ABSTRACT
These extracts from the Frederick Hawes letters reveal that Hawes was a native of Charlton, Wiltshire, and educated at private school in Malmesbury. Having emigrated in 1847, Hawes was a successful St Louis businessman and had already visited England twice. His descriptions of St Louis are remarkable, as are those of the Americans. He observes that, for Americans, ‘wealth is the one great object of pursuit, and gain! gain! gain! is the cry with which each one daily rushes to aid in dragging along Mammon’s Juggernaut’. Such observations and stereotypes were made by many other English observers of the time – Dickens and Frances Trollope the most famous – and must have had much truth to them. For Hawes, Americans’ materialistic ambitions are the reason why they supposedly ‘have not the capacity of social enjoyment’, an observation also made by many Americans, including Ralph Waldo Emerson. Hawes captures the ironic contradiction of American liberty when he writes ‘they tell me I am in a free country (a land containing only 5000000 slaves!! thats all)’. In addition he writes graphically about Indians and their tradition of scalping. Also very interesting is Hawes’s realization that encouraging his mother to join him in America is not, after all, a good idea, because she would be too old to adjust, and he concludes that emigration to America is only for the youthful and those who do not have ‘the means of subsistence’ in England. His descriptions of having squirrel pie and raccoon for Christmas dinner give us a sense of the types of adjustments he had to make for himself.
