ABSTRACT
The “red year Forty-eight,” as Melville recalled it in Ciarei, brought “the portent and the fact of war, and terror that into hate subsides.” He was referring to the series of revolutions from which Europe’s kings “fled like the gods”. The authorial time frame, then, opens with the Year of the Red Scare: Chartist agitation in England, the First Paris Commune, The Communist Manifesto, and widespread revolt in France and Austria. This explanation directly precedes Hawthorne’s reminder that “the scarlet letter had not done its office”. Hawthorne did his share by writing the official campaign biography, in which he extols Pierce as “the statesman of practical sagacity and he defends Pierce’s support of the Fugitive Slave Act by comparing the abolitionists, indirectly, to Europe’s “Red Republicans.” From the revolutions of 1848 through the election of Franklin Pierce, this rhetoric of compromise occupied the center of a debate whose extremes were pro-slavery constitutionalism and pro-constitutional abolitionism.
