"I regret that you think so doubtfully of the prospects of the Union; for I should like well enough to hold on to the old thing. And yet I must confess that I sympathize to a large extent with the Northern feeling, and think it is about time for us to make a stand. If compelled to choose, I go for the North. At present, we have no country—at least, none in the sense in which an Englishman has a country. I never conceived, in reality, what a true and warm love of country is, till I witnessed it in the breasts of Englishmen. The States are too various and too extended to form really one country. New England is quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can really take in.... However, I have no kindred with nor leaning toward the Abolitionists."
When hostilities had begun, he wrote to the same friend, May 26, 1861:—
"The war, strange to say, has had a beneficial effect upon my spirits, which were flagging woefully before it broke out. But it was delightful to share in the heroic sentiment of the time, and to feel that I had a country, a consciousness which seemed to make me young again. One thing as regards this matter I regret, and one thing I am glad of. The regrettable thing is that I am too old to shoulder a musket myself, and the joyful thing is that Julian is too young. He drills constantly with a company of lads, and means to enlist as soon as he reaches the minimum age. But I trust we shall either be victorious or vanquished by that time. Meantime, though I approve the war as much as any man, I don't quite see what we are fighting for or what definite result can be expected. If we pommel the South ever so hard, they will love us none the better for it; and even if we subjugate them, our next step should be to cut them adrift, if we are fighting for the annihilation of slavery. To be sure, it may be a wise object, and offers a tangible result and the only one which is consistent with a future union between North and South. A continuance of the war would soon make this plain to us, and we should see the expediency of preparing our black brethren for future citizenship, by allowing them to fight for their own liberties and educating them through heroic influences. Whatever happens next, I must say that I rejoice that the old Union is smashed. We never were one people, and never really had a country since the Constitution was formed."
Thus, then, Hawthorne, who had been brought up politically within the democratic party and thrice held office under its régime, had reached the conclusion, four years in advance of the event, that it was time for the North to "make a stand"; and now, while muskets rattled their grim prelude to a long and deadly conflict, he planted himself firmly on the side of the government—was among the first, moreover, to resolve upon that policy of arming the negroes, which was so bitterly opposed and so slow of adoption among even progressive reformers at the North. In his solitude, out of the current of affairs, trying to pursue his own peaceful, artistic calling, and little used to making utterances on public questions, it was not incumbent upon him nor proper to his character to blazon his beliefs where every one could see them. But, these private expressions being unknown, his silence was construed against him. One more reference to the war, occurring in a letter of October 12, 1861, to Lieutenant Bridge, should be recorded in this place:—
"I am glad you take such a hopeful view of our national prospects, so far as regards the war.... For my part, I don't hope (nor indeed wish) to see the Union restored as it was; amputation seems to me much the better plan, and all we ought to fight for is the liberty of selecting the point where our diseased members shall be lopped off. I would fight to the death for the Northern Slave-States, and let the rest go.... I have not found it possible to occupy my mind with its usual trash and nonsense during these anxious times; but as the autumn advances, I find myself sitting down to my desk and blotting successive sheets of paper, as of yore. Very likely I may have something ready for the public long before the public is ready to receive it."
It will be seen that he was not hopeful as to the restoration of the entire Union, adhered to his first view indeed, that the scission of a part would be preferable. In declining a cordial invitation from Bridge to come to Washington, in February, 1862, he gave renewed emphasis to this opinion. "I am not very well," he said, "being mentally and physically languid; but I suppose there is an even chance that the trip and change of scene might supply the energy which I lack." He announced that he had begun a new romance, and then turning to the questions of the day, remarked that he "should not much regret an ultimate separation," and that soon; adding that if a strong Union sentiment should not set in at the South, we ought to resolve ourselves into two nations at once. He was evidently growing despondent; a fact which may have been due in part to the physical and mental languor of which he told his friend. Misfortune had once more entered his household; for one of his children was suffering from a peculiarly distressing malady, which imposed a heavy strain upon his nerves and troubled his heart. More than this, he mourned over the multitude of private griefs which he saw or apprehended on every side—griefs resulting from the slaughter that was going on at the seat of war—as acutely as if they had been his own losses. He could not shut out, by any wall of patriotic fire, the terrible shapes of fierce passion and the pathetic apparitions of those whose lives had been blasted by the tragedies of the field. His health, we have already noticed, had begun to falter while he was still abroad. Neither was he free from pecuniary anxieties. He had laid up a modest accumulation from his earnings in the consulate; but the additions to his house, unambitious though they were, had cost a sum which was large in proportion to his resources; the expense of living was increased by the war, and his pen was for the time being not productive. His income from his books was always scanty. He was too scrupulous to be willing to draw upon the principal which had been invested for the future support of his family; and there were times when he was harassed by the need of money. All these causes conspired to reduce his strength; but the omnipresent misery of the war, and the destruction of the Union, which he believed to be inevitable, were perhaps the chief adverse factors in the case. "Hawthorne's life," Mr. Lowell has said to me, "was shortened by the war."
The romance mentioned as having been begun during this winter of 1861-62, was probably "Dr. Grimshawe's Secret," the first scheme of which appears as "The Ancestral Footstep;" and it was afterwards merged in "Septimius Felton." Hawthorne, however, did not make satisfactory progress with this work; and throughout the summer of 1862 he seems to have given such energies as he could command to the preparation of the chapters of travel subsequently collected under the title, "Our Old Home." The latter volume appeared at a time of fervid, nay, violent public excitement, caused by the critical state of military matters, the unpopularity of the draft, the increasing boldness of the democratic party at the North in opposing the war and demanding its cessation. To Hawthorne it appeared no more than just that he should dedicate his book to the friend whose public act, in sending him abroad in the government service, had made it possible for him to gather the materials he had embodied in these reminiscences. But his publisher, Mr. Fields, knowing that ex-President Pierce was very generally held to be culpable for his deference towards Southern leaders who had done much to bring on the war, and that he was ranked among the men who were ready to vote against continuing the attempt to conquer the Confederacy, foresaw the clamor which would be raised against Hawthorne if, at such a moment, he linked his name publicly with that of Pierce. He remonstrated upon the proposed dedication. But Hawthorne was not to be turned aside from his purpose by any dread of an outcry which he considered unjust. "I find," he replied, "that it would be a piece of poltroonery in me to withdraw either the dedication or the dedicatory letter, ... and if he [Pierce] is so exceedingly unpopular that his name is enough to sink the volume, there is so much the more need that an old friend should stand by him. I cannot, merely on account of pecuniary profit or literary reputation, go back from what I have deliberately felt and thought it right to do; and if I were to tear out the dedication, I should never look at the volume again without remorse and shame.... If the public of the North see fit to ostracize me for this, 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." The language did not lack vigor and warmth; but Dr. Loring has stated that he spoke of the matter to the same effect, "not in the heat of passion, but with a calm and generous courage." The dedicatory letter was printed, of course, and drew down upon Hawthorne abundant condemnation; but he had maintained his integrity.
The shock of such an accident was by no means the right sort of tonic for a man of Hawthorne's sensitive disposition when he was already feeble and almost ill. In April, 1862, he had been to Washington, and the things that impressed him there were noted down in an "Atlantic Monthly" paper, entitled "Chiefly About War Matters." At Washington, also, Leutze painted a portrait of him for General Pierce. In July, he took a brief trip with his son to the Maine coast, and began a new journal. There were no other changes of scene for him; the monotony of his life at The Wayside was seldom broken. That this period was for him one of unmitigated gloom cannot truthfully be predicated; he enjoyed his home, he had the society of his wife and children; he had many small and quiet pleasures. But there was likewise much to make him sorrowful, and the tide of vitality was steadily ebbing away. In May, 1863, James Russell Lowell invited him to Elmwood, and Hawthorne agreed to go, but he was finally prevented from doing so by a troublesome cold. The slow and mysterious disease, which was to prove fatal within a year, continued to make inroads upon his constitution. After the publication of "Our Old Home," in the autumn of 1863, there is no certain record of his condition or his proceedings, beyond this, that he went on declining, and that—having abandoned the two preceding phases of his new fiction—he attempted to write the resultant form of it, which was to have been brought out as "The Dolliver Romance."
Although the title had not yet been determined upon, he consented to begin a serial publication of the work in the "Atlantic Monthly" for January, 1864. But he wrote to Mr. Fields: "I don't see much probability of my having the first chapter of the Romance ready so soon as you want it. There are two or three chapters ready to be written, but I am not yet robust enough to begin, and I feel as if I should never carry it through.... I can think of no title for the unborn Romance. Always heretofore I have waited till it was quite complete, before attempting to name it, and I fear I shall have to do so now." On the 1st of December, he dispatched the manuscript of the first chapter, with the title of the whole. But he could not follow it up with more, and wrote, about the middle of January, 1864: "I am not quite up to writing yet, but shall make an effort as soon as I see any hope of success." At the end of February: "I hardly know what to say to the public about this abortive Romance, though I know pretty well what the case will be. I shall never finish it..., I cannot finish it unless a great change comes over me; and if I make too great an effort to do so, it will be my death." From this time on he accomplished no work which he was willing to send to the press, although he had among his papers the two fragmentary scenes from "The Dolliver Romance" that were posthumously printed.
The wife of ex-President Pierce died in December, 1863, and Hawthorne went to New Hampshire to attend the funeral. When he passed through Boston, on his return, he appeared to Mr. Fields ill and more nervous than usual. Dreary events seemed to thicken around his path. In the last days of March, 1864, Mr. Fields saw him again; and by this time his appearance had greatly changed. "The light in his eye was as beautiful as ever, but his limbs were shrunken, and his usual stalwart vigor [was] utterly gone." A photograph taken not long before that date represents him with cheeks somewhat emaciated, and a worn, strangely anxious, half-appealing expression, which, while singularly delicate and noble, is extremely sad. Soon after this, in March, he set out for Washington with Mr. William Ticknor, Mr. Fields's senior partner in the publishing firm of Ticknor & Fields. The travelling companions spent two or three days in New York, and had got as far as Philadelphia, when Mr. Ticknor was taken suddenly ill, at the Continental Hotel, and died the next day. Stunned, wellnigh shattered by this sinister event, Hawthorne was almost incapacitated for action of any sort; but there were kind and ready friends in Philadelphia who came to his aid, and relieved him from the melancholy duty which he would else have had to meet. He returned to Concord, in what forlorn state an extract from a letter of Mrs. Hawthorne's may best convey: "He came back unlooked for, that day; and when I heard a step on the piazza, I was lying on a couch and feeling quite indisposed. But as soon as I saw him I was frightened out of all knowledge of myself,—so haggard, so white, so deeply scored with pain and fatigue was the face, so much more ill than ever I saw him before." Mrs. Hawthorne still hoped for some favorable turn, if he could but obtain a complete change of scene and escape from the austere New England spring, into some warmer climate. "He has not smiled since he came home till to-day," she wrote, "when I made him laugh, with Thackeray's humor, in reading to him." She was constant in her care; she would scarcely let him go up and down stairs alone. But not the most tender solicitude, nor any encouragement of unquenchable hope, could now avail to help him.