Melville: His World and Work

by Andrew Delbanco

  These were old problems. Their intractability had led to many evasions and deferrals by which the solution had been left to the future. But in 1850 something fundamental changed, and a chronic problem became an acute one. Under the terms of the proposed compromise, California would be admitted as a free state, the Utah and New Mexico territories were to submit the question of slavery at some future date to popular vote, the slave trade in Washington, D.C., would be ended, and existing laws would be toughened to require local authorities in every state of the Union to arrest and return runaway slaves to their aggrieved masters. The effect of this omnibus bill, which passed piecemeal through Congress under the stewardship of Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas, was to answer the question, as Bronson Alcott phrased it in April 1851, “What has the North to do with slavery?” The answer was now clear: A great deal.

  For years, northerners had managed to convince themselves that slavery was somebody else’s problem. Yet everyone knew that northern banks invested heavily in cotton, and that in some northern ports the slave trade itself continued as an illegal, but tacitly permitted, smuggling business. In 1846, with war against Mexico looming, Theodore Parker had remarked that “Northern Representatives … are no better than Southern Representatives; scarcely less in favor of slavery, and not half so open.” When confronted with such charges, most northerners looked the other way.

  What the Fugitive Slave Law did for blacks was to rob them of hope. What it did for whites was to deny them mental refuge in willful insouciance. As Alcott put it, the new law “visibly answered” the question of the North’s relation to slavery, in the form of fugitives running for their lives without hope of finding sanctuary even in New England, where the long arm of the slavemaster could now legally reach them. In May 1851, Emerson made the matter more visible than even Alcott had done:

  If our resistance to this law is not right, there is no right.… This is not going crusading into Virginia and Georgia after slaves, who, it is alleged, are very comfortable where they are … but this is befriending in our own state, on our own farms, a man who has taken the risk of being shot, or burned alive, or cast into the sea, or starved to death, or suffocated in a wooden box, to get away from his driver; and this man, who has run the gauntlet of a thousand miles for his freedom, the statute says, you men of Massachusetts shall hunt, and catch, and send back again to the dog-hutch he fled from.

  2.

  In the summer of 1850, Melville was living far from where this drama was playing out, but he kept abreast of events through the local Democratic paper, the Pittsfield Sun, which took an acquiescent line on the new Fugitive Slave Law. His local literary friends were similarly conciliatory. Dr. Holmes, who signed a public circular in Boston praising Webster for showing statesmanship, was known to speak with nostalgia about the old days of “slavery in its best and mildest form.” Among those who signed a similar resolution in Pittsfield supporting every provision of the compromise was John C. Hoadley—a young widower and friend of the new owners of Broadhall, the Morewoods, who was to marry Kate Melville in 1853. As for Melville’s new friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, he was soon to write in his campaign biography of his Bowdoin classmate Franklin Pierce that in America, master and slave “dwelt together in greater peace and affection … than had ever elsewhere existed between the taskmaster and the serf.” But if Melville’s friends and family generally supported the new law, to support it was not necessarily to like it. As Lincoln later wrote, “I hate to see the poor creatures hunted down, and caught, and carried back to their stripes, but I bite my lip and keep quiet.” In Boston, the chief lip-biter was Judge Lemuel Shaw.

  Beginning in the fall of 1850, a rash of fugitive slave cases turned Boston into a battleground. In October, slave hunters appeared in the city looking for a pair of fugitives, William Craft and his wife, Ellen, who had escaped from bondage in Georgia. They had fled with the light-skinned Ellen disguised as an invalid white man in scarf and goggles, and her husband posing as her black attendant. With the help of Theodore Parker, whose actions on their behalf constituted a felony under the new law, the Crafts eventually escaped to England before they could be arraigned in the court where Judge Shaw would have ruled on their case. (Harriet Beecher Stowe had the Crafts in mind when she wrote some of the scenes in Uncle Tom’s Cabin of slaves fleeing bounty hunters.) A few months later, in early February 1851, a fugitive named Shadrach, also known as Frederick Minkins, was taken into custody in the federal courthouse where Shaw presided. Shortly afterwards, a mostly Negro mob invaded the building and, “like a black squall,” according to Richard Henry Dana, carried off the prisoner before he could be sent back south. In April, when another young black man, Thomas Sims, was arrested, the city marshal encircled the courthouse in heavy chains in order to prevent a repeat of the Shadrach rescue. Lawyers and judges had to stoop below the chain to enter. When Shaw delivered the order to return Sims to Georgia (where he later nearly died from a public flogging), Emerson wrote in his journal: “What a moment was lost when Judge Shaw declined to affirm the unconstitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law!”

  One effect of these events was to place Melville’s father-in-law at the center of the storm and turn him into the embattled leader of New England conservatism. Having once been praised by the fervently anti-slavery Charles Sumner as “pure, fearless, and upright,” Shaw now found himself regularly denounced as a truckler to what abolitionists called “the Slave Power.” In fact, he saw himself as a servant of the law much as his friend Webster did. Personally, he found slavery abhorrent. When the law permitted him to act against it, he did so, as he had done in an 1836 case involving a slave transported by her mistress to New England. Shaw had ruled that “an owner of a slave in another State where slavery is warranted by law, voluntarily bringing such slave into this State, had no authority to detain him against his will”—a judgment that later furnished the basis for Justice Benjamin Curtis’s dissent in the 1857 U.S. Supreme Court Dred Scott decision denying Negroes their citizenship rights.

  But after 1850, Shaw felt obliged to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law even if it required him to issue orders for remanding fugitives to their owners. What had changed was not Shaw’s position but that of the law he served, and to many of Shaw’s friends and peers it seemed that the world had turned upside down. “It is strange,” wrote Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1851, “to find one’s self outside of established institutions … to see law and order, police and military, on the wrong side, and find good citizenship a sin and bad citizenship a duty.” A decent man might once have lived comfortably with himself as long as he “abstains from doing downright ill,” Melville was soon to write in Pierre, and “is perfectly tolerant to all other men’s opinions, whatever they may be.” But with slavecatchers and anti-slavery vigilantes prowling the streets, abstention and toleration were already fond memories and, according to some, outright crimes. Not long before, when the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison proclaimed “NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS!,” his voice had seemed a howl from the fringe. Now he seemed to speak for the center.

  Lemuel Shaw, 1851 (list of illustrations 6.2)

  3.

  As Melville’s rather puerile sketches in Yankee Doodle and the political chapters of Mardi had made clear, he was, at best, a halfhearted political satirist. Politics never engaged him deeply. Passage of the Fugitive Slave Law did not incite him to loud outrage as it did contemporaries such as Emerson, who declared that “I wake in the morning with a painful sensation” at the smell of “infamy in the air,” or Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in hot fury at what she regarded as Webster’s perfidy. But Melville found himself full of foreboding on behalf of his country, and this apprehension was reflected in his new book. The ghost of slavery had made fleeting appearances in his earlier work—showing up in Mardi in the form of a handbill promising bounty for the capture of runaway slaves posted in the “Temple of Freedom” (the U.S. Capitol). In Redburn, the ghost had appeared in Liverpool when Melvil
le’s young American narrator looks upon a statue of Lord Nelson standing astride four “woe-begone figures of captives emblematic of Nelson’s principal victories” and finds himself thinking instead of “four African slaves in the marketplace.” In White-Jacket, upon witnessing a black sailor being flogged, the narrator is prompted by the slavery ghost to blurt out his relief—“Thank God! I am a white”—before recanting in a spasm of shame: “There is something in us, somehow that, in the most degraded condition, we snatch at a chance to deceive ourselves into a fancied superiority to others, whom we suppose lower in the scale than ourselves.”

  Melville knew that in America the dignity of whites depended on the degradation of blacks, and he was, at least sporadically, ashamed to be a beneficiary of the symmetry. But like virtually everyone in his time, including most abolitionists, he took for granted that some sort of racial hierarchy had always existed and always would. Even the belligerently egalitarian Whitman, whose panoptic poems tend to blur all human subjects into a monochrome crowd (“each answering all, each sharing the earth with all”), was not above speaking of black people as a “superstitious, ignorant, and thievish race.” If Emerson spoke compassionately about fugitive slaves, he also wrote in his journal that “so inferior a race must perish shortly like the Indians,” while Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of the telegraph, put the Negro just above the baboon in the great chain of being. These attitudes were so widespread that in 1842, while touring the United States, the English naturalist Charles Lyell was amazed at “the extent to which the Americans carry their repugnance to all association with the coloured race on equal terms.”

  On this question of race, Melville was a dissenter. “Seamen have strong prejudices,” he wrote in 1855, “particularly in the matter of race,” though aboard a whaleship (about the closest thing in antebellum America to an integrated society) there was, according to one black sailor writing in 1857, “no distinction as to color”—and it was on a whaleship that Melville’s adult consciousness had been formed. One of his former shipmates on the United States, the purser’s slave, Robert Lucas, had petitioned successfully to Judge Shaw for his freedom after the ship docked at Boston. And like Ishmael, Melville believed that “a man can be honest in any sort of skin.” Having served with black men of all qualities, he dismissed the various theories (blacks were said to have small cranial cavities and simian brows) with which some apologists for slavery argued that they were suited by nature for servitude. As for black women, Melville had probably read the Scottish explorer Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799), or was at least favorably aware of Park’s account of the kindness, refinement, and modesty of African mothers.

  One consequence of Melville’s years at sea was a certain cosmopolitan amusement at how human beings organize themselves into ranks, and at how those doing the organizing always reserve a place for themselves at the top. The many passages in Moby-Dick in which whales are listed, sorted, described, defined (“to be short, then, a whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail”), assigned a formal name (“Narwhale”) or nickname (“Nostril whale”), categorized by girth or physiognomy or even character (“the Fin-Back is not gregarious”), aesthetically assessed (the mealy-mouthed porpoise has “sentimental Indian eyes of a hazel hue. But his mealy-mouth spoils all”) amount to what one critic calls “a zestful-skeptical running commentary on the age’s passion for comparative anatomy.” These cetological chapters retard the pace of the narrative, and many readers prefer to skip them in order to get on with the great chase; but it is here that Melville makes his case, with tongue in cheek, against all forms of classification—including the racial form. “It is in vain,” he writes, with more than whales in mind, “to attempt a clear classification of the Leviathan,” yet

  some pretend to see a difference between the Greenland whale of the English and the right whale of the Americans. But they precisely agree in all their grand features; nor has there yet been presented a single determinate fact upon which to ground a radical distinction. It is by endless subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences, that some departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate.

  A few years after writing Moby-Dick, he was to place at the center of his great novella Benito Cereno a white New Englander too stupid to realize that he is being manipulated by an African slave of brilliance and wit.

  Melville regarded slavery, in other words, as a crime not only against one subjugated race but against humanity (a “sin it is, no less;—a blot, foul as the crater-pool of hell,” he wrote in Mardi), yet he was not sure where to place responsibility for it or how to begin to redress it. For one thing, he doubted that northerners were morally superior merely because the slave system had never established itself in their part of the country. Naval officers “from the Southern States,” he wrote in White-Jacket, “are much less severe, and much more gentle and gentlemanly … than the Northern officers”—a judgment with which Ahab concurs when he warns the Pequod’s black cabin boy that there are “no hearts above the snow-line.” In Mardi, Melville wrote that “humanity cries out against this vast enormity,” but “not one man knows a prudent remedy.” In Redburn, Melville touched the slavery theme again when the narrator complains that he has been treated “like a slave, and set to work like an ass!” with “vulgar and brutal men lording it over me, as if I were an African in Alabama.”

  When Moby-Dick began to take shape in Melville’s mind, the dispute between (and within) North and South over race and slavery was coming to crisis. Political orators of all stripes warned that the ship of state was “about to be dashed to pieces amidst the breakers with which she was visibly almost in contact,” yet most poets and fiction writers dealt with the crisis warily if at all. Longfellow addressed it in his “The Building of the Ship” (1850), about boatwrights who construct out of “cedar of Maine and Georgia pine” a vessel “sublime in its enormous bulk” to which they wishfully give the name Union. Thoreau wrote obliquely in Walden (1854) about the Mexican War by recounting the sight of red and black ants in a woodpile gnawing at each other with “the ferocity and carnage of a human battle” that “took place in the Presidency of Polk, five years before the passage of Webster’s Fugitive-Slave Bill.”

  It is impossible to say just when or how the political situation seized Melville’s attention; but at some point between the Webster-Calhoun exchange in Washington in March 1850 and the outbreak of conflict in Boston at the end of that year, the crisis took effect on his work-in-progress. In his earlier books, he had shunted political matters into tangential comments that read like editorials patched onto the main narrative; but in Moby-Dick, politics became a central element in the larger constellation of themes, as if the incidental realism of Redburn and White-Jacket had been melded with the political allegory of Mardi. The Pequod becomes a replica of the American ship of state; its thirty-man crew (“isolatoes federated along one keel”) matched in number the thirty states that constituted the Union in 1850. The Pequod’s labor system, made up of white overseers and dark underlings, replicates that of “the American army and military and merchant navies, and the engineering forces employed in the construction of the American Canals and Railroads.” And in an echo of a stock image in contemporary political cartoons showing a white planter atop the shoulders of a brawny black slave, one of the mates, Mr. Flask, perches on the shoulders of the “coal-black” harpooneer Daggoo, in order to get an aerial view of their hunting ground:

  New York newspaper cartoon, c. 1860 (list of illustrations 6.3)

  The sight of little Flask mounted upon gigantic Daggoo was … curious; for sustaining himself with a cool, indifferent, easy, unthought of, barbaric majesty, the noble negro to every roll of the sea harmoniously rolled his fine form. On his broad back, flaxen-haired Flask seemed a snow-flake. The bearer looked nobler than the rider.

  “Thy race is the undeniable dark side of mankind,” a Spanish sailor later tells Daggoo, “—devilish dark at that,” to which
Daggoo, half menacing, half mocking, shows his teeth.

  But more than Atlas-like Daggoo, it was the diminutive black cabin boy Pip (short for Pippin) whom Melville chose to bear the weight of the racial theme in Moby-Dick. In one of those anomalies that Melville left unrevised in his manuscript, he describes Pip as both an “Alabama boy” and a native of Connecticut, as if South and North had collaborated in creating him. At first, Pip is little more than the stock figure of the dancing darky, amusing the crew by high-stepping to the sound of his tambourine; when he cannot find the instrument, he is told to “Beat thy belly, then, and wag thy ears.” Later, in “The Castaway,” we ride with Pip in Stubb’s whaleboat, dragged along by a harpooned whale bucking and lurching in the maritime equivalent of a bronco ride until the boy loses his nerve, leaps out, and becomes entangled in the harpoon line. Mr. Stubb reluctantly halts the chase, allows his harpooneer to sever the line in order to save the boy at the expense of freeing the whale, and warns Pip that there will be no second rescue. “Stick to the boat, Pip,” Stubb says, or next time, “by the Lord, I wont pick you up.… We can’t afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama.” Sure enough, when Pip jumps a second time, he is left in the sea “like a hurried traveller’s trunk.”