The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World

by Grandin, Greg

  4. Herman Melville, Redburn, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, New York: Library of America, 1983, p. 170.

  5. Howard Horsford with Lynn Horth, eds., The Writings of Herman Melville: Journals, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1989, p. 50.

  6. A SUITABLE GUIDE TO BLISS

  1. Philippe de Lannoy begat Thomas, who begat Jonathan Sr., who begat Jonathan Jr., who begat Samuel, who begat Amasa. See Alicia Crane Williams, ed., Esther Littleford Woodworth-Barnes, comp., Mayflower Families through Five Generations, vol. 16, part 1, Plymouth: General Society of Mayflower Descendants, 1999, p. 49; Daniel Delano Jr., Franklin Roosevelt and the Delano Influence, Pittsburgh: James Nudi, 1946; Muriel Curtis Cushing, Philip Delano of the “Fortune” 1621, and His Descendants for Four Generations, Plymouth: General Society of Mayflower Descendants, 2002; Philip Delano of the “Fortune” 1621, and His Descendants in the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Generations, parts 1 and 2, Plymouth: General Society of Mayflower Descendants, 2004, 2011.

  2. For slavery in Duxbury, see Justin Winsor, History of the Town of Duxbury, Massachusetts, with Genealogical Registers, Boston: Crosby and Nichols, 1849, pp. 68, 70–71, 130, 271, 340; for enslavement of Native Americans, see pp. 71, 314. “Iron-nerved” and able to “hew down forests and live on crumbs” was how one of the town’s founders, Myles Standish, was described in “Alden Genealogy,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register, vol. 51 (October 1897), p. 430. See also George Ethridge, ed., Copy of the Old Records of the Town of Duxbury, Mas: From 1642 to 1770, Plymouth: Avery and Doten, 1893, p. 338; Jennifer Turner, “Almshouse, Workhouse, Outdoor Relief: Responses to the Poor in Southeastern Massachusetts, 1740–1800,” Historical Journal of Massachusetts 31 (Summer 2003): 212–14.

  3. At times written as: “The more there is of craft and management in sin, the more it is an abomination to God.” The story of the biblical Amasa’s murder is in 2 Samuel, which Herman Melville read closely, judging from the underlinings, checks, and markings in the Bible he was using at the time he wrote Benito Cereno. Much appreciation to Clifford Ross for allowing me to consult the book in his private collection. Another Melville family Bible (Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, 1810), now in the New York Public Library’s Gansevoort-Lansing collection, in an appendix titled “Index of Proper Names with Meanings in Original Language,” defines Amasa as “sparing the people.”

  4. Amasa came from a line of Indian-killers. In 1637, Philippe de Lanoy had volunteered to fight the Pequots, in a genocidal war that nearly destroyed the Native American group as a people. Survivors were hunted down and either killed or sold to the Spanish as slaves. Philippe volunteered in July 1837, after the infamous Mystic Massacre, where the British surrounded a Pequot roundhouse filled mostly with women, children, and elderly and burned it to the ground, killing hundreds. He might have participated in the July 1837 “swamp engagement,” one of the last battles of the war. Personal communication with Alfred Cave, December 16, 2012. See Alfred Cave, The Pequot War, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. For Amasa Delanoe and events surrounding the attack on Saint Francis, see Ian McCulloch and Timothy Todish, eds., Through So Many Dangers: The Memoirs and Adventures of Robert Kirk, Late of the Royal Highland Regiment, Fleischmanns: Purple Mountain Press, 3004, pp. 66–67; BN (London), WO 71/68, Marching Regiments (October 1760–July 1761), pp. 147–50; Nicolas Renaud d’Avène des Méloizes, Journal militaire de Nicolas Renaud d’Avène des Méloizes 1756–1759, Quebec, 1930, pp. 86–87; Stephen Brumwell, White Devil: A True Story of War, Savagery, and Vengeance in Colonial America, Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2004, pp. 230, 235, 305.

  5. Seth Sprague, “Reminiscences of the Olden Times,” 1845, n.p., in Hon. Seth Sprague of Duxbury, Plymouth County, Massachusetts; His Descendants down to the Sixth Generation and His Reminiscences of the Old Colony Town, comp. William Bradford Weston, n.p., 1915.

  6. For the contribution of Duxbury’s ministers to the emergence of Unitarianism, see Samuel Atkins Eliot, Heralds of a Liberal Faith, Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1910, pp. 122–30, 194–99. For Turner’s Election Sermon, see Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787–1788, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011, p. 205, and Charles Turner, A Sermon Preached before His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, Boston: Richard Draper, 1773.

  7. For the rebalancing of passions, interests, virtues, and vices, see the discussion in Daniel Walker Howe, Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997, p. 66, and Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

  8. Ira Stoll, Samuel Adams: A Life, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009, pp. 107–8; Harry Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 279, 377.

  9. “The Pence Property,” Duxbury Clipper, September 8, 2009.

  10. Unitarian Universalist Church at First Parish in Sherborn, http://www.uuac.org/about/roots.pdf, accessed September 5, 2012; Elijah Brown, A Sermon Preached at the Ordination of … Zedeziah [Zedekiah] Sanger, Boston: Fleets, 1776.

  11. Winsor, History of the Town of Duxbury, p. 144. Roughly a third of Duxbury’s male population, about 270 men, pretty much all who weren’t needed to keep the town fed, would join the revolutionary militia, and many of them would die at the hands of the British and their allies, including a favorite son scalped by a Seneca warrior. See William Stone, Life of Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea) including the Border Wars of the American Revolution, vol. 1, Albany: Munsell, 1865, p. 373. See Kevin Phillips, 1775: A Good Year for Revolution, New York: Viking, 2012.

  12. Sprague, “Reminiscences of the Olden Times,” n.p., for “literary attainments.” See also Dorothy Wentworth, Settlement and Growth of Duxbury, Duxbury: Duxbury Rural and Historical Society, 2000, p. 108; Weston, Hon. Seth Sprague of Duxbury; Patrick T. J. Browne, King Caesar of Duxbury: Exploring the World of Ezra Weston, Shipbuilder and Merchant, Duxbury: Duxbury Rural and Historical Society, 2006.

  13. “Old Duxbury Village Once Called Sodom,” Duxbury Clipper, June 26, 1996.

  14. Turner, “Almshouse, Workhouse, Outdoor Relief,” pp. 212–14.

  15. Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, New York: Vintage, 1993, pp. 230, 246, 305–6. Intellectual historians and political theorists distinguish between republicanism and liberalism in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. In broad terms, republicanism emphasized civic responsibility and public virtue while liberalism stressed individual freedom, natural rights, and the pursuit of self-interest. Theoretically, the two ideals are separated in how they understand the “common good” to be generated, with the first imaging a virtuous republic transcendent of the individual (Gordon Wood writes that republicanism contained a “moral dimension, a utopian depth” that valued the “sacrifice of individual interests to the greater good of the whole”; “ideally, republicanism obliterated the individual”) and the second arguing that the common good flows out of the private pursuits of the individual. The role of government in the first is to embody or enforce virtue; in the second, it is to protect the plurality of freedoms, rights, interests, and pursuits that generate virtue. Some scholars have seen the tension between republicanism and liberalism as central to American political culture. In practice, there was much slippage and overlap in how both common citizens and politicians and intellectuals experienced these ideals. Men like Amasa Delano, for example, raised in the ethos of what we would call eighteenth-century republicanism, could believe both that morality and responsibility existed above his own personal experience and that leaving him alone to pursue his own interests would add to the public well of virtue. For historians who caution against making too much of the distinctions, see Howe, Making the American Self, pp. 10–13; Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism, Princeton: 1987; Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism i
n the Historical Imagination, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

  16. Or, as a later historian more bluntly translated such sentiments: expansion in postrevolutionary America “was the only way to honor avarice and morality. The only way to be good and wealthy.” William Appleman Williams, America Confronts a Revolutionary World, 1776–1976, New York: Morrow, 1976, p. 43. See also Justin Winsor, The Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Settlement of Duxbury, Plymouth: Avery and Doten, 1887, p. 47.

  17. Howe, Making the American Self; Wood, Radicalism; Hirschman, Passions and the Interests, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.

  18. For Delano’s quotes, see Narrative, pp. 204, 256, 590.

  7. THE LEVELLING SYSTEM

  1. For Delano’s involvement in the opium trade, see DRHS, series 1, box 1, folder 1, “Amasa Delano to Samuel Delano, Jr., April 23, 1791.

  2. For the quotations here and below, see Delano, Narrative, pp. 200–4.

  3. Lorenzo Sabine, Biographical Sketches of Loyalists of the American Revolution, vol. 2, Bedford: Applewood Books, 2009, pp. 398, 430; Weston, Hon. Seth Sprague of Duxbury, p. 73; Winsor, History of the Town of Duxbury, p. 138.

  4. Meghan Vaughan, Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius, Durham: Duke University Press, 2005, pp. 231–35.

  5. DRHS, series 1, box 1, folder 2, “Amasa Delano to Samuel Delano, Jr., 1794.”

  6. Delano, Narrative, pp. 212, 250.

  8. SOUTH SEA DREAMS

  1. Delano, Narrative, pp. 252–53.

  2. Delano, Narrative, p. 254.

  3. DRHS, Bureau of Marine Inspection and Navigation Report, original in NARA (College Park), RG 41.

  4. Lorenzo Johnston Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, New York: Athenaeum, 1968, pp. 23–69; William Cahn, A Matter of Life and Death: The Connecticut Mutual Story, New York: Random House, 1970; “Slavery’s Fellow Travelers,” New York Times, July 13, 2000; “How Slavery Fueled Business in the North,” New York Times, July 24, 2000; “Slave Policies,” New York Times, May 5, 2002; Jay Coughtry, The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, 1700–1807, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981, pp. 92–95; Sharon Murphy, Investing in Life: Insurance in Antebellum America, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. See also the Slavery Era Insurance Registry Report, http://www.insurance.ca.gov/0100-consumers/0300-public-programs/0200-slavery-era-insur/slavery-era-report.cfm (accessed December 19, 2012); Ronald Bailey, “The Slave(ry) Trade and the Development of Capitalism in the United States: The Textile Industry in New England, Social Science History 14 (Autumn 1990): 373–414; Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jennifer Frank, Complicity: How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery, New York: Ballantine Books, 2006; Richard Hooker, Aetna Life Insurance Company: Its First Hundred Years, Hartford: Aetna Life Insurance Co., 1956, pp. 14–15; Gary Simon and Cheryl Chen, “Actuarial Issues in Insurance on Slaves in the United States South,” Journal of African American History 89 (Fall 2004): 348–57. See the review by Shaun Nichols of the conference “Slavery’s Capitalism,” held at Brown and Harvard Universities, H-Net Reviews. May 2011, http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=33419. See also Beckert and Rockman’s summation, “How Slavery Led to Modern Capitalism,” Bloomberg.

  5. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, Davis, Slavery and Human Progress, New York: Oxford University, Press, 1984; Douglas Egerton, “The Empire of Liberty Reconsidered,” in James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter Onuf, eds., The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002, p. 313. p. 262.

  6. DRHS, Gamaliel Bradford’s Diary. Bradford’s daughter, Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, was an early Concord Transcendentalist and owner of the Old Manse, which she rented to Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne. His son, George Partridge Bradford, was a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and a Brook Farmer. Bradford himself would found the Society for the Moral Improvement of Seamen in Boston and likely worshiped at the same Unitarian church as did Amasa Delano in the 1810s and early 1820s.

  7. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992, p. 232; Barry Alan Shain, The Myth of American Individualism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, pp. 288–319.

  8. Patriot Ledger, posted January 17, 2011, accessed November 9, 2011, at http://www.patriotledger.com/archive/x2081097545/Add-Duxbury-to-the-list-of-local-towns-with-historical-ties-to-slavery#ixzz1d1nH1SN1. See also The Sessional Papers Printed by the House of Lords; Correspondence with Foreign Powers Relating to the Slave Trade, London: William Clowes and Sons, 1842, pp. 183–84, for the British Royal Navy’s seizure of the Duxbury brig Douglas, bound for Bonny from Havana, on the charge of having “on board a suspicious cargo” believed to be traded for slaves; Browne, King Caesar of Duxbury, pp. 94–97, 100–5, 111–12; Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade to America, vol. 3, New York: Octagon Books, 1965, pp. 102–8; Frederick George Kay, The Shameful Trade, London: Muller, 1967, p. 126.

  9. “A Zombie Is a Slave Forever,” New York Times, October 30, 2012.

  10. Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy at the Whaleship Essex, New York: Penguin, 2000, p. xi.

  11. Moby-Dick, p. 1246.

  12. Ibid., p. 1239.

  13. Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, vol. 7, Boston: The Society, 1905, pp. 94–98.

  14. Delano, Narrative, pp. 49–53, for what follows. The boy was part of the Panther’s complement of lascars, enslaved, bonded, impressed, or otherwise coerced sailors whom all ships in the Royal Navy and the Bombay Marine relied on. By this time, lascar had come to collectively refer to Burmese, Bengali, Malabar, Malay, Manila, Javanese, Chinese, and other Asian mariners. The word, originally from either Urdu or Arabic, didn’t exactly mean slave but it generally suggested something quite less than equality. British merchant and Royal Navy ships often impressed these sailors straight off of Asian vessels. “Poor lascars,” said one reformer in the British Parliament, British captains were “treating them like dogs or slaves, crowding them into forecastles in a manner compared with which pigs in pig-styes had more accommodation.” See Anne Bulley, Free Mariner: John Adolphus Pope in the East Indies, 1786–1821, London: British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia, 1992; N. B. Dennys, ed., Notes and Queries on China and Japan, vol. 3, Hong Kong: C. A. Saint, 1869, p. 78; Great Britain, Parliament, The Parliamentary Debates, London: Reuter’s Telegram Co., 1895, p. 194; Norma Myers, Reconstructing the Black Past: Blacks in Britain, c. 1780–1830, London: Taylor and Francis (Routledge), 1996, pp. 104–17; Anne Bulley, The Bombay Country Ships, 1790–1833, London: Curzon Press, 2000.

  15. Davis, Problem of Slavery, pp. 558–62. The phrase “existential impasse” comes from Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Raymond Queneau, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980, p. 46. See discussion in Davis, Problem of Slavery p. 561; G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. John Sibree, New York: American Home Library Co., 1902, 511.

  INTERLUDE: BLACK WILL ALWAYS HAVE SOMETHING MELANCHOLY IN IT

  1. John Freeman, Herman Melville, New York: Macmillan, 1926, p. 61; Hugh Hetherington, ed., Melville’s Reviewers: British and American, 1846–1891, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961, p. 253.

  2. Carl Van Doren, “A Note of Confession,” Nation, December 5, 1928; Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998, p. 3.

  3. Many of these opinions are found in John P. Runden, ed., Melville’s Benito Cereno: A Text for Guided Research, Boston: Heath, 1965. See also Burkholder, ed., Critical Essays. For their original sources, see Rosalie Feltenstein, “Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno,’” American Literature 19 (1947): 245–55; Arthur Vogelback, “Shakespeare and Melville’s Benito Cereno,” Modern L
anguage Notes 67 (1952): 113–16; Newton Arvin, Herman Melville, 1950, New York: Grove, 2002, p. 240; Stanley Williams, “Follow Your Leader: Melville’s Benito Cereno,” Virginia Quarterly 23 (Winter 1947): 65–76; Richard Harter Fogle, Melville’s Shorter Tales, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960, p. 137; F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, New York: Oxford University Press, 1941, p. 508; Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason, Denver: Allan Swallow, 1947, p. 222. Many of these judgments regarding Babo’s moral malignancy were made in the late 1940s, during the transition from World War II to the Cold War. During this period, politics was often presented as metaphysics. That is, the totalitarianism of both the Nazi right and the Stalinist left tended to be understood much as Babo’s actions were understood, as motiveless, driven by a hatred of freedom. Scholarship on Benito Cereno, and indeed, much of the scholarship on Melville in general, reflected this drift, with Amasa Delano’s “innocence” taken as a metaphor for an America that only reluctantly confronts evil in the world. A good example is Richard Chase’s 1950 study of Herman Melville, which uses Melville’s skepticism and awareness of evil to criticize Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party, and that section of the New Deal coalition that, after World War II, wanted to return to a focus on remedying economic injustice at home rather on than building up a military to contain the Soviet Union abroad (Melville: A Critical Study, New York: Macmillan, 1949). See Clare Spark, Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival, Kent: Kent State University Press, 2001, for the definitive account of Cold War politics and Melville studies. Hershel Parker, in “Melville and Politics: A Scrutiny of the Political Milieux of Herman Melville’s Life and Works,” PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 1963, p. 222, downplays Benito Cereno as a critique of racism: “Melville made no covert attack on American slavery in Benito Cereno.”