Thomas J. Balcerski, on the lasting, and almost universally scorned, friendship of Franklin Pierce and Nathaniel Hawthorne:

Theirs is an example of how the tumultuous politics of the 1850s and 1860s transformed the meaning of a friendship from the purely personal to the highly political.… The terrible events of the Civil War had permanently divided long-time friends and literary associates and, in turn, had changed how each [person] understood friendship itself.… Their friendship suggests how political actors in this period, especially, came to define themselves in opposition to those who stood against them…