The Empire of Necessity (42 page)

HAITI AND FREEDOM

That the Haitian Revolution was a source of hope to enslaved men and women and fear to their enslavers is well known. Less recognized is that it had a direct effect on the course of history. In 1803, Haitians definitively routed Napoleon’s invading army, which had orders to retake the island as a French colony. Napoleon had envisioned a restored sugar-producing Saint-Dominique slave island as the anchor of a new French America running up the Mississippi Valley, connecting French Canada to the Caribbean, quarantining the young United States to the east and opening up the west to French settlers. But Haitians forced Napoleon to give up the dream. He sold Louisiana to Thomas Jefferson and turned his attentions to destroying Europe’s ancien régime, which, despite his expedient alliances with Madrid’s Bourbons, could mean only one thing: deposing those royal houses built on American slavery. After beating the Prussians at the Battle of Jena and checking the Russians at Eylau, Napoleon invaded Portugal and then turned on Spain, deposing the Bourbons and placing his brother Joseph on the throne (thus ending Amasa Delano’s expectation that he’d get anything more than a medal for his help retaking the
Tryal
). The combination of a financially draining war against Great Britain followed by France’s six-year occupation of Spain and Portugal marked the beginning of the end of Spanish rule in the Americas, paving the way for men like Bolívar and San Martín to launch their wars for independence. There would be many starts and stops, many advances and setbacks, but the continent-wide drive that began with Haiti first to wrest more freedom and then for total freedom was unstoppable. Even as one train of events moved forward in Europe and Spanish America, another accelerated in North America: Haiti’s defeat of Napoleon allowed Thomas Jefferson to make his Louisiana Purchase, which set in motion the simultaneous processes of westward expansion and the extension of slavery, leading first to the Mexican-American War and then to the Civil War.

Not too long ago, Haiti barely registered in histories of the Age of Revolution, which focused nearly exclusively on the American, French, and Spanish American Revolutions. Now, due to the work of the following scholars, it is understood to be not just a central event of that age, but, since insurgents insisted on applying the ideal of freedom to really existing slavery,
the
central event: Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Ada Ferrer, Laurent Dubois, Jeremy Popkin, David Patrick Geggus, Sibylle Fischer, Sue Peabody, Julius Scott, Matthew Clavin, and Robin Blackburn.

PABLO NERUDA, JOHN HUSTON, PAUL NEWMAN, AND
I SPY

In the late 1960s, Pablo Neruda told an interviewer that he couldn’t get a handle on the story he wanted to write about the
Tryal
uprising. Where Melville had focused on the deception, Neruda wanted to write about the slaves themselves, calling his screenplay
Babo, the Rebel
. But he found himself “fighting with shadows,” perhaps meaning the shadow cast by Melville. A fragment of the screenplay that he did finish imagines Melville as the last survivor, like Ishmael, arguing with Neruda over who can best narrate the story:

NERUDA:
Tell the story.

MELVILLE:
Let others tell it.

NERUDA:
You are the only witness from that time, your voice is the only one that remains.

John Huston, who had earlier brought
Moby-Dick
to the screen, wanted
Benito Cereno
to be his last movie and hoped to convince Paul Newman to play Amasa Delano. “Paul dear,” he wrote on April 8, 1987, “I hope to make one picture more, this one,… and to have you, my favorite actor on Earth, playing it.… I would so like our association to end on a note of triumph.” Two months later, the
New York Times
reported that Robert Duvall and Raul Julia had been cast to play Delano and Cereno. Huston died on August 28, 1987, before work on the project could begin.

In the mid-1960s, the poet Robert Lowell produced a stage version of
Benito Cereno
, starring the actor Roscoe Lee Browne as Babo, or Babu, as Lowell wrote him. The play was broadcast on public TV in 1965, just a few weeks after NBC, having overcome most of the opposition of its southern affiliated stations, premiered the “first weekly network television show to present a Negro as co-star in an integrated cast,” which was
I Spy
, with Bill Cosby. See “‘I Spy’ with Negro Is Widely Booked,”
New York Times
, September 19, 1965.

BABO, AFRICAN AMERICAN SCHOLARS AND WRITERS, AND BARACK OBAMA

Neruda might have had difficulty figuring him out, but African American writers recognized Babo. Ralph Ellison used an epigraph from the story for his novel
Invisible Man
, in which the narrator’s grandfather reveals on his deathbed that he wasn’t an obliging Tom but a stealth Babo, his last advice to his son being to “overcome” whites “with yeses, undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open.” Sterling Stuckey links Babo to Brer Rabbit, the trickster prominent in African American folktales. Writers from outside the United States, from the decolonizing third world, also saw their struggles in Babo’s actions. “Melville’s interest [in
Benito Cereno
] is in a vast section of the modern world,” wrote the Trinidadian C. L. R. James in 1953, “the backwards peoples, and today, from the continents of Asia and Africa, their doings fill the front pages of our newspapers.” Babo, James thought, was the “most heroic character in Melville’s fiction,… a man of unbending will, a natural leader, an organizer of large schemes but a master of detail.” “What does ‘Babo’ mean?” asked the Nigerian scholar Charles E. Nnolim in 1974. “The word ‘babo’ in the Hausa language … means ‘NO’—an expression of strong disagreement.… How did Melville know that ‘Babo’ … is ‘NO’?”

More recently, Barack Obama has cited
Benito Cereno
as having influenced him as a young man, perhaps preparing him for the hallucinations of his more feverish critics, who charge him with hijacking the ship of state and fantasize about having his head on a pike.

See Stuckey,
Going through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History
, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994; Charles E. Nnolim,
Melville’s “Benito Cereno”: A Study in Meaning of Name Symbolism
, New York: New Voices, 1974; Marvin Fisher,
Going Under: Melville’s Short Fiction and the American 1850s
, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977; and James,
Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways
, p. 112.

APES AND ANGELS

Herman Melville read the naturalists and geologists of his day and would consider the implications of what eventually came to be known as Darwinism throughout his whole writing life. He started his literary career joking, a decade before the publication of
On the Origin of the Species
, that man’s “ancestors were kangaroos, not monkeys,” that marsupials were the “first edition of mankind, since revised and corrected.” Thirty years later, he ended his eighteen-thousand-line poem,
Clarel
, with the question:
“
If Luther’s day expand to Darwin’s year, / Shall that exclude the hope—foreclose the fear?… Yea, ape and angel, strife and old debate, / The harps of heaven and the dreary gongs of hell; / Science the feud can only aggravate— / No umpire she betwixt the chimes and knell: / The running battle of the star and clod / Shall run forever—if there be no God.”

Melville purchased a copy of Charles Darwin’s
Journal of Researches into the Natural History and Geology of the Countries Visited during the Voyage of H.M.S.
Beagle
round the World, under the Command of Capt. Fitz Roy, R.N.
in 1847. For Melville’s reading of Darwin, see Charles Roberts Anderson,
Melville in the South Seas
, New York: Dover, 1966, p. 265; Merton M. Sealts,
Melville’s Reading
, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988, p. 171; and Mary K. Bercaw,
Melville’s Sources
, Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1987, pp. 2, 74. For the influence of Lyell and Darwin on Melville, see James Robert Corey, “Herman Melville and the Theory of Evolution,” PhD dissertation, Washington State University, 1968. See also Eric Wilson, “Melville, Darwin, and the Great Chain of Being,”
Studies in American Fiction
28 (2000): 131–50. And see the edition of
Moby-Dick
edited by Harrison Hayford, G. Thomas Tanselle, and Hershel Parker, Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 1988, p. 829, for another passage that closely follows Darwin’s
Journal of Researches
.

THE REVOLT OF THE
SAN JUAN NEPOMUCENO

Aside from a brief mention in an article published in a Peruvian history journal, I’ve found no other scholarly reference to this remarkable uprising. News of the fate of the
San Juan
was carried back to America by three of its passengers, who were taken to Salem, Massachusetts, on the brig
Sukey
, captained by John Edwards, which had been in Senegal trading for hides, gum, peanuts, and palm oil. The first report was published in the
Salem Impartial Register
on July 30, 1801, reprinted in newspapers throughout New England, and translated and published in Buenos Aires in the
Telégrafo Mercantil
on December 16, 1801. For the
Sukey
, see
History of Essex County, Massachusetts: With Biographical Sketches of Many of Its Pioneers and Prominent Men
, vol. 1, ed. Duane Hamilton Hurd, Philadelphia: J. W. Lewis, 1888, p. 92.

AMASA DELANO AND FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT

Eleanor Roosevelt Seagraves says in an e-mail communication that an old story that her grandfather, FDR, purchased all existing copies of Amasa Delano’s memoir is not true. She has no recollection of any family member during her childhood discussing Amasa, though she did wind up editing an abridged edition of
A Narrative
(1994). According to documents found (thanks to Josh Frens-String) in Chile’s Ministry of Foreign Relations (Archivo General Histórico del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Fondo Histórico, vol. 1404), Roosevelt was made aware of Delano’s memoir in 1934, by his undersecretary of state to Latin America, who suggested buying a copy and donating it to Chile’s national university as a token of Good Neighbor diplomacy. Roosevelt agreed, apparently inscribing the book thus: “May the modest part which my kinsman played in the building of Chile encourage further fruitful cooperation between our two peoples who share common ideals of justice, peace and humanity.”

JUAN MARTÍNEZ DE ROZAS, LEMUEL SHAW, AND
BILLY BUDD

Juan Martínez de Rozas and Lemuel Shaw played similar roles in creating their respective countries’ legal systems, helping to turn a mishmash of colonial jurisprudence into coherent bodies of modern republican case law (Shaw’s legal decisions, in particular, helped define norms related to commerce, free labor, mental capacity, and free speech). Likewise, Rozas’s 1805 ruling in the
Tryal
case is, in a way, comparable to Shaw’s 1851 upholding of the Fugitive Slave Act. The two men were personally opposed to slavery yet they both, when forced to adjudicate the struggle between justice and order, chose order (though Shaw’s ruling also upheld the nested levels of state sovereignty that is U.S. federalism, a jumble anathema to Rozas).

Melville would take up the question of whether justice was invested in “lasting institutions” or in natural rights that exist independently of those institutions in his last and posthumously published novel,
Billy Budd
, whose Christlike title character is condemned and executed by Captain Vere, master of a British man-of-war, for unintentionally killing an abusive officer. Some legal scholars believe that Melville based Vere on Shaw. The political theorist Hannah Arendt used
Billy Budd
to argue that since absolute justice can never be represented institutionally, the fight to obtain it leads to perpetual violence, to “war with the peace of the world and the true welfare of mankind,” as she quotes Melville’s summing up of Vere’s opinion. Writing in the middle of the insurgent 1960s, Arendt argued that the role of “virtue” in the institutions of law is “not to prevent the crime of evil but to punish the violence of absolute innocence,” since the drive to achieve perfection (or “perfect liberty,” as Amasa Delano saw the benighted goal of French revolutionaries) can destroy society as quickly as, if not quicker than, “elemental evil.”