and tended

farmland…The forest primeval was where James Fenimore

Cooper had set his highly successful Leatherstocking

series’, and adds ‘Could Longfellow have been hoping that

this readers would respond to the perils of Evangeline as

they had to the exploits of Natty Bumppo?’.48 This is

intended to be ironic, but is in my view entirely

accurate. In the historical sources about the Acadian

expulsion, it is suggested that the Acadians were allies

of their local Indian tribe and many escaped into the

forests in 1755 to join them, a detail that Longfellow

omits. But even without this detail, readers encountering

primeval forests in a text from the 1840s would be primed

to expect a particular narrative, and given that the rest

of her people are either dead or assimilated into the

American nation, Evangeline is in effect the last of her

race.

We can see the parallels clearly in a poem like

George Colton’s Tecumseh (1841), in which one of his

repeated laments for the disappearance of the Indian race48 O’Grady 391.

46

opens ‘The time has been when all this western world/ Was

one vast forest, crowded, dim and deep’ and continues:

And lo! no more, if eastern shores we tread,

Doth one lone stream primeval shadows lave,

And, with the forests, sink to silent grave

The tribes that roamed their wilds in savage

might,

Far west a few old woods and warriors brave

Yet linger on the verge of hastening light:

Full soon shall they, too, pass, and all to

them be night.49

There is no evidence that Longfellow read Tecumseh, though

he was aware of Colton as an acquaintance of Lowell’s and

the editor of the American Whig Review, and had seen the

review of his own poems alongside Tecumseh in the Foreign

and Quarterly Review of 1845.50 But Colton’s neglected poem,

one of several on the Indian hero of the Battle of

Tippecanoe, who united his tribes and fought with the

British against the Americans, does have intriguing

49 George Colton, Tecumseh; or The West Thirty Years Since (London: William Smith, 1844), 6250 ‘American Poets and Poetry’, Foreign Quarterly Review 32 (1844): 300-325.

47

parallels with Evangeline. It begins as the story of a

captured white maiden, Mary, separated from her lover

Moray, who spends most of the poem in a quest to find and

rescue her. Tecumseh then oddly switches gear as the focus

shifts to Tecumseh’s wandering quest to unify his people

after the loss of his homeland, and the poem becomes a

lament for the Shawnee tribe in exile, ‘By the usurping

stranger spurned/ Far from their homes beloved and

mourned’. As Colton observes in a footnote: ‘In 1780, the

continental troops expelled that portion of the tribe

from their pleasant home, and burned their villages

behind them, with what reason or justice I have not been

able to discover.’51 With a slight change of date, this

comment could apply just as neatly to the Acadians.

Colton’s poem highlights the importance of tropes of

wandering and exile in both its overt plot about Mary and

Moray (and it is worth noting that Longfellow’s reversal

of the roles assigned to the lovers makes Evangeline

appear considerably more active and resourceful by

comparison to the wholly passive Mary) and in the

parallel plot about the Shawnees and Tecumseh. 51 Colton 10, 74n.

48

In Evangeline, there is no explicit comparison made

between the Acadians and Indian expulsion from their

lands, but there are some suggestive moments. For

example, when Longfellow describes the prairies over

which Evangeline travels to find Gabriel, he observes:

Over them wander the scattered tribes of Ishmael’s

children,

Staining the desert with blood; and above their

terrible war-trails

Circles and sails aloft, on pinions majestic, the

vulture,

Like the implacable soul of a chieftain slaughtered

in battle,

**

Here and there rise smokes from the camps of these

savage marauders;

Here and there rise groves from the margins of

swift-running rivers; (103)

Here the Indians appear in a somewhat clichéd manner as

one of the potential hazards Evangeline may have to face

on her journey, and as a marker of the savagery of the

49

landscape of America. Like Colton’s identification of the

disappearing Indians with the disappearing forests, the

camps of the Indians are as much part of the natural

landscape as the trees. But this description is

complicated by an earlier reference to Ishmael, occurring

much earlier in the poem as Evangeline waits by her

window in Grand-Pré:

And, as she gazed from the window, she saw serenely

the moon pass

Forth from the folds of a cloud, and one star follow

her footsteps,

As out of Abraham’s tent young Ishmael wandered with

Hagar! (73)

This clearly foreshadows the imminent expulsion of

Evangeline and her people from her homes. Hagar, in

Genesis 21:9-20, was Abraham’s Egyptian bondwoman who was

cast out by jealous Sarah. She wanders in the wilderness

until God sees her and saves her son, Ishmael, saying

that he will be the founder of a great nation. By

repeating this allusion, Longfellow not only sets up a

parallel between Evangeline and the Indian tribes, he

50

also suggests that their ill-treatment by humans will be

remedied by God.

By far the most important reference to Indians in

the poem, however, is Evangeline’s encounter with a

Shawnee woman as she travels with Basil in search of

Gabriel:

Once, as they sat by their evening fire, there

silently entered

Into their camp an Indian woman, whose features

Wore great traces of sorrow, and patience as great

as her sorrow.

She was a Shawnee woman returning home to her

people,

From the far-off hunting grounds of the cruel

Camanches,

Where her Canadian husband, a Coureur-des-Bois, had

been murdered.

This woman sits ‘at the door of Evangeline’s tent’ to

relate her sad story:

Much Evangeline wept at the tale, and to know that

another

51

Hapless heart like her own had loved and had been

disappointed.

Moved to the depths of her soul by pity and woman’s

compassion,

Yet in her sorrow pleased that one who had suffered

was near her,

She in turn related her love and all its disasters.

(104-5)

As I have discussed elsewhere, this moment is vital to

the poem in that it models the way in which the

transmission of affect – the presence of shared bodily

emotion – operates in sentimental narratives to create a

sense of shared community and mutual understanding

between people of different races or nations.52 Since

Gabriel is also working as a Coureur-des-Bois, Evangeline

and this unnamed woman are associated, and Evangeline’s

story turns out to have strong parallels in Indian folk-

tales. The emphasis on ‘woman’s compassion’, however,

suggests a specific kind of gender-based and therefore

52 Kirstie Blair, ‘“Thousands of throbbing hearts”. Sentimentality and Community in Victorian Poetry: Longfellow’s Evangeline and Tennyson’s Enoch Arden’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 4(spring 2007): www.19.bbk.ac.uk/issue4/index.htm.

52

perhaps not unlimited sympathy, and the fact that the

woman’s husband has been murdered by a hostile tribe of

Indians evades the notion that her sufferings relate to

the wider responsibility for Indian affairs held by her

white hosts.

This turns a matter of public sentiment over the

mistreatment of the Indians as a whole into a moment of

private, personal loss, and while the Shawnee woman is

welcomed to the fireside, she is still placed in a

liminal space ‘at the door’ of the tent, not quite fully

welcomed into Evangeline’s domestic space.

The final and perhaps most intriguingly occluded

presence in the poem is that of slavery. When Harriet

Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), she argued

– in common with many other abolitionists – that the

greatest wrong created by slavery was the separation of

families, using the same image that Longfellow deployed

for the Acadians in stating that the system of slavery

‘whirls families and scatters their members, as the wind

whirls and scatters the leaves of autumn.’53 As Michael

Tadman’s detailed study has shown, the tendency to trade

53

slaves south grew rapidly in the first half of the

nineteenth century, and he conservatively estimates that

the forcible separation of couples, while lower than that

of parents and children, could be as high as 25 percent.

‘The exodus of slaves was forced, long-distance and

permanent’, Tadman comments, and those sold south ‘almost

certainly faced the prospect of forever, of a total loss

of contact with and support from their own family.’54 To

write a poem in 1847 in which the plot derives from a

woman desperately seeking her fiancé after they have been

cruelly separated, and which features a journey

southwards down the Mississippi, might seem to invite

comparison. As Seelye notes, Evangeline has a comparable

force to Hiram Powers’s famous statue of the ‘Greek

Slave’, in that the white heroine ‘serves as a vicarious

vehicle for emotions aroused by the plight of enslaved

black people’, and he suggests that the poem was a

probable influence on Stowe and her heroine, also named

Evangeline.55 Stephen Railton’s online resource on ‘Uncle

Tom’s Cabin and American Culture’ also suggests locating

Evangeline with Powers and Stowe, and reprints an

54

illustration from an 1850 edition of the poem by Jane

Benham which shows the Acadians chained together, rather

like a slave coffle.56 This image gains added resonance

from the detail, which Longfellow would have encountered

in Haliburton’s History of Nova Scotia, that the Government of

Philadelphia initially ‘proposed to sell’ the Acadian

refugees – with their consent, which was indignantly

refused.57 Evangeline, who lands in Philadelphia, might

have come closer to slavery than most readers of the poem

realized.

While composing Evangeline, Longfellow’s political

interests encompassed the abolition of slavery, though he

did not necessarily share the political views of the

‘Abolitionists’. He was exasperated to be the target of

the Abolition papers because his publishers’ (sanctioned

or at least unchallenged by Longfellow) had left his

anti-slavery poems out of the illustrated edition of 1845

– they were reinstated in the cheap edition of the

53 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, ed. Kenneth S. Lynn (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 442.54 Michael Tadman, Speculators and Slaves: Masters, Traders and Slaves in the Old South(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 134-5, 161. 55 Seelye 4356 Stephen Railton, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture’. University of Virginia. www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/sentimnt/snpohwla3t.html57 Haliburton 182.

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following year. But Longfellow also lamented the ‘apathy’

felt by the inhabitants of Portland on the subject of

slavery, highly regretted his absence from the dramatic

September 1846 meeting in Faneuil Hall to protest the

alleged ‘kidnapping’ of a slave from Boston harbour, at

which John Quincy Adams, Sumner, and Samuel Gridley Howe

all spoke, and discussed abolition with Lowell in summer

1846.58 His account books from the late 1840s onwards show

significant donations to abolitionist causes and

individual former slaves. He also ‘had a long talk’ with

Josiah Henson, the preacher and former slave, on 26 June

1846 about his escape from slavery with his family.59

Moreover, Longfellow was deeply interested in Sumner’s

public lecture on ‘White Slavery in the Barbary States’,

delivered in February 1847, describing it as ‘exceedingly

clever, simple and striking’.60 Sumner explicitly related

his historical discussion of Algerine slavery to African-

American slavery, and slyly played on his audience’s

emotional response to the separation of families:

58 Life 2:32, 51, 57 and Journal 1845-47. 59 Life 2:47-8. 60 Ibid. 80.

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Our liveliest sympathies attend these white

brethren, – torn from their homes, the ties of

family and friendship rudely severed, parent

separated from child and husband from wife.61

It is easy to imagine the orator’s subtle emphasis on

‘white’. Sumner had been following the composition of

Evangeline with interest and in the spring of 1847 was one

of three friends (with Felton and Charles Folsom) who

read the first proofs and offered suggestions. The lines

of influence between this public, political address and

Longfellow’s poem should be seen as mutual, or indeed, as

with Felton’s Acadian lecture, the poem might potentially

provide the pre-existing motive for the address.

References to slavery are notably absent from

Evangeline itself, with the one exception of Evangeline

noting in passing the ‘negro-cabins’ that form part of

the scenery of the plantations on the banks of the

Mississippi (Longfellow substituted ‘cabins’ for ‘huts’

in his manuscript revisions, which makes the scene a

little more cosy).62 Longfellow’s revisions to his

61 Sumner, White Slavery in the Barbary States (Boston: William D. Ticknor, 1847), 49. 62 Evangeline, first manuscript draft, 1846-7.

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manuscript suggest a deliberate evasiveness on the

subject. The first draft of Evangeline actually contained

two references to Basil Lajeunesse, who has made his

fortune in Louisiana, as a slave-holder. He is first

encountered by the newly arrived Evangeline standing on

the prairies gazing over his domains:

Broad and burnt was the face that from under its

Spanish sombrero

Gazed on the peaceful scene, with the lordly look of

its master

Round about him were numberless herds of kine, and

of horses

Quietly cropping the grass of the meadow and

breathing the freshness

That uprose from the river and spread itself over

the landscape

Near him a dozen slaves stood patiently waiting his

orders,63

The unsettling implication here is that the slaves are

equivalent to Basil’s cattle and horses, quiet and

obedient signs of his wealth and lordliness, and also, 63 Ibid.

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presumably, that he has enough slaves that a substantial

number can be spared to do nothing. The draft of this

section is dated February 1, 1847, and at some point,

before the publication of the first proofs, Longfellow

deleted this final line. A further reference originally

occurred when the Acadians admire Basil’s newfound

success:

Much they marvelled to see the wealth of the ci-

devant blacksmith

His domains and his slaves, and his patriarchal

demeanor64

‘Slaves’ here originally read ‘herds’ in the manuscript,

then this was crossed out and altered. The line did not

revert back to ‘herds’ until Folsom changed it in the

second set of proofs – Folsom’s notes are largely

concerned with historical accuracy, and he perhaps

suggested the revision because, as he noted on the

‘negro-cabins’ line, ‘why negro-slavery there in those

days?’.65 Yet while Longfellow may have retained this

64 Ibid. 65 Proof sheets of Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie (Boston: William Ticknor, 1847), with annotations by Longfellow, C. C. Felton, Charles Sumner and Charles Folsom. Houghton AC85.L8605.847.

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change because he shared Folsom’s doubt, he had already

cut the major reference to Basil as a slave-holder. It

seems significant that he probably did so in the same

month that Sumner produced his lecture on slavery,

February 1847.66 Perhaps this helped to convince

Longfellow that casual references to slavery were

potentially inflammatory and would be problematic for his

readers.

Basil is a sympathetic character within the poem, as

Gabriel’s outspoken father, a close friend of

Evangeline’s father and her travelling companion for part

of her journey, and, most notably, as a story of

immigrant success due to hard work and enterprise.

Longfellow’s major source for his descriptions of the

South, Charles Sealsfield’s Life in the New World, repeatedly

emphasizes the role of slaves in the life of a Southern

planter. But Basil’s representation of Louisiana as

paradisal and as a new Acadia, only with the added

advantage that ‘No King George of England shall drive you

66 Sumner and Longfellow discussed this lecture on 8 February and 21 February (see Life II, 79-80), and on 23 February Longfellow notes that‘Evangeline is nearly finished’. Sumner and Felton had seen the proofs by April (Journal 1845-1847).

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away from your homesteads’ (99), would sit unpalatably

with his status as a slave-holder. These revisions

display a potential unease, also reflected in the

language of the poem as the Acadians sail south. As they

enter the bayous they are lost: ‘In a maze of sluggish

and devious waters, /Which, like a network of steel,

extended in every direction’. This landscape of suspicion

and entrapment, which fills the travellers with ‘strange

forebodings of ill’ (90), surrounds Basil’s new Acadia

and might provide a context in which it becomes a more

unstable resting-place.

In 1856 Walt Whitman famously wrote in his open

letter to Emerson, ‘Old forms, old poems, majestic and

proper in their own lands here in this land are exiles.’67

It seems likely that he had Longfellow’s enormously

successful epics, Evangeline and Hiawatha, both self-

consciously based on European poetic forms, in mind.

Whitman’s comment is interesting in relation to Evangeline’s

status as a poem about exile that attempts in some degree

to become an American epic, and yet tends to place

67 Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass (2nd edn, 1856), The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 767.

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conscious distance between its concerns and the kind of

celebration of American identity advocated by Whitman –

which may of course partially explain why it still

remains exiled from the American canon. Replacing

Evangeline in its historical contexts makes it appear

considerably darker and more complicated than notions of

its easy sentimentality might suggest. Evangeline acts as a

reflection upon crucial questions about the expansionist

policies of the United States, its past and future

abilities both to create exiles and to incorporate exiled

peoples into unity. Indeed, Longfellow’s poem might

suggest that some of the foundational narratives of

America are concerned not with triumph but with

displacement, unfinished quests and lost opportunities.

Longfellow’s heroine, who wanders through the battle-

fields of the Revolutionary War and the ‘populous cities’

of the developing nation ‘like a phantom’ (109), haunts

the self-confidence of the early-mid nineteenth century.

Evangeline is a poem that wavers between eschewing and

inviting political responsibility, that sets up tensions

in both form and content that are beautifully held in

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balance throughout, so that readers might sense the

politicized undercurrents of the poem without necessarily

being halted by them. In doing so, it suggests some of

the more indirect and ‘devious’ paths by which

nineteenth-century poems, even when they seem innocent to

twenty-first century readers, were operating upon their

contemporary audience.

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