Excerpt from The Salem World of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Excerpt from The Salem World of Nathaniel Hawthorne by Margaret Moore
(courtesy of University of Missouri Press).
His family's association with those who persecuted Quakers, it appears,
troubled Nathaniel Hawthorne.
" . . . William Hathorne was 'a bitter persecutor' who ordered
the whipping of Quaker Ann Coleman through Salem and two other towns. Nathaniel
Hawthorne seemed haunted by his ancestor's association with the punishment
of the Quaker, the 'strange people' who had the 'gift of a new idea'"(31).
(courtesy of University
of Missouri Press)
