Thomas Higginson, also an abolitionist, would explain why the idea of spirits lit up the country. “In the midst of a world full of despondency, of doubt, of sadness, with a sad and weary life, in many cases bounded by a sadder and more weary view of eternity, comes a new hope,” he said, “a new excitement, a new aspiration.” Higginson was not the only hopeful abolitionist partial to spiritualism. William Lloyd Garrison, Joshua Giddings, Senator Benjamin Wade, and William Cullen Bryant were some of the other better-known antislavery activists with at least one foot in the spiritualist movement, and the editor Horace Greeley and his wife, after the death of a son, started attending seances. Meanwhile, Maggie and Kate Fox were performing at Rochester’s huge Corinthian Hall. Admission cost a quarter, and people began queuing for tickets at daybreak. Among the four hundred in attendance were skeptics, of course, who assumed the girls were ventriloquists, but these doubters were also won over. The Fox sisters were genuine; they had to be.
The Fox sisters were tapping out higher laws, much as that newfangled telegraph tapped out more pedestrian messages, for this was an age of technological miracle and, one hoped, of miracles of even greater, more transcendent and liberating magnitude. The railroad had spiritualized travel, as the writer Nathaniel Hawthorne had said (even though he was being sardonic); but hadn’t it? Hadn’t it diminished the distance between place and place? And hadn’t the telegraph made distance almost irrelevant with messages sent through immaterial ether? Couldn’t one then contact the spirit world with some human invention? Consider the miracle of the daguerreotype. When Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre brought to the public a machine that rendered the visible world in two-dimensional images on polished plates, the daguerreotype effectively replaced the transitory with the permanent and allowed the past to live in the present. Photographs keep “the form of the dead among the living,” said the main character, a daguerreotypist, in Hawthorne’s 1851 novel, The House of the Seven Gables. The dead were among the living; and if you could see them, you might hear them too.
The world was changing fast, to be sure, while managing to preserve, liberate, and extend itself. The telegraph and railroad could connect the country, the New Englander could talk to the Californian, or they might meet one another without having to travel around Cape Horn, if only that transcontinental railroad managed to get built. As for the daguerreotype, you didn’t have to be wealthy or well born to have your likeness taken. For two and a half dollars, your image could appear in a small, portable, often leather-lined packet. And you could own images of the rich and famous. An ambitious daguerreotypist with poor eyesight named Mathew Brady had realized that early on, and he’d realized that there was a market in images. Formerly a jewel case manufacturer, Brady published a daguerreotype of President Andrew Jackson that he’d taken just before Jackson died and in 1850 released twelve daguerreotyped portraits, called The Gallery of Illustrious Americans, that included Zachary Taylor, John Calhoun, Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay: Democrats and Whigs, Northerners and Southerners: it was a pictorial translation of the Compromise of 1850.
People wanted to see the politicians they’d read about. John O’Sullivan also used the daguerreotype in his magazine, The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, where he included a segment called “Political Portraits with Pen and Pencil.” Steel engravings made from daguerreotypes were strategically placed at the front of any issue with a profile of a government official. And when O’Sullivan was about to publish an essay about Hawthorne, he suggested that the reticent author sit for a daguerreotype to accompany the piece. “By manufacturing you thus into a Personage,” O’Sullivan explained, “I want to raise your mark higher.” Manufacture, yes; the Fox sisters were marketing a spectacle too.
For if the dead are never dead, then one can hear as well as see them—for a fee. That’s what the Fox sisters demonstrated, and soon men of probity such as Isaac Post were communicating with Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, the founder of the Quakers, George Fox, Voltaire, and William Penn. Most seances, however, were conducted by women; women were presumed to be the perfect, passive instrument for channeling the dearly departed. Yet there was power too in their presumed passivity, and mediumship converted what seemed to be compliance into coin—and sometimes into social action. The early women’s rights activists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Ann McClintock, Lucretia Mott, Jane Hunt, and Martha Coffin Wright sat around a spirit table hoping the dead would talk, and on the same table, Stanton composed the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments read at the women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, twenty miles from Hydesville. That was on July 19 and 29, 1848, not four months after the Fox sisters began tapping.
After attending the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London, where women were cordoned off in their own separate section of the hall, Mott and Stanton had decided to call for a women’s rights meeting in America to demand suffrage, equal pay, and a woman’s right to divorce or own property. It was a success. In the boiling heat of July 1848, three hundred men and women arrived in Seneca Falls. (The largest contingent was the antislavery Quakers from the Rochester and Waterloo area.) A second convention was held a few weeks later in Rochester, to which Amy Post went directly after a Fox seance, for she felt strong enough—inspired enough—to argue that a woman should chair the meeting, which a woman did. She knew that the spirits were backing women’s rights as well as abolition.
But the apostles of such liberation and equal rights—and abolition—struck many people as fanatics, not reformers; they were monsters of sentiment and vanity who believed that they alone could read by the light of a divine or higher law. “They have no heart, no sympathy, no reason, no conscience,” complained Hawthorne in The Blithedale Romance, a coruscating satire of such reformers published just after The House of the Seven Gables. “They will keep no friend, unless he make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and slay you, and trample your dead corpse under foot, all the more readily, if you take the first step with them, and cannot take the second, and their third, and every other step of their terribly straight path.”
Composed shortly after the Rochester rappings and the Seneca Falls convention, The Blithedale Romance is one of the strangest novels to come from the strange pen of the New Englander who, stranger still, had passed one spring among the utopian socialists of Brook Farm, where he’d hoed manure in the presence of such living spirits as Charles Anderson Dana, later the managing editor of Greeley’s New-York Tribune. (During the war, Dana was sent by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to report on General Grant’s susceptibility to drink; later still, he published the New York Sun, which he had purchased in a fire sale from the filibusters’ backer Moses Y. Beach.)
Blithedale, then, takes place in an eponymous pastoral community modeled on the short-lived Brook Farm. Founded in 1841 by George and Sophia Ripley and located on about 170 acres in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, Brook Farm was an experiment in cooperative living that intended to spiritualize manual labor by sharing it: “Thought would preside over the operations of labor,” Ripley said in trying to entice Ralph Waldo Emerson, who did not join. “We should have industry without drudgery, and true equality.” The Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education, as the community was formally called, eschewed rank, status, privilege, enforced labor (slavery) as well as wage slavery and formal attire. It welcomed everyone: farmers, mechanics, writers, and preachers. Children were educated in the community school, and the place was funded as a joint-stock company that paid a fixed 5 percent interest to its subscribers.
To Hawthorne, though, the experiment merely spawned the same old society with the same old problems that the benighted reformers had hoped to leave behind. (“No sagacious man will long retain his sagacity,” Hawthorne wrote, “if he lives exclusively among reformers and progressive people, without periodically returning into the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from that old stand-point.”) Among those benighted reformers is the beautiful Zenobia, a
character based on the women’s rights journalist Margaret Fuller. Magnificent but doomed, Zenobia is also the half sister of the far more passive and moony Priscilla, a veiled young woman who onstage mumbles hocus-pocus divinations dispatched, it’s widely assumed, directly from the spirit world. The other side of freedom and strength, Hawthorne was suggesting, is mumbo-jumbo, and as if to prove that women are never really tough or free, the once powerful Zenobia eventually kills herself.
Yet Hawthorne’s quarry in Blithedale was not just the counterfeit arcadia of the 1840s, the women’s movement, or the recent vogue in spiritualism; it was a fractious America in which all three were interwoven as so many threads in a national carpet, where women and men insisted that they spoke of higher laws with “authority from above.” The radical minister Theodore Parker thought Blithedale had been written just for him; perhaps William Seward, if he read the novel, thought the same.
Hawthorne was no reformer and certainly no abolitionist, and though his opposition to that movement embarrassed some of his acquaintances and later his admirers, the novelist did sign a Free Soil petition protesting the Fugitive Slave Act. Hawthorne regarded any law that ceded control to the federal government as absurd. “This Fugitive Law is the only thing that could have blown me into any respectable warmth on this great subject of the day,” he said, “—if it really be the great subject.”
The great subject, though, was America, particularly to Hawthorne’s onetime and uncategorizable neighbor, Herman Melville, a seafarer turned novelist, who lived near Hawthorne in western Massachusetts and loudly banged the drum for America: “We are rapidly preparing for that political supremacy among the nations,” he said, “which prophetically awaits us at the close of the present century.”
Melville wrote this in an erotic review of Hawthorne’s story collection Mosses from an Old Manse in the summer of 1850. Pretending to be a Virginian on summer holiday in Vermont, the ersatz Southerner says he feels Hawthorne “expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.” Undeniably ardent, the passage also suggests Melville is laying claim to a national literature with its roots in New England. But the soil that nurtures those roots is hot and Southern and presumably more fertile than New England’s. A true national literature, then, is a product of North and South.
The Compromise of 1850 had not yet passed. It was as if Melville were calling for it.
Still, Melville’s politics cannot be ascertained with any more certitude than his sex life. Even the colossal novel he was presently writing combined American history and politics with the lore of whaling, current events, philosophy, Shakespeare, Milton, Virgil, the Bible, Andrew Jackson, John Bunyan, and George Washington. Sounding much like O’Sullivan or even Emerson—“the world is as young today, as when it was created”—Melville asks his reader to “contemn all imitation . . . and foster all originality,” to take risks, to speak without bounds, to support American authors. That is, declaiming that the American must seize the moment, not sound like anyone else, and scrap all “leaven of literary flunkeyism towards England,” Melville brooked no compromise. And so he intended to blast open the conventions of the novel. Its rhythms bursting forward and upward, Moby-Dick contains multitudes: natural history and drama, cetology and science, philosophy and crude humor.
Sprawling and gargantuan as the great white whale that the protagonist, Captain Ahab, pursues round the globe, Moby-Dick is a riotous examination of human knowledge, its limits and circumference, as well as a meditation about morality and the ethical actions that make sense, if any do, in an indifferent universe. “Who ain’t a slave?” wonders the novel’s narrator, Ishmael, in a statement that, out of context, places the bitter debate over American slavery on an altogether nongeographic plane: “Let America add Mexico to Texas, and pile Cuba upon Canada; let the English overswarm all India, and hang out their blazing banner from the sun; two thirds of this terraqueous globe are the Nantucketer’s. For the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires.”
On that sea glides Ahab’s ship, the Pequod, and on that ship hides the black cabin boy Pip, who hails from Connecticut or Alabama or both (it’s not quite clear—which is to say he may also be a fugitive). When Pip one day leaps from the side of a whaleboat as the men go in for the kill, he flounders in the ocean, nothing in sight, until Stubb, the second mate, rescues him. Stubb tells Pip not to jump again. “We can’t afford to lose whales by the likes of you,” he says; “a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama.” Of course Pip gets frightened again, and he jumps again, and this time Stubb is in no hurry to rescue him. So Pip bobs in the ocean, his soul drowned in its immense heartlessness, and by the time Stubb finally fetches him, Pip has gone mad. But it’s Ahab, of all people, who recognizes Pip and his suffering. “I feel prouder leading thee by thy black hand,” says the monomaniacal captain, “than though I grasped an Emperor’s!”
If the brooding, angry, fire-defying Ahab would chase the white whale round the Horn into perdition’s flames—and he could—who might stop him? The person best suited to the task seems to be Starbuck, Ahab’s chief mate, a moral man, a brave man, an honest and steadfast and prudent man who will not persist “in fighting a fish that too much persisted in fighting him.” Starbuck would not have a man in his boat who is not afraid of a whale. “By this, he seemed to mean,” Melville explained, “not only that the most reliable and useful courage was that which arises from the fair estimation of the encountered peril, but that an utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.” Starbuck is looking for compromises; he’s a Henry Clay man.
Starbuck tries to influence Ahab by appealing to reason. “ ‘Vengeance on a dumb brute!’ cried Starbuck, ‘that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.’ ” Ahab’s zeal is no match for Starbuck’s logic. But if Ahab’s obsession will destroy the ship, Starbuck must consider slaying his captain. “Is there no other way? no lawful way?” he wonders, much as the men of moderation wondered when assaulted by fanatics, or fire-eaters, or even by the Fugitive Slave Act. But Starbuck would have to be Ahab to kill Ahab, and this far he cannot go. Insurgents sow insurgency, lawlessness, immorality.
Yet to Melville, moderation—“the incompetence of mere unaided virtue”—can itself be a crime. With no one stopping him, Ahab takes down the Pequod and its whole multiracial crew, all except Ishmael.
Moby-Dick is not a political parable. Melville was composing a novel unlike any other America had ever seen; he was not a political practitioner like his older brother Gansevoort, a Democratic booster. Rather, Melville is an Ishmael, the outsider and outcast who perceives that an ineffable, unutterable phantom swims before all human hearts, luring and evading, luring as it evades. Perhaps that phantom is freedom; it’s hard to know. But Melville is also Ahab, of course, and as Ahab, radically breaks through the mask—which is the novel: “If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?” Called crazy when the book appeared, Melville reached far and then burrowed deep into the human heart, where there is freedom but no law—and no moderation.
“SO YOU’RE THE little woman who wrote the book that started this great war,” Abraham Lincoln reportedly quipped to the diminutive Harriet Beecher Stowe—she stood under five feet tall—when they met in 1862. Though likely apocryphal, the remark encapsulates what was and remains Stowe’s ability to place the antislavery movement squarely on the American table. Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Henry James would drily remark, was the “irresistible cause.” George Orwell would call it “a good bad book” that was also “deeply moving and essentially true.”
Published around the same time as Moby-Dick and Blithedale, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: or, Life Among the Lowly was a whopping best seller: 10,000 copies flew off the shelves in the United States during t
he first week of publication, 300,000 in the first year. “Let us hope there are no more Blithedales,” groaned Hawthorne’s publisher. “The writer of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is getting to be a millionaire.” Blithedale had not been a commercial success, and Moby-Dick would fail utterly, its author vilified as vain or vulgar or a little crazy.
Initially serialized in The National Era, Gamaliel Bailey’s Washington-based antislavery magazine, Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been written by a woman who later said she wrote it with her “heart’s blood.” Harriet Beecher Stowe was no stranger to people whose blood was up. The daughter of the noted preacher Lyman Beecher, the sister of the pioneering female educator Catharine, the sister of the women’s rights activist and spiritualist Isabella, she was also the wife of Bowdoin College instructor Reverend Calvin Stowe and the mother of six living children. Her famous and histrionic brother was the antislavery clergyman Henry Ward Beecher. It was as if Mrs. Stowe’s family were a microcosm of the culture, politics, and evangelical religion of the Northeast, which included her own evangelical condemnation of slavery.
Because of its propaganda, the novel and its aesthetic merits have long been a question of some dispute and were even contested at the time of its publication. Hawthorne’s wife, who disparaged most abolitionists, haughtily remarked, “I have felt all along that Mrs. Stowe’s book was overrated—that it was not profound but exciting—too much addressed to the movable passions—not to the deeper soul. Also that it would do no good to the slave.” Yet despite its pieties, its glorification of submission and martyrdom and despite its racism, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a story of female liberation. With slave catchers in pursuit, the slave Eliza, clutching her baby, crosses the Ohio River into freedom as ice floes heave beneath her; the slave woman Cassy foils the cruel slave owner Simon Legree with a cunning plan that plays on the man’s superstitions. Woman’s wit triumphs, even if slavery persists. Though the putative hero of the book, even the Christian slave Uncle Tom is something of a lady, albeit the most docile sort, and his miserable fate ironically suggests the wages of female passivity.
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