information presumably more accurate. He was one of the band of
companions of the virtuous and exemplary John Winthrop, the almost
life-long royal Governor of the young colony, and the brightest and
most amiable figure in the early Puritan annals. How amiable William
Hathorne may have been I know not, but he was evidently of the stuff
of which the citizens of the Commonwealth were best advised to be
made. He was a sturdy fighting man, doing solid execution upon both
the inward and outward enemies of the State. The latter were the
savages, the former the Quakers; the energy expended by the early
Puritans in resistance to the tomahawk not weakening their disposition
to deal with spiritual dangers. They employed the same--or almost the
same--weapons in both directions; the flintlock and the halberd
against the Indians, and the cat-o'-nine-tails against the heretics.
One of the longest, though by no means one of the most successful, of
Hawthorne's shorter tales (_The Gentle Boy_) deals with this pitiful
persecution of the least aggressive of all schismatic bodies. William
Hathorne, who had been made a magistrate of the town of Salem, where a
grant of land had been offered him as an inducement to residence,
figures in New England history as having given orders that "Anne
Coleman and four of her friends" should be whipped through Salem,
Boston, and Dedham. This Anne Coleman, I suppose, is the woman alluded
to in that fine passage in the Introduction to _The Scarlet Letter_,
in which Hawthorne pays a qualified tribute to the founder of the
American branch of his race:--

"The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family
tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my
boyish imagination as far back as I can remember. It still
haunts me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with the past,
which I scarcely claim in reference to the present, phase of