The year 1824 was a serious one in American politics. The Republican-Democratic party, having become omnipotent, broke to pieces of its own weight. The eastern interest nominated John Quincy Adams for the Presidency; the western interest nominated Henry Clay; and the frontier interest nominated Andrew Jackson. Unfortunately the frontier interest included all the unsettled and continually shifting elements in the country, so that Jackson had nearly as strong a support in the East as in the West. Bridge says, “We were all enthusiastic supporters of old Hickory.” It was evidently Pierce who led them into this, and although it proved in a material sense for Hawthorne’s benefit, it separated him permanently from the class to which he properly belonged--the enlightened men of culture of his time; and Cilley’s tragical fate can be directly traced to it. The Jackson movement was in its essence a revolt against _civility_,--and it seems as if Hawthorne and Bridge might have recognized this. Hawthorne was well liked in his class in spite of his reserved manners, but he held no class offices that we hear of, except a place on a committee of the Athenæan Society with Franklin Pierce. Class days and class suppers, so prolific of small honors, were not introduced at Bowdoin until some years later. He graduated eighteenth in a class of thirty-eight, but this was not sufficient to give him a part in the commencement exercises. [Footnote: The President informed him that his rank in the class would have entitled him to a part if it had not been for his neglect of declamations; and Hawthorne wrote to his mother that he was perfectly satisfied with this, for it saved him the mortification of appearing in public.] Accordingly Hawthorne, Bridge, and others who were in a like predicament, organized a mock Commencement celebration at Ward’s Tavern, where they elected officers of a comical sort, such as boatswain and sea-cook, and concluded their celebration in a manner suitable to the occasion. Hawthorne was commonly known among his classmates, as “Hath,” and his friends addressed him in this manner long after he had graduated. His degree was made out in the name of Nathaniel Hathorne, above which he subsequently wrote “Hawthorne,” in bold letters. The question may well be raised here, how it happened that America produced so many men of remarkable intellect with such slight opportunities for education in former times, while our greatly improved universities have not graduated an orator like Webster, a poet like Longfellow, or a prose-writer equal to Hawthorne during the past forty years. There have been few enough who have risen above mediocrity.