Not only the obvious and crucial masterworks such as John Winthrop’s Journal and Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana, which together form a magisterial frame around the original Puritan century, but more local and embattled texts as well: Edward Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Saviour, for example, which recapitulated the first two decades of founding under the urgent aspect of an immanent second coming; and Nathaniel Ward’s Simple Cobbler of Aggawam, whose unwonted wit meant to instruct both New and Old England men in the more timely art of political compromise that yet stopped short of toleration; and New England’s Memorial by Nathaniel Morton, the nephew and loyal redactor of William Bradford, whose own authoritative account “Of Plymouth Plantation” was piously folded into the larger “non-separatist” account of Puritan motive and meaning; and even William Hubbard’s Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians of New England.

Nor did Hawthorne’s reading limit him to one side of the story. Willem Sewel’s History of the Quakers, which lies directly behind “The Gentle Boy,” tells much that providential and filiopietistic history found it necessary to omit or gloss over. More significantly, perhaps, Hawthorne appears to have learned the meaning of the “radical” dissent of Roger Williams and of the “populist” loyalties of John Wise directly from their own works. He even appears to have known (though perhaps at some second hand) the aboriginal Anglo-naturalism of Thomas Morton, whose New English Canaan—or whose infamous outpost at Merry Mount—has enlisted the sympathy of so many who hate Puritanism by instinct. Thus criticism as well as myth went early into the Hawthorne mix.

Hawthorne clearly read George Bancroft’s monumental but tendentious “libertarian” account of the Puritan contribution to the History of the United States as soon as the first volumes began to appear in 1834. But just as clearly he already knew much of the material on which it was based. Most importantly, perhaps, he was intensely familiar with the authoritative but not always “friendly” account it was supposed to supplant—the endlessly patient though often dull “constitutionalist” analysis of The History of Massachusetts Bay by Thomas Hutchinson, plainly the most fair and formidable of the Tory historians of prerevolutionary New England. Neither Hutchinson’s secularism nor his loyalty to the king was lost on the Hawthorne who wrote “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” though for other purposes the mentality of Hutchinson would have to be supplemented by that of Benjamin Trumbull, whose Complete History of Connecticut everywhere privileges the “higher” considerations of piety, declension, and revival. And behind Hawthorne’s alert response to these tomes lay his reading of the available local histories (of the towns of Boston, Salem, and Ipswich, for example, and of the regions of Maine and New Hampshire), and of dozens (probably hundreds) of local sermons and tracts. Apparently he even faced up to the available collections of legal and judicial proceedings from the earliest colonial years. The industrious graduate student is (cautiously) invited to attempt as much.

In the famously self-effacing letter to Longfellow of June 4, 1837, Hawthorne characterizes all this virtually archival reading as “desulcory.” And so it probably was, with regard to its available order and arrangement: who knew, in the 1820s, just how to re-cognize the colonial past? But Hawthorne appears to have read “religiously” as well, when we consider seriousness of purpose or efficacy of outcome. In one sense he merely did his required Americanist homework: before one could fairly “use” American materials, one had significantly to possess them. And in the end, what is often loosely referred to as Hawthorne’s artistic use of history turns out to be something very like history.

Best recognized, of course, is Hawthorne’s singular success in recovering the experience of those New England Puritans, whose piety and rhetoric have always advanced the most powerful claim to “founding” importance. And yet the evidence of the “Provincial Tales” suggests that it is possible to overstate and even misconstrue the place of Puritanism in the Hawthorne project. Hawthorne himself appears to have favored “The Gentle Boy” over “Malvin” and “Molineux,” reprinting the one in the first of his actually published collections, the Twice-told Tales of 1837, while reserving the other two for later reissue. But modern criticism uniformly prefers the two “non-Puritan” tales in this group. And more significantly, perhaps, all three reveal a similar dedication to the shape and implication of moral experience in the relevant past. “The Gentle Boy” aptly reminds us that the notoriously puritanic theme of “weaned affections” contains a powerful theologic prejudice against what rationalists and romantics both called nature; but “Malvin” and “Molineux” exist to recall that the complex problem of American guilt and innocence has a significant political as well as a religious dimension.

The crucial issue lurking here, however, is probably biographical, as it involves the question of the personal or familiar bias Hawthorne may have brought to his study of moral history in America. As too many of the older biographies begin their account of this “Capital Son of the Old Puritans” with a highly dramatic account of “Ancestral Salem” in the seventeenth century, so, too, many literary interpreters have assumed that Hawthorne’s penchant for and/or his quarrel with Puritanism was simply a given, with the implication that he wrote Puritan history either naturally or else by symptomatic retreat from an uncongenial present to a privileged past.

The facts tend to suggest otherwise. The Salem where Hawthorne was born (in 1804) was commerical rather than theologic in its dominant tone; and its religious cast was more liberal than conservative. His parents both belonged to churches that would become Unitarian when the “standing order” of Congregationalism was split in the 1820s; and all but one member of his extended family would favor churches teaching a decidedly un-Calvinistic understanding of sin and salvation. Accounts of Hawthorne’s childhood all indicate that he was indulged rather than disciplined, in the formidable manner of puritanic “Christian nurture”; and the record of his early education reads more like a Novel of Enlightenment than any conceivable Narrative of Surprising Conversion. The (modest) record of the Bowdoin years (1821-25) indicates that Hawthorne neatly avoided all organized attempts to awaken his slumbering sense of sin and save his soul. Further, as we have already noticed, none of his first works indicates that he is merely expressing some Puritanism of nature or early training. When the Puritan mentality does authoritatively appear, in “The Gentle Boy,” its context is one of learning and judgment: conscience and compulsion emerge as facts of the public rather than the private history.

Another way to approach the same fundamental point—that Hawthorne learned to do what he did with the past—is to notice that several other works published near the outset of his career also smell distinctly of the lamp of precise historical study. Three “sketches” of noteworthy historical figures, which appeared in the Salem Gazette in December 1830 and January 1831, all reveal a Hawthorne who is trying to be somewhat more precise about the import of the national “story” than he could conceivably have been in “The Hollow of the Three Hills” or “The Wives of the Dead.” “Sir William Phips” deftly characterizes the political career and private morale of the man who had been the first governor of New England under its new, “Royal,” and decidedly secularized charter of 1691. “Mrs. Hutchinson,” besides predicting a certain “typic” identity for Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, powerfully evokes the strain of theological feminism which mixes itself unstably in the religious recipe of Puritan prophecy. And “Dr. Bullivant” (omitted from this collection) aptly notices the puritanic expulsion of wit as but a merely naturalistic “humor,” even as it elaborately meditates the cause and consequence of what a still unhilarious nineteenth century called gloom.