Two versions of oppression: Hawthorne's stories

Because we might be going to Salem today in anticipation picked up old collection of very old Hawthorne stories - who reads these today except students? and me? - and read first in the collection, a patriotic rouser called The Grey Champion - obviously meant to be a stump speech or sermon type of story, a story to stir a crowd, maybe on a patriotic occasion - so appropriate that I read it on the 4th - and it's also very quaint to read it today, especially w/, as bro-in-law J was reminding me, our more complex understanding of the politics of the colonial era. This story recalls the rebellions of 1689 in the Mass Bay Colony when the people - although let's remember not the native people but the Puritan settlers - stood up against the British forces of Governor/General Andros and his lackeys. It's hysterical to read Hawthorne's characterizations of the British tyrants and their puppet government - and also very frightening, over-written as it may be - as there are similar oppressive governments (though they are less often colonial governments, that era seems largely completed on this planet) that hold people in terror and oppression. As the Puritans stand up to Andros, one brave, elderly, solitary figure - the eponymous champion - stands before the advancing redcoats and by his very presence halts the army - and who today could read this and not think of Tian-an-min Square, and who cannot think of the many truth-to-power revolutions of the past 20 years and of the oppressive governments yet to fall? The deeper "layer" that we bring to the story today, of course, is our understanding that the Puritans - which H. also shared, obviously, as anyone who's read the Scarlet Letter, that is, everyone, knows - weren't so morally or politically pure themselves: the freedom that they wanted was to a great to degree freedom to oppress or exclude others: the native Americans of course but also any community w/ differing religious beliefs; J points out that the British were bringing the various Mass colonies together into the present-day Commonwealth to dilute the Puritan power, as oppressive as the British monarchy against which Hawthorne fulminates.