

CRAS-38.2.-001 201..226


‘‘The Puritans of Today’’:
The Anti-WhigArgument
of The Scarlet Letter
Michael Ryan

Abstract: This essay explores the polemical context in which Nathaniel
Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter. It pays particular attention to the
Whig movement for moral reform in antebellum America, which sought
to merge church and state. Democrats like Hawthorne took exception to
this attempt to establish ‘‘moral government’’ in America. His novel argues
for an ideal of personal freedom in moral matters and criticizes the Whig
attempt to impose restrictive moral norms on human, especially sexual,
proclivities that Democrats such as Hawthorne felt were embodiments of
spirituality in nature. The novel refers obliquely to contemporary religious
debates that have been ignored by scholars, such as that concerning Horace
Bushnell’s God in Christ, a book whose presence in Hawthorne’s novel
is palpable. Bushnell was put on trial for heresy in 1849, as Hawthorne
was composing his novel. In the novel, Hawthorne enters those debates
and takes the side of natural religion against the Whig ideal of moral
government.

Keywords: religion, politics, Whig, Democrat, morality

Résumé : Le présent essai explore le contexte polémique où se situait
Nathaniel Hawthorne lorsqu’il a écrit The Scarlet Letter. Il porte une
attention particulière au mouvement Whig pour la réforme morale dans
une Amérique antebellum qui cherchait à fusionner l’Église et l’État. Des
Démocrates comme Hawthorne se sont insurgés contre cette tentative
d’établir un « gouvernement moral » en Amérique. Son roman présente
des arguments en faveur d’un idéal de liberté personnelle en ce qui a
trait aux questions morales, et critique la tentative des Whigs d’imposer
des normes morales restrictives aux tendances sexuelles des humains que
des Démocrates comme Hawthorne considéraient comme le symbole de la
spiritualité dans la nature. Le roman réfère obliquement à des débats
religieux contemporains qui ont été ignorés par les universitaires en ce
qui a trait au livre God in Christ de Horace Bushnell, un livre dont la

�CanadianReviewofAmericanStudies/Revuecanadienned’e¤ tudesame¤ ricaines38, no. 2, 2008


présence est perceptible dans le roman de Hawthorne. Bushnell a fait
l’objet d’un procès pour hérésie en 1849, alors même que Hawthorne
écrivait son roman. Dans son roman, Hawthorne s’immisce dans ces
débats et se range du côté de la religion naturelle contre l’idéal Whig
d’un gouvernement moral.

Mots clés : religion, politiques, Whig, Démocrate, moralité

To fetter the freedom of man is not only to act the part of tyranny,
but to inflict a gross wrong . . . [against] the essential equality
of men. . . . Endued, as they are, with the same appetites and
desires, with conscience, reason, and free will . . . sharers of the
same beautiful existence, handiwork of the same God,
children of a common destiny, hastening on to an eternal world,
who shall . . . affix the mark which shall debar either this one or
that one from the full fruition of every blessing of existence—every
gift of God?

—‘‘Democracy’’ (attr. John L. O’Sullivan)

We all know then, what moral government is, and that men cannot
exist in society without it. In that form of it called civil government,
the lowest culprit in his prison knows its general nature, its principles,
its end, and its absolute necessity to this end, as well as the judge who
condemns him. . . . Now the object of a perfect moral governor is not
merely to secure right moral action, but to secure it . . . by a peculiar
influence—the influence of his authority . . . It is to bring his subject to
. . . an act of obedience . . . involving . . . recognition of [the governor’s]
right to rule.

—Nathaniel Taylor, Lectures on the Moral Government of God (1859)

Scholars of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) have
paid surprisingly little attention to the ambient religious debates
from which the novel draws much of the substance for its internal
polemic.1 A conflict between those who would use legislation to
control personal morality and those who opposed such intrusive-
ness in the name of the doctrine of natural revelation is central both
to the novel and to the culture wars of the era in which Hawthorne
wrote. Historian Daniel Walker Howe argues that ‘‘without an
understanding of the religion of the middle period, there can be
no understanding of its politics’’ (‘‘Religion’’ 121), and the same
might be said of a work such as The Scarlet Letter that is concerned

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with moral issues. To understand it fully, we must take into consid-
eration the religious debates of the era.2

The leading public intellectuals of the early nineteenth century
were theologians such as Lyman Beecher, Francis Wayland, Asa
Burton, Nathaniel Taylor and Horace Bushnell. Those intellectuals
who were not professional theologians—Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, George Bancroft and
John L. O’Sullivan—were nevertheless steeped in religious
ideas, and their writings resonate with a sense of the unquestioned
truth of the doctrines of natural revelation. For the orthodox
Protestant theologians such as Beecher and Taylor, God was a
distant being who oversaw a sin-prone humanity that needed
guidance from churchmen in order to attain salvation. In Their
Brothers’ Keepers: Moral Stewardship in the United States, 1800–1865,
Clifford Griffin writes, ‘‘These latter-day Calvinists still argued
that only the Almighty could save souls—that men by their own
acts alone could not merit redemption’’ (47–8). For intellectuals
such as Bancroft and O’Sullivan, in contrast, as well as for more
liberal theologians such as Burton and Bushnell, God was a pres-
ence in nature which guaranteed that human passion was intrinsi-
cally moral and that human striving could lead to salvation. In the
chapter ‘‘The Rise of Religious Liberalism,’’ in his book Churchmen
and Philosophers, Bruce Kuklick notes that, at this time,

[t]he issues of sovereignty, responsibility, grace, and depravity
all found their critical substantive locus in the question of the
will’s freedom—the most important recurring theme in the
literature. . . . [N]atural theology was increasingly stressed.
Newtonianism implied that knowledge of God was contained
in nature. . . . For the liberals, at bottom, religion rested on the
revelations to which the biblical miracles testified. Other bases
for Christianity—experience, tradition, the authority of the
church—were set aside. (44, 82–3)

These theological differences were not merely intellectual. The two
major political parties of the era, the Whigs and the Democrats,
appealed to religious ideas to justify their contending positions
regarding everything from moral legislation to economic policy.
A major difference between anticlerical Democrats and Whig evan-
gelical conservatives was in their views of the proper relation of
church and state.3 The Whigs, whom Daniel Howe characterizes as

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‘‘the evangelical united front in the polling place’’ (Howe, Political
Culture 18), laid claim to the Puritan theocratic legacy that author-
ized public supervision of private morality. Wishing to create a
‘‘Righteous Empire’’ in the United States, in which what they
called ‘‘moral government’’ would merge law and religion, Whigs
sought to use legislation to bring about ‘‘moral purity and reform’’
(Kelley, Cultural Pattern 163). Modernizers, they believed in using
government to promote business-friendly economic development
through monopolies, charters, tariffs and publicly funded canals
and roads. Having witnessed the disestablishment of the Christian
churches in all the states, Whig religious conservatives turned, in
mid-century, to education, especially in the Sunday School and
public school movements, to ensure that Christian values and
norms prevailed in America.4 Historian Ronald Formisano writes,

Henry Cabot Lodge once called the Federalists ‘‘the Puritan
party,’’ and he might have said the same of the Whigs. The
Federal and Whig parties both expressed the ancient Puritan
concern for society as a corporate whole; both attempted to use
the government to provide for society’s moral and material
development. (Transformation 289)

Whigs found justification for their program of moral government
in the reformed Calvinist theology that emerged in the early nine-
teenth century. While taking into account the emphasis on free will
in post-Enlightenment America, theologians such as Beecher and
Taylor nevertheless held that humans were innately prone to sinful-
ness. Beecher argued ‘‘that man is desperately wicked, and cannot
be qualified for good membership in society without the influence
of moral restraint’’ (qtd. in Bodo 153). In his famous 1828 sermon,
Concio ad Clerum: A Sermon On Human Nature, Sin, and Freedom,
Nathaniel Taylor preached,

What then are we to understand, when it is said that mankind
are depraved by nature? I answer—that such is their nature, that
they will sin and only sin in all the appropriate circumstances of
their being. . . . By the moral depravity of mankind I intend
generally, the entire sinfulness of their moral character.
(qtd. in Ahlstrom 220–2)

This vision of the world justified the Whig claim that an elite of
morally superior people should exercise moral government over
others through the political state. Lee Benson notes that ‘‘[Whig]
Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune argued that the state was a

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proper instrument for the regulation of every ‘evil’ in society’’ (207).
Michael Holt, in The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party,
points out that ‘‘to a far greater degree than Democrats, Whigs
backed state intervention to regulate social behavior: temperance
legislation, Sunday blue laws, and the creation of state-run public
schools’’ (68).

Democrats opposed the Whig desire to merge church and state and
to use law to regulate personal behaviour. ‘‘The Puritans of today,’’
a Democratic newspaper editor wrote in 1852, ‘‘like the Puritans
of 1700, conceive themselves to be better and holier than others,
and entitled—by divine right as it were—to govern and control
the actions and dictate the opinions of others’’ (Kelley, ‘‘Portrait’’
79). If Whigs thought of themselves as ‘‘the party of decency and
respectability, the guardians of piety, sober living, proper manners,
thrift, steady habits, and book learning’’ (Kelley, Cultural Pattern
166), Democrats portrayed them as religious zealots who consti-
tuted a threat to civil liberties. William Cullen Bryant held that
‘‘our civil and religious liberty exists, not in consequence, but
in spite of the spirit and genius of Puritanism’’ (qtd. in Howe,
Political Culture 89) In one fictional debate between a Democrat
and a Whig in a pamphlet from 1854, the Democrat contends that
‘‘all legislation having any other object but the protection of rights is
not only injurious to morality, but is in itself immoral and wicked’’
(qtd. in Benson, 206–7). Robert Kelley notes, regarding these
debates,

Central to the ideology of Anglo-American, freethinking
intellectuals was a conviction that clerics must be kept out
of politics, that their moral preachments were arrogance and
their attempts to control the lives of others a continuing danger
to freedom of thought and belief. This led many Democratic
intellectuals to reject abolitionism, for it emerged out of the
camp of the enemy: zealous, moralistic, church-and-state
Yankeeism. (Cultural Pattern 171)

If Whig political theory drew on reformed neo-Calvinist theology
to justify its ideal of moral government, Democratic political theory
turned instead to the theological doctrine of natural revelation.
Democratic intellectuals such as O’Sullivan and Bancroft believed
that nature, because infused with divinity, should be allowed to
follow its own course without theocratic interference. Morality
arose spontaneously from natural processes, and no legislation

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and no moral discipline were needed to control passions that,
because natural and therefore divinely inspired, could not be
sinful. Natural revelation located divinity in everyone, without
distinction of ‘‘rank,’’ an appealing idea in an era when egalitarian
ideals fuelled immigrant aspirations. Bancroft writes, ‘‘The barbar-
ian who roams our Western prairies has like passions and
like endowments with ourselves. He bears within him the instinct
of Deity, the consciousness of a spiritual nature, the love of beauty,
the rule of morality’’ (414). By placing the ‘‘rule of morality’’
in nature rather than institutions or laws, Democrats sought
to undermine the Whig justification for moral government by
a holy elite.

Democrats used similar arguments to oppose Whig pro-business
economic policy. They believed that a benevolent nature, if left on
its own, would make all right with the economic world.5 Whig
‘‘improvements,’’ especially banks and chartered monopolies that
favoured the economic elite, did more harm than good by making
people dependent on government instead of on their own natural
talents. Democrats argued for a model of economic self-government
that would approximate the self-regulating laws of nature that are
God’s creation: ‘‘[T]he voluntary principle, the principle of
Freedom, suggested to us by the analogy of the divine government
of the Creator; the natural laws which will establish themselves and
find their own level are the best laws’’ (‘‘Introduction’’ 7). America
should place trust in ‘‘the same fundamental principle of spontane-
ous action and self-regulation which produces the beautiful order of
[nature]’’ (‘‘Introduction’’ 7). At the core of the theory was an ideal
of self-dependent manhood: ‘‘[By] throwing men upon their own
energies for success, [free trade] would accustom them to the prac-
tice of self-dependence and train them to habits of perseverance and
economy’’ (‘‘History’’ 305).

Sexual morality was a crucial site of conflict between the contend-
ing parties. In 1843 in Michigan, when Democrats ‘‘amended and
loosened the laws relating to adultery and fornication which had
made those sins criminal offenses,’’ Whigs characterized the change
as an outrage that struck ‘‘at the foundations of our social system’’
(Formisano, Birth 124). If Whigs devoted their energies to institu-
tions such as the Magdalen Society that spread moral discipline
amongst prostitutes and domestic workers, Democrats were more
inclined to be critical of moral institutions that discriminated along
gender lines in the allocation of moral punishment. In an 1846

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essay—‘‘The Legal Wrongs of Women’’—in The Democratic Review,
the anonymous writer argues, ‘‘The injustice is sufficiently flagrant
which permits a man, whether single or married, to lead a licen-
tious life without losing caste, while a poor girl, betrayed through
her affections into guilt, almost inevitably becomes castaway
through public scorn’’ (482). That this argument is central to The
Scarlet Letter should alert us to how steeped the novel is in these
contemporary debates.

As an inhabitant of a Whig stronghold—Salem, Massachusetts—
Hawthorne would have been keenly aware of the Whigs’ use of
Puritanism as a justification for a strong government role in pro-
moting business-friendly economic development and the moral
‘‘improvement’’ of the population. In 1849, while Hawthorne was
composing The Scarlet Letter, regular advertisements for a history of
the Puritans in the town’s Whig newspaper, the Salem Gazette, made
explicit links between Puritanism and Whig policies. According to
the advertisements, the book, a republication of William Hubbard’s
General History of New England, praised ‘‘the hardy Puritan pioneers
who for God, for Conscience, and for Humanity braved the perils
of the ocean . . . [and] planted on this rocky shore the principles
that have made us what we are.’’ Those ‘‘principles’’ sustained
‘‘the best’’ of New England, ‘‘its Manufactures, its Commerce, its
Public Buildings . . . its contributions to the public and private
nature of the great stack of New England industrial and productive
accumulations’’ (Salem Gazette).6 As the Whigs styled themselves
neo-Puritans, the Puritans, according to the Advertiser, were proto-
Whigs. The Sunday School Union, a typical Whig evangelical
organization, which emphasized rote learning, Puritan-style, of
religious doctrine, also held its annual meeting in Salem in the
summer of 1849. And the Whig governor of Massachusetts,
George Briggs, made clear, with calls for public days of fasting in
November of the same year, that he felt religion and government
served a common purpose: ‘‘The Holy Scriptures declare, that if
men will ‘acknowledge God in all their ways, he will direct their
paths’ ’’ (Salem Gazette). It must have been a trying place to live for a
Democrat who was ‘‘beyond the church,’’ as his sister-in-law Louisa
Hawthorne put it in a letter to Sophia Peabody (qtd. in Fick 155).

What this polemical context suggests is that, in 1850, a depiction of
Puritans as less moral than they claimed to be or as being as prone
to the very passions they condemned in others would have been an
especially appealing polemical gesture for a Democrat to make.

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Kelley notes that ‘‘Most Whigs believed . . . [t]he nation was right-
fully to be thought of as a single moral community to be welded
together in holy living, to be fashioned in the image of New
England’s ‘citty on a hill’ ’’ (Cultural Pattern 163). The Scarlet
Letter—I will argue—by asking how Puritans can pretend to
govern others’ morality if they themselves are subject to the same
natural passions as everyone else, implies a similar question regard-
ing the Whigs who sought to establish moral government
in America in the mid-nineteenth century.

The story of The Scarlet Letter is framed by a rejection of moral
government, ‘‘whatever priests or legislators ha[ve] established’’
(199). The anachronistic ‘‘legislators’’ (there were none in America
in the 1640s) should have alerted readers that, when Hester points
Dimmesdale the way to freedom, away from ‘‘the clerical band . . .
or the church’’ (199), her gesture has a contemporary resonance.
The major themes and concerns of the novel acquire an added
significance when considered in this polemical context. The
Custom House sketch comes to seem a meditation on the negative
effect of Whig economic policies on the people’s moral health.
Dimmesdale’s election-day sermon becomes more pointedly
Democratic in tenor and substance, and his death, rather than seem-
ing a gesture of abdication, instead takes on the air of a martyrolo-
gical indictment of Whig religious institutions that, in the eyes of
Democrats, fostered hypocrisy and promoted an unhealthy sense of
guilt and self-punishment regarding natural inclinations. Hester ’s
fate, in the polemical context, seems less a model for a vague sense
of compromise with slavery than a more affirmative and positive
example of non-institutional religion and of a natural piety that
owes nothing to the moral guidance of orthodox churchmen.

In reconsidering the novel in light of the culture war between
Whigs and Democrats, I will concentrate on the Custom House
chapter, the conflict between Hester, Pearl and the Puritan autho-
rities, and Dimmesdale’s fate.

The Scarlet Letter opens with an odd meditation on the negative
moral effects of people’s economic dependence on Uncle Sam.
Whig economic policy called for the government to subsidize
economic development that, according to Democrats, served
the interests of the Whig economic elite. In Whig hands, gov-
ernment had been used to create, as Hawthorne puts it in The Life
of Franklin Pierce, ‘‘commerce where it did not exist’’ (29).

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Government assistance for business was also seen by Democrats as
an obstacle to the free development of the talents of the industrious
classes—the labourers, artisans, farmers and small businessmen
who were natural Jacksonian constituencies.

Commentators on the Custom House have focused on Hawthorne’s
account of his Puritan ancestors and on the description of the
romance aesthetic. Yet these topics occupy only a few pages of
the text. The rest of the sketch is concerned with the negative
moral consequences of dependence on government for one’s
economic well-being. According to Rush Welter, Democrats were
especially concerned with the moral effects of politics on society,
and in their eyes, Whigs, by asking for government subsidies for
business, were undermining the ideal of self-dependence that was
the foundation of moral citizenship. Democrat Gideon Welles, in
1847, articulated this position: ‘‘One man looks to government for
assistance, his neighbor relying on his own energies asks only for
protection. . . . [T]heir fundamental opinions . . . distinguish between
the democrat and the anti-democrat’’ (qtd. in Brock 23).

In his account of life in the Custom House, Hawthorne portrays
those who accept government support as having lost contact
with the spirit in nature. He compares them to quadrupeds,
whose ‘‘torpid,’’ ‘‘sluggish,’’ and ‘‘dependent’’ behaviour contains
‘‘a very trifling admixture of moral and spiritual ingredients’’ (14).
Hawthorne notes that ‘‘the greater part of my officers were Whigs’’
(13), and he is especially severe in his evaluation of the Inspector:
‘‘He had no soul, no heart, no mind.’’ His father ‘‘had created an
office for him,’’ and like the others, he suffered ‘‘moral detriment
from this peculiar mode of life’’ (18). The negative consequence of
having a powerful government make jobs for people by fostering
economic development is that it makes people lose contact with
their own ‘‘native energy,’’ ‘‘original nature,’’ and capacity for
‘‘self-support.’’ To Democrats such as Bancroft and O’Sullivan,
such loss was the same as losing contact with revealed divinity
in nature. For this reason, perhaps, Hawthorne compares such a
dependent state of being to ‘‘a quality of enchantment like that
of the Devil’s wages’’ that deprives one of one’s ‘‘soul’’ (39). In a
recognizably Democratic gesture, Hawthorne characterizes Whig
policies that interfere with nature as immoral.

Hawthorne offers himself as an example of why government sup-
port of any kind in economic life is detrimental to the ‘‘moral and

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intellectual health’’ of people. Having become dependent for sup-
port on the government by taking the surveyor’s job at the Custom
House, Hawthorne suffers the same moral harm as his Whig
co-workers. Like the Whigs, he loses contact with divinity revealed
in nature: ‘‘Nature,—except it were human nature,—the nature that
is developed in earth and sky, was, in one sense, hidden from me;
and all the imaginative delight, wherewith it had been spiritualized,
passed away out of my mind’’ (26). In this light, the account of
romance aesthetics acquires a political resonance. Hawthorne
twice uses the word ‘‘spiritualize’’—the same word he uses to char-
acterize the alienation from nature brought about by dependence on
government—to describe how romance transforms reality. When
‘‘spiritualized,’’ life’s details ‘‘seem to lose their actual substance,
and become things of intellect’’ (39).That Hawthorne regains his
ability to ‘‘spiritualize’’ nature once he leaves the Custom House
is proof that freedom from dependence on government is morally
salutary. When he puts aside ‘‘the strong arm of Uncle Sam’’ that
raises and supports him, he is able to regain his ‘‘original nature,
the capability of self-support,’’ and this takes the form of his exer-
cising his natural talent as a writer. He regains ‘‘his soul . . . its
sturdy force, its courage and constancy, its truth, its self-reliance,
and all that gives the emphasis to manly character’’ (39).

What is striking about the Custom House sketch is the identification
of theology, politics and aesthetics. Whig economic policies are cri-
ticized on Democratic theological grounds. They distance the indi-
vidual from nature and from natural revelation. The romance
aesthetic, by abstracting imaginatively from the facts of sense per-
ception—the basis, according to orthodox neo-Puritan epistemol-
ogy, of moral truth—allows access to spirit in nature.7 Exercising
one’s natural talents in an economic sense, similarly ‘‘spiritualizes’’
the world. Spontaneous natural action, for Democrats, mimes divin-
ity in nature. The Democratic objection to Whig economic policy is
that it denies the individual the ability to achieve the moral good
through self-dependence by drawing on her or his own natural (and
therefore divinely inspired) talents. The novel continues this argu-
ment by portraying the Whig policy of merging church and state as
having a similarly immoral effect on people whose natural moral
powers are extinguished by moral supervision. The ‘‘consecration’’
that is their natural impulse is reviled rather than revered.

The novel opens by evoking what, in Democratic eyes, was
the Whig ideal of moral government, a world in which, as

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Hawthorne puts it, ‘‘religion and law were almost identical’’ (50).
From the outset, Hawthorne, by using terms such as ‘‘natural dig-
nity’’ and ‘‘free will,’’ characterizes Hester in terms that suggest
Democratic resistance to such government. Hester fulfils the
Democratic ideal of a nature at odds with restrictive moral rules
and given over to the free expression of self-regulating laws. She
grudgingly accepts her punishment, but her extravagant creativity
in stitching the scarlet letter is suggestive of imaginative resistance.
That Hester exercises her imagination to transform a stigmatic
emblem into an object that embodies ‘‘spirit’’ also aligns her char-
acter with Hawthorne’s theological ideal of revealed divinity in
nature accessible through the imagination—‘‘artistically done, and
with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy [that it]
seemed to express the attitude of her spirit’’ (53).

Perhaps the most interesting word, for my argument, that
Hawthorne associates with Hester is ‘‘christianize’’: ‘‘It was the
exhilarating effect—upon a prisoner just escaped from the dungeon
of his own heart—of breathing the wild, free atmosphere
of an unredeemed, unchristianized, lawless region’’ (201). Ronald
Formisano describes the ‘‘evangelical impulse to Christianize
America, that ubiquitous energy radiated by New England
Protestantism to create the moral, homogeneous, commonwealth. . . .
Thus, the Whig party . . . became the evangelicals’ best hope to
Christianize America’’ (Transformation 61, 104). Hester is often read
as embodying a general antinomianism, but a word like ‘‘unchristia-
nized’’ lends her resistance a more specific historical inflection as
a fictional expression of the Democratic argument that the Whig
ideal of moral government was an offence to civil liberties.

Given how important the Puritan legacy was to Whigs, perhaps the
most interesting moment in Pearl’s characterization is when she
dances on the graves of the Puritans. She is described as embodied
spirit, and that for Hawthorne meant that she is aligned with the
idea of revealed divinity in nature. Like nature, her spontaneous
actions are inherently spiritual. Toward Dimmesdale, for example,
she gives ‘‘marks of childish preference, accorded spontaneously by
a spiritual instinct’’ (124). Pearl embodies the idea that natural
impulses, however at odds with moral laws, cannot be crimes if
divinity resides in nature: ‘‘It was as if she had been made afresh,
out of new elements, and must perforce be permitted to live her
own life, and be a law unto herself, without her eccentricities being
reckoned to her for a crime’’ (135). The antithesis of the Whig

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theological concept of innate sinfulness, she represents the idea that
passionate natural behaviour should not be subject to restrictive
moral laws or branded with harmful moral judgements. In her
repeated calls to Dimmesdale to ‘‘be true,’’ she articulates the
Democratic conviction that, as long as one is true to nature, either
in the form of revealed divinity or as one’s own ‘‘original nature,’’
one cannot but be moral.

It would be a mistake to suggest that the novel is an allegory in
which all terms match up with the contemporary debate between
Democrats and Whigs. Nevertheless, the fact that the Whigs had a
positive conception of Puritan moral government, while Democrats
found it alien to their own ideals, suggests that a Democratic
writer ’s portrait of Puritan governors, especially, might evoke
Democratic arguments against the Whigs. The governors are, in
fact, described in terms that are evocative of Whig ideas and
culture. Democrats accused Whigs of aspiring to create an aristoc-
racy in America and of being overly loyal to English cultural
models. In the Province House tales that Hawthorne published in
the early issues of the Democratic Review, he uses the term ‘‘rank’’ to
characterize English governors who trample on the rights of
Americans. The term reappears in the novel in association with
the fictional governors. He describes them, in terms that echo
Democratic characterizations of Whigs, as aristocratic ‘‘men of
rank’’ who are charged with ‘‘the guardianship of the public
morals’’ (162; see Ashworth 34–47). The governor ’s mansion is char-
acterized in terms that recall English models, and a significantly
placed Chronicles of England sits on a table in the hallway.
Moreover, the governor behaves toward them in a way that embo-
dies the high-church Yankeeism that historians ascribe to Whigs.
He asks Pearl to prove that she has submitted to church discipline
by reciting the Catechism, and he threatens to deprive an unwed
mother of her child.8

Roger Chillingworth is, in some respects, the double of the gover-
nors. He demonstrates that their apparent distance from passion in
fact conceals passions far worse than those they condemn in others.
Chillingworth takes pleasure in disciplining others for their
pleasures. Hawthorne is quite clear in his evaluation of the differ-
ence. Hester and Dimmesdale’s passion is counted a ‘‘consecration’’
in natural religious terms, while Chillingworth, in equally religious
terms, is condemned for having abused the ‘‘sanctity’’ of the
human heart. This way of characterizing Chillingworth has a

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contemporary resonance with Democratic arguments against Whig
moral government. Democrats characterized Whig intrusiveness in
others’ moral lives as a species of abuse. One Democrat writing in
the Boston Globe on 22 April 1841, described Whigs as ‘‘men who
can fathom all the mysteries of the human heart; who have studied
all the direct and indirect ways of approaching the citadel of integ-
rity, and all the means of undermining or sapping its integrity’’
(qtd. in Kohl 32).9

In the character of Chillingworth, Whig moral government is repre-
sented as an assault on the theological foundations of Democratic
political theory. To pursue others’ sins, as Whigs would have
government do, is to pervert nature and harm natural spirituality.
Given the prominent role the world ‘‘spiritualize’’ plays in the
articulation of Hawthorne’s argument, it is noteworthy that
Chillingworth is characterized as having ‘‘lost the spiritual view
of existence’’ (119). As elsewhere in the novel, such a loss of
access to spirit in nature is associated with a departure from the
naturalist principles of democracy. Hawthorne uses a vocabulary
that draws on Chillingworth’s name to describe the negative effect
of Puritanism on Hester and Dimmesdale’s aspirations for freedom
from moral supervision. The word ‘‘chill’’ occurs in the forest scene
as the antithesis of natural passion, natural freedom, and by impli-
cation, natural divinity: ‘‘Arthur Dimmesdale put forth his hand,
chill as death, and touched the chill hand of Hester Prynne’’ (190).
The word ‘‘chill’’ suggests the denial of divinely inspired natural
impulses of the kind that are evident especially in Pearl and the
refusal to recognize their true ‘‘worth,’’ a phrasing that recalls
Hawthorne’s earlier description of spirit in nature as ‘‘the true
and indestructible value.’’

‘‘Chill,’’ in the novel’s political typology, also stands opposed to
terms such as ‘‘heart’’ that Hawthorne associates with the demo-
cratic multitude. He uses it on the first pages of the book in regard
to divinity: ‘‘the one heart and mind of perfect sympathy’’ (3). And
throughout the novel, it is used to characterize democracy. In the
election sermon, Dimmesdale’s voice, for example, is described as
having ‘‘blended into one great voice by the universal impulse
which makes likewise one vast heart of the many’’ (250). In The
Life of Franklin Pierce, he uses the same metaphor to characterize
Pierce’s democratic effect on his audiences: ‘‘It was the influence
of a great heart pervading the general heart, and throbbing with it
in the same pulsation’’ (50). ‘‘Chill,’’ in contrast, is used to

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characterize harm to democracy: ‘‘This frankness, this democracy
of good feeling, had not been chilled by the society of politicians’’
(Life 18). Chillingworth’s abuse of the sanctity of the human heart is
thus an offence to the natural divinity that underwrites the
Democratic ideal of an egalitarian community. To exercise moral
supervision over private morality is to harm democratic equality
by presuming moral superiority over others.

Initially a servant and a captive of moral government, Dimmesdale
comes eventually to be associated with Democratic values. He
moves from an acceptance of restraints on his natural, passionate
self to the freely chosen revelation of his spiritual nature. As with
Hawthorne himself in the Custom House, this rediscovery of ‘‘orig-
inal nature’’ occurs as a recovery of a lost natural talent, a theme
that evokes the Democratic economic argument against Whig
governmentalism—that it suppresses the natural talents of working
men in favour of what Hawthorne calls ‘‘monopolized labor’’ (7).
As Hawthorne was able, finally, to write his novel, Dimmesdale is
able to write his election-day sermon ‘‘with such an impulsive flow
of thought and emotion, that he fancied himself inspired’’ (225).
That it is ‘‘inspired’’ suggests that it draws on the same well
of natural revelation that sustains Democratic values. His walk
to the church is characterized in similar terms: ‘‘[H]is strength
seemed not of the body. It might be spiritual, and imparted to
him by angelic ministrations’’ (238).

The election-day sermon is a work of Democratic Party oratory, and
the election day itself is, of course, a democratic event, ‘‘the day
on which the new Governor was to receive his office at the hands of
the people’’ (226). Hawthorne characterizes the market place as a
site of contention between popular passions and moral government
in a way that echoes the contemporary cultural battles between
Democrats and Whigs that often came down to conflicts between
immigrant holiday customs, such as public beer drinking, and
Protestant Sabbatarianism. On election day, most entertainments
are outlawed, and when an illegal entertainment breaks
out, ‘‘much to the disappointment of the crowd,. . . the town
beadle, who had no idea of permitting the majesty of the law to
be violated by such an abuse of one of its consecrated places’’
interposes (232).

Dimmesdale’s sermon both evokes Democratic ideals and produces
democratic effects. He speaks democratically ‘‘to the great heart

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of mankind,’’ and he speaks to everyone equally: ‘‘Like all other
music, it breathed passion and pathos, and emotions high or
tender, in a tongue native to the human heart, wherever educated’’
(243). This egalitarian ideal, while crucial to Democrats’ vision
of America’s unique destiny among nations, contradicts Whig
assumptions regarding the necessary segregation of the respectable
from the reprobate. Hawthorne implicitly denies such distinctions
when he notes how the sermon provokes a democratic reaction:

This [shout] . . . was felt to be an irrepressible outburst of
the enthusiasm kindled in the auditors by that high strain of
eloquence which was yet reverberating in their ears. Each felt
the impulse in himself, and, in the same breath, caught it from
his neighbor. . . . [E]ven that mighty well of many voices,
blended into one great voice by the universal impulse which
makes likewise one vast heart out of the many. (250)

The ideal of equality is the principle that both Bancroft and
O’Sullivan foreground as the source of America’s uniqueness.
In ‘‘The Great Nation of Futurity,’’ O’Sullivan uses the word
‘‘destiny’’ to describe the country’s identification with equality,
and Hawthorne assigns to Dimmesdale O’Sullivan’s word, as well
as the idea with which it is associated: ‘‘[A]s he drew towards
the close, a spirit as of prophecy had come upon him . . . [I]t was
his mission to foretell a high and glorious destiny for the newly
gathered people of the Lord’’ (249). Dimmesdale’s sermon is
characterized as being almost a direct expression of divinity
(‘‘spirit of prophesy’’). And it gives rise to a pre-civil sound that
is akin to unmediated nature speaking. For Democrats, such expres-
sions of nature always have an element of divine sanction to
them. According to Andrew Jackson, in his first Inaugural
Address (1828), when ‘‘the people’’ spoke, God spoke (qtd. in
McLoughlin 139).

But if Dimmesdale is aligned with Democratic values and especially
with the idea of revealed divinity in nature, how should we read his
final act of confession? It has been interpreted as an act of abdica-
tion and of compromise with the Puritan moral authorities. But
given the ethos of the election sermon, it would be inconsistent
for Dimmesdale, who has just inspired so strong a sense of demo-
cratic egalitarianism in his audience, to embrace the inegalitarian
ideology of Whig moral government. It would be more in keeping
with Hawthorne’s argument up to this point for his confession to

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represent a rejection of the distinction between the holy and the
reprobate.

I have suggested that the contest between theocratic Whigs and
anti-clerical Democrats hinged on the question of whether an elite
of moral guardians had the right to supervise the morality of others.
Yankees, one Democrat argued, referring to New England Whigs,
felt ‘‘they had a presumptive right to impose their politics, their
habits, manners, and dogmas on the sister states’’ (Kelley, Portrait
79). They did so because they believed divinity was not present in
nature and not accessible, as liberal theology claimed, to human
striving. Mark Noll, in America’s God, notes that liberal theology
‘‘amounted to an open invitation for others to postulate an auton-
omy of action for the faculty of the will. . . . Against this rising tide of
rights talk, the Calvinists were trying to stand firm’’ (284). Because
the neo-Calvinists held that divinity was distant from human life,
they felt moral government by churchmen was necessary to assist
people towards ‘‘regeneration.’’10 Regarding this neo-Puritan theo-
logical position, historian Bruce Kuklick writes, ’’[T]he New
England Theologians assumed a great divide between God and
man, and between the realms of nature and grace. Both distinctions
were reflected in the persistent exploration of human responsibility
for sin and God’s sovereignty over grace’’ (44).

Much of Hawthorne’s argumentative labour in the latter part of the
novel is occupied with dispelling this notion. His most significant
move in this argument is his depiction of Dimmesdale as being able
to achieve atonement on his own, without assistance or direction
from his church. God, rather than be a distant being, appears
instead, in the forest scene, as a spirit in nature who is available
to human striving. And Hester, after rejecting the Whig ideal of
moral government and of restrictive moral laws that would seek
to imprint morality on her from without, finds in her own nature
and in her own natural labours a more substantial morality.11 The
most striking move in this part of Hawthorne’s fictional argument
is Dimmesdale’s revelation of his own ‘‘sinfulness.’’ It suggests that,
if the holy are no higher than the reprobates, the justification for
moral government both in the seventeenth and in the nineteenth
centuries loses force. The holy cannot govern the reprobates,
Hawthorne argues, because they are all equally natural, passionate
and ‘‘sinful.’’ Hawthorne has prepared such a reading in the course
of the novel by noting of Dimmesdale, for example, that he feels
‘‘sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind;

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so that his heart vibrated in unison with theirs’’ (142). The point
is made more polemically in Hester ’s characterization:

Sometimes, the red infamy upon her breast would give a
sympathetic throb, as she passed near a venerable minister
or magistrate, the model of piety and justice, to whom that age
of antique reverence looked up, as to a moral man in fellowship
with angels. ‘What evil thing is at hand?’ would Hester say to
herself. (87)

Dimmesdale’s gesture in the market place suggests the possibility
of spontaneous, self-achieved, and unguided atonement outside the
jurisdiction of moral government. Hawthorne’s reference to
‘‘Christian nurture’’ in the novel links his thinking to that of the
revisionist theologian Horace Bushnell, whose book of that title
(Views of Christian Nurture) appeared in 1847.12 Bushnell’s major
work, God in Christ, appeared in the spring of 1849, and it seems
clear that Hawthorne read it and was aware of the controversy it
generated.13 The Scarlet Letter is the only one of his works in which
he makes repeated references to typology (‘‘hieroglyph,’’ ‘‘figure,’’
‘‘symbol’’), and Bushnell’s book is famous for its first chapter, a
‘‘Preliminary Dissertation on Language,’’ that contains a lengthy
discussion of Christian typology.14 Moreover, while orthodox theo-
logians believed that a sense of one’s own sinfulness was necessary
for salvation, Bushnell contended that the sense of having sinned
impedes rather than assists redemption. He was critical of the ‘‘self-
accusing spirit of sin,’’ which he felt inspired unhealthy self-pun-
ishment in the form of ‘‘vigils . . . tortures . . . to ease the guilt of the
mind’’ (God in Christ 212–3). It is a conception that Hawthorne
seems to evoke in his portrait of Dimmesdale as someone who is
‘‘conscious that the poison of one morbid spot was infecting his
heart’s entire substance’’ (140). He characterizes the scarlet letter
as having a similar effect on Hester: ‘‘This morbid meddling of
conscience with an immaterial matter betokened . . . something
doubtful, something that might be deeply wrong, beneath’’ (84) In
typically Democratic fashion, Hawthorne assigns ‘‘wrong’’ to what
moral government does to people (‘‘morbid meddling’’) rather than
to the natural acts that moral government brands as sinful.

Dimmesdale finally sheds his self-punitive sense of sinfulness and
begins moving toward a public act of atonement when Hester
pledges her love for him in the forest. When Bushnell describes
atonement in God in Christ, he does so in terms that resonate with

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the forest scene and with crucial words such as ‘‘joy’’ and ‘‘sacred
love’’ in the novel’s conclusion. Bushnell argues that a ‘‘sinner’’
cannot attain atonement alone:

[T]o remove this disability, God needs to be manifested as Love.
The Divine Object rejected by sin and practically annihilated as
a spiritual conception, needs to be imported into sense. Then
when God appears in His beauty, loving and lovely, the good,
the glory, the sunlight of soul, the affections, previously dead,
wake into life and joyful play. (Bushnell 212)

Hester ’s avowal of love for Dimmesdale allows him to imagine
freeing himself from the power of moral government. And the
ensuing burst of sunshine would seem, in Bushnell’s understanding
of the divine character of sunlight, to add divine sanction to the
event—‘‘All at once, as with a sudden smile of heaven, forth burst
the sunshine . . .’’ (203).

In the final scaffold scene, Dimmesdale brings the natural principle
of the forest to the very place that is most associated with moral
government’s disciplinary practice of shame. He embraces the
natural family that his sense of sinfulness had obliged him to aban-
don. That family has been made to suffer at the hands of a moral
government that would put formal rules before natural principles.
The distinction is registered in the difference between the natural,
if doctrinally ‘‘sinful,’’ family of Dimmesdale, Hester and Pearl
and the ‘‘unnatural,’’ if doctrinally correct, one of Hester and
Chillingworth. In the scaffold scene, Dimmesdale affirms the
pre-eminence of the natural to the doctrinal, of the spontaneous
principles of natural spirituality to the theological doctrines of the
church. Natural principles are also given primacy over formal
doctrine in the revelation of Dimmesdale’s spontaneously gener-
ated ‘‘A.’’ The gesture of revealing the letter constitutes a rejection
of the emotional economy of sin that would stigmatize natural
passion and make it an occasion for shame. By publicly assuming
responsibility for his actions, Dimmesdale rejects the imposition by
moral government of shame, falseness and self-concealment on
people who are made to feel guilt regarding natural impulses. He
is finally ‘‘true,’’ to use Pearl’s term. Having achieved atonement
through his own striving and through contact with divinity in
nature, he bears proof, appropriately generated spontaneously on
his natural body, that the ideology of moral government is flawed.
By depicting atonement as attainable through free will and human

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striving, Hawthorne sides with the liberal position in the religious
debates of the period.

Hawthorne proposes, then rejects, a Whig interpretation of
Dimmesdale’s death: ‘‘It was to teach [the people], that the holiest
among us has but attained so far above his fellows as to discern
more clearly the Mercy which looks down, and repudiate more
utterly the phantom of human merit, which would look aspiringly
upward’’ (259). In few other places in the novel does Hawthorne so
clearly describe the hierarchical theological assumption of Whig
moral government. God is a distant being, and people cannot
atone and achieve salvation on their own. They should instead
submit to their governors. Hawthorne immediately questions this
interpretation and calls it ‘‘stubborn.’’ It is contradicted, he writes,
by ‘‘proofs, clear as the mid-day sunshine on the scarlet letter, [that]
establish [Dimmesdale] a false and sin-stained creature of the dust’’
(259). This characterization of Dimmesdale as being no holier than
anyone else suggests an equality comparable to that inspired by his
sermon and seems more consistent with Hawthorne’s argument so
far than does the suggestion that Dimmesdale compromises in the
end with the Puritan authorities and with Calvinist theological
assumptions. Hawthorne’s point would seem to be, rather, that
even moral governors are creatures of passion, and they, as a
result, cannot claim a right to supervise the moral lives of others.
Indeed, the point of the final chapter would seem to be that true
moral worth exists apart entirely from the institution of the church,
whose instrument of moral government—the scarlet letter—
eventually becomes an ironic sign of moral virtue rather than
of shame.

A similar irony governs the novel’s entire argument. The truly
virtuous are shamed and punished, while the emblems of Whig
intrusiveness in others’ moral lives are honoured. The emblem of
moral government is compared to the devil, while the innocent
child, whose criminal and lawless nature he would dissect, is
compared to divinity itself. The irony pointed to by Democratic
arguments at the time was that moral government was itself
immoral, while the sins such government sought to criminalize
were natural passions that, because they were natural, were
imbued with divinity. In the context of this Democratic framework,
the moral wrong in the novel is thus not that someone committed
adultery. Indeed, at the time, Democrats were active, as in Michigan
in 1843, in efforts to decriminalize the practice. Rather, the moral

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wrong is the stigmatizing of natural passion by both seventeenth
and nineteenth century Puritanism that betrays natural divinity and
obliges people to be false about feelings that, because they are nat-
ural, are spiritual. In this light of this argument, it is noticeable that
the narrator’s final injunction—‘‘Be true!’’—is not a call to avoid
such ‘‘sins’’ as adultery. It is, rather, a call not to be false about
one’s passionate nature. For Democrats of the time, like
Hawthorne, the true immorality in the novel would not have
been the ‘‘sin’’ of adultery but rather the imposition of moral
laws that treat passion as a crime rather than a manifestation of
‘‘spiritual nature.’’

Notes

1 Several scholars have commented on religion in Hawthorne’s work,
although always in regard to religious themes rather than to the
contemporary debates; see, most recently, Denis Donohue; Agnes
McNeill Donohue; also Fick; Warren; Simonson. Harvey Gable
discusses overlaps between the work of Horace Bushnell and
Hawthorne, but he is concerned primarily with language and
typology, not politics or theology.

2 See Bodo; Cole; Griffin; Bushman; Marty; Handy; Welch; Hammond;
Kuklick; Stavely; Hatch; Noll.

3 See Kelley, Transatlantic; McCormick; Benson; Formisano, Birth; Kelley,
Cultural Pattern; Howe, Political Culture; Formisano, Transformation;
Holt.

4 Historian Louise Stevenson characterizes the Whigs as economic
and social modernizers:

Whiggery stood for the triumph of the cosmopolitan and
national over the provincial and local, of rational order
over irrational spontaneity, of school-based learning over
traditional folkways and customs, and of self-control over self-
expression. Whigs believed that every person had the poten-
tial to become moral or good if family, school, and community
nurtured the seed of goodness in his moral nature. (6)

5 See also, Welter 92, 88. Welter notes that Democratic economic theory
‘‘owed more to ‘nature’ understood as morality’’ than to laissez-faire
theory. ‘‘Unlike the Whigs, they were committed to an economy of
principle rather than an economy of consumption. . . . [They were]
convinced that moral laws governed the economy.’’

6 Hawthorne would have had ample contact with Whig culture and
with neo-Puritanism growing up in Salem, which, along with
Newburyport, was a centre of Federalist and Whig power in the state
of Massachusetts; see Hartford 1–64.

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7 For an account of ‘‘common sense’’ realism, see Charvat 36–9; Martin
91, 151–65. Hawthorne mocks such ‘‘common sense’’ in ‘‘The Snow
Angel.’’

8 Kelley writes,

Parishioners were drilled in the specifics of doctrine, not let to
apply them to the ills of the world. ‘‘Instruction in the
Catechism,’’ Charles A. Briggs of Union Theological Seminary
in New York City later observed, ‘‘was almost universal. . . .‘‘
The reigning mode of Biblical interpretation was sternly
fundamentalist. (Transatlantic Persuasion 313)

9 This was a dimension of Whig moral government that even some
Whigs criticized: ‘‘In the solemn affairs of religion, moreover, instead
of looking into our own sins, we are striving to look into the hearts of
others.’’ (qtd. in Kohl 32). In contrast, democracy, O’Sullivan suggests,
‘‘respects the human soul’’ (‘‘Introduction’’ 11).

10 On regeneration, see Beecher.

11 Rather than be seen in the end as an emblem of compromise, Hester
should be read as resisting moral government by withdrawing from its
control, pursuing a life of ‘‘Christian-style simplicity,’’ and creating a
more authentic religious community of her own. Marty describes
contemporary left-wing Christianity in this way: ‘‘These idol-smashers
found a target in the alliance between evangelicals and other defenders
of the political or economic existing order . . . They criticized the ties
between clergy and men of wealth or of middle-class aspirations, in
the interest of primitive Christian-style simplicity or authentic human
community’’ (113).

12 The following passage seems to prefigure Hawthorne’s description of
how Pearl inherits Hester’s ‘‘unquiet elements’’:

[I]f we examine the relation of parent and child, we shall
not fail to discover something like a law of organic connection,
as regards character, subsisting between them. Such a
connection as makes it easy to believe, and natural to expect
that the faith of the one will be propagated in the other.
Perhaps I should rather say, such a connection as induces
the conviction that the character of one is actually included
in that of the other, as a seed is formed in the capsule . . . And
the parental life will be flowing into him all that time.
(Bushnell, Views 109)

For an account of Bushnell’s work, see Barnes.

13 Published in April of 1849, by mid-May, God in Christ was already
generating discussion in the Boston Daily Advertiser. Moreover, stories
in the orthodox press suggest that Bushnell had become an object of
much lively discussion in the spring and summer of 1849. In the 30
March issue of the Boston Recorder, an anonymous reviewer writes that

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‘‘Dr. Bushnell has gone mad with panic and is for killing all the
harmless and useful dogmas which venture to show themselves in the
street without their muzzles on.’’ A writer in the Puritan Recorder of 8
November 1849 writes that Bushnell ‘‘has become a kind of ‘chartered
libertine’ ’’ who

has acquired the right to do as he likes with impunity. . . . Still,
it is a most solemn consideration that somebody must be
responsible for all the disturbance of the peace of the
churches, this distraction of the minds and Christians from the
quiet work of saving men, and the agitation and unsettlement
of the faith of many in the great concerns of redemption.

14 Bushnell advocates a figural conception of language and of the world:
‘‘There is a logos in the form of things, by which they are prepared
to serve as types or images of what is inmost in our souls’’ (God in
Christ 23). Bushnell’s influence on Hawthorne would explain the
expression of spirit in physical characteristics, such as Chillingworth’s
deformity or Dimmesdale’s letter. Those events seem to exemplify
Bushnell’s ideas concerning the relation between physical form and
spirit: ‘‘For the body is living logos, added to the soul, to be its form,
and play it forth into social understanding. . . . [S]ubjective truths
often find objective representations’’ (God in Christ 23, 250); see
Gura 156; Roger.

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Bodo, John. The Protestant Clergy and Public Issues, 1812–1848. Princeton:
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