The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 32 (2021)
Copyright © 2021 Nozomi Fujimura. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with thisnotice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Transnational Revision ofAmerica and Civil Wars: The American Claimant
Manuscripts Reconsidered

Nozomi FUJIMURA*INTRODUCTION
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64), appointed US consul in Liverpool by
President Franklin Pierce, arrived in England with his family in July 1853.1
During the four years in office that his campaign biography of his college
friend—The Life of Franklin Pierce (1852)—had brought him, thetransatlantically celebrated author of The Scarlet Letter (1850) beganplanning a new romance about an American claimant to an English estate.
He wrote three manuscripts between April 1858 and the fall of 1861—aperiod that encompasses the Hawthornes’ travels in Italy, France, andBritain, as well as their return to America in June 1860. However,Hawthorne ultimately left them unpublished. These manuscripts, titled “TheAncestral Footstep,” “Etherege,” and “Grimshawe” by the editors of The
Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, were compiled as
The American Claimant Manuscripts (1977).2
Hawthorne’s later works, written after the late 1850s, were long neglected
as failures of the aging author. Charles Swann’s Nathaniel Hawthorne:
Tradition and Revolution (1991) was exceptional in considering themsignificant achievements.3 In the 2009 special issue of the Nathaniel*Associate Professor, Asia University

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Hawthorne Review, “The Later Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne,” Magnus
Ullén and David Greven called for overdue reevaluations of late Hawthorne.
Nevertheless, The American Claimant Manuscripts have received little
critical attention. Objecting to Edward H. Davidson’s pioneering study
Hawthorne’s Last Phase (1949), Ullén and Greven asserted that it “failed todifferentiate properly the American Claimant materials . . . from the much
more nearly finished Septimius romance.”4 As this remark suggests, theirfocus was on salvaging Hawthorne’s later manuscripts that deal with a youthof mixed English and Native American ancestry who seeks the elixir of life:“Septimius Felton” and “Septimius Norton.” Indeed, the issue included threearticles on the Septimius romance, whereas James Hewitson’s “A System‘Too Bare and Meagre for Human Nature to Love’: America in The
American Claimant Manuscripts” was the only article in the issue toexamine the earlier manuscripts. As Robert Milder asserts in Hawthorne’s
Habitations: A Literary Life (2013), “Hawthorne’s English years are thebest-documented and least-addressed phase of his career.” However,praising Hawthorne’s late realism, Milder regards his English sketch Our
Old Home (1863) as a “quiet masterpiece” but disapproves of his
unpublished romances.5
To be sure, “The Ancestral Footstep,” “Etherege,” and “Grimshawe” allexhibit a certain level of incompleteness. Each of the three contains
Hawthorne’s working notes and asides. Particularly in “Etherege,” theauthor repeatedly expresses difficulty with his plot and characterization,
which at one point culminates in the following ejaculation: “Oh, Heavens! I
have not the least notion how to get on. I never was in such a sad
predicament before.”6 Yet, the American Claimant romance is undoubtedly
one of Hawthorne’s major engagements in his later years, given that hegrappled with it for more than five years. To elucidate what he tackled isessential not only for a reevaluation of these manuscripts but also for abetter understanding of Hawthorne as a writer and of his career.
In this article, I aim to demonstrate that throughout The American
Claimant Manuscripts, Hawthorne wrestles with the question of what
America is in an increasingly transnational context. As Swann and Hewitson
point out, Hawthorne developed a critical view of his native country whilewriting these manuscripts in the period preceding and after the beginning of
the American Civil War.7 However, he did not simply explore the meaningof America in its relation to England. It is necessary to pay closer attention
to the order and places of his writing, which requires consideration of thethree manuscripts together with The Marble Faun (1860), an Italian romance

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that Hawthorne published after he suspended writing “The Ancestral
Footstep.”8 For my analysis of The American Claimant Manuscripts here, I
refer to David Armitage’s Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (2017). Explaining
the objective of his study, Armitage states, “They [historians]—I should say,
we—have tended to study particular conflicts: the English Civil Wars, theAmerican Civil War, the Spanish Civil War. We have rarely treated civil war
as a serial phenomenon, across time and around the world.” Thus, hedelineates “what has been at stake, and what still remains at issue, in civil
wars over the past two thousand years.”9 Hawthorne, having read some of
the texts that Armitage deals with, exhibits a certain idea that the presentday historian illustrates. I argue that Hawthorne’s transnational experiences,along with his familiarity with world history, gradually enabled him to see
America in the context of the transnational history of civil wars. His revisionof America from such a perspective caused him to face the nation—and
ultimately himself—and radically transformed his romance from the one hehad initially conceived.
1.

HAWTHORNE’S ENGLISH YEARS AND THE HISTORY OF BLOODSHED

Hawthorne wrote “The Ancestral Footstep” in Rome in a journal-likeformat between April 1 and May 19, 1858.10 The first entry contains a
passage, “the battlefields of the Roses, or of the Parliament.”11 Althoughthese civil wars—the Wars of the Roses (1455–85) and the English Civil
Wars (1642–51)—are mentioned only in this passage in “The Ancestral
Footstep,” they subsequently appear in “Etherege” and “Grimshawe” indifferent ways and with varying significance. To understand what occupied
Hawthorne’s mind throughout his writing of the American Claimantromance, it is first necessary to provide an overview of Hawthorne’s English
years.
Shortly after Hawthorne settled in Liverpool and assumed the consulshipin August 1853, he began researching from which part of England William
Hathorne—his ancestor who had emigrated to New England and settled in
Salem—had originated.12 Hawthorne added the “w” to his family namesometime after his 1825 college graduation. On October 9, 1854, he wrote in
his notebook:
My ancestor left England in 1630. I return in 1853. I sometimes feel as
if I myself had been absent these two hundred and eighteen years[sic]—leaving England just emerging from the feudal system, and32

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finding it on the verge of Republicanism. It brings the two far separated
points of time very closely together, to view the matter thus.13
In the absence of success with his research, Hawthorne’s yearning for aconnection turned into a near identification with his ancestor.
Hawthorne’s “transatlantic fancies of England” were not readily satisfied,because he was occupied with his consular job in “the greatest commercial
city of the world.”14 He worked at the consulate six days a week, rarely
taking holidays for the first two years. According to Bill Ellis, “Liverpool at
the time was the main portal of trade to the United States, and the consul’s
responsibilities included dealing with all the commercial and diplomatic
ambiguities that arose in Anglo-American trade.”15 Additionally, there wereceaseless visitors, among whom were countless (and, in many cases,
questionable) Americans who sought the consul’s support for their claims to
English property. By late 1854, Hawthorne had come to regard suchclaimants as “another instance of the American fancy for connecting
themselves with English property and lineage.”16
Meanwhile, as consul, Hawthorne came across a group of people whoreflected the context of the time: sailors of various races who had beenbrutally treated on board.17 Shipmasters and captains often escaped
punishment because of the complex and ineffective legal system. The
violent death of Daniel Smith—a South Carolinian farmer deceived into
serving as a sailor—particularly shocked Hawthorne.18 “This was a hardfate, certainly,” he wrote in his notebook on May 15, 1855, “and a strange
thing to happen in the United States, at this day—that a free citizen shouldbe absolutely kidnapped, carried to a foreign country, treated with savage
cruelty during the voyage, and left to die on his arrival.”19 Within ten days,
Hawthorne not only reported the matter to William Marcy, Secretary ofState, but also wrote to Charles Sumner, his longtime friend, to ask for help:“These shipping-masters should be annihilated at once;—no slave-drivers
are so wicked as they, and there is nothing in slavery so bad as the systemwith which they are connected.”20
Hawthorne’s comparison of the system of merchant ships to slavery
reminds us that Sumner was a reformer, abolitionist, and senator from
Massachusetts, who staunchly opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
Hawthorne might have used this comparison to stir Sumner into action,although it did not motivate the senator, who was busily dealing withslavery itself. At the same time, it illuminates that Hawthorne saw theinhumanity of violence in both systems. Ellis considers that Hawthorne

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nonetheless “suppressed” his descriptions of shipboard cruelties when hecompiled his notebook entries into Our Old Home.21 In any case, “Bleeding
Kansas,” caused by the passage of the act in May 1854, symbolized theincreasingly divided and bloody nation on the eve of the American Civil
War.
About a month after the passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Hawthorne
wrote to the publisher William Ticknor: “I find it impossible to read
American newspapers (of whatever political party) without being ashamedof my country.”22 In December, he told Horatio Bridge, his college friend:“our country has not a very inviting aspect from this side of the water—so
convulsed with party-spirit as it is. . . . From this distance, it looks to me as
if there were an actual fissure between the North and South, which may
widen and deepen into a gulf, anon.” He continued, “If it were not for mychildren, I never would come back.”23 Britain, however, was carrying on the
Crimean War. In October 1854, after the news of the fall of Sevastopol—
Russia’s naval port that was besieged by Anglo-French forces—turned out tobe wrong, Hawthorne saw British people as “somewhat grim” and could not
help feeling that “it is impossible for a true American to be otherwise thanglad.”24 Later in the month, he confided in the poet Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow: “I am not particularly patriotic, myself;—indeed, I neverconsidered myself at all so, at home; but, here, among our ill-wishers andmaligners, my heart warms a little.”25 In November 1855, Hawthorne feared
a possible war between the two nations due to the tension caused by
Britain’s Foreign Enlistment Act and ensuing recruitment in the UnitedStates.26 Under these circumstances, Hawthorne’s “divided feelings forEngland and America” intensified.27
Considered against this background, Hawthorne’s trips in September andOctober 1855 reveal some curious moments. On September 10, he visited
the Tower of London and viewed the relics of past kings, noblemen, andprisoners, including the gilded armor of Charles I; the golden staff of
Edward the Confessor, the last Anglo-Saxon king defeated in the Norman
Conquest (1066); and the Bloody Tower, where “the supposed bones of thelittle princes”—Edward V and his brother Richard, commonly believed tohave been assassinated by Richard III (1483)—were discovered. Later, in the
Temple Garden, recollecting the famous scene in the first part of Henry VI,
Hawthorne reflected: “This is the spot in which, according to Shakespeare,
the Plantaganets [sic] and the Lancastrians plucked their pale and bloody
roses.” Still later in the day, Hawthorne heard that Sevastopol had beentaken.28 On October 1, at the chapel of the Chelsea Hospital, he saw “the34

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dusty and tattered banners” of the countries against which Britain had foughtwars: France, the Netherlands, India, Prussia, America, and China. He thentold a Chelsea pensioner that “some Russian banners might soon hang fromthe walls.”29 Visiting Worcester about a week later, Hawthorne observed thestatues of Charles I and Charles II, along with some remains of the Battle ofWorcester (1651), the final battle in the English Civil Wars. In his notebook,he specifically mentions that it was “the night of rejoicing for the taking of
Sebastopol.”30 Clearly, Hawthorne saw a long history of bloodshed, cappedby the recent battle in the Crimean War.
Hawthorne’s allusions to Henry VI and Richard III are unsurprising. In his
boyhood, he loved reading English literature, and Shakespeare was among
his favorites. Sixteen-year-old Hawthorne, expressing his wish to become awriter, hoped that his future works would be praised “as equal to proudest
productions of the scribbling sons of John Bull.”31 He was also an avid
student of history. In his twenties, Hawthorne checked out an astonishingnumber of books from the Salem Athenaeum, including the Earl of
Clarendon’s The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1702–
4) and Algernon Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government (1698).32
However, Hawthorne’s references to the Wars of the Roses and theEnglish Civil Wars, as well as his view of English history as a continuous
series of bloody conflicts, must be understood in a broader context.
According to Armitage, some of the most influential works in early modern
Europe, including Shakespeare’s plays and Sidney’s work, were inspired by
Roman narratives of civil war.33 One such narrative is “the republican
story”: “sympathetic to the supposedly selfless civic values of the Roman
republic, it portrayed the endless repetition of civil wars as springing fromthe very roots of Rome itself”—that is, Rome’s founding myth of Romulus’s
murder of his brother Remus.34 “In fact,” Armitage asserts, “fratricide would
become the central metaphor of the unnatural dissension at the heart of civilwar.”35 In the mid-nineteenth century, as the world was becomingtransnationally connected, “any distinctions between civil war and foreign
war had begun to collapse.” To use the words from Les Misérables (1862)that Armitage quotes, “every war” had become “war between brothers.”36
Against this background, Hawthorne conceived the first idea for his
romance in April 1855. At a party, Hawthorne learned of the legend of abloody footstep left in Smithills Hall, a medieval manor house in Bolton.
The legend goes that “a certain martyr, in Bloody Mary’s time,” being
examined before the master of the house, “stamped his foot in earnest
protest against the injustice with which he was treated”; blood from his foot

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left “a long footmark printed in blood” and remained there for centuries.37 A
week later, Hawthorne wrote in his notebook:
In my Romance, the original emigrant to America may have carriedaway with him a family-secret, whereby it was in his power (had he sochosen) to have brought about the ruin of the family. This secret hetransmits to his American progeny, by whom it is inherited throughout
all the intervening generations. At last, the hero of the Romance comes
to England, and finds that, by means of this secret, he still has it in his
power to procure the downfal [sic] of the family.38
This was the nucleus of the romance that Hawthorne would revise
throughout “The Ancestral Footstep,” “Etherege,” and “Grimshawe.” While
moving his residence from Britain to Italy, back to Britain, and then to
America again, he would struggle to figure out the relations between
England and America, those between ancestors and descendants, and theirconnections to the history of bloodshed that his image of the Bloody
Footstep symbolized.
2. AMERICAN DEMOCRACY, ENGLISH ARISTOCRACY, AND
ROMAN FRATRICIDEAs mentioned above, Hawthorne did not start to write “The Ancestral
Footstep” until April 1858. Having handed over his consul duties to his
successor, he left for Italy via France with his family in January. Before that,
he put his English notebooks in the charge of his English friend Henry
Bright. Hawthorne most likely wrote the first manuscript with the intentionof revising it later with his notebooks in hand.
To trace the transformation of the American Claimant romance, it isessential to look at Hawthorne’s initial plans in his memoranda and abstract.
His memoranda, the early parts of which were written in England, revealthat Hawthorne intended the “English and American ideas to be brought
strikingly into contrast and contact,” focusing on the “feelings of the
Democrat and Aristocrat.” He also sketches his protagonist as a “lawyer”
and “politician,” who “might too have been a soldier in the Mexican War.”This personage, who strongly recalls Pierce, is characterized as “a self-mademan.”39 In “an abstract of the plot of this story” inserted early in “TheAncestral Footstep,” the protagonist—a nineteenth-century American—goes
to England in search of his hereditary mansion. His ancestor emigrated from

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NOZOMI FUJIMURAEngland to America more than two hundred years previously, leaving behinda legacy and a legend. Significantly, the legend had lost “some of its
connecting links”; however, “it referred to a murder, to the expulsion of abrother from a hereditary house, in some strange way, and to a Bloody
Footstep which he had left impressed into the threshold, as he turned about
to make a last remonstrance.” Ultimately, the protagonist turns out to be “therightful heir to the title and estate,” but he “rejects both, feeling that it isbetter to take a virgin soil, than to try to make the old name grow in a soilthat had been darkened with so much blood and misfortune as this.” This
family story is supposed to have “an ending unexpected by everybody, andnot satisfactory to the natural yearnings of novel-readers.”40
On the basis of these plans, Hawthorne fleshes out his characters and plot.
The protagonist, Middleton, is a former congressman, but discouraged withhis political ambition, he has come to England to search for his hereditarymansion on account of a family legend he heard in his boyhood. His searchbrings him into contact with other major characters: Eldredge, the current
owner of the mansion; the Master of Eldredge Hospital, who tells Middleton
the history of the Eldredges; Hammond (also called Rothermel or
Wentworth), an old American pensioner at the hospital; and Alice,
Hammond’s daughter, who was brought up by her relative in America andhas been in England for two years.
Hawthorne modifies the legend of the Bloody Footstep to suit his
purpose.41 In “The Ancestral Footstep,” the setting of the legend is shiftedfrom “Bloody Mary’s time” (1553–58) to the beginning of the Britishcolonies in America: the original Middleton “emigrated to New Englandwith the Pilgrims; or . . . to Virginia with Raleigh’s colonists” (1620/1585).
Furthermore, the footstep was produced not by a martyr’s protest but by abrother’s expulsion due to “bitter hostility between two brothers” out of thefamily’s three sons.42 This hostility stemmed from a love triangle: the eldest
son was engaged to a woman who was mutually in love with the second son.
When the second son disappeared, he was thought to have been killed by theeldest son; in reality, it was the second son who hurt his elder brother andleft the Bloody Footstep. The second son fled to America with his beloved
and changed his name. Instead of the eldest son, who later died unmarriedand childless, the third son became the family heir. The father of the threesons founded the Eldredge Hospital in atonement for the “dissension andbloodshed between the sons.”43 Eldredge, the current owner of the mansion,
is a descendant of the third son, whereas Middleton is descended from thesecond son and therefore “the rightful heir” to the estate. In “The Ancestral

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Footstep,” the above-mentioned civil wars—the Wars of the Roses and theEnglish Civil Wars—are implicitly connected to the soil of England, where
the Bloody Footstep remains.
As the abstract describes, Middleton ultimately rejects the “soil that had
been darkened with so much blood and misfortune.” He returns to America,
but not by himself. Alice, with her “free spirit,” helps him: “It shall be partly
due to her high counsel that Middleton forgoes his claim to the estate, andprefers the life of an American, with its lofty possibilities for himself and his
race, to the position of an Englishman of property and title.” Alice, too,“shall choose the condition and prospects of woman in America, to theemptiness of the life of a woman of rank in England.”44 Thus, Middleton andAlice become “the Adam and Eve of a new epoch,” returning to “a virginsoil.”45
In “The Ancestral Footstep,” however, Hawthorne finds particulardifficulty in his characterization of Eldredge. That Middleton is the rightful
heir to the mansion turns Eldredge into its unlawful occupant; therefore, thelatter, an Englishman, attempts to remove the former, an American.
However, Hawthorne also believes in “English moral sense and simple
honor,” which prevents him from making the Englishman thoroughly evil.46
In the latter part of the manuscript, he suddenly furnishes Eldredge with
Italian traits: “Mr. Eldredge, as a Catholic . . . had resided long on theContinent; long in Italy; and had come back with habits that little accordedwith those of the gentry of the neighborhood; so that, in fact, he was almost
as much a stranger, and perhaps quite as little of a real Englishman, as
Middleton himself.”47 Hawthorne seems to have made this change not only
on account of the cultural differences between Anglo-America and Italy—
especially their religious differences, as mentioned in the passage—but also
to evoke Rome’s connection with fratricide. However, the change has asignificant impact on the story’s overall design: it transforms Hawthorne’s
initial idea of the romance presenting a contrast between American
democracy and English aristocracy into something very different, which I
demonstrate in my subsequent sections.
After Hawthorne had written the final entry in “The Ancestral Footstep,”
he next engaged himself with The Marble Faun. While writing “TheAncestral Footstep” between April and May 1858, Hawthorne viewed such
artworks as the Faun of Praxiteles and “the bronze she-wolf suckling
Romulus and Remus” in the Capitol and conceived the first idea of his
Italian romance.48 This overlap in the time of their composition andconception, as well as their correspondence in terms of subject matter,

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enables these two works to be regarded as twin texts. In The Marble Faun,
the role of “the Adam and Eve of a new epoch,” who reject the blood-soaked
soil, is assumed by Kenyon and Hilda, American artists in Rome. However,
it is dubious in the Italian romance whether the America to which they are
returning is “a virgin soil.”At the beginning of The Marble Faun, Hawthorne introduces its Roman
setting as follows: “Far off, the view is shut in by the Alban mountains,
looking just the same, amid all this decay and change, as when Romulus
gazed thitherward over his half-finished wall.”49 Here, Rome’s mythicalfounder is depicted without any mention of his killing of Remus. Led by this
implicit fratricide, the romance tells another fratricidal story: Donatello’s
murder of the Model, a.k.a. “Brother Antonio.” The passage near the end of
the romance—“the Republic was again crumbling into ruin”—refers to not
only Rome’s repeated civil wars and the ongoing wars of 1859–60 in thecourse of Risorgimento but also the America that had by then become
deeply divided.50
3. A DISUNITED STORY OF “DIS UNITED STATES” IN THE
TRANSNATIONAL CONTEXT
The Hawthornes moved from Rome to London in May 1859, just after
war broke out in northern Italy. While staying in England, the author
published The Marble Faun. Preparing for the publication, he wrote to
Ticknor: “I have another Romance ready to be written, as soon as this one is
off the stocks.”51 When he returned home to Concord, Massachusetts, withhis family in June 1860, however, things did not turn out as he expected.
Hawthorne tackled the second and third manuscripts of the American
Claimant romance—“Etherege” and “Grimshawe”—between the latter halfof 1860 and the fall of 1861. Into “Etherege” he inserts a revealing aside:“President Buchanan of dis United States.”52 Indeed, Hawthorne and his
romance were going through the disunited state of the nation: South
Carolina’s secession from the Union, Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, theConfederate bombing of Fort Sumter, the First Battle of Bull Run, and thecrushed hopes of a swift close to the war.53 This war assumed transnationalsignificance. “The U.S. Civil War,” Armitage states, “took place at the heartof a global capitalist economy built on cotton and the labor of the enslaved,with ramifications felt in the Caribbean, Europe, Egypt, and South Asia.”54
Hawthorne—as former consul in Liverpool, the global center of the cotton
trade in his time and the largest slave-trading port in Europe in the

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eighteenth century—must have had this context in view.55 As seen above, hecompared the system of merchant ships to slavery in his letter to Sumner. In
fact, within the same notebook entry in which he describes the death of the“kidnapped” farmer Smith, Hawthorne writes the following: “The seed ofthe long-stapled cotton, now cultivated in America, was sent thither in 1786
from the Bahama islands by some of the royalist refugees who had settled
there.” Hawthorne captures the dark side of American prosperity when heremarks: “to the refugees, America owes as much of her prosperity as is dueto the cotton crops, and much of whatever harm is to result from slavery.”56
Considered in the course of the American Claimant romance’s
transformation, “Etherege” displays a noticeable tendency to situate
America and England, along with their participation in the slavery andcotton industry, in a transnational context. Significantly, this manuscript
contains a new introductory part about the protagonist’s boyhood in
America. Unlike “The Ancestral Footstep,” “Etherege” is not journal-likebut consists of thirty sections, ten of which comprise the author’s working
notes.57 The first nine sections are set in America, whereas the rest basicallyfollow the story of “The Ancestral Footstep,” although a number of majoralterations are made as the manuscript proceeds. The setting of theAmerican story plays an important role. It is modeled on the Charter Street
Burying Point in Salem, where Hawthorne’s ancestor John—William
Hathorne’s son and the notorious judge of the Salem witchcraft trials(1692)—was buried. In “Etherege,” the graveyard is characterized as “themost ancient” and “more English than anything else in town” because of the“bones and dust of the first ancestors.”58 The story is set around the turn ofthe nineteenth century. Thus, the graveyard connects the past to the present
as well as England to America.
The protagonist, now named Ned (Edward) Etherege, lives in a housenext to the graveyard with Doctor Etherege (Ned’s guardian), Elsie (theDoctor’s niece), Hannah (a handmaid), and the Doctor’s pet spiders. Beingan orphan, Ned often thinks about his unknown origin and hopes to go to
England someday to search for a Bloody Footstep and a mansion connectedwith it, which he vaguely remembers being told about by his mother or
nurse. The Doctor exerts a strong influence on Ned. This “ancient
gentleman” was “a traveller in various parts of the world”—Paris, Rome,
Vienna, and London—and “studied in famous old universities.”59 Based on
this background, the Doctor gives instruction to Ned and leaves him alegacy so that the orphan may continue his studies after his guardian’s deathand become a politician. However, the Doctor is also related to other parts of

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the world. His pet spiders are from “some torrid region,” and his favorite is a
“great African spider.” His cobwebby room is described as “the only textile
factory that existed, at that epoch, in New England.”60 When the Doctor isrecast as a more sinister personage later in “Etherege,” his power to trammel
others is called “a kind of slavery.”61
Another important episode in the American part is Mountford’s search for
Colcord’s grave. Mountford, a London lawyer from the Temple and envoyof the English family, visits the Doctor to ask about the grave. Searchingwith Mountford for this grave in the adjoining graveyard, Ned discovers anantique key supposedly connected to an English property. Mountford’s storyof Colcord is also noteworthy. Colcord, he says, “appears to have been oneof the prisoners at the battle of Worcester, whom the Roundhead
Government transported to America”; afterward, Colcord lived in New
England “as a bond-servant, bought at public auction.”62 Mountford’sreference to the Battle of Worcester, along with the Temple’s implied
relation with the Wars of the Roses, suggests that Hawthorne is here
drawing a connection between these civil wars in England and bond servants
as chattel in colonial New England. Colcord seems to be the same person as
the second son, who left the Bloody Footstep, mentioned below. Although
the episode of Colcord fades away in “Etherege,” it reappears in“Grimshawe” with different details.
Ned goes to England more than twenty years later, when the English partof the story begins. The family history is more explicitly connected with theEnglish history of bloodshed in “Etherege.” The hospital of the family, now
named the Brathwaites, was founded on “the transgressions of the builders;
the wealth unjustly obtained, in the wars of the Roses.”63 Ned is brought into
the hospital in a state of unconsciousness and provided with care after being
unknowingly assaulted by Brathwaite, the current owner of the mansion,
who attempts to remove the American. Pearson, a pensioner at the hospital,
helps Ned; he meets Elsie again as Pearson’s daughter. The legend of the
Bloody Footstep is given various possible origins: the Norman Conquest,
the Wars of the Roses, “Bloody Mary’s days,” and the English Civil Wars.64
The family’s second son, who left the Bloody Footstep, becomes the only
Protestant member of the Catholic family. Hawthorne illustrates that this son
was “kidnapped” to America, which calls to mind the above-mentioned
farmer Smith.65
The transnational context of “Etherege” is foregrounded in the new sceneof a dinner party that the Warden of the hospital organizes for Ned. Dishes
and drinks from all over the world—sherry, port, claret, turtle, salmon, “all

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candied conserves of the Indies,” and so on—are made possible by the
British Empire’s trade.66 At the party, Ned’s appointment as US ambassador
to Hohenlinden is celebrated.67 The Warden asks his “transatlantic guest” tomake an “international speech.”68 Ned meets Brathwaite, also the Warden’sguest, on this occasion. The owner of the English mansion remains a “longItalianized Englishman,” but Hawthorne seeks better ideas. One of them is“a partaker in the massacres of India”—that is, the Indian Mutiny (1857–59), which Hawthorne paraphrases in terms of fratricide: “a man bedaubed
all over with the blood of his own countrymen.”69
During his long-awaited visit to Brathwaite Hall, Ned comes across its
entrance, stained with the Bloody Footstep. En route, he notices that themansion presents “a new aspect from this point of view,” which brings him arealization: “If I come back hither, with the purpose to make myself an
Englishman—especially an Englishman of rank and hereditary estate—thenfor me America has been discovered in vain, and the great spirit that has
been breathed into us is in vain; and I am false to it all!”70 However, Ned islater imprisoned in the mansion by Brathwaite. Although Pearson and Elsie
rescue him, this final event reveals that Pearson is the rightful heir to theestate. “Etherege” does not suggest that Ned and Elsie return to America as“the Adam and Eve of a new epoch.” In this manuscript, America is nolonger “a virgin soil,” as the graveyard next to their childhood home
represents.
In his abstract of the plot inserted in “The Ancestral Footstep,”
Hawthorne writes that the family legend had lost its “connecting links.”“Etherege” illuminates that the author himself was unclear about those links.
“I don’t in the least see my way,” he writes more than once; “Still I shallkeep hold of this slippery idea, stubbornly, stubbornly, and grasp again, andyet again, and seize it wholly at last.”71 Hawthorne’s torturous process offiguring the links out, however, evoked a long-forgotten memory in his own
family history.
4.

RETURN TO THE FRATRICIDAL ORIGINS OF THE NATION AND THE SELF

“Grimshawe” is about half the length of “Etherege.” Of its fifteen
sections, the first eleven are set in America; after an intervening section
consisting of an author’s note, the last three relocate to England.72 The
English part of the story ends abruptly soon after the protagonist, now
named Ned (Edward) Redclyffe, is brought to the hospital. The current
owner of the English mansion no longer appears, and Hawthorne’s emphasis

42

NOZOMI FUJIMURAin “Grimshawe” is placed elsewhere.
As before, the American part begins with Ned’s early life, with the Doctor(now called Grimshawe, Grim, or Ormskirk), Elsie, Hannah, and theDoctor’s spiders in the house next to Salem’s oldest and most Englishtinctured graveyard. In “Grimshawe,” however, Hawthorne highlights thecommunity at a specific time: “it was a very rude epoch, just when the
country had come through the war of the Revolution, and while the surges ofthat commotion were still seething and swelling, and while the habits andmorals of every individual in the community still felt its influence.”73 Thus,
Hawthorne situates “Grimshawe” in the fratricidal origin of the nation: theAmerican Revolution.74
This setting is symbolic. Describing the townspeople’s antipathy toward
the Doctor as a “Tory,” Hawthorne chooses a wording similar to the “partyspirit” that he used to denote pre–Civil War America: “Nobody thought very
well of him . . . so that he had not that very desirable strength, in a society
split up into many sects, of being able to rely upon the party-sympathies ofany one of them.”75 Meanwhile, in the scene in which these people mob theDoctor, the author elucidates “the genuine hereditary growth of the frame of
public mind which produced the witchcraft delusion.”76 In short, Hawthorne
attends to the American history of bloodshed from colonial New England to
the American Civil War.
In “Grimshawe,” Hawthorne alters the legend of the Bloody Footstep toillustrate such “party-sympathies.” Here, his use of point of view isparticularly significant. The Doctor and Colcord (also called Seymour) bothnarrate the family legend, thus revealing its different aspects. As the Doctor
remarks, “There are two ways of telling that legend.”77 First, the Doctor is “alow-born Englishman” who harbors enmity against the family. In his legend,
the only Puritan son of the Catholic family became a masked headsman ofCharles I; afterward, he always “made a bloody track wherever he went.”
This Puritan son was hated by his family because he “fought against his own
brothers.” Thus, he was “sent to Virginia and sold as a bond slave” buteventually came to New England.78 Meanwhile, for Colcord, the family’s
second son who emigrated to America was “of a milder, sweeter cast” thanhis brothers. As a descendant of this second son, Colcord relates that his
ancestor was “one of the earliest Quakers converted by George Fox.”
According to this legend, the second son escaped from his cruel papist
brothers and left “much track of blood” as he went, bleeding from his
tortured foot. He eventually came to New England, but there, he suffered“much persecution likewise from the Puritans.”79 Later, in the English part,NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE’S TRANSNATIONAL REVISION OF AMERICA AND CIVIL WARS

43

Colcord reappears as the pensioner at the hospital and emphasizes theatonement of its founder—his ancestor—rather than his crime during theWars of the Roses. This founder, Edward Redclyffe, is the Doctor’s object ofrevenge; the Doctor makes Ned (Edward Redclyffe) his namesake so thatthe orphan may supplant the family. Thus, their stories trace not one footstep
but a trail of bloody footsteps from England to America, reversing thevictimized and the victimizer according to their respective viewpoints.
Significantly, Hawthorne’s representation of America, and Salem inparticular, as the successor to the English history of fratricide includes his
family’s connection to this history: William Hathorne’s persecution of
Quakers and John’s hanging of Salem witches. In this regard, it isnoteworthy that in “Grimshawe,” Salem is also portrayed withintransnational relations. Narrating the origin of the Doctor’s spiders,
Hawthorne writes: “from certain inquiries and transactions of Doctor
Ormskirk’s with some of the ship masters of the port, who followed the Eastor West Indian, the African, or the South American trade, it was supposedthat this old philosopher was in the habit of importing choice monstrosities
in the spider kind from all those tropic regions.”80 While “Etherege”
suggests the Doctor’s personal connection with slavery through his African
spider, “Grimshawe” shows that his importation of spiders is made possibleby the community’s commitment to trade with these regions. This is also
applicable to Hannah’s characterization. While the handmaid plays almost
no part in “Etherege,” “Crusty Hannah” in “Grimshawe” is introduced as “amixture of Indian and Negro, & as some say, Monkey”; she is “such a
mixture of persons and races as could be found only at a seaport.”81 Here,
Salem is foregrounded as a seaport town.
This aspect of Salem calls to mind that Hawthorne’s father, Nathaniel
Hathorne, was a sailor.82 His 1795–98 logbook of the ships America andPerseverance reveals that he visited places such as Bengal, St. Helena,
Ascension, Batavia, Manila, and Canton on his voyages.83 He died fromyellow fever in Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana, in early 1808, when his son wasjust three years old. In 1820, sixteen-year-old Hawthorne was given thelogbook. He must have read it with a deep yearning for a connection withhis father whom he barely remembered. His own writing on its title pageshows both his identification with his namesake father and, by entering thedate 1820, his differentiation of himself from his father. However,Hawthorne changed his name around the time he began his literary career.
By so doing, he symbolically killed Nathaniel Hathorne, his father and his
earlier self.

44

NOZOMI FUJIMURANathaniel Hathorne, Logbook of the ship America and ship Perseverance, 1795–98.
Courtesy of Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Rowley, MA.

James R. Mellow states, “Although Hawthorne frequently remarked on
his paternal ancestors and their lives, he exhibited a marked reticence—or,
perhaps, reverence—concerning his father.” “Nathaniel Hathorne,” Mellow
continues, “is virtually never mentioned in Hawthorne’s letters orjournals.”84
I speculate that while Hawthorne was revising the American Claimantromance, his notebook description of Daniel Smith’s death might havereminded him of his father, who had likewise died on foreign shores morethan fifty years previously. If so, the writer in his later years could also havethought of a possible aspect of his father that young Hawthorne had neverimagined—Captain Hathorne, remembered by a colleague as “the sternest
man that ever walked a deck,” might have been a cruel captain.85 In addition,according to Margaret B. Moore, a Salem captain “was murdered by theslaves he was transporting in 1789,” although “[s]lavery was abolished in
Massachusetts in 1780, and the slave trade prohibited in 1788.”86 It must be
underscored that I do not have any proof of Nathaniel Hathorne’s
involvement in shipboard cruelty or the slave trade. However, such a line ofthought is suggested by Hawthorne’s characterization of the Doctor as theNATHANIEL HAWTHORNE’S TRANSNATIONAL REVISION OF AMERICA AND CIVIL WARS

45

father figure.
In fact, one of the major alterations in “Grimshawe” is its depiction of thefather-son relationship between the Doctor and Ned. Seeing in Ned “therudiments of a poetic and singular mind,” the Doctor says, “I want you to bea man; and I’ll have you a man or nothing.”87 When Ned enters boarding
school, the Doctor tells him, “Ned, my son, goodbye. . . . Do not be castdown, my boy. Face the world; grasp the thistle strongly, and it will sting
you the less. Have faith in your own fist! Fear no man! Have no secretplot!”88 However, Hawthorne as a writer had less to do with his “fist” thanwith a “plot” for his story. Earlier, in “The Custom-House,” the introduction
to The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne depicts an imaginary conversation between
his ancestors William and John about himself: “A writer of story-books!
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, thedegenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!”89 For Hawthorne as awriter, his sense of deviation from the fathers’ norms—the American gendernorms of a self-made man—was a standpoint from which he criticallyreconsidered the America created by the fathers.90
Given this background, a passage near the end of “Grimshawe” attains a
special significance. In the hospital, Ned is asked about his old scar andanswers from a wandering mind that is recovering from the assault: “It wasan Indian bullet . . . shot at me in battle, two or three hundred years
hereafter.” The surgeon responds to this incoherent speech, “Ah; he hasserved in the East Indies.”91 Hawthorne’s use of the ambiguous word
“Indian” is intentional. In “Etherege,” the owner of the English mansion is
once envisioned as a partaker in the Indian Mutiny. At the end of“Grimshawe,” Hawthorne suggests that his American protagonist is aparticipant in the Indian Wars, to which his family was deeply committed.
CONCLUSION
Hawthorne’s long years of grappling with the American Claimantromance was a painful process of facing both national and personal trauma
and recovering their “connecting links.” After his years of reconsidering
America in the transnational history of civil wars, he relinquished his initialidea of the romance presenting a contrast between American democracy andEnglish aristocracy, with the American Adam and Eve rejecting the bloody
soil and returning to a virgin land; he ultimately came to view his native
country, his family, and himself as part of the long history of fratricide.

46

NOZOMI FUJIMURA

Hawthorne shows the influence of what Armitage calls “the republican
story,” which regards civil wars as endlessly repeated from the mythicalorigin of Rome. He also reflects the nineteenth-century tendency to see
every war as fratricide. Hawthorne’s experiences in Britain and Italy, his
return to the disunited country, and his ambivalence toward England andAmerica as well as the fathers all caused the romance’s transformation.
Although Hawthorne abandoned the American Claimant romance, hediscovered something valuable through the process: the potential ofjuxtaposing two stories told by opposing parties, as shown by the legend of
the Bloody Footstep told by the Doctor and Colcord in “Grimshawe.”
Hawthorne subsequently developed this way of telling stories in the
Septimius romance, in which the legend of the Bloody Footstep once again
appears—this time, as the heritage handed down by both the English andNative American lineages of the mixed-blood protagonist Septimius. Living
in a house on Concord’s Lexington Road—the location of Hawthorne’s own
house—at the time of American Revolution, Septimius kills an English
officer who turns out to be his kin. Here, Hawthorne went on to tackle theAmerican history of fratricide that had resulted in the ongoing Civil War, of
which he would not live to see the end.
NOTES
An early version of this paper was presented at the Tokyo Branch Meetingof the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society of Japan, Taisho University, on
February 29, 2020.
I am grateful to Claire Blechman, digital asset manager at the Peabody
Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, and Jennifer Hornsby, reference
librarian at the museum’s Phillips Library, Rowley, Massachusetts, for theirassistance with my research on Nathaniel Hathorne’s logbook and thepermission to use its image.
1
For biographical information on Hawthorne, see James R. Mellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne
in His Times (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); and Brenda Wineapple,
Hawthorne: A Life (New York: Knopf, 2003). For his English years, see Raymona E. Hull,
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The English Experience, 1853–1864 (Pittsburgh: University ofPittsburgh Press, 1980).
2
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed.
William Charvat et al., vol. XII, The American Claimant Manuscripts (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 1977). All references to Hawthorne’s works relate to this edition (hereafterCE) and are noted by volume and page number. For basic information on these manuscripts,
see Edward H. Davidson and Claude M. Simpson, “Historical Commentary,” XII: 491–521.
3Charles Swann, Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tradition and Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE’S TRANSNATIONAL REVISION OF AMERICA AND CIVIL WARS

47

University Press, 1991), 132–259. For a revision of Swann’s overview of Hawthorne’s later
works, see Nozomi Fujimura, “Mikan no Saisei—The Marble Faun no Hôsôn Kôki Sakka
Keireki ni okeru Igi [Unfinished Resurrections: The Significance of The Marble Faun in the
Later Works of Hawthorne],” Studies in English Literature 92 (2015): 43.
4
Magnus Ullén and David Greven, “Late Hawthorne: A Polemical Introduction,”
Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 35.2 (2009): 8–9.
5
Robert Milder, Hawthorne’s Habitations: A Literary Life (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2013), 170, 271.
6
XII: 286.
7
Swann, 179; James Hewitson, “A System ‘Too Bare and Meagre for Human Nature toLove’: America in The American Claimant Manuscripts,” Nathaniel Hawthorne Review 35.2
(2009): 41.
8
My argument on the relation between “The Ancestral Footstep” and The Marble Faun isa revision of my earlier argument on the Italian romance. See Fujimura.
9David Armitage, Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2017), 19–20.
10
XII: 3–89.
11
XII: 5.
12
According to Loggins, William (ca. 1606/07–1681) was born in Bray, Berkshire, which
remained unknown to Hawthorne. See Vernon Loggins, The Hawthornes: The Story of Seven
Generations of an American Family (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951), 3–95.
13
CE, vol. XXI, The English Notebooks, 1853–1856 (1997), 138.
14
XXI: 9, 14.
15Bill Ellis, “Introduction: Hawthorne’s Consular Letters, 1853–1857,” CE, vol. XIX, The
Consular Letters, 1853–1855 (1988), 17.
16
XXI: 140.
17Regarding Hawthorne’s action to save abused sailors and their background, see Ellis,
25–39.
18
Reynolds considers Hawthorne’s reaction to the case of Smith and his letter to Sumner as
examples that show his characteristics as a reformer. See Larry J. Reynolds, Devils andRebels: The Making of Hawthorne’s Damned Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2008), 105–10.
19
XXI: 169.
20
XIX: 294; CE, vol. XVII, The Letters, 1853–1856 (1987), 345.
21
Ellis, 37.
22
XVII: 237.
23
XVII: 294.
24
XXI: 137.
25
XVII: 266.
26
XVII: 396–400.
27
Frederick Newberry, Hawthorne’s Divided Loyalties: England and America in His Works(Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987), 225.
28
XXI: 321–28.
29
XXI: 377–78.
30
XXI: 393–96.
31
CE, vol. XV, The Letters, 1813–1843 (1984), 139.
32
Marion L. Kesselring, Hawthorne’s Reading, 1828–1850: A Transcription and
Identification of Titles Recorded in the Charge-Books of the Salem Athenaeum (New York:
Haskell House Publishers, 1975), 47, 61.
33
Armitage, 93–120.

48

NOZOMI FUJIMURA

Armitage, 88.
Armitage, 46.
36
Armitage, 168–69.
37
XXI: 160.
38
XXI: 162.
39
XII: 472–80.
40
XII: 10–11.
41
Gollin considers that the Bloody Footstep in the three manuscripts “signifies ‘brotherly
hatred and attempted murder’” and sees in it “the archetypal fratricide of Cain, and theinherent fratricide of all civil wars.” Rita K. Gollin, “Estranged Allegiances in Hawthorne’s
Unfinished Romances.” Hawthorne and the Real: Bicentennial Essays, ed. Millicent Bell
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005), 163.
42
XII: 49.
43
XII: 29.
44
XII: 70, 84–85.
45
XII: 58.
46
XII: 79.
47
XII: 60–61.
48
CE, vol. XIV, The French and Italian Notebooks (1980), 162; Fujimura, 44.
49
CE, vol. IV, The Marble Faun (1968), 6.
50
IV: 443; Fujimura, 55.
51
CE, vol. XVIII, The Letters, 1857–1864 (1987), 164.
52
XII: 220.
53
James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988), 234–368.
54
Armitage, 169.
55
Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage, 2015), 200–203;
David Eltis and David Richardson, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2010), 52.
56
XXI: 169. Beckert also mentions the 1786 introduction of the long-staple cotton from the
Bahamas. See Beckert, 101.
57
XII: 90–342. What I call a “section” is a unit of passages separated by blank lines.
Sections are not numbered in the manuscript. Hawthorne’s working notes occur in the 2nd,
5th, 7th, 9th, 15th, 17th, 18th, 21st, 23rd, and 28th sections.
58
XII: 91.
59
XII: 90, 107.
60
XII: 93, 118, 110.
61
XII: 295.
62
XII: 100–01.
63
XII: 137.
64
XII: 151.
65
XII: 195.
66
XII: 235–39.
67
XII: 245.
68
XII: 168, 191.
69
XII: 205, 265.
70
XII: 280–81.
71
XII: 201–02.
72
XII: 343–471.
73
XII: 380.
34
35

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE’S TRANSNATIONAL REVISION OF AMERICA AND CIVIL WARS

49

Regarding the American Revolution as a civil war, see Armitage, 121–58.
XII: 384, 380–81.
76
XII: 382.
77
XII: 421.
78
XII: 364–68.
79
XII: 395–97.
80
XII: 350.
81
XII: 344, 440.
82
See Loggins, 189–210; Mellow, 12–14. Loggins and Mellow also refer to Nathaniel
Hathorne’s logbook.
83
Nathaniel Hathorne, Logbook of the Ship America and Ship Perseverance, 1795–1798,
Log 3003 (OS). Courtesy of Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Rowley, MA.
84
Mellow, 14.
85
Mellow, 13.
86
Margaret B. Moore, The Salem World of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbia: University ofMissouri Press, 1998), 13.
87
XII: 425–26.
88
XII: 431.
89
CE, vol. I, The Scarlet Letter (1962), 10.
90
Nozomi Fujimura, “‘A Text of Deep and Varied Meaning’: Nathaniel Hawthorne, ‘The
Story Teller,’ and the Making of the American Subject,” Studies in English Literature 51(2010): 50.
91
XII: 453.
7475