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PIERCE, Franklin. Autograph letter signed ("Franklin Pierce"), as former President, to Mary M. Aiken, Concord, N. H., 25 October 1864. 3 pages, 4to, mourning stationery, ink somewhat pale.
A MELANCHOLY PIERCE FONDLY RECALLS NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AND CONCORD DAYS. Pierce had a difficult retirement, one marked by personal tragedy and regret over the eruption of civil war. Here, however, he expresses a measure of contentment and tells his sister-in-law that "Altho most things connected with my relations and hopes are so sadly changed, I begin to realize again something like a home feeling in Concord....The portraits of Mr. Webster, Gov. Marcy and dear Hawthorne hang in the little parlor where I usually pass my evenings and are a comfort to me." Pierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne had been college friends at Bowdoin, and as President he gave the cash-strapped writer a sinecure in the U.S. consulate in Liverpool. Hawthorne died in May 1864, while traveling with Pierce in the White Mountains, and he joins select political company on Pierce's wall, along with the great Senate orator Daniel Webster and William Marcy, former governor of New York and Pierce's Secretary of State.
Yet with all his young children having predeceased him, and then his wife dying just months after he left the White House, Pierce's thoughts were often gloomy and morbid. "I have passed the morning at the cemetery," he tells Mrs. Aiken, "to which my steps often tend. The monument [for his dead wife] strikes me as quite complete and altogether fitting. The material is admirable, the proportions just and I think the whole effect what you would desire. I am particularly thankful that it is surmounted with what the dear, precious one penciled as 'Luther's idea.' We shall look upon it some day together my dearest sister, not only with love and sorrow, but with sweet hope and solace..."
A MELANCHOLY PIERCE FONDLY RECALLS NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AND CONCORD DAYS. Pierce had a difficult retirement, one marked by personal tragedy and regret over the eruption of civil war. Here, however, he expresses a measure of contentment and tells his sister-in-law that "Altho most things connected with my relations and hopes are so sadly changed, I begin to realize again something like a home feeling in Concord....The portraits of Mr. Webster, Gov. Marcy and dear Hawthorne hang in the little parlor where I usually pass my evenings and are a comfort to me." Pierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne had been college friends at Bowdoin, and as President he gave the cash-strapped writer a sinecure in the U.S. consulate in Liverpool. Hawthorne died in May 1864, while traveling with Pierce in the White Mountains, and he joins select political company on Pierce's wall, along with the great Senate orator Daniel Webster and William Marcy, former governor of New York and Pierce's Secretary of State.
Yet with all his young children having predeceased him, and then his wife dying just months after he left the White House, Pierce's thoughts were often gloomy and morbid. "I have passed the morning at the cemetery," he tells Mrs. Aiken, "to which my steps often tend. The monument [for his dead wife] strikes me as quite complete and altogether fitting. The material is admirable, the proportions just and I think the whole effect what you would desire. I am particularly thankful that it is surmounted with what the dear, precious one penciled as 'Luther's idea.' We shall look upon it some day together my dearest sister, not only with love and sorrow, but with sweet hope and solace..."