Hawthorne | Page 3

to a note of our
author's in 1837, was "Wigcastle, Wigton." Hawthorne, in the note in question, mentions
the gentleman who was at that time the head of the family; but it does not appear that he
at any period renewed acquaintance with his English kinsfolk. Major William Hathorne
came out to Massachusetts in the early years of the Puritan settlement; in 1635 or 1636,
according to the note to which I have just alluded; in 1630 according to information

presumably more accurate. He was one of the band of companions of the virtuous and
exemplary John Winthrop, the almost life-long royal Governor of the young colony, and
the brightest and most amiable figure in the early Puritan annals. How amiable William
Hathorne may have been I know not, but he was evidently of the stuff of which the
citizens of the Commonwealth were best advised to be made. He was a sturdy fighting
man, doing solid execution upon both the inward and outward enemies of the State. The
latter were the savages, the former the Quakers; the energy expended by the early
Puritans in resistance to the tomahawk not weakening their disposition to deal with
spiritual dangers. They employed the same--or almost the same--weapons in both
directions; the flintlock and the halberd against the Indians, and the cat-o'-nine-tails
against the heretics. One of the longest, though by no means one of the most successful,
of Hawthorne's shorter tales (The Gentle Boy) deals with this pitiful persecution of the
least aggressive of all schismatic bodies. William Hathorne, who had been made a
magistrate of the town of Salem, where a grant of land had been offered him as an
inducement to residence, figures in New England history as having given orders that
"Anne Coleman and four of her friends" should be whipped through Salem, Boston, and
Dedham. This Anne Coleman, I suppose, is the woman alluded to in that fine passage in
the Introduction to The Scarlet Letter, in which Hawthorne pays a qualified tribute to the
founder of the American branch of his race:--
"The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky
grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination as far back as I can remember. It still
haunts me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in
reference to the present, phase of the town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence
here on account of this grave, bearded, sable-cloaked and steeple-crowned
progenitor--who came so early, with his Bible and his sword, and trod the unworn street
with such a stately port, and make so large a figure as a man of war and peace--a stronger
claim than for myself, whose name is seldom heard and my face hardly known. He was a
soldier, legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the church; he had all the Puritanic traits, both
good and evil. He was likewise a bitter persecutor, as witness the Quakers, who have
remembered him in their histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity towards a
woman of their sect which will last longer, it is to be feared, than any of his better deeds,
though these were many."
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: It is proper that before I go further I should acknowledge my large
obligations to the only biography of our author, of any considerable length, that has been
written--the little volume entitled A Study of Hawthorne, by Mr. George Parsons Lathrop,
the son-in-law of the subject of the work. (Boston, 1876.) To this ingenious and
sympathetic sketch, in which the author has taken great pains to collect the more
interesting facts of Hawthorne's life, I am greatly indebted. Mr. Lathrop's work is not
pitched in the key which many another writer would have chosen, and his tone is not to
my sense the truly critical one; but without the help afforded by his elaborate essay the
present little volume could not have been prepared.]
William Hathorne died in 1681; but those hard qualities that his descendant speaks of

were reproduced in his son John, who bore the title of Colonel, and who was connected,
too intimately for his honour, with that deplorable episode of New England history, the
persecution of-the so-called Witches of Salem. John Hathorne is introduced into the little
drama entitled The Salem Farms in Longfellow's New England Tragedies. I know not
whether he had the compensating merits of his father, but our author speaks of him, in the
continuation of the passage I have just quoted, as having made himself so conspicuous in
the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may be said to have left a stain upon him.
"So deep a stain, indeed," Hawthorne adds, characteristically, "that his old dry bones in