Democratic Party

The Democratic Party, to which the narrator of The Scarlet Letter professes allegiance, serves as the political backdrop against which the Custom-House sketch unfolds. The narrator identifies himself as "a faithful Democrat in principle," though he notes that he "neither received nor held his office with any reference to political services." This distinction matters because it sets him apart from the more partisan figures who might have used the Surveyorship as a reward for party loyalty. His own tenure, he implies, was not earned through the usual machinery of party patronage, and this very independence makes his eventual removal by the victorious Whigs a matter of impersonal political routine rather than personal vendetta.

The Election of 1848 and the Fall of the Surveyor

The decisive event that ends the narrator's public career is the election of General Zachary Taylor to the presidency in 1848, a victory for the Whig Party. The narrator describes this as "a remarkable event of the third year of my Surveyorship." With the incoming hostile administration, his position becomes "one of the most singularly irksome, and, in every contingency, disagreeable, that a wretched mortal can possibly occupy." He observes with distaste the "bloodthirstiness" that develops in the hour of triumph, noting that the victorious Whigs seem sufficiently excited to have "chopped off all our heads, and have thanked Heaven for the opportunity!" He contrasts this with the Democrats' own habits in victory, claiming that "the long habit of victory has made them generous" and that their axe, when it strikes, "is seldom poisoned with ill-will." Despite his own party's defeat, the narrator finds himself "on the losing side rather than the triumphant one" and, by a "reasonable calculation of chances," sees his own prospect of retaining office as better than that of his Democratic brethren. Yet, he ruefully concludes, "My own head was the first that fell."

The Consequences of Ejection

The narrator's dismissal from the Custom-House, though initially a shock, ultimately proves liberating. He reflects that his fortune "somewhat resembled that of a person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and although beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap to be murdered." The forced removal from office breaks the enervating spell of public employment, which he had come to recognize as a threat to his intellectual and moral health. He had spent three years in the Custom-House, a term "long enough to rest a weary brain: long enough to break off old intellectual habits, and make room for new ones: long enough, and too long, to have lived in an unnatural state." The ejection, he concludes, is a kind of martyrdom: "after he had won the crown of martyrdom (though with no longer a head to wear it on), the point might be looked upon as settled." Freed from the "toils and honours of public life," he opens his "long-disused writing desk, and was again a literary man." It is this political defeat, then, that directly enables him to take up the manuscript of Surveyor Pue and write The Scarlet Letter.

Narrative Significance

The Democratic Party's electoral loss is not merely a biographical detail but a structural necessity for the novel's existence. The narrator's political identity as a Democrat places him within a specific historical moment—the spoils system of mid-nineteenth-century America—and his removal from office provides the catalyst for his return to literature. The entire Custom-House sketch, with its detailed portraits of Whig and Democratic functionaries, serves to establish the authenticity of the discovered manuscript while also dramatizing the narrator's own transformation from a public servant back into a writer. The party's defeat, in this sense, is the novel's enabling condition: without the Whig victory, the narrator would have remained a Surveyor, and the story of Hester Prynne might never have been told.