From Hawthorne to history: the mythologizing of John Endecott

Abstract

Since the Revolutionary War, American historians, literary artists, and social commentators have undertaken a retroactive search for an acceptable myth of origin predating the Revolution. While the war itself has been endlessly and successfully deployed as a sterling founding moment, that claim alone has proved insufficient for several reasons. First, Americans have long been ambivalent about their pre-Revolution Puritan heritage. The new republic emerging from the revolutionary effort rested on ground previously inhabited by British colonists (and others) since the 1620s, but the colonial past did not readily speak to the feisty, independent, and distinctively AAmerican” self-image that mythologized during and after the war. Additionally, by the 19th century, when the writing of New England history came prominently into vogue, quite a few pages of the Puritan chapter had become embarrassing. Something else was needed: an event earlier than the shot heard round the world in 1775, and a governing image more manly than the standard figure of the pious Puritans. When Nathaniel Hawthorne=s stories AEndicott and the Red Cross@ and AThe May- Pole of Merry Mount@ entered the nubile world of American literature in the 1830s, Hawthorne seemed to have answered that call. Reaching back to1634, he made historical John Endecott a central fictional figure: a man “wrought of iron” wielding a mighty sword against the idolatrous May-Pole and slashing the red cross from the English flag—precisely the needed image. Typically, Hawthorne’s readers, then and now, have generally missed his ironic signals and interpreted Endecott’s sword-play as the first declaration of independence. Hawthorne’s slippery tone has seldom produced more long-lasting literary and historical consequences than it has in his Endecott stories. This study analyzes their manifestations in a gallery of colonial and American historians, annalist, and folklorists (Hutchinson, Johnson, Parkman, Bancroft, Motley, Felt, Drake), through Longfellow and Whittier, to scholarly and family biographies of Endecott, and into the 20th century in Lowell’s plays and the Merry Mount opera of Hanson and Stokes. Endecott’s case dramatizes literature’s power to perform “cultural work” by trumping history when a nation needs to create its myths of origin from accounts of a dubious past.