The Midnight Message

I issue of this magazine, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, one of ’s founders, published what would become perhaps his most popular poem, the opening stanza of which is immortal: “Listen, my children, and you shall hear / Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” But the past century or so has not been overly or to the rest of the Longfellow canon. He’s been adjudicated by many critics to have been a purveyor of sentimental, manipulative doggerel. But stay with me for a minute, because beneath its putative literary failings, the work has hidden layers. Longfellow, like most of ’s founders—including Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, and Harriet Beecher Stowe—was , and used funds raised from the sale of his poems to buy freedom for enslaved people in the South.