In March of 1863, 18-year-old Charles Appleton Longfellow left his family’s house in Cambridge, Massachusetts—a colonial mansion that had served as General Washington’s headquarters from 1775 to 1776. Unknown to his family, he boarded a train bound for Washington, D.C., in order to join President Lincoln’s Union army to fight in the Civil War.
Charles was the oldest of six children born to Fannie Elizabeth Appleton and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the celebrated literary critic and poet. Charles had five younger siblings: a brother aged 17 and four sisters ages 13, 10, 8 and one who had died as an infant. Only two years earlier, Charles’s mother Fannie had tragically died after her dress caught on fire. Her husband, Henry, awakened from a nap, tried to extinguish the flames as best he could, but she had already suffered severe burns. She died the next morning on July 10, 1861. Henry Longfellow’s own burns were severe enough that he was unable to attend his wife’s funeral. He stopped shaving on account of the burns, growing a beard that would become associated with his image.
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