In The Salem World of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret B. Moore talks
about the attitude of Derby and of Salem to slaves brought from Africa, and
she also discusses the possibility that Hawthorne wrote some of his stories
in the garden of the Richard Derby house (courtesy of the University
of Missouri Press)
"According to Margaret B. Moore in The Salem World of Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Hawthorne visited that house and wrote stories in the summerhouse
in the garden. If so, Moore says, "it changes the picture of Nathaniel holed-up
in his top-floor room [of the Manning house at 10 1/2 Herbert St.], isolated
from the world. It would mean that he had written some of those early stories
in the midst of flowers and sunshine! And its influence may be seen in the description
of the Pyncheon garden in The House of the Seven Gables…" (213).
Moore also notes in her book The Salem World of Nathaniel Hawthorne
that Elias Haskett Derby "refused to let his ship, the Grand Turk,
board slaves on its first voyage to the Gold Coast" (137). She goes on to
say that "[f]or the most part, Salem did not seem to be heavily involved in
slavery; at the same time the town did not seem overly aware of any problem
with it" (137).
