Seacoast History Blog #84
February 27, 2010

I don’t know how I missed this one. Despite a lifetime off-and-on fascination with Nathaniel Hawthorne, I had no clue that his 1836 story “The Minister’s Black Veil” might be based on a real live minister from York, Maine. I’ve been tearing through the Internet for a couple of hours now pulling the story together. I even tried to download and re-read the classic Hawthorne story of the minister who wore a black cloth over his face to cover up his sins, but I fell asleep three times in the process. (Continued below)

What fascinates me is how I finally discovered the story. It wasn’t by taking one of those ghastly ghostly tours or even while visiting the Museum at Old York, a place I truly admire. I did not see the story in the Portsmouth Herald, where it apparently appeared twice in the last decade. 

I’m proud to say that I first read about Joseph A. “Handerchief” Moody in an 1847 biography of the Moody family. The pride comes from the fact that I really was digging into the past and then sort of stumbled forward with my research. I bought the little book, initially, because a very early Rev. Moody set up the first church in Portsmouth. Another was a missionary to the “heathen” fishing families at the Isles of Shoals. That led me to the chapter on Rev. Sam Moody of York, ME who ended up at the Siege of Louisbourg in 1745. 

As the story goes, when father Sam was in Nova Scotia fighting the French, he left his son Joseph to minister to the residents of York, Maine. Joseph had an unknown mental disorder or nervous condition that led him to wear a black veil over his face. That’s the legend, anyway. For reasons unknown, he did not want people to see him, even when he preached the gospel, so he turned his back on his parishioners while delivering a sermon and covered his face when he spoke to people directly. 

Most of the accounts you will find on the Internet state emphatically that Moody confessed on his deathbed that he could not bear for people to see his sinful face because he had shot his best friend when he was a boy. Then he lied about the death – a gun accidentally went off while the boys were playing with it – and blamed the murder on a passing Indian. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne turned out a complex parable about sin and guilt in “The Minister’s Black Veil”, a classic bit of American literature. I wanted to know where and when Hawthorne heard the story of “Handkerchief Moody”. So far, I haven’t been able to track that down. 

The legend also got a boost in recent years when author Rick Moody dug into the story in his semi-memoir The Black Veil. He may be distantly descended from the York minister. 

Now I’ve read enough local legends and “ghost” stories to know most are based on a grain of fact and ocean of gossip. The more I read, the more determined I was that, while Hawthorne may certainly have borrowed the idea for his story from a local cleric, that the original Moody story was largely a myth. I’ve spent a lot of the last few years busting as many of these myths as I can, and it’s exhausting work. And people don’t like to have their bubbles popped. They like the spooky stories and people in funny costumes like to charge tourists a few bucks to retell them in graveyards and in cheesy books. 

So I was greatly pleased to discover that Richard Bowen has already written a brief debunking of the tale for the museum at Old York. Bowen says, and I instantly believe him and disbelieve all the other accounts, that Moody went through an unstable period after the sudden death of his wife and newborn son. He did briefly wear a white handkerchief over his face, but recovered from his shame. He was involved in a childhood shooting accident, but he was never known as “Handkerchief Moody”. He was a talented and respected minister who went through a bad patch. 

That’s usually how it goes. The historical backstory tends to be a complex tale of human passion. The folklore version, however, connects fewer dots. If a boy shot a friend and later covered his face, then one certainly led to another. And it’s more interesting if the covering is a black cloth, and it’s a better story if he wore it throughout his life and explained his behavior with a deathbed confession. 

Bowen, unlike the tellers of ghostly tales, took the time to dig down into the facts in search of the real human being at the core. Sadly, Rev. Moody will never be free. Fiction, as is so often true in American history, outlives fact.  

It’s still a great myth and Hawthorne’s fictional version is still a rich and intelligent work for literature students to dissect, although it may not be as much fun to read as it was in 1836. 

Copyright © 2010 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.