Examining the hitherto neglected analogy between the Salem Witchcraft Trials (1692) and the Revolutionary War (1775-83), this paper attempts to illuminate the trajectory from Puritan governors to American presidents, with a special emphasis on the literary tradition of Election Day Sermons. While the Salem Witchcraft Trials were caused by disbelief in the “Foreign Power” as partially represented by the governor Edmund Andros, “The Declaration of Independence” (1776) retrofits the rhetoric of hardcore Puritans attacking the witches and witch-like governors in the previous century, and impeaches King George III for being another invader and plunderer, paving the way for American Presidency. However, it is also true that a glance at the Puritan heritage of Election Day Sermons from Samuel Danforth to Samuel Langdon suggests that Puritan ministers begin to displace their theocratic tone with a more democratic one. Surviving the political upheavals in American history, the spirit of Election Day Sermons transformed Danforth’s concept of “Errand into the Wilderness” into John O’Sullivan’s slogan “Manifest Destiny” (1845), the updated version of the Monroe Doctrine, and another name for imperialist expansionism.
This perspective allows us to reread Nathaniel Hawthorne’s magnum opus The Scarlet Letter (1850) not only for its embedded Election Day sermon but also the novel with its “The Custom-House” preface itself as an incredibly well-wrought romance of the Election Day Sermon. Of course, I am keenly aware that a number of distinguished scholar-critics such as A.W. Plumstead, Sacvan Bercovitch, Alan J. Silva and others have already pointed out the impact of Election Day Sermons on the discourse of Arthur Dimmesdale, the forbidden lover of the heroine Hester Prynne. Indeed, without the heritage of Election Day Sermons, Hawthorne, a close friend of O’Sullivan, could not have described the minister so vividly in Chapter 23, “The Revelation of the Scarlet Letter”: “His subject, it appeared, had been the relation between Deity and the communities of mankind, with a special reference to the New England which they were here planting in the wilderness. ... whereas the Jewish seers had denounced judgments and ruin on their country, it was his mission to foretell a high and glorious destiny for the newly gathered people of the Lord” (Norton 168, italics mine). But what interests me most here is that in producing Dimmesdale’s sermon Hawthorne himself perhaps wanted to express a more contemporary American Jeremiad, in the wake of the presidential election in 1848. For the advent of the new president Zachary Taylor of the Whig party deprived Hawthorne the Democrat of his surveyorship in the Custom House, leading him to narrate the moral panic by means of the metaphor of “guillotine,” with which the members of the victorious have “chopped off all our heads” (31). It is at this moment that Hawthorne’s actual Jeremiad in antebellum America coincides with the fictional Dimmesdale’s apocalyptic sermon, revealing the creatively anachronistic but surprisingly organic interactions between “The Custom-House,” written after the 1848 Presidential election, and The Scarlet Letter, featuring the 1649 Election Day sermon given for the new Puritan governor.
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