The Empire of Necessity (36 page)

Mexico had abolished slavery in 1829, joined by most of the rest of Spanish America by the mid-1850s. But southerners, feeling hemmed in by the North, saw a chance: “I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States,” said Mississippi senator Albert Gallatin Brown in 1859, “and I want them all for the same reason—for the planting or spreading of slavery.” Augusta’s
Daily Constitutionalist
was even more ambitious in its call to reestablish slavery in Spanish America. The Georgia paper wanted southerners to build a slave “empire,” extending from “San Diego, on the Pacific Ocean, thence southward along the shore line of Mexico and Central America, at low tide, to the Isthmus of Panama; thence South—still South!—along the western shoreline of New Granada and Ecuador, to where the southern boundary of the latter strikes the ocean”—near to the Chilean waters where Amasa Delano’s
Perseverance
met Benito Cerreño’s
Tryal
. In a way, this vision brings the story full circle, with the nightmare Delano sailed into in 1805 transformed into a dream slavers had five decades later for the whole hemisphere.
⁴

*   *   *

For those paying attention, the situation was as alarming as a “fire bell in the night,” as Thomas Jefferson in 1820 described the division of an expanding republic into competing free and slave camps. Still, through the 1840s, it was possible to believe that abolition would be achieved within the legal and political institutions of the country, by letting the reality of the law catch up with its promise: that
all
men are created equal. This possibility seemed to be confirmed in 1841, when former U.S. president John Quincy Adams invoked the principle of natural rights to successfully defend the African
Amistad
rebels before the U.S. Supreme Court. In a bid to obtain their freedom, fifty-three Africans (forty-nine adults and four children) had risen up, seized the slave ship that was holding them captive, and murdered its captain and some of the crew. Adams argued, among other things, that this act was fully within the “law of Nature and of Nature’s God on which our fathers placed our own national existence.” The rebels were freed and allowed to return to Africa.

But nine years later, Congress passed a law that threw what many thought the natural course of liberalism into reverse. In an effort to appease the southern states, legislators approved the Fugitive Slave Act, which guaranteed that the federal government would return escaped slaves to their owners. It was part of a grand bargain, yet another “compromise” worked out by national leaders, men like Boston’s own Daniel Webster, who held the protection of property and the preservation of the Union to be higher priorities than the abolition of slavery. Thomas Sims, a seventeen-year-old escaped slave, was among the first caught in the act’s net. His arrest on a Boston street in April 1851, on a warrant issued on behalf of his Georgia master, galvanized the city’s abolitionist community, whose lawyers petitioned the chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, Lemuel Shaw, Herman Melville’s father-in-law, for a writ of habeas corpus.

To grant the writ would be to imply that the Fugitive Slave Act was unconstitutional, confirming the criticisms of southern slavers that Washington wasn’t willing to enforce the law. Already, in just the year since the act had been in effect, thousands of escaped slaves living in northern states, including some who had been arrested under the act and had to escape again, had fled to Canada, at least three thousand in the last months of 1850 alone. A large crowd gathered at the Boston courthouse, which was protected by a phalanx of police, marshals, and militiamen. Chains had been wrapped around the building to prevent Sims’s escape and Judge Shaw had to bend low to enter: “the judiciary crawling under his chains,” reported the antislavery press.
⁵

Shaw was among the country’s most respected jurists. He was personally in favor of emancipation, having over the years creatively interpreted the law to limit the scope of slavery and expand the definition of free labor. Melville’s father-in-law was not what today would be called an originalist. Now, though, believing that the fate of the republic was in his hands, he said that a strict reading of the Constitution limited his ability to contravene federal legislation. At various points, his decision explicitly stated that what he called “peace,” “happiness,” and “prosperity,” made possible by the preservation of “union,” took precedent over the natural right to freedom. “Writ refused,” Shaw said.

Then the petition went before Duxbury’s Peleg Sprague. Earlier, when he was a U.S. senator, Sprague had said that the “the Savior” himself wouldn’t abolish slavery if it meant meddling in a nation’s laws. Now as a federal appeals judge he had an opportunity to do as he believed Jesus would do. Sprague also denied Sims’s petition. The prisoner was marched through the streets of Boston to the harbor, put on the
Acorn
, and sailed back to Savannah, where he was publicly whipped and put to work in a rice field.

The Sims case radicalized antislavery reformers, destroying for many of them the legitimacy of the law and legal institutions. Abolitionists compared the chief justice to Pontius Pilate, and Henry David Thoreau apparently had Shaw, and perhaps Sprague, in mind when he said that judges were “merely the inspectors of a pick-lock and murderer’s tools, to tell them whether they are in working order or not.” The rulings “snapped Ralph Waldo Emerson’s equanimity,” leading the philosopher who valued quiet reflection and individual autonomy above all else to call for collective resistance against the law. If judges couldn’t figure out how to protect the “sovereignty of the state”
and
the “life and freedom of every inhabitant,” then what good was their “learning or veneration”? Emerson asked. “They are no more use than idiots.”
⁶

*   *   *

Like everything else about Melville’s politics, scholars have debated what his opinion was regarding his father-in-law’s ruling. For all of Melville’s emotional insurgency, his raucous prose celebrating the liberties of the world, his appreciation of the “tragic graces” of even the “meanest misfits, castaways, and renegades,” Melville was not an insurrectionist. He feared war and revolution, believing that however justified their cause their consequences would be worse. “Storms are formed behind the storm we feel,” he later wrote in one of his Civil War poems, titled “Misgivings.” And he distrusted the zeal of many abolitionists, who were as dangerous, he thought, to the country’s “institutions,” in which were invested the “great hopes of mankind,” as the Jacobins in Paris had proved to be to the “promise” of the French Revolution.

What separated Melville from statesmen and judges, like Shaw and Sprague, who designed and upheld the Fugitive Slave Act and other appeasements was that he also knew that the injustices identified by abolitionists and Jacobins were equally destructive of mankind’s hopes. He included ship mutinies in many of his stories, starting with his first book,
Typee
. Yet only one of those mutinies is carried forward to completion. Either they are called off at the last moment or the abuse that provoked them is remedied by the intercession or repentance of a higher officer. The sole story where Melville goes ahead with a revolt is
Benito Cereno
, and the resulting disaster is close to total.
⁷

Benito Cereno
, written four years after the Sims decision, captures the impasse of the 1850s, a sense that the country faced one of two equally unacceptable options: abolish slavery, which might lead to the abolition of the Union, or leave slavery alone and accept the fact that freedom for some required the enslavement of others. The
Tryal
, or as Melville named the ship, the
San Dominick
, not the
Amistad
, was America’s metaphor.

*   *   *

Events moved quickly in the years after the Sims case. Kansas “bled,” John Brown raided, slaves continued to escape, and the Whig Party collapsed, replaced by the antislavery Republicans, who would soon send Abraham Lincoln to the White House.

When the Civil War finally came, Lincoln would sound as severe as Calvin himself, warning Americans that the conflict might be God’s retribution for “all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil.” But earlier, in the 1850s, a cheerier man, Franklin Pierce, led the nation, presiding over a bubble of national confidence and Wall Street profits. Despite the fact that the annexation of Texas and the conquest of nearly half of Mexican territory had worsened the sectional crisis, Pierce told the country to carry on, to cast aside any “timid forebodings” it might have about the “evil” of “expansion.”

The march west wasn’t just revitalizing slavery and deepening polarization. It was rendering explicit what had heretofore been implicit, that, as Edmund Morgan wrote, American freedom was “intertwined and interdependent” with American slavery. Pierce’s signature legislation was the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which granted to white settlers the right to decide for themselves if their territory was to be free or slave. Based on a doctrine promoted by northern Democrats called “popular sovereignty,” the act effectively defined freedom as the freedom of white men to enslave black men, women, and children. In the South, too, defenders of slavery were saying in public what many of them believed in private, that freedom required slavery, that slavery was, in the words of the South Carolinian John Calhoun, a “positive good,” the foundation of “free and stable political institutions.”
⁸

Melville anticipated his nation’s coming catastrophe in
Moby-Dick
, published in late 1851. But that book, despite its apocalyptic ending, was joyful, hinting at possible emotional emancipations, including Pip’s ability to draw out Ahab’s “humanities” and the love shared between Ishmael and the islander Queequeg. Who aint a slave? We all are! Four years later, though, midway through Pierce’s presidency, Melville might have had that question in mind again when he sat down to rewrite chapter 18 of Amasa Delano’s memoir. The answer would have been the same yet the implications grimmer. There were no free people on board the
Tryal.
Obviously not Cerreño, held hostage to the West Africans. Not Babo, Mori, and the rest of the rebels, forced to mimic their own enslavement and humiliation. And not Amasa Delano, locked in the soft cell of his own blindness. Trying to “break one charm,” Melville wrote of his fictional New Englander, Delano was “becharmed anew.”

Melville didn’t have to make Amasa’s kind of oblivion up. Denial was all around him, in his friends and neighbors, people whom he respected. Nathaniel Hawthorne, whom for a while Melville considered the darkest and deepest ponderers of the human condition America had yet produced, wrote with a naïve nostalgia that the southern master and slave “dwelt together in greater peace and affection … than had ever elsewhere existed between the taskmaster and the serf.” Melville’s Berkshire neighbor Oliver Wendell Holmes spoke warmly about “slavery in its best and mildest form”—like the kind the fictional Delano believed existed between Cereno and Babo, until events proved otherwise. And Melville’s father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, later, after he had retired from the bench, continued to believe he made the right decision in sending Thomas Sims back to slavery and spent the last days of his life urging Massachusetts to repeal a law that had nullified the Fugitive Slave Act.
⁹

In retelling the story of the
Tryal
uprising and deception, Melville jettisoned Delano’s nearly yearlong hounding of Cerreño for half the value of his ship, including the value of its slaves. Instead, he ended his novella with Amasa consoling a dying Benito, a conclusion that I don’t think was meant to cast the American captain in a better light. I think it was Melville’s way of saying that he no longer believed that his country would, or should even try to, escape history: “But the past is passed; why moralize upon it?” Melville has Delano advise the Spaniard: “Forget it. See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves.” Why, Melville’s Delano wants to know, can’t Cereno do the same and move on? The answer echoes the historical Cerreño’s description of the historical Delano as a monster (a description that is not in Delano’s memoir and thus that Melville couldn’t have been aware of).

“Because they have no memory,” Cereno replies, “because they are not human.”
¹⁰

*   *   *

Events proved Melville’s “misgivings” wrong. War came, slaves were emancipated, and the Union survived. The United States, it seemed, had broken the paradox of freedom and slavery. Melville was a Union man when the fighting finally did start, calling slavery, in an appendix to his Civil War poems, an “atheistical iniquity” and joining “in the exulting chorus of humanity over its downfall.” But he continued to brood, concerned with, among other things, the degeneration of the promise of American freedom into a “vile liberty,” as he put it in 1876 on the centenary of the American Revolution, with “reverence” for “naught”—not for God, not for nature, and not for others.

There’s another way of thinking about the relationship between slavery and freedom, beyond simply identifying the paradox, captured in an epigraph Melville used for another one of his short stories: “Seeking to conquer a larger liberty, man but extends the empire of necessity.” The idea conveys forward motion, hinting that it is not the paradox that defines America but rather the ceaseless bids to escape the paradox, to slip out of the shackles of history, even as such efforts inevitably deepen old entanglements and create new “necessities”—the way, for example, the opening of the West wound up energizing slavery and accelerating the rush to war. Or the way the rise of free trade promised (and still promises) that if men were set free to pursue their self-interests, an ever more harmonious world would result. Experience has proven otherwise. In the United States, a purer ideal of freedom has come to hold sway, at least among some, based on the principles of liberal democracy and laissez-faire economics but also on a more primal animus, an individual supremacy that not only denies the necessities that bind people together but resents any reminder of those necessities.