Why is Nathaniel Hawthorne considered a Romantic?

Hawthorne is America's first great classic authors, from
all perspectives—that of his 19th-century contemporaries and of today as well. Henry
James considered The Scarlet Letter to be the first major work of the New World, worthy
of entering the ranks of European literature, and posterity has agreed. Yet Hawthorne is
strangely against the times. His relentless obsession with the sins of the past, those
of his own ancestors in the Salem witch trials, and those of the young republic, stands
in strong contrast to the cheery optimism and progressivist thinking of Jacksonian
America. Hawthorne's collection of Twice-Told Tales (1837) shows us a writer wrestling
with the image of America, determined to reveal the ironies and ambiguities of the
Puritan "errand in the wilderness," the pious manner in which New England chose to view
itself. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne bequeaths to us the richest image we have of
the Puritan mind, a mind obsessed with spiritual salvation as it coexists with human
happiness and the life of the community. Yet this retrospective look into the past is
inextricably of its own mid-19th-century moment: concerned with political dissent, with
the failure of Revolution in Europe, with the problematic role of a strong woman in a
repressive culture. Hawthorne's book captures, as no other American text does, the high
political drama of freedom and revolt, somewhat in the Romantic landscape, but it
highlights even more powerfully the processes of interpretation and analysis, the ways
by which we read the heart and come to knowledge.