Excerpt from The Salem World of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Excerpt from The Salem World of Nathaniel Hawthorne by Margaret
Moore
In this passage Margaret Moore clarifies Hawthorne's own connection to
the cruel ancestor of Young Goodman Brown.
"In 'Young Goodman Brown' the young protagonist talks of his ancestor
who commanded the constable to lash 'the Quaker woman so smartly though the
streets of Salem.' Hawthorne had read this detail of the whipping of Ann Coleman
in William Sewel's The History of the People Called Quaker, which said
that Major Hathorne had once opposed 'compulsion for conscience' but that his
'firm warrant' for whipping had almost cost Coleman's life"(32). (courtesy
of University of Missouri Press)
