Fannie Longfellow's Death and "God Is Not Dead"

Fannie Longfellow (1820-1861)

On July 10, 1861, Frances Elizabeth "Fannie" Appleton Longfellow died from complications of an accidental fire in her home at Cambridge, Massachusetts.

While combing the hair of her three young girls (Alice, Allegra, and Edith) on Tuesday evening, July 9, a self-lighting phosphorous match fell to the floor, sparking a flame that caught Fannie's delicate muslin dress on fire. 
 
Screaming, Fannie ran into the study where her husband sat at his desk.

Startled, Henry Longfellow immediately jumped to the aid of his burning wife, pulling a throw rug from the floor and wrapping it around Fannie. Henry threw his wife to the floor and sought to put out any unsuffocated flames using his hands and face. 

House servants came with buckets of water, but it was too late.

Fannie suffered fatal 3rd-degree burns over her entire body.

The mother of five and wife of the greatest American poet of his day survived through the night. She remained in a conscious state due to the effects of the ether given to deaden her pain. Early in the morning of July 10, 1861, Fannie fell asleep and died.

I have in my possession an Appleton family letter from July 1861 that describes in vivid detail the intense pain Henry Wadsworth Longfellow suffered in the aftermath of the fire.

The burns he received on his hands and face prevented him from attending his wife's funeral.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

It took months of healing before Longfellow could use his fingers to write poetry.

Never again would Longfellow be seen without his signature beard, grown to cover the disfiguring scars on his face.

It took even longer for Longfellow's emotional wounds to heal.

Tasked with raising his six mother-less children, Henry depended on his sister for help those first few months, but he determined to spend as much personal time with them as possible.

Longfellow particularly sought to comfort his three girls, describing them in 'The Children's Hour' as "grave Alice and laughing Allegra and Edith with golden hair."

The painful aftermath of Fannie Longfellow's death precluded Henry's productivity as a writer and poet.

Henry published Tales of a Wayside Inn in the spring of 1863, a work he'd mostly finished before the tragedy two years earlier. Friends helped him bring it to completion.

To compound the sorrow, Charles Longfellow, Henry's 18-year-old son, walked out of the Longfellow house on Brattle Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, without so much as a good-bye, early in 1863. Charles went to the train station and joined the Union Army against his father's wishes. Henry didn't even like to hunt game, and he'd vocally opposed his son's desires to join the army.

Within a few short months, word came that Charles had been severely wounded on the battlefield. Henry and another of his sons took the train to Washington, D.C. where they picked up Charles to transport him home to Cambridge. They found Charles at the train station, paralyzed from the waist down due to battlefield injuries.

The ride home to Cambridge that Fall of 1863 was somber.

Christmas Day

A few weeks after bringing Charles home, on Christmas Day 1863, Henry wrote his first poem since his wife's tragic death 30 months earlier.

Henry's motherless six children gathered at the Longfellow home, with the now paralyzed nineteen-year-old Charles lying in his bedroom.

57-year-old Henry Wadsworth Longfellow sat at his desk in the very study where he'd suffered disfiguring burns attempting to save his wife's life in July 1861.

The church bells in Cambridge began ringing that Christmas morning.

Christmas carols, old and familiar carols, the bells played.

Henry Longfellow pulled out a quill, ink, paper, and began to write.

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

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

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

He entitled his seven-stanza poem Christmas Bells.

You know it as I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.

A few years later Longfellow's poem was put to music and turned into a Christmas, and the modern version sung by Casting Crowns is one of my favorites.

I love the carol because of these three lines: 

God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail.

It's difficult to see how the "wrong" in this life which produces envy, hate, fights, wars, injuries, deaths, scars, and all sorts of pain can actually fail when it looks as if it now prevails.

But Jesus has indeed come.

It’s His job to ensure wrong ultimately fails and right prevails.

He’ll finish what He’s started for “the gates of hell shall not prevail.”