Hawthorne

by Brenda Wineapple

  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 Pea
ce 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.