CHAPTER NINETEEN
Look ever to the main chance. English proverb.
signed, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Concord, December 31, 1852
HIS FACE the shape of a baked potato, Franklin Pierce earned a reputation for sociability—too much sociability, if rumors about his drinking were true. And they were. Sophia Hawthorne didn’t care. “My own experience, in my young girlhood, with the morphine that was given to me to stop my headaches,” she archly announced, “has given me infinite sympathy and charity for persons liable to such a habit.”
Critics of Pierce included Sophia’s mother. “It is mysterious to me how General Pierce with a face beaming with benevolence & sweetness can enjoy the horrors of battle, the groans of his murdered fellows—the triumphs of blood—,” she had shuddered during the Mexican War. “Smooth it over as you will, it is only legal murder.” Other Boston Whigs were more serene, at least initially. Pierce, they laughed, was nothing but the hero of “many a hard-fought bottle.” Emerson would call him paltry.
As brigadier general in the Mexican War, the handsome Pierce earned a dubious renown in the battle of Contreras when he was thrown by his horse, which then stumbled and fell on him. His knee and pelvis injured, Pierce fainted from the pain, missed the call to battle, and was called a coward by a subordinate. The label stuck, even though Pierce, hobbling, found a stray horse, rejoined his troops, and fought on until the next day, when, as bad luck would have it, he twisted his injured knee and passed out again.
Hawthorne’s friend George Hillard considered Pierce “just an average man—such as are found in every considerable town in the U.S.—of popular manners & convivial habits, but as a statesman, an orator, or even a lawyer, of no account at all.” A mediocrity. Yet Pierce’s early life had been crowned with success. At the age of twenty-seven he had been appointed to the bench of the New Hampshire Supreme Court; in 1833, at the age of twenty-nine, he was elected New Hampshire’s representative to Congress, and in 1837 the blue-eyed politician became the youngest member of the United States Senate. Five years later, though, he tendered his resignation, withdrawing more or less from public office. He declined an appointment in Polk’s administration as attorney general, and he refused to be nominated governor of New Hampshire because, he said, he loved his wife, who mistrusted both politics and her husband’s predilection for hard liquor. It was a lethal combination, obligatory from Pierce’s point of view.
Franklin Pierce, president-elect, at the age of forty-eight, 1852 (Library of Congress)
The daughter of Jesse Appleton, Bowdoin College’s second president, Jane Appleton Pierce was a chronically depressed woman, all fire and brimstone turned against herself. Hawthorne didn’t much like her but respected Frank’s devotion, bound as it was with personal tragedy. The Pierces had lost their first child, a son, three days after his birth; their second son died of typhus in 1843 at the age of four; and ten weeks before Pierce’s inaugural as the fourteenth president of the United States, their third son and only remaining child was killed in a train wreck right before their eyes. Jane Pierce had reason to be depressed.
The heartbreak inevitably affected Pierce’s performance as president, but it never changed his outlook. A Democrat of the Jacksonian school, Pierce stood four-square by states’ rights, limited federal control, and unfettered territorial expansion. He read the Constitution as a strict constructionist, helped purge the Democratic Party in New Hampshire of Free-Soilers, and fully backed all parts of the Compromise of 1850. As Hawthorne bluntly put it, Pierce “dared to love that great and sacred reality—his whole, united, native country—better than the mistiness of a philanthropic theory.”
Southern Democrats were grateful for his support, and northern Democrats, pleased by his imperturbability, suggested Pierce for the vice presidency in 1852. Pierce insisted that he was still unavailable. It was a good strategy. Politicians, especially New Englanders, weren’t supposed to be too obvious or hungry. “He has a subtle faculty of making affairs roll onward according to his will,” Hawthorne observed, “and of influencing their course without showing any trace of his action.” At the Democratic convention in Baltimore that June, the dark horse candidate was suddenly praised as the party’s unifier, and Pierce won the nomination with 282 votes on the forty-ninth ballot. He received the news by telegram. His wife fainted.
A farmer from the Granite State was said to predict the future with Yankee foresight. Frank does well enough for New Hampshire, he nodded, “but he’ll be monstrous thin, spread out over the United States.”
News of Pierce’s nomination quickly reached Hawthorne, who immediately wrote his old friend that “it has occurred to me that you might have some thoughts of getting me to write the necessary biography.” Not wishing to sound too eager (the same strategy Pierce had used), Hawthorne downplayed his qualifications. “I should write a better life of you after your term of office and life itself were over, than on the eve of an election,” he joked. Pierce wasn’t fooled.
Though another biographer stood in the wings—a Connecticut writer, David Bartlett—Pierce promptly accepted Hawthorne’s offer. Likely he anticipated it. Stopping at the Tremont Hotel in Boston, not far from the Corner Bookstore, Pierce was surrounded by well-wishers, party hacks, politicians, office-seekers, and friends in the plush mahogany public rooms, all of whom he refused to meet, but he did receive Hawthorne, whom he hadn’t seen in over two years. The dark-browed writer entered the room—or so the story goes—clasped Pierce’s hand, and then flopped on one of the lounges. “Frank,” he said, “I pity you.” Pierce smiled his affable smile. “I pity myself,” he replied.
After a couple of seconds Hawthorne replied, “But, after all, this world was not meant to be happy in—only to succeed in!”
Gentlemen of genius and renown (so Sophia said) traipsed in and out of the Wayside volunteering Pierce anecdotes for the biography. And they urged Hawthorne, the candidate’s unofficial prime minister, to exert his influence. Pierce mustn’t be so apathetic; Van Buren and Lewis Cass had been sure they’d be elected, and look what happened to them. “I want you to scare Pierce a little,” pleaded one operative, requesting that Hawthorne arrange meetings between Pierce and Democratic representatives in New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Hawthorne reportedly held a reception at the Wayside, introducing Pierce to local backers.
The matter of Hawthorne writing a campaign biography, however, was to be kept quiet—probably until The Blithedale Romance was published, so as not to prejudice reviewers.
Hawthorne’s publishers had contracted to bring out the campaign biography, paying Hawthorne a flat fee of three hundred dollars. With Fields abroad, Hawthorne had been consulting with the firm’s senior partner, William Davis Ticknor. Six years younger than Hawthorne, he looked older, almost paternal, his forehead sloping down from a shiny pate and a fringe of white whiskers coating his chin like a bib. Ticknor’s daughter thought him handsome, as daughters do, but his look, like his manner, was understated and subdued. A milder man than Fields though no less charming, Ticknor was cordial, sharp-witted, adept with balance sheets, accounts, patrons, and writers. Hawthorne trusted him.
And Ticknor fully backed Pierce. Fields’s politics, insofar as he was political at all, may have inclined elsewhere. (Fields’s biographer insists unconvincingly that Fields inclined to nothing but literature.) Hawthorne cautiously explained that he simply must write the campaign biography of a friend with whom he’d been “intimate through life.” Besides, he added gratuitously, tipping his hand, “I seek nothing from him.”
Indeed he should not, snorted Louisa Hawthorne. At the Salem depot, she bumped into Horace Conolly and David Roberts on the platform, the two of them bursting with talk of the exotic diplomatic posts Hawthorne should receive at the hand of a President Pierce. She dismissed the conjectures in a huff. Its mention soiled her skirts. Roberts thought her ridiculous. She didn’t care. “I told him I hoped he would have nothing to do with an office,” she proudly reported to Ebe.
If Louisa’s disdain represented the family’s view—politics paved the way to hell, not glory—small wonder that Hawthorne kept his worldly aspirations to himself.
After much hesitation, Louisa decided to come to the Wayside, choosing the most indirect route possible. She would stop in Concord when coming home from Saratoga Springs, New York, where she and her uncle John Dike would take the waters. Then they’d steam down the Hudson River from Saratoga to New York aboard the Henry Clay, and Louisa would head up north to Concord by herself.
On the afternoon of July 28, a calm and sunny day, the Henry Clay raced a rival ship, the Armenia, on the river, steam belching, crew scurrying, passengers cowering. Out of control, the Clay soon slammed into the Armenia. People screamed. Metal ripped, wood crackled, but the Clay continued the race. A wall of flame leaped from the boiler room. Men and women ran for the lifeboats. There were none. Fire licked the wheelhouses. The steamer couldn’t slow down. It plowed forward, heading straight for the riverbank. A group of passengers huddled together and waited for the crash. Others leaped into the water, hoping to swim for their lives. Many jumped to their deaths, Louisa Hawthorne among them.
As soon as he could, John Dike telegraphed Salem. He reclaimed a small brooch, a mourning pin, stained and blackened by the salt water. William Pike did not carry it when he caught the early train for Concord. He traveled alone and light. The railroad coach dropped him near the Wayside gate shortly before seven in the morning. Sophia had not yet come down for breakfast, but seeing Pike through the window, she called out his name and waved him onto the piazza. There he stood, flushed and nervous, when she and Hawthorne opened the door. Louisa is dead, drowned, he blurted out the story. Hawthorne listened, face leeched of color. Write Pierce, Hawthorne told Pike; he’d have to delay the biography. Then he shut himself in his study.
That afternoon one could glimpse him plodding on the hilltop at the rear of the house, hands clasped behind his back, head sunk.
Hawthorne went to Salem, but with Pike confused about the time of the service, he arrived too late for the funeral. “I was glad,” Sophia placated herself, “it would have been so painful for him to go through any ceremony & to hear all the Calvinistic talk.” Mrs. Peabody warned Sophia to keep her rationalizations to herself. Ebe seemed dazed. Hawthorne escorted her back to Beverly, where she now lived, in a chaise.
If Hawthorne dreamed that the Wayside might soothe his restless soul, Louisa’s death sent him in search of distant pastures yet again. No longer did he equivocate about the matter of a consular post. As he told William Ticknor, “We are politicians now; and you must not expect to conduct yourself like a gentlemanly publisher.” The gloves were off.
Ticknor began to advertise Hawthorne’s Life of Pierce in August knowing that the rival campaign biography would preempt Hawthorne’s. But Hawthorne’s slim book, 144 pages in all, bore the most prestigious imprimatur in America, that of Ticknor, Reed and Fields, and, of course, that of Hawthorne himself, whose other work Ticknor cagily advertised on the frontispiece.
“Being so little of a politician that he scarcely feels entitled to call himself a member of any party,” Hawthorne introduces himself in the biography. He is a cordial nonpartisan concerned only for the welfare of his country and does not voluntarily undertake the writing of the book. Politics are “too remote” from the romancer’s “customary occupations.”
Whigs chuckled. Such a suave introduction: it was Hawthorne’s newest romance.
He continued. His task, as he saw it, was to explain why Pierce, despite all his civil and military appointments, remained so little known. (Who is Franklin Pierce, cried the newspapers, and how had a man of Pierce’s passable talents risen so high?) Hawthorne, however, interpreted Pierce’s failings as proof of good character. The man may not be a brilliant strategist, a brilliant orator, or a natural leader; but he is of great heart and conviction, earnest, steadfast, generous, a man who waits “for the occasion to bring him inevitably forward,” Hawthorne claimed; bumptious, yes, but steady, manly, whole, and far preferable to Dimmesdale or Hollingsworth.
Not to the Manns. To them, Pierce was a knave, “a thorough, unmitigated, irredeemable pro-slavery man,” Horace Mann stormed. How could Hawthorne back him? Mary Mann said Hawthorne was writing the biography only out of friendship. Mann wanted to know whether his brother-in-law would ignore the need—the anguish—of enslaved millions for mere personal considerations. “Is Hawthorne such a man?”
Hawthorne was. “If he makes out Pierce to be either a great or a brave man, then it will be the greatest work of fiction he ever wrote,” Mann declared. Certainly Hawthorne didn’t share Pierce’s views. But he did. To one who never felt quite at home, the symbolic loss of one—the dissolution of the Union—was intolerable. Conceived in liberty and hope, the Union was the only rationale possible for a bloody, fratricidal American revolution that pitted not just governments but family members against one another. And despite satires depicting American vulgarity, avarice, and idiocy, Hawthorne could just as easily summon a rhetoric of manifest destiny, the country as hallowed experiment, the Constitution its covenant.
To Hawthorne, the Constitution must never be sundered or sullied by the stupidity of common mortals who set themselves up as gods, like the witch judges or the tuneless mobs that tarred and feathered Tories or the opponents of slavery, like Whig senator William Seward, waving the banner of what he in his arrogance calls a “higher law.” For the Constitution preserves the Union precisely by keeping its various elements in check, ensuring the rule of law and order essential to the social good and preventing mass hysteria, demagoguery, and the petty tyranny of petty men.
Like Daniel Webster, Hawthorne considered the Compromise of 1850 the best means of protecting the Constitution from abolitionist agitators in the North and the slaveholding intransigents of the South. No surprise, then, that in the campaign biography he portrayed Pierce as the “unshaken advocate of Union, and of the mutual steps of compromise which that great object unquestionably demanded.” As for the Fugitive Slave Law he once berated, Hawthorne fell prudently silent. So did Pierce.
Yet Hawthorne didn’t for a minute condone slavery. Rather, he considered himself a hardheaded realist who understood, as the impractical philanthropists did not, that once passed, the Compromise laws—all of them—needed to be upheld. “The fiercest, the least scrupulous, and the most consistent of those, who battle against slavery,” Hawthorne insisted, “recognize the same fact that he [Pierce] does. They see that merely human wisdom and human efforts cannot subvert it, except by tearing to pieces the Constitution, breaking the pledges which it sanctions, and severing into distracted fragments that common country, which Providence brought into one nation through a continued miracle of almost two hundred years, from the first settlement of the American wilderness until the Revolution.”
Human wisdom and effort can’t abolish slavery? What then? Hawthorne still favored a gradual approach, as he indicated in Journal of an African Cruiser. The institution of slavery, though execrable, if let alone, will disappear like a dream, he now said, “by some means impossible to be anticipated, but of the simplest and easiest operation, when all its uses shall have been fulfilled.”
This is an incredible statement for a man cynical about humanity and its enlightenment. Hawthorne saw no other way. “There is no instance,” he insists, “in all history, of the human will and intellect having perfected any great moral reform by methods which it adapted to that end.” That is slavery is preferable to whatever nefarious system might rise—or be used—to replace it. “The evil would be certain,” Hawthorne continues in his most exhortatory vein, “while the good was, at best, a contingency.” In Blithedale, he wrote almost the same thing: “Little as we know of our life to come, we may be very sure, for one thing, that the good we aim at will not be attained. People never do get just the good they seek. If it come at all, it is something else, which they never dreamed of, and did not particularly want.”
Hawthorne defends passivity and inaction, the one a psychological state, the other a political one, and both of them consistent with the proslavery argument. Emancipation would inevitably lead to crime, poverty, and bloody violence; and once freed, the emancipated slave would not be able to find a livelihood or a home. Thus, any action taken on behalf of abolition only serves to aggravate the situation of those “whose condition it aimed to ameliorate, and terminating, in its possible triumph—if such possibility there were—with the ruin of two races which now dwelt together in greater peace and affection, it is not too much to say, than had ever elsewhere existed between the taskmaster and the serf.”
Recall that Hawthorne had written almost the same thing seventeen years earlier in his sketch “Old News,” where he deemed slavery a “patriarchal, and almost a beautiful, peculiarity” of early American life, not admirable, to be sure, but not without its benefit for the slave; an inferior people is better off enslaved. Latter-day Hawthorne fans may want to read him as tongue-in-cheek; in his own days, his sisters-in-law did not. Appalled, Mary Mann and Elizabeth Peabody, realizing they could no longer speak their minds to Sophia, decided that Pierce had led the befuddled romancer down a primrose path of moral obliquity.
Hawthorne as master ironist, or a naïve romancer out of his element: the evidence suggests he was neither. He meant what he said and knew what he meant.
Doubtless Hawthorne considered blacks an inferior race, as did most of his New England compeers, whether Oliver Wendell Holmes, at one smug extreme, or Theodore Parker at the antislavery other. Strange and disappointing, though, is Hawthorne’s complete lack of empathy for the slave. His conscious sympathies lay with the laboring white man who would certainly lose his job to an emancipated black man. And doubtless Hawthorne identified with the southern white slaveholder to the extent that he romanticized an agrarian planter class as more cultured and genteel than its busy Yankee counterpart, those no-nonsense industrialists, slick and utilitarian, or their Brahmin brothers, their privileged eyes foggy with reform. Yet like most people, Hawthorne regarded himself as well-intentioned and fair-minded, a neo-Jeffersonian patriot devoted to “preserving our sacred Union, as the immovable basis from which the destinies, not of America alone, but of mankind at large, may be carried upward and consummated.”
“The biography has cost me hundreds of friends, here at the north, who had a purer regard for me than Frank Pierce ever gained, and who drop off from me like autumn leaves, in consequence of what I say on the slavery question.” Hawthorne wrote to Bridge. “But they were my real sentiments, and I do not now regret that they are on record.”
In the process of writing Pierce’s biography, Hawthorne decided that Pierce possessed the character of a great ruler. “There are scores of men in the country that seem brighter than he is; but Frank has the directing mind, and will move them about like pawns on a chess-board, and turn all their abilities to better purpose than they themselves could.”
Hawthorne was wrong on several counts.
Reviews of Hawthorne’s book split along party lines. The Springfield Republican dubbed it fiction; the Democratic Review liked it, and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine deftly sidestepped politics to speak of literary form. The New York Herald called Hawthorne a hack, and the New York Times, a Whig paper, dismissed Hawthorne as a partisan still harboring a grudge against the village custom house. As for the biography, the Times continued, it exposed the real Frank Pierce: average student, lackluster attorney, unsuccessful soldier, boring speaker, doughface (as southern sympathizers were called) politician: “This is the marrow of Mr. Hawthorne’s panegyric.”
While the press debated the biography’s demerits, Hawthorne went up to Maine to join Pierce at Bowdoin’s commencement and semicentennial celebration. “All my cotemporaries [sic] have grown the funniest old men in the world,” Hawthorne wrote home to Sophia. “Am I a funny old man?” Exhausted from writing, grieving Louisa’s death, tired of Peabody politics, and cranky about domestic life, he had looked forward to the tall academic pines, scented as they were with another era. And he liked spending time with Pierce.
It seems an unlikely pairing—poky politician, stylish writer; one outgoing, the other introspective—but only at first glance. Hawthorne was more relaxed and jovial, Pierce more considerate and caring, than most people knew. “He is deep, deep, deep,” said Hawthorne of Pierce. Mostly, though, these two men—out of step with their milieu though in step with their times—sought and found in each other the comfort of a thirty-year friendship and the full acceptance neither had quite discovered elsewhere, despite all their success. “I love him,” Hawthorne said. It was a simple statement of easy truth.
Pierce commissioned George Healy, portraitist of the famous, to paint Hawthorne and paid one thousand dollars, a goodly sum. Pierce, who cherished the picture, kept it on exhibit in Washington during his entire term of office, and for more than a century it remained in the Pierce family, Hawthorne glancing outward, somber, not sad, his eyebrows black as crows, his eyes impenetrable. During the sitting, a visibly nervous Hawthorne grew more comfortable. At his request, Mrs. Healy read one of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s works, or Hawthorne chatted amiably with the painter, comparing notes about their early, unsuccessful days when Hawthorne said he couldn’t afford more than plain wooden furniture that Sophia painted in her artistic way.
Healy thought Hawthorne looked like a poetical Daniel Webster, if shyer and more feminine, as befitted a writer; perhaps Healy confused the two men and their politics, although several others, like Fields and Ellery Channing, had noticed the similarity. It was flint.
After Brunswick, Hawthorne rode down the coast to the rocky Isles of Shoals, nine miles off the coast of Rye Beach, New Hampshire, and accessible by ferry from Portsmouth. Pierce introduced Hawthorne at the small hotel, Leighton’s, perfect for escape. He stayed there twelve days, waking each morning to the caw of gulls and the soft sound of water lapping at the shore. White sun and stinging salt burned out his malaise, and back at the Wayside, he said he was ready to start a new romance. It was to be “in the Scarlet Letter vein,” Fields purred with delight.
“I am beginning to take root here, and feel myself, for the first time in my life, really at home,” Hawthorne confided to Longfellow while he set his sights on foreign shores.
Tuesday, November 2, 1852, was a day of dull rain and clammy fog in Boston, except for Democrats. Franklin Pierce defeated both his Whig opponent, Winfield Scott, and Free-Soil Democrat John P. Hale, whom he detested. Hawthorne began making plans. Sophia and the children would go to the Manns for Thanksgiving; he invited Pike to join him in Concord for a bachelor’s holiday. They talked politics. The scramble for appointments had begun.
From distant Concord, Hawthorne pulled Salem’s political levers. He dickered with George Bailey Loring, Democratic Party leader, who wanted Ephraim Miller’s position in the Custom House, and he worked to keep Miller in the Custom House, hoping to appease Loring with the postmaster’s job. He backed Nathaniel James Lord, president of the Essex County Democrats, for district attorney and advised Zach Burchmore to go to the Boston Custom House, hoping Loring would then support him. (“Do not let my name be mixed up with the above business,” he admonished Burchmore.) The maneuvering took skill, patience, and circumspection. “A subtile boldness with a veil of modesty over it, is what is needed,” Hawthorne confided to one aspirant. It was the method he used.
And it worked. Everyone was happy with what they received, including Hawthorne’s ne’er-do-well uncle William Manning, who landed a job as superintendent of repairs—janitor—in the Custom House.
Literary friends also looked to Hawthorne for their ration of spoils. Richard Stoddard, a young poet Hawthorne had met the previous summer, wanted an office of some sort; Charles Wilkins Webber asked for help with an appointment in South America; Ellery Channing hoped to go to Rome or Naples; and with Pierre, his new novel, a disaster, Melville half hoped for a foreign post. In November he visited Concord, and soon afterwards Hawthorne took Melville’s name to Washington. Nothing came of Hawthorne’s efforts on Melville’s behalf, and it’s impossible to know how strongly he pushed, though for years he felt guilty about not succeeding. “However, I failed only from real lack of power to serve him,” he later told himself on seeing Melville again, “so there was no reason to be ashamed.”
As for himself, Hawthorne was reasonably certain he’d be given the consulship in Liverpool. He spoke longingly of England, noted Henry Bright, a young Englishman visiting Concord, and Hawthorne explained to Bridge that he’d received “several invitations from English celebrities to come over there; and this office would make all straight”—meaning it was a position he could afford, given the salary and fees. Fields sulked. “We shall have no more romances from his pen at present.”
Sophia pretended not to know of Hawthorne’s plans, or if she did, kept mum so as not to distress her mother. But Mrs. Peabody died in early January. Two months later, in March, news of Hawthorne’s assignment hit the newspapers. Ecstatic at the prospect of Europe—at long last—Sophia shunted aside criticism, real and perceived, about Hawthorne’s appointment. He had not jockeyed for it, she snapped; it belonged to him by right. Not that the plum of a post had anything to do with Pierce’s friendship or the biography, she asserted with sticky innocence. “Bargain & sale are not terms or ideas to influence such a man as he or my husband & since I know it & them, I do not care a fig what low minded people may say or think up on the subject.”
On March 26, 1853, the United States Senate approved Pierce’s nomination of Nathaniel Hawthorne as United States consul in Liverpool. Hawthorne accepted the position. He torched old letters and papers, as well as hundreds of letters Sophia had written him before they married. It was a key gesture: covering his traces so as to reinvent the past.