CHAPTER EIGHT
Jollity and gloom were contending for an empire.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The May-Pole of Merry Mount”
HER CHARITY began at home and ended nowhere, her credulity outran her charity, and by the end of her long life she knew less about people’s motives than her traffic in them might suggest: so Henry James characterized Elizabeth Palmer Peabody in his 1886 novel The Bostonians, calling her Miss Birdseye and giving her a squint. One could see Peabody in those days, riding a Boston streetcar, hair disheveled, spectacles crooked, bonnet cockeyed, and her beaming face upturned. A garrulous commitment to what she called “the joy of the Ideal” made her insufferable to many—this she readily admitted—but she never yielded her principles or her self-respect. At eighty-two she was the sole survivor of her family, its oldest chronicler, and still the benevolent booster of causes, one of which happened to be her brother-in-law, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Hawthorne presented Peabody with a copy of Twice-told Tales shortly after its publication. That much is certain. But how Peabody and Hawthorne met and when and where are matters of speculation. Sarah Clarke, a friend of Peabody’s, thought they were introduced in Salem at Judge Daniel White’s. It’s a plausible suggestion, for White was the father-in-law of Hawthorne’s friend Caleb Foote, editor of the Salem Gazette.
There is also reason to suppose Elizabeth Peabody had met Hawthorne sometime earlier, if not in Judge White’s drawing room, then at the Washington Square mansion of Mary Silsbee, whom Peabody knew. In fact, Hawthorne and Mary Silsbee were likely flirting when Peabody first met the author, and Peabody’s interference—meddling, some would call it—may have hastened the end of that affair. As Ebe Hawthorne once said, Elizabeth Peabody’s philanthropy sowed dissension between husbands and wives and lovers once affianced. “Miss Peabody,” she crisply remarked, “certainly has a propensity for doing mischief remarkable in a woman of so much benevolence.”
Peabody told her own tale. She “discovered” Hawthorne. That is, having admired his anonymously published stories in The Token, she set about learning the author’s identity, and after she did, the author himself sent her Twice-told Tales “with his respects.” Then he came to call, a hooded sister on each arm, his wonderful eyes “like mountain lakes seeming to reflect the heavens.” (Peabody’s gifts did not include metaphor.) In near delirium, she ran upstairs to her sister Sophia’s bedroom. “He is handsomer than Lord Byron!” cried Peabody. “You must get up and dress and come down.” Sophia, an invalid, laughed. “If he has come once he will come again,” she said.
There is some truth—Peabody-style—to the story. For as she herself once observed, she always spoke the truth as it appeared to her, “and with no regard to consistency,” she added, a creed articulated best by her friend Ralph Emerson, who’d tutored her in Greek: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” Emerson would write in his essay “Self-Reliance.” With Emerson as moral touchstone and William Ellery Channing, the apostle of Unitarianism in Boston, as her spiritual guide, Peabody gladly dissembled whenever the unvarnished truth did not meet her higher standard. “I think she is benevolent,” Ebe Hawthorne commented in later life, “and a well wisher of every human being, but I suspect no one who knows her relies upon her word.”
It wouldn’t have been hard to find the identity of the anonymous writer since Park Benjamin, Hawthorne’s editor at the American Monthly, had married a Peabody cousin. But Peabody probably told the truth when she said that on learning the writer was Hawthorne, she assumed it had to be the astonishing Ebe, whom she’d remembered from childhood when her mother had taught both girls. According to Peabody, she then marched over to Herbert Street to renew her acquaintance. “Presently Louisa came in,” Peabody reminisced, “and I soon learned from her that it was not Elizabeth but Nathaniel who was the author.”
Louisa invited Peabody to call again, which she didn’t, but she did receive a presentation copy of Twice-told Tales, which she read with delight. By then she’d heard, probably from Mary Silsbee, that Hawthorne had been invited to contribute to a new monthly, the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, edited by John O’Sullivan, a Washington friend of Silsbee’s, so she wrote to Herbert Street asking for information on how to publish there, and, she added, why not put aside ceremony and come over to her family’s home on nearby Charter Street that very night.
On Saturday evening, November 12, 1837, Nathaniel and the astonishing Ebe rang the Peabody bell. “He has a temple of a head (not a tower) and an eye full of sparkle, glisten, & intelligence,” Peabody’s other sister, Mary, described Hawthorne to their brother George. “He has lived the life of a perfect recluse till very lately—so diffident that he suffers inexpressibly in the presence of his fellow-mortals.” Mary seemed smitten too. “He has promised to come again and if we can get fairly acquainted I think we shall find much pleasure in him.”
To explain what the fuss was about, Mary mailed George the treasured presentation copy of Twice-told Tales—and was told to mail it back.
And so Hawthorne entered the Peabody circle. Since he liked to dramatize his favorite subject, himself, for Peabody he painted a picture similar to the one concocted for Longfellow. “We do not live at our house, we only vegetate,” he enthralled her, portraying himself as friendless and forsaken. He ate alone, he said, his meals were left outside the door to his room, which he kept locked. He had not even seen his sister Ebe in three months, she being even more reclusive than he.
False in particulars, Hawthorne’s self-portrait was faithful to his sense of alienation—he was like a man talking to himself in a dark place, he told Peabody—and it explained to contemporaries like Longfellow or Peabody, men and women already active in the world, why he had not yet made his mark. Your brother has no right to be idle, Peabody remembers telling Louisa, inadvertently touching the quick of Hawthorne’s dilemma: here he was, able and more educated than his family—or his ancestors—and contributing less to society than they did.
Hawthorne could repair the damage with a tale of solitude that melted hearts, and Peabody, hers dripping, disseminated the Hawthorne fable. “An extreme shyness of disposition—and a passionate love of nature—together with some peculiar circumstances have made him live a life of extraordinary seclusion,” she characterized Hawthorne to the educator Horace Mann. To William Wordsworth, with whom she had an occasional correspondence, she depicted Hawthorne as a pastoral person with a character beyond reproach. “His early & his college years were passed in the country. He is almost the only young American of any ability that I have known, who has hidden himself during his nonage and kept his own secret,” she continued. “—A fineness of stature and holiness of spirit—which have nothing in common with effeminacy, seem to have borne him quite above the career of vulgar ambition, so that he has not encountered that current which sweeps everything into publicity & common stock.”
Moreover, all her friends and acquaintances should read him. “He is a man of first rate genius,” she wrote, pushing Hawthorne’s stories on a dour Horace Mann and a daft Jones Very, another Peabody protégé. To Hawthorne’s own family she called him one of nature’s ordained priests, an Ariel breathing moral ambrosia, a second Homer. “I see that you both think me rather enthusiastic,” she conceded.
A born publicist, Peabody was a loyal believer in Hawthorne’s talent who remained true to him to the end. Fidelity of purpose, she later said, was her most prominent trait, perseverance her greatest virtue.
Early in February 1838, almost a year after the publication of Twice-told Tales, Hawthorne invited Bridge to meet him in Boston. He was planning to go to Washington and hoped to see Bridge before he left. “Not that you can do me the least good,” Hawthorne enigmatically remarked. With even more mystery he added, “And, there may be cause for regret on your part, should we fail of a meeting. But I repeat that you cannot exercise the slightest favorable influence on my affairs—they being beyond your control, and hardly within my own.”
Hawthorne’s intended trip to Washington has been the subject of some biographical debate because Elizabeth Peabody later alleged that Mary Silsbee had precipitated a quarrel between Hawthorne and his new friend John O’Sullivan. According to Peabody, Silsbee pretended that O’Sullivan had compromised her integrity in some way. To defend her honor, Hawthorne challenged O’Sullivan to a duel, but O’Sullivan declined the invitation in a conciliatory letter that revealed Miss Silsbee’s duplicities and bound the two men forever after.
The story of Hawthorne’s near duel seems a Peabodyesque fantasia hatched out of “Alice Doane.” Hawthorne had actually condemned the habit of dueling as early as Fanshawe. Edward Walcott foolishly accepts a challenge from the story’s villain only to be wittily chided by a tavern keeper: “And you, Master Edward, with what sort of a face will you walk into the chapel, to morning prayers, after putting a ball through this man’s head, or receiving one through your own?—Though in this last case, you will be past praying for, or praying, either.” At age eighty, when Peabody recalled the dueling incident to Julian Hawthorne, she may have been remembering Fanshawe. What lends the story the pall of credibility is the death of Jonathan Cilley, who decided to accept a challenge himself.
Cilley was a radical Democrat who proudly expected to occupy his seat in Congress among men of “real heart felt & active benevolence, mutual simplicity, unaffected humility, manly strength of mind, & everlasting truth.” But the muddy streets of the nation’s capital, the taverns, boardinghouses, and smoky hotels promptly reminded him that politics was no tidy playground of well-behaved boys. “My labors here are arduous, & the opposition is as relentless & persecuting as can be,” he said. “A man, if he think free & boldly, must take his life in his hand.”
Cilley wasn’t exaggerating. Writing to his wife on February 22, 1838, he’d already tangled himself in the affair that in two days’ time would leave him bleeding to death on the Marlboro Pike, just outside Washington.
The ostensible reason for the duel makes no sense. On the congressional floor Cilley had questioned the ethics of the newspaper, the New York Courier and Inquirer, edited by General James Watson Webb—the very paper at the center of the recently formed Whig Party, a coalition of former Federalists, like Daniel Webster, who endorsed a strong federal government, and of those men who deplored Jackson’s autocratic brand of Jeffersonianism. General Webb, believing his name had been sullied, deputized an intermediary, William Graves, to deliver a formal note to Cilley requesting that Cilley retract his statements. Cilley replied that he meant Graves no disrespect, but he couldn’t comment one way or another about Webb; nor could he receive any communication from him. Graves persisted, Cilley was intransigent. Graves then frostily inquired “whether you declined to receive his communication on the ground of any personal exception to him as a gentleman or a man of honour?” When Cilley declined to answer, Graves challenged him to a duel, and Cilley accepted the challenge.
The two men, their seconds, and a surgeon met at about noon. Exchanging civilities, Cilley and Graves acknowledged one another and then, having opened their pistol cases, separated, counted paces, turned, raised their pistols, and fired. Each of them missed. Cilley again insisted that he meant no disrespect toward Graves. Yet he would say nothing more, certainly nothing about Webb, and Graves, unsatisfied, demanded another round. Again the two men raised their guns, shot, and missed. Their representatives conferred, pleading with the two men to quit. For a third time they counted paces, aimed, and fired. The smoke hadn’t cleared when Cilley moaned, “I am shot,” and thudded to the ground.
Congress exploded. Bloody accounts of the Washington murder spattered the newspapers. Cilley’s friends cried foul, and several Democrats alleged Henry Clay had fomented the quarrel to get rid of Cilley, a firebrand willing to stand up to southerners; it was also rumored that Graves had been urged forward by Henry Wise of Virginia, another Whig. Franklin Pierce joined a committee set up by the House of Representatives to investigate the barbarous affair, and for another six years censures, dismissals, inquiries, and partisan denunciations racked all of Congress. More than fifty years later, Horatio Bridge was still enraged about the conspiracy “to put the brilliant young Democrat out of the way.”
The uproar didn’t console Cilley’s family or make sense of the affair to Hawthorne, who believed Cilley had yielded his very life to a grotesque—and southern—form of chivalry.
John O’Sullivan remembered Cilley urging him to get a contribution from Hawthorne for the Democratic Review, O’Sullivan’s new literary and political periodical that, he bragged, would publish the country’s best. An excellent editor, O’Sullivan did attract to his magazine a band of choice writers that over time included William Ellery Channing, John Greenleaf Whittier, the young Walter Whitman, Poe, Longfellow, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, William Gilmore Simms, George Bancroft, and Orestes Brownson. Even Elizabeth Peabody contributed an unsigned review of Emerson’s 1836 book, Nature, to the magazine’s early pages, probably with Hawthorne’s help.
Hawthorne supplied a small sketch, “The Toll-Gatherer’s Day,” to the magazine’s first number in October 1837, and over the next eight years he contributed twenty new short stories in addition to a memorial of Jonathan Cilley. Impetuous and warmhearted, O’Sullivan was just the kind of man to engage Hawthorne, for despite his skeptical edge, he shared O’Sullivan’s democratic vision, at least in theory, and he quickly came to consider O’Sullivan, nine years his junior, “one of the truest and best men in the world.” Said Hawthorne, “The Devil has a smaller share in O’Sullivan than in other bipeds who wear breeches.”
Born on a British ship off Gibraltar during the War of 1812, O’Sullivan devoted himself to the care of his mother after his father, a ship’s captain, died when his ship went down in 1824. He graduated from Columbia College at nineteen, received a master of arts degree three years later, was admitted to the bar, and then, as a journalist in Washington, founded the Democratic Review with his brother-in-law, Samuel Langtree. The money came from his having successfully settled a suit against the United States government, which had impounded one of his father’s ships for alleged piracy.
Hawthorne and O’Sullivan were contradictory men, and each recognized something of the other in himself. Like Hawthorne, O’Sullivan held on to the romantic story of his lineage, in this case Irish nobility, in lieu of a father, but he also bristled at the undemocratic privileges vested in class or rank. He condemned capital punishment, considered insanity a disease, and supported American expansion and imperialism, coining the phrase “manifest destiny.” He believed in popular sovereignty and the working classes; he abominated lawyers, corporations, and bankers. He served in the New York legislature, was a nationalist, a pacifist, a spiritualist, and a racist. During the Civil War he backed the Confederacy. But in 1837 his loyalty to Martin Van Buren earned him the endorsement of Attorney General Benjamin F. Brown, and with it, the Democratic Review became a respected party organ. “The Best Government Is That Which Governs Least,” its masthead blared.
Hoping to integrate literature into the political life of the country, O’Sullivan adapted Emerson’s exhortatory style to political journalism. “The eye of man looks naturally forward,” O’Sullivan proclaimed, and in the first number of his magazine posted the Democratic credo: “Democracy is the cause of Humanity. It has faith in human nature. It believes in its essential equality & fundamental goodness.… Its object is to emancipate the mind of the mass of men from the degrading, & disenheartening fetters of social distinctions & advantages.…”
Poe considered O’Sullivan an ass. Whitman thought him handsome and generous, and Longfellow regarded the slender young man as nervous, dainty, and refined; “I cannot believe he is at heart a radical.” Yet he was. And he soon became the first of Hawthorne’s great editor friends, bolstering the author with the confidence—and the audience—he had not corralled on his own. O’Sullivan loved Hawthorne, whom he regarded “as gentle as a girl, as shy as a deer, with, at the same time, the highest attributes of the man of principle, honor, and heart.”
According to O’Sullivan, Jonathan Cilley had been working hard to find Hawthorne a place at the Salem post office, and there had been talk of a position in Washington. It’s likely, then, that Hawthorne invited Bridge to a rendezvous in Boston not because he was heading to Washington to duel but because he wanted to talk over the possibility of his taking a government job.
“We would not yoke Pegasus to the dray-car of utility,” a horrified Elizabeth Peabody quaked with distaste. “I too would have him help govern this great people; but I would have him go to the fountains of greatness and power”—by which she meant art and literature. Voicing her objections to Ebe since Ebe exercised considerable influence over her brother, she produced an alternative: Hawthorne should be convinced to take “such a view of a literary life as will fill his desire of action, and connect him with society more widely than any particular office under Government could do.” She relented only to acknowledge that if “he has been so long uneasy—however, perhaps he had better go; only, may he not bind himself long, only be free to return to freedom.”
In later years, Peabody conveniently forgot about Hawthorne’s government commission. To her, Washington was a death sentence, a sentiment that might explain her mixing up Hawthorne with the fateful Cilley duel. At the time of Cilley’s death, however, she didn’t even want Hawthorne to write a biographical sketch of Cilley, as O’Sullivan had requested, in the Democratic Review. His hands should be kept clean.
Unfortunately, Julian Hawthorne took a fancy to Peabody’s story and trimmed it with a flourish of his own. When Hawthorne learned of Cilley’s death, wrote Julian, “he felt as if he were almost as much responsible for his friend’s death as with the man who shot him.” Of course, neither Peabody nor Julian Hawthorne would want to recall that, at the time, Hawthorne wanted to marry Mary Silsbee and needed to provide concretely for his future. That meant writing less and earning more. The rewards of Twice-told Taleshad not been as remunerative as Hawthorne had hoped—quite the opposite—and though no announcement of an engagement had been made public, Hawthorne himself supposed Silsbee’s father “knew something of the affair, and sanctioned it.”
With Cilley dead, Hawthorne had to busy himself with writing projects, much to Peabody’s delight. In March he was hoping to collaborate with Longfellow on a book of fairy tales “provided I have time—which seems more probable now than it did a few months since,” he wrote the poet. Their book might earn a “pleasant and peculiar kind of reputation,” he surmised—and “put money in our purses.” Henry Longfellow took a stage to “Sunday-looking” Salem and passed a friendly afternoon with Hawthorne at a local coffeehouse; and though their book never materialized, Longfellow noted that his new friend was not the reclusive owl he said he was. Hawthorne played rubbers of whist with Horace Conolly, his sister Louisa, Susanna Ingersoll (a second cousin), and the attorney David Roberts. At Roberts’s law office on Essex Street, he picked up the gossip, and when in Boston had researched family history with another cousin, Charles Andrew. At night he downed a glass of champagne with friends. “He is much of a lion here,” Longfellow commented in his journal, “sought after, fed, and expected to roar.”
Hawthorne had entered Elizabeth Peabody’s life at a fortuitous time. The last few years had been difficult. As Bronson Alcott’s assistant in Boston at his progressive Temple School, she had worked tirelessly for no pay, and when she published a book about the unconventional school in 1835, a warehouse fire destroyed all the unsold copies, consuming her scant profits and leaving her in debt since an author was responsible for all unsold books. Then she argued with Alcott, and when her sister Sophia took Alcott’s side, she felt doubly betrayed, all the more so when Alcott, despite her objection, subsequently published the controversial Conversations with Children on the Gospels, which scandalized proper Bostonians with its allusions to sex and birth. But Peabody was loyal, always, and sacrificed her own pedagogical capital to defend Alcott. Meantime, though, she spent the rest of her emotional reserves worrying about two ill friends—one of them was Emerson’s brother Charles; both friends died.
The appearance of handsome Nathaniel Hawthorne—his spirit unsoiled, his work fresh—rekindled Peabody’s considerable zest for uncommon projects and unusual people. And that he now wanted to write a children’s book was nothing she’d like better. (It must have seemed he was following her advice about a literary life actively connected to society.) So she immediately applied to Horace Mann, now secretary of Massachusetts’s new state board of education. If Mann wanted a series of library books for children, Hawthorne was the person for the job, for Hawthorne hoped to accomplish, as she told Mann, “one great moral enterprise as I think it & you will agree—to make an attempt at creating a new literature for the young.” But the author possessed no talent for negotiation, she sighed, hoping Mann might put in a word with the publisher Nahum Capen.
“He [Hawthorne] says that were he embarked in this undertaking he should feel as if he had a right to live—he desired no higher vocation, he considered it the highest,” Peabody concluded her sales pitch. A right to live? Peabody’s hyperbole hits a mark; she knew that Hawthorne’s nagging sense of guilt partly derived from a sense of inadequacy. Twice-told Tales had not fulfilled any practical purpose; it hadn’t made any money.
Lacking purpose—in the sense of moral purpose—is how Horace Mann read Hawthorne’s stories. Although Mann liked the style well enough, he found Hawthorne’s content pretty thin: “We want something graver and sterner even than those,—a development of duties in all the relation of life,” he condescended. “Such a story as the ‘Wedding Knell,’ wherefore is it and to what does it tend?”
The gossips of Salem started to link Hawthorne to Elizabeth Peabody as well as to Mary Silsbee.
No one knows for sure what Hawthorne felt for Peabody in these early days of their acquaintanceship. He was definitely gratified by her unalloyed enthusiasm for his writing, and the two of them did spend a good deal of time together. Beyond that, there is little information. It isn’t even known how Peabody looked as a young woman. Scattered correspondence indicates her sisters may have been prettier but not that she was unattractive or clumsy. A family silhouette supplies her with a cinched waist, a cap, and a book—nothing extraordinary—and a former student would remember her as slight and lovely, with fair hair and a glowing face. Of course, no silhouetted profile can peel away the dowdiness heaped upon her by years of caricature: Lizzie Peabody, the ungainly woman in a fuzzy cap who unwittingly crushes a litter of kittens when she sits upon them unawares.
Boston scuttlebutt about Peabody and Hawthorne persisted for decades. Sarah Sturgis Shaw, a contemporary, was said to dislike Hawthorne “on acct of his engagement to Miss E. P. his sister in law.” Another woman vowed that “Sophia never knew of her sister’s engagement to N.H. but Hawthorne lived in terror lest E.P.P. should tell her.” But for many years male scholars recoiled in horror at such preposterous claims or the very idea that Hawthorne might have inclined in Peabody’s direction. “An engagement with Elizabeth there almost certainly was not,” Norman Holmes Pearson snarls, his syntax twisted by asperity.
Peabody’s own romantic history is vague. She had suffered the affection of at least one suitor, whom she rejected, and she may have been infatuated with Horace Mann before she recognized that her sister Mary loved him. (“Everybody thought Miss Elizabeth Peabody was dead set on Horace Mann,” reminisced Rebecca Clark, their boardinghouse proprietress.) Before Mann entered her life, she’d seemed interested in Jared Sparks, but then Mary Silsbee caught his eye. And now Mary Silsbee was studying German with Hawthorne—Peabody herself had suggested he study the language—borrowing Peabody’s books to do so.
There was an even more ominous development. Peabody’s brother, also named Nathaniel, having failed in several business ventures, recently lost the teaching post Peabody had arranged for him in Maine, where, poor and cold, he had to sell his furniture to keep his wife and child supplied with firewood. He looked to his parents for help, and they relied on their redoubtable daughter Elizabeth, regardless of the cost to her. For Elizabeth Peabody shouldered obligations. She agreed to help her brother set up a school in West Newton, Massachusetts, ten miles west of Boston. “Circumstances are such that there is no alternative,” sighed her sister Mary. In the spring of 1838, Peabody left Salem.
Hawthorne and Peabody promised to write one another while apart on the condition that she burn his letters after reading them. But when Peabody rode out of Salem in the middle of April, she understood she’d sacrificed a very special tactical advantage—and not to Mary Silsbee. Many years later, Peabody still could see Hawthorne’s face the night he met her sister Sophia. “And afterwards,” said Peabody, “as we went on talking, she would interpose frequently a remark in her low sweet voice. Every time she did so, he looked at her with the same intentness of interest. I was struck with it, and painfully.”
The languishing Sophia took morphine every morning, and though she might come downstairs when Mr. Hawthorne rang the bell, she declared she never meant to have a husband. “Rather, I should say,” she pertly added, “I never intend any one shall have me for a wife.”