GLOddities: Nathaniel Hawthorne at the Texas General Land Office
Since its establishment in 1836, the General Land Office has amassed more than 35.5 million documents and maps in its Archives. This vast collection tells the history of the public lands of Texas as they transitioned from one sovereign to the next and from public to private hands. With so many documents, it’s not out of the question to encounter some “oddities” that tell a different story altogether — documents that prompt the question, “Why is this here?” In this case, we find the signature of famed American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne on two documents from his time as American consul in Liverpool, England.
The consulate of the United States in Liverpool was founded in 1790 and was the first European consulate established by the newly independent United States.[1] The port of Liverpool was an integral part of trans-Atlantic commerce, and serving as a consul there was considered a prestigious political appointment.
In 1853, President Franklin Pierce selected famed novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne — a close friend of Pierce’s from their time together at Bowdoin College, and the author of a highly flattering campaign biography of Pierce — to head the consulate in Liverpool. The $7,500 salary that came along with the position was a boon to Hawthorne, whose books, while well known, were not exactly making him rich.[2]
Nathaniel Hawthorne rose to prominence as a novelist and short-story writer in North Carolina in the 1840s. Some of his best-known works include The Scarlet Letter and Tanglewood Tales. Once he arrived in Liverpool, he colorfully described his duties as bringing him “in contact with insane people, criminals, ruined speculators, wild adventurers, … and all manner of simpletons and unfortunates” during his visits to “prisons, police-courts, hospitals, lunatic asylums, coroner’s inquests, death-beds, funerals…”[3] Hawthorne served as consul in Liverpool until 1857.
The first GLO document bearing Hawthorne’s signature is addressed from the Consulate of the United States of America for the Port of Liverpool and dated December 21, 1855. In it, Hawthorne records that several members of the Young family, citizens of Liverpool, appeared before him to acknowledge an “annexed document.”
This second document, much larger than the first and also bearing Hawthorne’s signature, seal and acknowledgment, is a letter signed by the various Young family members. It granted power of attorney to Arthur T. Lynn, British consul to Galveston, to act on their behalf in legal matters. At the center of these filings was a house and lot of land in Galveston which had belonged to their sister, Mary Young, who had recently passed away. As the representative for her only living heirs, Lynn was instructed to receive the property and “to sell and convert into money, with all convenient speed, the said whole property, estate and effects.”
These documents illustrate the difficulty involved with transacting business from such great distances at the time. What today would simply require a string of emails and phone calls, in 1855 necessitated the involvement of two national consulates and months of time spent awaiting correspondence.
While these documents are anomalies in the Land Office Archives, they are still very much relatable to the story of Texas. They tell the tale of a family far removed from the borders of Texas attempting to administer the estate of a deceased family member, not unlike the efforts of the families of Texas Revolution veterans, who used local agents to obtain their land through the Court of Claims, and filed power of attorney documentation at the county level as well as the GLO, where it is still maintained in the agency’s Archives. In this case, it just so happened that the English family in question required the assistance of a great American writer, and the Land Office acquired another unique artifact with its own story to tell.
[1] William Sommers, “American Writers Who Were Diplomats: Nathaniel Hawthorne.” http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/item/2011/0912/ca/sommers_writers.html Accessed 5/19/15.
[2] Nathaniel Hawthorne and Joel Myerson, Selected Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002. p. 184.
[3] Milton Meltzer, Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography (Minneapolis: Twenty-First Century Books, 2007), 114.
