The whole history of grandfather's chair ; or, True stories from New England history, 1620-1803

Front matter

NUMBERS 7, 8 AND 9

HAWTHORNE'S Grandfather's Chair

TrueStories

PART 1. A Sketch of the Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne . . v

Author's Preface xxv

I. Grandfather and the Children and the Chair . 1

II. The Puritans and the Lady Arbella. . . 5

III. A Rainy Day 15

IV. Troublous Times 18

V. The Government of New England ... 24

VI. The Pine-Tree Shillings 29

VII. The Quakers and the Indians 35

VIII. The Indian Bible 41

IX. England and New England . . . . .48

X. The Sunken Treasure 54

XI. What the Chair had known 62

Appendix. Extracts from the Life of John Eliot . 66

Part II

I. The Chair in the Firelight 71

III. The Old-Fashioned School 80

IV. Cotton Mather 86

V. The Rejected Blessing 93

VI. Pomps and Vanities 104

VII. The Provincial Muster 109

VIII. The Old French War and the Acadian Exiles . 118

IX. The End of the War 130

X. Thomas Hutchinson 136

Appendix. Account of the Deportation of the Aca-

dians 142

PART HI.

I. A New Year's Day 149

II, The Stamp Act 152

IV

CONTENTS.

ni. The Hutchinson Mob . rV. The British Troops iisr Boston V. The Boston Massacre "VI. A Collection of Portraits .

VII. The Tea-Party and Lexington Vni. The Siege of Boston IX. The Tory's Farewell X. The War for Independence .

XI. Grandfather's Dream Appendix. A Letter from Governor Hutchinson

ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAGE

Portrait of Hawthorne Frontispiece

King's Chapel Burying-Ground, Boston . . . Facing 14 Early Yieav of Harvard College .... "26

A Pine-Tree Shilling ,34

Facsimile of Title-Page of Eliot's Indian Bible " 44 Roger Williasis' House, Salem .... Facing 76

Province House, Boston '' HO

Map of Acadia 123

Quebec, 1732 Facing 130

Portrait of Governor Shirley .... " 150

Liberty Tree, Boston Facing 156

The Royal Stamp 157

Faneuil Hall, Boston Facing 184

Craigie House, Cambridge " 208

A SKETCH OF THE

LIFE OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

EARLY DAYS.

The old town of Salem, in Massachusetts, was once a famous seaport, and ships sailed out of its harbor to the ends of the world. In the East Indies so many merchant vessels bore the word " Salem " on the stern that people there supposed that to be the name of some pow^erful country, and " Mass.," which was sometimes added, to be the name of a village in Salem. As Boston and New York grew more important, they drew away trade from the smaller towns, and Salem became less busy. It still has wharves, and large, roomy houses where its rich merchants lived, and shows in many streets the signs of its old prosperity ; but one living in Salem is constantly reminded how famous the old town once was, rather than how busy it now is.

It is doubtful if any town in America has been more affectionately set forth in literature than the old Salem of the middle of this century. A delightful volume of sketches entitled Old Salem, by " Eleanor Putnam," keeps its fragrance, and other writers have loved to dwell upon its quaint flavor ; one, in particular, has preserved its charm in a multitude of sketches, like Main Street, Little Annie's Ramble, A Rill from the Town Pump ; in many of his stories also, but most of all in the background of The House of the Seven Gables, where Hepzibah Pyncheon in her old shop recalls with the precision of fact and the light of rosy imagination more than one actual old Salem reduced gentlewoman.

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All this is intelligible enough, for in an old house in Union Street, in Salem, was born, July 4, 1804, the author of these sketches and stories, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and in one near by, in Herbert Street, he spent his boyhood. The town had already begun to decline when he was a boy there ; and as he walked about the streets and listened to the talk of people, he seemid always to be in the company of old men, hearing about old times, and watching the signs of decay. There were strange stories of what had happened in former days, especially since Salem was the place where, more than a hundred years before, there had been a terrible outbreak of superstition ; men and women had been charged with witchcraft, and had been put to death for it. One of Hawthorne's own ancestors had been a judge who had condemned innocent people to death because he believed them guilty of witchcraft. A visitor to Salem court house is shown now a bottle containing some large coarse pins, such as were made a couple of hundred years ago, and is told that these pins were found sticking into cliildren's bodies, and some old woman was accused of being a witch and sticking them in, though no one saw her do it. It seems foolish enough to us who look at the old bottle of pins to-day, and hear the steam trains and electric cars go whizzing by outside, but it was a very serious matter in the Salem of witchcraft times.

Hawthorne was the second in a family of three children. Elizabeth was two years older and Louisa four years younger. His father was a sea-captain, as was also his grandfather, who was a privateersman in the Kevolutionary War. Nathaniel was four years old when his father died, but his mother lived until he was forty-six years old ; his elder sister outlived him, his younger died two years after their mother. Whatever character Nathaniel Hawthorne received from his father, came, therefore, by inheritance, and not much from direct influence ; his mother had more to do with shaping his life. She was but twenty-eight years

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. vil

old when her husband died, but in those days, more than now, a widow in New England was likely to lead a secluded life, and Madam Hawthorne was almost a hermit the rest of her days. She was a woman of fine mind, and very striking in appearance, looking, as has been said, " as if she had walked out of an old picture, with her antique costume, and a face of lovely sensibility and great brightness." She was left with very little property, so that she could not give and receive much company, even if she had not been as reserved as she was. Nathaniel's elder sister, Elizabeth, writing after his death, to his daughter, says : —

" I remember, that one morning, my mother called my brother into her room, next to the one where we slept, and told him that his father was dead. He left very little property, and my grandfather Manning [Madam Hawthorne's father], took us home. All through our childhood we were indulged in all convenient ways, and were under very little control, except that of circumstances. There were aunts and uncles, and they were all as fond of your father, and as careful of his welfare, as if he had been their own child. He was both beautiful and bright, and, perhaps his training was as good as any other could have been. We always had plenty of books. He never wanted money, except to spend ; and once, in the country, where there were no shops, he refused to take some that was offered to him, because he could not spend it immediately. Another time, old Mr. Forrester offered him a five-dollar bill, which he also refused ; which was uncivil, for Mr. Forrester always noticed him very kindly when he met him."

When Hawthorne was a boy of fourteen, he went with his mother and sisters to live for a year in a lonely place in Maine. He spent much of his time by himself in the open air. In summer he took his rod or his gun and roamed for hours through the woods. On winter nights he would skate by moonlight, all alone, upon the ice of Sebago Pond, and sometimes rest till morning by a great camp-fire which he

Viii A SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF

built before a log-cabin. He led a strange, solitary life, and formed habits of being by himself which lie never shook off ; but he learned also to observe the world about him, and his eye and ear were trained like those of an Indian. He, himself, says : —

" I am quite wild, and would, I doubt not, have willingly run wild till this time, fishing all day long, or shooting with an old fowling-piece ; but reading a good deal, too, on the rainy days, especially in vShakespeare and The Filgrirti's Progress, and any poetry or light books within my reach. Those were delightful days ; for that part of the country was wild then, with only scattered clearings, and nine tenths of it primeval woods. But, by and by, my good mother began to think it was necessary for her boy to do something else ; so I was sent back to Salem, where a private instructor fitted me for college. I was educated, as the phrase is, at Bowdoin College. I was an idle student, negligent of college rules and the Procrustean details of academic life, rather choosing to nurse my own fancies than to dig into Greek roots and be numbered among the learned Thebans."

Bowdoin College is at Brunswick, in Maine, and one of Hawthorne's classmates there was the poet Longfellow, whose father lived in Portland. Another of his college friends was Franklin Pierce, who afterward was President of the United States, and who was able, when in that office, to be of material service to his fellow-collegian. Hawthorne had already begun to show that he was to be a writer. '• While we were lads together at a country college," he wrote once to his friend, Horatio Bridge, an officer in the navy, " gathering blueberries in study hours, under those tall academic pines ; or watching the great logs, as they tumbled along the current of the Androscoggin ; or shooting pigeons and gray squirrels in the woods ; or bat-fowling in the summer twilight ; or catching trout in that sliadowy little stream, which, I suppose, is still wandering riverward

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. ix

through the forest, though you and I will never cast a line in it again, — two idle lads, in short (as we need not fear to acknowledge now), doing a hundred things that the faculty never heard of, or else it had been the worse for us, — still it was your prognostic of your friend's destiny that he was to be a writer of fiction."

n.

FIRST WRITINGS.

After he was graduated, Hawthorne went back to Salem and lived there, with only occasional excursions into the country, until 1838. '' It was my fortune or misfortune," he once wrote in a brief sketch of himself, ''just as you please, to have some slender means of supporting myself, and so, on leaving college in 1825, instead of immediately studying a profession, I sat myself down to consider what pursuit in life I was best fit for. My mother had now returned, and taken up her abode in her deceased father's house, a tall, ugly, old grayish building (it is now the residence of half a dozen Irish families), in which I had a room. And year after year I kept considering what I was fit for, and time and my destiny decided that I was to be the writer that I am. I had always a natural tendency (it appears to have been on the paternal side) toward seclusion ; and this I now indulged to the utmost, so, that for months together, I scarcely held human intercourse outside of my own family ; seldom going out except at twilight, or only to take the nearest way to the most convenient solitude, which was of tenest the sea shore, — the rocks and beaches in that vicinity being as fine as any in New England. Once a year, or thereabouts, I used to make an excursion of a few weeks, in which I enjoyed as much of life as other people do in the whole year's round. Having spent so much of my boyhood and youth away from my native place, I had very few acquaintances in Salem, and during the nine

X A SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF

or ten years that I sjient there in this solitary way, I doubt whether so much as twenty people in the town were aware of my existence. Meanwhile, strange as it may seem, I had lived a very tolerable life, always seemed cheerful, and enjoyed the very best bodily health. I had read endlessly all sorts of good and good-for-nothing books, and, in the dearth of other employment, had early begun to scribble sketches and stories, most of which I burned. Some, however, got into the magazines and annuals ; but being anonymous, or under different signatures, they did not soon have the effect of concentrating any attention upon the author." Here and there, indeed, a reader was found who wondered at the strange beauty of his tales, but most passed them by. At length, through the help of his old friend Bridge, some of the stories were collected and published in a volume called Twice Told Tales. It is pleasant to notice that Longfellow was one of the first to welcome the book and to give it hearty praise in an article in the North American Hevieiv. Hawthorne wrote also at this time some short sketches of biography and history.

While leading this quiet, uneventful life, he began to keep note-books, in which he recorded what he saw on his walks, what he heard other people say, and thoughts and fancies which came to him through the day and night. He did not make these note-books for publication ; they held the rough material out of which he made books and stories, but they had also much that never reappeared in his own writings. He jotted down what he said for his own use and pleasure, and thus sometimes he did not make complete sentences. He was like an artist who takes his pencil and draws a few lines, by which to remember something which he sees, and afterwards j)aints a full and careful picture from such notes. The artist's studies are very interesting to all who like to see how a picture grows, and often the sketch itself is very beautiful, for one who paints well can scarcely heljD putting beauty into his simplest outlines ; then, by drawing con-

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. xi

stantly, he acquires the power of putting down what he sees in few but vivid lines. After Hawthorne's death, selections from his Note-Books were published. One may learn by them how to write carefully, just as one may learn to draw by studying an artist's sketches.

These thirteen years meant much to Hawthorne. He was learning to write ; he was steadily using the power which had been given him, and it was growing stronger every year. Yet they were lonely and often discouraging years to him. He could earn but little by his pen. Very few people seemed to care for what he did, and he loved his own work so well that he longed to have others care for it and for him. He went back afterward to the chamber where he had read and written and waited, and as he sat in it again he took out his note-book, and wrote : ''If ever I should have a biographer he ought to make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here, and here my mind and character were formed; and here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been despondent. And here I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know me, and sometimes wondering why it did not know me sooner, or whether it would ever know me at all, — at least, till I were in my grave. . . . By and by the world found me out in my lonely chamber, and called me forth."

His son Julian describes Hawthorne as the handsomest young man of his day in that part of the world. " Such," he says, " is the report of those who knew him ; and there is a miniature of him, taken some years later [later, that is, than his college days], which bears out the report. He was five feet, ten and a half inches in height, broad-shouldered, but of a light athletic build, not weighing more than one hundred and fifty pounds. His limbs were beautifully formed, and the moulding of his neck and throat was as fine as anything in antique sculpture. His hair, which had a long, curving wave in it, approached blackness in color ; his xii A SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF

head was large and grandly develoi3ed ; his eyebrows were dark and heavy, with a superb arch and space beneath. His nose was straight, but the contour of his chin was Roman. He never wore a beard, and was without a moustache until his fifty-fifth year. His eyes were large, darkblue, brilliant, and full of varied expression. Bayard Taylor used to say that they were the only eyes he had ever known flash fire. Charles Reade, in a letter written in 1876, declared that he had never before seen such eyes as Hawthorne's, in a human head. When he went to London, persons whose recollections reached back through a generation or so used to compare his glance with that of Robert Burns. While he was yet in college, an old gypsy woman, meeting him suddenly in a woodland path, gazed at him and asked, ' Are you a man or an angel ? ' His complexion was delicate and transparent, rather dark than light, with a ruddy tinge in the cheeks. The skin of his face was always very sensitive, and a cold raw wind caused him actual pain. His hands were large and muscular, the palm broad, with a full curve of the outer margin ; the fingers smooth, but neither square nor pointed ; the thumb long and powerful. His feet were slender and sinewy, and he had a long elastic gait, accompanied by a certain sidewise swinging of the shoulders. He was a tireless walker, and of great bodily activity ; up to the time he was forty years old, he could clear a height of five feet at a standing jump. His voice, which was low and deep in ordinary conversation, had astounding volume when he chose to give full vent to it ; with such a voice, and such eyes and presence, he might have quelled a crew of mutinous privateersmen at least as effectively as Bold Daniel, his grandfather : it was not a bellow, but had the searching and electrifying quality of the blast of a trumpet."

NATHANIEL HAWTHOUNE. xiii

III. Hawthorne And Sophia Peabody

There was a neighboring family to the Hawthornes in Salem, that of Dr. Nathaniel Peabody, whose children were playmates of the Hawthornes before Captain Hawthorne's death. After the Hawthornes returned from Lake Sebago, the Peabodys still lived in the same neighborhood, but the young people scarcely saw each other, so secluded were the Hawthornes. Indeed the girls in the Peabody family were reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's tales without knowing they were written by the handsome, silent young man whom they saw occasionally. There were three of these girls. The eldest, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, lived to a great age unmarried, but well known as having done more than any person to introduce the kindergarten in America ; the second, Mary, married Horace Mann, whose statue stands in front of the State House in Boston because he was the chief organizer of public schools in Massachusetts ; the third daughter, Sophia, was a delicate girl, very much of an invalid, who was the joy of the household for her lovely spirit, and early showed such a love of art that she was trained to draw and paint, so that when Hawthorne was trying his hand at writing, she was making sketches, and after the sisters had found out that their young neighbor was an author, Sophia made a drawing illustrating his story of The Gentle Boy, The acquaintance between the young people of the two families had just been renewed, and one day Sophia Peabody showed him the picture, saying,

" I want to know if this looks like your Ibrahim ? " He sat down and looked at it, and then looked up and said, "He will never look otherwise to me."

From this time the acquaintance rapidly passed into ardent love, and it was not long before the two young people, — Sophia was seven years the younger, — were engaged to be married. Apparently this engagement spurred

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Hawthorne to greater activity. He did not abandon his writing, but he began to go about more among men, and seeking further means of support he obtained a post in the Boston custom-house, which was given him by the historian George Bancroft, who was then collector of the port. It was at this time that he wrote The Whole History of Grandfather's Chair, which was originally published in three sejjarate parts. He had a plan for having Sophia Peabody make illustrations for it, and pointed out the opportunity there was for sketches in Master Cheever's School, the Acadians, the Earl of Loudoun's military council in Boston, and Liberty Tree, but nothing seems to have come of the plan.

The long seclusion in which Hawthorne had brooded in Salem had made him, especially after Sophia Peabody had come into his life, eager to be amongst men and to get to work at something with his hands. " I want to have something to do with this material world," he said to Sophia's sister, Elizabeth, and when, after two years in the Boston custom-house, he was turned out of office by the coming in of a new political administration, he looked about for further work of a kind that should bring him close to the soil and the people. Just at this time there was started in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, an experiment which greatly interested Hawthorne and his friends. A number of men and women, chiefly persons of intellectual ability, were restless under what they thought was a very unsatisfactory condition of society, and they were resolved to form a little community of their own, to show the world how it was possible for people to live rationally, to support themselves by work with their hands, and yet have leisure for intellectual occupation. It was to be a true community where all should share each other's goods, whether those goods were property or mind.

They called the place they established Brook Farm, and thither Hawthorne went after he was turned out of the

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. xv

custom-house, and cast in his lot with the eager little community. Apparently, he planned to try the experiment by himself, and if it worked well, he could then marry and take his wife there to live with him. Here is a letter which he wrote to his sister Louisa shortly after he joined Brook Farm.

"Bkook Farm, West Roxbury, May .3, 1841, "As the weather precludes all possibility of ploughing, hoeing, sowing, and other such operations, I bethink me that you may have no objections to hear something of my whereabout and whatabout. You are to know, then, that I took up my abode here on the 12th ultimo, in the midst of a snow-storm, which kept us idle for a day or two. At the first glimjDse of fair weather, Mr. Ripley summoned us into the«cow-yard, and introduced me to an instrument with four prongs, commonly entitled a dung-fork. With this tool I have already assisted to load twenty or thirty carts of manure, and shall take part in loading nearly three hundred more. Besides, I have planted potatoes and peas, cut straw and hay for the cattle, and done various other mighty works. This very morning I milked three cows, and I milk two or three every night and morning. The weather has been so unfavorable that we have worked comparatively little in the fields ; but, nevertheless, I have gained strength wonder fully, — grown quite a giant, in fact, — and can do a day's work without the slightest inconvenience. In short, I am transformed into a complete farmer.

" This is one of the most beautiful places I ever saw in my life, and as secluded as if it were a hundred miles from any city or village. There are woods in which we can ramble all day without meeting anybody or scarcely seeing a house. Our house stands apart from the main road, so that we are not troubled even with passengers looking at us. Once in a while we have a transcendental visitor, such as Mr- Alcott ; but ge^grally we pass whole days without see-

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ing a single face, save those of the brethren. The whole fraternity eat together ; and such a delectable way of life has never been seen on earth since the days of the early Christians. We get up at half-past four, breakfast at half-past six, dine at half-past twelve, and go to bed at nine.

" The thin frock which you made for me is considered a most sjjlendid article, and I should not wonder if it were to become the summer uniform of the Community. I have a thick frock, likewise ; but it is rather deficient in grace, though extremely warm and comfortable. I wear a tremendous pair of cowhide boots, with soles two inches thick, — of course, when I come to see you I shall wear my farmer's dress.

" We shall be very much occupied during most of this month, ploughing and planting ; so that I doubt whether you will see me for two or three weeks. You have the portrait by this time, I suj^pose, so you can very well dispense with the original. When you write to me (which I beg you will do soon), direct your letter to West Roxbury, as there are two post-offices in the town. I would write more, but William Allen is going to the village, and must have this letter. So good-by.

" Nath. Hawthorne, Ploughman."

IV. Life At The Old Manse

Hawthorne remained but a few months at Brook Farm ; but he stored the experience in his mind, and some years later availed himself of it, when writing The Bllthedale Romance. On the 9th of July, 1842, he married Miss Peabody, and the young couple went to live in Concord, Massachusetts. They occupied for four years an old house near the river, which had been the home of the village minister for more than one generation, and was known as the Old Manse. Their eldest child was born there, and the

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. xvii

life of the husband and wife was one of great happiness. They were wont to keep a joint diary, in which now one, now the other, held the pen. Hawthorne was thirty-eight years old, and his solitary life hitherto had confirmed a natural tendency to seclusion; his wife guarded well his solitude, and he in turn gave her a love which was infused with reverence.

Yet the Hawthornes were not without the choicest company ; for at this time Emerson was living in Concord. It was in the old Manse itself that he had written Nature, a long essay which had brought him into the notice of thoughtful men. " It was good," Hawthorne wrote, " to meet him in the wood paths, or sometimes in our avenue, with that pure intellectual gleam diffused about his presence, like the garment of a shining one ; and he so quiet, so simple, so without pretension, encountering each man alive, as if expecting to receive more than he could impart." Younger men were Thoreau and EUery Channing, the latter a poet and dreamer, still living (1896) in Concord, and known, among other ways, by his curious published sketch of Thoreau. Others, like George S. Hillard, who wrote Six Months in Italy, came as visitors to Concord, attracted by the companionship of the men of letters who made it their home.

Hawthorne occupied himself with writing, printing some things and burying more in his capacious note-books. The most enduring of his work is to be found in his Mosses from an Old Manse, a collection of twenty-six tales, together with a delightful introductory chapter, descriptive of the manse itself. The title of the book intimates how antique for the most part were the stories he had been writing ; how, like the moss, they gathered about the life of an old society.

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V. Out In The World

Mosses from an Old Manse was published in 1846 ; in that same year he was appointed surveyor of the port of Salem, and held the office for three years. It was while living in Salem, among the old familiar scenes, that he wrote the novel which gave him fame. The Scarlet Letter ; yet so diffident was he, and so discouraged by the slow sale of the little books he had put forth, that the manuscript of the first draft of the novel lay neglected, until the loss of his office through a change of administration made some resource necessary, and the encouragement of his wife and Mr. James T. Fields, the publisher, led to the finishing of the work. v

The publication at once brought Hawthorne into distinction, and shortly after he took his family to Lenox, in the western part of Massachusetts, where he lived for more than a year, occupying a small red wooden house near the Stockbridge Bowl. The delights of country life, and the pleasure which he took in his little family of a son and daughter, reappear in the embroidery of the Wonder Book, and Tanglewood Tales, for though the small people to whom the stories are told in imagination are not actual reproductions of his own children, the childish life is a reflex of what he was now enjoying, and it was a pleasant fancy which led him to put the tales into the mouth of a young collegian as if he were himself then renewing his youth.