CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
If a group of chosen friends, chosen out of all the world and all time for their adaptedness, could go on in endless life together, keeping themselves mutually warm in their high, desolate way, then none of them need ever sigh to be comforted in the pitiable snugness of the grave.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Septimius Felton”
HAWTHORNE CREDITED James T. Fields with helping him find an audience. “My literary success, whatever it has been or may be, is the result of my connection with you,” Hawthorne thanked his friend in 1861. “Somehow or other, you smote the rock of public sympathy on my behalf.” Before Fields, Hawthorne had been known mainly to a small band of writers and intellectuals; Edgar Allan Poe had called him “the example, par excellence, in this country, of the privately-admired and publicly underappreciated man of genius.” That was in 1847; Hawthorne was forty-three. When he was forty-six, Fields published The Scarlet Letter, and Hawthorne entered the most prolific period of his life.
Like Sophia, Fields supplied the appreciation and encouragement—and publishing wherewithal—Hawthorne needed in order to write and to face the consequences of writing: what it meant, how he felt about it, the uneasy anticipation of reviews or sales. Fields knew Hawthorne was a perfectionist unwilling to release any of his work to the public before he had polished it to a high gloss, as if its unsullied surface protected him from rejection. He weighed each word, balanced each sentence, scrutinized each character for motive and depth and meaning. Extant manuscripts reveal his vigilance, how he organized each scene, wringing from it nuance, embedding it with significance until at last it satisfied him. “I am sensible that you mollify me with a good deal of soft soap,” Hawthorne grinned, “but it is skillfully applied and effects all that you intend it should.” The two men understood one another.
But sitting beneath the spirelike ceiling of his tower, he found it difficult to work. He felt restless, anxious, confined. His tower was too hot in summer, too cold in winter. “He always, I believe, finds fault,” Ellery Channing had once observed; the man who wrote compellingly of a sense of place could find none for himself.
“The war continues to interrupt my literary industry,” Hawthorne ruefully informed Ticknor, saying he wished he could perform some “useful labor”—an old theme going back to his youth—and he proclaimed that if he were younger, he’d volunteer. His own blood was up. In milder moments, he confessed that he didn’t quite understand “what we are fighting for, or what definite result can be expected.” The elimination of slavery? “It may be a wise object,” Hawthorne nominally agreed with Horatio Bridge. Writing to Francis Bennoch, he was less sure. “We seem to have little, or, at least, a very misty idea of what we are fighting for,” he repeated. “It depends upon the speaker, and that, again, depends upon the section of the country in which his sympathies are enlisted.” Southerners fight for states’ rights; westerners, for the Union; northeasterners, to end slavery. “One thing is indisputable; the spirit of our young men is thoroughly aroused.”
If Hawthorne fancied himself shouldering a musket, the vision didn’t last. “I wish they would push on the war a little more briskly,” he joked without humor. “The excitement had an invigorating effect on me for a time, but it begins to lose its influence.” Throughout the spring and summer of 1861, news from Washington was contradictory and disheartening, and though he complained to Horatio Bridge that “all we ought to fight for is, the liberty of selecting the point where our diseased members shall be lopt off,” he bristled with patriotism, almost against his will, in the face of Henry Bright’s English insolence. “Every man of you wishes to see us both maimed and disgraced,” he snapped, “and looks upon this whole trouble as a god-send—if only there were cotton enough at Liverpool and Manchester.” As for Bright’s qualms about rising death tolls, Hawthorne sourly replied, “People must die, whether a bullet kills them or no.”
Hawthorne’s friends in England gasped. “If this is the literary tone of the United States,” said Richard Monckton Milnes, “what must be the rowdy?” Hawthorne didn’t care; he’d quit idealizing the sceptered isle, its green hedge primly clipped, and put away his unfinished tales about American claimants and English patrimony. To continue with the Grimshawe manuscript was folly while drums of war beat at the Concord Common and Julian marched off each morning to drill at the town armory. Far easier was rooting around in his English journals for essays, especially since Fields now sat in the editor’s chair at the Atlantic. Hawthorne sent him “Near Oxford” and “Pilgrimage to Old Boston,” and in the next two years produced nine essays in all, seven of which were published in the Atlantic—“capital papers,” Fields would approve, for a “delectable Book.”
In December he consented to being photographed. “He allowed the photographer to poke about his sacred face and figure,” Sophia reported to Fields, “arranging even the hairs of his head and almost his eyelashes, and turning his brow as if on a pivot. He was as docile as the dearest baby,” she marveled, “though he hates to be touched any more than anyone I ever knew.” A wide-brimmed felt hat in his hand, Hawthorne stares as if afraid to move from his seat lest an epithet fall from his expressionless mouth. His hair lies in thick, graying abundance on the side of his head; brows darkening his eyes but not the circles underneath them. Hawthorne admired the photographer’s handiwork enough to mail a copy of the finished product to Bridge.
The photographer poked at Sophia too. Bent slightly forward in a chair, collar finely scalloped, brooch in center place, and her skirts spread voluminously about her, she looks as plain as she believed she was. “I have no features,” she lamented. True: nothing of her ebullience, her stubbornness, or her unconditional enthusiasm peeps from mouth or eye. Instead she seems either ready to assist the fussy photographer—or to run away.
The Hawthorne children look fretful. Una, handsome at seventeen, sneers; ten-year-old Rose frowns; and Julian, an attractive boy of fifteen, looks as though he might burst into tears: children at wartime, nervous and sad.
Paymaster general of the United States Navy in charge of provisions and clothing, Horatio Bridge invited Hawthorne to visit him and his wife, stationed in Washington, D.C., to glimpse the war firsthand. Hawthorne pleaded lassitude of mind or body, hard to say which, and a new romance, he hinted, in the works. Mostly, though, he paced lugubriously on the hillside. Worried, Sophia took the invitation as a godsend and asked Ticknor if he’d accompany her husband to Washington.
The two men set out on the railroad the first Thursday in March, chugging through a frostbitten Massachusetts to New York and then on to a balmy Philadelphia. At each stop, the number of soldiers increased, young men with smooth cheeks and scratchy uniforms as eager for news as the two travelers. Ticknor managed everything. He bought gloves for the two of them; he arranged their transportation; he paid their bills. “He says this is the only way he can travel with comfort,” Ticknor wrote to his wife, “and it is no trouble to me.”
Though Hawthorne wanted somehow to participate in the war, he also wanted to shut it out. So he watched. From the sooty window of the railway car, he saw jerry-built fortifications, cannons of iron, and smoky canvas tents, all flying by, and when he stepped off the train in the Washington station, it was still swarming with soldiers and muskets even though he and Ticknor had missed the sixty thousand men who’d waded into muddy Virginia just hours before. Hawthorne had refused to travel at night, and they had been delayed. Ticknor was disappointed.
Thanks to Horatio Bridge and other connections, Ticknor and Hawthorne lost no more time. They joined Representative Charles Russell Train and the Massachusetts delegation for the presentation of an ivory-handled leather whip, made in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to Abraham Lincoln, the homeliest man Hawthorne had ever seen. “If put to guess his calling and livelihood,” Hawthorne would subsequently write, “I should have taken him for a country schoolmaster.” Lank, loose-limbed, and awkward, Lincoln appeared before the delegation, his hair rumpled, his frock coat rusty and unbrushed. His feet sloshed in shabby slippers. As for his vaunted perspicacity, Uncle Abe, as Hawthorne called him, would “take an antagonist in flank, rather than to make a bull-run at him right in front,” Hawthorne loved his puns. “On the whole, I like this sallow, queer, sagacious visage, with the homely human sympathies that warmed it; and, for my small share in the matter, would as lief have Uncle Abe for a ruler as any man whom it would have been practicable to put in his place.”
Next day, Hawthorne was taken to Virginia, where he and Ticknor heard the commander address his troops, and the day after that, they splattered through the bleating rain to the military base at Harpers Ferry. A document signed by Secretary of War Stanton authorized their passage by steamer to Fortress Monroe, the naval base near Newport News; on another excursion, they pressed south again, this time to Manassas, as a guest of the Baltimore &Ohio Railroad, along with the writer Nathaniel Parker Willis and the reporter Benjamin Perley Poore, several members of Congress, several officials of the railroad, several newspaper editors, an English correspondent, and the Bridges. It was a group of do-gooders, spectators, and enthusiasts straight out of the pages of “The Celestial Rail-road.”
Hawthorne felt good. He lingered in Washington, willing to sit for the painter Emanuel Leutze, who was applying the final dabs to his manifest-destiny mural in the House of Representatives. Leutze supplied Hawthorne with several glasses of champagne and several cigars to achieve a ruddier, more affable image—though not much of a likeness—than anything achieved at Mathew Brady’s Gallery of Photographic Art. Those photographs, taken by Alexander Gardner, show Hawthorne grimmer and grayer, his skin as wrinkled as crumpled paper around the large, weary eyes that reveal nothing. He stands erect in a Napoleonic pose, white collar caressing his face, coat lapels a snazzy velvet. Yet of the several pictures of Hawthorne taken that day, all stern, there is a special one. Hawthorne’s hand rests on a table as his lower body slowly washes into whiteness; here, he seems approachable, palpable, evanescent, and mortal, all at the same time.
Revived, Hawthorne opened the back door to the Wayside on April 10, and in less than a month produced for the Atlantic a tour de force called “Chiefly About War Matters by a Peaceable Man.” He’d lost none of his satirical power. The essay is Swiftian, corrosive and funny, and directed at the foibles both of humankind and, more precisely, the Atlantic readership.
Generals are bullet-headed, the Monitor a rattrap, war a savage feat of recidivism. “Set men face to face, with weapons in their hands, and they are as ready to slaughter one another now,” Hawthorne writes, “after playing at peace and good will for so many years, as in the rudest ages, that never heard of peace-societies, and thought no wine so delicious as what they quaffed from an enemy’s skull.” When the Army of the Potomac finally crossed the river after months of delay, it encounters no one: “It was as if General McClellan had thrust his sword into a gigantic enemy, and beholding him suddenly collapse, had discovered to himself and the world that he had merely punctured an enormously swollen bladder.” And Hawthorne’s proposals for the conduct of war are venomously comic: send old men to war instead of the young: “As a general rule, these venerable combatants should have the preference for all dangerous and honorable service in the order of their seniority,” he writes, “with a distinction in favor of those whose infirmities might render their lives less the worth keeping.”
Fed up with political poltroonery, Hawthorne rails at one side and excoriates the other. War spills blood, despoils the landscape, sends bumpkins into battle unaware of any noble cause, if noble it is, given the country’s prodigality in “sacrificing good institutions to passionate impulses and impracticable theories.” Once again Hawthorne offers his chilling proscription: “Man’s accidents are God’s purposes. We miss the good we sought, and do the good we little cared for.”
As for the freeing of slaves, Hawthorne refuses to beat the drum. “I wonder whether I shall excite anybody’s wrath by saying this?” Hawthorne inquires in his deadpan tone, likening a group of contrabands (fugitive slaves) to rustic fauns with nice manners: Donatello in blackface. Donatello and the contrabands are primitive creatures, almost androgynous, without consciousness or complexity—domesticated savages apt to revert to type, capable of murder and mayhem. No doubt about it: to Hawthorne, blacks and Italians and Jews are inferior to Anglo-Saxons, whom he doesn’t much like either.
Yet any of them are liable to change—or conversion—and emancipation will provide a rite of passage for former slaves. But transformation into what, he asks, and at whose behest? A skeptic about the war, about emancipation—in fact, about everything—Hawthorne readily admits he lives in a society as racist as himself. “Whosoever may be benefited by the result of this war,” he writes, “it will not be the present generation of negroes, the childhood of whose race is now gone forever, and who must henceforth fight a hard battle with the world, on very unequal terms.”
These unequal terms are his point. And what he means by unequal terms lies at the heart of a national hypocrisy that, in one incarnation or another, has always been Hawthorne’s subject, whether he writes about Puritans, Tories, rebels, or transcendentalists. America is conceived in liberty and oppression, and with this insight Hawthorne moves beyond a consideration of local politics, beyond even his own racism, to the extent that it’s possible, to a fine-tuned perception of America’s heritage. The slaves are “our brethren,” he writes, “as being lineal descendants from the May Flower, the fated womb of which, in her first voyage, sent forth a brood of Pilgrims upon Plymouth Rock, and, in a subsequent one, spawned Slaves upon the southern soil:—a monstrous birth, but with which we have an instinctive sense of kindred.”
En route to New York in May when Hawthorne sent “Chiefly About War Matters” to the Atlantic, Fields approved it on faith. “This is somewhat to be regretted,” Hawthorne told Ticknor, “because I wanted to benefit of somebody’s opinion besides my own, as to the expediency of publishing two or three passages in the article.” He explained he’d already omitted several “which I doubted the public would bear. The remainder is tame enough in all conscience, and I don’t think it will bear any more castration.” Nor would he decline responsibility for what he wrote and felt. “I think the political complexion of the Magazine has been getting too deep a black Republican tinge,” he went on, “and that there is a time pretty near at hand when you will be sorry for it. The politics of the Magazine suit Massachusetts tolerably well (and only tolerably) but it does not fairly represent the feeling of the country at large.”
Returning home, a wide-eyed Fields read Hawthorne’s description of President Lincoln as homely, coarse, and unkempt. That, of all things, was unacceptable. Fields assured Hawthorne that he liked the article—no question there—but said he and Ticknor both thought “it will be politic to alter yr. phrases with reference to the President, to leave out the description of his awkwardness & general uncouth aspect.”
“What a terrible thing it is to try to let off a little bit of truth into this miserable humbug of a world!” Hawthorne grumbled, submitting to the editorial knife. He cut the description of Uncle Abe and for Fields’s sake modified a few more passages, as when he describes a nameless officer as sitting on his horse like a meal-bag, and “the stupidest looking man he ever saw.” But he warned Fields that should he collect the sketch into a book, “I shall insert it in all its original beauty.”
Hawthorne also inserted a series of editorial footnotes, written by himself in the voice of a dull-witted editor who, as a Massachusetts patriot, misunderstands the author’s satire or condemns it. In place of the Lincoln passage, then, Hawthorne-as-editor notes that “we are compelled to omit two or three pages, in which the author describes the interview, and gives his idea of the personal appearance and deportment of the President.… It lacks reverence, and it pains us to see a gentleman of ripe ages, and who has spent years under the corrective influence of foreign institutions, falling into the characteristic and most ominous fault of Young America.”
To a man without faith or the conviction of a just cause—or what passes for either—war degenerates into butchery, massacre without meaning or end. And so the Peaceable Man and his editor together lampoon the slaveholding South and the censorious North; and together they lampoon Fields as editor and Hawthorne as writer and an entire country, bloodlusting and blind. “Can it be a son of old Massachusetts who utters this abominable sentiment?” Hawthorne, as editor, writes of the Peaceable Man. “For shame!”
“What an extraordinary paper by Hawthorne in the Atlantic!” Charles Eliot Norton (son of Andrews Norton) wrote to George William Curtis, editor of Harper’s Weekly magazine. “It is pure intellect, without emotion, without sympathy, without principle.”
“ ‘A fig for your kindly feelings,’ might the escaping fugitives say to him,” William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator scorned Hawthorne. “He says he would not have turned them back, and yet ‘should have felt almost as reluctant, on their own account, to hasten them forward to the stranger’s land’ ”! A nice balancing of considerations, truly! But the fugitives, it seems, had no difficulty whatever in determining ‘on their own account,’ whether to remain in the house of bondage.”
Hawthorne dashed off another piece, much briefer, for a short-lived local weekly, the Monitor, in which he celebrated the North—or, rather, the northern soldier, having met on his trip from Manassas “the sons of Northern yeomen,” a whole division of them, about fifteen thousand, who displayed gallantry toward the women in Hawthorne’s party. He contrasted these regiments with the chivalrous southern soldiers who swept the battlefields for human bones to send home to their sweethearts or mothers for souvenirs. But he hadn’t changed his position; this piece was no sop to the North; barbarity on either side revolted him.
“Chiefly About War Matters” offended most Atlantic readers not because it frequently seems prosouthern but because it is so virulently and unequivocally antiwar—and this during a war fought for such a palpable moral good. “If ever a man was out of his right element, it was Hawthorne in America,” observed Edward Dicey, the thirty-year-old correspondent Hawthorne had met during his trip to Virginia. Dicey remembered that Hawthorne seemed to feel more at ease with him, an Englishman, than with his fellow Americans. “It was impossible for a man like Hawthorne to be an enthusiastic partisan,” Dicey justified Hawthorne, who in these days needed the support. “Nobody disliked slavery more cordially than he did,” Dicey insisted; “and yet the difficulty of what was to be done with the slaves weighed constantly upon his mind.”
Dicey visited Concord in June. Hawthorne had returned to his tower, descending once in a while to plant sunflowers or entertain Atlantic contributors come to call. One of them, Rebecca Harding, who’d published “Life in the Iron Mills” in the magazine, had written Hawthorne just before his trip to Washington. He’d graciously answered, and that spring she took the train to Concord to knock at the door of the Wayside, where Emerson and Bronson Alcott had gathered in the little parlor, the latter standing before the fireplace, white hair cascading over his shoulders. He rambled on and on about the war as Hawthorne calmly sat astride a chair, chin resting on folded arms, shrewd laughter tucked in his eye. He was a stranger, Harding later recalled, even in his own home, like Banquo’s ghost among the thanes.
He pulled himself to his feet, she remembered. “ ‘We cannot see that thing at so long a range. Let us go to dinner,’ and Mr. Alcott suddenly checked the droning flow of his prophecy and quickly led the way to the dining-room.”
Whenever Hawthorne went to Boston, he stopped by the Fields home at 37 Charles Street, a “fostering roof” (the phrase belongs to Henry James Jr.) that overlooked the river. From the front windows, boats sailing the river tilted by as the Fieldses sat with friends, Atlantic contributors, and other writers come to feel important, entertained, comforted, indispensable. Fields sent Hawthorne a typical note of thanks after Hawthorne met Anthony Trollope at a Fields soiree: Trollope had fallen in love with Hawthorne, “the handsomest Yankee that ever walked the planet.”
Merry and smart though he was—and powerful—Fields did not accomplish his magic alone. Annie Fields bore the real brunt of making a salon: fresh cloths on the mahogany, clean linens on the bed, plump cushions, ready wit, and of course making sure the larder brimmed with enough food and wine for guests who might, at the last minute of course, spend the weekend. She covered her table in flowers from the wide garden at the back of the house and showed to her guests Leigh Hunt’s old brown Boccaccio. Always welcome, Una and Julian often stayed on Charles Street in pampered style, or Sophia lay on their couch in the parlor to watch the moon rise over the river. For Hawthorne, Annie reserved the extra bedroom with a view of the water and fed him hot chowder.
With her graces and background, her easy learning, her beauty, and her adulation of Hawthorne, Annie Fields was the sort of woman Sophia could appreciate. She coaxed rather than criticized, inspiring confidences impossible for Sophia to share with her sisters. For Annie Fields would not cross her, especially about Nathaniel or the children. Quite the reverse: both Annie Fields and Sophia Hawthorne needed heroes.
Sophia also needed affection, the kind Hawthorne was less and less capable of giving. Cloistered within his tower or in the downstairs library, curtains drawn, and on occasion able to eat only a little potato at dinnertime, Hawthorne seemed to shrink inside himself, unavailable and unavailing. With her sisters nearby and the war and Sanitary fairs and the children growing up, Concord largely fulfilled her need for sociability. But none of it replaced the profound intimacy with her husband that had lit the early days of their marriage. And like Hawthorne, she craved something more, something different: in her case, the female sympathy that Annie Fields provided. “I love you with a mighty love,” Sophia opened her heart to Annie. “You embellish my life.”
When Hawthorne was in his tower, Sophia sat at her own desk, gushing to Annie, “I will say just what I choose and you must hear it as you can. For how absurd for me to have these facts on the tip of my pen, and from a foolish conventional reticence, repair from letting them crystalline on the paper when I wish to do so.” Annie objected. Sophia should restrain herself. Sophia could not.
The intensity of their friendship, as binding for a time as that of Hawthorne and Pierce, could not survive Hawthorne’s death. For Sophia and Annie, intimacy required four people, not two. Sophia eventually quarreled with James Fields and severed all ties with the Fieldses. No one was more hurt than Annie. In 1871, after Sophia’s death, she put her own sorrow into wobbly verse, remembering “that grief,/Which thou with mortal insight dealt to me,/Leaving a gaping wound without relief,/While yet we drifted on life’s misty sea.”
Probably not even Pierce’s wife loved him as Hawthorne did. Princlie Frank was Hawthorne’s anagram for Pierce; it was the small things that Pierce did that made him such. On the iron-cold day of Jane Pierce’s funeral, Pierce, in mourning, leaned over to Hawthorne and to protect him from the biting wind drew up the collar of his coat.
Except for “Chiefly About War Matters,” Hawthorne spent the rest of 1862 and the first half of 1863 mining his English notebooks for Atlantic essays instead of writing his new romance. Fields had promised to pay one hundred dollars for articles of ten pages, and for anything more than that, another ten dollars per page. (Hawthorne’s reminiscence of Delia Bacon, “Recollections of a Gifted Woman,” netted $150, no small sum. In 1863, three hundred dollars bought exemption from the draft, and a nice house could be had for three thousand, which Hawthorne just about spent to renovate the Wayside.)
“Have you not almost enough for a book prepared?” Fields angled. “And when will you like to publish a volume?” Though Hawthorne was dubious about the literary value of the sketches, he churned them out. He handed Fields “A London Suburb” in January, “Up the Thames” in February, and “Outside Glimpses of English Poverty” by mid-April. For the projected book, he proposed to rewrite an essay on his visit to Uttoxeter, published in The Keepsake in London in 1857, and he set about another sketch, “Civic Banquets,” which he completed in June. And he composed an autobiographical piece, “Consular Experiences,” to be saved for the collection, which already had a title: “Our Old Home: a series of English Sketches,” combining, or so he said, intellectual ice with the wine of memory.
Come what may, he also proposed to dedicate them in a prefatory letter to Franklin Pierce, who made this book possible, in deference “to my own life-long affection for him.”
That summer Hawthorne went to see Pierce in Concord, New Hampshire, and on July 4, Hawthorne’s fifty-ninth birthday, Pierce mounted a wooden dais festooned with flags at Capitol Square to deliver an Independence Day speech. Declaring himself weary of carnage and war, the ex-president flayed the present administration as despotic, Lincoln as a demagogue, and, in a burst of alliteration, depicted the war as “fearful, fruitless, fatal.” In the words of Pierce’s biographer, the speech was a consummate literary feat in a lifetime of platitudes. But while Pierce disgorged his jeremiad, rumors of the Union’s hard-fought victory at Gettysburg gripped the crowds. Pierce the Copperhead—as Republicans called rabid Peace Democrats—had managed to destroy what little reputation he had.
Doubtless, however, the fracas merely hardened Hawthorne against Pierce’s detractors. “He will not relent,” Annie Fields noted, partly in anger, partly in admiration. Fields predicted disaster; one book dealer, a large one, said he wouldn’t order any book with a dedication to Franklin Pierce. Hawthorne did not yield. “Such adherence is indeed noble,” Annie Fields stiffly noted. “Hawthorne requires all that popularity can give in a pecuniary way for the support of his family.”
Later that month, rioters protesting the draft stormed New York City. Before federal troops could restore some semblance of order, about two thousand people lay dead, including one hundred blacks lynched or otherwise killed. “The negroes suffer in NY,” Sanborn told Moncure Conway, “but they are enlisting in the South at the rate of a regiment a week at least.” Smaller riots broke out in Boston while edgy soldiers roved the cobblestones. On July 18, at Fort Wagner, South Carolina, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the son of Francis and Anna Shaw (who’d donated money to the Hawthornes several times in the 1840s), was shot through the heart. Killed with most of his regiment, the proud black troop known as Massachusetts Fifty-fourth, he was thrown into an unmarked grave. “Higginson is only slightly wounded,” Sanborn reported of another of the Fifty-fourth’s white officers, gratuitously adding, “Hawthorne has behaved badly and is a copperhead of the worst kind.”
“He is in despair about the war and the country,” said Henry Yates Thompson, an Englishman visiting Concord, “and he is a copperhead of copperheads. Mr. Hawthorne has all the prejudices about the negroes—‘ the smell, their intellects are inferior’, etc., etc.’ ” Hawthorne was an anathema.
Fields presumably asked Ellery Channing to make Hawthorne retract the dedication. A coward, Channing begged Elizabeth Peabody to do it. Devoted to him after all these years, unafraid of his moods or his repugnant politics, she pleaded with him that it would hurt the cause. Amused and touched, he waved away her objections in a letter that reveals his respect for her. Of all people, he wrote, she should recognize Pierce’s sterling qualities, which, he implied, were like hers: “There is a certain steadfastness and integrity with regard to a man’s own nature (when it is such a peculiar nature as that of Pierce) which seems to me more sacred and valuable than the faculty of adapting one’s self to new ideas, however true they may turn out to be.”
Hawthorne was intransigent.
He added that he was not proslavery. Nor did he consider himself a Peace Democrat seeking reconciliation with the South; far from it. The recent northern victories, he feared, would drive the South into the arms of the Peace Democrats and bring about a coalition that would prolong slavery for at least another hundred years, “with new bulwarks” no less. Meantime, the North would think they’d won a victory “and never know they had shed their blood in vain, and so would become peace Democrats to a man. In that case, woe to the Abolitionists!”
To him, disunion now seemed the only viable alternative.
But he wasn’t sure. So he requested that Peabody keep his views to herself. He’d always depended on her discretion. As for anything else, well, she could read what he had to say in his dedication to Pierce.
As loyal as Hawthorne was to Pierce, Fields was to Hawthorne. If Hawthorne insisted on the dedication, so be it—although the editor did suggest his author emend the last paragraph. “It would be a piece of poltroonery in me to withdraw either the dedication or the dedicatory letter,” Hawthorne answered. If Pierce’s name was enough to scuttle the book, the more reason to stand by him. “I can only say that I would gladly sacrifice a thousand or two of dollars rather than retain the good will of such a herd of dolts and mean-spirited scoundrels.”
Yet he was no martyr. He’d strike the last paragraph of his dedicatory letter, which Fields thought contentious:
Can it be that no man shall hereafter reach that elevated seat!—that its platform, which we deemed to be so firmly laid, has crumbled beneath it!—that a chasm has gaped wide asunder, into which the unbalanced Chair of State is about to fall! In my seclusion, accustomed only to private thoughts, I can judge little of these matters and know not what to hope, although I can see much to fear. I might even deem it allowable in the last resort, to be contented with half the soil that was once broad inheritance. But you, as all men may know by the whole record of your life, will hope stedfastly while there shall be any shadow or possibility of a country left, continuing faithful forever to that grand idea which, as you once told me, was the earliest that your brave father taught you; and whether the Union is to be henceforth a living giant, or a mangled and dismembered corpse, it will be said of you that this mighty Polity, or this miserable ruin, had no more loyal, constant, or single minded son than Franklin Pierce.
To Fields’s amazement, the dedication didn’t hurt advance sales of Our Old Home. Before its publication date, September 19, he put a second edition to press, and in October he reported that the confounded book continued to sell “bravely.” But Pierce’s name curdled in the mouths of every northerner. Just days before the publication of Our Old Home, a group of soldiers had discovered a letter that Pierce had written to Jefferson Davis in 1860 fomenting secession. If the South seceded from the Union, Pierce had told Davis, fighting would break out in the North, and the Democrats would side with him. “I have never believed that actual disruption of the Union can occur without blood,” Pierce wrote; “and if through the madness of northern abolitionists that dire calamity must come, the fighting will not be along Mason & Dixon’s line merely. It will be within our own borders, in our own streets.”
According to Elizabeth Peabody, she and Mary Mann subscribed to the Evening Post, which published the treasonous letter on September 19 and then again on October 7. The sisters promptly showed the item to Sophia, who declared the letter a forgery and left their house in a snit. Once home, she sent for the paper, saying Hawthorne wanted to see it. From then on, Peabody insisted, Hawthorne never uttered Pierce’s name to his sisters-in-law. He didn’t denounce him; he just wanted to avoid an argument.
Early in October, Harper’s Weekly requested that Hawthorne absolve himself of “Pierce’s infamy” by saying he hadn’t known of it when writing his dedication. Hawthorne would do no such thing. “I was very sorry to see what Hawthorne said,” lamented George Curtis on reading the dedication. “He has a kind of moral blindness like color blindness, and except when he insults us all, as in this letter, we can do nothing but spit and pass on.” In the review of Our Old Home that Curtis may have written, he praised Hawthorne’s sinewy style and condemned his point of view: “That one of the most gifted and fascinating of American writers should fail to see, or to care for, the very point of our contest is monstrous.”
Franklin Sanborn or Moncure Conway expressed bafflement in the pages of Commonwealth, which they coedited. How could Hawthorne call Pierce a patriot, they gaped in disbelief. Like everyone commenting on Hawthorne’s new book, they duly trotted out the references to Addison, Gibbon, and Lamb when characterizing Hawthorne’s graceful style. But grace has its limits: “His perception is quick but partial; he relates better than he observes, and observes better than he generalizes,” said Commonwealth.
Reviewers relished the book’s personal tone, especially the autobiographical sketch “Consular Experiences,” and the North American Review, among others, praised “images reflected from the mirror and mottled with the intense idiosyncrasies of the writer.” Readers agreed that Hawthorne finds nooks and crannies overlooked by most travel writers; his England exists not on the map but in the evanescent envelope of consciousness. “What was he to Liverpool, or Liverpool to him?” asked Henry Bright.
But Hawthorne’s decision to pay tribute to Pierce ruffled most every feather. Charles Eliot Norton said the dedicatory letter “reads like the bitterest of satires; and in that I have my satisfaction. The public will laugh. ‘Praise undeserved’ (say the copybooks) ‘is satire in disguise’—& what a blow his friend has dealt to the weakest of our Presidents.” Harriet Beecher Stowe was indignant. “Do tell me if our friend Hawthorne praises that arch traitor Pierce in his preface & your loyal firm publishes it,” she admonished Fields. “I never read the preface and have not yet seen the book, but they say so here & I can scarcely believe it of you—if I can of him.” Calling the book pellucid but not deep, Emerson sliced out its dedication.
Bright too was offended, though not about Pierce. Hawthorne talked like a cannibal, he said. Bright couldn’t brook Hawthorne’s cynical, contemptuous (Bright’s words) treatment of the “bulbous, long-bodied, short-legged, heavy-witted” Englishman (Hawthorne’s words), to say nothing of Englishwomen, whom Hawthorne had compared to overblown cabbage-roses “massive with solid beef and streaky tallow” and “made up of steaks and sirloins.” Bright wasn’t alone. Hawthorne’s acrid humor, his jeers at the British class system, at the aristocracy, and at Englishwomen were not meant to please, and they didn’t. “Whether it be that Nathaniel loved our British beer, not wisely, but too well,” retorted Blackwood’s, “and has found that it permanently disagrees with him; or whether the British beef has destroyed his digestion, and left his liver hopelessly deranged, we know not; but the same dyspeptic way of viewing things English accompanies him into all scenes.” Punch also poked fun at Hawthorne—a Liverpool Lovelace—whose indictment of British women must have been a momentary weakness. “Can any created woman be terrible to you?” the magazine reveled in deadpan. “Away, eater of hearts.” Never mind, Mr. Punch soothed. “You are strong enough in your own works to bear being supposed a descendant from a gorilla, were heraldry unkind.”
Nathaniel Hawthorne, two years before his death. “Things and men look better at a distance than close at hand.” (Library of Congress)
Daily, Hawthorne was vilified either in letters or in reviews from across the sea. It must seem rather queer to him whose books had always been adored, Una remarked. Sophia wondered how much the “carping” (her term) bothered him. She didn’t know. Fields did. Hawthorne told him not to send any more reviews.
Having miscalculated the extent of his own hostility, he was startled by the hostility he reaped. “But they do me great injustice in supposing that I hate them,” he told Fields. “I would as soon hate my own people.”
Except that, in a way, he did.
“It is impossible to possess one’s mind in the midst of a civil war to such a degree as to make thoughts assume life. I hear the cannon and smell the gunpowder through everything.”
Though he’d easily plundered his journals for publishable sketches, Hawthorne struggled with his fiction not just because the war rang loudly in his ears or because on some days he felt unaccountably ill. He also knew the days of romance, diction elegant and sentences poised, were numbered. He’d implied as much in The Marble Faun. “I feel as if this great convulsion were going to make an epoch in our literature as in everything else (if it does not annihilate all),” he wrote to Francis Bennoch, “and that when we emerge from the war-cloud, there will be another and better (at least, a more national and seasonable) class of writers than the one I belong to. So be it.”
This class of writers included Rebecca Harding and William Dean Howells. But the youthful Howells hadn’t written much, and Hawthorne soon tired of Harding’s work, or so Sophia confided to Annie Fields. “Mr. Hawthorne cannot read her [Miss Harding’s] productions now, they are so distasteful to him from her bad style and slimy gloom.”
Had he lived, Hawthorne himself might have been a charter member in a new class of American journalist, modern, cold, dispassionate, satiric. “Chiefly About War Matters” signaled a new style and direction. But something else was on his mind—immortality, the tacit, impossible aim of him and everyone else in the throes of catastrophe.