Their son Julian recalls in his memoirs that after receiving the news, Mr. “Yes.” “What was the matter?” “She was drowned.” “Where?” “On the Hudson, in the ‘Henry Clay’!” He then came in, and my husband shut himself in his study. “Your sister Louisa is dead!” I thought he meant that his own sister was dead, for she also is called Louisa. Pike, without a smile, deeply flushed, seemed even then not in his former body. Hawthorne opened the door with the strange feeling that he should grasp a hand of air. But upon going to the piazza, there he stood unaccountably, without endeavoring to enter. Dike?–I must then have seen his spirit,” said I. I said, “Go to the western piazza, for the front door is locked.” I continued to dress my hair, and it was a considerable time before I went down. Dike!” He glanced up, but did not see me nor smile. I knew how impossible it was for him to leave his affairs. It struck to my heart that he had come to inform us of some accident. He left us on Monday morning,–two days ago.

I was at the toilet-table in my chamber, before seven o’clock, when the railroad coach drove up. It is difficult to realize such a sudden disaster. Dike for a fortnight, and was returning by way of New York, and we expected her here for a long visit. She has been at Saratoga Springs and with Mr. This morning we received the shocking intelligence that Louisa Hawthorne was lost in the destruction of the steamer “Henry Clay” on the Hudson, on Wednesday afternoon, July 27. Dike’s appearance in a letter to her mother a few days later: The siblings were close, as Nathaniel’s letters testify: Louisa was the first person he had written to after his marriage to Sophia Peabody, asking her to come and visit them at the Old Manse, and just before her death, he had written and asked her to come and live with his family permanently. Louisa was on this journey with her uncle John Dike, the husband of her maternal aunt Priscilla Manning, who survived the wreck and traveled directly to Concord to tell Nathaniel. To make matters worse, the ship’s paddle wheels kept spinning, further imperiling those who did jump into the river. The ship’s pilot aimed for the banks of the Hudson, but those passengers in the stern (like Louisa) were trapped, and faced with that very difficult choice. The Henry Clay was apparently well in the lead, its engines bursting to capacity, when the fire broke out in their compartments. Apparently this was common: the fastest steamship (not the safest!) drew the most passengers. In a display of what can only look like wanton recklessness to us, the Henry Clay was engaged in a fiercely competitive race with another steamboat, the Armenia, on their way to New York City, passengers be damned. It wasn’t just the distinction or associations of some of the victims, it was the way they died. 2, 1852 Nathaniel Currier, “Burning of the Henry Clay Near Yonkers,” Metropolitan Museum of Art The survivor: the Armenia, Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen, Christie’s. She choose the latter, and drowned, in one of the River’s worst maritime disasters, in the conspicuous company of former NYC Mayor Stephen Allen, landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing, the granddaughter of a President and the sister of a Senator, among many other victims. In a very telling and consequential mid-nineteenth-century moment, Louisa found herself, after a lifetime of service to the various family members in Salem whom she was also quite dependent on in her single state, and after a rare vacation to that celebrated hotspot Saratoga Springs, on board the paddle-wheel steamboat Henry Clay on its journey from Albany to New York City on Jwhen a ravenous fire on board forced her to choose: conflagration or the deep, dark Hudson. Today my focus is on Maria Louisa Hawthorne (1802-52), the younger sister of Nathaniel Hawthorne: we can get to Louisa (which she was called) through Nathaniel, but also, unfortunately, through her tragic, even sensational death. Sometimes this is difficult to do, as the sources simply aren’t there, and sometimes you can only illuminate these women through their association with something or someone who leaves a source-strewn trail. I’m seeking to cast some light on relatively or completely unknown Salem women for my #SalemSuffrageSaturday posts, in addition to the usual suspects, who live on in perpetual sunshine.

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