Chapter 2

In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in
the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf—but which is now
burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no
symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way
down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a
Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood—at the head, I
say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and
along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the
track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty
grass—here, with a view from its front windows adown this not very
enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious
edifice of brick. From the loftiest point of its roof, during precisely
three and a half hours of each forenoon, floats or droops, in breeze or
calm, the banner of the republic; but with the thirteen stripes turned
vertically, instead of horizontally, and thus indicating that a civil,
and not a military, post of Uncle Sam’s government is here established.
Its front is ornamented with a portico of half-a-dozen wooden pillars,
supporting a balcony, beneath which a flight of wide granite steps
descends towards the street. Over the entrance hovers an enormous
specimen of the American eagle, with outspread wings, a shield before
her breast, and, if I recollect aright, a bunch of intermingled
thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each claw. With the customary
infirmity of temper that characterizes this unhappy fowl, she appears
by the fierceness of her beak and eye, and the general truculency of
her attitude, to threaten mischief to the inoffensive community; and
especially to warn all citizens careful of their safety against
intruding on the premises which she overshadows with her wings.
Nevertheless, vixenly as she looks, many people are seeking at this
very moment to shelter themselves under the wing of the federal eagle;
imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the softness and snugness
of an eiderdown pillow. But she has no great tenderness even in her
best of moods, and, sooner or later—oftener soon than late—is apt to
fling off her nestlings with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak,
or a rankling wound from her barbed arrows.

The pavement round about the above-described edifice—which we may as
well name at once as the Custom-House of the port—has grass enough
growing in its chinks to show that it has not, of late days, been worn
by any multitudinous resort of business. In some months of the year,
however, there often chances a forenoon when affairs move onward with a
livelier tread. Such occasions might remind the elderly citizen of that
period, before the last war with England, when Salem was a port by
itself; not scorned, as she is now, by her own merchants and
ship-owners, who permit her wharves to crumble to ruin while their
ventures go to swell, needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood of
commerce at New York or Boston. On some such morning, when three or
four vessels happen to have arrived at once usually from Africa or
South America—or to be on the verge of their departure thitherward,
there is a sound of frequent feet passing briskly up and down the
granite steps. Here, before his own wife has greeted him, you may greet
the sea-flushed ship-master, just in port, with his vessel’s papers
under his arm in a tarnished tin box. Here, too, comes his owner,
cheerful, sombre, gracious or in the sulks, accordingly as his scheme
of the now accomplished voyage has been realized in merchandise that
will readily be turned to gold, or has buried him under a bulk of
incommodities such as nobody will care to rid him of. Here,
likewise—the germ of the wrinkle-browed, grizzly-bearded, careworn
merchant—we have the smart young clerk, who gets the taste of traffic
as a wolf-cub does of blood, and already sends adventures in his
master’s ships, when he had better be sailing mimic boats upon a
mill-pond. Another figure in the scene is the outward-bound sailor, in
quest of a protection; or the recently arrived one, pale and feeble,
seeking a passport to the hospital. Nor must we forget the captains of
the rusty little schooners that bring firewood from the British
provinces; a rough-looking set of tarpaulins, without the alertness of
the Yankee aspect, but contributing an item of no slight importance to
our decaying trade.

Cluster all these individuals together, as they sometimes were, with
other miscellaneous ones to diversify the group, and, for the time
being, it made the Custom-House a stirring scene. More frequently,
however, on ascending the steps, you would discern— in the entry if it
were summer time, or in their appropriate rooms if wintry or inclement
weathers—a row of venerable figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs,
which were tipped on their hind legs back against the wall. Oftentimes
they were asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking together, in
voices between a speech and a snore, and with that lack of energy that
distinguishes the occupants of alms-houses, and all other human beings
who depend for subsistence on charity, on monopolized labour, or
anything else but their own independent exertions. These old
gentlemen—seated, like Matthew at the receipt of custom, but not very
liable to be summoned thence, like him, for apostolic errands—were
Custom-House officers.