Coming up on the 250th birthday of the USA, I thought to look up Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne, Nathaniel's older sister and co-editor with him on "The American magazine of useful and entertaining knowledge" (1834-37), a compendium of all sorts of information designed to "give to the public a work descriptive, not merely of subjects, scenes, places, and persons existing in distant climes, but also of those which are to be found in our own fine and native country."
In it pages, "The American magazine" states that hemp is “a native of Persia and India; whence it was introduced into Europe. In the United States it has become naturalized; but not so extensively cultivated, as to supply the wants of the manufacturers. Large quantities are exported to America from Russia....It is a matter of wonder with some, that both hemp and linen are not more generally cultivated in America."
"The stem of this plant is erect, simple, herbaceous, and grows four and six feet high," the entry continues. "It possesses narcotic properties; and in eastern countries it is common to mix the leaves with tobacco for smoking." A drawing or engraving of a hemp plant is included.
Hemp is mentioned elsewhere in the magazine as encompassing both male and female plants, substituting for mulberry to feed silkworms, and luring wild ducks to their death by spreading hempseed on pond water.
It's possible that Elizabeth is the editor who contributed the hemp information to the magazine: Her nephew Manning Hawthorne thought that while topics on literature or colonial history in the magazine were mainly written by Nathaniel, "the bulk of the useful and entertaining knowledge was furnished by Elizabeth."
WHO WAS ELIZABETH M. HAWTHORNE?
Elizabeth (known as Aunt Ebe) was born in 1802 in Salem, Massachusetts, just seven months after the marriage of her parents, Elizabeth Clarke Manning and sea captain Nathaniel Hathorne, who was to die when little Elizabeth was six. (Her brother Nathaniel, author of American classics like "The Scarlet Letter" and "The House of the Seven Gables," added a "w" to the family's last name to distance them from their great-great-grandfather John Hathorne, one of the judges at the Salem witch trials.)
A precocious child, Ebe reportedly walked and talked at nine months, and could read and write at age four. Uninterested even as a child in doing household chores when she could be reading or walking in the woods, this was still true in 1849 when her sister-in-law Sophia Hawthorne wrote her husband that, "Elizabeth is not available for every-day purposes of pot-hooks and trammels, spits and flat-irons."
While staying with relatives, Elizabeth wrote to her mother in 1822, "Bodily Labour comprises their only idea of intellectual and moral excellence, and an angel would fail to obtain their approbation, unless he came attired in a linsey-woolsey gown & checked apron, and assumed an honourable and dignified station at the washing tub.—If I remain at home, the whole family express their astonishment at my 'moping in the house when the weather is so fine,' & if I go out two days in succession, I am, with equal justice and elegance, accused of 'spinning street yarn.' If I do, I am blamed for devoting my attention exclusively to one person, who unfortunately never happens to be the right one."
There was "a very strong bond between Nathaniel and Elizabeth...Each seemed indolent, though the brain was always racing; each loved books and ideas; each resented being forced into a mold." Late in his life, Nathaniel wrote that Elizabeth was "the most sensible woman I ever knew in my life, much superior to me in general talent and of fine cultivation....She has both a physical and intellectual love of books, a born book worm."
She seems to have written and perhaps published some poetry in her youth. "Tell Ebe she's not the only one of the family whose works have appeared in the press," wrote Nathaniel to their younger sister Louisa in 1819. She reportedly translated the whole of Le Bon Jardinier for her uncle Robert Manning, along with several of Cervantes's tales.
Expressing an interest in becoming a librarian, Ebe chose the books for Nathaniel at the Salem Athenaeum, and, probably, at the circulating libraries. He instructed Louisa to do his laundry, but he asked Elizabeth to write for his magazine. He constantly urged her to "concoct - concoct - concoct."
She wrote a sketch of Alexander Hamilton, which Nathaniel changed somewhat because he had "been obliged to correct some of your naughty notions about arbitrary government." Manning Hawthorne thought she may have written a life of John Adams that appeared in one issue of the magazine, and Nathanael asked her to wrote one on Thomas Jefferson, but it never appeared.
In a lengthy letter Elizabeth wrote about her brother to his publisher James T. Fields in 1860, she says, "In 1836, I think, he went to Boston to edit the American Magazine of useful Knowledge. He was to be paid $600 a year, but probably he was not paid anything; for the proprietors became insolvent, or were already so before they engaged him....There were no contributors; he had to write it all himself, and he was furnished with no facilities for collecting the useful knowledge that it was his business to send forth to the world. He wrote short biographical sketches of eminent men, and other articles of a similar kind; and when I met with anything that might pass for useful, I copied it and sent him,—extracts from books such as people who subscribed for that Magazine would be likely to comprehend."
The siblings' next collaboration was to write "Peter Parley's Universal History on the Basis of Geography for the Use of Families" for which they received $200, all of which Nathaniel gave to Elizabeth. One who knew her said that Elizabeth had written the whole text. That book also mentions hemp in a chapter about Russia, saying, "St. Petersburg carries on a great deal of commerce by sea, and many of our ships to there to get hemp, iron, hides, and other things." This fits with Jack Herer's theory that Napoleon fought the war of 1812 to secure hemp from Russia.
ELIZABETH'S LETTERS AND WRITINGS
Elizabeth’s correspondence contains commentary on important figures of the day, and covers a variety of subjects, such as current books and newspaper stories, and political events. She is not shy about expressing her rather extreme opinions. Nathaniel once said, "The only thing I fear ... is the ridicule of Elizabeth."
She wrote to her Manning cousins in 1880, "What do you think of our next President [James Garfield] as I hope he will be. Western men, when they are good, are excellent; but as to the South, I always thought, during the War, and still think, that while our troops were there they might have been usefully employed in digging away the soil, and thus annihilating States, and State Rights, once for all....Some such process of annihilation is the only effectual means of removing from our borders a turbulent and deceitful race who will always hate us. The idea was suggested to me by a very judicious remark that I always thought showed great political insight, 'that the only remedy for the evils of Ireland [was] to sink the island for an hour under the ocean.' But it is too late to think of such a decisive measure now."
In a letter where she disses George Eliot's "Middlemarch" and calls her heroine Dorothea "a wearisome young woman," Elizabeth writes, "I rely upon the opinions of General Sherman, and Sheridan and others, who say that if the Indians want war, enough of it should be given to them. And is it not absurd to take extraordinary pains to perpetuate a race who, if they renounced their murderous impulses, and sought to be civilized, would still be inferior to white people."
Peter Parley, written by Elizabeth and/or Nathaniel, says that American was inhabited by many tribes of Indians, "but these people had no books, and knew nothing of the rest of the world." Writing of the pilgrims who traveled to America on the Mayflower, it says, "In addition to their other troubles, the wild Indians sometimes threatened to attack them. But the Pilgrims were as brave and patient as they were pious. They put their trust in God, and steadily pursued their design of making a permanent settlement in the country."
"The settlers of New England were good and pious people; but many of them seemed to have much the same feeling towards to the Indians that they had towards the bears and wolves," Peter Parley continues (perhaps with the steadying hand of Nathaniel?). "They considered them a sort of wild animal, or if men, very wicked ones." The Indians, for their part, "were afraid that, in time, [the white men] would cut down all the trees of the forest, and change their hunting grounds into cultivated fields."
"When William Penn arrived in the country, he bought land of the Indians, and made a treaty with them. This treaty was always held sacred. The Indians saw that the Quakers were men of peace, and therefore they were careful never to do them any injury. There are no stories of Indian warfare with the Quakers of Pennsylvania."
This jibes with a wonderful story I just read in Peter Cozzens's book "Tecumseh and the Prophet: The Struggle for American's Heartland" about Shakers from an Ohio settlement encountering the Indian warrior Tecumseh and his brother, the holy man Tenskwatawa, who smoked a large tomahawk pipe. Learning that the Shakers eschewed alcohol, the Indians declared them a holy and peaceful people.
Western Native American tribes smoked "kinnikinnick," a mixture of bark and herbs. Eastern tribes are said to have smoked Nicotiana rustica, a psychoactive tobacco.
Nathaniel Hawthorne's fictional account, "The May-Pole of Merry Mount," about the colony of Bacchanites who were destroyed by the Puritans, uses the admonishment, ``Stand off, priest of Baal!'' His collection of short stories "Mosses from an Old Manse" contains “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” about a medical researcher in Padua who grows a garden of poisonous plants and brings up his daughter to tend them, making her poisonous herself. Also, the story of an old woman/witch who brings a scarecrow to life by having him puff on her tobacco pipe ("Feathertop: A Moralized Legend").
Much like Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Hawthorne was much in tune with the local flora in her neighborhood. Her letters frequently note the seasonal changes—autumn leaves, which she sometimes encloses in the envelope, or blooming laurel or violets, which she urges her Manning cousins to come and enjoy. What she may have been smoking we do not know.
SOURCES:
Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne: A Life in Letters
Cecile Anne de Rocher
Cecile Anne de Rocher
Margaret B. Moore
Manning Hawthorne
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