And my thoughts would revert to Virginia and Carolina; and also to the historical fact, that the African slave-trade once constituted the principal commerce of Liverpool; and that the prosperity of the town was once supposed to have been indissolubly linked to its prosecution. And I remembered that my father had often spoken to gentlemen visiting our house in New York, of the unhappiness that the discussion of the abolition of this trade had occasioned in Liverpool; that the struggle between sordid interest and humanity had made sad havoc at the fire-sides of the merchants; estranged sons from sires; and even separated husband from wife.
Melville was especially impressed with the way the monument’s “hideous skeleton” insinuated “his bony hand under the hero’s robe,” groping for Nelson’s heart. “A very striking design, and true to the imagination; I never could look at Death without a shudder.”4
Considering that Melville resisted imagining chattel slavery as a singular problem, distinct from other forms of domination, the proposition set forth in the second paragraph is interesting: Liverpool’s wealth, as well as Carolina’s and Virginia’s, was built on the backs of enslaved Africans. But what is especially compelling is the cascading flow of the prose, the way an initial, fleeting impression kicks off an “involuntary” stream of associations revealing slavery’s outsized role in Western history, the way the trade made seemingly random coincidences fit into a meaningful pattern.
One such coincidence involves the Nelson statue itself. Melville probably didn’t know it, but the monument was raised by a civic committee made up mostly of slavers, shippers, and sugar planters who were grateful that the Royal Navy, thanks to Nelson, had established its dominance over the Atlantic, so that they could sail their vessels to and from the slave plantations in the Caribbean in relative safety. Among them was John Bolton. This meant that the slaver responsible for the arrival in America of some of the West Africans who would later inspire Melville to write Benito Cereno was also responsible for the “fleeting images” that prompted Melville, years earlier, to write about slavery in the first place.
Melville’s vision would soon pass and he would return to discussing slavery as a proxy for the human condition in general. Yet while in Liverpool, he circled the ghastly memorial “repeatedly.” “How this group of statuary affected me,” Melville wrote in Redburn, based on that visit, “may be inferred from the fact, that I never went through Chapel-street without going through the little arch to look at it again. And there, night or day, I was sure to find Lord Nelson still falling back, Victory’s wreath still hovering over his sword point, and Death grim and grasping as ever, while the four bronze captives still lamented their captivity.”
Melville returned one more time to look at the monument, in 1856, a year after he wrote Benito Cereno. “After dinner went to Exchange,” he recorded in his diary, “Looked at Nelson statue, with peculiar emotion, mindful of 20 years ago.”5
PART II
A LOOSE FISH
What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish?
—HERMAN MELVILLE, MOBY-DICK
6
A SUITABLE GUIDE TO BLISS
Amasa Delano was born into one of those sprawling pilgrim families that, if not for their pedigree then because of their numbers, seemed to have had a hand in everything America was becoming. His great-great-great grandfather Philippe de Lannoy arrived in Plymouth in 1621, one ship behind the Mayflower. Within less than a decade, he had joined with other colonists to sail his family across the bay, settling what became the town of Duxbury on a spit of forest and meadowland nestled between the ocean and salt marshes and fed with freshwater springs.
Philippe married twice, had five sons, four daughters, and thirty-eight grandchildren—who each in turn had a prodigious number of offspring, eagerly so: one of Philippe’s sons, Amasa’s great-great grandfather, was fined ten pounds for having committed “carnall copulation” with a woman he subsequently married. “They are so plentiful they roost in trees like turkeys,” a Duxbury neighbor once said. The Delanos, as the name came to be written, were soon found across New England, from Maine to New York, and beyond, and included branches that produced some of America’s most successful businessmen, artists, and statesmen, among them three presidents: Ulysses S. Grant, Calvin Coolidge, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Amasa’s mother’s ancestors also arrived early in Plymouth, descended from a Devonshire man said to have been knighted by Queen Elizabeth.1
At the time of Amasa’s birth in 1763, Duxbury was a poor fishing town made up of horse trails and cottages stocked with rough-edged, homemade furnishings. Only one home had anything that could be called a carpet and nobody had a four-wheel cart and just a few families owned African slaves. Marshfield, one town over, was wealthier. Its sons went to Harvard or enlisted in the British Royal Navy. Duxbury stayed stocked with farmers, fisherman, wood cutters, colliers (charcoal makers), and shipwrights, “iron-nerved” men who could “hew down forests and live on crumbs.” All were poor, but some were poorer, mostly the elderly who had outlived their kin and couldn’t survive on their own. Families took turns “keeping” a distant cousin of Amasa’s, for instance, “old Jane Delanoe,” and then paid for her coffin when she died.2
Amasa’s parents, Samuel and Abigail, called the rest of their boys Alexander, William, and Samuel Jr. But they named their firstborn after his uncle Amasa, which in Hebrew means burden or to carry a heavy load. There is only one Amasa in the Old Testament. He is King David’s nephew, murdered by his cousin Joab, who with his right hand pulls Amasa’s beard in friendship as if to kiss him as he uses his left to thrust a dagger into his side. Amasa’s intestines spill out on the ground and he dies in his own blood. “The more plot there is in sin, the worse it is,” was how an eighteenth-century commentary on the Bible interpreted this passage. And if the biblical reference weren’t forbidding enough, the circumstances of his namesake uncle’s death were even darker.3
On October 4, 1759, Amasa’s uncle Amasa Delanoe, a sergeant in Rogers Rangers, a celebrated British militia, took part in an attack on Saint Francis, a French-allied Abenaki settlement near the Saint Lawrence River. The village’s men had gone out patrolling, leaving behind mostly children, women, the sick, and the old. Dressed as Indians, the Rangers set the village on fire. In “less then a quarter of an hour the whole town was in a blaze, the carnage terrible,” Robert Kirk, a Scottish member of the Rangers, recorded in his diary. “Those who the flames did not devour were either shot or tomohawk’ed.” Kirk called it “the bloodiest scene in all America.”
The killing was over in a few hours, but the retreat down the Connecticut River valley, with the British pursued by the French and Abenaki, lasted weeks. Short on food and water and badly exposed to the elements, the Rangers, now broken up into small bands, got lost in the woods. Exhausted and starving, they survived through cannibalism. Kirk’s unit was in killed a captive they had taken from Saint Francis, Marie-Jeanne Gill, the daughter of the Abenaki chief. “We then broiled and eat most of her,” Kirk wrote, “and receive great strength thereby.” Delanoe’s group, reduced to three soldiers, did the same to its prisoner, who might have been the Abenaki leader’s other child, his son Xavier. The next day, the Abenaki caught Delanoe and his men near Lake Champlain, and when they learned the British “had killed and eat a Little Boy,” the Indians “killed and scalped” them “in revenge.”4
* * *
The younger Amasa took first to freshwater, then to salt, and by the age of five could plunge into the cold ocean and stay under for unusual lengths. Even as a boy he had a compact physique, as if he were composed of condensed energy. Along with his younger brothers, Samuel and William (Alexander died an infant), Amasa learned to build ships from their shipwright father and to navigate on fishing trips to the Grand Banks, bringing back cod, mackerel, and herring to sell in Boston. He quit school after a few years, rebelling against the “severity of schoolmasters,” though he continued to be a voracious reader.
Duxbury was a small
town and a large part of Amasa’s moral education took place in his family’s pew in its clapboard First Parish Church. Reverend Charles Turner was the village pastor through the whole of Amasa’s first thirteen years. He was a severe-looking man who wore an unusually large white wig as he made his rounds calling on families and scaring children. “I was exceedingly afraid of him,” recalled one of Amasa’s contemporaries.5
Turner projected authority but his theology was subversive. He was a man of “practiced eloquence,” part of a generation of preachers who were planting the seeds of what would later become known as Unitarianism. They were leaving behind the cold Calvinism of Delano’s parents and grandparents, which held that there was little an individual could do to change the course of his afterlife (and which thought it nothing to name a baby boy Amasa). The people of Duxbury were embracing a more liberal faith, which included the notion that man possessed free will. Turner had an opportunity to rehearse this new outlook in Boston in 1773, before an audience of royal magistrates. He had been selected to give that year’s annual Election Sermon, a prestigious honor in recognition of a long and distinguished career in the ministry.6
Preached before the British governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, at a time when Boston newspapers were openly debating the question of independence, Turner’s sermon was practically insurrectionary. “The scriptures,” he said, “cannot rightly be expounded without explaining them in a manner friendly to the cause of freedom.” Turner said that he had lived for nearly two decades among the good men and women of Duxbury. London opinion thought of them, along with the rest of America’s “common people,” as “little superior to Indian Barbarians,” but they, better than the king and his deputies, were the true source and guardians of virtue.
Turner also included in his sermon a formulation that would become increasingly common in public debate, the idea that the “avarice” of individuals could contribute to “publick advantage.” By increasing available wealth and resources, the pursuit of personal gain, he said, could benefit the community as a whole. In this new equation, qualities that Christians in the past had considered vices, such as ambition, were placed in the category of “interests.” They weren’t to be repressed but balanced by virtue—or, as Turner put it, “enriched” by “higher principles” that would protect the “publick good” from the “vile affections of a few.” Man’s passions, appetites, and interests needed to be, he said, regulated with what “if we please we may call a constitution.”7
Turner’s remarks are a clear example of one of the things that the historian Gordon Wood says made the American Revolution radical: the equation of the governance of the self and the governance of society, a reliance on a moral constitution to check and balance passions in individuals and a written one to check and balance them in politics. Governor Hutchinson “winced and changed color during the sermon” and “pointedly did not invite Turner to the festive meal that followed the preaching.” Samuel Adams, though, was so impressed with Turner’s sermon that he distributed its text far and wide, throughout the colonies and to London, where it reached the desk of Benjamin Franklin.8
Back in Duxbury, Turner would take his flock to the shores of the revolution and leave them there. He retired from the ministry in early 1776 due to ill health. On July 3, 1776—the day after the Continental Congress voted to break with Great Britain and the day before it adopted the Declaration of Independence—the town’s new minister, Zedekiah Sanger, was ordained, and Reverend Elijah Brown, pastor of nearby Sherborn’s First Parish Church, gave the sermon.9
Brown’s optimism concerning human nature was even greater than Turner’s. “There is nothing in divine revelation inconsistent with, or contrary to the prime dictates and requirements, of pure, unabused reason,” he said in his lecture introducing Sanger. “Reason, that shining ray of the Deity—that bright effulgence of eternal light, when first implanted in the human soul,” he continued, choosing a set of luminous words that radiated pure love, “was a suitable guide to bliss and glory.”10
But Reverend Brown had a problem. Like many of its neighboring towns, Duxbury had sided with Boston’s Sons of Liberty against London. Three years earlier, Amasa’s father and uncles helped raise the village’s first company of minutemen, promising to “stand or fall” with the Congress. Duxbury paid a price. Even before the Battle of Lexington, royal troops were harassing its residents, encircling its church during services and political meetings, and impeding its fishermen from going to sea. The Royal Navy burned one schooner just off shore, transferring its crew, which included a number of Amasa’s cousins, to a prison ship in New York Harbor, where some perished. Elsewhere, too, the war against the British had exacted a heavy toll. And the losses suffered at the hands of the British were nothing compared with the smallpox epidemic that swept North America, from New England to Mexico, beginning in 1775, laying siege to cities and villages and claiming more than 100,000 victims by the time it abated.11
And so, at the end of his sermon celebrating the brightness and bliss of God-given reason, Brown turned gloomy. He told the Duxury congregation that he supported independence from Great Britain and he urged the town to continue “struggling for our natural rights.” But the situation is “calamitous,” he said; “heaven is angry with us.” The wasting plagues, the groans of our wounded, the blood of our brethren, the horrors of war—how else could such a procession of woe be understood other than as punishment? Have we not, he asked, “wickedly forsaken the lord?”
Brown had given up the doctrine of predestination for individual souls, yet he held on to the idea that God spoke through history, that history was more than the accumulated tally of individual acts derived from free will. It was an expression of divine favor or disfavor. If the good people of Duxbury had used their free will to act virtuously—to fight for their natural rights—then how to account for their suffering?
Amasa was thirteen years old in 1776. By all accounts he was a thoughtful boy. Yet sitting in the Delano family pew, he probably missed the depth of Brown’s paradox, that individual lives might not be foreordained but the course of history was still guided by God. It wouldn’t be until the end of his life that he questioned the idea that if reason and discipline were put to controlling appetites and impulses, success would follow. In any case, the reverend’s dark turn was brief, coming at the very end of a long, long sermon.
When Brown finished, he yielded the pulpit to Duxbury’s new minister, who started with the subject on everyone’s mind. Reverend Sanger began by quoting Leviticus: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”
* * *
The revolution changed Duxbury. Samuel Delano, Amasa’s father, did well as the owner of a small shipyard, moving from being “poor and without any literary attainments” to, in 1783, able to buy a decent-sized plot of land. Yet though he is often listed among the men whose skill and hard work made Duxbury rich, his name doesn’t appear on the rolls of those who became rich themselves, like his neighbor Ezra Weston. Weston also started as a poor freeholder and shipwright, but he came to dominate the town’s economy by the end of the 1700s, owning a large shipyard, a blacksmith shop, timberlands, a ropewalk, a sawmill to cut spars, and a fleet of fishing ships. He acquired so much wealth and influence that he would earn about as damning a nickname as could be imagined in republican New England: King Caesar.12
Duxbury’s postrevolutionary prosperity led to an increase in harlotry, hard drinking, cursing, gambling, and other iniquities concentrated near its shipyards. “Keep away,” one old timer warned a bunch of back-country farm boys looking for work with the town’s fishing fleet. “It’s Sodom, and it’s going to be sunk, it is.” Individuals like King Caesar, who reigned over Duxbury’s little Sodom, accumulated riches that would have been undreamed of just decades earlier. Weston’s son, Ezra Weston Jr.—who was about the same age as Amasa—inherited not just his father’s business and property but his title as well. He was King Caesar II, pres
iding over the further expansion of his family’s shipping empire.13
With wealth came poverty. The kind of occasional family and church charity that paid for old Jane’s coffin was no longer enough to deal with spreading destitution. In 1767, the town had voted to “drive the poor” into a workhouse, and soon thereafter a standing committee was established to administer the institution. In exchange for food and clothing, the insolvent picked oakum (like Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist), pulling strands of hemp or jute out of old rope, which would then be mixed with tar and used to caulk the hulls of ships.14
The changes in Duxbury were slices of larger ones taking place throughout the new republic. Gordon Wood describes this period in American history, in the decades following the triumph of the revolution, as a great unraveling. “Everything seemed to be coming apart,” he writes, “and murder, suicide, theft and mobbing became increasingly common responses to the burdens that liberty and the expectation of gain were placing on people.” Far from creating a nation founded on “benevolence and selflessness, enlightened republicanism was breeding social competitiveness and individualism.” Reverend Turner’s idea that “higher principles” could temper private ambitions was put on its head. For many, private ambition was the higher principle. Everywhere rude men were accumulating great fortunes, speculating, lending money at high interest, price gouging, or seeking political office to advance not the ideals of the republic but the interests of their particular class, or worse, just themselves, by “exploiting the revolutionary rhetoric of liberty and equality.” “The Revolution,” Wood writes, “was the source of its own contradictions.”15
The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World Page 7