This posthumous gathering opens with the life of Franklin Pierce that Hawthorne wrote for his old Bowdoin classmate’s presidential campaign of 1852, tracing Pierce from his New Hampshire boyhood through Congress, the bar and the Mexican War. It also carries Hawthorne’s observations from a wartime journey to Washington and Virginia, where he watched the ironclad Monitor and the armies of 1862, along with briefer sketches.
A side of Hawthorne few readers meet: the reluctant political biographer and the sceptical observer of the Civil War. Download the free EPUB.