After a fortnight in the residence on Harvard Square, now known as Wadsworth House, he ordered the men of Marblehead out of the Vassall house to make room for his staff and headquarters. For ten months it was his base of operations, the longest period during which he occupied any headquarters during the Revolution. He came there the authorized commander of an undisciplined, inexperienced mob. He left only after he had transformed that mob into an army, fed it, clothed it, armed it, guarded it from small-pox, and finally, with its valor and enthusiasm and skill, ejected the British from Boston for a more hospitable battleground to the southward.
The southeast room was his office. One day in the early winter of ’75–6 an out-rider came in with good news, and presently Martha Washington “arrived in great ceremony, with a coach and four black horses, with postilions and servants in scarlet livery.” She was installed in the sunny room across the hallway, the room from whose walls look down today the interesting faces of Sir William Pepperrell’s children, and the same room in which you may find an exquisite onyx and metal goblet from the studio of that delightful international scamp, Benvenuto Cellini.
As chatelaine of headquarters she presided over a modest celebration of their wedding anniversary, although, Miss Alice Longfellow says, “the General had to be much persuaded by his aides.” And there was a “Twelfth Night party” which is a tradition in the Longfellow family. On rare occasions since it has been repeated, once by a group of youngsters of all ages who impersonated in costume the guests of Washington, and some of those latter-day guests were direct descendants of the earlier dignitaries. On another winter night the Longfellow children dressed in the characters of the successive occupants of the house, and the sword of General Craigie clanked about the boots of a certain Boston lawyer until, as he says “I was no longer Dana; I felt like a regular profiteer!”
For the end of the Revolution was the beginning of a large period of hospitality in the life of General Andrew Craigie. He had been apothecary-general to the Continental army, and in the light of the recent war, it must be evident that purveying to any victorious army is profitable. The Vassall House, during the seventeen years after Washington’s departure, had been occupied by two good patriots: Nathaniel Tracy, who gave a hundred ships to the government during the war, and Thomas Russel, the same who set Timothy Dexter an example for making a fortune. Then Andrew Craigie (General, if you like) bought the house, and it bears his name as commonly today as that of the poet.
Hawthorne, the quiet, handsome young writer who used to visit the house years later, should have known General Craigie. For all his garden parties at Commencement time, with their distinguished guests, like Talleyrand, and Admiral d’Estaing, and Prince Edward (the father of Queen Victoria), for all the refinishing and painting he did in the house, for all the splendor of the organ which he installed in the northeast room between two fine Corinthian columns, and the rare girandole in the study, and the Adam mantels—for all his creature magnificence, he had a scenario or two concealed about his person.
Hark!
“I am the ghost of Madame Craigie. I loved an impetuous youth from the south, then a student. We parted, for my family forbade me. But we swore to write each other. He did not write; I pined; then, desperate, obeyed my parents’ mandates, and married General Craigie. And as we sat at table in his great house, a letter came to me, in my maiden name—the name, ah me! now forfeit—saying ‘I have no word of you, no word since I went away. Why do you not write?’ And then I knew that they had kept his letters from me, and mine from him! And from that day I never spoke to my husband save on matters of essential business.”
Hawthorne could have made something out of that.
Or this: the poet was surprised one morning as he came downstairs to see lying on one of the lower treads a letter. It was a fervent letter, with no clue to the addressee nor to its source. Inquiry disclosed nothing from any member of the household. The next morning another letter—also fervent. When it happened again and still again, he set himself to solve the mystery. And it was no mystery, for in the Craigie dynasty there had been an affair, which Andrew was only too anxious not to pile on his wife’s already considerable grievance. So he walled the letters up under the stairs, and thought them safe. But as the sea gives up her dead, the gradual settling of the staircase and the tapping of feet upon it slowly and inexorably provoked a crack through which revenge fed the letters, one by one, confiding the story piecemeal, to a poet.
Capricious investments sent Craigie to his grave in 1818 a poor man. If Madam Craigie was in the slightest degree relieved at his departure, her obligation to him was diluted by the fact that she must now support herself. By “taking in boarders” she could manage to live on in the old house, and make ends meet. For those who could pass her rather rigid inspection it offered accommodation far better than the average. Naturally such folk as Edward Everett and his bride, and President Jared Sparks of Harvard and Josiah Worcester, who wrote a dictionary, needed no references. With strangers it was different. A gentle young fellow with light hair and deep-set eyes, and a clean, aquiline profile, appeared one afternoon in 1837 and asked for lodgings. She said she had none vacant. In the temporizing dialogue which followed it developed that his name was Longfellow and that he was the author of a book she had quite recently been reading, and her manner thawed so readily that he got the room.