The Empire of Necessity (56 page)

  
4
. Harvard Law Library, Small Manuscript Collection, Judge Story Papers.

  
5
. Information on this phase of Delano’s life comes from various sources: 1810 Census, Boston, Ward 11, Suffolk, p. 107, line 33; National Archives micropublications, M 252, roll 21;
The Boston Directory; Containing the Names of the Inhabitants
, Boston: Edward Cotton, 1809, p. 47 (also see 1810 ed., p. 63). Delano’s father died in 1814, leaving his house, land, and livestock, along with two meetinghouse pews, to the younger William, who was then starting a family. Childless Amasa inherited $200 but it immediately went to his creditors. Samuel received $500 and each of the three Delano sisters, Irene, Abigail, and Elizabeth, inherited $100. Information from Probate no. 6321, Estate of Samuel Delano, d. 6 Nov. 1814, and from Plymouth County Registry of Deeds, book 70, p. 148, summarized in notes available at the DRHS. See also DRHS, Delano Papers, box 8, folders 17 and 18 for Delano’s “accounts” with Weston.

  
6
. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, Hyde Park, New York, Frederic Delano Papers, exchange of letters between Amasa Delano and Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, December 1817.

  
7
. For “most trifling purpose,” see Perry Miller,
Errand into the Wilderness
, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984, pp. 66–67.

  
8
. Sellers,
Market Revolution
, p. 87; Bruce Mann,
Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence
, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. The progress of Delano’s life, as he tells it in
A Narrative
, reads much like Melville’s
Israel Potter
, published just before
Benito Cereno
, which tells the story of a life that starts out “gloriously” but leads “nowhere,” that of a Revolutionary War veteran who “proves to have little flexibility, little resilience (after a series of defeats), but an almost infinite capacity for suffering and enduring.” The story begins with Potter leaving his farm to fight at the Battle of Bunker Hill, a battle Melville describes in ignoble terms: Potter is bewildered by the battlefield’s “dense crowd and confusion” and begins to swing his rifle butt wildly, like the way “seal-hunters on the beach” swing their clubs. He looks down and thinks he sees a sword being thrust up at him. But the weapon is in a hand attached to a severed arm. After the battle, Potter is catapulted into the world of high politics. He conspires with Benjamin Franklin in France, fights at the side of John Paul Jones, tries to help Ethan Allen escape from jail, and even meets King George. But he is as lost in the mazes of history as Amasa was in Lima’s royal palace. Melville ends his story by bringing Potter, after half a century of exile, back to Bunker Hill on July 4, 1826, where a crowd has gathered to view the now completed monument. But instead of being recognized as a Son of Liberty, Potter is nearly run down by a “patriotic triumphal car” flying a gilt-embroidered banner celebrating veterans of the battle. He returns to his father’s homestead, but no one recognizes him there either. Unable to convince the government to give him a pension, he dies broke; “his scars proved his only medal.” For the descriptions of
Israel Potter
, see Andrew Delbanco,
Herman Melville: His World and Work
, New York: Knopf, 2005, p. 226; Parker,
Herman Melville: A Biography
, vol. 2, p. 224.

  
9
. DRHS, Delano Papers, ser. 1, box 1, folder 5, Samuel Delano Jr. to Samuel Delano III, March 21, 1820; DRHS, Delano Papers, ser. 1, box 1, folder 5, Samuel Delano, Jr. to Captain Henry Chandler, December 11, 1832.

10
. DRHS, Delano Papers, ser. 1, box 8, folder 14, Amasa to Samuel Delano, Jr., September 7, 1821. For Samuel’s finances, see DRHS, Delano Papers, ser. 3, box 2, folder 2, “Attachment of Goods and Estate of Samuel Delano, Jr.,” July 22, 1822, and “Settlement of Grievance between Samuel Delano, Jr. and G. W. Martin,” April 21, 1823.

11
. Daniel Walker Howe,
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848
, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 617.

12
.
Speeches and Address of Peleg Sprague
, Boston: Phillips, Samson, 1858, p. 452.

13
. MA (Boston), Judicial Archives, docket no. 27093, vols. 121 (pp. 300 and 464); 121-1 (p. 37); 172 (p. 104); 193 (p. 226); 207 (p. 170).

EPILOGUE: HERMAN MELVILLE’S AMERICA

  
1
. Daniel Johnson and Rex Campbell,
Black Migration in America: A Social Demographic Hisory
, Durham: Duke University Press, 1981; John Russell Rickford,
Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English
, Hoboken: John Wiley, 2002, p. 138; Walter Johnson, “King Cotton’s Long Shadow,”
New York Times
, March 30, 2013; Frederic Bancroft,
Slave Trading in the Old South
, 1931, New York: Frederick Ungar, 1959, p. 363, for fever quotes. See also Johnson,
River of Dark Dreams
, pp. 374–78; John Craig Hammond,
Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West
, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007; Matthew Mason,
Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic
, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006; Adam Rothman,
Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South
, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007, p. 193.

  
2
. Stephen Matterson, “Introduction,” in Herman Melville,
The Confidence-Man
, New York: Penguin, 1990, p. xxiv. At the same time, Melville was also questioning this belief; see Hershel Parker, “Politics and Art.”

  
3
.
White-Jacket
, pp. 505–6; For Melville’s “radical” break with the past, Matterson, “Introduction,”
The Confidence-Man
, p. xxiv. For Melville’s use of naval discipline and the arbitrary power of officers as a metaphor for slavery, and one southern reviewer’s recognition of the metaphor, see Karcher,
Shadow over the Promised Land
, pp. 44–47.

  
4
. Robert May,
The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire
, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973, p. 164.

  
5
. John M. Murrin, Paul E. Johnson, James M. McPherson, Alice Fahs, and Gary Gerstle,
Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People
, Independence Cengage Learning, 2012, p. 463;
Liberator
, May 23, 1851.

  
6
. Robert Cover,
Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process
, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975, p. 251;
The Writings of Henry David Thoreau: Cape Cod and Miscellanies
, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1906, p. 396; Jeannine DeLombard, “Advocacy ‘in the Name of Charity’ or Barratry, Champerty, and Maintenance? Legal Rhetoric and the Debate over Slavery in Antebellum Print Culture,” in
Law and Literature
, ed. Brook Thomas; Turbinger: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2002, p. 271, Robert D. Richardson Jr.,
Emerson: The Mind on Fire
, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, p. 496; Louis Menand,
The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001, p. 21; Len Gougeon,
Virtue’s Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform
, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010, p. 244; William Nelson, “The Impact of the Antislavery Movement upon Styles of Judicial Reasoning in Nineteenth-Century America,”
Harvard Law Review
87 (1974): 513–66; Anthony Sebok,
Legal Positivism in American Jurisprudence
, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 69;
Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1851
, vol. 61, Boston: Little, Brown, 1853, p. 310; Don Fehrenbacher,
The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery
, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 234. For Shaw’s previous antislavery rulings, see Cover,
Justice Accused.
In 1844, for instance, Shaw freed Robert Lucas, who arrived in Boston on the USS
United States
(the same ship that carried Herman Melville home from his soon-to-be famous Pacific voyages). Shaw’s ruling in the Lucas case was in a way similar to the earlier one issued by the state’s Supreme Judicial Court in the suit brought by James Mye’s would-be masters, who had signed him up as a hand on the
Tryal
with the expectation that they would receive a percentage of his shares. With Lucas, his owner had enlisted him in the navy and collected his pay, but once docked in Massachusetts, the slave petitioned the court for his freedom and Shaw granted it. “None but a free person can enter a contract,” Shaw wrote.

  
7
. Parker,
Herman Melville: A Biography
, vol. 2, p. 454.

  
8
. For “popular sovereignty” as “white supremacy,” see Pamela Brandwein,
Reconstructing Reconstruction: The Supreme Court and the Production of Historical Truth
, Durham: Duke University Press, 1999, p. 38; Ashraf H. A. Rushdy,
American Lynching
, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012, p. 143; Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel,
Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre–Civil War Kansas
, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009, p. 4.

  
9
. Delbanco,
Melville
, pp. 153–54; Parker,
Melville and Politics
, p. 234.

10
.
Benito Cereno
, p. 257.

11
. Davis,
Problem of Slavery
, p. 563; Douglas Blackmon,
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II
, New York: Anchor Books, 2008.

ILLUSTRATIONS CREDITS

I’m indebted to the following individuals and institutions for permission to publish images from their collections: Carolyn Ravenscroft and Erin McGough of the Duxbury Rural and Historical Society (for the painting of the
Perseverance
,
image 15
); Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, of the NYPL (
image 5
); the Print Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs of the NYPL (
images 9
,
10
,
11
, and
20
); the General Research Division of the NYPL (
images 21
,
25
,
27
,
28
,
31
); the Picture Collection of the NYPL (
image 36
); Michael Dyer of the New Bedford Whaling Museum (for
images 30
and
34
); The British Library (
image 32
); and Garrick Palmer, who graciously allowed me to produce two of his wonderful wood engravings (
images 33
and
37
), which illustrate a 1972 edition of
Benito Cereno
.