In 1863, a man named Henry spent Christmas morning sitting next to his son’s hospital bed in Washington, DC. He was perhaps looking back at the events that brought them both there. Henry had spent the two years since the start of the American Civil War trying to convince his eldest son Charles not to join the Union Army. While not ideologically opposed to the war, he didn’t want to risk his son dying. Henry had already lost a daughter in her infancy, and Charles’s mother had died from a tragic fire shortly after the start of the war. These two deaths undoubtedly weighed heavy on his mind, especially considering Henry had been through the pain of losing his first wife and child years before.
He did not want to see any more death, and so refused to allow his son to join the army. It is not difficult to imagine an argument that might have erupted on a March night in Cambridge, Massachussetts earlier that year which finally compelled the 19-year-old Charles to run away from home and join the Union army in Washington, DC.
Imagine what the last spoken words between Henry and Charles might have been like. What was the last thing he said to his son? Charles left a note telling his father where he was going, and in a few short weeks he earned himself an officer’s commission. What pride and fear did Henry feel?
In a few months time, in late November, Henry’s fears were realized when Charles was struck by a bullet, gravely injuring him. It wasn’t until December 1st that a message reached Cambridge that the young man had been taken to a military hospital in Washington, DC. The distraught father immediately made arrangements and set out for the warring nation’s capitol.
Once there, he is told that the bullet passed through his son, coming very close to his spine. Even if Charles recovered from his initial injury, there is the looming threat of infection and disease so common in the Civil War.
And that is how we find him on Christmas morning 1863, sitting at his son’s bedside. The hospital ward is filled with other young men, some perhaps wounded more severely than Charles. Imagine Henry listening to tolling of the church bells as he sits at his son’s bedside, surrounded by wounded men. Men who are, in his 56-year old eyes, only children. Men who have waged war and had war aged against them. The tolling of Christmas church bells being rung in celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, while he is surrounded by the human toll of man’s penchant for violence.
This is where we find Henry Wadsworth Longfellow when he wrote “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.”
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 thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along
The unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
Till ringing, singing on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime,
A chant sublime
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
Then from each black, accursed mouth
The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!
It was as if an earthquake rent
The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born
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 the earth, good-will to men.”
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