NO MAN LOVED BY HAWTHORNE COULD BE ALL THAT BAD:

BOOKNOTES: Franklin Pierce: New Hampshire's Favorite Son by Peter Wallner (C-SPAN, November 28, 2004, 8 & 11pm)

Biography of Franklin Pierce, New Hampshire native and 14th president of the United States. Volume covers Pierce to the night of his inauguration.

Franklin Pierce is much reviled in the history books for the imagined sin of not single-handedly avoiding the Civil War, but there was an interesting discussion on Booknotes earler this year, Hawthorne: A Life by Brenda Wineapple (C-SPAN, 1/04/04):

BRIAN LAMB, HOST: Brenda Wineapple, author of "A Life," Hawthorne, how much did politics play in his life?

BRENDA WINEAPPLE, AUTHOR, "HAWTHORNE: A LIFE": It played a much larger role than people have liked to think. He was a political man. He was involved in politics, and he was best friends with arguably one of the worst American presidents, which is saying something.

LAMB: Franklin Pierce.

WINEAPPLE: Franklin Pierce.

LAMB: How did he get to know Franklin Pierce?

WINEAPPLE: They met at college. They were at Bowdoin together. Pierce was a year ahead of Hawthorne. Pierce was a very gregarious, outgoing, warm and genial person, and he and Hawthorne became friends. They actually marched in a little group called the Bowdoin Cadets. One doesn`t think of Hawthorne marching, and certainly not marching behind anyone, but they did. And also, politics at Bowdoin was very important. They were both what became Democrats. They were Jeffersonian Republicans at the time, so that was a very important connection between the two men then. And they stayed friends for their entire lives.

LAMB: Bowdoin had, I think, 38 people in the graduating class that included Pierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne, but there were three -- I mean, three congressmen came out of that same class.

WINEAPPLE: Yes. Pierce was actually the class ahead of Hawthorne. It was -- Hawthorne`s class, which was the class of `25 was very well known because, I think, John Russworm (ph), who was the first president of Liberia, the colony, the American colony where emancipated slaves were sent for a while -- he was a member of the Bowdoin class. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from a whole other perspective, was a member of the Bowdoin class. Another very good friend of Hawthorne`s, Horatio Bridge (ph), was a member of that class. So it was a famous class, still, I think, in Bowdoin`s annals. [...]

After Hawthorne was married, he and his bride, Sophia (ph) Peabody Hawthorne, moved to Concord, Massachusetts, where they rented a house. They -- she was painting, he was writing. They weren`t making a lot of money. They were -- they were really poor. And so friends of Hawthorne, like Pierce, everybody else he knew -- he knew a number of very political people, John O`Sullivan, the man who coined the term "manifest destiny" -- all worked hard to get Hawthorne almost literally out of the kitchen, because they couldn`t afford hired help and his wife was pregnant, into political appointments.

And they went to Bancroft and whoever else they had to once the Democrats were back in power. Eventually, Hawthorne got the Salem Custom House, which he wanted very much. The family moved back to Salem, and he was there until a rotation in office. Democrats were voted out. The Whigs were voted in. Hawthorne was kicked out, and there was quite a brouhaha. So that was the next major appointment, and that lasted until 1849.

LAMB: As a matter of fact, you wrote, page 380, "He stood for dark, doubt and the Democratic Party."

WINEAPPLE: Right.

LAMB: Start with the Democratic Party. What was the Democratic Party back in the 1800s, 1850s?

WINEAPPLE: It developed out of Jackson. It`s a sort of Jacksonian Democrat. And the Democratic Party in those years was more like today`s Republicans. It`s important to sort of remember who became what. The Democrats stood very strongly for states` rights, and as a result, early on, they became a party associated with expansion, manifest destiny, as I said, expanding territories to the west, even to the south. And partly as a consequence of that, they also became associated with pro-slavery. A large part of the Democratic Party was pro-slavery, was a pro-slavery wing. It separated out later on as politics got even more dicey than they were.

But it was also a progressive party in that it was for the working person. It was -- stood against kind of moneyed capitalist aristocracy, say, of Boston, which was associated with the Whigs. So by Hawthorne and then Pierce and his friends at Bowdoin joining with the Jacksonian Democrats, they felt that they were joining with something that was youthful, exciting, exuberant, offered a kind of real hope and egalitarianism for America, which was true, as long as you were white and male.

But that was true, and that was the vision. So it was a kind of -- it was a kind of party, in a sense, of optimism, a kind of party of reform, too, which is interesting because then, later, when it becomes associated with pro-slavery forces, we tend to then think of that party as being conservative, benighted, reactionary. It was more complicated than that.

The Republicans rose out of the Whig Party that was against the Democrats. And the anti-slavery Whigs or the conscience Whigs, and the anti-slavery Democrats joined forces eventually, by 1860, and elected Lincoln as a Republican. Hawthorne stayed true to the Democratic Party all the way through, even though lots of people left it, became either -- if they didn`t become Whigs, that would be too hard, went to the Republicans, because, after all, the Republicans seemed to promise some of the things that the Democrats stood for but also anti-slavery. Hawthorne did not. So he was in the most -- he stayed with the most conservative part of the Democratic Party, which eventually fell apart. [...]

LAMB: Go back to, though, the biography. And almost all the lists you see of books that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, they don`t list -- I don`t mean you, but they don`t -- often, you don`t see the list of the biography of Franklin Pierce. How big a book was that?

WINEAPPLE: Oh, that`s interesting. I mean, that`s interesting. I mean, I -- that never dawned on me. You mean how long a book was it?

LAMB: Yes.

WINEAPPLE: It was about 250 pages. It was long enough. I mean, it was...

LAMB: Have you read it?

WINEAPPLE: Have I read it?

LAMB: Yes.

WINEAPPLE: Oh, yes. Oh, it`s fascinating.

LAMB: Why?

WINEAPPLE: Well, first of all, it`s Hawthorne. It has the signature of Hawthorne. The sentences are elegant and beautifully balanced. And he gives on one hand and takes away on the other. He won`t perjure himself. He won`t say, you know, Pierce is a great person. He says Pierce is great for the job, something like that.

But from another point of view, you know, quite -- not just literary, although literary is connected to it, it also demonstrates Hawthorne`s view of the Constitution, of slavery and of politics. He`s not mincing words. He doesn`t have the veil in front of his face. He`s very clear about what he thinks and what he thinks about what Pierce thinks. And because Pierce backs the Constitution, Hawthorne thinks he`s the man for the job because Hawthorne himself believes in the Constitution, which makes sense, when you think about it.

He was a cynical man who was conscious that we`re capable of doing terrible things to one another. And for him law, the Constitution, is a kind of document that prevents demagoguery, the demagoguery of, say, the witch trials or whatever in the -- you know, in the 17th century or the demagoguery that he would be a little bit skeptical about vis-a-vis Lincoln, you know? It prevents mob rule, all of those things. He really believed in the Constitution.

LAMB: But here you have a man that was born in the Northeast, and also Franklin Pierce, from Concord, New Hampshire.

WINEAPPLE: Yes.

LAMB: And he was a Democrat, elected in 1852, four years only. What was he about? Why was he so pro-slavery?

WINEAPPLE: I -- you know, it`s a terrible one-word answer. I wouldn`t say this about Hawthorne, but the first word that comes to my mind when you ask me that question is stupid.

(LAUGHTER)

WINEAPPLE: But that`s not a good answer. Why was he pro-slavery in that way? I think because he lacked the imagination to think of what it really is to be a slave. You know, I mean, I think it was a real failure -- it`s a failure of moral nerve and it`s a failure of imagination that comes to Pierce that he didn`t bother to think about it. He never got beyond the rule of law. So it wasn`t real to him.

Maybe being from the Northeast had something to do with it. Maybe being, as most people were -- whether it was Hawthorne at one extreme or even Theodore Parker at the other extreme -- maybe being racist had something to do with it. But he believed that -- and maybe there was some validity to one argument, that if the institution of slavery -- the institution -- is reprehensible, which it is -- they agreed about that. They disagreed about the means by which it should be changed. And in a sense, Pierce was a quietist. Pierce thought you leave just it alone, and eventually, it will go away. Hawthorne thought that, too, actually.

LAMB: How`d he ever get elected president?

WINEAPPLE: Pierce?

LAMB: Yes.

WINEAPPLE: Dark horse. You know, I mean, the sort of mechanics of the election of 1852 were such that he was able to get in. I don`t remember on which ballot, but eventually, he was able to get in. And it was also because he didn`t -- he offended the least amount of people. He was one of those kinds of candidates that, you know, the South could deal with him. The South thought it was OK. And the North -- well, he was still a Northerner. He`s still, as you said, from Concord, so that he had -- so represented the North and the South. And he tried not to say too much. He wouldn`t talk about the fugitive slave law, for example, even though he was for it. And because people liked him. He was evidently, to meet him, a very personable, charming guy.

LAMB: You say they were together when Nathaniel Hawthorne died?

WINEAPPLE: Yes, they were. As I mentioned, Hawthorne was ill. He`d been progressively ill. It`s hard to say exactly what he had. And he wanted -- he had already taken one failed journey from his house, very tragically, because his editor, one of his editors happened to die on that trip, so Hawthorne`s health clearly didn`t improve, especially to the extent that it was psychologically driven. And his wife, Sophia, thought that it would be good for him to take another trip. The only person he would go with was Franklin Pierce. He loved Pierce. You want to talk about people loving each other, these two men loved each other. And Pierce came to Boston, and Sophia took Nathaniel into Boston, and they went in Pierce`s carriage up through New Hampshire to -- and eventually, they went to Plymouth, and that`s where Hawthorne died, in the Pemigewasset (ph) Inn in Plymouth.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 28, 2004 8:00 PM