Elizabeth was also cited for attending Quaker meetings in the home of Lawrence and Cassandra Southwick. It is no surprise Elizabeth deviated from the conventional Puritan sect. During her first years in Massachusetts, she lived in the home of her aunt Anne Hutchinson. She organized in her Boston home the forerunner of all those groups in which women throughout the United States assemble today to improve themselves and the rest of the world.
For this reason, among others, she is regarded also as the pioneer feminist among the North American colonists. I found an interesting article in the Boston Herald on early tavern and house owners in Boston who supported Anne Hutchinson.
Although she began her spiritual teachings with women, she would catch the ears of several prominent men. The Turner family were neighbors of Anne Hutchinson. Come look today and see what you can discover! Their children records from Colonial Society of Massachusetts. This is a great story with facts and really interesting details; thank you for sharing.
I was adopted, and I am searching for my father. My birth certificate says my real last name was Gardner. Lisa, thank you for sharing and please keep us posted on your findings. Love to know more. Please reach out if you need any help with research. I will be working on Gardner again so stay tuned! Anne Hutchinson is one of my ancestors. I have been a member of GenealogyBank for years and never realized you had a monthly newsletter.
Thank you. Hi Joyce. In , his family managed to scrape together enough money to send Hawthorne to Bowdoin College in Maine. After four years at Bowdoin, he returned to Salem in and began working on his first novel Fanshawe. The novel was published shortly after in , at his own expense, but Hawthorne disapproved of it and tried to destroy all copies. Although Hawthorne descended from a long line of sea captains, he decided against entering into the profession.
It is not known why he veered away from going to sea, but it is most likely because of the danger associated with the profession.
Many of his sea-faring relatives died at sea, including his father. Hawthorne probably did not want to join them. Nonetheless, he felt guilty for not following in the footsteps of his more prosperous ancestors, according to an autobiographical sketch he wrote for the introduction to the Scarlet Letter, which he titled The Custom-House:. No aim, that I have ever cherished, would they recognize as laudable; no success of mine—if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been brightened by success—would they deem otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful.
What kind of a business in life—what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation—may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler! And yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine. The Hawthornes struggled with debt and a growing family and eventually returned to Salem in He held the job for a few years until he lost it when there was a change in the administration.
Hawthorne published his most well-known work, The Scarlet Letter, shortly after in , bringing him fame and financial relief. In , Hawthorne purchased the Wayside from the Alcotts in Concord. This home was the only house Hawthorne ever owned. William Hathorne was a local judge who earned a reputation for cruelly persecuting Quakers, most notably ordering the public whipping of Ann Coleman in In The Custom-House, an introductory sketch to the Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel criticized both John and William Hathorne, apologized for their actions and asked for the curse to be lifted:.
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 trode the unworn street with such a stately port, and made 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 record of his better deeds, although these were many.
His son, too, inherited the persecuting spirit, and made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his old dry bones, in the Charter Street burial-ground, must still retain it, if they have not crumbled utterly to dust!
I know not whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them, in another state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them—as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race, for many a long year back, would argue to exist—may be now and henceforth removed.
Nathaniel Hawthorne was a part of the American Renaissance that occurred in the 19th century, which is considered the romantic period in American literature.
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