On Hawthorne`s forthcoming campaign biography - photo 1
On Hawthorne`s forthcoming campaign biography - photo 2
On Hawthorne`s forthcoming campaign biography - photo 3
On Hawthorne`s forthcoming campaign biography - photo 4

On Hawthorne`s forthcoming campaign biography

Lot 107
15.06.2023 10:00UTC -05:00
Classic
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$ 2 268
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUSA, New York
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ID 967649
Lot 107 | On Hawthorne's forthcoming campaign biography
Estimate value
$ 1 000 – 1 500
On Hawthorne's forthcoming campaign biography

Franklin Pierce, 23 June 1852

PIERCE, Franklin (1804-1869). Autograph letter signed ("Frank. Pierce") to Charles O'Connor, n.p., 23 June 1852.



One page, bifolium, 250 x 198mm (minor soiled spots at extreme margins).



"My friend Nathl. Hawthorne is writing a biographical sketch…" Presidential candidate Pierce writes of his forthcoming campaign biography. Hawthorne and Pierce first met as students at Bowdoin College and remained lifelong friends. On 5 June 1852, Pierce found himself (unexpectedly) the Democratic nominee for President after the convention deadlocked and selected the former New Hampshire senator as a dark horse compromise candidate after 49 ballots. To prepare for the contest against the Whigs in the general election, Pierce tapped his old friend who had been turned out of his own federal post as port surveyor of Beverly, Massachusetts in 1849 when the Whigs took control of the White House. Here, Pierce offers to send O'Connor a copy "perhaps before it is generally circulated," but warns that he is "inclined to think that he [Hawthorne] would prefer not to have his undertaking made public at present." Hawthorne's biography was a positive spin on the New Hampshire Democrat which carefully avoided the subject of Pierce's drinking habits. Horace Mann quipped that if the author of the Scarlet Letter "makes out Pierce to be a great man or a brave man, it will be the greatest work of fiction he ever wrote." After Pierce won the general election in November, he secured Hawthorne the post of United States Consul at Liverpool and remained there until the end of the Pierce Administration in 1857.



[With:] PIERCE, Jane (1806-1863). Autograph letter signed ("Jane") to Mary Aiken, Concord, 1 October 1862. Four pages, bifolium, 183 x 148mm, with original transmittal envelope addressed in her hand, 68 x 119mm. Pierce reports to her older sister on her husband's busy schedule a month before his death and complains of "the gross and revolting falsehoods wh[ich]. appear in the papers." Pierce had been the victim of a letter purportedly sent as a hoax to a Detroit newspaper in the Spring of 1862 intimating that the former President was organizing a plot to overthrow the federal government (See "General Pierce and the State Department," New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette, Concord, 9 April 1862, p. 2.) Pierce also writes of her pleasure that Mary liked "Hawthorne's book — it so simply truthful." It is unclear whether she is referring to Hawthorne's last major novel, The Marble Faun (1860) or his July 1862 essay on the Civil War, "Chiefly About War Matters," published in The Atlantic Monthly which proved controversial for his southern sympathies and its antiwar sentiments.

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