I apologize. How presumptuous to assume knowledge that may not be there.

Benjamin Crowninshield came from a prominent Salem maritime family, and they were an unusual bunch because they tended to be Jeffersonian Democrats. Benjamin served as Secretary of the Navy under both Madison and Monroe from 1814-1818 (in fact, Monroe stayed at Crowninshield's home during a visit to Salem -- the home stands next to the Salem Custom House, and was later used as a home for aged women), and served a few terms in Congress (1823-1831). He is buried with all the other eastern Massachusetts luminaries at Mt. Auburn Cemetery.

Some claim that "King" Elias Hasket Derby, a very prosperous and clever Salem merchant, was America's first millionaire. His son, Elias Junior, inherited the family business acumen, but instead of the sea was drawn to the rails as a persistent advocate of New England railroad development in the 1840s and 1850s. Elias Senior's beautiful home still stands, a nearly perfect example of Georgian mid-18th century architecture. Here is a picture of it; scroll down a bit to see.

And who designed that house? Why Samuel McIntire, of course, Salem's answer to Charles Bulfinch of Boston, and one of the premier Federal designers between 1790 and 1810.

Joseph Story was never Chief Justice (quite a shame, since Marshall lived so damn long) but an associate justice of the Supreme Court between 1812 and 1845. He began life as a confirmed Salem Democrat (there were such things in staid Whiggish Salem, Story and Crowninshield the most prominent), but over time gravitated to conservative Webster Whiggery. His Commentaries on the Constitution (1833) were widely read (note that he quotes Cicero and Burke on the frontspeice, very nice), and along with Marshall and Taney was among the best known and influential American jurists.

And note that I did not say "canonical" when referring to dear Hawthorne's works from 1850-1852; I made reference to the volume of his work. That said, Pierce remains a very interesting read, and while literature-types might find it unpalatable, those of us with a political eye gobble up the observations of America's great Jacksonian Democratic novelist. A taste:

The theorist may take that view in his closet; the philanthropist by profession may strive to act upon it uncompromisingly, amid the tumult and warfare of his life. But the statesman of practical sagacity--who loves his country as it is, and evolves good from things as they exist, and who demands to feel his firm grasp upon a better reality before he quits the one already gained--will be likely here, with all the greatest statesmen of America, to stand in the attitude of a conservative. Such, at all events, will be the attitude of Franklin Pierce ... Those northern men, therefore, who deem the great cause of human welfare all represented and involved in this present hostility against southern institutions, and who conceive that the world stands still except so far as that goes forward--these, it may be allowed, can scarcely give their sympathy or their confidence to the subject of this memoir. But there is still another view, and probably as wise a one. It looks upon slavery as one of those evils which divine Providence does not leave to be remedied by human contrivances, but which, in its own good time, by some means impossible to be anticipated, but of the simplest and easiest operation, when all its uses shall have been fulfilled, it causes to vanish like a dream. There is no instance, in all history, of the human will and intellect having perfected any great moral reform by methods which it adapted to that end; but the Progress of the world, at every step, leaves some evil or wrong on the path behind it, which the wisest of mankind, of their own set purpose, could never have found the way to rectify. Whatever contributes to the great cause of good, contributes to all its subdivisions and varieties; and, on this score, the lover of his race, the enthusiast, the philanthropist of whatever theory, might lend his aid to put a man, like the one before us, in the leadership of the world's affairs.

Mais oui! Read it all here.