Welcome to the American Story. Stories about what it is that makes America beautiful.

Heartbreaking, funny, inspiring, and endlessly interesting.

This is Chris Flannery with the Claremont Institute.

I call this one

Sale on.

At his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on November 11, 1849, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the most widely read living author in 19th century America, was talking politics with his close friend Charles Sumner.

Longfellow and Sumner were both anti-slavery men, committed to the free soil movement

out of which would come the Republican Party of

Abraham Lincoln. Longfellow was strongly inclined to remain aloof from the

Hurley Burley of politics, But by this time, his dear friend

had already been cast out of polite society in Boston

for his inflammatory anti-slavery speeches.

A few years later, for another anti-slavery speech, Sumner would be beaten almost to death on the floor of the United States Senate by Democratic Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina.

We know from Longfellow's notes that after his long political conversation with

Sumner on that November day, he made a last minute change to the ending of a poem he had already submitted to his publisher.

The change seems to have been inspired by their conversation,

and it gave the poem immediate impact and enduring fame.

Written in the summer months of that year,

the poem was called The Building of the Ship,

and it really was about building a ship. The central character is a master ship

builder overseeing the construction and launching of a wooden sailing vessel. A love story

about the shipbuilder's daughter is built into the story.

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