In “The Custom-House” Hawthorne draws a wry, punning contrast between “the enervating magic of place” which enthralls the dismissed federal officer with mirages of Uncle Sam's future patronage and the “spell” of that very solid “native place,” Salem, to which successive generations of his ancestors had clung with “oyster-like tenacity” and which pulls Hawthorne himself back as if it were “the inevitable centre of the universe.” Neither “place” offered him the security he needed in 1849, since the Whigs most responsible for despoiling him of office were Salem Whigs, his fellow townsmen. Nonetheless, the rival attractions of the two kinds of “place” continued to exert their power over him as they had done throughout his adult life, and they appealed to much besides material self-interest. To state the matter very simply and broadly, Hawthorne associated the future of society with American nationhood, its past with Europe and the ex-colonial regions of the Atlantic seaboard. He was drawn to both but perfectly at home with neither, and many – very many – of his maneuvers in life and art can be interpreted as attempts to effect a reconciliation or discover the one in the other. Obtaining the surveyor's post at the U.S. Custom House in Salem was but the most obvious and painfully unsuccessful one.