CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“We public men,” replies the showman, meekly, “must lay our account, sometimes, to meet an uncandid severity of criticism.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Main-street”
IAM TURNED OUT of office!” Hawthorne was horrified. It had taken almost two years to get his government post, and now he’d lost it.
Hawthorne’s appointment as surveyor of the Salem Custom House finally came in March 1846, five months after the Hawthornes had returned to Salem. Prominent Democrats had been besieging Polk. The chairman of the Essex County Democratic Committee had written the president; so had Senator John Fairfield of Maine and Franklin Pierce and the publishers of the Salem Advertiser, who praised Hawthorne as a pure and primitive Democrat, a phrase likely intended as a compliment. Friends like William Pike, Hawthorne’s crony in the Boston Custom House, and Horace Conolly, now chairman of the second congressional district committee, argued that Hawthorne’s appointment would heal party rifts in Salem. Even Benjamin Browne, whose job at the Salem post office Hawthorne had tried to steal, threw his support to the writer. In gratitude, Hawthorne edited Browne’s “Papers of an Old Dartmoor Prisoner” for the Democratic Review. “I have grown considerable of a politician by the experience of the last few months,” Hawthorne sheepishly declared in early March.
Nor did Whigs oppose Hawthorne’s candidacy. George Hillard backed Hawthorne, and Charles Sumner pleaded with Elizabeth Bancroft: “Poor Hawthorne (that sweet, gentle, true nature) has not wherewithal to live.”
It was true. With Sophia pregnant again, the baby due in the spring of 1846, Hawthorne was almost frantic. “What a devil of a pickle I shall be in,” he told Bridge, “if the baby should come, and the office should not!” His suit against Ripley had not been tried, so he couldn’t anticipate any cash from that direction, and though the publishers sent him a small royalty from the second edition of Journal of an African Cruiser, he still owed Bridge money.
And he couldn’t write. On Herbert Street, he struggled over a preface for a new collection of short stories that Evert Duyckinck, inspired by O’Sullivan, had solicited on behalf of Wiley and Putnam’s Library of American Books. Nothing materialized. Frustrated, Duyckinck goaded the dilatory author. “MSS! MSS! Mr. Wiley’s American series is athirst for a volume of Tales.”
The past year had chipped away at his confidence. He answered Duyckinck, apologetic. “I have reached that point in an author’s life, when he ceases to effervesce; and whatever I do hereafter must be done with leaden reluctance, and therefore had better be left undone.”
Overlooking the self-pity, Duyckinck suggested Hawthorne expand the collection to two volumes. Hawthorne appreciated the offer, particularly since he didn’t think he’d be writing any more stories: self-pity again, but understandable. “It is rather a sad idea,” he said, “—not that I am to write no more in this kind, but that I cannot better justify myself for having written at all.”
Then, in March, Hawthorne learned he’d been appointed surveyor at the Salem Custom House. His salary—twelve hundred dollars per year plus incidental fees—was modest but allowed for some luxuries, and besides, the job itself entailed no great expenditure of time. His mood considerably brightened, and on April 9, 1846, Hawthorne swore the oath of office fully expecting to be able to write and free himself at last from debt. Six days later he sent the preface “The Old Manse” to Duyckinck, overdue by almost a year.
“The Old Manse” is an elegiac evocation of time past and passing, for the Manse itself had come to represent a last summer in the haze, lovely, enchanted, doomed to slide into the meaner seasons of obligation and middle age.
“Ah,” writes Hawthorne, “but there is a half-acknowledged melancholy, like to this, when we stand in the perfected vigor of our life, and feel that Time has now given us all his flowers, and that the next work of his never idle fingers must be—to steal them, one by one, away!”
The Manse is another of Hawthorne’s old houses, fragrant with the spirit of former tenants and, perched on the banks of the past, fit emblem of his imagination. In the Manse, one is not compelled, Hawthorne explains, to “subserve some useful purpose.” Rather, the writer fishes in the nearby river, picks apples from his orchard, and on a rainy day pokes around a garret stocked with Latin folios and old books bound in black leather. From the upstairs window of his study he dreams of bygone soldiers near the North Bridge, battle smoke barely dispersed in the wind. And he mulls over a tale he heard about a young woodchopper who, happening upon a wounded British soldier, splits his head with an ax for no apparent reason. Out of such stuff are stories made.
Days at the Manse float on a cloud of leisure, fantasy, and lazy liberty. But the inhabitant of the Manse has matured into a man of regret. He never wrote a novel or produced any great work while living there. “The treasure of intellectual gold, which I hoped to find in our secluded dwelling,” Hawthorne admits, “had never come to light. No profound treatise of ethics—no philosophic history—no novel, even, that could stand, unsupported on its edges. All that I had to show, as a man of letters, were these few tales and essays, which had blossomed out like flowers in the calm summer of my heart and mind. Save editing (an easy task) the journal of my friend of many years, the African Cruiser, I had done nothing else.”
For his sin, the writer is expelled from the Manse and cast into a world of smiling public men in another edifice, the Custom House. “As a storyteller, I have often contrived strange vicissitudes for my imaginary personages,” he grins, “but none like this.”
Hawthorne doesn’t say—he can’t say—that he’d maneuvered ceaselessly for this new berth or that the honeymoon years at the Manse may have been conceived from the start as a vacation forced on him by a hostile administration. Nor would he admit that he could never tolerate Eden for too long anyway, or that the Salem Custom House was a retreat no less than the Manse, and not just from economic privation but from the agonies of literature.
On June 5 Hawthorne’s new collection, Mosses from an Old Manse, was published in two volumes, sold individually or as a set, the title stamped in gold on the spine. In addition to the preface, the collection contained most of the stories written at the parsonage along with “Young Goodman Brown” and “Roger Malvin’s Burial,” reprinted at last. “I am jogging onward in life, with a moderate share of prosperity,” he wrote to Bridge, “and am contented and happy.” Life was good again.
Hoping to earn more money and broaden his readership, Hawthorne sent advance copies to Margaret Fuller in New York, where she wrote for Horace Greeley’s New-York Daily Tribune, as well as to Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Tuckerman, and Rufus Griswold, the tubercular editor of Graham’s. The response was mostly favorable. Notices in Graham’s Magazine and the Harbinger complimented the book, with William Henry Channing emphasizing Hawthorne’s tragic vision: “No masks deceive him. And plainly, the mockeries of life have cost him sleepless nights and lonely days.” Lest Hawthorne’s reputation as a Democrat nettle readers, Charles Wilkins Webber, writing in the American Whig Review, recommended Mosses as “the specific remedy for all those congestions of patriotism which relieve themselves in uttering speeches.”
In her large review, posted on the front page of the Tribune, Margaret Fuller refused to give a full-throttled endorsement to Hawthorne’s work; this, after her hesitant review of Twice-told Tales, may account for the chill soon to settle over her friendship with the Hawthornes. Commending stories like “The Birth-mark,” “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” and “Young Goodman Brown,” she nonetheless found Hawthorne’s style “placid” and his command of language “indolent.” The coup de grâce: “Hawthorne intimates and suggests, but he does not lay bare the mysteries of our being.”
Eight years after Fuller’s premature death, Hawthorne retaliated with vitriolic pleasure. Writing in his notebooks in 1858, he characterized his former friend as lacking “the charm of womanhood” and a humbug, talented, yes, but arrogantly determined to “make herself the greatest, wisest, best woman of the age; and to that end, she set to work on her strong, heavy, unpliable and, in many respects, defective and evil nature, and adorned it with a mosaic of admirable qualities, such as she chose to possess.” Continuing for pages, he savored his own portrait of the woman he once cared for: “But she was not working on an inanimate substance, like marble or clay; there was something within her that she could not possibly come at, to recreate and refine it; and by and by this rude old potency bestirred itself, and undid all her labor in the twinkling of an eye. On the whole, I do not know but I like her the better for it;—the better, because she proved herself a very woman, after all, and fell as the weakest of her sisters might.”
Hawthorne rewrote Margaret Fuller’s life, the ambitious guest as fallen woman.
Fuller wasn’t alone in criticizing Hawthorne’s work. Edgar Allan Poe liked Hawthorne’s precision and fluency but not the hermetic, rarified quality of the stories. Scorning the New England drawing rooms and the dainty prose applauded there, Poe tendered his advice: “Get a bottle of visible ink, come out from the Old Manse, cut Mr. Alcott, hang (if possible) the editor of The Dial, and throw out of the window to the pigs all his odd numbers of The North American Review.”
With Texas admitted into the Union in December 1845, James K. Polk ordered American troops, led by Zachary Taylor, to cross the border into Mexico. To John Quincy Adams, the invasion was morally reprehensible, but to John O’Sullivan, America was simply spreading freedom and democracy, like spilled ink, over the continent. O’Sullivan wanted no bloodshed, but Polk didn’t seem to mind and in the spring of 1846 declared all-out war.
That same spring, Hawthorne was climbing the wide granite staircase of the Salem Custom House, a massive brick building that overlooked the ocean, its small windowed cupola bright on a sunny morning and with a huge gilt eagle, arrows and thunderbolts in each claw, poised to take flight from its roof. Each morning, Hawthorne entered the arched doorway at about ten o’clock, looked at the morning papers, and swapped stories with the custom officers, chairs tipped back, until the ships arrived.
He liked his new life and joked to George Curtis, former Brook Farmer and Concord resident, that he’d use the Custom House barge as a private yacht. Ellery Channing came to visit, watching in awe as Hawthorne tread the docks, proof glass in hand, and tested the strength of the rum to be exported to the African coast. Natives shall have “as good liquor as anybody gets from New England,” the new surveyor insisted. Just as often, though, the docks were empty and there was nothing to do. The officers hung around, talking, smoking, reading the papers. Hawthorne might write a couple of letters until one o’clock, when he descended the Custom House steps and walked home to Herbert Street.
For the last months of her pregnancy, Sophia had taken Una and gone to Boston to the home of Sophia’s sister Mary and her husband, Horace Mann. (Mary had married Mann in 1844.) The Manns were in Wrentham for the summer, where Horace’s sister lived. Hawthorne too stayed at the Mann’s place at 77 Carver Street, commuting to work on the railroad, disembarking in Salem and then going over to Herbert Street, where he bathed and breakfasted before his duties began. It was inconvenient but good for Sophia: near Back Bay, Carver Street was also near Mrs. Peabody and Sophia’s solicitous homeopath, Dr. William Wesselhoeft, as well as far from the Hawthorne women. Sophia tolerated Louisa but felt nervous around Ebe, who lavished too much attention on Una from Sophia’s point of view, sneaking the girl candy and allowing her, against Sophia’s distinct instructions, to pad into Mrs. Hawthorne’s chilly, uncarpeted room. And the Hawthornes had even brought their airtight stoves with them; it was time to move.
On June 22, 1846, just after sunrise, Sophia gave birth to a baby boy. Called the Black Prince by his father for his dark curls and apple-red cheeks, Julian was not named for almost six months, by which time he’d been carried back to Salem and its best neighborhood. But the house and yard at 18 Chestnut Street were cramped, and as soon as the air blew cold, the Hawthornes huddled indoors, banging into one another. Hawthorne, who had no study, complained he couldn’t write. He couldn’t afford to move either, his expenses in Boston having been greater than he’d anticipated, his Custom House fees less. Salem shipping was in its final death throe.
Hawthorne had to borrow money to pay off the rent he still owed for the Manse. Sophia owned few dresses and no warm coat, and when the Hawthornes did finally move into a bigger place in the fall of 1847, they refrained from decorating the downstairs parlor and the guest room because they had no money for furniture. Nonetheless, Sophia was pleased. “This small income that comes from external business is far better than our former income which was coined out of fine imaginings & profound searching thoughts,” she declared. “That gold always seemed to me too precious to spend for earthly goods & the pressure upon the brain was too great.”
The sunny three-story house at 14 Mall Street was large enough to accommodate Hawthorne’s mother and sisters, who may have moved there to help Hawthorne economize, if he was now paying their rent, or to free them from Uncle William. Sophia now claimed not to mind. The Hawthornes were too polite to get underfoot. And she was genuinely grateful her husband could finally establish himself in a study on the third floor, “as quiet up there as if among the stars,” Sophia observed, “& still, yet within my reach.” It had been nearly a year since he’d touched his desk, she said. “He—the poet, the waiter upon the Muse—the heaven gifted seer—to spend his life in the Custom-house & Nursery!”
As a matter of fact, Hawthorne had been writing, albeit sporadically, publishing occasional reviews in the Salem Advertiser, mainly of books in Duyckinck’s series. Work for the Democratic Review had all but dried up since O’Sullivan had married and sold it, so Hawthorne asked Longfellow to alert him to opportunities “to add something to my income.” And when he repaid a loan from Francis Shaw, the philanthropist who helped finance Brook Farm, he similarly asked Shaw to keep him apprised of opportunities for work, probably editorial.
Yet Hawthorne strolled Salem streets with a swelling sense of accomplishment, and no doubt he appreciated the irony of his position: by scribbling tales in his lonely bedroom, he’d won a political appointment and, indirectly, a wife and children. He was also secretary of the Salem Lyceum, and he invited to Salem speakers from Daniel Webster to Henry Thoreau. He himself declined invitations, however, especially from Salem’s gentry. Conscious of his rising social cachet, he was confident enough to defy it. “His taste was more democratic than aristocratic,” a Salem writer commented; “he preferred gin to champagne.” Aristocratic Salem felt the snub.
Local Democrats capitalized on Hawthorne’s association with the party. They submitted Hawthorne’s name as a member of the Democratic Town Committee and advertised him as a delegate to the state party convention. That he did not attend these functions was of no real concern; his name reflected glory. And though he contributed what few reviews he wrote mainly to the Salem Advertiser, the Democratic paper, Hawthorne billed himself as “high & dry out of the slough of political warfare,” or so Sophia alleged to Mary Mann. “… He took his office because it was presented to him, but not a word or look would he be persuaded to give for it as a pledge of action.”
Mary’s husband had also entered government service. After the death of John Quincy Adams, Horace Mann had been elected to complete Adams’s term in Congress, and the following fall, 1848, Mann ran for the seat himself, backed by a coalition of Cotton (proslavery) and Conscience Whigs. The Manns and the Hawthornes disagreed on political matters, especially slavery; like the Hawthornes, the Manns weren’t abolitionist but they did want to stop the extension of slavery and to meliorate the condition of the slave as rapidly, and legally, as possible.
Waiting for her husband to return from Washington, Mary Mann provided room and board to Chloe Lee, an African-American student refused lodging everywhere else. Sophia appreciated Mary’s “Christian motive” but protested loudly when Mary invited Miss Lee to dinner. Unthinkable. “I think your white guests have rights as well as your black one,” Sophia seethed. “I could scarcely eat my supper, so intolerable was the odor wafting from her to me.” Black skin, as she pointed out to her benighted sister, “is the one natural barrier between the races.”
Of her husband’s response to this or similar episodes, Sophia said nothing. Nor does Hawthorne himself offer his own account of the dinner. But Rose Hawthorne, having heard of the Chloe Lee incident, would recall that “once, at the table of Horace Mann, he [her father] was expected to sit down to dinner with a Negro slave. He did; but that table lost its attractiveness for him, thenceforth.”
In his third-floor study at Mall Street, away from the racket and the merciless baby linen, Hawthorne wrote every afternoon.
“When shall you want another article?” Hawthorne asked Charles Wilkins Webber at the end of 1848. Webber was starting a new magazine, the American Review. “Now that the spell is broken, I hope to get into a regular train of scribbling.”
It’s likely he sent Webber “The Unpardonable Sin,” later known as “Ethan Brand,” the story of a man who searches everywhere to discover the worst mankind can do. Elizabeth Peabody had rejected the tale as too morose for her own journal, Aesthetic Papers;Henry Thoreau’s lecture “Resistance to Civil Government” (subsequently titled “Civil Disobedience”) was more to her taste. So Hawthorne substituted “Main-street,” a historical overview of Salem told by a showman-artist who exhibits scenes from the past with a turn of a mechanical crank: one rotation and William Hathorne orders the whipping of the Quaker Ann Coleman, ten stripes in Salem, ten in Boston, and ten in Dedham; two turns and the Salem witches march up Main Street to Gallows Hill. Hawthorne’s Salem forebears were on the loose again.
Hawthorne was composing quite a bit. When he came downstairs after a stint of writing, he brought his journal with him to record the movements of his children. Una was of special interest. Mercurial and alternately imperious and gentle, affectionate and tempestuous, she scampered helpfully about the house until reprimanded, and then she threw herself against the walls, uncontrollable. If her parents locked her in a room, she emerged sassy and willful. “In short, I now and then catch an aspect of her,” Hawthorne writes, “in which I cannot believe her to be my own human child, but a spirit strangely mingled with good and evil, haunting the house where I dwell.” By contrast, Julian was steady, good-natured, forgettable: “The little boy is always the same child, and never varies in his relation to me.” But Una reflected back her father’s turmoil, his ambition, his frustration, even his ennui. “I’m tired of little Una Hawsorne,” the child cried.
Wondering if this child was beautiful or terrible—the same question Giovanni had posed in “Rappaccini’s Daughter”—Hawthorne would change Una into Pearl, the illegitimate daughter of Hester Prynne, a spritelike, demonic girl, source both of salvation and of bleak terror.
If Una stirred Hawthorne’s imagination, so did Elizabeth Peabody’s newest protégé, Dr. Charles Kraitsir, a Hungarian linguist whose theory was that language, functioning as an image of the human mind, reveals the essential unity of all peoples. “If it [language] is Babel,” Kraitsir wrote, “it is because men have abandoned themselves to chance, and lost sight of the principle by which language was constructed.” In 1846 Peabody had published his knotty pamphlet, Significance of the Alphabet, and in Aesthetic Papers tried hopelessly to explain his theory.
The alphabet and language—the letter “A,” in fact—would be a theme of The Scarlet Letter, though Hawthorne is less interested in the origin of language than in its manifold interpretations. People may be alike, but when they express themselves, the results are often perplexing and ambiguous, as he suggests, sending Pearl’s skulking father into the night where he sees the letter “A” emblazoned across the sky, his guilt writ large. “But what shall we say,” Hawthorne reasons, “when an individual discovers a revelation, addressed to himself alone, on the same vast sheet of record! In such a case, it would only be the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul’s history and fate.”
As Hawthorne mulled over ideas soon to become The Scarlet Letter, Kraitsir’s theories were ultimately of less interest to him than the salacious details of the man’s domestic life: a loveless marriage, an abandoned wife, and the hapless daughter that Elizabeth Peabody, in her headlong way, decided to rescue.
To Peabody, Kraitsir leaped directly from the pages of Jane Eyre; he was Mr. Rochester dogged by an uncaged Bertha, for Kraitsir’s wife was the incurable madwoman who, according to Peabody, “has broken all the commandments,” meaning she seduced several students while Kraitsir was teaching at the University of Virginia. “I wonder he do not divorce himself from a woman who has dishonored him,” Sophia marveled with reason. He did not. Instead Kraitsir quit his job, deposited his wife and daughter in Philadelphia, and settled himself in Boston, where he thrived under Elizabeth Peabody’s protection, quaking, claimed Peabody, lest the crazy Mrs. Kraitsir rush into his new classroom one day, shiny knife in hand.
Peabody figured she could free Kraitsir of his troubles by assuming guardianship of the child, and with this delirious scheme in mind, she boarded a train for Philadelphia, a flurry of skirts, to inform Mrs. Kraitsir of her plan. The meeting was a disaster. Incensed, Mrs. Kraitsir followed Peabody back to Boston, where Peabody and Kraitsir tried to have her committed to the McLean Asylum. Mrs. Kraitsir rallied friends; the friends rallied the press.
Cited as the third party in a failing marriage, Peabody found herself at the center of a sensational storm. “Every body seems to think Dr. Kraitsir very dilatory, weak, even craven not to justify himself & Elizabeth by the revelation of the whole,” Sophia tartly told her mother. Former supporters of Peabody averted their eyes while the penny press made a pretty penny, Peabody said, at her expense. “Though everybody respectable take our part,” she claimed, “they do not come out in the newspapers, because this is vulgar they think.”
Her name pilloried, her honor questioned, Peabody did not bow her head. She refused to exonerate herself in a public statement. “Wondrous strength and generosity of a woman’s heart,” Hawthorne would soon write in The Scarlet Letter, as if referring to Peabody’s tenacious defense of a very weak man.
Margaret Fuller, Una Hawthorne, the Kraitsir affair; Puritans, pariahs, and in Salem, a household of women: the scene is set for The Scarlet Letter.
Biographical legend insists that The Scarlet Letter was composed in a white heat after Hawthorne lost his job at the Custom House. Sophia, however, stated otherwise. “The Photographic study of the children in 1848 was at the very time he was writing The Scarlet Letter!” she recalled shortly after Hawthorne’s death, “when he used to come from his labor of pain to rest by observing the sports and characteristics of the babies and record them.”
Actually, it does appear that Hawthorne began The Scarlet Letter and possibly The House of the Seven Gables before the Custom House debacle. Horace Conolly distinctly remembered Hawthorne composing “at odd times, when he felt in the vein, as he called it. This [The House of the Seven Gables] and the ‘Scarlet Letter’ were written both, in Mall St.,” recollected Conolly, “during the years 1846–7 and 8.” Again Sophia corroborates Conolly’s version of events. Having finished “The Unpardonable Sin,” Hawthorne started another story, she said, or “rather went on with another, & finally it grew so very long that he said it would make a little book—So he had to put that aside & begin another.” Presumably this was the first draft of one or both of his early novels. But everything was shelved when the clamor of 1848 reached up to his third-floor study.
Free trade, free labor, free soil, free men and women: 1848 was a year of revolutions abroad and at home. “Kings, princes and potentates flying dismayed to the right and left, and nation after nation rising up demanding freedom,” actress Fanny Kemble reported from Europe. That July, in America, more than three hundred women and men assembled in Seneca Falls, New York, in the boiling heat to demand suffrage, equal pay, and a woman’s right to divorce and own property. In Buffalo the next month, Free-Soilers, as they were called, split the Democratic Party. Riding high on the Wilmot Proviso, which forbade slavery in the territory acquired from Mexico, these antislavery Democrats from New York lined up with Conscience Whigs to choose Martin Van Buren as their presidential candidate, so fed up were they with Lewis Cass, the Democratic Party nominee, and politics as usual.
Van Buren didn’t carry a single state. Instead Zachary Taylor, a Whig, won the presidency in November. Hawthorne read the handwriting on the wall. Aware that he’d alienated a number of Democrats and that Salem Whigs wanted him out, he began to plot his defense. He was a writer, not a politician. How dare he be removed from office on political grounds? He asked Hillard to mobilize prominent Whigs in his behalf, and he began to do the same.
It was no use.
On June 8, 1849, Hawthorne received the telegram. He had been fired.
In Boston with the children, Sophia had not yet heard. “She will bear it like a woman,” Hawthorne informed Hillard, “—that is to say, better than a man.”
Foul, cried the press, when it learned Hawthorne had been sacked. “An act of wanton and unmitigated oppression by the Whigs,” charged William Cullen Bryant’s New York Evening Post, a Democratic paper. “There stands, at the guillotine, beside the headless trunk of a pure minded, faithful, and well deserving officer, sacrificed to the worst of party proscription,” reproved the Boston Post, and the Albany Atlas yelped that “the man who would knowingly commit such an act would broil a humming bird, and break a harp to make the fire.”
Dissenters laughed, contemptuous both of the issues and of Hawthorne’s profession. “Not one of Mr. Hawthorne’s ‘twice told tales’ has been more repeated than the sickly sentimentality evinced when a ‘literary man’ is turned out of office. He has no more right to be pensioned than an honest, hard working day laborer.”
But testimonials flooded the Secretary of the Treasury’s office in Washington. “The office has given us a compliment to letters & genius, & I earnestly hope it may be continued on the same generous & graceful policy,” claimed Rufus Choate, a Whig conservative. The scholar George Ticknor, also a conservative, said he detested all forms of patronage but regretted Hawthorne’s poverty, and as for politics, “I am satisfied that while he is a Democrat, he is a retired, quiet, and inoffensive one.” Another supporter called Hawthorne an elegant gentleman devoted only to literature, and Democratic firebrand John O’Sullivan testified, “I should as soon have dreamed of applying to a nightingale to scream like a vulture, as of asking Hawthorne to write politics.”
Hawthorne spoiled for a fight. “If they will pay no reverence to the imaginative power when it causes herbs of grace and sweet-scented flowers to spring up along their pathway,” he warned, “then they should be taught what it can do in the way of producing nettles, skunk-cabbage, deadly night-shade, wolf’s bane, dog-wood.” Charged with malfeasance, he shot back that he had never written political articles, nor had he undertaken any overtly political action except voting. (He couldn’t deny his appointment had been political, though.) He did not pay Democrats in the Custom House more than Whigs, he said. As for the allegation that he had actively sought office, he denied that too, requesting Hillard to publish his full rebuttal in the Boston Advertiser under the rubric of a letter to a friend. “He seems to be all in a rouse,” said Elizabeth Peabody.
By the end of June, there seemed to be a stay of execution: “He is either to be reinstated if he will consent—or to be presented with a better office,” Sophia thought. Angry, Hawthorne considered compromise unacceptable; he kept the job or nothing.
With Hawthorne intransigent, the Whigs redoubled their effort under the direction of the smooth-talking Reverend Charles Wentworth Upham (“that oily man of God,” Charles Sumner reportedly called him). The Whig Ward Committee reconvened, unanimously declaring Hawthorne a two-bit politician and party hack who screamed nonpartisanship when his job was threatened.
Haranguing continued on both sides. Hawthorne wanted the surveyor-ship back. It was a matter of pride. Upham wanted him gone. He had his own pride to consider. And that Hawthorne had also intervened for Zachariah Burchmore, secretary of Salem’s Democratic Party, when Burchmore almost lost his job, raised the stakes even higher. Local Whigs argued that Hawthorne’s apolitical posture was a charade “supported by all the talent which Mr. Hawthorne may have possessed.”
To block the reinstatement, Upham drafted a huge document, a “Memorial of the Whigs of Salem in regard to Mr. Hawthorne.” The case against Hawthorne was scrupulously mounted. Not only had Hawthorne as surveyor superintended discrepancies in pay, which Upham itemized, he had demanded his own officials kick back their extra salary to pay party dues and support the Salem Advertiser—sheer and incontrovertible improprieties. Boston Whigs began to huff and puff and then to backpedal. “I was yesterday informed upon authority which I cannot distrust, that Mr. Hawthorne has been, while in office, the agent of party measures of the most objectionable character, acting perhaps rather as the instrument of other than for his own impulses, but in such a manner as to destroy all claim to the plea of neutrality.” Edward Everett retracted his letter of support.
All the Sturm und Drang, bitter and intense, makes one wonder what really motivated the attack on Hawthorne, a man Salem knew well, or too well. There is no simple or completely satisfying answer. Enmity in Salem was, as ever, historical; Sophia speculated that George Devereux conspired against Hawthorne “on account of an ancient family feud between Hawthornes & Devereux!” But the animus against Hawthorne seems personal, not just historical and decidedly not abstract. Charles Upham, who had promised Hawthorne immunity should administrations change, was motivated by injuries near at hand, and Horace Conolly went so far as to cross party lines to jockey for Hawthorne’s removal. Even Hawthorne’s friend Caleb Foote voted to dump him.
Evidently Hawthorne’s position as a writer-politician infuriated these men, who preferred artists to know their place and keep to it. If Hawthorne wanted to be a writer, fine; but he couldn’t be a writer and a backroom politician at the same time. So with the political means at their disposal, Hawthorne’s foes sent the man of letters packing, straight back to the dreamy region he had vainly claimed as his defense.