Fine series of Longfellow letters to his closest friend, Senator Charles Sumner
LONGFELLOW, HENRY WADSWORTH. Collection of six autograph letters signed with initials to Charles Sumner.
Cambridge, 25 December 1851 - 8 November 1870
6 letters comprising 22 pages, various sizes. Very good condition.
An important correspondence between Longfellow and his closest friend, Charles Sumner, the abolitionist senator from Massachusetts.
A highlight of the collection is the letter Longfellow wrote immediately after the brutal attack on Sumner by congressman Preston Brooks. Two days after Sumner’s May 20, 1856 speech condemning southern slaveholders, Brooks repeatedly struck Sumner on the head with a cane on the floor of the Senate. The badly injured Sumner was unable to retake his Senate seat for more than three years.
These fascinating letters cover a wide range of literary and personal matters. He reports to Sumner on “a dinner given by Lowell to Darley the artist, who is now here making studies for a series of Illustrations for ‘The Scarlet Letter,’” the success of the Atlantic Monthly, and the latest from Oliver Wendell Holmes (“in full blast, at his ‘Breakfast Table’”). He discusses Emerson’s speech at the Burns dinner, an inside joke by Lowell in an Atlantic article on Shakepeare, and refers to Emerson, Dana, Norton, Ticknow, James, Palfrey, Felton, Parker, Stowe, Fields, and many others.
Longfellow’s touching letter on the death of the historian William H. Prescott states in part, “And so I stand here at my desk by the window, thinking of you, and hoping you will get some other letter from Boston before you do mine, so that I may not be the first to break to you the sad news of Prescott’s death! Yes, he is dead! He died of a stroke of paralysis on Friday last … We shall see that cheerful, genial, sunny face no more! … How much sunshine it will take out of the social life of Boston!”
This is a superb and wide-ranging correspondence between two giants of the era. Their close friendship lasted until Sumner’s death in 1874. Longfellow was among the pallbearers at his funeral, together with Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
“the greatest voice, on the greatest subject, that has been entered since we became a nation. No matter for insults—we feel them with you—no matter for wounds, we also bleed in them! You have torn the mask off the faces of Traitors, and at last the Spirit of the North is aroused.” – Longfellow to Sumner after the Preston Brooks caning.
See Blue, “The Poet and the Reformer: Longfellow, Sumner, and the Bonds of Male Friendship, 1837-1874,” Journal of the Early Republic, Summer 1995.
$12,000