“THE BIBLE – WE CANNOT DO WITH IT AS IT IS”

HERMAN MELVILLE

1754

During this year appeared the Reverend Jonathan Edwards’s FREEDOM OF THE WILL, a piece of Calvinism dealing with the relations of the human will with predestination and grace, nicely calculated to inspire the reader to accept the inevitable with grace. Herman Melville would refer to this treatise in his BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1614

April 24(?), Thursday: With the blessing of the father of the bride, the widower John Rolfe and young Pocahontas, the frolicsome one, were wed.1

The bride had received baptism under the English name “Rebecca Rolfe.” This marital liaison is credited with bringing 8 years of racial accord. Pocahontas’s white spouse was of the opinion that the people like him on the Virginia coast, white people, were “a peculiar people, marked and chosen by the hand of God.” Let us hope this husband somehow found a way to presume that his replacement wife, also a member of a peculiar people, had been likewise marked and chosen by the hand of God.2

At Jamestown on the Virginia coast, according to Ralph Hamor, “The Towne it selfe by the care and providence of Sir Thomas Gates, who for the most part had his chiefest residence there, is reduced into a handsome forme, and hath in it two faire rowes of houses, all of framed Timber, two stories, and an upper Garret, or Corne loft high, besides the three large, and substantial Storehouses, joyned together in a length some hundred and twenty foot, and in breadth forty, and this town hath been lately newly, and strongly impaled, and a faire platforme fro Ordence in the west Bulwarke raised: there are also wothout this towne in 1. John actually had to deliberate over marrying this lass, apparent age about 14: would the other white people suppose that he was coupling with her out of a “hungry appetite,” would they suppose that what he wanted to do was to “gorge” himself upon sexual “incontinency”? Would he be seen as guilty of an “unbridled desire of carnal affection”? His ongoing meditations on this topic he described in his journal as a “mighty war.” Finally the reluctant bridegroom reassured himself that this would be one of the “pious duties of a Christian,” that this would be “godly labor,” and that he could therefore indulge himself in miscegenation with “an unspotted conscience.” 2 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

HERMAN MELVILLE HERMAN MELVILLE the Island, some very pleasant, and beautifull houses, tow Blockhouses, to observe and watch least the Indians at any time should swim over the back river, and come into the Island, and certain other farme houses.” “No sooner was he thus fenced, and in a manner secured from the Indians, but his next worke (without respect to his owne health or particular welfare) was building at each corner of the towne, very strong and high commanders or watch-towers, a faire and handsome Church, and storehouses, ... There is in this town 3 streets of well framed houses, a hansom Church, and the foundations of a more stately one laid, of Brick, in length, an hundred foote, and fifty foot wide, beside Store houses, watch houses, and such like: there are also, as ornaments belonging to this Town, upon the verge of this River, five faire Block houses, or commanders, wherein live the honesteo sort of people, as in Farmes in England. ... by name, Hope in faith, Coxen Dale, secured by five Forts, called, Charity Fort, Mount malado, a retreat, or guest house for sick people, a high seat, and wholesome aire, Elizabeth Fort, and Fort patience: and heere hath Mr. Whitacres chosen his Parsonage, or Church land ... called Rocke Hall ...”

2. The chauvinist idea that the whites were God’s chosen people is not an idea which had to wait to begin only with the Pilgrim Fathers in their “City upon a Hill,” Boston. By the time of the American revolt, the 13 original colonies had become God’s chosen people. By 1850 Herman Melville would be able to write in all seriousness that “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people — the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.... God has predestined, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls. The rest of the nations must soon be in our rear. We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours.”

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1773

December 16, Thursday: Under cover of a public protest meeting at Faneuil Hall and the Old South Meeting House, a group of white Bostonians disguised as Mohawk sneaked onto Griffin’s Wharf and silently boarded three cargo vessels. They carefully lowered 342 chests of tea leaves belonging to the East India Company into the foul brackish waters of the harbor without causing any splashes. Several tons of tea were destroyed, and the

crew of a British frigate moored some 500 yards away heard nothing. This was not, as you may have been instructed in your public schooling, in protest against the import tax placed on tea leaves by the government. It was, instead, a protest over a tax exemption that King George III had granted, that favored this one company over others in the tea trade.

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Some of these public-spirited vandals stole some of the East India Company’s duty-free tea. When the organizers of this event discovered one of their number with tea leaves stuffed down his pants, they got out the tar and feathers and made an honorary Negro out of him.3 Please note that, although in some circles it is considered impolite to point this out, these white people were following a long tradition of white people, of disguising themselves as non-white people in order to perpetrate some necessary and therefore serious piece of white mischief.4 Some have been proud to record that one of Herman Melville’s grandfathers, Major Thomas Melvill (sic), attended this party. In fact this racist incident has been touted as a piece of our nation’s proud history, despite its consonance with many other incidents in which white people masqueraded as non- white people in order to be able to murder as non-white people murder but as white people do not murder, to torture as non-white people torture but as white people do not torture, and to rape as non-white people rape but

3. Or perhaps an honorary chicken, I don’t know. The tea leaves he stuffed down his pants, confiscated as evidence, are still on display at the Old State House. 4.You can see from the above that white people can disguise themselves as non-white people when they need to be mischievously destructive — I suppose because non-white people are known by white people to be natural, and therefore to be naturally mischievously destructive? We saw the same thing happen again, more recently, in 1992, when a white man murdered his white wife near the Boston waterfront and then brazenly informed the police that he saw a black man murder her. Because the murderous husband told the police that the murderer was black, the police of course believed this white man for quite some time and went around looking for some black perp to arrest, until the husband lost his nerve and committed suicide. (You probably saw this on the TV news, and, let me bet, you probably made no connection between this and the Boston Teaparty which you learned about in public school despite the entirely insignificant fact that these two events happened within about a mile of each other, one in 1773 and one in 1992 — and, also, despite the entirely significant fact that both misdeeds involved the deployment of racist stereotypes by white perps.) “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 5 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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as white people do not rape.

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1776

July 4, Thursday: It was a cloudy day, and the temperature was but 76 degrees Fahrenheit. In North America, the process that had begun when a crafty old politician named Benjamin Franklin had been placed on a Constitutional Committee of Pennsylvania to draft a declaration of the independence of the former North American seacoast colonies of Great Britain was brought to fruition, in that a broadside to that effect was on this date roughly printed off in Philadelphia.

JOHN TRUMBULL

The more alterations Congress made on his draft, the more miserable Jefferson became. He had forgotten, as has posterity, that a draftsman is not an author. READ THE FULL TEXT

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This date saw, also, the publication of Adam Smith’s AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF THE WEALTH OF NATIONS.

The point at which Professor Smith writes about pin-manufacture (Chapter 1, page 3), as the basis for division of labor and therefore for the wealth of nations, is displayed on a following screen.

An extract from its section “The cost of Empire” is on subsequent screens:

[see following]

Certain American business types would come to regard this latter document, possibly on account of its publication date and possibly for some other reason, as their real Declaration of Independence, although by 1844 Friedrich Engels would be challenging such an attitude toward freedom in his THE CONDITION OF THE WORKING MAN IN ENGLAND and by 1855 Herman Melville would be challenging such an attitude toward freedom in his BENITO CERENO.

Only John Hancock, president of the assembly, and Charles Thomson, secretary of the assembly, signed the draft of “A Declaration by the representatives of the United states of America, in Congress assembled” accepted on this day, which was declaring itself as being issued “in the name and by the authority of the good people of these ... free and independent states.” That draft incorporated markup of the changes made by the delegates, along with symbols inserted by Jefferson to indicate the points at which a person reading it orally ought to pause for rhetorical effect. The printer who typeset this document inserted quotation marks to represent Jefferson’s symbol, and then found he had to pull them out in general replacing them by extra spaces. This draft was not preserved and, it seems, nobody made any particular effort to preserve any copies of this original printing. Of the 25 copies that by the sheerest chance have survived, the 25th was to be discovered as the paper backing of a painting that had been bought at a flea market in Pennsylvania in 1989 for $4, and this copy seems now to be worth more than $8,000,000 on the open market as it has become the sole copy not owned by an institution. It would not be until after the delegation from the colony of New York had belatedly received instructions to cast their vote also for independence and thus render the vote of the Continental Congress unanimous, that the delegates would be able to insert the word “unanimous” into this title. At the same time they would delete the reference to mere “representatives,” thus strengthening the affirmation of colonial consensus. Although the JOURNALS OF CONGRESS did identify the members of the committee that had prepared the draft for this Declaration document and thus listed the name of Thomas Jefferson among the others, there was no mention made at this time of his having provided a contribution that was being considered unique. –In fact Jefferson himself would make no such public claim, until the year prior to his death.

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Adam Smith on “The cost of Empire,” from AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF THE WEALTH OF NATIONS:

The countries which possess the colonies of America, and which trade directly to the East Indies, enjoy, indeed, the whole show and splendour of this great commerce. Other countries, however, notwithstanding all the invidious restraints by which it is meant to exclude them, frequently enjoy a greater share of the real benefit of it. The colonies of Spain and Portugal, for example, give more real encouragement to the industry of other countries than to that of Spain and Portugal.... After all the unjust attempts, therefore, of every country in Europe to engross to itself the whole advantage of the trade of its own colonies, no country has yet been able to engross to itself anything but the expense of supporting in time of peace, and of defending in time of war, the oppressive authority which it assumes over them. The inconveniencies resulting from the possession of its colonies, every country has engrossed to itself completely. The advantages resulting from their trade it has been obliged to share with many other countries. At first sight, no doubt, the monopoly of the great commerce of America naturally seems to be an acquisition of the highest value. To the undiscerning eye of giddy ambition, it naturally presents itself amidst the confused scramble of politics and war, as a very dazzling object to fight for. The dazzling splendour of the object, however the immense greatness of the commerce, is the very quality which renders the monopoly of it hurtful, or which makes one employment, in its own nature necessarily less advantageous to the country than the greater part of other employments, absorb a much greater proportion of the capital of the country than what would otherwise have gone to it.... It is not contrary to justice that ... America should contribute towards the discharge of the public debt of Great Britain.... a government to which several of the colonies of America owe their present charters, and consequently their present constitution; and to which all the colonies of America owe the liberty, security, and property which they have ever since enjoyed. That public debt has been contracted in the defence, not of Great Britain alone, but of all the different provinces of the empire; the immense debt contracted in the late war in particular, and a great part of that contracted in the war before, were both properly contracted in defence of America.... If it should be found impracticable for Great Britain to draw any considerable augmentation of revenue from any of the resources above mentioned; the only resource which can remain to her is a diminution of her expense. In the mode of collecting, and in that of expending the public revenue; though in both there may be still room for improvement; Great Britain seems to be at least as economical as any of her neighbours. The military establishment which she maintains for her own defence in time of peace, is more moderate than that of any European state which can pretend to rival her either in wealth or in power. None of those articles, therefore, seem to admit of any considerable reduction of expense. The expense of the peace establishment of the colonies was, before the commencement of the present disturbances, very considerable, and is an expense which may, and if no revenue can be drawn from them ought certainly to be saved altogether. This constant expense in time of peace, though very great, is insignificant in comparison with what the defence of the colonies has cost us in time of war.

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Adam Smith on “The cost of Empire,” from AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF THE WEALTH OF NATIONS:

The last war, which was undertaken altogether on account of the colonies, cost Great Britain ... upwards of ninety millions. The Spanish war of 1739 was principally undertaken on their account; in which, and in the French war that was the consequence of it, Great Britain spent upwards of forty millions, a great part of which ought justly to be charged to the colonies. In those two wars the colonies cost Great Britain much more than double the sum which the national debt amounted to before the commencement of the first of them. Had it not been for those wars that debt might, and probably would by this time, have been completely paid; and had it not been for the colonies, the former of those wars might not, and the latter certainly would not have been undertaken. It was because the colonies were supposed to be provinces of the British empire, that this expense was laid out upon them. But countries which contribute neither revenue nor military force towards the support of the empire, cannot be considered as provinces. They may perhaps be considered as appendages, as a sort of splendid and showy equipage of the empire. But if the empire can no longer support the expense of keeping up this equipage, it ought certainly to lay it down; and if it cannot raise its revenue in proportion to its expense, it ought at least, to accommodate its expense to its revenue. If the colonies, notwithstanding their refusal to submit to British taxes, are still to be considered as provinces of the British empire, their defence in some future war may cost Great Britain as great an expense as it ever has done in any former war. The rulers of Great Britain have, for more than a century past, amused the people with the imagination that they possessed a great empire on the west side of the Atlantic. This empire, however, has hitherto existed in imagination only. It has hitherto been, not an empire, but the project of an empire; not a gold mine, but the project of a gold mine; a project which has cost, which continues to cost, and which, if pursued in the same way as it has been hitherto, is likely to cost, immense expense, without being likely to bring any profit; for the effects of the monopoly of the colony trade, it has been shown, are, to the great body of the people, mere loss instead of profit. It is surely now time that our rulers should either realise this golden dream, in which they have been indulging themselves, perhaps, as well as the people; or, that they should awake from it themselves, and endeavour to awaken the people. If the project cannot be completed, it ought to be given up. If any of thee provinces of the British empire cannot be made to contribute towards the support of the whole empire, it is surely time that Great Britain should free herself from the expense of defending those provinces in time of war, and of supporting any part of their civil or military establishments in time of peace, and endeavour to accommodate her future views and designs to the real mediocrity of her circumstances.

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1799

As would be reported in Captain Amasa Delano of Duxbury MA’s NARRATIVE OF VOYAGES AND TRAVELS IN THE NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN HEMISPHERES of 1817, and then in Herman Melville’s BENITO CERENO of 1855, in this year Captain Delano, in hope of resupplying his large seal-hunting ship and general trader with water, brought it to anchor with a valuable cargo in the harbor of St. Maria, a small uninhabited island toward the southern extremity of the Chilean coast.

1819

August 1, Sunday: King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia and King Friedrich August I of Saxony met in reconciliation at Pillnitz.

The India Company had, on the island of St. Helena in the south Atlantic, 700 to 800 Chinese workmen. They had divided into factions and began to struggle among themselves, with the whites on the island presuming this to amount to some sort of religious dispute. They formed, near Plantation House where Napoléon Bonaparte was being kept, into three or four bands of about 150 each, and arming themselves with bamboo sticks, spears, knives, etc., “rushed upon each other with frightful ferocity ... uttering piercing cries.” The post at High Knoll despatched “some St. Helena sharp-shooters, for the most part drunk, all young lads who were impatient to finish the affair, and who, without waiting for anybody’s orders, started shooting wildly. There were some killed and a good many wounded. The commanding officers will be courtmartialed.”

Herman Melville was born as “Herman Melvill” at 6 Pearl Street on Manhattan “Island of the Hills,” in New- York, to importer Allan Melvill and Martia Gansevoort Melvill, daughter of Revolutionary War general Peter Gansevoort.5 Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 1st day 1st of 8 M 1819 / Our Meeting was solid & D Buffum was favor’d in a lively & pertinent testimony to the efficacy of the Truth In the Afternoon J Dennis Anne Greene & H Dennis were all engaged in short testimonies RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

5.See Jay Leyda’s THE MELVILLE LOG: A DOCUMENTARY LIFE OF HERMAN MELVILLE, published in 1951. 12 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1820

The Essex, a whaler, sank after an attack by a sperm whale. The white members of the crew, in order to survive after their shipwreck, had resort to cannibalism. The crew members of color were of course the first to die and be eaten — the only crew members to survive would be of the white color. Only a few Quakers would survive — and only by drawing lots and killing and eating the Quaker who drew the short straw. This ship’s captain, disowned Friend George Pollard, Jr., would live out his life on Nantucket Island as a night watchman, but it would be generally recognized in this ship’s home port that “on Nantucket we do not speak of the Essex.”

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1823

February 11, Tuesday: During the hours of darkness disowned Friend George Pollard, Jr. had kept his whaling vessel moving along despite the fact that no stars were visible — and despite the fact that the Two Brothers was being sailed through a poorly charted quadrant of the Pacific Ocean some 600 miles northwest of the Hawaiian chain known to contain shoals. Due to this extremely poor judgment, off French Frigate Shoals his vessel ripped its bottom on a reef. The captain did not want to abandon ship but was brought along by his crew into their small boats, and the following morning all lives would be saved by another Nantucket whaler. (Captain Pollard had been in charge during the shipwreck of the Essex. This would be, therefore, the final time he would be entrusted with a vessel — he would finish out his life as a night watchman. Herman Melvill(e) would seek him out in Nantucket for a sympathetic interview, and in 2011 the wreck of the Two Brothers would be explored by skindivers: its anchors, its trying vessels for whale blubber, etc.) LOST AT SEA

TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS

1826

Spring: An attack of scarlet fever caused damage to Herman Melvill’s eyes that would bring increasing problems in later years. At age seven, according to his father “very backward in speech and somewhat slow in comprehension” due to this damage, yet “of a docile and amiable disposition,” Herman would enter the New- York Male High School.6

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1828

NARRATIVE OF THE GLOBE, BY LAY AND HUSSEY SURVIVORS. A.D. 1828. Herman Melvill(e), in the preface to MOBY-DICK; OR, THE WHALE, would extrapolate from this sad history: “The Whale-ship Globe, on board of which vessel occurred the horrid transactions we are about to relate, belonged to the island of Nantucket.”

SAMUEL B. COMSTOCK

6. Then Melville’s father’s felt and fur import business would go bankrupt and the family would relocate from Manhattan “Island of the Hills” upstate to Albany, New York. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 15 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1829

David Dudley Field’s and Professor Chester Dewey’s HISTORY OF THE COUNTY OF BERKSHIRE, MASSACHUSETTS; IN TWO PARTS. THE FIRST BEING A GENERAL VIEW OF THE COUNTY; THE SECOND, AN ACCOUNT OF THE SEVERAL TOWNS. BY GENTLEMEN IN THE COUNTY, CLERGYMEN AND LAYMEN (Pittsfield: Samuel W. Bush). BERKSHIRE, MASSACHUSETTS

On page 39 of this volume the bugs that ate their way out of a table made of apple wood may be found, which would later eat their way out of Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS concluding chapter, and then out of Herman Melvill(e)’s tale entitled “The Apple-Tree Table: or, Original Spiritual Manifestations.”

(Berkshire County is technically not a county, since it has no governmental services of its own, but is a district association that covers the entire mountainous western end of the state of Massachusetts, including the towns of Adams, Alford, Becket, Cheshire, Clarksburg, Dalton, Egremont, Florida, Great Barrington, Housatonic, Hancock, Hinsdale, Lanesborough, Berkshire, Lee, Lenox, Dale, Mount Washington, New Ashford, New Marlborough, North Adams, Otis, Peru, Pittsfield, Richmond, Sandisfield, Savoy, Ashley Falls, Stockbridge, Glendale, Interlaken, Tyringham, Washington, West Stockbridge, Williamstown, and Windsor.)

WALDEN: Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts, –from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb, –heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board,– may unexpectedly come forth amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

ENTOMBED LIFE

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The “Berkshire” District

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1832

Herman Melvill’s father died in Albany, New York, a failure at every business venture in which he had ever taken part, leaving nothing but debts for his extended family to deal with (however, many families in the US were far less well provided for and far less well connected than the beleaguered Melvill widow and her young charges). It would be after the father’s death that the family would change its name from Melvill to Melville. This adoption of the Scottish spelling would add to the aristocratic aura of the name while distancing the family’s next generation somewhat from the unsavory reputation that the previous generation had acquired on account of various secret credit New-York business dealings and debt abandonments.

William James, father of Henry James, Sr., died. Having started out with a modest dry-goods and tobacco store, James had wound up owning his own savings bank. After being a member of the Erie Canal Commission and a founder of Union College, at his death in this year he was worth some $3,000,000 (all of which he was forced to leave behind him). There was but one wealthier businessman in America: the New-York landlord John Jacob Astor.

Primitive artist May Keys painted Lockport on the Erie Canal.

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1833

It would have been in about this year that Herman Melville was forced from school, by family finances, and into a job as a clerk at his Uncle Peter’s bank.

August: Dr. James Cowles Prichard pioneered “the term monomania, meaning madness affecting one train of thought … adopted in late times instead of melancholia.” (Herman Melville’s father-in-law, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, would utilize this concept “monomania” in a legal opinion in 1844, and Melville would deploy it in MARDI AND A VOYAGE THITHER in 1849, and then in MOBY-DICK; OR, THE WHALE in 1851 as the defining characteristic of the psychology of the maimed Captain Ahab.) As what in this year would have been considered to be a prime instance of such monomania, in this year there appeared Lydia Maria Child’s infamous APPEAL IN FAVOR OF THAT CLASS OF AMERICANS CALLED AFRICANS.

(The author’s “madness affecting one train of thought” was immediately recognized, and in an attempt at a cure her library privileges at the Boston Athenæum were summarily revoked.) The Reverend William Ellery Channing walked down to Child’s cottage from his home on Beacon Hill, a mile and a half, to discuss the book with her for all of three hours, but not because he agreed with her — the Reverend Channing considered Child misguided and a zealot. Child later commented that she had “suffered many a shivering ague-fit in attempting to melt, or batter away the glaciers of his prejudices.” The window of

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William Davis Ticknor’s Old Corner Bookstore was smashed because this APPEAL was on display. Having

overheard his parents discussing APPEAL (and perhaps having heard of that smashed window at the Old Corner Bookstore, which had been smashed by someone leaning against or being shoved against it), the 11-year-old Edward Everett Hale considered heaving a stone at it through the shop window. This is the book that a manager of the American Bible Society refused to read for fear it would make him an abolitionist, and in fact it would be what the 22-year-old Wendell Phillips would be reading just as he was abandoning the practice of law in order to devote his life to abolitionism.

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Here is the cover of a modern edition of that offending treatise:

Outspoken in her condemnation of slavery, Mrs. Child pointed out its contradiction with Christian teachings, and described the moral and physical degradation it brought upon slaves and owners alike — not omitting to mention the issue of miscegenation, and not excepting the North from its share of responsibility for the system. “I am fully aware of the unpopularity of the task I have undertaken,” she wrote in the Introduction, “but though I expect ridicule and censure, it is not in my nature to fear them.” As a direct result of this, she would lose her editorial post with The Juvenile Miscellany (if you are so impolite and inconsiderate that you mention that we routinely molest our black servants, we certainly cannot allow you to have contact with our children).

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December 14, Saturday: Kaspar Hauser was stabbed, in a murder for which today we still have neither a clear motive nor an identified suspect.7

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Herman Melville would compare the tongue-tied innocent doomed victim character of his last fiction, BILLY BUDD, to this mysterious historic personage, Kaspar Hauser:

BILLY BUDD: And here be it submitted that apparently going to corroborate the doctrine of man's fall, a doctrine now popularly ignored, it is observable that where certain virtues pristine and unadulterate peculiarly characterize anybody in the external uniform of civilization, they will upon scrutiny seem not to be derived from custom or convention, but rather to be out of keeping with these, as if indeed exceptionally transmitted from a period prior to Cain’s city and citified man. The character marked by such qualities has to an unvitiated taste an untampered-with flavor like that of berries, while the man thoroughly civilized, even in a fair specimen of the breed, has to the same moral palate a questionable smack as of a compounded wine. To any stray inheritor of these primitive qualities found, like Caspar Hauser, wandering dazed in any Christian capital of our time, the good- natured poet’s famous invocation, near two thousand years ago, of the good rustic out of his latitude in the Rome of the Cesars, still appropriately holds:— “Honest and poor, faithful in word and thought, What has thee, Fabian, to the city brought?” Though our Handsome Sailor had as much of masculine beauty as one can expect anywhere to see; nevertheless, like the beautiful woman in one of Hawthorne’s minor tales, there was just one thing amiss in him. No visible blemish, indeed, as with the lady; no, but an occasional liability to a vocal defect. Though in the hour of elemental uproar or peril he was everything that a sailor should be, yet under sudden provocation of strong heart-feeling, his voice otherwise singularly musical, as if expressive of the harmony within, was apt to develop an organic hesitancy, in fact, more or less of a stutter or even worse. In this particular Billy was a striking instance that the arch interferer, the envious marplot of Eden, still has more or less to do with every human consignment to this planet of earth. In every case, one way or another he is sure to slip in his little card, as much as to remind us — I too have a hand here.

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1834

At approximately this point in time, Herman Melville was working as a farmhand on his uncle Tom’s farm in western Massachusetts.

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1835

In approximately this year Herman Melville was working for his elder brother as a store clerk and bookkeeper (pending the failure of this brother’s business during the financial crisis of 1837).

1836

In approximately this year, Herman Melville became a country schoolmaster near Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

HERMAN MELVILLE

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1837

New Bedford, Massachusetts would not reach its peak for another two decades, but it was already most prosperous. The registered tonnage of ships, inclusive of some 300 whaling vessels, centering on the Acushnet River (including those of Fairhaven across the inlet), was exceeded only by the registered tonnage of New- York, of Boston, and of New Orleans (pictured here, in this year):

For the next quarter century, up until the Civil War times, this port would continue to enjoy its constant growth and prosperity, and Ishmael, in Herman Melville’s MOBY-DICK; OR, THE WHALE, would refer to it as “perhaps the dearest place to live in, in all New England.” In this fortunate port, here was Friend Daniel Ricketson

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portrayed during this year at the age of 25:

(This would be a portrait of Friend Daniel as he would have liked to appear — for in real life after one eye had been struck by another boy, not only would that eye be deficient in vision but it would be distinctly smaller than the other.)

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Herman Melville’s brother’s business, which was Herman’s source of employment, went bankrupt.

1838

The Jordan Level of the Erie Canal, between Montezuma and Camillus, was straightened, shortening the stretch by a mile and saving $18,323.72 in cost.

The state floated a bond issue of $4,000,000 for enlarging the Erie Canal.

The New York registry of canal boats was completed.

The Melvilles moved to Lansingburgh in upstate New York, where they would depend upon the assistance of a wealthy relative. Herman Melville began to study engineering and surveying, hoping for a job on the new Erie Canal (but no such job would materialize). Filling in his time, Melville became involved in a public namecalling contest with another young gentleman. They exchanged “silly and brainless loon” for “Ciceronian baboon,” “stranger to veracity” for “moral Ethiopian,” “narrow-minded and jealous” for “child of the devil, full of all subtility and all mischief,” etc. Melville won — if anyone could be said to win at this sort of game.

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Late in the year, Herman Melville was walking the streets daily in the vicinity of the New Bedford waterfront, while Frederick Douglass was doing the same. Wouldn’t it have been nice if these two manual laborers Douglass and Melville, who would become the authors of personal narratives of white racist abuse of non-

whites, had met and had gotten to know each other? –But in that day, if they passed each other in the street in public as strangers of different races, they would have each been inhibited from relating to the other except in the most perfunctory and functional manner. Besides, compared to Douglass, seaman Melville was still wet behind the ears.

At this point Frederick and Anna Murray Douglass were living in a small rented house at 157 Elm Street and had joined the New Bedford Zion Methodist Church after having discovered that all the other Methodist churches in New Bedford had racially segregated pews.

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1839

By this point the heath hen [Heath Hen Tympanuchus cupido cupido], New England’s version of the prairie chicken, had been so reduced in numbers throughout New England, that it remained only on the island of Martha’s Vineyard.8An article in the Knickerbocker Magazine reported on “an old bull whale of prodigious

size and strength,” called Mocha Dick, in the Pacific Ocean. This beast was reported to be “as white as wool.” Herman Melville sailed before the mast, that is, as an apprentice seaman, on the merchantman St. Lawrence bound for Liverpool and return.

8. The species probably died off in the sand plains of Long Island and southeastern New England not due to the overhunting but in consequence of denial of habitat, caused by cessation of the native American fire management habits by the European intrusives. Without sporadic fires to keep the pitch pine low forest burned back, the sort of grassy environment of annuals required by the heath hen simply ceases to exist. Steps the white people were taking to preserve the value of their property in the environment actually had been, that is, destroying this environment. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 29 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1840

Herman Melville traveled to Illinois to try to get work from his Uncle Tom. He passed the ruins of the fort of Michilimackinac, got as far west as the falls of St. Anthony on the Mississippi River near St. Paul in what would eventually be Minnesota, and did part of the journey on a Mississippi steamboat, the trip out and the trip back each requiring about a month.

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By this point New Bedford had become known as the “City of Palaces” on account of the row after row of Greek Revival mansions that graced its grid of streets in the uphill tony neighborhoods. One sailor passing through during the 1850s would describe this prosperity as: For a place in which so large a business is carried on as here, “Bedford” is remarkably still. At the distance of three squares from the water side, one would never guess that he stood within the bounds of a city which ranks in commercial importance the seventh seaport in the Union, and whose shops float upon every ocean. A more quiet and rural looking place than that portion of the city beyond the immediate business limits, it would be difficult to imagine. Here is Herman Melville’s description of the New Bedford of this period: In New Bedford, actual cannibals stand chatting at street corners; savages outright; many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh. It makes a stranger stare. But besides the Feegeeans, Tongataboors, Errormanggoans, Panangians, and Brighggians, and, besides the wild specimens of whaling-craft which unheeded reel about the streets, you will see other sights still more curious, certainly more comical. There weekly arrive in this town scores of green Vermonters and New Hampshire men, all athirst for gain and glory in the fishery.... Many are as green as the Green Mountains whence they came.... Look there! that chap strutting round the corner. He wears a beaver hat and swallow-tail coat, girdled with a sailor-belt and sheath-knife.

One suspects that a Frederick Douglass attired as a working black man would have been hardly exotic enough to have caught a Melville’s eye.

THE LIFE OF SAMUEL COMSTOCK, THE TERRIBLE WHALEMAN: CONTAINING AN ACCOUNT OF THE MUTINY, AND MASSACRE OF THE OFFICERS OF THE SHIP GLOBE, OF NANTUCKET: WITH HIS SUBSEQUENT ADVENTURES, AND HIS BEING SHOT AT THE MULGRAVE ISLANDS... / BY HIS BROTHER, WILLIAM COMSTOCK. Boston: James Fisher, 1840. Samuel Comstock’s younger brother William had been aboard the Globe with him, but had had of course too much sense to take any part in the mutiny. After his return from the Pacific, he was developing a career as a reporter and press writer, initially in Massachusetts but then in New York (his name is to be found in the Brooklyn city directories for 1866, 1867, 1868, 1871, 1874, 1875, 1876, 1877, 1878, 1880, 1881, and 1882). He was the father of the American author Augustus Comstock.9 Goold [believed] that if the assailants hit him with a snow ball on one cheek, it was his duty to turn and receive a patch of mud on the other. Such are the principles of the Quakers — but, unfortunately, the anger which they are forbidden to express by outward actions, finding no vent, stagnates the heart, and, while they make professions of love and good will to their opponents, the rancour and intense malevolence of their feelings poison every generous spring of human kindness. It is not theirs 9. Augustus had been born on February 14, 1837 in Charlestown, Massachusetts, but would be brought to New-York with his parents when he was 7. When 14, he would leave school to set type in the office of the Morning Star. Subsequently he would work for the Atlas, until by accidentally “pying” the type (upsetting a case of set type) he would get his young ass fired. He would then attempt to study for the law in the office of a relative until, abandoning this, he would go to sea. His grandfather, Nathan Comstock, would help him enlist aboard a whaler. After some years of whaling, he would return to New-York and begin to author sea tales. All his publications would be under a pen name, “Roger Starbuck.” He would enlist as a private in Durvee’s Zouaves, the 5th Regiment of New York Volunteers, and several stories of life in the Union army would appear in the New-York Weekly in 1861. On August 29, 1862, at the 2d Battle of Bull Run, he would receive a wound which would hamper his activities. After the war, in Brooklyn, he would devote himself to the writing of serials and sketches for the story papers and dime novel publishers of that period. He would also be able to place stories in Harper’s Weekly and other periodicals. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 31 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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to unsheathe the sword or poise the lance, but they make use of their influence and false pretensions to respectably ruin the reputation, standing, and hopes of those they hate — pursuing their adversaries even beyond the grave, and blasting widows and orphans, “in a quiet and sober manner.” Notwithstanding their smooth professions, they are the most proud, aristocratic, selfish and spiteful people on the face of the earth. Herman Melville, in the preface to MOBY-DICK; OR, THE WHALE, would extrapolate from this sad history: “‘If you make the least damn bit of noise,’ replied Samuel, ‘I will send you to hell.’”

SAMUEL B. COMSTOCK

Melville, in MOBY-DICK, would described the whalers as “fighting Quakers ... Quakers with a vengeance.”

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Spring: The steamboat Herald which had sunk in the Merrimack River and been refitted as a side-wheel excursion steamer capable of taking 500 passengers on an outing was carried overland down and around Pawtucket Falls, and when the water rose in the spring it was floated down to Newburyport and sailed to New-York harbor — where it became a ferry.10

THE FERRY AT BROOKLYN PIER IN 1840

10. We may wonder whether it was one of the ferries that Walt Whitman rode between Manhattan and Brooklyn: “Specimen Days”

MY PASSION FOR FERRIES Living in Brooklyn or New York city from this time forward, my life, then, and still more the following years, was curiously identified with Fulton ferry, already becoming the greatest of its sort in the world for general importance, volume, variety, rapidity, and picturesqueness. Almost daily, [Page 701] later, (’50 to ’60,) I cross’d on the boats, often up in the pilot-houses where I could get a full sweep, absorbing shows, accompaniments, surroundings. What oceanic currents, eddies, underneath — the great tides of humanity also, with ever-shifting movements. Indeed, I have always had a passion for ferries; to me they afford inimitable, streaming, never-failing, living poems. The river and bay scenery, all about New York island, any time of a fine day — the hurrying, splashing sea-tides — the changing panorama of steamers, all sizes, often a string of big ones outward bound to distant ports — the myriads of white-sail’d schooners, sloops, skiffs, and the marvelously beautiful yachts — the majestic sound boats as they rounded the Battery and came along towards 5, afternoon, eastward bound — the prospect off towards Staten island, or down the Narrows, or the other way up the Hudson — what refreshment of spirit such sights and experiences gave me years ago (and many a time since.) My old pilot friends, the Balsirs, Johnny Cole, Ira Smith, William White, and my young ferry friend, Tom Gere — how well I remember them all.

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Steamboat service was established between Norwich CT and New-York harbor. At Norwich the steamboatSTEAMBOAT passengers would be able to connect with the Worcester-Norwich RR, and at Worcester with the Boston-Worcester RR. –But the river ice would prove not to be manageable this far upstream.

When the Cunard Steamship Line selected Boston as its North American terminus, Boston became a major US port for immigrants during the decade of the 1840s.11

When Herman Melville’s brother’s business, which was his source of employment, went bankrupt in this year,

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he would be traveling to Illinois to seek opportunities there, part of the way on a Mississippi steamboat.

The Fort Snelling surgeon, Dr. John Emerson, was at his own request and for the benefit of his “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 35 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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health transferred from the Minnesota Territory to a post in Florida — where a war upon the Seminole natives was at the moment taking place. (Dr. Emerson would find Florida also to be bad for his health. He had a delicate constitution, seemingly fitted only for travel from post to post.)

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December 30: Herman Melville signed onto the whaler Acushnet in New Bedford harbor. There is a theory that in this period young people did not achieve their full stature as they do now, in about their 20th year, but in about their 1 25th year. In this case, Melville had at the age of 21 reached 5 foot 9 /2 inches tall — although he would later be characterized with perhaps some exaggeration as a 6-footer, and as of 1860, after having shrunk somewhat as we all do by reason of aging and by reason of loss of motivation to exaggerate, he would still measure 5 foot 3 9 /4 inches in height.

Table of Altitudes

Yoda 2 ' 0 '' Lavinia Warren 2 ' 8 '' Tom Thumb, Jr. 3 ' 4 '' Lucy (Australopithecus Afarensis) 3 ' 8 '' Hervé Villechaize (“Fantasy Island”) 3 ' 11'' Charles Proteus Steinmetz 4 ' 0 '' Mary Moody Emerson per FBS (1) 4 ' 3 '' Alexander Pope 4 ' 6 '' Benjamin Lay 4 ' 7 '' Gary Coleman (“Arnold Jackson”) 4 ' 8 '' Queen Victoria with osteoporosis 4 ' 8 '' Queen Victoria as adult 4 ' 10 '' Margaret Mitchell 4 ' 10 '' length of newer military musket 4 ' 10'' Charlotte Brontë 4 ' 10-11'' Harriet Beecher Stowe 4 ' 11'' Laura Ingalls Wilder 4 ' 11'' a rather tall adult Pygmy male 4 ' 11'' John Keats 5 ' 0 '' Clara Barton 5 ' 0 '' Isambard Kingdom Brunel 5 ' 0 '' Andrew Carnegie 5 ' 0 '' Thomas de Quincey 5 ' 0 ''

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Stephen A. Douglas 5 ' 0 '' Danny DeVito 5 ' 0 '' Immanuel Kant 5 ' 0 '' William Wilberforce 5 ' 0 '' Mae West 5 ' 0 '' Mother Teresa 5 ' 0 '' Deng Xiaoping 5 ' 0 '' Dred Scott 5 ' 0 '' (±) Captain William Bligh of HMS Bounty 5 ' 0 '' (±) Harriet Tubman 5 ' 0 '' (±) Mary Moody Emerson per FBS (2) 5 ' 0 '' (±) John Brown of Providence, Rhode Island 5 ' 0 '' (+) Bette Midler 5 ' 1 '' Jemmy Button 5 ' 2 '' Margaret Mead 5 ' 2 '' R. Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller 5 ' 2 '' Yuri Gagarin the astronaut 5 ' 2 '' William Walker 5 ' 2 '' Horatio Alger, Jr. 5 ' 2 '' length of older military musket 5 ' 2 '' 1 the artist formerly known as Prince 5 ' 2 /2'' 1 typical female of Thoreau's period 5 ' 2 /2'' Francis of Assisi 5 ' 3 '' Volt ai re 5 ' 3 '' Mohandas Gandhi 5 ' 3 '' Sammy Davis, Jr. 5 ' 3 '' Kahlil Gibran 5 ' 3 '' Friend Daniel Ricketson 5 ' 3 '' The Reverend Gilbert White 5 ' 3 '' Nikita Khrushchev 5 ' 3 '' Sammy Davis, Jr. 5 ' 3 '' Truman Capote 5 ' 3 '' Kim Jong Il (North Korea) 5 ' 3 '' Stephen A. “Little Giant” Douglas 5 ' 4 '' Francisco Franco 5 ' 4 '' President James Madison 5 ' 4 '' Iosef Vissarionovich Dzugashvili “Stalin” 5 ' 4 '' Alan Ladd 5 ' 4 '' Pablo Picasso 5 ' 4 '' Truman Capote 5 ' 4 '' Queen Elizabeth 5 ' 4 ''

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Ludwig van Beethoven 5 ' 4 '' Typical Homo Erectus 5 ' 4 '' 1 typical Neanderthal adult male 5 ' 4 /2'' 1 Alan Ladd 5 ' 4 /2'' comte de Buffon 5 ' 5 '' (-) Captain Nathaniel Gordon 5 ' 5 '' Charles Manson 5 ' 5 '' Audie Murphy 5 ' 5 '' Harry Houdini 5 ' 5 '' Hung Hsiu-ch'üan 5 ' 5 '' 1 Marilyn Monroe 5 ' 5 /2'' 1 T.E. Lawrence “of Arabia” 5 ' 5 /2'' average runaway male American slave 5 ' 5-6 '' Charles Dickens 5 ' 6? '' President Benjamin Harrison 5 ' 6 '' President Martin Van Buren 5 ' 6 '' James Smithson 5 ' 6 '' Louisa May Alcott 5 ' 6 '' 1 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 5 ' 6 /2'' 1 Napoleon Bonaparte 5 ' 6 /2'' Emily Brontë 5 ' 6-7 '' Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 5 ' ? '' average height, seaman of 1812 5 ' 6.85 '' Oliver Reed Smoot, Jr. 5 ' 7 '' minimum height, British soldier 5 ' 7 '' President John Adams 5 ' 7 '' President John Quincy Adams 5 ' 7 '' President William McKinley 5 ' 7 '' “Charley” Parkhurst (a female) 5 ' 7 '' Henry Thoreau 5 ' 7 '' 1 the average male of Thoreau's period 5 ' 7 /2 '' Edgar Allan Poe 5 ' 8 '' President Ulysses S. Grant 5 ' 8 '' President William H. Harrison 5 ' 8 '' President James Polk 5 ' 8 '' President Zachary Taylor 5 ' 8 '' average height, soldier of 1812 5 ' 8.35 '' 1 President Rutherford B. Hayes 5 ' 8 /2'' President Millard Fillmore 5 ' 9 '' President Harry S Truman 5 ' 9 '' 1 President Jimmy Carter 5 ' 9 /2''

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3 Herman Melville 5 ' 9 /4'' Calvin Coolidge 5 ' 10'' Andrew Johnson 5 ' 10'' Theodore Roosevelt 5 ' 10'' Thomas Paine 5 ' 10'' Franklin Pierce 5 ' 10'' Abby May Alcott 5 ' 10'' Reverend Henry C. Wright 5 ' 10'' 1 Nathaniel Hawthorne 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 Louis “Deerfoot” Bennett 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 Friend John Greenleaf Whittier 5 ' 10 /2'' 1 President Dwight D. Eisenhower 5 ' 10 /2'' Sojourner Truth 5 ' 11'' President Grover Cleveland 5 ' 11'' President Herbert Hoover 5 ' 11'' President Woodrow Wilson 5 ' 11'' President Jefferson Davis 5 ' 11'' 1 President Richard M. Nixon 5 ' 11 /2'' Robert Voorhis the hermit of Rhode Island < 6 ' Frederick Douglass 6 ' (-) Anthony Burns 6 ' 0 '' Waldo Emerson 6 ' 0 '' Joseph Smith, Jr. 6 ' 0 '' David Walker 6 ' 0 '' Sarah F. Wakefield 6 ' 0 '' Thomas Wentworth Higginson 6 ' 0 '' President James Buchanan 6 ' 0 '' President Gerald R. Ford 6 ' 0 '' President James Garfield 6 ' 0 '' President Warren Harding 6 ' 0 '' President John F. Kennedy 6 ' 0 '' President James Monroe 6 ' 0 '' President William H. Taft 6 ' 0 '' President John Tyler 6 ' 0 '' John Brown 6 ' 0 (+)'' President Andrew Jackson 6 ' 1'' Alfred Russel Wallace 6 ' 1'' President Ronald Reagan 6 ' 1'' 1 Venture Smith 6 ' 1 /2'' John Camel Heenan 6 ' 2 '' Crispus Attucks 6 ' 2 ''

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President Chester A. Arthur 6 ' 2 '' President George Bush, Senior 6 ' 2 '' President Franklin D. Roosevelt 6 ' 2 '' President George Washington 6 ' 2 '' Gabriel Prosser 6 ' 2 '' Dangerfield Newby 6 ' 2 '' Charles Augustus Lindbergh 6 ' 2 '' 1 President Bill Clinton 6 ' 2 /2'' 1 President Thomas Jefferson 6 ' 2 /2'' President Lyndon B. Johnson 6 ' 3 '' Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 6 ' 3 '' 1 Richard “King Dick” Seaver 6 ' 3 /4'' President Abraham Lincoln 6 ' 4 '' Marion Morrison (AKA John Wayne) 6 ' 4 '' Elisha Reynolds Potter, Senior 6 ' 4 '' Thomas Cholmondeley 6 ' 4 '' (?) Franklin Benjamin Sanborn 6 ' 5 '' Peter the Great of Russia 6 ' 7 '' Giovanni Battista Belzoni 6 ' 7 '' Thomas Jefferson (the statue) 7 ' 6'' Jefferson Davis (the statue) 7 ' 7'' 1 Martin Van Buren Bates 7 ' 11 /2'' M. Bihin, a Belgian exhibited in Boston in 1840 8 ' Anna Haining Swan 8 ' 1''

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1841

Herman Melville visited the Galápagos (he would write this up in 1854 in THE ENCANTADAS).

HERMAN MELVILLE

January 3: The Acushnet, and Herman Melville, “blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.”

HERMAN MELVILLE

Angelina Emily Grimké Weld gave birth to Theodore Grimké Weld. THEODORE DWIGHT WELD

March: The Acushnet, off the coast of Brazil with Herman Melville, engaged in the first of its whale hunts.

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1842

There was a sensational trial, the “Somers” trial, at which a cousin of Herman Melville named Guert Gansevoort was the presiding judge. In result, three navies would be sent to the yardarm to hang for mutiny. The trial and the punishment evidently had a deep impact and would influence the scribbling cousin’s BILLY BUDD of the 1886-1891 period.

BILLY BUDD: ... that harassed frame of mind which in the year 1842 actuated the Commander of the U.S. brig-of-war Somers to resolve, under the so-called Articles of War, Articles modelled upon the English Mutiny Act, to resolve upon the execution at sea of a midshipman and two petty-officers as mutineers designing the seizure of the brig. Which resolution was carried out though in a time of peace and within not many days’ sail of home. An act vindicated by a naval court of inquiry subsequently convened ashore. History, and here cited without comment.

The author revisited the Galápagos Islands (he would write this up in 1854 in THE ENCANTADAS).

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January: During this month the printer Samuel Adams was murdered by John Caldwell Colt, sensationally involving the unwed mother of his child (in November this murderer would strike again, committing suicide by plunging a knife into his own heart in a cell of New-York’s Tombs prison half an hour before being scheduled to be taken to his hanging). From Herman Melville’s BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER of 1853: “I was now in such a state of nervous resentment that I thought it but prudent to check myself at present from further demonstrations. Bartleby and I were alone. I remembered the tragedy of the unfortunate Adams and the still more unfortunate Colt in the solitary office of the latter; and how poor Colt, being dreadfully incensed by Adams, and imprudently permitting himself to get wildly excited, was at unawares hurled into his fatal act — an act which certainly no man could possibly deplore more than the actor himself. Often it had occurred to me in my ponderings upon the subject that had that altercation taken place in the public street, or at a private residence, it would not have terminated as it did. It was the circumstance of being alone in a solitary office, up stairs, of a building entirely unhallowed by humanizing domestic associations — an uncarpeted office, doubtless, of a dusty, haggard sort of appearance-this it must have been, which greatly helped to enhance the irritable desperation of the hapless Colt.” (Melville would seem to refer to this also in the final scene of his PIERRE.)

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June: Frederick Douglass visited Cape Cod. Hey, you guys ever hear about human slavery?

Herman Melville arrived in French Polynesia. Hey, where you keep-ee alla girls-ee?

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July: With a shipmate, Herman Melville jumped ship to stay with natives of the Marquesas for a period amounting to several weeks (it may perhaps have seemed longer).

August: The federal Congress provided funding for the National Observatory (the hobby of President John Quincy Adams had been stargazing). When the facility was created, everything appeared to be in order, but then it was discovered that Lt. James Melville Gilliss of the US Navy had failed to properly oversee the construction, and the placing of the instruments, and that the concrete beneath the telescopes and other equipment was dangerously weak and damp. Everything had had to be removed while the structure was repaired, and while that had been going on Gillis was reassigned elsewhere. The new facility came therefore to be under the direction of the crippled Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury. The facility’s primary mission was to care for

the United States Navy’s marine chronometers, charts, and other navigational equipment. It would calibrate ships’ chronometers by timing the transit of stars across the meridian. Initially located downtown in Foggy Bottom (near the Lincoln Memorial), the observatory would not be relocated to Observatory Hill overlooking Massachusetts Avenue until 1893, amidst perfectly circular grounds. For the initial dozen years of its existence this facility would be referred to alternatively as the National Observatory and as the US Naval Observatory, and Lt. Maury would need to prepare each and every document and letter in duplicate under each designation

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until this nomenclature issue would be resolved in follow-on legislation. At the facility, Maury would data- mine an enormous collection of old ships’ logs and charts for observations on winds, calms, and currents for all seas in all seasons, discovering, for instance, that these documents could be used to determine the migration patterns of various species of whales. Because whales had been described in the Pacific Ocean as having carried in their bodies old harpoons of a design used only in the Atlantic and vice versa, and because whales had not been observed to journey via the channels at the tip of South America, he hypothesized that there must be occasions on which the north polar ocean is sufficiently free of its crust of ice to allow these breathing mammals to transit.

Herman Melville was picked up by an Australian whaler, the Lucy Ann, signing on for 1/200ths of whatever proceeds were generated by its voyage. There would be, however, no proceeds to speak of, and he would participate in a revolt of the crew, winding up in prison with them on Tahiti. When released, he would spend a few months exploring the fauna and flora of Tahiti and Eimeo.

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November: Having only recently been imprisoned for a period in Tahiti for having participated in the revolt aboard an Australian whaler, and upon release having spent some time exploring the fauna and flora of Tahiti and Eimeo, Herman Melville signed aboard the Charles & Henry, a Nantucket Island whaler.

(After being discharged from this whaler in Honolulu sometime during 1842 or 1843 or 1844, Melville would live as a beachcomber for a few months before signing aboard the frigate USS United States.)

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1843

In about this year, while between ships in Honolulu, Herman Melville was earning his keep by setting pins in a local bowling alley (for some reason avoiding bowling balls hasn’t been, however, the sort of experience young men write long stories about).

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May 2, Tuesday: The 14-year-old Helen Mar Kimball assented to marriage with Joseph Smith, Jr., in order to ensure the eternal salvation and exaltation of her entire family of origin, and was then surprised to find this not to be merely a symbolic gesture: “I would never have been sealed to Joseph had I known it was anything more than ceremony. I was young, and they deceived me, by saying the salvation of our whole family depended on it.”

Discharged from the Nantucket whaler Charles & Henry in Lahaina12 after an only moderately successful whaling cruise off Japan, Herman Melville would do the beachcomber thing for some three months and take a job setting pins in a local bowling alley.13

Henry Thoreau was written to by Elizabeth Sherman Hoar in Boston. [Boston, May 2, 1843] DEAR HENRY,— The rain prevented me from seeing you the night before I came away, to leave with you a parting assurance of good will and good hope. We have become bet- ter acquainted within the two past years than in our whole life as schoolmates and neighbors before; and I am unwilling to let you go away without telling you that I, among your other friends, shall miss you much, and follow you with re- membrance and all best wishes and confidence. Will you take this little ink- stand and try if it will carry ink safely from Concord to Staten Island? and the pen, which, if you can write with steel, may be made sometimes the interpreter of friendly thoughts to those whom you leave beyond the reach of your voice, — or record the inspirations of Nature, who, I doubt not, will be as faithful to you who trust her in the sea-girt Staten Island as in Concord woods and mead- ows. Good-by, and {Greek}, which, a wise man says, is the only salutation fit for the wise. Truly your friend, E. Hoar.

August 17, Thursday: In Honolulu, Herman Melville enlisted as a seaman aboard the frigate USS United States, bound for the Navy Yard at Boston. Over the following 14 months, Seaman Melville would stand at attention as witness to 163 floggings with the cat-o’-nine-tales. One man in particular would impress him, an Englishman named Jack Chase who was the crew chief of the warship’s maintop detail, and in late life he would dedicate his novel BILLY BUDD to that man:

12. Lahaina, as in Pearl Harbor, as in Honolulu on Oahu! –A tropical paradise, grass shacks, a few grass skirts, a few ukuleles, some pigs, some poi, and not very many missionaries. 13. Setting pins in a bowling alley would, it seems, not be the sort of activity about which it is easy to write long exotic travel tales. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 51 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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BILLY BUDD, Sailor

What befell him in the year of the Great Mutiny, etc.

DEDICATED TO JACK CHASE, ENGLISHMAN

“Wherever that great heart may now be Here on Earth or harbored in Paradise”

Captain of the Maintop in the year 1843 in the U.S. Frigate United States

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1844

October 14, Monday: At the Navy Yard in Charlestown, Herman Melville was paid off.

From my twenty-fifth year I date my life.

There had been all of 163 seaman floggings recorded in the frigate USS United States’s log during her voyage home — which amounted to a steady display before the crew of at least 2 and often 3 such government- sponsored public tortures per week.

As the frigate had docked on the 11th the first order of business had been to take the purser’s 40-year-old personal servant Robert T. Lucas into protective custody — because this American black’s slavemaster Fitzgerald had presented him in Norfolk, Virginia to serve the US Navy in return for being provided his wages of nine dollars a month, and in the normal course of operations the vessel had now entered a port of a free state. Judge Lemuel Shaw would in “Commonwealth v. Fitzgerald, in the matter of Lucas” rule that the Fugitive Slave Law, being in violation of justice and humanity, could be construed only in the strictest manner: Under the statute of the United States of 1837, slaves cannot be enlisted in the naval service. It seems that in a state where slavery is permitted, the United States may make a contract for the employment of a slave, which will be binding in that state, but cannot be enforced in a state where slavery does not exist. Where the master of a slave places him on board a United States vessel, and the vessel comes into the port of a free state, the slave cannot be restrained of his liberty. [The legal question would be whether when] a vessel, conveying slaves from one slave state to another, should be cast away on the coast of a free state, the slaves would become free ... The purser of the frigate United States, by the leave of the secretary of the navy, took on board that ship his slave in the port of Norfolk, Va., the slave was entered on the muster roll, and his master drew his wages. The frigate being ordered into the port of Charlestown, Massachusetts, it was held that there was no law to authorize his restraint ... enlistment is a contract, and none but a free person can enter into a contract. Slaves can make no contract. ... he was still a slave, and therefore under the control of his master. In the eye of the law he could have no will of his own. ... As therefore Lucas is not lawfully enlisted in the United States service, and cannot be held there by his former owner, he must be discharged.

Henry Thoreau wrote from Concord to James Munroe & Co in Boston, to obtain copies to distribute of Waldo Emerson’s speech of August 1st celebrating “EMANCIPATION IN THE BRITISH WEST INDIES”.“EMANCIPATION IN THE ... INDIES....” Concord Oct 14th James Munroe & Co, Please to send me a dozen copies of Mr. Emerson’s Address by the bearer— Yrs respecty “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 53 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Henry D. Thoreau.

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1845

At age 27 Herman Melville published his first book, about his adventure in French Polynesia, in England because publication in the US had been refused by Harper and Brothers due to uncertainty about his

truthfulness. The title was NARRATIVE OF A FOUR MONTHS’ RESIDENCE AMONG THE NATIVES OF A VALLEY 14 OF THE MARQUESAS ISLANDS; OR, A PEEP AT POLYNESIAN LIFE. (When this book was later reissued in an American edition as TYPEE, the key idea of Melville’s writing, of “white civilized man as the most ferocious

14. The question of truthfulness wasn’t anything so mundane as the real questions which might occur to us now, of exactly how long the young white man had actually spent in that valley (it seems it couldn’t possibly have been more than a few weeks, couldn’t possibly have extended to as much as one month let alone four) or whether the people Melville was staying with were actually in some regard cannibals or not. No, what it was really about, if you want to know, was the truthfulness of portraying “white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth.” How could this be, said white people with great sincerity? For white people can ascertain from introspection that they only do the things they do out of love, and out of this need that exists, that we create a better and more decent world. (As Thoreau was to point out in WALDEN, only Alek Therien, among the white men of his experience, failed to perceive the reality of this need — and as a French Canadian and as a day laborer, Therien would have been considered to be a white man in Concord only by way of extending him a courtesy.) Thus, when this book was later reissued in an American edition as TYPEE, the key idea of Melville’s writing, of the white colonizer as “the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth,” had been quite omitted. May we legitimately hypothecate a comparison of this omission to the counterfactual idea of omitting the white slavemaster from the American edition of NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SLAVE, WRITTEN BY HIMSELF — another first-person narrative published in this same year? “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 55 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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animal on the face of the earth,” had been quite omitted.)

According to Walter Benjamin, by this point the flâneur had all but disappeared from the city streets of Europe, as having become an overly transparent social fantasy. It had come to be no longer possible, in the anonymous crudity of the city throng, to value one’s isolation and anonymity as if were some sort of “prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito,” consuming and comprehending the throngs who passed before his eyes as a “botanist on asphalt.” Dana Brand, who has found exemplars of the flâneur in Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville but, strangely, not in Henry Thoreau, has commented on this as follows:15 [T]he flaneur, understood by Benjamin and others as an exclusively and quintessentially Continental phenomenon, was in fact a significant presence in the culture of the United States in the three decades before the Civil War.

15. My own take on this, obviously, would be that Thoreau should be considered as having been in the flâneur tradition, except that just as the flâneur of the boulevards considered himself to be an on-asphalt transplant of the botanist of the rural walks, by a doubled reversal Thoreau would have considered himself to be an on-soil transplant of the urban “botanist on asphalt” (this situation was so obvious, however, that he didn’t ever feel the need to come right out and say so). 56 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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When Evert Augustus Duyckinck asked Hawthorne whom he might include in a new series of American books

being published by Wiley & Putnam, Hawthorne suggested Henry Thoreau but with the same breath damned him to neglect by commenting that “The only way, however, in which he could ever approach the popular mind, would be by writing a book of simple observations of nature, somewhat in the vein of [the Reverend Gilbert White’s THE NATURAL HISTORY AND ANTIQUITIES OF SELBORNE].”16 As for Thoreau, there is one chance in a thousand that he might write a most excellent and readable book; but I should be sorry to take the responsibility, either towards you or him, of stirring him up to write anything.... He is the most unmalleable fellow alive — the most tedious, tiresome, and intolerable — the narrowest and most notional — and yet, true as all this is, he has great qualities of intellect and character. The only way, however, in which he could ever approach the popular mind, would be by writing a book of simple observation of nature, somewhat in the vein of White’s History of Selborne.

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Summer: Horace Mann, Sr. issued his counter-counter-counter-counterpublication titled ANSWER TO THE “REJOINDER” OF TWENTY-NINE SCHOOLMASTERS, PART OF THE “THIRTY-ONE” WHO PUBLISHED “REMARKS” ON THE SEVENTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE MASSACHUSETTS BOARD OF EDUCATION, in 124 pages. HORACE’S 124 PAGES

From the Messerli biography of Mr. Mann, we learn that:

[D]espite claims that [Horace] Mann laid the basis for a philosophy of public education, ... there is a relative dearth of philosophical content in his writings.... Philosophical discussions only impeded results and besides, they carried the troublesome implication that he just might be wrong. Those who opposed him did so because they lacked moral rectitude and honest motives.... Desperately, Mann struggled for the opportunity to demonstrate his sincerity to himself so that he might know that he was right and his opponents therefore wrong. Developing a bigotry of purpose, he worked toward his self-conceived goal ... one cannot escape the monomania at work in Mann, and its corollary, the total absence of self-doubt among the reformers. In fact, among them one finds the same hypercertainty, narrowness of purpose, and adamancy which Mann utterly detested in his opponents.... He knew what society needed and how to accomplish it.... Thoughts of his own fallibility were anathema to him.... In Mann, there was what Herman Melville described in Ahab, “an infirmity of the firmest fortitude.”

The Manns were spending their summer in Concord, boarding where they could overlook the river and watch the sunsets for $10.00 the week. When Horace Mann, Sr. found out that the Reverends Theodore Parker and Waldo Emerson were scheduled to speak at the inauguration of one of his normal schools, he barfed. It was all right to have such personages as friends and acquaintances, but not as spokespersons for his public school system: it WILL NOT DO.... [O]ne of these men may do, but not both — better neither.” Mann, who was never anything other than confrontational and self-righteous, was by his own lights seeking to avoid controversy and get on with the grand job of storming Heaven through the shoving of rote memorization at little children. Instead of these controversial speakers, he obtained the Reverend Heman Humphrey, an orthodox type.

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December 13: At the age of 27 Herman Melville obtained his first book contract, with an advance of £100 against half the profits, for the publication of 1,000 copies of his story of his adventure in French Polynesia, in two

volumes, in England because publication in the US had been refused by Harper and Brothers due to

uncertainty about this young adventurer’s truthfulness. The text of this initial printing would prove to be quite 1 corrupt, as the British publisher, John Murray, had allowed one Henry Milton to bill for 168 /2 hours of work editing the author’s manuscript claims for general credibility as well as for general intelligibility. The title was NARRATIVE OF A FOUR MONTHS’ RESIDENCE AMONG THE NATIVES OF A VALLEY OF THE MARQUESAS “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 59 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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ISLANDS; OR, A PEEP AT POLYNESIAN LIFE.17 Frederick Douglass, also age 27, published the first printing of

the 1st edition of NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SLAVE. WRITTEN BY

17. The question of truthfulness wasn’t anything so mundane as the real questions which might occur to us now, of exactly how long the young white man had actually spent in that valley (it seems it couldn’t possibly have been more than a few weeks, couldn’t possibly have extended to as much as one month let alone four) or whether the people Melville was staying with were actually in some regard cannibals or not. No, what it was really about, if you want to know, was the truthfulness of portraying “white civilized man as the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth.” How could this be, said white people with great sincerity? For white people can ascertain from introspection that they only do the things they do out of love, and out of this need that exists, that we create a better and more decent world. (As Thoreau was to point out in WALDEN, only Alek Therien, among the white men of his experience, failed to perceive the reality of this need — and as a French Canadian and as a day laborer, Therien would have been considered to be a white man in Concord only by way of extending him a courtesy.) Thus, when this book was later reissued in an American edition as TYPEE: A PEEP AT POLYNESIAN LIFE, the key idea of Melville’s writing, of the white colonizer as “the most ferocious animal on the face of the earth,” had been with Melville’s prior acquiescence quite eliminated. May we legitimately hypothecate a comparison of this omission to the counterfactual idea of omitting the white slavemaster from the American edition of NARRATIVE OF THE LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, AN AMERICAN SLAVE. WRITTEN BY HIMSELF — another first- person narrative published in this same year? 60 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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HIMSELF.

[P]erhaps Douglass’s telling of his odyssey is closest cousin to Thoreau’s account of his altogether safe escape to Walden Pond. That quietly contained, subversive tale has reverberated ever since its telling with a message of radical repudiation of corrupt society. Thoreau heard a Wendell Phillips lecture describing Douglass’s exodus –and reporting that a written account was on its way– in the spring of 1845 as he was planning his sojourn outside Concord. Robert D. Richardson, Jr., who wrote Thoreau’s intellectual biography, has said that it is not “an accident that the earliest stages of Thoreau’s move to Walden coincide with ... the publication of Douglass’s narrative of how he gained his freedom. WALDEN is about self-emancipation.”

In September of this year Frederick Douglass had departed for a 3-month lecture tour of Great Britain and Ireland. Douglass’s traveling companion in steerage aboard the Cunard steamship Cambria to Ireland had been Friend James N. Buffum, a successful carpenter of Lynn MA. They had been required to travel in the steerage compartment in the vessel’s stern because of Captain Judkins’s and the other passengers’ prejudice against Douglass’s skin color.18 Buffum had to be along, and handle the money, because of the anti-slavery society’s prejudice against Douglass’s skin color. When Douglass had attempted to speak on the abolition of chattel slavery, other passengers on the liner had threatened to throw him overboard. Douglass’s NARRATIVE was published in an initial American edition of 5,000 copies in May, it had sold out in 4 months. In this work, Douglass inverted the animal imagery then current, and suggested to his white audience (an audience that had been constantly told in other publications since the 1830s that the Negro was a mere “beast of burden,” a form intermediate between the brute and the human but more similar to the former than to the latter) that if they helped the slavery cause, they would make themselves like the lion and the crocodile, that is, become

18. Captain Judkins would, however, permit Douglass to come up from steerage onto deck for air during the voyage — and for this affront to his genteel passengers, he would be referred to afterward in the New-York Herald as “the Nigger Captain”: Captain Judkins of the Cambria, an able and prompt commander, is the man who insisted upon Douglass being admitted to equal rights upon his deck with the insolent slave-holders, and assumed a tone toward their assumptions, which, if the Northern States had had the firmness, good sense, and honor to use, would have had the same effect, and put our country in a very different position from that she occupies at present. He mentioned with pride that he understood the New York Herald called him “the Nigger Captain,” and seemed as willing to accept the distinction as Colonel McKenney is to wear as his last title that of “the Indian’s friend.” — AT HOME AND ABROAD “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 61 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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themselves savage beasts of prey. While in Liverpool, Douglass make a point of visiting “the home of my paternal ancestors.”19 Meanwhile, “Douglass”’s “owner,” the Thomas Auld referenced previously, “sold” his “rights” in this self-“stolen” item of “property,” to his brother Hugh Auld, Jr., for $100.00 –My gosh, it takes a lot of scare quotes to say something like this!

This is what Frederick Douglass looked like during his late 20s when he knew Thoreau, according to an oil- on-canvas likeness now in our National Portrait Gallery, which had been completed by an unidentified artist sometime between 1841 and 1845 (presumably closer to 1845 than to 1841):

On the following page is Douglass’s speaking schedule for the year 1845:

19. Talk about confrontation politics! Talk about street theatre! –I wish I could have witnessed this! Why has no Hollywood movie been based on this drama? We may cast our eyes forward to the time, sometime after 1876, when Frederick Douglass’s former owner Thomas Auld lay dying, and Douglass went to visit him:

We shook hands cordially and in the act of doing so, he, having been long stricken with palsy, shed tears as men thus afflicted will do when excited by any deep emotion.

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Frederick Douglass’s US speaking schedule for 1845:

January 24-26 Marlboro Chapel, Boston and the Hall of the House of Representatives for annual mtg. of Mass. Anti-Slavery Society February 14-16 Cornish, New Hampshire February 17-18 Claremont, New Hampshire March 8-9 New Bedford, Massachusetts March 11 Worcester, Massachusetts March 18 Brinley Hall in Worcester for the quarterly meeting of the Worcester County South Division Anti-Slavery Society April 19-20 Dodge’s Hall in Manchester, Massachusetts for the annual meeting of the Essex County Anti-Slavery Society April 24 Dedham, Massachusetts for the annual meeting of the Norfolk County Anti-Slavery Society May 6 New-York’s Broadway Tabernacle and Minerva Rooms, for annual mtg. of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and Zion Chapel for the New-York Vigilance Society May 25 New Bedford, Massachusetts May 27-29 Boston, Massachusetts’s Marlboro Chapel for the annual New England Anti-Slavery Convention May 31-June 4 (?) ConcordCONCORD , New Hampshire for the annual meeting of the New Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society June 8 Springfield MA June 9 Albany, New York’s City Hall June 12 Albany, New York’s City Hall June 14 Georgetown, Massachusetts for the annual meeting of the Essex County Anti-Slavery Society June 25-26 Quarterly meeting of the Worcester County South Division Anti-Slavery Society, in Uxbridge, Massachusetts July 1 Worcester, Massachusetts July 2 Holden, Massachusetts July 3 Westminster, Massachusetts July 4-5 Athol, Massachusetts July 6 Hubbardstown, Massachusetts July 7 Princeton, Massachusetts July 8 Barre, Massachusetts July 10 West Brookfield, Massachusetts July 11 South Wilbraham, Massachusetts July 12 Albany, New York July 13 Troy, New York July 14 The Baptist Meetinghouse of West Winfield, New York July 15 Utica, New York July 16 Rome, New York July 17 Syracuse, New York July 18 Skaneateles, New Hampshire July 19-20 Waterloo, New York July 21-22 Palmyra, New York July 23-24 Rochester, New York August 7 Weymouth MA August 8 Hingham MA August 9 Kingston, Massachusetts August 10 Duxbury, Massachusetts August 13 Town Hall of New Bedford, Massachusetts August 15 Lyceum Hall of Lynn, Massachusetts

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1846

Ida Pfeiffer’s travel journal was published in Austria. She used the returns from VISIT TO THE HOLY LAND, EGYPT, AND ITALY to finance a new adventure into Iceland. Unlike other travelers to Iceland of the time, she was alone and on a tight budget. She relied upon the local pony carts and for some six months lived as the Icelanders did. She sold the plant and rock collections she had made to museums. Her observations would become JOURNEY TO ICELAND, AND TRAVELS IN SWEDEN AND NORWAY. Then, still in the same year, she embarked on a Danish ship with the destination being Rio de Janeiro on the coast of South America. She hired a guide and went into the rain forest to visit the Puri. Then she continued on around the world by way of Cape Horn, her entire journey consuming three years and completing in Vienna only in November 1848. Along the way she became just outraged at the open sensuality of Tahitian females.20

She rode up the river from Portuguese Macau aboard a cargo junk and at Canton she crossed paths with Professor Louis Agassiz. CHINA

For several months she traveled in India with a leather pouch for water, a small pan for cooking, some salt,

20. In America during this year, Herman Melville’s narrative of his sailor sojourn on an island in Polynesia was being republished (it had already appeared in England under the title NARRATIVE OF A FOUR MONTHS’ RESIDENCE AMONG THE NATIVES OF A VALLEY OF THE MARQUESAS ISLANDS; OR, A PEEP AT POLYNESIAN LIFE) by Wiley and Putnam, as TYPEE: A PEEP AT POLYNESIAN LIFE. Melville was “dedicating” this book to his father-in-law Judge Shaw, who had been advancing the cause of racial fairness from the bench. Henry Thoreau read this new book (it may be the only thing by Melville that he ever read) and stuck a reminder to himself into a journal notebook he was keeping that fall, that he would use in his writings about his Maine adventures and then put into his 1st draft of WALDEN, a reminder to cite this work by Melville as proof that elderly people in primitive societies are healthier than their civilized counterparts. Longfellow was praising Melville’s “glowing description of Life in the Marquesas,” and Amos Bronson Alcott was referring to the volume as “charming.” Nathaniel Hawthorne, who by the influence of his friends Horatio Bridge and Franklin Pierce in the Democratic party, had secured a morning job, “Surveyor of Port,” at the Salem Custom House, was provided with a review copy by Evert Duyckinck and commented in the Salem Advertiser that he knew of “no work that gives a freer and more effective picture of barbarian life.” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 65 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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and bread and rice. INDIA

Continuing on to Baghdad she joined a camel caravan for the 300-mile trek through the desert to Mosul, and then went into Persia, to Tabriz, where she amazed the British consul. Joining a caravan going toward Russia, she was of course briefly detained as a spy and jotted in her journal, “Oh you good Arabs, Turks, Persians, Hindoos! How safely did I pass through your heathen and infidel countries; and here, in Christian Russia, how much have I had to suffer in this short space.”

WALDEN: When Madam Pfeiffer, in her adventurous travels round the PEOPLE OF world, from east to west, had got so near home as Asiatic Russia, WALDEN she says that she felt the necessity of wearing other than a travelling dress, when she went to meet the authorities, for she “was now in a civilized country, where ... people are judged of by their clothes.” Even in our democratic New England towns the accidental possession of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal respect. But they who yield such respect, numerous as they are, are so far heathen, and need to have a missionary sent to them.

Ida Pfeiffer continued through Turkey, Greece, and Italy to her home in Vienna and reunion with her two sons.

March 20, Friday: Herman Melville’s TYPEE was published in New-York.

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Fall: Wiley and Putnam having put out an American edition of Herman Melville’s NARRATIVE OF A FOUR MONTHS’ RESIDENCE AMONG THE NATIVES OF A VALLEY OF THE MARQUESAS ISLANDS; OR, A PEEP AT POLYNESIAN LIFE, using the title TYPEE: A PEEP AT POLYNESIAN LIFE, this fall out at the pond Henry Thoreau

was reading in this new book (it may be the only thing by Melville that he ever read) and stuck a reminder to himself into the journal notebook he was keeping, a reminder that he would use in his writings about his Maine adventures and then put into his 1st draft of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, to cite this work by Melville as proof that elderly people in primitive societies are healthier than their civilized counterparts:

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December 2: A deed of sale was witnessed by Henry David Thoreau, for purchase for $1,239.56 of 41 acres at Walden Pond by Waldo Emerson.

By this point in time Thoreau had finished his draft account of his visit to Maine, the one into which his readings in Herman Melville’s TYPEE had been interpolated. Eventually this reading would show up in the

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published WALDEN, in masked form as follows:

WALDEN: The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin- deep and unalterable.

After December 2: When I am stimulated by reading the biographies of literary men to adopt some method of educating myself and directing my studies –I can only resolve to keep unimpaired the freedom & wakefulness of my genius. I will not seek to accomplish much in breadth and bulk and loose my self in industry but keep my celestial relations fresh. 70 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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No method or discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert– What is a course of History –no matter how well selected –or the most admirable routine of life –and fairest relation to society –when one is reminded that he may be a Seer that to keep his eye constantly on the true and real is a discipline that will absorb every other. How can he appear or be seen to be well employed to the mass of men whose profession it is to climb resolutely the heights of life –and never lose a step he has taken Let the youth seize upon the finest and most memorable experience in his life –that which most reconciled him to his unknown destiny –and seek to discover in it his future path. Let him be sure that that way is his only true and worthy career. Every mortal sent into this world has a star in the heavens appointed to guide him– Its ray he cannot mistake– It has sent its beam to him either through clouds and mists faintly or through a serene heaven– He knows better than to seek advice of any. This world is no place for the exercise of what is called common sense. This world would be denied. Of how much improvement a man is susceptible –and what are the methods? When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary motion or say rather like a comet –for the beholder knows not if with that velocity and that direction it will ever revisit this system –its steam-cloud like a banner streaming behind like such a fleecy cloud as I have seen in a summer’s day –high in the heavens unfolding its wreathed masses to the light –as if this travelling and aspiring man would ere long take the sunset sky for his train in livery when he travelled – When I have heard the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth –with his feet and breathing fire and smoke– It seems to me that the earth has got a race now that deserves to inhabit it. If all were as it seems, and men made the elements their servants for noble ends. If the cloud that hangs over the engine were the perspiration of heroes or as innocent and beneficent an omen as that which hovers over the parched fields of the farmer. If the elements did not have to lament their time wasted in accompanying men on their errands. If this enterprise were as noble as it seems. The stabler was up early this winter morning by the light of the stars to fodder and harness his steed –fire was awakened too to get him off– If the enterprise were as innocent as it is early– For all the day he flies over the country stopping only that his master may rest– If the enterprise were as disinterested as it is unwearied.– And I am awakened by its tramp and defiant snort at midnight while in some far glen it fronts the elements encased in ice and snow and will only reach its stall to start once more If the enterprise were as important as it is protracted. No doubt there is to follow a moral advantage proportionate to this physical one Astronomy is that department of physics which answers to Prophesy the Seer’s or Poets calling It is a mild a patient deliberate and contemplative science. To see more with the physical eye than man has yet seen to see farther, and off the planet –into the system. Shall a man stay on this globe without learning something –without adding to his knowledge –merely sustaining his body and with morbid anxiety saving his soul. This world is not a place for him who does not discover its laws. Dull Despairing and brutish generations have left the race where they found it or in deeper obscurity and night –impatient and restless ones have wasted their lives in seeking after the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life– These are indeed within the reach of science –but only of a universal and wise science to which an enlightened generation may one day attain. The wise will bring to the task patience humility (serenity) –joy – resolute labor and undying faith.I had come over the hills on foot and alone in serene summer days travelling early in the morning and resting at noon in the shade by the side of some stream and resuming my journey in the cool of the evening– With a knapsack on my back which held a few books and a change of clothing, and a stout staff in my hand. I had looked down from Hoosack mountain where the road crosses it upon the village of North Adams in the valley 3 miles away under my feet –showing how uneven the earth sometimes is and making us wonder that it should ever be level and convenient for man, or any other creatures than birds. As the mountain which now rose before me in the Southwest so blue and cloudy was my goal I did not stop long in this village but buying a little rice and sugar which I put into my knapsack and a pint tin dipper I began to ascend the mt whose summit was 7 or 8 miles distant by the path. My rout lay up a long and spacious valley sloping up to the very clouds, between the principle ridge and a lower elevation called the Bellows. There were a few farms scattered along at different elevations each commanding a noble prospect of the mountains to the north, and a stream ran down the middle of the valley, on which near the head there was a mill It seemed a very fit rout for the pilgrim to enter upon who is climbing to the gates of heaven– now I crossed a hay field, and now over the brook upon a slight bridge still gradually ascending all the while with a sort of awe and filled with indefinable expectations as to what kind of inhabitants and what kind of nature I should come to at last– And now it seemed some advantage that the earth was uneven, for you could not imagine a more noble position for a farm and farm house than this vale afforded farther or nearer from its head, from all the seclusion of the deepest glen overlooking the country from a great elevation –between these two mountain walls. It reminded me of the homesteads on Staten Island, on the coast of New Jersey– This island which is about 18 miles in length, and rises gradually to the height of 3 or 400 feet in the centre, commands fine views in every direction, whether on the side of the continent or the ocean –and southward it looks over the outer bay of New York to Sandy Hook and the Highlands of Neversink, and over long island quite to the open sea toward the shore of

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europe. HUGUENOTS There are sloping valleys penetrating the island in various directions gradually narrowing and rising to the central table land and at the head of these the Hugenots the first settlers placed their houses quite in the land in healthy and sheltered places from which they looked out serenely through a widening vista over a distant salt prairie and then over miles of the Atlantic –to some faint vessel in the horizon almost a days sail on her voyage to Europe whence they had come. From these quiet nooks they looked out with equal security on calm and storm on fleets which were spell bound and loitering on the coast for want of wind and on tempest & shipwreck. I have been walking in the interior seven or eight miles from the shore, in the midst of rural scenery where there was as little to remind me of the ocean as amid these N H hills when suddenly through a gap in the hills –a cleft or “Clove road”, as the Dutch settlers called it I caught sight of a ship under full sail over a corn field 20 or thirty miles at sea. The effect was similar to seeing the objects in a magic lantern, passed back and forth by day-light since I had no means of measuring distance.

1847

Friedrich Gerstäcker’s DIE DEUTSCHEN AUSWANDERER, MISSISSIPPI-BILDER, and REISEN UM DIE WELT.

He also issued a translation of Herman Melville, entitled OMOO ODER ABENTEUER IM STILLEN OCEAN.

During this year Richard Henry Dana, Jr. and Herman Melville met. Leon Howard has suggested that during the couple of years in which these two authors knew one another, Dana may have been prompting Melville to attempt to do for whalers what Dana had done for merchant sailors.21

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Morison, Samuel Eliot. THE MARITIME HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS: 1783-1860. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921 “A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”

“Direct Connections Between Massachusetts Maritime Tradition and Massachusetts Literary Tradition” Morison cites the literary and social contributions of such Massachusetts men as Waldo Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Horace Mann, Sr., Samuel Gridley Howe & Thomas Handasyd Perkins, Longfellow, Prescott, Charles Sumner, James Russell Lowell, Thoreau, and the Brook Farm experience. However, “there is little connection, to be sure, between the maritime history of Massachusetts and these highlights of reform, revolt, and letters” (227). “In general ... the New England poet’s attitude toward the sea is that of a summer boarder who is afraid to get his feet wet” (footnote on page 227). Of the Massachusetts literati of the mid- 19th Century, only Richard Henry Dana, Jr. and Herman Melville were in touch with the sea, and “What seafaring people, in the nineteenth century, has left prose monuments to compare with these?” (227) {”You there, Joseph Conrad, sit down!” Those New Englanders and their centrism!}

(James E. Stout, March 14, 1986)

May 4: Annie Shepard Keyes was born, a daughter of John Shepard Keyes and Martha Prescott Keyes (she would get married with Dr. Edward Waldo Emerson). ... our home was blessed with a daughter who brought back life and cheer to our hearts. J.S. KEYES AUTOBIOGRAPHY

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At the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts, Herman Melville viewed Thomas Cole’s “The Course of Empire” (this would influence his next book, MARDI; AND A VOYAGE THITHER).

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August: Herman Melville began to write reviews for the Literary World under Evert Augustus Duyckinck, a Wiley and Putnam editor.

The most scholarly circle was that of the brothers Duyckinck, old New Yorkers, Episcopalians, like the veteran Gulian C. Verplanck, who also stood for the dying Dutch element of the town. The sons of a publisher of earlier days, with a certain hereditary interest in books, Evert and George Duyckinck edited The Literary World, a weekly journal of literature and art. Somewhat later, in the middle fifties, they were to compile the CYCLOPÆDIA OF AMERICAN L ITERATURE, a rival of Rufus Griswold’s anthologies, which had recently proclaimed that America had a literature of its own. Somewhat staid, with a clerical air and with little of the gusto of some at least of the Boston and Cambridge bookmen, they were rather antiquarians than critics in the proper sense, for all their hospitality to the younger men. Their cyclopædia especially dwelt on the early obscure American authors whom they rescued from oblivion for a time, while Evert Duyckinck’s well-known library all but overflowed a house that, for the rest, was a rendezvous of men of letters. There, authors, artists, editors and actors met and discussed the events of the day, the revolutions of ’48, the gold rush on the Western coast, the slavery question, Manifest Destiny, Frémont. The talk in the parlour of the Duyckinck house was reflected in Herman Melville’s MARDI, which ... appeared in 1849; for Melville, a family friend of the Duyckincks, who ... settled in New York in 1847, ... spent many evenings in their circle.

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August 1: Herman Melville got married with Elizabeth Shaw, daughter of Lemuel Shaw, the Chief Justice of Massachusetts. That night, coincidentally of course, there would be a brilliant display of northern lights over the city of Boston.22 SKY EVENT

AURORA BOREALIS

1848

June: Herman Melville read the Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s 1812 translation of Dante Alighieri’s DIVINE COMEDY.23

22. If the earth moved for these newlyweds, that of course would need to be put down also as coincidence. Nuptials being transacted, the couple would settle in New-York, where the groom was to write reviews for the Literary World under Evert Augustus Duyckinck. During this year, publication of OMOO: A NARRATIVE OF ADVENTURES IN THE SOUTH SEAS, a narrative found by its audience to be titillatingly suggestive of its creator’s sexual adventurousness. There seems to be no evidence that Henry Thoreau ever glanced at this or any of Melville’s later works, after his initial perusal of TYPEE in the fall of 1846 (Thoreau seems to have stepped past Melville into more original sources such as William Ellis’s POLYNESIAN RESEARCHES). 80 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1849

Birth of Sarah Alice Nott.

One of the names being used for the dreaded yellow fever was the black vomit, because it was causing its victims to vomit black blood. As an example of this usage, in this year Herman Melville was writing, in his REDBURN, HIS FIRST VOYAGE, BEING THE SAILOR-BOY CONFESSIONS AND REMINISCENCES OF THE SON-OF-

23. There have been over the years a very great many attempts to accomplish this: 1782 Charles Rogers’s INFERNO only (blank verse) 1785-1802 Reverend Henry Boyd’s DIVINE COMEDY (rhymed six-line stanzas) 1805-1806 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s INFERNO only (blank verse) 1812 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s DIVINE COMEDY (blank verse) 1807 N. Howard’s INFERNO only 1833-1840 I.C. Wright’s DIVINE COMEDY 1836 Odoardo Volpi’s ten cantos of INFERNO in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1842 C. Hindley’s INFERNO only (in prose) 1843 Reverend John Dayman’s INFERNO only 1849 Dr. John Aitken Carlyle’s INFERNO only (in prose) 1850 Patrick Bannerman’s DIVINE COMEDY 1851-1854 C.B. Cayley’s DIVINE COMEDY 1852 E. O’Donnell’s DIVINE COMEDY (in prose) 1854 T. Brooksbank’s INFERNO only 1854 Frederick Pollock’s DIVINE COMEDY 1846 James Henry Leigh Hunt’s STORIES FROM THE ITALIAN POETS, portions of DIVINE COMEDY 1859 J.W. Thomas’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1859 Bruce Whyte’s INFERNO only 1862 “Hugh Bent” (nom de plume)’s INFERNO only 1862 W.P. Wilkie’s INFERNO only 1862/1863 Mrs. Ramsay’s DIVINE COMEDY 1865 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 17 cantos of INFERNO 1865 James Ford’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1865 Reverend John Dayman’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1865 William Michael Rossetti’s INFERNO only 1865/1866 Reverend H.F. Cary’s INFERNO only, illustrated by G. Doré 1867 Dr. John Aitken Carlyle’s INFERNO only (in prose) (2d edition) 1867 Thomas William Parsons’s first canticle of INFERNO only 1867 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s DIVINE COMEDY 1867 Reverend Henry F. Cary’s DIVINE COMEDY 1867/1868 D. Johnston’s DIVINE COMEDY 1871 Miss Rossetti’s SHADOW OF DANTE, portions of DIVINE COMEDY 1871 Ernest Ridsdale Ellaby’s ten cantos of INFERNO in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1876 J.W. Parsons’s nine cantos of PURGATORIO 1877 Mrs. Oliphant’s FOREIGN CLASSICS FOR ENGLISH READERS, portions of DIVINE COMEDY 1892 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s INFERNO with illustrations by Gustave Doré 1899 Thomas Okey (PURGATORIO), Dr. John Aitken Carlyle (INFERNO), and Philip H. Wicksteed (PARADISO) DIVINE COMEDY 1980 C.H. Sisson’s DIVINE COMEDY 1994 Robert Pinsky’s THE INFERNO OF DANTE (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 81 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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A-GENTLEMAN, IN THE MERCHANT SERVICE:

REDBURN: No more did we think of the gale and the plague; nor turn our eyes upward to the stains of blood, still visible on the topsail, whence Jackson had fallen; but we fixed our gaze on the orchards and meads, and like thirsty men, drank in all their dew. On the Staten Island side, a white staff displayed a pale yellow flag, denoting the habitation of the quarantine officer; for as if to symbolize the yellow fever itself, and strike a panic and premonition of the black vomit into every beholder, all quarantines all over the world, taint the air with the streamings of their fever-flag. But though the long rows of white-washed hospitals on the hill side were now in plain sight, and though scores of ships were here lying at anchor, yet no boat came off to us; and to our surprise and delight, on we sailed, past a spot which every one had dreaded. How it was that they thus let us pass without boarding us, we never could learn.

William Thompson was arrested in New-York after a career in which he approached the well-to-do, gained their confidence on the basis of his easy manner and meticulous attire, and got them to place money or their watch in his custody. The case would be a useful source for Herman Melville’s novel THE CONFIDENCE-MAN, to be published in 1857. When the New-York Herald dubbed Thompson “the confidence man,” this was in fact the 1st known use of that term.Arrest of the Confidence Man.—For the last few months a man has been MUMPERY traveling about the city, known as the “Confidence Man,” that is, he would go up to a perfect stranger in the street, and being a man of genteel appearance, would easily command an interview. Upon this interview he would say after some little conversation, “have you confidence in me to trust me with your watch until to- morrow;” the stranger at this novel request, supposing him to be some old acquaintance not at that moment recollected, allows him to take the watch, thus placing “confidence” in the honesty of the stranger, who walks off laughing and the other supposing it to be a joke allows him so to do. In this way many have been duped, and the last that we recollect was a Mr. Thomas McDonald, of No. 276 Madison street, who, on the 12th of May last, was met by this “Confidence Man” in William Street, who, in the manner as above described, took from him a gold lever watch valued at $110; and yesterday, singularly enough, Mr. McDonald was passing along Liberty street, when who should he meet but the “Confidence Man” who had stolen his watch. Officer Swayse, of the Third Ward, being near at hand, took the accused into custody on the charge made by Mr. McDonald. The accused at first refused to go with the officer; but after finding the officer determined to take him, he walked along for a short distance, when he showed desperate fight, and it was not until the officer had tied his hands together that he was able to convey him to the police office. On the prisoner being taken before Justice McGrath, he was recognized as an old offender by the name of Wm. Thompson, and is said to be a graduate of the college at Sing Sing. The magistrate committed him to prison for a further hearing. It will be well for all those persons who have been defrauded by the “Confidence Man” to call at the police court Tombs and take a view of him.

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At about this point Samuel Stillman Osgood painted Melville’s portrait. This is not it, but a portrait by Joseph Oriel Eaton which now hangs in the Houghton Library of Harvard University.24

24. Osgood had also painted a portrait of Edgar Allan Poe. Was this portrait painter related to the Osgood who married Ellen Devereux Sewall, or to the female poet Frances Sargent Osgood to whom Poe sent a handmade Valentine’s Day card? “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 83 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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January: Extracts from Thoreau’s “Ktaadn” were appearing in The Student (a monthly reader for school and home instruction printed by Jacob S. Denman at New-York with Norman Allison Calkins and R.A. Phippin as editors, from May 1846 to April 1854, for fifty cents a year).

“The Significance of the Alphabet. By Charles Kraitsir, M.D.” appeared on pages 160-182 of the North American Review (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, No. 112 Washington Street). SIGNIFICANCE OF ALPHABET

The publisher John Murray rejected Herman Melville’s MARDI: AND A VOYAGE THITHER at proof stage — but it was accepted by the publisher Richard Bentley in London to appear in three volumes and the author was paid the sum of 200 guineas. MARDI: AND A VOYAGE THITHER

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Spring: Publication of Herman Melville’s MARDI: AND A VOYAGE THITHER, a political and philosophical allegory. In 1833 Dr. James Cowles Prichard had pioneered the term “monomania, meaning madness affecting one train of thought … adopted in late times instead of melancholia.”

Melville’s father-in-law Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw had utilized this concept in a legal opinion in 1844 and Melville deployed it 1st here (and then in MOBY-DICK; OR, THE WHALE would deploy it again as the defining characteristic of the psychology of the maimed Captain Ahab).

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[Perhaps this is the point at which to mention that it is Henry Thoreau who appears in Brook Thomas’s 1987 monograph CROSS-EXAMINATION OF LAW AND LITERATURE: COOPER, HAWTHORNE, STOWE, AND MELVILLE (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, page 160) as a type case for the “abolitionists who would suspend established rule of law in order to pursue their own transcendental dreams and take revenge on what they saw to be the seat of sin.”25 According to Thomas, when Herman Melville caused the Pequod not to return to its home port, at the end of MOBY-DICK, but instead to suffer disaster at sea, this “might be Melville’s warning that the abolitionists’ voyage into unexplored continents,” abolitionism such as that of Thoreau of Concord, Massachusetts and such as that of Nathaniel P. Rogers, editor of the Herald of Freedom of Concord, New Hampshire, “does not herald freedom but disaster.” Thomas concludes that “If natural law is not benevolent, appeals to it can lead to violence and destruction” (Thomas’s proof is that Thoreau argued in defense of Rogers). –What Thomas seems to have neglected ever to notice is that when Thoreau defended Rogers he was defending this editor against William Lloyd Garrison, the dude who would have been the actual type case for the abolitionists of that period who were eminently guilty of attempting to “suspend established rule of law in order to pursue their own transcendental dreams and take revenge on what they saw to be the seat of sin.” If any abolitionist was the Captain Ahab of the Pequod, therefore, it would have been Garrison rather than Thoreau or Rogers. —Thomas simply isn’t close enough to that 19th-Century argument to keep the players straight or understand what sides there were and who was on what side.26]

April 14: Herman Melville’s MARDI AND A VOYAGE THITHER, a political and philosophical allegory, was placed on sale in US bookstores.

25. Typically, Thoreau appears in the pages of Thomas’s writings as part of the recurring phrase “Emerson and Thoreau” (although, on one occasion, Thomas does cast this duo as “Thoreau and Emerson”) — for instance, on Thomas’s page 276 the telling combination of names occurs fully seven-count-’em-seven times. It is as if Thomas were too far off to be able to notice these persons, except as a pair. 26. Although Brook Thomas was my near neighbor, and we came to each other’s houses occasionally, he never ever discussed any of this with me (as a faculty spouse I was transparent, a nonentity). “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 87 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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PISAFall: Herman Melville’s REDBURN, HIS FIRST VOYAGE, BEING THE SAILOR-BOY CONFESSIONS AND REMINISCENCES OF THE SON-OF-A-GENTLEMAN, IN THE MERCHANT SERVICE was published in New-York: Looking shoreward, I beheld lofty ranges of dingy warehouses, which seemed very deficient in the elements of the marvelous; and bore a most unexpected resemblance to the ware-houses along South-street in New REDBURN York. There was nothing strange; nothing extraordinary about them. There they stood; a row of calm and collected ware-houses; very good and substantial edifices, doubtless, and admirably adapted to the ends had in view by the builders; but plain, matter-of-fact ware-houses, REDBURN nevertheless, and that was all that could be said of them. To be sure, I did not expect that every house in Liverpool must be a Leaning Tower of Pisa, or a Strasbourg Cathedral; but yet, these edifices I must confess, were a sad and bitter disappointment to me. Chapter 15, “The Melancholy State of His Wardrobe”: And now that I have been speaking of the captain’s old clothes, I may as well speak of mine.... I can not tell how I really suffered in many ways for my improvidence and heedlessness, in going to sea so ill provided with every thing calculated to make my situation at all comfortable, or even tolerable. In time, my wretched “long togs” began to drop off my back, and I looked like a Sam Patch, shambling round the deck in my rags and the wreck of my gaff-topsail-boots. I often thought what my friends at home would have said, if they could but get one peep at me. But I hugged myself in my miserable shooting-jacket, when I considered that that degradation and shame never could overtake me; yet, I thought it a galling mockery, when I remembered that my sisters had promised to tell all inquiring friends, that Wellingborough had gone “abroad;” just as if I was visiting Europe on a tour with my tutor, as poor simple Mr. Jones had hinted to the captain.

Chapter 24, “He Begins to Hop About in the Rigging Like a Saint Jagos Monkey”: But the first time we reefed top-sails of a dark night, and I found myself hanging over the yard with eleven others, the ship plunging and rearing like a mad horse, till I felt like being jerked off the spar; then, indeed, I thought of a feather-bed at home, and hung on with tooth and nail; with no chance for snoring. But a few repetitions, soon made me used to it; and before long, I tied my reef- point as quickly and expertly as the best of them; never making what they call a “granny-knot,” and slipt down on deck by the bare stays, instead of the shrouds. It is surprising, how soon a boy overcomes his timidity about going aloft. For my own part, my nerves became as steady as the earth’s diameter, and I felt as fearless on the royal yard, as Sam Patch on the cliff of Niagara.

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October 11, Tuesday: Herman Melville was departing for England in an attempt to persuade his British publisher of the authenticity of his narrative WHITE JACKET, OR, THE WORLD IN A MAN-OF-WAR.27

WHITE JACKET: Rio is a small Mediterranean; and what was fabled of the entrance to that sea, in Rio is partly made true; for here, at the mouth, stands one of Hercules’ Pillars, the Sugar-Loaf Mountain, one thousand feet high, inclining over a little, like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. At its base crouch, like mastiffs, the batteries of Jose and Theodosia; while opposite, you are menaced by a rock-founded fort. The channel between –the sole inlet to the bay– seems but a biscuit’s toss over; you see naught of the land-locked sea within till fairly in the strait. But, then, what a sight is beheld! Diversified as the harbor of Constantinople, but a thousand-fold grander. When the Neversink swept in, word was passed, “Aloft, top-men! and furl the t’-gallant-sails and royals!”

On the pier while embarking in New-York, he met philologist George Adler, who was sailing for Europe for a year in an attempt to recover from a bout of insanity (they would become friends).

Aboard the vessel Southampton with Melville would be an English gent who was taking back moose antlers from the woods of Maine, “trophies of his prowess.”28

27. You may consult this in JOURNAL OF A VISIT TO LONDON AND THE CONTINENT, 1849-1850, edited by Eleanor Melville Metcalf in 1949. 28. Here is a contemporary photograph in which two men are mourning the recent death of a moose (one of the two was willing to pay $3,450 to the other of the two, in a jet boat at Chilko Lake BC, to lead him to this moose so he could off it):

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October 27, Saturday, night: Aboard the packetship Southampton, Herman Melville listened to a conversation between a Frenchman and a Swede upon which he would draw in 1870 while writing CLAREL: A POEM AND PILGRIMAGE IN THE HOLY LAND. The conversation was about the repudiation of Alphonse de Lamartine as a leader by the French public after the Bloody June Days of 1848. Melville would identify with the repudiated French leader and come to consider that revolutionary activity on behalf of the common man was futile.

November 3, Saturday: Ebenezer and Abijah Learned, brothers with prior grand larceny convictions living in a mansion overlooking the sea, were arrested and charged with the theft from the safe in Provincetown. Only $200.00 of the $20,000.00 was recovered from their possession (more research would be necessary, to verify that these brothers were convicted as charged and to discover what sort of prison terms they served).

In England, Herman Melville paid half a crown for permission to stand on an adjacent roof, in order to witness the hanging of a married couple, Maria and George Manning, who had conspired to murder a friend. How titillating this must have been for these spectators! Then he had breakfast and went to the zoo.

(Charles Dickens also attended this interesting hanging — though not in the company of Melville.)

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1850

H. von Helmholtz measured the speed of nervous impulses in frogs.

E. Du Bois-Reymond invented a galvanometer that could measure the electric impulses in nerves.

The mechanization of agriculture began. Mechanical reapers, and later the internal combustion engine (and consequently the tractor) altered the face of the world — and the growth and increasing urbanization of the world population. Between 1860 and 1920, about 1,000,000,000 acres of new land were brought under cultivation, with another 1,000,000,000 acres coming into production during the following six decades. Improvements in shipping, refrigeration, and processing further industrialized this process. Today’s American farmer receives 4% of the price of chicken in the store and 12% of the price of a can of corn.

During this decade Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution, exploiting the popularity of the writings of Humboldt in an utterly typical and enviably wrongheaded manner, would be espousing a novel and dangerous notion: in this best of all possible worlds, rain follows the plow. All we need to do, therefore, in this best of all possible worlds, to transform the arid high grasslands of the center of the North American continent into an edenic paradise, is determinedly to turn that arid sod and till that arid soil. As in baseball’s field of dreams, if you build it they will come! “They,” in this case, would turn out to be the vast black clouds of dust and despair of the 1930s: the Dustbowl. Ecology will not be mocked. By this point fully half of the native-born Vermonters had abandoned its rocky soil for points west. Sometimes entire towns moved as groups. Herman Melville would comment after a tour during the 1850s, that “Some of these mountain townships … look like countries depopulated by plague and war. Every mile or two a house is passed untenanted.” Horace Greeley would embrace this wish-fulfilment fantasy: “Go West, Young Man!” The rolling plains of Illinois would turn out to possess singular advantages not only in terms of a more fertile soil but also in terms of a scale more appropriate to the emergence of labor-saving farm machinery. The dry plateaus of Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, and the Texas panhandle would prove to be another, no less rocky, disappointment. And when they did turn the land into an ecological disaster, where would be Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian to say that “he was sure sorry”; where would be the federal government to make up for its poor imperial advice by the rendering of assistance to the distressed?

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Spencer Fullerton Baird became junior assistant secretary at the Smithsonian Institution. The next fifteen years would be made difficult not only for him but for the others there, because of the character of the first secretary of that institution, Joseph Henry. It was perfectly legitimate, Henry felt, since he was the boss and since the reputation of that establishment was upon his shoulders, that he should be able at any time to riffle through the desks, opening and reading any and all correspondence. Woe would be the lot of any person there who had a locked desk, if the first secretary found that the key he had been given was not a working key! When Baird arrived at the new Smithsonian Castle, there were still slave pens behind the structure. On the bright side, Congress had just agreed to the Compromise of 1850 — so these pens were not as jam packed full of human chattel as they had been in previous years.

Shortly before meeting Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville moved to Pittsfield, Massachusetts and wrote HAWTHORNE AND HIS MOSSES. He was thrilled at this author’s misanthropy and depression: “Hawthorne’s vision was all for the evil and sin of the world; a side of life as to which Emerson’s eyes were thickly bandaged.”29 Melville praised Hawthorne by the use of an interestingly Thoreauvian “interior travel” metaphor: “[I]f you travel away inland into his deep and noble nature, you will hear the far roar of his Niagara.”

NIAGARA FALLS

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In about this year, Albert Sands Southworth (1811-1894) and Josiah Johnson Hawes (1808-1901) photographed Herman Melville’s father-in-law. Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw:

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February: Herman Melville returned from England.

The Reverend Daniel Foster left Danvers MA to take over a church in Chester MA and there married Deborah “Dora” T. Swift (aunt of Lindsey Swift, the Brook Farm historian).

The young man Hinton Rowan Helper’s indenture being completed, he moved to New-York to seek his fortune. Unfortunately, his idea of seeking a fortune would never seem to involve any great deal of hard work, and he would depend more upon being personally impressive — which indeed he was.

HINTON ROWAN HELPER

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Spring: Herman Melville read THE SCARLET LETTER and wrote an essay praising Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1846 ruminations, which had been published as MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE. Hawthorne needed all the help he could get, since the Salem Register, for instance, had commented that his initial chapter –by far the only readable thing in the book, for any cheerful person– had quite managed to obliterate “whatever sympathy was felt for Hawthorne’s removal from office.” Would Hawthorne self-destruct, as Melville later self-destructed, by getting way out ahead of his audience? Henry Thoreau surveyed a farm for Jesse Hosmer, near Barrett’s Mill Road and the present Route 2 at the foot of Annursnack Hill, that had early belonged to the Cuming family. It contained over 100 acres, and Thoreau’s plot shows the road leading to G.M. Barrett’s. “First piece surveyed with my compass though with a tape.”

View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm

(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be recovered.)

View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_surveys/61.htm

Thoreau circulated a handbill offering his services as surveyor.

Harriet Beecher Stowe moved with her theologian husband to Bowdoin College in Brunswick ME, where they would live at the crest of the hill at 63 Federal Street and where their seventh and last child would be born and where she would write her UNCLE TOM’S CABIN — starting of course with the scene in which she kills off her main character.

Summer: Herman Melville borrowed Henry Thoreau’s A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS from the library of Evert Augustus Duyckinck.

Prince Albert talked to Lord John Russell about the Lady Dacre incident (a lusty bedchamber invasion in the palace) when Queen Victoria asked for Lord Palmerston to be sacked as Foreign Secretary: How could the Queen consent to take a man as an adviser and confidential counsellor in all matters of State, religion, society, Court, etc., etc., he who as her Secretary of State and while a guest under her roof at Windsor Castle had committed a brutal attack upon one of her ladies? Had at night by stealth introduced himself into her apartment, barricaded afterwards the

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door and would have consummated his fiendish scheme by violence had not the miraculous efforts of his victim and such assistance attracted by her screams saved her. Lord Russell informed the queen that he would be unable to accomplish this because Lord Palmerston had such great popularity in the House of Commons.30

July: Herman Melville read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s MOSSES FROM AN OLD MANSE. He purchased, for $0.75, David Dudley Field’s and Professor Chester Dewey’s HISTORY OF THE COUNTY OF BERKSHIRE, MASSACHUSETTS; IN TWO PARTS. THE FIRST BEING A GENERAL VIEW OF THE COUNTY; THE SECOND, AN ACCOUNT OF THE SEVERAL TOWNS. BY GENTLEMEN IN THE COUNTY, CLERGYMEN AND LAYMEN, which had been printed by Samuel W. Bush in Pittsfield in 1829 (on page 39 of this volume the bugs that ate their way out of a table made of apple wood may be found, which would later eat their way out of Henry Thoreau’s WALDEN’s concluding chapter, and then out of Melville’s “The Apple-Tree Table: or, Original Spiritual Manifestations”).31 BERKSHIRE, MASSACHUSETTS

WALDEN: Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts, –from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb, –heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board,– may unexpectedly come forth amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

ENTOMBED LIFE

30. The Commons liked the trick Henry John Temple, Lord Palmerston (1784-1865), “Lord Pumice-Stone,” had — of always leaving a situation worse rather than better. 31. Berkshire County is technically not a county, since it has no governmental services of its own, but is a district association that covers the entire mountainous western end of the state of Massachusetts, including the towns of Adams, Alford, Becket, Cheshire, Clarksburg, Dalton, Egremont, Florida, Great Barrington, Housatonic, Hancock, Hinsdale, Lanesborough, Berkshire, Lee, Lenox, Dale, Mount Washington, New Ashford, New Marlborough, North Adams, Otis, Peru, Pittsfield, Richmond, Sandisfield, Savoy, Ashley Falls, Stockbridge, Glendale, Interlaken, Tyringham, Washington, West Stockbridge, Williamstown, and Windsor. 96 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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August 5, day: The British Parliament passed the Australia Constitution Act (Victoria was separated from New South Wales; South Australia and Tasmania were granted representative government).

In Massachusetts, Herman Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne during a climb, of Monument Mountain in the Berkshire Hills, that had been sponsored by a group of luminaries and publishers (luminaries such as Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, publishers such as Melville’s boss Evert Augustus Duyckinck).

While they were appreciating their champagne at the summit, Cornelius Mathews recited for them William Cullen Bryant’s doggerel poem about a jilted native maiden who had thrown herself from a precipice, “The Story of the Indian Girl,” a poem tainted irremediably by primitivism which enjoyed considerably greater reputation then than, fortunately, now. …There was scooped, Upon the mountain’s southern slope, a grave; And there they laid her, in the very garb With which the maiden decked herself for death, With the same withering wild-flowers in her hair. And o’er the mound that covered her, the tribe Built up simple monument, a cone Of small loose stones. Thenceforward all who passed, Hunter, and dame, and virgin, laid a stone In silence on the pile. It stands there yet….

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(In a few days, Herman would be seeking out Nathaniel at the Red Shanty which now stands on the grounds of Tanglewood, and they would again be enjoying champagne.)

August 17: Henry Thoreau surveyed land near Concord’s railroad depot for Francis Monroe. At this time, Thoreau was busy trying to lay out a road from the west end of the Mill Dam to the Railroad Station. This proposal is the present Middle Street from Academy Lane to Thoreau Street. The old Concord Academy Building stood on the spot so it had to be moved to the south side of the new street. Land owners here were William Wheildon, Hartwell Bigelow, William Monroe, and Henry Wheeler. The Concord Free Public Library preserves a copy of the official Railroad notice of the acceptance of the new street, dated March 1851.

View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm

(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be recovered.)

View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/137.htm

The 1st installment of Herman Melville’s anonymous analysis “Hawthorne and His Mosses” appeared in The Literary World.

An issue of Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal: CHAMBERS’ EDINBURGH JOURNAL ISSUE OF AUGUST 17

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August 24: The final installment of Herman Melville’s anonymous analysis “Hawthorne and His Mosses” in The Literary World.

An issue of Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal: CHAMBERS’ EDINBURGH JOURNAL ISSUE OF AUGUST 24

Mid-September: For $6,500.00 (of which $3,000.00 was borrowed from father-in-law Lemuel Shaw) the Melvilles “bought the farm” near the summer residence of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and near where the Hawthornes were living, something they would learn to regret and regret and regret, the farm being the 160-acre “Arrowhead” near Mount Greylock and North Adams, Massachusetts with the “Captain David Bush” house dating to 1780 constructed around one of those colonial massive central chimneys:

...a fine old farm-house –a mile from any other dwelling, and dipped to the eaves in foliage– surrounded by mountains, old woods, and Indian ponds....

(This was in the sticks, of course, but since they would accommodate three household servants there, we shouldn’t exactly get the impression that the family was roughing it.)

The mountain known as Greylock is in the Berkshire Hills along the north-west border of Massachusetts, north of Pittsfield and in the vicinity of the town of North Adams. It is the highest point in the state. Its name is said to be derived from that of an early 18th-Century chief of the Waranokes.

Winter: Herman Melville included snippets from Luís Vaz de Camões in his WHITE JACKET; OR, THE WORLD IN A MAN-OF-WAR, including this one at the very end: How calm the waves, how mild the balmy gale! The Halcyons call, ye Lusians spread the sail! Appeased, old Ocean now shall rage no more; Haste, point our bowsprit for yon shadowy shore. Soon shall the transports of your natal soil O’erwhelm in bounding joy the thoughts of every toil.

1851

January 29, Wednesday: William John Broderip was elected treasurer of Gray’s Inn (he would also become responsible for that institution’s library).

David Mapes and a group of Ripon townspeople founded a college on top of their hill, Brockway College. (As of 1864 the name would be changed to Ripon College.)

On or about this day, Herman Melville wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne:

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That side-blow thro’ Mrs Hawthorne will not do. I am not to be charmed out of my promised pleasure by any of that lady’s syrenisms. You, Sir, I hold accountable, & the visit (in all its original integrity) must be made. — What! spend the day, only with us? — A Greenlander might as well talk of spending the day with a friend, when the day is only half an inch long. As I said before, my best travelling chariot on runners, will be at your door, & provision made not only for the accomodation of all your family, but also for any quantity of baggage. Fear not that you will cause the slightest trouble to us. Your bed is already made, & the wood marked for your fire. But a moment ago, I looked into the eyes of two fowls, whose tail feathers have been notched, as destined victims for the table. I keep the word “Welcome” all the time in my mouth, so as to be ready on the instant when you cross the threshold. (By the way the old Romans you know had a Salve carved in their thresholds) Another thing, Mr Hawthorne — Do not think you are coming to any prim nonsensical house — that is nonsensical in the ordinary way. You must be much bored with punctilios. You may do what you please — say or say not what you please. And if you feel any inclination for that sort of thing — you may spend the period of your visit in bed, if you like — every hour of your visit. Mark — There is some excellent Montado Sherry awaiting you & some most potent port. We will have mulled wine with wisdom, & buttered toast with story-telling & crack jokes & bottles from morning till night. Come — no nonsence. If you dont — I will send Constables after you. On Wednesday then — weather & sleighing permitting I will be down for you about eleven o’clock A.M. By the way — should Mrs Hawthorne for any reason conclude that she, for one, can not stay overnight with us — then you must — & the children, if you please. H. Melville

March 13-14: Nathaniel Hawthorne and his daughter Una Hawthorne visited the Melvilles at their “Arrowhead” farm near Mount Greylock in the north-west corner of Massachusetts. It was raining during the visit, so Nathaniel and Herman Melville wound up philosophizing in the barn with Hawthorne seated on a carpenter’s bench. At leavetaking Hawthorne jested that were he to write a report of their discussion, he might parody the theologizing of Henry Thoreau’s A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS by entitling his report A WEEK ON A WORKBENCH IN A BARN.

April: Herman Melville wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne:

Take God out of the dictionary, and you would have Him in the street.

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April 7, Monday: The Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway’s first sermon as a Methodist circuit-rider.32 AUTOBIOGRAPHY VOLUME II

Herman Melville’s father-in-law Judge Lemuel Shaw refused to help save from slavery the teenage runaway Thomas Simms (Sims).

Soon Waldo Emerson sought consolation in his journal:

It is now as disgraceful to be a Bostonian as it was hitherto a credit.... I met an episcopal clergyman, & allusion being made to Mr Webster’s treachery, he replied “Why, do you know I think that the great action of his life?” I opened a paper today in which he pounds on the old strings in a letter to the Washington Birth Day feasters at N.Y. “Liberty! liberty!” Pho! Let Mr Webster for decency’s sake shut his lips once & forever on this word. The word liberty in the mouth of Mr Webster sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtezan.... What a moment was lost when Judge Lemuel Shaw declined to affirm the unconstitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Law!

RESISTING THE FUGITIVE SLAVE LAW A foot-note of the Report of the Senate of Massachusetts on the case would put the matter of responsibility most succinctly: It would have been impossible for the U.S. marshal thus successfully to have resisted the law of the State, without the assistance of the municipal authorities of Boston, and the countenance and support of a numerous, wealthy, and powerful body of citizens. It was in evidence that 1500 of the most wealthy and respectable citizens —merchants, bankers, and others— volunteered their services to aid the marshal on this occasion.... No watch was kept upon the doings of the marshal, and while the State officers slept, after the moon had gone down, in the darkest hour before daybreak, the accused was taken out

32. Conway’s journal for the critical years 1851, 1852, and 1853, never published, is now present on the internet in holograph image at http://deila.dickinson.edu/cdm4/document.php?CISOROOT=/ownwords&CISOPTR=23390 “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 101 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of our jurisdiction by the armed police of the city of Boston.

Moloch in State Street, by John Greenleaf Whittier THE moon has set: while yet the dawn Breaks cold and gray, Between the midnight and the morn Bear off your prey! On, swift and still! the conscious street Is panged and stirred; Tread light! that fall of serried feet The dead have heard! The first drawn blood of Freedom’s veins Gushed where ye tread; Lo! through the dusk the martyr-stains Blush darkly red! Beneath the slowly waning stars And whitening day, What stern and awful presence bars That sacred way? What faces frown upon ye, dark With shame and pain? Come these from Plymouth’s Pilgrim bark? Is that young Vane? Who, dimly beckoning, speed ye on With mocking cheer? Lo! spectral Andros, Hutchinson, And Gage are here! For ready mart or favoring blast Through Moloch’s fire, Flesh of his flesh, unsparing, passed The Tyrian sire.

Ye make that ancient sacrifice Of Man to Gain, Your traffic thrives, where freedom dies, Beneath the chain. Ye sow to-day; your harvest, scorn And hate, is near;

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How think ye freemen, mountain-born, The tale will hear? Thank God! our mother State can yet Her fame retrieve; To you and to your children let The scandal cleave. Chain Hall and Pulpit, Court and Press, Make gods of gold; Let honor, truth, and manliness Like wares be sold. Your hoards are great, your walls are strong, But God is just; The gilded chambers built by wrong Invite the rust. What! know ye not the gains of Crime Are dust and dross; Its ventures on the waves of time Foredoomed to loss! And still the Pilgrim State remains What she hath been; Her inland hills, her seaward plains, Still nurture men! Nor wholly lost the fallen mart; Her olden blood Through many a free and generous heart Still pours its flood. That brave old blood, quick-flowing yet, Shall know no check, Till a free people’s foot is set On Slavery’s neck. Even now, the peal of bell and gun, And hills aflame, Tell of the first great triumph won In Freedom’s name. The long night dies: the welcome gray Of dawn we see; Speed up the heavens thy perfect day, God of the free!

circa April: When I read the account of the carrying back of the fugitive into slavery, which was read last sunday evening –and read also what was not read here that the man who made the prayer on the wharf was Daniel Foster of Concord I could not help feeling a slight degree of pride because of all the towns in the Commonwealth Concord was the only one distinctly named as being represented in that tea-party –and as she had a place in the first so would have a place in this the last & perhaps next most important chapter of the Hist of Mass. But my second feeling, –when I reflected how short a time that gentleman has resided in this town, – was one of doubt & shame –because the men of Concord in recent times have done nothing to entitle them to the honor of having their town named in such a connexion.

April 16, Wednesday: On about this date, Herman Melville wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne: My Dear Hawthorne, — Concerning the young gentleman’s shoes, I desire to say that a pair to fit him, of the desired pattern, cannot be had in all Pittsfield, — a fact which sadly impairs that metropolitan pride I formerly took in the capital of Berkshire. Henceforth Pittsfield must hide its head. However, “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 103 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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if a pair of bootees will at all answer, Pittsfield will be very happy to provide them. Pray mention all this to Mrs. Hawthorne, and command me. “The House of the Seven Gables: A Romance. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. One vol. 16mo, pp. 344.” The contents of this book do not belie its rich, clustering, romantic title. With great enjoyment we spent almost an hour in each separate gable. This book is like a fine old chamber, abundantly, but still judiciously, furnished with precisely that sort of furniture best fitted to furnish it. There are rich hangings, wherein are braided scenes from tragedies! There is old china with rare devices, set out on the carved buffet; there are long and indolent lounges to throw yourself upon; there is an admirable sideboard, plentifully stored with good viands; there is a smell as of old wine in the pantry; and finally, in one corner, there is a dark little black-letter volume in golden clasps, entitled “Hawthorne: A Problem” It has delighted us; it has piqued a re-perusal; it has robbed us of a day, and made us a present of a whole year of thoughtfulness; it has bred great exhilaration and exultation with the remembrance that the architect of the Gables resides only six miles off, and not three thousand miles away, in England, say. We think the book, for pleasantness of running interest, surpasses the other works of the author. The curtains are more drawn; the sun comes in more; genialities peep out more. Were we to particularize what most struck us in the deeper passages, we would point out the scene where Clifford, for a moment, would fain throw himself forth from the window to join the procession; or the scene where the judge is left seated in his ancestral chair. Clifford is full of an awful truth throughout. He is conceived in the finest, truest spirit. He is no caricature. He is Clifford. And here we would say that, did circumstances permit, we should like nothing better than to devote an elaborate and careful paper to the full consideration and analysis of the purport and significance of what so strongly characterizes all of this author’s writings. There is a certain tragic phase of humanity which, in our opinion, was never more powerfully embodied than by Hawthorne. We mean the tragicalness of human thought in its own unbiassed, native, and profounder workings. We think that into no recorded mind has the intense feeling of the visable truth ever entered more deeply than into this man’s. By visable truth, we mean the apprehension of the absolute condition of present things as they strike the eye of the man who fears them not, though they do their worst to him, — the man who, like Russia or the British Empire, declares himself a sovereign nature (in himself) amid the powers of heaven, hell, and earth. He may perish; but so long as he exists he insists upon treating with all Powers upon an equal basis. If any of those other Powers choose to withhold certain secrets, let them; that does not impair my sovereignty in myself; that does not make me tributary. And perhaps, after all, there is no secret. We incline to think that the Problem of the Universe is like the Freemason’s mighty secret, so terrible to all children. It turns out, at last, to consist in a triangle, a mallet, and an apron, — nothing more! We incline to think that God cannot explain His own secrets, and that He would like a little information upon certain points Himself. We mortals astonish Him as much as He us. But it is this Being of

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the matter; there lies the knot with which we choke ourselves. As soon as you say Me, a God, a Nature, so soon you jump off from your stool and hang from the beam. Yes, that word is the hangman. Take God out of the dictionary, and you would have Him in the street. There is the grand truth about Nathaniel Hawthorne. He says No! in thunder; but the Devil himself cannot make him say yes. For all men who say yes, lie; and all men who say no, — why, they are in the happy condition of judicious, unincumbered travellers in Europe; they cross the frontiers into Eternity with nothing but a carpet-bag, — that is to say, the Ego. Whereas those yes-gentry, they travel with heaps of baggage, and, damn them! they will never get through the Custom House. What’s the reason, Mr. Hawthorne, that in the last stages of metaphysics a fellow always falls to swearing so? I could rip an hour. You see, I began with a little criticism extracted for your benefit from the “Pittsfield Secret Review,” and here I have landed in Africa. Walk down one of these mornings and see me. No nonsense; come. Remember me to Mrs. Hawthorne and the children. H. Melville. P.S. The marriage of Phoebe with the daguerreotypist is a fine stroke, because of his turning out to be a Maule. If you pass Hepzibah’s cent-shop, buy me a Jim Crow (fresh) and send it to me by Ned Higgins.

June 29, Sunday: An estimate of the talents and dispositions of a lady, Charlotte Brontë, was made by a phrenologist, Dr. Browne (writing to George Smith in the following month, Charlotte would indicate that the estimate made of him during the same visit had been “a sort of miracle — like — like — like as the very life itself.”): Temperament for the most part nervous. Brain large; the anterior and superior parts remarkably salient. In her domestic relations this lady will be warm and affectionate. In the care of children she will evince judicious kindness, but she is not pleased at seeing them spoiled by over-indulgence. Her fondness for any particular locality would chiefly rest upon the associations connected with it. Her attachments are strong and enduring; indeed, this is a leading element of her character. She is rather circumspect, however, in the choice of her friends, and it is well that she is so, for she will seldom meet with persons whose dispositions approach the standard of excellence with which she can entirely sympathise. Her sense of truth and justice would be offended by any dereliction of duty, and she would in such cases express her disapprobation with warmth and energy. She would not, however, be precipitate in acting thus, and rather than live in a state of hostility with those she could wish to love she would depart from them, although the breaking off of friendship would be to her a source of great unhappiness. The careless and unreflecting whom she would labour to amend might deem her punctilious and perhaps exacting, not considering that their amendment and not her own gratification prompted her to admonish. She is sensitive, and is very anxious to succeed in her undertakings, but is not so sanguine as to the probability of success. She is occasionally inclined to take a gloomier view of things than perhaps the facts of the case justify. She should guard against the effect of this where her affection is engaged, for her sense of her own impatience is moderate and not strong enough to steel her against disappointment. She has more

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firmness than self-reliance, and her sense of justice is of a very high order. She is deferential to the aged and those she deems worthy of her respect, and possesses much devotional feeling, but dislikes fanaticism, and is not given to a belief in supernatural things without questioning the probability of their existence. Money is not her idol; she values it merely for its uses. She would be liberal to the poor and compassionate to the afflicted, and when friendship calls for aid she would struggle even against her own interest to impart the required assistance; indeed, sympathy is a marked characteristic of this organisation. Is fond of symmetry and proportion, and possesses a good perception of form, and is a good judge of colour. She is endowed with a keen perception of melody and rhythm. Her imitative powers are good, and the faculty which gives small dexterity is well developed. These powers might have been cultivated with advantage. Is a fair calculator, and her sense of order and arrangement is remarkably good. Whatever this lady has to settle or arrange will be done with precision and taste. She is endowed with an exalted sense of the beautiful and ideal, and longs for perfection. If not a poet her sentiments are poetical, or at least imbued with that enthusiastic grace which is characteristic of poetical feeling. She is fond of dramatic literature and the drama, especially if it be combined with music. In its intellectual development this head is very remarkable. The forehead is at once very large and well formed. It bears the stamp of deep thoughtfulness and comprehensive understanding. It is highly philosophical. It exhibits the presence of an intellect at once perspicacious and perspicuous. There is much critical sagacity and fertility in devising resources in situations of difficulty; much originality, with a tendency to speculate and generalise. Possibly this speculative bias may sometimes interfere with the practical efficiency of some of her projects. Yet, since she has scarcely an adequate share of self-reliance, and is not sanguine as to the success of her plans, there is reason to suppose that she would attend more closely to particulars, and thereby prevent the unsatisfactory results of hasty generalisation. The lady possesses a fine organ of language, and can, if she has done her talents justice by exercise, express her sentiments with clearness, precision, and force—sufficiently eloquent but not verbose. In learning a language she would investigate its spirit and structure. The character of the German language would be well adapted to such an organisation. In analysing the motives of human conduct this lady would display originality and power, but in her mode of investigating mental science she would naturally be imbued with a metaphysical bias. She would perhaps be sceptical as to the truth of Galle’s doctrine; but the study of this doctrine, this new system of mental philosophy, would give additional strength to her excellent understanding by rendering it more practical, more attentive to particulars, and contribute to her happiness by imparting to her more correct notions of the dispositions of those whose acquaintance she may wish to cultivate. J. P. Browne, M.D. 367 Strand:

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June 29, 1851. Herman Melville wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne: My dear Hawthorne — The clear air and open window invite me to write to you. For some time past I have been so busy with a thousand things that I have almost forgotten when I wrote you last, and whether I received an answer. This most persuasive season has now for weeks recalled me from certain crotchetty and over doleful chimearas, the like of which men like you and me and some others, forming a chain of God’s posts round the world, must be content to encounter now and then, and fight them the best way we can. But come they will, — for, in the boundless, trackless, but still glorious wild wilderness through which these outposts run, the Indians do sorely abound, as well as the insignificant but still stinging mosquitoes. Since you have been here, I have been building some shanties of houses (connected with the old one) and likewise some shanties of chapters and essays. I have been plowing and sowing and raising and painting and printing and praying, — and now begin to come out upon a less bustling time, and to enjoy the calm prospect of things from a fair piazza at the north of the old farm house here. Not entirely yet, though, am I without something to be urgent with. The “Whale” is only half through the press; for, wearied with the long delay of the printers, and disgusted with the heat and dust of the babylonish brick-kiln of New York, I came back to the country to feel the grass — and end the book reclining on it, if I may. — I am sure you will pardon this speaking all about myself, for if I say so much on that head, be sure all the rest of the world are thinking about themselves ten times as much. Let us speak, although we show all our faults and weaknesses, — for it is a sign of strength to be weak, to know it, and out with it, — not in [a] set way and ostentatiously, though, but incidentally and without premeditation. — But I am falling into my old foible — preaching. I am busy, but shall not be very long. Come and spend a day here, if you can and want to; if not, stay in Lenox, and God give you long life. When I am quite free of my present engagements, I am going to treat myself to a ride and a visit to you. Have ready a bottle of brandy, because I always feel like drinking that heroic drink when we talk ontological heroics together. This is rather a crazy letter in some respects, I apprehend. If so, ascribe it to the intoxicating effects of the latter end of June operating upon a very susceptible and peradventure feeble temperament. Shall I send you a fin of the Whale by way of a specimen mouthful? The tail is not yet cooked — though the hell- fire in which the whole book is broiled might not unreasonably have cooked it all ere this. This is the book’s motto (the secret one), — Ego non baptiso te in nomine — but make out the rest yourself. H.M.

June 29, Sunday: There is a great deal of white clover this year. In many fields where there has been no clover seed sown for many years at least, it is more abundant than the red and the heads are nearly as large. Also pastures which are close cropped and where I think there was little or no clover last year are spotted white with a humbler growth– And everywhere by road sides garden borders &c even where the sward is trodden hard –the small white heads on short stems are sprinkled every where– As this is the season for the swarming “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 107 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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of bees –and this clover is very attractive to them, it is probably the more difficult to secure them –at any rate it is the more important to secure their services now that they can make honey so fast. It is an interesting inquiry why this year is so favorable to the growth of clover! I am interested to observe how old-country methods of farming resources are introduced among us. The irish laborer for instance seeing that his employer is contemplating some agricultural enterprise –as ditching –or fencing suggests some old country mode with he has been familiar from a boy –which is often found to be cheaper as well as more ornamental than the common– And Patrick is allowed to accomplish the object his own way –and for once exhibits some skill and has not to be shown –but working with a will as well as with pride – does better than ever in the old country. Even the Irish man exhibits what might be mistaken for a Yankee knack –exercising a merely inbred skill derived from the long teachings and practice of his ancestors. I saw an Irish man building a bank of sod where his employer had contemplated building a bank wall –piling up very neatly & solidly with his spade & a line the sods taken from the rear & coping the face at a very small angle from the perpendicular –intermingling the sods with bushes as they came to hand which would grow & strengthen the whole. It was much more agreeable to the eye as well as less expensive than stone would have been –& he thought that it would be equally effective as a fence & no less durable. But it is true only experience will show when the same practice may be followed in this climate & in Ireland –whether our atmosphere is not too dry to admit of it. At any rate it was wise in the farmer thus to avail himself of any peculiar experience which his hired laborer possessed, That was what he should buy. Also I noticed the other day where one who raises seeds when his ropes & poles failed had used ropes twisted of straw to support his plants –a resource probably suggested & supplied by his foreign laborers. It is only remarkable that so few improvements or resources are or are to be adopted from the old world. I look down on rays of prunella by the road sides now– The panicled or privet Andromeda with its fruit-like white flowers– Swamp-pink I see for the first time this season. –The Tree Primrose (Scabish) Oenothera biennis a rather coarse yellow flower with a long tubular calyx naturalized extensively in Europe.– The clasping bellflower –Campanula perfoliata from the heart shaped leaves clasping the stalk an interesting flower– The Convolvulus Sepium Large Bindweed –make a fresh morning impression as of dews & purity– The Adder’s tongue Arethusa a delicate pink flower. How different is day from day! Yesterday the air was filled with a thick fog-like haze so that the sun did not once shine with ardor but every thing was so tempered under this thin veil that it was a luxury merely to be out doors– You were less out for it. The shadows of the apple trees even early in the afternoon were remarkably distinct The landscape wore a classical smoothness– Every object was as in picture with a glass over it. I saw some hills on this side the river looking from Conantum on which the grass being of a yellow tinge, though the sun did not shine out on them they had the appearance of being shone upon peculiarly.– It was merely an unusual yellow tint of the grass. The mere surface of water was an object for the eye to linger on. The panicled cornel a low shrub in blossom by wall sides now. I thought that one peculiarity of my “Week” was its hypæthral character –to use an epithet applied to those Egyptian temples which are open to the heavens above –under the ether– I thought that it had little of the atmosphere of the house about –but might wholly have been written, as in fact it was to a considerable extent – out of doors. It was only at a late period in writing it, as it happened, that I used any phrases implying that I lived in a house, or lead a domestic life. I trust it does not smell of the study & library –even of the Poets attic, as of the fields & woods.– that it is a hypæthral or unroofed book –lying open under the ether –& permeated by it. Open to all weathers –not easy to be kept on a shelf. The potatoes are beginning to blossom Riding to survey a woodlot yesterday I observed that a dog accompanied the wagon– Having tied the horse at the last house and entered the woods, I saw no more of the dog while there; –but when riding back to the village DOG I saw the dog again running by the wagon –and in answer to my inquiry was told that the horse & wagon were hired & that the dog always accompanied the horse. I queried whether it might happen that a dog would accompany the wagon if a strange horse were put into it –whether he would ever attach himself to an inanimate object. Methinks the driver though a stranger as it were added intellect to the mere animality of the horse and the dog not making very nice distinctions yielded respect to the horse and equipage as if it were human If the horse were to trot off alone without wagon or driver –I think it doubtful if the dog would follow –if with the wagon then the chances of his following would be increased –but if with a driver though a stranger I have found by experience that he would follow. At a distance in the meadow I hear still at long intervals the hurried commencement of the bobolink’s strain the bird just dashing into song –which is as suddenly checked as it were by the warder of the seasons –and the strain is left incomplete forever. Like human beings they are inspired to sing only for a short season. That little roadside –pealike blossomed blue flower is interesting to me. The mulleins are just blossoming. The voice of the crickets heard at noon from deep in the grass allies day to night– It is unaffected by sun & moon. It is a mid-night sound heard at noon –a midday sound heard at mid night. I observed some mulleins growing on the western slope of the sandy railroad embankment –in as warm a place as can easily be found –where the heat was reflected from the sand oppressively at 3 o clock P M this hot day–

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Yet the green & living leaves felt rather cool than other-wise to the hand –but the dead ones at the root were quite warm. The living plant thus preserves a cool temperature in the hottest exposure. as if it kept a cellar below from which cooling liquors were drawn up. Yarrow is now in full bloom. & elder –and a small many-head white daisy like a small white weed. The epilobium too is out. The night warbler sings the same strain at noon. The song-sparrow still occasionally reminds me of spring. I observe that the high water in the ponds –which have been rising for a year –has killed most of the pitch pines & alders which it had planted & merely watered at its edge during the years of dryness– But now it comes to undo its own work. How aweful is the least unquestionable meanness –when we cannot deny that we have been guilty of it– There seems to be no bounds to our unworthiness

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July: The treaty of Traverse des Sioux, by which Dakota headmen ceded all their lands in Iowa, and some in Minnesota, to the US federal government. Herman Melville purchased Burton’s ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY in a used bookstore in Pittsfield MA — only to discover on the flyleaf that his father had owned that very volume in 1816.

The chip doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Bronson Alcott was marveling at how his shriveled “heart” was becoming engorged under the ministrations of the attractive and pleasant young lady, Ednah Dow Littlehale. They were walking together each dawn on

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the Boston Common:

She came — the maiden and passed the morning: a long and lavish morning with me, and left me the principal owner of a heart green with youthful regards, of sweet regard for herself the friend and stimulus to Genius.

THE ALCOTT FAMILY Here is a description of this well-endowed daughter of the well-to-do Boston merchant Sargeant Smith

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Littlehale, by the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson:

She was a brunette, had a great deal of rich, black hair with large dark eyes, and was talking eagerly between intervals with some male companion.... Not equalling the ablest of early women leaders, like Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody, in extent of early training, she was equalled by no other in a certain clearness of mind and equilibrium of judgement....

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY

July 22, Tuesday: About this day of July 22d, Waldo Emerson recorded in his journal:

Eddy & Edie going with me to bathe in Walden, Eddy was very brave with a sharp bulrush, & presently broke into this rhyme— “With my sharp-pointed sword I will conquer Concórd.”

Herman Melville wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne: My dear Hawthorne: This is not a letter, or even a note — but only a passing word said to you over your garden gate. I thank you for your easy- flowing long letter (received yesterday) which flowed through me, and refreshed all my meadows, as the Housatonic — opposite me — does in reality. I am now busy with various things — not incessantly though; but enough to require my frequent tinkerings; and this is the height of the haying season, and my nag is dragging me home his winter’s dinners all the time. And so, one way and another, I am not yet a disengaged man; but shall be, very soon. Meantime, the earliest good chance I get, I shall roll down to you, my good fellow, seeing we — that is, you and I, — must hit upon some little bit of vagabondism, before Autumn comes. Graylock — we must go and vagabondize there. But ere we start, we must dig a deep hole, and bury all Blue Devils, there to abide till the Last Day. Goodbye, his X mark.

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July 22, Tuesday: The season of morning fogs has arrived I think it is connected with dog days Perhaps it is owing to the greater contrast between the night & the day –the nights being nearly as cold while the days are warmer? Before I rise from my couch I see the ambrosial fog stretched over the river draping the trees– It is the summers vapor bath –what purity in the color– It is almost musical; it is positively fragrant. How faery like it has visited our fields. I am struck by its firm outlines as distinct as a pillow’s edge about the height of my house –a great crescent over the course of the river from SW to NE. 51/2 Am Already some parts of the river are bare– It goes off in a body down the river before this air –and does not rise into the heavens– It retreats & I do not see how it is dissipated. This slight thin vapor which is left to curl over the surface of the still dark water still as glass –seems not be the same things –of a different quality. I hear the cockrils crow through it –and the rich crow of young roosters –that sound indicative of the bravest rudest health –hoarse without cold –hoarse with a rude health That crow is all nature compelling –famine & pestilence flee before it– These are our fairest days which are born in a fog I saw the tall lettuce yesterday Lactucca elongata –whose top or main shoot had been broken off –& it had put up various stems –with entire & lanceolate –not runcinate leaves as usual –thus making what some botanists have called a variety –. linearis– So I have met with some Geniuses who having met with some such accident maiming them –have been developed in some such monstrous & partial though original way. They were original in being less than themselves. Yes your leaf is peculiar –and some would make of you a distinct variety –but to me you appear like the puny result of an accident & misfortune –for you have lost your main shoot –and the leaves which would have grown runcinate are small & lanceolate. The last sunday afternoon I smelled the clear pork frying for a farmer’s supper 30 rods off (what a sunday supper!) the windows being opens –& could imagine the clear tea without milk which usually accompanies it Now the catonine tails are seen in the impenetrable meadows & the tall green rush is perfecting its tufts. The spotted Polygonum P. Persicaria by the roadside I scare up a wood-cock[American Woodcock Scolopax minor] from some moist place at mid day–

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The Pewee[Wood Pewee Contopus virens] & Kingbird [Eastern Kingbird Tyrannus tyrannus] are killing bees perched on a post or a dead twig. I bathe me in the river– I lie down where it is shallow –amid the weeds over its sandy bottom but it seems shrunken & parched– I find it difficult to get wet through– I would fain be the channel of a mt brook. I bathe & in a few hours I bathe again not remembering that I was wetted before. When I come to the river I take off my clothes & carry them over then bathe & wash off the mud & continue my walk. There was a singular charm for me in those French names more than in the things themselves The name of Italian & Grecian cities villages & natural features are not more poetic to me than the names of those humble Canadian villages –to be told by a habitant when I asked the name of a village in sight that is St Fereole or St Anne’s But I was quite taken off my feet when running back to inquire what river we were crossing –and thinking for a long time he said la Riviere d’Ocean it flashed upon me at last that it was la rivière du chien the la rivière so often repeated in the {One leaf missing} There was so much grace and sentiment & refinement in the names how could they be coarse who took them 114 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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so often on their lips –St Anne’s St Joseph’s the holy Annes the holy Joseph’s. Next to the Indian the French missionary & voyageur & Catholic habitant have named the natural features of the land– The prairie –the voyageur– Or does every man think his neighbor is the richer & more fortunate man –his neighbor’s fields the richest. It needed only a little outlandishness in the names a little foreign accent a few more vowels in the words –to make me locate all my ideals at once– How prepared we are for another world than this– We are no sooner over the line of the states –than we expect to see men leading poetic lives –nothing so natural that is the presumption– the names of the mountains & the streams & the villages reel with the intoxication of poetry – Longoeil Chambly –Barthillon? Montilly? Where there were books only –to find realities of course we assign to the place the idea which the written history or poem suggested Quebec of course is never seen for what it simply is to practical eyes –but as the local habitation of those thoughts & visions which we have derived from reading of Wolfe & Montcalm Montgomery & Arnold – – It is hard to make me attend to the geology of Cape diamond –or the botany of the Plains of Abraham. How glad we are to find that there is another race of men –for they may be more successful & fortunate than we. Canada is not a place for rail-roads to terminate in or for criminals to run to.

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October: Publication of a ms that had been entitled “The Whale,” as MOBY-DICK; OR, THE WHALE, dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne. In 1833, Dr. James Cowles Prichard had pioneered “the term monomania, meaning madness affecting one train of thought … adopted in late times instead of melancholia.”

Melville’s father-in-law, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, had utilized this concept in a legal opinion in 1844, and Melville had deployed it in 1849 in MARDI AND A VOYAGE THITHER, and here he deployed it as the defining characteristic of the psychology of the maimed Captain Ahab. This book was considered, however, by Herman Melville’s boss at the Literary World, Evert Augustus Duyckinck, to be immoral.33 Immoral it may not be —

but is it accurate? It states that the skeleton of Bentham hangs for candelabra in the library of one of his executors, and although it is true that Bentham had suggested that the bodies of the dead be used as remembrances of them, and invented the term “auto-icon” for such use, and had suggested that the dead person’s face might be preserved with copal varnish, it is also the case that his own face looked so gruesome after death and autopsy that the embalming surgeon preserved the body merely by placing a waxen image on

33. One wonders whether Bronson Alcott ever read this MOBY-DICK book. In Chapter 35 we read that you’ll never get rich if you let yourself get taken in tow by a “sunken-eyed young Platonist.” In Chapter 78 we read of a honey-collector in Ohio who leaned into a honey tree, slipped, and was embalmed, and then Melville hits us with this punchline: “How many, think ye, have likewise fallen into Plato’s honey head, and sweetly perished there?” 116 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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top of his dressed-up skull.

His body bones are not within the dummy underneath that authentic wax-encrusted skull in the closet at Cambridge, but this Melvillian disposition of Bentham’s body bones is something of which I have not elsewhere seen confirmation: But it may be fancied, that from the naked skeleton of the stranded whale, accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. Not at all. For it is one of the more curious things about this Leviathan, that his skeleton gives very little idea of his general shape. Though Jeremy Bentham’s skeleton, which hangs for candelabra in the library of one of his executors, correctly conveys the idea of a burly-browed utilitarian old gentleman, with all Jeremy’s other leading personal characteristics; yet nothing of this kind could be inferred from any Leviathan’s articulated bones. In fact, as the great Hunter says, the mere skeleton of the whale bears the same relation to the fully invested and padded animal as the insect does to the chrysalis

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that so roundingly envelopes it.

There was a speed and pulling contest between various designs of locomotives on the Western Railroad between Wilmington MA and Lowell MA. William Mason, a textile manufacturer of Taunton MA, witnessed this contest and determined to enter the business of manufacturing locomotives. Perhaps some of Mr. Mason’s locomotives would assist some Americans in obtaining the comparative freedom of Canada, Americans such as this Henry Williams who was fleeing his father and owner, locomotives such as this one pulling the 5PM train north out of Concord, upon which our Henry had positioned this fleeing Henry. UNDERGROUND RAILROAD

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November 14, Friday: Herman Melville’s MOBY-DICK; OR, THE WHALE was published by Harper and Brothers in New-York. (Harriet Beecher Stowe’s serialized “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” would have record sales whereas this effort by Melville would not sell 50 copies.)

The volume had been dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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1852

Publication of PIERRE; OR, THE AMBIGUITIES. Waldo Emerson is said to appear in caricature in this, in the figure of Plotinus Plimlimmon. While reviewing the manuscript, Herman Melville’s boss at the Literary World, Evert Augustus Duyckinck, concluded that Melville had become insane.34

January 8, Thursday: Henry Thoreau read from his WALDEN MS, Draft C, to Miss Mary Moody Emerson.

January 8, Thursday: I notice that almost every track which I made yesterday in the snow – perhaps 10 inches deep – has got a dead leaf in it – though none is to be seen on the snow around. Even as early as 3 o’clock these winter afternoons the axes in the woods sound like night fall as if – like the sound of a twilight labor. Reading from my MSS to Miss Emerson this evening & using the word God in one instance in perchance a merely heathenish sense – she inquired hastily in a tone of dignified anxiety– “Is that god spelt with a little g?” Fortunately it was. (I had brought in the word god without any solemnity of voice or connexion.) I perceive that the livid lettuce leaved lichen which I gathered the other day – has dried almost an ash or satin

34. Edward L. Widmer is of the opinion that, just as Nathaniel Hawthorne “probably re-created” John L. O’Sullivan, “less harshly,” as Holgrave in THE HOUSE OF SEVEN GABLES, so also did Melville parody Duyckinck in PIERRE. Widmer also mentions that Henry Thoreau, even though he did publish in O’Sullivan’s The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, was “anything but a Young American.” 120 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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with no green about has bleached.

Herman Melville wrote to Sophia Peabody Hawthorne: My Dear Mrs Hawthorne I have hunted up the finest Bath I could find, gilt-edged and stamped, whereon to inscribe my humble acknowledgement of your highly flattering letter of the 29th Dec: — It really amazed me that you should find any satisfaction in that book. It is true that some men have said they were pleased with it, but you are the only woman — for as a general thing, women have small taste for the sea. But, then, since you, with your spiritualizing nature, see more things than other people, and by the same process, refine all you see, so that they are not the same things that other people see, but things which while you think you but humbly discover them, you do in fact create them for yourself — Therefore, upon the whole, I do not so much marvel at your expressions concerning Moby Dick. At any rate, your allusion for example to the “Spirit Spout” first showed to me that there was a subtile significance in that thing — but I did not, in that case, mean it. I had some vague idea while writing it, that the whole book was susceptible of an allegoric construction, & also that parts of it were — but the speciality of many of the particular subordinate allegories, were first revealed to me, after reading Mr Hawthorne’s letter, which, without citing any particular examples, yet intimated the part-&-parcel allegoricalness of the whole. But, My Dear Lady, I shall not again send you a bowl of salt water. The next chalice I shall commend, will be a rural bowl of milk. And now, how are you in West Newton? Are all domestic affairs regulated? Is Miss Una content? and Master Julien satisfied with the landscape in general? And does Mr Hawthorne continue his series of calls upon all his neighbors within a radius of ten miles? Shall I send him ten packs of visiting cards? And a box of kid gloves? and the latest style of Parisian handkerchief? — He goes into society

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too much altogether — seven evenings out, a week, should content any reasonable man. Now, Madam, had you not said anything about Moby Dick, & had Mr Hawthorne been equally silent, then had I said perhaps, something to both of you about another Wonder- (full) Book. But as it is, I must be silent. How is it, that while all of us human beings are so entirely disembarrased in censuring a person; that so soon as we would praise, then we begin to feel awkward? I never blush after denouncing a man: but I grow scarlet, after eulogizing him. And yet this is all wrong; and yet we can’t help it; and so we see how true was that musical sentence of the poet when he sang — “We can’t help ourselves” For tho’ we know what we ought to be; & what it would be very sweet & beautiful to be; yet we can’t be it. That is most sad, too. Life is a long Dardenelles, My Dear Madam, the shores whereof are bright with flowers, which we want to pluck, but the bank is too high; & so we float on & on, hoping to come to a landing-place at last — but swoop! we launch into the great sea! Yet the geographers say, even then we must not despair, because across the great sea, however desolate & vacant it may look, lie all Persia & the delicious lands roundabout Damascus. So wishing you a pleasant voyage at last to that sweet & far countree — Beleive Me Earnestly Thine— Herman Melville

I forgot to say, that your letter was sent to me from Pittsfield — which delayed it. My sister Augusta begs me to send her sincerest regards both to you & Mr Hawthorne.

February 8, Sunday: Herman Melville wrote to Julian Hawthorne: My Dear Master Julian I was equally surprised and delighted by the sight of your printed note. (At first I thought it was a circular (your father will tell you what that is)). I am very happy that I have a place in the heart of so fine a little fellow as you. You tell me that the snow in Newton is very deep. Well, it is still deeper here, I fancy. I went into the woods the other day, and got so deep into the drifts among the big hemlocks & maples that I thought I should stick fast there till Spring came, — a Snow Image. Remember me kindly to your good father, Master Julian, and Good Bye, and may Heaven always bless you, & may you be a good boy and become a great good man. Herman Melville

Feb. 8. Mrs Buttrick says that she has 5 cents for making a shirt, and that if she does her best she can make one in a day. It is interesting to see loads of hay coming down from the country now a days – (within a week) they make them very broad & low. They do not carry hay by RR yet. The spoils of up-country fields. A Mt of dried herbs. I had forgotten that there ever was so much grass as they prove.– And all these horses & oxen & cows thus are still fed on the last summer’s grass which has been dried! They still roam in the meads. One would think that some people regarded character in man as the botanist (regards character) in flowers– who says “Character characterem non antecellit nisi constantia.” but this is well explained, and so that it becomes applicable to man, by this parallel aphorism of Linnaeus – Character non est, ut genus fiat, sed ut genus noscatur.”

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It is apparently Fries who is made to say of his own system – or it may be Tuckerman who says it – that “By this key, I have not yet found that any plants, manifestly & by consent of all allied, are sundered.” Tuckerman says cunningly “If the rapt admirer of the wonders and the beauties of life & being might well come to learn of our knowledge the laws and the history of what he loves, let us remember that we have the best right to all the pleasure that he has discovered, and that we are not complete if we do not possess it all. Linnaeus was as hearty a lover & admirer of nature as if he had been nothing more”. Night before last our first rain for a long time– This afternoon the first crust to walk on. It is pleasant to walk over the fields raised a foot or more above their summer level – and the prospect is altogether new. Is not all music a hum more or less divine? I hear something new at every telegraph post. I have not got out of hearing of one before I here a new harp. Thoughts of different dates will not cohere. Carried a new cloak to Johnny Riaden? I found that the shanty was warmed by the simple social relations of the Irish. On sunday they come from the town & stand in the door way & so keep out the cold. One is not cold among his brothers and sisters. What if there is less fire on the hearth, if there is more in the heart. These Irish are not suceeding so ill after all– The little boy goes to the primary school and proves a forward boy there– And the mothers brother who has let himself in the village tells me that he takes the Flag of our Union – (if that is the paper edited by an Irishman). It is musical news to hear that Johnny does not love to be kept at home from school in deep snows. In this winter often no apparent difference between rivers ponds & fields The French respected the Indians as a separate & independent people and speak of them & contrast themselves with them – as the English have never done. They not only went to war with them but they lived at home with them. There was a much less interval between them. ***

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A 20th-Century painting by Charles Ephraim Burchfield representing this thought “Is not all music a hum more or less divine? I hear something new at every telegraph post. I have not got out of hearing of one before I hear a new harp” displays a more modern type of telegraph-line insulator than actually had been in use during the 1850s:

The line insulators in use during that earlier period would actually have looked more like the following preserved examples:

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July 17, Saturday: It was reported in the Practical Christian that, during a sermon at Hopedale delivered by the Reverend John Murray Spear, Medium, the spirit of Benjamin Franklin had manifested itself through the reverend, and had communicated its satisfaction with “the rise and progress of a people so practical, in respect to all that is necessary to human welfare, morally, intellectually and physically.”

The Hopedale community would become more and more entangled in spiritualism and table-rapping. Herman Melville wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne: My Dear Hawthorne: — This name of “Hawthorne” seems to be ubiquitous. I have been on something of a tour lately, and it has saluted me vocally & typographically in all sorts of places & in all sorts of ways. I was at the solitary Crusoeish island of Naushon (one of the Elisabeth group) and there, on a stately piazza, I saw it gilded on the back of a very new book, and in the hands of a clergyman. — I went to visit a gentleman in Brooklyne, and as we were sitting at our wine, in came the lady of the house, holding a beaming volume in her hand, from the city — “My Dear,” to her husband, “I have brought you Hawthorne’s new book.” I entered the cars at Boston for this place. In came a lively boy “Hawthorne’s new book!” — In good time I arrived home. Said my lady-wife “there is Mr Hawthorne’s new book, come by mail” And this morning, lo! on my table a little note, subscribed Hawthorne again. — Well, the Hawthorne is a sweet flower; may it flourish in every hedge. I am sorry, but I can not at present come to see you at Concord as you propose. — I am but just returned from a two weeks’ absence; and for the last three months & more I have been an utter idler and a savage — out of doors all the time. So, the hour has come for me to sit down again. Do send me a specimen of your sand-hill, and a sunbeam from the countenance of Mrs. Hawthorne, and a vine from the curly arbor of Master Julian. As I am only just home, I have not yet got far into the book but enough to see that you have most admirably employed materials which are richer than I had fancied them. Especially at this day, the volume is welcome, as an antidote to the mooniness of some dreamers — who are merely dreamers — Yet who the devel aint a dreamer? H Melville My rememberances to Miss Una & Master Julian — & the “compliments” & perfumes of the season to the “Rose-bud.”

July 17, Saturday: Cooler weather –a gentle steady rain not shower –such coolness as rain makes –not sharp & invigorating –exhilirating as in the spring –but thoughtful –reminding of the fall –still –moist – unoppresive weather in which corn & potatoes grow –not a vein of the N-W. wind or the N-E. The coolness of the west tempered with rain & mist. As I walked by the river last evening. I heard no toads.– A coolness as from an earth covered with vegetation –such as the toad finds in the high grass. A verdurous coolness –not a snowy “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 125 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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or icy one –in the shadow of the vapors which the heat makes rise from the earth. Can this be dog-day-ish?

Pm A summer rain– A gentle steady rain –long agathering –without thunder or lightning– Such as we have not & methinks could not have had earlier than this.

To Beck Stow’s I pick raspberries dripping with rain beyond Sleepy Hollow– This weather is rather favorable to thought –on all sides is heard a gentle dripping of the rain on the leaves –yet it is perfectly warm. It is a day of comparative leisure to many farmers. Some go to the mill-dam & the shops, some go a-fishing. The Antennaria Margaritacea Pearly Everlasting is out. & the thoroughworts –red & white begin to show their colors. Notwithstanding the rain some children still pursue their black berrying on the Great Fields. Swamp pink lingers still. Roses are not so numerous as they were– Some which I examine now have short stout hooked thorns & narrow bracts– Is it the R. Carolina? I love to see a clear crystalline water flowing out of a swamp over white sand & decayed wood –spring like. The year begins to have a husky look or scent in some quarters– I remark the green coats of the hazel nuts –& hear the permanent jay. Some fields are covered now with tufts or clumps of Indigo weed yellow with blossoms –with a few dead leaves turned black here & there. Beck Stow’s swamp! What an incredible spot to think of in town or city! When life looks sandy & barren –is reduced to its lowest terms –we have no appetite & it has no flavor– Then let me visit such a swamp as this deep & impenetrable where the earth quakes for a rod around you at every step. –with its open water where the swallows skim & twitter –its meadow & cotton grass –its dense patches of dwarf andromeda now brownish green— — with clumps of blue-berry bushes –its spruces & its verdurous border of woods imbowering it –on every side. The trees now in the rain look heavy & rich all day as commonly at twilight –drooping with the weight of wet leaves. That seriocarpus conyzoides prevails now & the entire leaved erigeron still abounds every where– The meadows on the Turnpike are white with the meadow rue now more than ever. They are filled with it many feet high. The lysimachia lanceolata is very common too. All flowers are handsomer in rain. Methinks the sweetbriar is done. The hard-hack whose spines are not yet abundant stands to me for agreeable coarseness. Swallows are active throughout this rain.

Lobelia inflata Ind. tobacco. Lappa Major Burdock. Amaranthus hybridus — though not yet red. Verbena hastata. blue vervain. Gnaphalium uliginosum by the roadside. cud-weed

Again methinks I hear the goldfinch but not for a day or two the bob-o-link. At evening the prunellas in the grass like the sky glow purple which were blue all day– The vetch I looked for is mown –but I find it fresh elsewhere. The caducous polygala has the odor of checker-berry at its root & hence I thought the flower had a fugacious spicy fragrance Hypericum Canadense. The slender bell flower –galium like with a triangular stem in low grounds now.

August 13, Friday: Herman Melville wrote to Nathaniel Hawthorne: While visiting Nantucket some four weeks ago, I made the acquaintance of a gentleman from New Bedford, a lawyer, who gave me considerable information upon several matters concerning which I was curious. — One night we were talking, I think, of the great patience, & endurance, & resignedness of the women of the island in submitting so uncomplainingly to the long, long abscences of their sailor husbands, when, by way of anecdote, this lawyer gave me a leaf from his professional experience. Altho’ his memory was a little confused with regard to some of the items of the story, yet he told me enough to awaken the most lively interest in me; and I begged him to be sure and send me a more full account so soon as he arrived home — he having previously told me that at the time of the affair he had made a record in his books. — I heard nothing more, till a few days after arriving here at Pittsfield I received thro’ the Post Office the enclosed document. — You will perceive by the gentleman’s note to me that he assumed that I purposed making

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literary use of the story; but I had not hinted anything of the kind to him, & my first spontaneous interest in it arose from very different considerations. I confess, however, that since then I have a little turned the subject over in my mind with a view to a regular story to be founded on these striking incidents. But, thinking again, it has occurred to me that this thing lies very much in a vein, with which you are peculiarly familiar. To be plump, I think that in this matter you would make a better hand at it than I would. Besides the thing seems naturally to gravitate towards you (to spea[k] ... [half a line torn] should of right belong to you. I cou[ld] ... [half a line torn] the Steward to deliver it to you. — The very great interest I felt in this story while narrating to me, was heightened by the emotion of the gentleman who told it, who evinced the most unaffected sympathy in it, tho’ now a matter of his past. — But perhaps this great interest of mine may have been largely helped by some accidental circumstance or other; so that, possibly, to you the story may not seem to possess so much of pathos, & so much of depth. But you will see how it is. — In estimating the character of Robinson Charity should be allowed a liberal play. I take exception to that passage from the Diary which says that “he must have received a portion of his punishment in this life”— thus hinting of a future supplemental castigation.— I do not at all suppose that his desertion of his wife was a premeditated thing. If it had been so, he would have changed his name, probably, after quitting her.— No: he was a weak man, & his temptations (tho’ we know little of them) were strong. The whole sin stole upon him insensibly— so that it would perhaps have been hard for him to settle upon the exact day when he could say to himself, “Now I have deserted my wife[”]; unless, indeed upon the day he wedded the Alexandran lady.— And here I am reminded of your London husband; tho’ the cases so rudely contrast.— Many more things might be mentioned; but I forbear; you will find out the suggestiveness for yourself; & all the better perhaps, for my not intermeddling.— If you should be sufficiently interested, to engage upon a regular story founded on this narration; then I consider you but fairly entitled to the following tributary items, collected by me, by chance, during my strolls thro the islands; & which— as you will perceive— seem legitimately to belong to the story, in its rounded & beautified & thoroughly developed state;— but of all this you must of course be your own judge— I but submit matter to you— I dont decide. Supposing the story to open with the wreck then there must be a storm; & it were well if some faint shadow of the preceding calm were thrown forth to lead the whole.— Now imagine a high cliff overhanging the sea & crowned with a pasture for sheep; a little way off— higher up,— a light-house, where resides the father of the future Mrs Robinson the First. The afternoon is mild & warm. The sea with an air of solemn deliberation, with an elaborate deliberation, ceremoniously rolls upon the beach. The air is suppressedly charged with the sound of long lines of surf. There is no land over against this cliff short of Europe & the West Indies. Young Agatha (but you must give her some other name) comes wandering along the cliff. She marks how the continual assaults of the sea have undermined it; so that the fences fall over, & have need of many shiftings inland. The sea has

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encroached also upon that part where their dwelling-house stands near the light-house.— Filled with meditations, she reclines along the edge of the cliff & gazes out seaward. She marks a handful of cloud on the horizon, presaging a storm tho’ all this quietude. (Of a maratime family & always dwelling on the coast, she is learned in these matters) This again gives food for thought. Suddenly she catches the long shadow of the cliff cast upon the beach 100 feet beneath her; and now she notes a shadow moving along the shadow. It is cast by a sheep from the pasture. It has advanced to the very edge of the cliff, & is sending a mild innocent glance far out upon the water. Here, in strange & beautiful contrast, we have the innocence of the land placidly eyeing the malignity of the sea. (All this having poetic reference to Agatha & her sea-lover, who is coming in the storm: the storm carries her lover to her; she catches a dim distant glimpse of his ship ere quitting the cliff)— P.S. It were well, if from her knowledge of the deep miseries produced to wives by marrying seafaring men, Agatha should have formed a young determination never to marry a sailor; which resolve in her, however, is afterwards overborne by the omnipotence of Love.— P.S. No 2. Agatha should be active during the wreck, & should, in some way, be made the saviour of young Robinson. He should be the only survivor. He should be ministered to by Agatha at the house during the illness ensuing upon his injuries from the wreck.— Now this wrecked ship was driven over the shoals, & driven upon the beach where she goes to pieces, all but her stem- part. This in course of time becomes embedded in the sand— after the lapse of some years showing nothing but the sturdy stem (or, prow-bone) projecting some two feet at low water. All the rest is filled & packed down with the sand.— So that after her husband has disappeared the sad Agatha every day sees this melancholy monument, with all its remindings.— After a sufficient lapse of time— when Agatha has become alarmed about the protracted abscence of her young husband & is feverishly expecting a letter from him— then we must introduce the mail-post— no, that phrase wont’ do, but here is the thing.— Owing to the remoteness of the lighthouse from any settled place no regular mail reaches it. But some mile or so distant there is a road leading between two post-towns. And at the junction of what we shall call the Light- House road with this Post Rode, there stands a post surmounted with a little rude wood box with a lid to it & a leather hinge. Into this box the Post boy drops all letters for the people of the light house & that vicinity of fishermen. To this post they must come for their letters. And, of course, daily young Agatha goes— for seventeen years she goes thither daily. As her hopes gradually decay in her, so does the post itself & the little box decay. The post rots in the ground at last. Owing to its being little used— hardly used at all— grass grows rankly about it. At last a little bird nests in it. At last the post falls. The father of Agatha must be an old widower— a man of the sea, but early driven away from it by repeated disasters. Hence, is he subdued & quiet & wise in his life. And now he tends a light house, to warn people from those very perils, from which he himself has suffered. Some few other items occur to me— but nothing material— and I fear to weary you, if not, make you smile at my strange impertinent officiousness.— And it would be so,

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were it not that these things do, in my mind, seem legitimately to belong to the story; for they were visably suggested to me by scenes I actually beheld while on the very coast where the story of Agatha occurred.— I do not therefore, My Dear Hawthorne, at all imagine that you will think that I am so silly as to flatter myself I am giving you anything of my own. I am but restoring to you your own property— which you would quickly enough have identified for yourself— had you but been on the spot as I happened to be. Let me conclude by saying that it seems to me that with your great power in these things, you can construct a story of remarkable interest out of this material furnished by the New Bedford lawyer.— You have a skeleton of actual reality to build about with fulness & veins & beauty. And if I thought I could do it as well as you, why, I should not let you have it.— The narrative from the Diary is instinct with significance.— Consider the mention of the shawls— & the inference derived from it. Ponder the conduct of this Robinson throughout.— Mark his trepidation & suspicion when any one called upon him.— But why prate so— you will mark it all & mark it deeper than I would, perhaps. I have written all this in a great hurry; so you must spell it out the best way you may. P.S. The business was settled in a few weeks afterwards, in a most amicable & honorable manner, by a division of the property. I think Mrs. Robinson & her family refused to claim or recieve anything that really belonged to Mrs. Irwin, or which Robinson had derived through her.— [Enclosure: the lawyer’s story of Agatha] May 28th 1842 Saturday. I have just returned from a visit to Falmouth with a Mr Janney of Mo on one of the most interesting and romantic cases I ever expect to be engaged in.— The gentleman from Missouri Mr Janney came to my house last Sunday evening and related to myself and partner that he had married the daughter of a Mrs Irvin formerly of Pittsburgh Pa. and that Mrs Irvin had married a second husband by the name of Robertson. The latter deceased about two years since. He was appointed Admr to his Estate which amounted to $20,000— about 15 months afterwards Mrs Robertson also died and in the meantime the Admr had been engaged in looking up heirs to the Estate— He learned that Robertson was an Englishman whose original name was Shinn— that he resided at Alexandria D.C. where he had two nephews— He also wrote to England and had ascertained the history and genealogy of the family with much accuracy, when on going to the Post Office one day he found a letter directed to James Robertson the deceased, post marked Falmouth Masstts— on opening it he found it from a person signing herself Rebecca A. Gifford and addressing him as “Father.” The existence of this girl had been known before by Mrs Robertson and her husband had pronounced her to be illegitimate The Admr then addressed a letter to Mrs Gifford informing her of the decease of her father. He was surprized soon after by the appearance in St Louis of a shrewd Quaker from Falmouth named Dillingham with full powers and fortified by letters and affidavits shewing the existence of a wife in Falmouth whom Robertson married in 1807 at Pembroke Mass & the legitimacy of the daughter who had married a Mr Gifford and laying strong claims to the entire property. The Admr and heirs having strong doubts arising from the declarations of Robertson during his lifetime & the peculiar expressions contained in the

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letters exhibited, as to the validity of the marriage & the claim based upon it, determined to resist and legal proceedings were at once commenced. The object of the visit of Mr Janney was to attend the taking of depositions, upon a notice from the claimants— The Minister Town Clerk and Witnesses present at the ceremony established the fact of a legal marriage and the birth of a child in wedlock, beyond all cavil or controversy all of the witnesses were of the highest respectability and the widow and daughter interested me very much. It appeared that Robertson was wrecked on the coast of Pembroke where this girl, then Miss Agatha Hatch was living— that he was hospitably entertained and cared for, and that within a year after, he married her, in due form of law— that he went two short voyages to sea. About two years after the marriage, leaving his wife enciente he started off in search of employment and from that time until Seventeen years afterwards she never heard from him in any way whatsoever, directly or indirectly, not even a word. Being poor she went out nursing for her daily bread and yet contrived out of her small earnings to give her daughter a first rate education. Having become connected with the Society of Friends she sent her to their most celebrated boarding school and when I saw her I found she had profited by all her advantages beyond most females. In the meantime Robertson had gone to Alexandria D.C. where he had entered into a successful and profitable business and married a second wife. At the expiration of this long period of 17 years which for the poor forsaken wife, had glided wearily away, while she was engaged away from home, her Father rode up in a gig and informed her that her husband had returned and wished to see her and her child— but if she would not see him, to see her child at all events— They all returned together and encountered him on the way coming to meet them about half a mile from her father’s house. This meeting was described to me by the mother and daughter— Every incident seemed branded upon the memories of both. He excused himself as well as he could for his long absence and silence, appeard very affectionate refused to tell where he was living and persuaded them not to make any inquiries, gave them a handsome sum of money, promised to return for good and left the next day— He appeared again in about a year, just on the eve of his daughter’s marriage & gave her a bridal present. It was not long after this that his wife in Alexandria died— He then wrote to his son-in-law to come there— He did so— remained 2 days and brought back a gold watch and three handsome shawls which had been previously worn by some person— They all admitted that they had suspicions then & from this circumstance that he had been a second time married. Soon after this he visited Falmouth again & as it proved for the last time— He announced his intention of removing to Missouri & urged the whole family to go with him, promising money land and other assistance to his son-in-law. The offer was not accepted He shed tears when he bade them farewell— From the time of his return to Missouri till the time of his death a constant correspondence was kept up money was remitted by him annually and he announced to them his marriage with Mrs Irvin— He had no children by either of his last two wives. Mr Janney was entirely disappointed in the character of the evidence and the character of the claimants. He considered them, when he first came, as parties

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to the imposition practised upon Mrs Irvin & her children. But I was satisfied and I think he was, that their motives in keeping silence were high and pure, creditable in every way to the true Mrs Robertson. She stated the causes with a simplicity & pathos which carried that conviction irresistibly to my mind. The only good(?) it could have done to expose him would have been to drive Robertson away and forever disgrace him & it would certainly have made Mrs Irvin & her children wretched for the rest of their days— “I had no wish” said the wife “to make either of them unhappy, notwithstanding all I had suffered on his account”— It was to me a most striking instance of long continued & uncomplaining submission to wrong and anguish on the part of a wife, wch made her in my eyes a heroine. Janney informed me that R. and his last wife did not live very happily together and particularly that he seemed to be a very jealous suspicious man— that when a person called at his house he would never enter the room till he knew who it was & “all about him.[”] He must have recieved a portion of his punishment in this life. The fact came out in the course of examination that they had agreed to give Dillingham one half of what he might obtain deducting the expenses from his half— After the strength of the evidence became known Mr Janney commenced the making of serious efforts to effect a compromise of the claim. What the result will be time will shew— This is, I suspect, the end of my connexion with the case—

September: Alpheus Marshall Merrifield was instructed to “prepare a plan for a dwelling for the President of Antioch College, not to exceed $3,000, to be begun when funds will permit.” Horace Mann, Sr. requested that his library be so positioned as to look out over his campus.

Nathaniel Hawthorne was invited to Brunswick, Maine for the 50th anniversary of the foundation of his alma mater, Bowdoin College. Afterward he vacationed at the tourist hotel on the Isle of Shoals.

This was probably the month that Herman Melville visited the Hawthornes in Concord.

Daniel Foster and Deborah “Dora” Swift Foster moved from Concord, Massachusetts to Cambridge, where Dora’s parents lived.

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September 27, Monday,: In Troy, New York, actor-playwright George L. Aiken premiered an unauthorized dramatization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The book and/or the play would inspire sheet music:

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Although Stowe’s book was a wild best-seller (120 editions would be published in the US in 1852 alone), Herman Melville’s novel MOBY-DICK of the previous year would sell only about 50 copies during the author’s entire lifetime. However, eventually it would sell quite well as a comic book:

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In the “Afterword” to UNCLE TOM’S CABIN Harriet Beecher Stowe defended her work: The writer has often been inquired of, by correspondents from different parts of the country, whether this narrative is a true one; and to these inquiries she will give one general answer. The separate incidents that compose the narrative are, to a very great extent, authentic, occurring, many of them, either under her own observation, or that of her personal friends. She or her friends have observed characters the counterpart of almost all that are here introduced; and many of the sayings are word for word as heard herself, or reported to her. The personal appearance of Eliza, the character ascribed to her, are sketches drawn from life. The incorruptible fidelity, piety and honesty, of Uncle Tom, had more than one development, to her personal knowledge. Some of the most deeply tragic and romantic, some of the most terrible incidents, have also their parallel in reality. The incident of the mother’s crossing the Ohio river on the ice is a well-known fact. The story of “old Prue,” in the second volume, was an incident that fell under the personal observation of a brother of the writer, then collecting-clerk to a large mercantile house, in New Orleans. From the same source was derived the character of the planter Legree. Of him her brother thus wrote, speaking of visiting his plantation, on a collecting tour; “He actually made me feel of his fist, which was like a blacksmith’s hammer, or a nodule of iron, telling me that it was ‘calloused with knocking down niggers.’ When I left the plantation, I drew a long breath, and felt as if I had escaped from an ogre’s den.” That the tragical fate of Tom, also, has too many times had its parallel, there are living witnesses, all over our land, to testify. Let it be remembered that in all southern states it is a principle of jurisprudence that no person of colored lineage can testify in a suit against a white, and it will be easy to see that such a case may occur, wherever there is a man whose passions outweigh his interests, and a slave who has manhood or principle enough to resist his will. There is, actually, nothing to protect the slave’s life, but the character of the master. Facts too shocking to be contemplated occasionally force their way to the public ear, and the comment that one often hears made on them is more shocking than the thing itself. It is said, “Very likely such cases may now and then occur, but they are no sample of general practice.” If the laws of New England were so arranged that a master could now and then torture an apprentice to death, would it be received with equal composure? Would it be said, “These cases are rare, and no samples of general practice”? This injustice is an inherent one in the slave system, — it cannot exist without it. The public and shameless sale of beautiful mulatto and quadroon girls has acquired a notoriety, from the incidents following the capture of the Pearl. We extract the following from the speech of Hon. Horace Mann, Sr., one of the legal counsel for the defendants in that case. He says: “In that company of seventy-six persons, who attempted, “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 135 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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in 1848, to escape from the District of Columbia in the schooner Pearl, and whose officers I assisted in defending, there were several young and healthy girls, who had those peculiar attractions of form and feature which connoisseurs prize so highly. Elizabeth Russel was one of them. She immediately fell into the slave-trader’s fangs, and was doomed for the New Orleans market. The hearts of those that saw her were touched with pity for her fate. They offered eighteen hundred dollars to redeem her; and some there were who offered to give, that would not have much left after the gift; but the fiend of a slave-trader was inexorable. She was despatched to New Orleans; but, when about half way there, God had mercy on her, and smote her with death. There were two girls named Edmundson in the same company. When about to be sent to the same market, an older sister went to the shambles, to plead with the wretch who owned them, for the love of God, to spare his victims. He bantered her, telling what fine dresses and fine furniture they would have. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that may do very well in this life, but what will become of them in the next?’ They too were sent to New Orleans; but were afterwards redeemed, at an enormous ransom, and brought back.” Is it not plain, from this, that the histories of Emmeline and Cassy may have many counterparts? Justice, too, obliges the author to state that the fairness of mind and generosity attributed to St. Clare are not without a parallel, as the following anecdote will show. A few years since, a young southern gentleman was in Cincinnati, with a favorite servant, who had been his personal attendant from a boy. The young man took advantage of this opportunity to secure his own freedom, and fled to the protection of a Quaker, who was quite noted in affairs of this kind. The owner was exceedingly indignant. He had always treated the slave with such indulgence, and his confidence in his affection was such, that he believed he must have been practised upon to induce him to revolt from him. He visited the Quaker, in high anger; but, being possessed of uncommon candor and fairness, was soon quieted by his arguments and representations. It was a side of the subject which he never had heard, — never had thought on; and he immediately told the Quaker that, if his slave would, to his own face, say that it was his desire to be free, he would liberate him. An interview was forthwith procured, and Nathan was asked by his young master whether he had ever had any reason to complain of his treatment, in any respect. “No, Mas’r,” said Nathan; “you’ve always been good to me.” “Well, then, why do you want to leave me?” “Mas’r may die, and then who get me? —I’d rather be a free man.” After some deliberation, the young master replied, “Nathan, in your place, I think I should feel very much so, myself. You are free.” He immediately made him out free papers; deposited a sum of money in the hands of the Quaker, to be judiciously used in assisting him to start in life, and left a very sensible and kind letter of advice to the young man. That letter was for some time in the writer’s hands. The author hopes she has done justice to that nobility, generosity, and humanity, which in many cases characterize individuals at the, South. Such instances save us from utter

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despair of our kind. But, she asks any person, who knows the world, are such characters common, anywhere? For many years of her life, the author avoided all reading upon or allusion to the subject of slavery, considering it as too painful to be inquired into, and one which advancing light and civilization would certainly live down. But, since the legislative act of 1850, when she heard, with perfect surprise and consternation, Christian and humane people actually recommending the remanding escaped fugitives into slavery, as a duty binding on good citizens, —when she heard, on all hands, from kind, compassionate and estimable people, in the free states of the North, deliberations and discussions as to what Christian duty could be on this head, —she could only think, These men and Christians cannot know what slavery is; if they did, such a question could never be open for discussion. And from this arose a desire to exhibit it in a living dramatic reality. She has endeavored to show it fairly, in its best and its worst phases. In its best aspect, she has, perhaps, been successful; but, oh! who shall say what yet remains untold in that valley and shadow of death, that lies the other side? To you, generous, noble-minded men and women, of the South, — you, whose virtue, and magnanimity and purity of character, are the greater for the severer trial it has encountered, —to you is her appeal. Have you not, in your own secret souls, in your own private conversings, felt that there are woes and evils, in this accursed system, far beyond what are here shadowed, or can be shadowed? Can it be otherwise? Is man ever a creature to be trusted with wholly irresponsible power? And does not the slave system, by denying the slave all legal right of testimony, make every individual owner an irresponsible despot? Can anybody fall to make the inference what the practical result will be? If there is, as we admit, a public sentiment among you, men of honor, justice and humanity, is there not also another kind of public sentiment among the ruffian, the brutal and debased? And cannot the ruffian, the brutal, the debased, by slave law, own just as many slaves as the best and purest? Are the honorable, the just, the high-minded and compassionate, the majority anywhere in this world? The slave-trade is now, by American law, considered as piracy. But a slave-trade, as systematic as ever was carried on on the coast of Africa, is an inevitable attendant and result of American slavery. And its heart-break and its horrors, can they be told? The writer has given only a faint shadow, a dim picture, of the anguish and despair that are, at this very moment, riving thousands of hearts, shattering thousands of families, and driving a helpless and sensitive race to frenzy and despair. There are those living who know the mothers whom this accursed traffic has driven to the murder of their children; and themselves seeking in death a shelter from woes more dreaded than death. Nothing of tragedy can be written, can be spoken, can be conceived, that equals the frightful reality of scenes daily and hourly acting on our shores, beneath the shadow of American law, and the shadow of the cross of Christ. And now, men and women of America, is this a thing to be trifled with, apologized for, and passed over in silence? [she addressed

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residents of various free states one by one, and then addressed mothers ...] By the sick hour of your child; by those dying eyes, which you can never forget; by those last cries, that wrung your heart when you could neither help nor save; by the desolation of that empty cradle, that silent nursery, — I beseech you, pity those mothers that are constantly made childless by the American slave-trade! And say, mothers of America, is this a thing to be defended, sympathized with, passed over in silence? Do you say that the people of the free state have nothing to do with it, and can do nothing? Would to God this were true! But it is not true. The people of the free states have defended, encouraged, and participated; and are more guilty for it, before God, than the South, in that they have not the apology of education or custom. If the mothers of the free states had all felt as they should, in times past, the sons of the free states would not have been the holders, and, proverbially, the hardest masters of slaves; the sons of the free states would not have connived at the extension of slavery, in our national body; the sons of the free states would not, as they do, trade the souls and bodies of men as an equivalent to money, in their mercantile dealings. There are multitudes of slaves temporarily owned, and sold again, by merchants in northern cities; and shall the whole guilt or obloquy of slavery fall only on the South? Northern men, northern mothers, northern Christians, have something more to do than denounce their brethren at the South; they have to look to the evil among themselves. But, what can any individual do? Of that, every individual can judge. There is one thing that every individual can do, — they can see to it that they feel right. An atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human being; and the man or woman who feels strongly, healthily and justly, on the great interests of humanity, is a constant benefactor to the human race. See, then, to your sympathies in this matter! Are they in harmony with the sympathies of Christ? or are they swayed and perverted by the sophistries of worldly policy? Christian men and women of the North! still further, — you have another power; you can pray! Do you believe in prayer? or has it become an indistinct apostolic tradition? You pray for the heathen abroad; pray also for the heathen at home. And pray for those distressed Christians whose whole chance of religious improvement is an accident of trade and sale; from whom any adherence to the morals of Christianity is, in many cases, an impossibility, unless they have given them, from above, the courage and grace of martyrdom. But, still more. On the shores of our free states are emerging the poor, shattered, broken remnants of families, —men and women, escaped, by miraculous providences from the surges of slavery, —feeble in knowledge, and, in many cases, infirm in moral constitution, from a system which confounds and confuses every principle of Christianity and morality. They come to seek a refuge among you; they come to seek education, knowledge, Christianity. What do you owe to these poor unfortunates, oh Christians? Does not every American Christian owe to the African race some effort

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at reparation for the wrongs that the American nation has brought upon them? Shall the doors of churches and school-houses be shut upon them? Shall states arise and shake them out? Shall the church of Christ hear in silence the taunt that is thrown at them, and shrink away from the helpless hand that they stretch out; and, by her silence, encourage the cruelty that would chase them from our borders? If it must be so, it will be a mournful spectacle. If it must be so, the country will have reason to tremble, when it remembers that the fate of nations is in the hands of One who is very pitiful, and of tender compassion. Do you say, “We don’t want them here; let them go to Africa”? That the providence of God has provided a refuge in Africa, is, indeed, a great and noticeable fact; but that is no reason why the church of Christ should throw off that responsibility to this outcast race which her profession demands of her. To fill up Liberia with an ignorant, inexperienced, half- barbarized race, just escaped from the chains of slavery, would be only to prolong, for ages, the period of struggle and conflict which attends the inception of new enterprises. Let the church of the north receive these poor sufferers in the spirit of Christ; receive them to the educating advantages of Christian republican society and schools, until they have attained to somewhat of a moral and intellectual maturity, and then assist them in their passage to those shores, where they may put in practice the lessons they have learned in America. There is a body of men at the north, comparatively small, who have been doing this; and, as the result, this country has already seen examples of men, formerly slaves, who have rapidly acquired property, reputation, and education. Talent has been developed, which, considering the circumstances, is certainly remarkable; and, for moral traits of honesty, kindness, tenderness of feeling, —for heroic efforts and self-denials, endured for the ransom of brethren and friends yet in slavery, —they have been remarkable to a degree that, considering the influence under which they were born, is surprising. The writer has lived, for many years, on the frontier-line of slave states, and has had great opportunities of observation among those who formerly were slaves. They have been in her family as servants; and, in default of any other school to receive them, she has, in many cases, had them instructed in a family school, with her own children. She has also the testimony of missionaries, among the fugitives in Canada, in coincidence with her own experience; and her deductions, with regard to the capabilities of the race, are encouraging in the highest degree. The first desire of the emancipated slave, generally, is for education. There is nothing that they are not willing to give or do to have their children instructed, and, so far as the writer has observed herself, or taken the testimony of teachers among them, they are remarkably intelligent and quick to learn. The results of schools, founded for them by benevolent individuals in Cincinnati, fully establish this. The author gives the following statement of facts, on the authority of Professor C.E. Stowe, then of Lane Seminary, Ohio, with regard to emancipated slaves, now resident in Cincinnati; given to show the capability of the race, even without any very particular assistance or encouragement.

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The initial letters alone are given. They are all residents of Cincinnati. B——. Furniture maker; twenty years in the city; worth ten thousand dollars, all his own earnings; a Baptist. [she described several other freed slaves, their industry and accomplishments, then suggested that the judgment of God insists on justice, ending with the following paragraph] A day of grace is yet held out to us. Both North and South have been guilty before God; and the Christian church has a heavy account to answer. Not by combining together, to protect injustice and cruelty, and making a common capital of sin, is this Union to be saved, — but by repentance, justice and mercy; for, not surer is the eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the ocean, than that stronger law, by which injustice and cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of Almighty God!

September 27. ... When I could sit in a cold chamber muffled in a cloack each evening till Thank- giving time — warmed by my own thoughts — the world was not so much with me.

October 25, Monday: Herman Melville wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne: My Dear Hawthorne— If you thought it worth while to write the story of Agatha, and should you be engaged upon it; then I have a little idea touching it, which however trifling, may not be entirely out of place. Perhaps, tho’, the idea has occurred to yourself.— The probable facility with which Robinson first leaves his wife & then takes another, may, possibly, be ascribed to the peculiarly latitudinarian notions, which most sailors have of all tender obligations of that sort. In his previous sailor life Robinson had found a wife (for a night) in every port. The sense of the obligation of the marriage-vow to Agatha had little weight with him at first. It was only when some years of life ashore had passed that his moral sense on that point became developed. And hence his subsequent conduct— Remorse &c. Turn this over in your mind & see if it is right. If not— make it so yourself. If you come across a little book called “Taughconic”— look into it and divert yourself with it. Among others, you figure in it, & I also. But you are the most honored, being the most abused, and having the greatest space allotted you.— It is a “Guide Book” to Berkshire. I dont know when I shall see you. I shall lay eyes on you one of these days however. Keep some Champagne or Gin for me. My respects and best remembrances to Mrs: Hawthorne & a reminder to the children. H Melville If you find any sand in this letter, regard it as so many sands of my life, which run out as I was writing it.

November 25: Herman Melville wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne: My dear Hawthorne,— The other day, at Concord, you expressed uncertainty concerning your undertaking the story of Agatha, and, in the end, you urged

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me to write it. I have decided to do so, and shall begin it immediately upon reaching home; and so far as in me lies, I shall endeavor to do justice to so interesting a story of reality. Will you therefore enclose the whole affair to me; and if anything of your own has occurred to you in your random thinking, won’t you note it down for me on the same page with my memorandum? I wish I had come to this determination at Concord, for then we might have more fully and closely talked over the story, and so struck out new light. Make amends for this, though, as much as you conveniently can. With your permission I shall make use of the “Isle of Shoals,” as far as the name goes at least. I shall also introduce the old Nantucket seaman, in the way I spoke to you about. I invoke your blessing upon my endeavors; and breathe a fair wind upon me. I greatly enjoyed my visit to you, and hope that you reaped some corresponding pleasure. H. Melville Julian, Una, and Rose, my salutations to them.

In agony and despair Ellery Channing wrote to Ellen Channing, as depicted on the following screen.

1853

Summer: During the 7th meeting of Louis Agassiz’s American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Cleveland, Henry Thoreau and 239 others were elected to membership.35 These people were worse than the church from which he had been forced to formally sign off. To prevent becoming entangled with this new church of science, he would have to repeat himself, write to them and again formally sign off.

Herman Melville probably wrote “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” between the late summer of this year and the early spring of the following year (it would be published in 1855).

35. He was listed as “Thoreau, Henry D., Concord, Mass.” Joseph Lovering, ed., Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Seventh Meeting, Held at Cleveland, Ohio, July, 1853 (Cambridge: Joseph Lovering; New York: G.P. Putnam & Co., 1856), page xiii. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 141 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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To Mrs Ellen K F. Channing, Concord Nov. 25, 1853 I command you as your husband, as you have left my bed & board without provocation to return forthwith with my children. I make this order absolutely & for the last time. I have never & shall never consent to a separation between us, and in no case will I relinquish my rights to and in my children.I am & have always been willing to do anything to make your life more agreeable to you here, & shall continue in that mind. Should you not accede to this perfectly reasonable & right request, I must then proceed to take those other steps which will be so painful to my children to yourself & to me. I advise you to leave your children for a day & to come here, & talk over this matter. Any day you may appoint I shall be here to see you. W E Channing

It seems to me so totally out of your character to deliberately sit down to destroy a man, who has never done you an injury in his life, that I cannot believe it. I have never & in the presence of God I would say the same, done you an injury. I have never even so much as faintly dreamed of a separation from you up to the moment last spring I believe, you first spoke of it.But if I had done you all the injuries ever inflicted by the worst man who ever lived, what could they be compared with the injury, the living death you propose to me. To endeavor to deprive me of the only beings on earth for whom I have any fondness, or who are in any manner connected with me, to propose seriously to seize from a father his children, all his children, because you may think I have done you injuries, but great God! what has this to do with my children, beings who owe their life to me, who are mine as much as they are yours, to become the deliberate murder of your husband’s peace of mind, to make the earth a living grave to him, a man who has done all on earth that he could do, for you, & to set yourself up in judgment over me. Why did you not poison me, or stab me, or kill me outright, or do you think that I can live here and die by inches? And to think that you can have advised with strangers over this, with your mother or brothers, over my death, over this cruel, horrible unnatural murder of a man who has never consciously injured you in his life, & you a woman, one who values herself upon her heart. There must be a God, there must be justice, there must be for horrible crimes a horrible end. I do not wish to bring upon my children the awful recollection of their father’s violent death, I do not wish to bring them into Courts of Justice, but I am innocent man, & to have my whole heart and mind 142 destroyed withoutCopyright fault2013 Austinis Meredithtoo horrible to contemplate. HDT WHAT? INDEX

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November: This month’s issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine featured “A Visit to the Land of the Cocoa and Palm” by Thomas Ewbank.

CONSULT THIS ISSUE

This month’s issue of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine began Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener.” CONSULT THIS ISSUE

According to page 333 of Laurie Robertson-Lorant’s MELVILLE: A BIOGRAPHY (NY: Clarkson Potter, 1996), “I would prefer not to,” when Bartleby the scrivener was asked by his boss to copy in Melville’s story, “[b]y voicing a personal preference, …throws a monkey wrench into the whole system; it is almost as though Melville created Bartleby to embody Henry Thoreau’s idea that a person who resists oppression actas as ‘a counter-friction to the machine’ that crushes initiative and creativity.” (She does acknowledge that she has been unable to come up with any evidence whatever, of Melville having come into contact with “CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE.” However, she neglects to acknowledge that should this have been Melville’s presentation of Thoreau’s message –that one should refuse to obey a work supervisor who is interfering with one’s initiative and creativity– it was an entire misunderstanding and a trivialization of the discourse.)

December: This month’s issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. CONSULT THIS ISSUE

This month’s issue of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine concluded Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” CONSULT THIS ISSUE

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1854

The recent California emigrant John Rollin Ridge (a Cherokee also named Yellow Bird) produced a fiction entitled THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF JOAQUIN MURIETA, THE CELEBRATED CALIFORNIA BANDIT. Of course there was no such person in California, actually, as this bandito desesperado Joaquin Murieta, but of course there were banditos desesperados aplenty in the territory to which Ridge had arrived in 1850, and this native author quite like his fictional character had been driven there by a white-man goldrush of sorts36 — except that in Ridge’s real case as a native American, the “goldrush” in question had been the State-of- Georgia-sponsored rush of white citizens into the hilly Cherokee homelands. In the fiction in question, events have a catastrophic impact upon “Joaquin Murieta” and the author expresses this in a distinctively Emersonian spatial metaphor: His soul swelled beyond its former boundaries, and the barriers of honor, rocked into atoms by the strong passion which shook his heart like an earthquake, crumbled around him. Then it was he declared ... [that] he would live henceforth for revenge and that his path should be marked with blood. So, now, here below, I will supply you with the extrapolation which has been made upon this theme recently by a scholar named John Lowe in “‘I am Joaquin!’ Space and Freedom in Yellow Bird’s THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF JOAQUIN MURIETA, THE CELEBRATED CALIFORNIA BANDIT,” which is to be found as pages 104-21 in Helen Jaskoski’s EARLY NATIVE AMERICAN WRITING: NEW CRITICAL ESSAYS (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996): Joaquin’s circle of self, thwarted in its effort to grow via the traditional American way (hard work, enterprise, and democratic leadership), has burst through into a new and larger circle through the passion of anger. His vow to cut a “bloody path” through the state as he avenges the wrongs done to him and his family presages ever-widening circles of spatial/criminal conquest. His path echoes several principles set down in the 1840s by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his seminal essay “CIRCLES”. In one of literary Transcendentalism’s prime expressions, Emerson gives space and confinement elemental circular forms, first in the human eye and then, significantly, in nature, for the “horizon” formed by the eyes is the second circle man knows, a “primary figure” that is repeated “without end” in nature. Here and in his other essays, Emerson maps out an imperial self that properly seeks expansion and power, a process generated from and paralleled by nature itself. The concept of the self expressed by ever-expanding concentric circles has a demonic side as well; at one point in “Circles,” Emerson relates his expanding circles of self to explosive anger, the kind Ridge’s readers see expressed by Joaquin Murieta: “But the heart refuses to be imprisoned; in its first and narrowest pulses it already tends outward with a vast force and to immense and innumerable expansions.” Theories of “self-reliance” and the “imperial self” fed into the ideology of manifest destiny. These ideas would find magnificent expression in other key works of the period, particularly in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s exploration of the “magic circles” of the self in THE SCARLET LETTER (1850 ) and in Herman Melville’s critique of unleashed darker elements of 36. A gold nugget weighing in at a full 162 pounds was discovered in the diggings in this year. This real event would have made a better story, of course, if for instance the guy who discovered it had weighed less than it did — but he didn’t. 144 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Emersonian and capitalist ideology, MOBY-DICK (1851 ), books published only a few years before JOAQUIN. Although it is beyond the scope of this essay, THE LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF JOAQUIN MURIETA, THE CELEBRATED CALIFORNIA BANDIT surely demands to be studied alongside these books and other masterworks of what we have called the “American Renaissance,” as well as with the works of newer members of the canon such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Harriet Jacobs.

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Charles Pickering created GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF ANIMALS AND PLANTS (Volume 15 of the Reports of the US South Seas Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842), and would create also a 2nd volume (which would be published privately in 1876).

Herman Melville’s THE ENCANTADAS; OR, ENCHANTED ISLES in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art gave Henry Thoreau a chance to learn about the Galápagos Islands (which Melville had visited in 1841 and revisited in 1842) as a symbol of desolation (Melville would recycle these stark images in his CLAREL: A POEM AND PILGRIMAGE IN THE HOLY LAND as a comparison for the deserts of the Holy

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Land), and Thomas Cholmondeley’s ULTIMA THULE; OR, THOUGHTS SUGGESTED BY A RESIDENCE IN NEW

ZEALAND gave him a chance to learn about New Zealand.37 It would have been possible for Thoreau to have learned, at this point, that while the Maori population of New Zealand was still radically declining, its English population had reached:

1846 12,000

1848 17,000

1850 23,000

1852 26,000

and would by this year of 1854 have probably arrived at more than 30,000 white souls “had not an

37. Cholmondeley, Thomas. ULTIMA THULE; | OR, | THOUGHTS | SUGGESTED BY | A RESIDENCE IN NEW ZEALAND | BY | THOMAS CHOLMONDELEY. | London: | John Chapman, 142, Strand. | MDCCCLIV. 8vo. Pp. iv, 344. “‘A new country ought to produce new thoughts.’ Speculations and suggestions of a scholarly kind; an outcome of the novel conditions which surround a settler in a new country. The Constitution, Church, society, education, occupation, history, &c., of New Zealand all pass under able review. The author was one of the first Canterbury settlers.” READ CHOLMONDELEY

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overwhelming attraction,” the Australia of the great gold rush years, “drawn away numbers of settlers.” The imagination of my own boyhood surrounded the tattooed natives with a halo of delightful mystery. Their warlike power was tremendous; their aspect ferocious; their cruelty unutterable: unfortunate white men seldom escaped, and then only half-roasted, from their horrid orgies; their priests were wizards, and they loved the flesh of the missionaries more than any other food. What principally struck Hongi, when in England, was the magnificence of King George, the multitude and splendour of his men-of-war, and the abundance of his swords and guns. He made up his mind that when he returned home he would become the King George of New Zealand; a determination which he afterwards carried out to the best of his power. A decidedly clever man he must have been. He managed to get supplies of muskets and ammunition by selling at Port Jackson the presents of his English friends. His warlike raids, in one of which he killed about 1500 of his enemies, were so judiciously carried on as never to derange the good understanding between him and the Church Missionary Society. Nor did the work of depopulation, which Hongi’s ambition had accelerated, cease with the death of that great savage. The causes lay far deeper than the accident of individual ambition. The native ferocity of a savage race was as yet untamed when they found themselves suddenly in possession of a new and extraordinary means of destruction; suddenly exposed to overwhelming temptations, —perplexed by strange thoughts, without the safeguard of religion; suddenly enchanted by visions of wealth and power, without the check of knowledge and experience. The shadow of the white man, yet afar off, fell like a blight upon them. The evil eye from across the ocean hit them. For twenty years the work of extirpation went on. The north, where the mightiest warriors dwelt, preyed upon the south, which retaliated in its turn. Thousands perished. Thousands were carried away captives. In the whole of the Middle Island, which is larger than England, there are now not above 3000 Maories. In short, the intestine warfare of the native New Zealanders so thinned their numbers, and wore away their strength, that they became only a miserable wreck of former greatness. And thus it became comparatively easy for the Europeans, finding them weakened and divided, to gain a firm foothold among them, and ultimately to appropriate their broad lands. Nevertheless, given the potential of the wool business, “If we rate the present number of white people at 30,000, as before stated, and account that they have more than doubled in the last eight years, we shall

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be warranted in concluding that these 30,000 will have become at least 60,000 by the year 1864.” The Maori population, now about 100,000, is yearly declining. Altogether, I should place the New Zealanders of 1864, white and dark faces together, at about 150,000. But this calculation is framed upon the supposition that the whites will continue to increase at a little less than the rate of the last few years, while very possibly they may increase much faster; in which case so also will their powers of production; and that the Maories will continue rapidly to decrease; possibly, however, the decay of that nation may yet be arrested. ...the Maories, as such, are disappearing. Those whom their own depopulating wars have left surviving, are dying very rapidly away. The number of the children is small; they do not replace their fathers. It is strange, on entering one of their villages, to see how all the finest specimens of humanity it contains are greatly past the flower of life. The young people look mean, squalid, and sickly; the children miserable in the extreme. Whether the decree is irrevocable; whether the finger of time can go back upon the dial, and the past can be so far recovered as to give this race yet a chance of prolonged existence, is a question which the experience of the next few years will enable us to answer.... Nothing can keep out white settlers, and wherever they come, the natives, as a fact, die away. So, in our woods and fields, even in England, we may observe that a new kind of tree or plant will elbow out another, which flourished before it was introduced. The antagonisms and antipathies of race and society, are but an extension of the phenomena of natural history. Cholmondeley was much preoccupied by the prospects of the productive middle class of New Zealand, and had a number of general thoughts to offer on the productive middle classes of the various colonies and former colonies of England: This middle class is all in all in a colony; everything moves to it, and everything depends upon it.... The United States is nothing else but an enormous, an overwhelming middle class, with a few proscribed gentlemen (a thousand, perhaps, who keep to themselves, too glad to be allowed to live), and millions of Negroes, and English, Irish, Scotch, Welsh, French, and German servants, to black their shoes, wheel their barrows, make bricks, &c. This, however, is unexampled prosperity. In the English colonies, generally, and in New Zealand in particular, the small business-capitalist is the man wanted. There are thousands of such men without openings in England.

While in Australia Richard Henry Horne brought out there a new edition of his ORION. He supported himself as a Goldfields Commissioner at the Waranga goldrush and named the township of Rushworth. During his time there he also reached a peaceful settlement with over 4,000 gold miners who had rioted over the payment of their mining license fee and, in his memoirs, stated that he believed this action, in light of the events at the Eureka Stockade a few months later, was never adequately recognized. Instead he would be dismissed from the civil service for erratic behavior.

Henry Trevanion died.

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December 28, Thursday: Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, back from the Pacific, had expected to be greeted as a hero, and that hadn’t happened, or at least hadn’t happened to Perry’s satisfaction. –So he had turned to Nathaniel Hawthorne, the big-name ghostwriter of the era, asking for a book about the incredible intrepidity of his intimidation of the Japanese, casting himself as the great white hope. On this day Hawthorne commented in his journal, “It would be a very desirable labor for a young literary man, or for that matter, an old one; for the world can scarcely have in reserve a less hackneyed theme than Japan.” (Hawthorne, strangely reluctant to explore the mentality of the Great White Shark, would sic the stuffed-shirt wannabee on Herman Melville, his transparent excuse being that Melville was great at writing that Pacific stuff, and then this commodious Commodore would attempt to himself author this book about himself — excreting what has been said to be a wooden monstrosity.) US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS

On Nantucket Island: Captain Gardiner carried Henry Thoreau in his carriage to Siasconset and they went up to the top of the lighthouse at Sancoty Head and then visited the Athenaeum’s museum, seeing the “various South Sea implements, etc. etc., brought home by the whalers.” In the evening Thoreau delivered “WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” before the Athenaeum.

THOREAU’S SERMON

[Various versions of “LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE”, variously titled, would be delivered:

•“WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” on December 6, 1854 at Railroad Hall in Providence RI •“WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” on December 26, 1854 in the New Bedford MA Lyceum •“WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” on December 28, 1854 at the Athenaeum on Nantucket Island • On January 4, 1855 in the Worcester Lyceum, as “The Connection between Man’s Employment and His Higher Life” •“WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” on February 14, 1855 in the Concord Lyceum •“WHAT SHALL IT PROFIT” on November 16, 1856 for the Eagleswood community • “Getting a Living” on December 18, 1856 in the vestry of the Congregational Church of Amherst, New Hampshire •“LIFE MISSPENT” on Sunday morning, October 9, 1859 to the Reverend Theodore Parker’s 28th Congregational Society in Boston Music Hall •“LIFE MISSPENT” on Sunday, September 9, 1860 at Welles Hall in Lowell MA.]

1855

In ISRAEL POTTER; HIS FIFTY YEARS OF EXILE, Herman Melville launched an all-out satiric onslaught against everything that Benjamin Franklin had stood for.

The Melvilles, in financial desperation despite these new publications, offered their home “Arrowhead” to local officials as a possible site for an insane asylum which was in the planning process.

August: Henry Thoreau wrote to George William Curtis.

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Mr Editor, You say that you had no idea that the Cape Cod [paper] “was to be expanded into a book”. It has not been expanded— It is no longer than it was when I told you sent you the first[ ]pages & told you of its length though you had not inquired about it. You say there is enough for 4 numbers of your magazine still on hand— I have sent some 208 pages in all & you have printed about 137 of them in 3 numbers. I write this merely in self defence & not to induce you to print it. Will you please send to me the remainder of the MSS by express— Yrs Henry D Thoreau

Thoreau’s “The Beach” appeared in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art. READ THIS ARTICLE TIMELINE OF CAPE COD

Herman Melville’s “The Bell-Tower” appeared anonymously in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art. This was the first short story inspired by Mary Shelly’s FRANKENSTEIN; OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS. In the Melville rendition, a machine-man which has been constructed to strike the hours in a Renaissance Italian bell tower destroys its creator. The summation sentence: “And so pride went before the fall.”

CONSULT THIS ISSUE

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December: This month’s issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. CONSULT THIS ISSUE

Herman Melville placed BENITO CERENO in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art — which poses an interesting question about the nature of human freedom in its relation to a market economy. CONSULT THIS ISSUE

1856

Herman Melville’s THE PIAZZA TALES. In addition, this year Melville finished THE CONFIDENCE MAN: HIS MASQUERADE and in October began to journey abroad alone, for his health.38 From Scotland he went to Liverpool where he attempted one last meeting with Nathaniel Hawthorne (whom he told he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated”), and then sojourned on in Malta, Greece, Egypt, Palestine, and Italy. “Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand!” VOLCANISM

April: The Melvilles sold half their farm “Arrowhead” in north-western Massachusetts in the vicinity of Mount Greylock.

38. His father-in-law Lemuel Shaw loaned him $1,500 for this journey, which would be the equivalent today of loaning someone $150,000 without security so that they could go off on a world tour (in other words, this was not something that anyone in their right mind would contemplate doing without having some really good reason –even if they never tell anyone what their reason is– some reason such as “I need to get you the hell away from my daughter.”). You may consult a record of this journey in JOURNAL UP THE STRAITS, OCTOBER 1, 1856-MAY 5, 1857, which has been published in 1935. 152 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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May: Herman Melville’s story “The Apple-Tree Table; or, Original Spiritual Manifestations” appeared in the May issue of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art (VI, pages 465-75). It would appear that Melville had been intrigued by the same story that had fascinated Henry Thoreau, of the antique wooden tabletop in Berkshire County from which insects had gnawed their way, but had taken the story in a different direction.

WALDEN: Every one has heard the story which has gone the rounds of New England, of a strong and beautiful bug which came out of the dry leaf of an old table of apple-tree wood, which had stood in a farmer’s kitchen for sixty years, first in Connecticut, and afterward in Massachusetts, –from an egg deposited in the living tree many years earlier still, as appeared by counting the annual layers beyond it; which was heard gnawing out for several weeks, hatched perchance by the heat of an urn. Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb, –heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board,– may unexpectedly come forth amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

ENTOMBED LIFE

Did Melville learn of the incident through WALDEN’s concluding chapter? Melville’s treatment was comic, and was intended in derogation of the “rapping” frenzy inspired by “the Fox girls.” He pushed this “mysterious table” and its “unaccountable tickings” not in the direction of “resurrection and immortality” chosen by Thoreau, but in the direction of depicting this sort of spiritualism as a follow-on manifestation of the sad New England history of witchcraft persecutions.

September 1, Monday: William Ellerton Alger was born at Boston.

Henry Thoreau wrote to Bronson Alcott in Walpole, New Hampshire.

Concord Sep 1st ’56 Mr Alcott, I remember that in the spring you invited me to visit you. I feel in- clined to spend a day or two with you and on your hills at this sea- son, returning perhaps by way of Brattleboro. What if I should take the cars for Walpole next Friday morning? Are you at home?— and will it be convenient and agreeable to you to see me then?— I will await an answer. I am but poor company, and it will not be worth the while for you to put yourself out on my account; yet from time to time I have some thoughts which would be the better for an airing. I also wish to get some hints from September on the Connecticut to help me under-

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stand that season on the Concord;– to snuff the musty fragrance of the decaying year in the primitive woods. There is considerable cel- lar room in my nature for such stores, a whole row of bins waiting to be filled before I can celebrate my Thanksgiving. Mould is the richest of soils, yet I am not mould. It will always be found that one flourishing institution exists & battens on another mouldering one. The Present itself is parasitic to this extent. Your fellow traveller Henry D. Thoreau

Lemuel Shaw, Herman Melville’s father-in-law, wrote to his son Samuel that:

I suppose you have been informed by some of the family, how very ill, Herman has been. It is manifest to me from Elizabeth’s letters, that she has felt great anxiety about him. When he is deeply engaged in one of his literary works, he confines him[self] to hard study many hours in the day, with little or no exercise, & this specially in winter for a great many days together. He probably thus overworks himself & brings on severe nervous affections. He has been advised strongly to break off this labor for some time, & take a voyage or a journey, & endeavor to recruit....

October: This month’s issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. CONSULT THIS ISSUE

Herman Melville left on an extended tour of the Near East, Greece, and Italy. Lemuel Shaw lent/gave his son- in-law $1,500 to pay for his trip. Just before he left, his brother Allan signed an agreement on his behalf with Dix & Edwards to publish THE CONFIDENCE MAN: HIS MASQUERADE. The initial step in Melville’s voyage took him to Liverpool, where he would get a boat to Constantinople. While there he would visit the Hawthornes.

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November: During this month Herman Melville visited the Hawthornes in England. Nathaniel would write in his journal:

A week ago last Monday, Herman Melville came to see me at the Consulate, looking much as he used to do (a little paler, and perhaps a little sadder), in a rough outside coat, and with his characteristic gravity and reserve of manner.... [He] has not been well, of late; he has been affected with neuralgic complaints in his head and limbs, and no doubt has suffered from too constant literary occupation, pursued without much success, latterly; and his writings, for a long while past, have indicated a morbid state of mind.... I do not wonder that he found it necessary to take an airing through the world, after so many years of toilsome pen- labor and domestic life, following upon so wild and adventurous a youth as his was.

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November 18, Tuesday: From the Rhode Island diary of John Hamlin Cady (1838-1914): “A panther was shot in Greenwich on Sunday morning early, supposed to be one which escaped from a menagerie 2 years ago.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in his journal:

... on the intervening day, we took a pretty long walk together, and sat down in a hollow among the sand hills (sheltering ourselves from the high, cool wind) and smoked a cigar. Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he had “pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated;” but still he does not seem to rest in that anticipation; and, I think, will never rest until he gets hold of a definite belief. It is strange how he persists — and has persisted ever since I knew him, and probably long before — in wandering to and fro over these deserts, as dismal and monotonous as the sand hills amid which we were sitting. He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief; and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.

He sailed from Liverpool in a steamer on Tuesday, leaving his trunk behind in my consulate, and taking only a carpet-bag to hold all his travelling-gear. This is the next best thing to going naked; and as he wears his beard and moustache, and so needs no dressing-case — nothing but a tooth-brush — I do not know a more independent personage. He learned his travelling habits by drifting about all over the South Sea, with no other clothes or equipage than a red flannel shirt and a pair of duck trowsers. Yet we seldom see men of less criticizable manners than he.

November 20: In Liverpool, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne had attempted one last meeting, and then Herman had gone on toward Malta, Greece, Egypt, and Palestine.39 Nathaniel wrote in his journal:

he can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief: and he is too honest and courageous not to try to do one or the other. If he were a religious man, he would be one of the most truly religious and reverential; he has a very high and noble nature, and better worth immortality than most of us.

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December: Herman Melville toured Constantinople and Egypt.

Putnam’s Monthly Magazine of American Literature, Science and Art expressed the unsettled striving in which American life consisted: The word is, “Go ahead; be something; make a pile, and make your mark.”

1857

The Milan-Venice railway was completed, thus linking Venice by rail with other important (if less wonderful) European capitals.

Herman Melville continuing on tour abroad, arrived in Palestine.40 Edward Dahlberg has described this visit in the following manner:

Melville traveled to the Holy Land for surcease and grace, to tarry at the sepulcher, at Bethesda, to gaze at Kedron’s flow; but stayed to repine at the scrofulous Cavalry relics, the cross-mongers, “Cloaca of remotest day.” Melville found an impious, lousy Gethsemane.

Meanwhile, stateside, his THE CONFIDENCE-MAN: HIS MASQUERADE appeared. This is a long tale now seldom read except by literature grad students, in which “an impression of Thoreau” as “Egbert” has been said to function as a minor character.41

Within a few months after the publication of this book a partner at the Dix & Edwards publishing house dipped his hand in the till, and the firm was forced out of business.

During this year or the following one, Melville would continue on tour abroad, visited Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands, return to England, and sail for home. In the US again, he would lecture on crowd-pleasing topics such as “Statues in Rome.” It must have been entirely wearing.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, intending to go to the Amazon, journeyed down the Mississippi toward New Orleans and met the steamboat pilot Horace Bixby. He became a pilots’ apprentice.

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41. Melville also satirized Ralph Waldo Emerson as “Mark Winsome.” To his perception, in their writings these two had presented false characters of themselves to the world. They had not actually been their literary personae:

Their so-called “philosophy” masks Yankee shrewdness and cold-blooded selfishness under the names of plain dealing and self-reliance.

The “whodunit” in this book is alleged to be that the reader needs to figure out which of the passengers on the river boat is the confidence trickster, with the suspicion being allowed that all of them are tricksters in the sense that each person negotiates his or her way through life by projecting a persona for his or her own purposes. Big wow. If this writing indicates anything to me at all, however, it indicates that Melville didn’t know Henry Thoreau’s thought very well, although the line “War would be left to the red and black ants” in Melville’s story “The Armies of the Wilderness” does suggest that this author had made at least a superficial scan of the “Brute Neighbors” chapter in WALDEN. 158 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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David Livingstone’s book of MISSIONARY TRAVELS was published. He had sent back to Europe a dried tsetse fly Glossina palpalis (Isaiah 7:18-25) and a portrait of this “scourge” appeared on the frontispiece. The head of the fly had come off in transport and had been remounted, so in this frontispiece the head of the tsetse actually is upside down. At that time it was supposed that the fly was deadly to domestic livestock because it injected a debilitating poison, and nothing was known of the Trypanosoma brucei microorganism of which it is the vector. It is, of course, entirely due to the protection of a band across middle Africa from the depredations of humans bringing domestic livestock that we owe the continued existence of so many of the large veldt animals of Africa, such as the lion, the elephant, the rhinoceros, etc. And it is, of course, entirely due to the fact that this region of Africa has been protected from us that we refer to the tsetse (named after its buzzing sound) as a “scourge” and have been attempting repeatedly to eradicate it.

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Giuseppi Mazzini helped plot the Carlo Pisacane landing in the Reggio Callabria of Italy — which proved to be a disaster.

Demolition, in New-York, of the Broadway Tabernacle, a Congregational church on Worth St. near Broadway erected in 1836, which had hosted the annual meetings of numerous moral reform groups during the 1830s and 1840s. The congregation had built a new tabernacle further up Broadway. (I don’t have an image of what the

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avenue looked like in 1857, but what follows is how it would appear in 1860.)

January: Harriet Beecher Stowe visited the home of the Massachusetts sculptor William Wetmore Story in Rome. He was at work at the time on the statue “Cleopatra,” which Stowe characterized as being like a “heavy thunder- cloud” with “lumbering weight and fullness of passion.”42 At one of the breakfasts that Story threw for the American expat crowd and tourists Stowe amused all with what Mary Beecher Perkins would characterize as a “sermon.” Stowe’s little presentation was about Sojourner Truth, was based upon the visit to Stone Cabin in Andover, and was in dialect. Truth, when she would belatedly learn of this, would object to the embellishment of her — that never in her life had she called a white woman “Honey.”

Herman Melville was touring Palestine and Jordan.

February: Early in this month Herman Melville toured Greece.

Although Nathaniel Hawthorne attempted to resign as US Consul, he would need to continue to provide service in Liverpool.

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Mid-February through Mid-April: Herman Melville toured Italy. He must have been feeling grand: “Give me a condor’s quill! Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand!” VOLCANISM

March: The Treaty of Paris was signed in March, ending the Anglo-Persian war. The Treaty granted independence to Afghanistan.

Samuel Adler, newly arrived from Germany, became the rabbi of New-York’s Emannu-El congregation.

THE CONFIDENCE MAN: HIS MASQUERADE appeared on bookstore shelves in both New-York and London. Though it is doubtful that Herman Melville would have ranked it as high in purpose as MOBY-DICK and PIERRE, it was certainly not just a “pot-boiler.” The stories take place on a steamer, filled with passengers, traveling up and down the Mississippi River — no doubt similar to the steamer Melville himself had traveled on in 1840. The confidence man, appearing in a variety of disguises, swindles people by gaining their trust and then capitalizing on their greediness, virtuousness, etc. No one was exempt: the believer, the skeptic, the lover, the misanthrope — all humans were fools. It’s not surprising that Melville should have written this book when he did: sick, “damned by dollars” more than ever, with evidence mounting that he was never going to be considered a great author — he had ample reason to feel out of sorts.

April 1, Wednesday: Herman Melville’s THE CONFIDENCE-MAN was issued. This book would fall stillborn from the press, its publishers would be forced into bankruptcy — and this particular author would not be able to publish any more novels.

Henry Thoreau wrote to Friend Daniel Ricketson. Concord Ap. 1 1857 Dear Ricketson, I got your note of welcome night before last. Channing is not here, at least I have not seen nor heard of him, but depend on meeting him in New Bedford. I expect, if the weather is favorable, to take the 4.30 train from Boston tomorrow, Thursday, [p]m—for I hear of no noon train, and shall be glad to find your wagon at Tarkiln Hill, for I see it will be rather late for going across lots.

Alcott was here last

Page 2 week, and will probably visit New Bedford within a week or 2. I have seen all the spring signs you mention and a few more, even here. Nay I heard one frog peep nearly a week ago, methinks the very first one in all this region. I wish that there were a few more signs of spring in myself--however, I take it that there are as many within us as we think we hear without us. I am decent for a steady pace but not yet for a race. I have a little cold at present, & you speak of rheumatism about the head & shoul- ders. Your frost

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Page 3 is not quite out. I suppose that the earth itself has a little cold & rheumatism about these times, but all these things together produce a very fair general result. In a concert, you know, we must sing our parts feebly sometimes that we may not injure the general effect. I shouldn't wonder if my two-year old invalidity had been a positively charming feature to some amateurs favorably located. Why not a blasted man, as well as a blasted tree, on your lawn? If you should happen not to see me by the train named, do not go

Page 4 again, but wait at home for me, or a note from Yrs Henry D Thoreau

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Friend Daniel Ricketson to his journal, in New Bedford with Bronson Alcott:

Spent the day at home with Mr. Alcott; I find him a genial, highly gifted man. H.D. Thoreau arrived to- night from Concord; met him at Tarkiln Hill.

It was during one of the gatherings of Ricketson, Ellery Channing, Alcott, etc. at Ricketson’s home during this period that the famous incident occurred, in which Henry Thoreau sang and danced in the parlor and heartily trod upon Alcott’s toes. Thoreau had grown a full beard and Ricketson, who was 5'3'' himself, was thinking that a long beard was inappropriate on a short man. The Improvised Dance Like the Indian dance of old, Far within the forest shade, Showing forth the spirit bold

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That no foeman e’er dismayed; Like the dancing of the hours, Tripping on with merry feet, Triumphing o’er earthly power, Yet with footsteps all must greet; Like the Fauns and Satyrs, too, Nimbly leaping in the grove, Now unseen and then in view, As among the trees they move; Like the leaves by whirlwind tossed In some forest’s valley wide, Scattered by the Autumn frost, Whirling madly, side by side; Thus, and still mysterious more, Our philosopher did prance, Skipping on our parlor floor In his wild, improvised dance.

April 21, Tuesday: Lemuel Shaw, Jr., Herman Melville’s brother-in-law, wrote his brother Samuel:

Elizabeth has gone to Pittsfield to set her house in readiness to receive her husband whom she expects sometime in May. A new book by Herman called “The Confidence Man” has recently been published. I have not read it; but have looked at it & dipped into it, & fear it belongs [to] that horribly uninteresting class of nonsensical books he is given to writing — where there are pages of crude theory & speculation to every line of narrative — & interspersed with strained & ineffectual attempts to be humorous. I wish he could or would do better, when he went away he was dispirited & ill — & this book was left completed in the publisher’s hands.

Henry Thoreau received a letter from Eben J. LoomisEBEN J. LOOMIS presumably in Cambridge.

April 21. Tuesday. Mr. Loomis writes me that he saw two barn swallows [Barn Swallow Hirundo rustica] in Cambridge April 1st! I have the Corema Conradii from Plymouth, in bloom. It snows hard all day. If it did not melt so fast, would be a foot deep. As it is, is about three inches on a level.

April/May: Late in April, Herman Melville toured Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands.

In Nicaragua, Commander C.H. Davis of the United States Navy, with some marines, received the surrender of William Walker and his gang of filibusters, who had been attempting to get control of the country, thus protecting these Americans from the retaliation of the native allies who had been opposing their intrusion. US MILITARY INTERVENTIONS

May: In Liverpool, England, briefly, Herman Melville again met with Nathaniel Hawthorne.

May 20, Wednesday: Herman Melville arrived back in New-York.

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May 20. Began to rain the latter part of yesterday, and rains all day against all desire and expectation, raising the river and, in low land, rotting the seed. Gardeners wish that their land had not been planted nor plowed. Postpone your journey till the May storm is over. It has been confidently asserted and believed that if the cold in the winter exceeded a certain degree it surely killed the peach blossoms. Last winter we had greater cold than has ever been generally observed here, and yet it is a remarkable spring for peach blossoms; thus once for all disproving that assertion. Everything in the shape of a peach tree blossoms this season, even a mutilated shrub on the railroad causeway, sprung from a stone which some passenger cast out. Nevertheless the lowest limbs, which were covered by the drifts, have blossomed much the earliest and fullest, as usual, and this after-blow is quite unexpected. Peach trees are revealed along fences where they were quite unobserved before. The expression in Sophocles’ Œdipus at Colonos, “White Colonos,” said to refer to the silvery soil, reminded me at first of the tracts now whitened by the pyrus blossoms, which may be mistaken for hoary rocks. Vide this description of Colonos. Have all the Canada plums that striking pink color at the base of the blossoms at last? I find that the corydalis sprig which I brought home five days ago keeps fresh and blossoms remarkably well in water, — its delicate bright flesh-colored or pink flowers and glaucous leaves! How suddenly, after all, pines seem to shoot up and fill the pastures! I wonder that the farmers do not earlier encourage their growth. To-day, perchance, as I go through some run-out pasture, I observe many young white pines dotting the field, where last year I had noticed only blackberry vines; but I see that many are already destroyed or injured by the cows which have dived into them to scratch their heads or for sport (such is their habit; they break off the leading shoot and bend down the others of different evergreens), or perchance where the farmer has been mowing them down, and I think the owner would rather have a pasture here than a wood- lot. A year or two later, as I pass through the same field, I am surprised to find myself in a flourishing young wood-lot, from which the cows are now carefully fenced out, though there are many open spaces, and I perceive how much further advanced it would have been if the farmer had been more provident and had begun to abet nature a few years earlier. It is surprising by what leaps — two or three feet in a season — the pines stretch toward the sky, affording shelter also to various hardwoods which plant themselves in their midst. I do not know a white pine in the town which has been set out twenty-five years.

November: The Great Eastern, double the length and triple the tonnage of the largest hull afloat, began to slip down the greased ways into the sewage-laden Thames. A crowd of 100,000 ticket-paying spectators lined the docks. The ship slid four feet toward the river, killing two men at a winch, and stopped. It would require three months of shoving and tugging and levering and greasing to get that bulk into the water. When fully laden, at 22,000 tons, she would outweigh the 197 ships that had defeated the Spanish Armada. Walt Whitman and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow would write poems to her. Her innards would be subdivided into five floating hotels intended to service a total of 4,000 passengers at a time — except that these passengers would never be attracted on board because the ship would quickly acquire a well-deserved reputation as not only slow and inconvenient but also accident-prone. However, that was for the future. At this point Herman Melville was anticipating, when he noted in his diary: “Vast toy. No substance.”

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1858

Herman Melville continuing on tour abroad, visited Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands, returned to England, and sailed for home. In the US again, he lectured on topics such as “Statues in Rome.”

Speaking of statues in Rome, here is Harriet Goodhue Hosmer’s marble confection “Will-o-the-Wisp,” done in her Rome studios during this year:

(One wishes that someone had suggested she do it in butter, or sugar or anything more or less edible.)

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1859

Herman Melville was still lecturing on topics such as “Statues in Rome” and “The South Seas” when, in this year, a harpoon finally hit a vital area in Mocha Dick, an actual sperm whale that over the years had caused the actual deaths of more than 30 whaling men. During this year, also, the Reverend Henry Whitney Bellows of All Souls Church in New-York, Unitarian minister of Herman and Elizabeth Melville, went to the Harvard Divinity School without a harpoon to lecture a select group of alumni about “The Suspense of Faith.”

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1860

Ailing, Lemuel Shaw retired after thirty years as Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Assured of an inheritance from his father-in-law, Herman Melville sailing around the Horn on the clipper Meteor, abandoned the voyage at San Francisco, then settled in New-York.

This was the San Francisco he had found:

Since about 1855 somebody had created a MINING SCENE WITH A FLUME AND MINERS, INCLUDING A CALIFORNIA INDIAN (?) IN FOREGROUND. VIEW THIS DAGUERREOTYPE

During this year Melville had “Misgivings” about our fair land linked so tightly to human slavery: When ocean-clouds over inland hills Sweep storming in late autumn brown, And horror the sodden valley fills, And the spire falls crashing in the town, I muse upon my country’s ills– The tempest bursting from the waste of Time On the world’s fairest hope linked with man’s foulest crime.

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Nature’s dark side is heeded now— (Ah! Optimist-cheer disheartened flown)— A child may read the moody brow Of yon black mountain lone. With shouts the torrents down the gorges go, And storms are formed behind the storm we feel: The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the driving keel.

1862

March 9, Sunday: The fighting at Hampton Roads continued into another day.

In an attempt to reduce the North’s great naval advantage, Confederate engineers had converted a scuttled Union frigate, the U.S.S. Merrimac, into an iron-sided vessel rechristened the C.S.S. Virginia. On this date, in the first naval engagement between ironclad ships, the Monitor fought the Virginia to a draw, but not before the Virginia had sunk two wooden Union warships off Norfolk, Virginia. Here is Herman Melville’s “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight”: Plain be the phrase, yet apt the verse, More ponderous than nimble; For since grimed War here laid aside His painted pomp, ’twould ill befit Overmuch to ply The rhyme’s barbaric cymbal. Hail to victory without the gaud Of glory; zeal that needs no fans Of banners; plain mechanic power Plied cogently in War now placed- Where War belongs- Among the trades and artisans. Yet this was battle, and intense- Beyond the strife of fleets heroic; Deadlier, closer, calm ’mid storm; No passion; all went on by crank, Pivot, and screw, And calculations of caloric. Needless to dwell; the story’s known. The ringing of those plates on plates Still ringeth round the world- The clangor of that blacksmith’s fray. The anvil-din Resounds this message from the Fates: War shall yet be, and to the end; But war-paint shows the streaks of weather; War shall yet be, but warriors Are now but operatives; War’s made Less grand than Peace, And a singe runs through lace and feather.

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April 6-7: Some 23,741 Americans killed one another in the woods around Shiloh Baptist Church near Pittsburg Landing in Tennessee. On the first day of this confrontation, Confederate forces attacked Union forces under General Ulysses S. Grant. By nightfall the federal troops were almost defeated yet, during the night, reinforcements arrived, and by the next morning the Union forces were able to dominate the field.

When the Confederate forces retreated, the exhausted federal forces did not follow.

The corpse of Dr. Josiah Clark Nott’s and Sarah (Sally) Deas Nott’s son Henry Nott was left among those littering this field.

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“It is a consolation to those who mourn their loss and erect this monument to know that they died in defence [sic] of Liberty and left behind untarnished names.”

The following requiem poem would be prepared long afterward by Herman Melville. Skimming lightly, wheeling still, The swallows fly low Over the field in clouded days, The forest-field of Shiloh— Over the field where April rain Solaced the parched ones stretched in pain Through the pause of night That followed the Sunday fight Around the church of Shiloh— The church so lone, the log built one, That echoed to many a parting groan And natural prayer Of dying foemen mingled there— Foemen at morn, but friends at eve— Fame or country least they care: (What like a bullet can undeceive!) But now they lie low, While over them the swallows skim, And all is hushed at Shiloh.

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John Wesley Powell lost his right arm as a Union officer at the Battle of Shiloh. Our history texts now record that General Grant’s Union armies were victorious in a battle near Shiloh Baptist Church.

Later on during this year, not having heard of their father and husband Willard Woolson for more than a year, the Woolson family of New York would trace him to Minnesota, where he was being treated after receiving a leg wound, allegedly at the battle of Shiloh. The leg would be amputated and Mr. Woolson would soon die.43

43. If this soldier actually had been wounded in the leg in Tennessee in April, what on earth was he doing in Minnesota later on in the same year — and how in hell had he made it all that distance on his wounded leg? Something in this family legend simply doesn’t add up. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 173 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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July 1: The “7-Days” battle before Richmond, Virginia came to an end with General Lee’s defeat at Malvern Hill (known to Southerners as Poindexter’s Farm): Ye elms that wave on Malvern Hill In prime of morn and May, Recall ye how McClellan’s men Here stood at bay? While deep within yon forest dim Our rigid comrades lay — Some with the cartridge in their mouth, Others with fixed arms lifted South — Invoking so The cypress glades? Ah wilds of woe! The spires of Richmond, late beheld Through rifts in musket-haze, Were closed from view in clouds of dust On leaf-walled ways, Where streamed our wagons in caravan; And the Seven Nights and Days Of march and fast, retreat and fight, Pinched our grimed faces to ghastly plight — Does the elm wood Recall the haggard beards of blood? The battle-smoked flag, with stars eclipsed, We followed (it never fell!) — In silence husbanded our strength — Received their yell; Till on this slope we patient turned With cannon ordered well; Reverse we proved was not defeat; But, ah, the sod what thousands meet! — Does Malvern Wood Bethink itself, and muse and brood? We elms of Malvern Hill Remember every thing; But sap the twig will fill: Wag the world how it will, Leaves must be green in spring.

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in excess of 20,000. When in 1866 Herman Melville would write about this battle as above, he would point out in BATTLE-PIECES AND ASPECTS OF THE WAR that humans were not wise enough to leave war “to the red and black ants” of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS (his readings of Henry Thoreau’s writings were typically shallow), and he would dedicate his poems only to the 300,000 Union soldiers who had died during the violence making no mention of the roughly equivalent number of Confederate soldiers who had died roughly equivalent deaths during the violence.

Speaking of typically shallow readings of Thoreau’s writings — meanwhile in Concord Ellen Emerson was noticing that “Father is constantly engaged now in writing and reading about Mr. Thoreau,” and jotted down the information that neither her father Waldo nor her mother Lidian had the practical background to have been able to grasp Thoreau’s commonsense remark about circumstantial evidence (the “trout in the milk” remark).

The daughter had had to explain to the parents about the commercial practice of the watering down of milk.

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According to John d’Entremont’s SOUTHERN EMANCIPATOR: MONCURE CONWAY, THE AMERICAN YEARS 1832-1865 (NY: Oxford UP, 1987, pages 167-171), after having procured land for a black settlement, the Reverend Moncure Daniel Conway ventured back to Stafford County, Virginia to search out his father’s abandoned slaves and lead them to the safety of Yellow Springs, Ohio. With the assistance of Charles Sumner and Salmon P. Chase and with a Union Army pass in h is pocket, he led a group back through Washington DC. They crossed Baltimore on foot, avoiding angry crowds, and he put them on board a train. Conway would record that a total of 31 freedmen made it safely all the way to Yellow Springs.

This image of Eliza Gwinn and Dunmore Gwinn, former Conway slaves, was made in Yellow Springs, Ohio:

July 13, Monday through July 16, Thursday: Antebellum white anti-slavery people were forced to have categorically excessive positive feelings for the American black as victim, because the race issue was so troublesome and dangerous that the only alternative attitude available to them would have been an unacceptably bitter resentment of American blacks in all their troublesomeness. In fact this submerged resentment did from time to time come to the surface, as in the New-York anti-draft riot of this summer, and ever and again would need to be pushed down into the cultural unconsciousness. During this four-day period in steamy New-York, a largely Irish proslavery Copperhead mob attacked the Colored Orphan Asylum at 5th Avenue and 43d Street, driving the orphans into the street. One of the orphans, ten year old, by the name of Jane Barry, was killed when the rioters were heaving a bureau out of a window and by accident it landed on top of her. TIMELINE OF ACCIDENTS

During the four days in which this sort of thing would be going on, the mob would also lynch some citizens of African descent, lightening people up by hanging them from lamp-posts. Sometimes they lightened them up by cutting off their fingers and toes. In regard to a Mr. William Jones whom they hanged from a tree on Clarkson Street, they lit a fire beneath him as he swung. After they had strongarmed a disabled black coachman by the name of Abraham Franklin from his home and strung him up in this manner, an 18-year-old Irishman by the name of Patrick Butler dragged the corpse of Abraham Franklin through the streets by the genitals, to general applause. The mob drove some

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blacks into the river, where they drowned. The Roman Catholic bishop there, John Joseph Hughes, who had

been born in Ireland, helped bring this to a stop, but mostly, what brought it to a stop was the arrival of US Army troops still alive after an intense struggle which had taken place at Gettysburg PA (July 2d and 3d) to take military control over the streets of the city.44 For these four days the city police made themselves very scarce –precisely as the white-dominated LAPD would make itself scarce while the 1992 riots in LA were starting, though perhaps for quite opposite tactical reasons– while these gangs of “outraged citizens” went into black neighborhoods and set them to the torch. The question of the day among these outraged whites was, “Is it not outrageous that Irish men are being drafted by the Union government in Washington DC, merely to send them off and endanger their precious lives in order to obtain freedom for these unworthy black people?” In other words, these race riots were draft riots, with anger directed against the distant government that was offering to let rich men escape the draft for a cash payment of $300, and yet were redirected against innocent and helpless local people.

44. This factoid has been offered by some in a demonstration that it is not categorically correct to presume that during this period, due to the intensity of the economic competition, the American Irish were hopelessly hostile to American blacks on a racial basis. If it makes you feel better to suppose this, fine, but factor into your thinking that once upon a time during a correspondence with the convert to Catholicism Orestes Augustus Brownson, Archbishop John Joseph Hughes declared himself as perplexed and frustrated at the insanity of a crusade to end human enslavement in America: [S]ometimes it has appeared to us that abolitionism ... stands in need of a strait jacket and the humane protection of a lunatic asylum. 178 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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The complex of events would be described by Herman Melville in “The House-Top: A Night Piece”: No sleep. The sultriness pervades the air And blinds the brain — a dense oppression, such As tawny tigers feel in matted shades, Vexing their blood and making apt for ravage. Beneath the stars the roofy desert spreads Vacant as Libya. All is hushed near by. Yet fitfully from far breaks a mixed surf Of muffled sound, the Atheist roar of riot. Yonder, where parching Sirius set in drought, Balefully glares red Arson — there — and there. The town is taken by its rats — ship-rats And rats of the wharves. All civil charms And priestly spells which late held hearts in awe — Fear-bound, subjected to a better sway Than sway of self; these like a dream dissolve And man rebounds whole aeons back in nature. Hail to the low dull rumble, dull and dead, And ponderous drag that jars the wall. Wise Draco comes, deep in the midnight roll Of black artillery; he comes, though late; In code corroborating Calvin’s creed And cynic tyrannies of honest kings; He comes, nor parlies; and the Town, redeemed, Gives thanks devout; nor, being thankful, heeds The grimy slur on the Republic’s faith implied, Which holds that man is naturally good, And — more — is Nature’s Roman, never to be scourged. The rioters, it would turn out, had been able to disrupt police communications merely by clipping single telegraph lines. This would have the effect of forcing the police to become intensely aware of their need to establish multiple independent routes for information flow: redundancy. And it was this sort of concern for the reliability which comes only through redundancy which would eventually lead to Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart’s proposal in 1950 that we establish a national information network. Just as it was the police in 1863 that first grasped the need for local redundancy, it would be the military in 1950 that would first grasp the need for national redundancy. This was achieved by asking the military hard questions such as “How does the East Coast give orders to the West Coast after Castro has taken out the Midwest?” and the result would be an item in the development of ELECTRIC WALDEN technology, the military ARPAnet of 1969. Commenting on the Scorsese movie “Gangs of New York”: “In my own research of New York history, through first-person accounts and newspaper reports, I have found that our past was often at least as violent and squalid, if not more so, than the movie depicts.” — Kevin Baker

Eric Foner refers to this event as “the largest civil insurrection in American history other than the South’s rebellion. Nevertheless it has been the sort of non-event which Mary McCarthy, writing in 1946, would term, like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the phenomenon of the “hole in human history.” There is such a hole in human history, it would seem, at every point at which an atrocity has been committed by some group which then “won.” —For instance, the hole in Concord history which resulted from the racial mass murder on the watershed of Walden Pond as of the Massachusetts race war in 1675-1676.—For instance, the hole in human history which resulted from the use of Christian Dakota as hostages during this race war of 1863. Writing thirty years after the fact of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Ralph Lapp, who had worked on the A-bomb, would ask “If the memory of things is to deter, where is that memory?” He would add that “Hiroshima has been taken out of the American conscience, eviscerated, extirpated.” We might easily say “The New-York draft riot of 1863 has been taken out of the American conscience, eviscerated, extirpated.”

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Speaking of holes in American history, one hole was left when the bulk of the private papers of Friend Isaac T. Hopper were destroyed in the sacking and torching of the home of his daughter Abby Hopper Gibbons. The home was known to the Copperhead rioters to have been one that had housed antislavery activists. Abby herself was not endangered by the proslavery New-York rioters because at the time she was nursing wounded at the front. However, we have been forced to reconstruct the detail of Friend Hopper’s life out of what Lydia Maria Child had included in her 1853 biography of him.45

Here are these New-York draft riots, as they would be described in Frederick Douglass’s 1893 LIFE AND TIMES: This [race prejudice] was especially true of New York, where there was a large Irish population. The attempt to enforce the draft in that city was met by mobs, riot, and bloodshed ... the Irish began to hang, stab, and murder the negroes in New York. Douglass had come to detest the American Irish and lower-class Catholics in general. At one point he would become reflective, attempting to figure out why it was that these marginal whites were “among our bitterest persecutors.” Here is his rumination, in which, to put the matter in the vernacular, his concept was simply that what had been going around had been coming around: It is said that a negro always makes the most cruel negro driver.... The Irishman has been persecuted for his religion about as rigorously as the black man has been for his color. * * * They [the immigrant Irish, arriving as foreigners] are taught to believe that he [the native-born American negroes] eats the bread that belongs to them. What Douglass had to say to Ireland in 1893, by way of amelioration of this hostile standoff, was utterly blunt and hostile: [S]end no more such children here.

(For background, on the following screens appears the article “The Conscription a Great National Benefit”

45. Lydia Maria Child. ISAAC T. HOPPER: A TRUE LIFE (Boston: Jewett)

A TRUE LIFE

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as it was printed on this day in The New-York Times.)

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The National Enrollment Act, the enforcement of which was commenced in this City on Saturday, will be carried into execution until the quota of the State of New York and of every State in the Union shall be raised and in the field. It may not be necessary that a man of those drafted shall ever go into line of battle during this war. Yet it is a national blessing that the Conscription has been imposed. It is a matter of prime concern that it should now be settled, once for all, whether this Government is or is not strong enough to compel military service in its defence. More than any other one thing, this will determine our durability as a Republic and our formidableness as a nation. Once establish that not only the property, but the personal military service of every ablebodied citizen is a the command of the national authorities, constitutionally exercised, and both successful rebellion and successful invasion are at once made impossible for all time to come. From that time it will be set down as a known fact that the United States is the most solidly based Government on the face of the earth. The standing reproach against the Republican form of government hitherto has been, that its superior freedom was obtained at the expense of its security. It has been deemed a very comfortable sort of Government for fair weather, but quite unfit for a storm. A Federal Republic, made up like ours of distinct States, has been considered particularly weak. Every philosophical writer who has treated of our institutions, has put his finger upon the weakness of the central authority as the special reason for doubting their perpetuity. De Tocqueville himself, much as he admired our constitutional system, did not hesitate to say, “It appears to me unquestionable that if any portion of the Union seriously desired to separate itself from the other States, they would not be able, nor indeed would they attempt, to prevent it.” and to illustrate the helplessness of the federal authority, he cites from a letter of Jefferson’s to Lafayette the statement that, “during the War of 1812, four of the Eastern States were only attached to the Union like so many inanimate bodies to living men.” Everybody knows that one of the chief embarrassments of that war was the unwillingness of some of the State authorities to surrender the control of their military forces to the Federal Executive. Another of these embarrassments was the great difficulty of keeping the armies up to the necessary figure, notwithstanding extraordinary bounties for the encouragement of the enlistments. The Secretary of War, at that period, in his strait for soldiers, proposed a Conscription system, but it was deemed by Congress dangerous and impracticable, and hardly obtained a hearing. In fact, up to the last year the popular mind had scarcely bethought itself for a moment that the power of an unlimited Conscription was, with the sanction of

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Congress, one of the living powers of the government in time of war. The general notion was that Conscription was a feature that belonged exclusively to despotic Governments, and that the American reliance could only be upon volunteered effort, as prompted by patriotic feeling or pecuniary inducements. It was not until the second year of this terrible rebellion that the public mind began seriously to question whether it would answer to depend entirely upon these precarious stimulants; and even then it began to question only in a whisper. Even the boldest shrank; for they well understood how quickly the factious enemies of the Government would seize upon the old hated word Conscription, and do their best with it to make the war itself odious. But as the war lingered on without result, the Government gradually braced itself up to the responsibility of demanding under the mild name of a National Enrollment bill, what was in reality nothing less than a Conscription law on the European model. Congress, after deliberation, framed and passed such a law. The great practical question now to be determined is whether such a law can be sustained or not in other words, whether this American Republic has or has not the plenary power of its own defence which is possessed by a European monarchy. For a time after the act was passed, the chiefs of faction were free in their threats that any attempt to carry it out should be resisted by force and arms. In some few localities they succeeded in working up popular passion against its first processes, even to a fighting place; but it was very quickly made apparent that the people at large would never sustain any such resort to violence, and that it was worse than idle to contend thus with the Government. Since then, the talk of these factionists on the platform and in their newspaper organs has been that the appeal shall be carried to the ballot-box. They flatter themselves that, by working diligently upon the basest motives and meanest prejudices, they can secure popular majorities that will force a repeal of the measure, or at least deter the Government from carrying it out to its complete execution. Well, let them do their worst. We want it determined whether the majority of the American people can be induced by any such influences to abandon the cause of their country. So far as the Government itself is concerned, we have no fear that it will fail to do its duty. Every day adds new evidence that it means to go straight on to the complete enforcement of the act. The world will now have a better chance to judge than ever before what the real strength of this Republic is. And unless we greatly mistake, it will be seen that an overwhelming majority of the people will stand by the Government in this exercise of the mightiest of its powers; and will show a proud satisfaction in demonstrating that freemen are as capable as subjects

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and serfs of abiding any needful requirements for the national safety. No people on the face of the earth have such reason to submit to the extremist sacrifices for the salvation of their Government; and, if conscription be necessary to replenish its struggling armies, no population, we undertake to say, has ever endured it with more patience or cheerfulness than the American people will now do. The Government is the people’s Government, and the people will never consent that their Government shall suffer in a critical hour for the want of a power which is not grudged even the worse Government when its existence is threatened. When it is once understood that our national authority has the right, under the Constitution, to every dollar and every right arm in the country for its protection, and that the great people recognize and stand by that right, thenceforward, for all time to come this Republic will command a respect, both at home and abroad, far beyond any ever accorded to it before. It will be a new and priceless security against all future rebellion and wanton foreign attack.

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LABOR COMPETITION AND THE NEW YORK DRAFT RIOTS OF 1863

By Albon P. Man, Jr. Journal of Negro History, Vol. XXXVI, No. 4, October 1951 The New York draft riots of July, 1863, had their origin largely in a fear of black labor competition which possessed the city’s, Irish unskilled workers. Upon emancipation, they believed, great numbers of Negroes would cross the Mason-Dixon line, underbid them in the Northern labor market and deprive them of jobs. Similar fears helped produce mass anti-Negro violence in World Wars I and II, also periods of acute labor shortage. The movement of Negro strikebreakers into the East St. Louis, Illinois, area, for example, touched off the demonstrations which occurred there in July, 1917,46 while the upgrading of a few Negro employees signalled the start of the ugly Philadelphia transit strike of August, 1944.47 But the New York draft disturbances remain the bloodiest race riots of American history. Police figures on deaths among the white rioters ranged from 1,200 to 1,500, and it is impossible to know how many bodies of Negro victims of the lynch mobs were borne away by the waters on either side of Manhattan Island.48 Significantly, the Negro population of the metropolis dropped 20% between 1860 and 1865, declining from 12,472 to 9,945.49 This article will seek to answer some of the more important questions bearing upon the white workers’ dread of labor competition from contrabands: What predictions as to the consequences of emancipation were made by pro-slavery politicians and journalists between the campaign of 1860 and the sultry week of July 12, 1863? How did abolitionists and Republicans try to allay the fear stirred up in the minds of white workers by opponents of emancipation? Did former slaves within Union lines in the South really wish to go northward at that time? Was there any appreciable migration to the North? In addition, this article will examine the actual, rather than anticipated, labor competition between whites and Negroes in various occupations in New York, with special attention to the crucial longshore field and to the anti-Negro violence which marked the waterfront strikes of 1855 and 1863.50 For that violence was to be repeated, intensified a thousandfold, in the draft riots immediately following the strikes of 1863. At the outset, mention should be made of the fact that before the spurt in immigration in the decades of the forties and fifties, such occupations in New York as those of longshoremen, hod-carriers, brickmakers, whitewashers, coachmen, stablemen, porters, bootblacks, barbers, and waiters in hotels and restaurants had been almost wholly in the hands of colored men.51 46. Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, They Seek a City (Garden City, 1945), pp. 125-131. 47. New York Times, August 2-11, 14-18, 1944. 48. William Osborn Stoddard, The Volcano Under the City (New York, 1887), p. 293; New York Herald, July 18, 1863. 49. United States Census Office, 8th Census, 1860; Population of the United States in 1860 (Washington, 1864), pp. 335, 337. 50. For a preliminary but suggestive treatment of the subject of labor competition, see Williston H. Lofton, “Northern Labor and the Negro during the Civil War,” Journal of Negro History, XXXIV (July, 1949), 251. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 185 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Domestic maids, cooks, scullions, laundresses and seamstresses were generally colored women. They were secure in these types of employment and earned relatively good wages. But with the huge influx of white foreigners, particularly after the Irish famine of 1846, their position changed radically. The unskilled Irish swarmed into the menial occupations which had been monopolized by the colored. Offering to work for any wages they could obtain, they reduced the Negroes’ earnings drastically and deprived many of employment.52 As Frederick Douglass wrote, admonishing Negroes to learn trades or perish: “Every hour sees the black man elbowed out of employment by some newly arrived emigrant whose hunger and whose color are thought to give him a better title to the place.”53 Thus the Irish themselves had earlier subjected Negroes to the same job rivalry that Democratic politicians and journalists prophesied would be offered to the Irish by former slaves from the South. To those dire predictions, especially as uttered during the election campaigns of 1860, 1861 and 1862 and after the Emancipation Proclamation and adoption of the draft act in March, 1863, we shall now turn. At the Democratic rally on October 8, 1860, to ratify the coalition Douglas-Breckinridge-Bell slate of presidential electors in New York, James W. Gerard, prominent lawyer and candidate for Congress, ventured a typical prediction of intensified Negro-white labor competition in the event of emancipation.54 He warned his listeners-above all, his “friends from Ireland” and immigrants from other countries-that the Republican party was an abolition party: Abraham Lincoln, if honest to his party, means to do his best that the free men of the North shall make free the laboring population of the South. (Cries of “Never,” and cheers.) ... I call upon all adopted citizens to stand up and vote against Abraham Lincoln, or you will have negro labor dragging you from your free labor. Speaking again later in the month, Gerard returned to this theme, cautioning Irish and German laborers not to vote Republican lest in casting their ballots to exclude slavery, they “exclude bread from their own table.”55 Likewise, General Leslie Combs, of Kentucky, declared at a Democratic mass meeting in New York during the campaign of 1860 that if the slaves in the South were liberated, they would come North and take away the jobs of white longshoremen and other laborers. He warned: Let the four millions of slaves in the South be set at 51. The New Moral World (Owenite newspaper), June 29, 1844, in John R. Commons et al., A Documentary History of American Industrial Society (Cleveland, 1910-1911), IX, 60, 61; G. E. Haynes, The Negro at Work in New York City (New York, 1912), pp. 67, 68, 97; A.A. Payne, “The Negro in New York prior to 1860,” Howard Review, I (June, 1923), 1-64; Sterling D. Spero and Abram L. Harris, The Black Worker (New York, 1931), pp. 12, 13. 52. J.H. Harmon, A.G. Lindsay and C.G. Woodson, The Negro as a Business Man (Washington, 1929), p. 4; Lindsay, “The Economic Condition of the Negroes of New York Prior to 1861,11 Journal of Negro History, VI (April, 1921), 193-196; Charles E. Wesley, Negro Labor in the United States, 1850-1925 (New York, 1927), pp. 75-77. 53. Quoted in Charles E. Wesley, Negro Labor in the United States, 1850-1925 (New York, 1927), pp. 61, 62. 54. Herald, October 9, 1860. 55. Herald, October 28, 1860. 186 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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liberty, and left to their own free will and desires, and we should very soon have, not the great conflict so long predicted between free labor and slave labor, but a terrible conflict between white labor and black labor. (Applause.) ... The unemployed slaves will be found among you in sufficient numbers to compete with you at your wharves and your docks, and in every branch of labor in which white people alone are now employed.56 Pro-South business houses, too, brought pressure to bear upon their employees to vote for the fusion Democratic ticket, to preserve themselves from Negro competition.57 During the campaign of 1860, the virulently anti-Negro Herald also carried editorials foretelling catastrophe if Lincoln were elected. A wholesale exodus of four million Negroes from the South would occur. If they were anything like the fugitive slaves “of the most vicious and degraded, character” who had already emigrated to the North, it said on one occasion, they would refuse to work and would steal the fruits of Northern industry and burden Northern workers with taxes for their maintenance.” The Herald did not hesitate to contradict itself in its arguments, however, for after dwelling one day upon the supposed laziness of freed Negroes, the tax burden for their support, and their criminal tendencies, on another day it would raise the spectre of job competition from apparently hard- working contrabands: Hundreds of thousands will emigrate to their friends - the republicans -- North, and be placed by them side by side in competition with white men. Are you ready to divide your patrimony with the negro? Are you ready to work with him in competition to work more than you do now for Less pay? If you are, vote for the republican candidate.58 Similar to this was the final appeal of James Gordon Bennett, editor of the Herald, to Irish and German laborers on election day, 1860: “If Lincoln is elected to-day, you will have to compete with the labor of four million emancipated negroes.... The North will be flooded with free negroes, and the labor of the white man will be depreciated and degraded.”59 Even the surge of patriotism which swept the city immediately after the attack on Port Sumter did not delete from Democratic newspapers the theme of Negro labor competition upon emancipation.60 It was reiterated by the demagogic Fernando Wood in campaigning for the office of mayor of New York in the fall of 1861. He charged that his Republican opponent was the candidate of a party which would fill regiments with Irish and German laborers and then bring Negroes North to take their jobs away.61 Wood also used the inconsistent argument that the support of contraband paupers in the North would be a crushing financial burden.”62 He played upon fear of Negro labor competition most 56. Herald, October 25, 1860. 57. Basil Lea Lee, Discontent in New York City, 1861-1865 (Washington, 1943), p. 7. 58. Herald, October 1, 1860. 59. Herald, November 5, 1860. 60. Herald, November 6, 1860. 61. Herald, April 20, 1861; Irish American, May 24, 1861. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 187 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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often in bidding for Irish votes.63 In the mayoralty campaign of 1861 the Herald once more used its stock prediction of the displacement of white workers, notably the Irish, by black workers, should the Republicans prevail.64 In the interval between the campaigns of 1861 and 1862, there were few allusions by politicians and press to the danger of Negro labor competition in the event of emancipation. But with the appearance of the preliminary proclamation of emancipation in September, 1862, and the Seymour Wadsworth contest for the New York governorship that year, the old warnings were re- echoed. George Francis Train, the Irish nationalist, said that the abolitionists were “combining to manacle the white man” and were engaged in a “conspiracy against the Irish,” whom they sought to degrade by placing Negroes to work beside the65 Another Irish-American leader, Richard O’Gorman, describing himself as “a sincere friend of the negro,” spoke of the impolicy of freeing the black man from the civilizing restraints of servitude.66 “May not these poor people, joying their newly acquired freedom, swarm on us here in the North?” he asked. Congressman Samuel S. Cox, of Ohio, felt sure that New Yorkers would elect the Democratic candidate for Governor, Horatio Seymour, because “they would never consent to have negroes compete with them. “I Indeed, he suggested that when whites and freed Negroes clashed in New York’s labor market, blood would flow and colored men would get the worst of it.67 In his campaign pronouncements Seymour himself was more restrained in criticizing Lincoln’s preliminary proclamation on the score of Negro labor competition.68 Of course, the Herald ran true to form editorials on the menace of Negro labor, addressed to Irish and German laborers. “The Irish and German immigrants, to say nothing of native laborers of the white race, must feel enraptured,” Bennett wrote, “at the prospect of hordes of darkeys overrunning the Northern States and working for half wages, and thus ousting them from employment.’69 Promulgation of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, and adoption of the conscription act on March 3, 1863, caused a new outburst. The rabid New York Weekly Caucasian rejoiced that the Proclamation had led the Metropolitan Record, which had been the official organ of the Catholic Archbishop of New York, to oppose the war and asserted that its course was generally approved by Irish Americans, who did not relish the thought of having Negroes on their economic level.70 The newly- formed Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge, an anti-emancipation propaganda group in New York City, published as its first pamphlet a letter written by Henry Clay twenty years before, depicting a horrible doom for white labor in the North 62. Herald, November 28, 1861; New York Tribune, November 28, 1861; Lee, op. cit., p. 289. 63. Herald, November 30, 1861; Tribune, November 30, 1861. 64. Harper’s Weekly, V (December 21, 1861), 802, 803. 65. Herald, October 20, 31, November 27, 28, 1861. 66. Herald, September 24, 1862; Tribune, October 2, 1862; Irish American, October 11, 1862. 67. Herald, November 8, 1862. 68. Herald, October 29, 1862. 69. Herald, October 30, 1862; Tribune, October 30, 1862. 70. De Alva Stanwood Alexsinder, Political History of the State of New York (New York, 1906-1923), III, 27-29; Sidney D. Brummer, Political History of New York State during the Period of the Civil War (New York, 1911), pp. 238-240. 188 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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if slavery were abolished. As Orestes A. Brownson, one of the few leading anti-slavery Catholics, wrote, Democratic leaders and journalists in this period convinced the Irish that in resisting the draft they were simply refusing to fight for their own economic suicide.71 How did Republicans and Abolitionists deal with these predictions of their opponents? In 1860 and 1861 they failed to answer them at all. In 1862, however, they began to grasp the fact that the labor competition argument was making a deep impression upon the working people of New York, particularly the Irish, and that it could no longer be allowed to go unchallenged. In fact, Horace Greeley declared on the eve of the election of 1862 that it was the most common argument advanced against the abolition of slavery.72 From the summer of 1862 on, Greeley and other Republican and abolitionist leaders undertook to refute it on every possible occasion. Whatever Negroes had migrated to the North had done so to escape slavery, they said. Eliminate, slavery, and the movement northward would stop, the Negro having an exceptionally strong attachment to the locality in which he was born, according to General Hunter.73 Furthermore, with the terror of the auction block removed, the colored population of the North would go south, as it was by nature better suited to the climate there and more adept at raising cotton, tobacco, rice and sugar than earning a living at other pursuits in the North. It was therefore clearly to the interest of white workers, including Irish laborers, to support emancipation.74 This was the approach of James S. Wadsworth, in his message in October, 1862, accepting the Union party’s nomination for Governor of New York and defending Lincoln’s preliminary proclamation against the Negro labor competition arguments Daniel S. Dickinson, erstwhile Democratic leader, reasoned the same way, as did Secretary of War Stanton, Senator Charles Sumner, Governor John A. Andrew of Massachusetts, Major General Cassius M. Clay (who was most disturbed by the effect of the competition idea upon the Irish), and Robert Dale Owen.75 Greeley also ridiculed the inconsistency of anti- emancipationists in contending that former slaves would work so hard and so cheaply that they would displace white men and then adding in the same breath that they would be indolent paupers whose upkeep would drain the public treasury.76 In his extremely eloquent oration on the Emancipation Proclamation, on February 6, 1863, at the Cooper Institute, Frederick Douglass similarly heaped scorn upon such logic.77 Once Greeley was bold enough to declare that even if there were 71. Herald, October 20, 1862; see also Herald, October 13, 21, November 1, 1862. 72. New York Weekly Caucasian, March 28, 1863. 73. Society for the Diffusion of Political Knowledge, Papers (New York, 1863), no. 1. 74. Orestes Augustus Brownson, “Catholics and the Anti-draft Riots,” Brownson’s Quarterly Review, Third New York Series, IV (October 1863), 401. 75. Tribune, November 5, 1862. 76. Tribune, August 4, 1862. 77. Harper’s Weekly, VI (August 23, 1862), 530, 531; Tribune, August 28, November 5, 1862; January 12, March 23, April 16, 1863; R. Dale Owen, J. McKayes and Samuel G. Howe, Preliminary and also the Final Report of the American Freedinen’s Inquiry Commission. United States Congress. Senate Executive Documents, No. 53, 38th Cong., lot seas., p. 8, 1864. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 189 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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an influx of fugitives into the North, it would not injure white workers, because the normal labor force of the North had been depleted by the demands of the army and needed supplementing.78 The Negroes would produce as much as they would consume, he insisted, observing not very convincingly that they would, moreover, leave whites free to secure “higher, easier, better recompensed positions.”79 Lincoln himself took note of the Negro labor competition argument against the emancipation program in his message to Congress on December 1, 1862.80 His answer was colonization: “Reduce the supply of black labor by colonizing the black laborers out of the country, and by precisely so much you increase the demand for, and the wages of, white labor.” But Lincoln denied that even without the deportation of freed slaves there would be any mass migration northward and supplanting of white workers, since Negroes would no longer have to flee from bondage in the South. Unfortunately, information on whether there was actually any movement of freed Negroes from the South to the Northeast is scanty, incidental and inconclusive.81 There is a hint here and there buried in the fine print of a Civil War newspaper, a random suggestion in an obscure pamphlet, but no authoritative or extended treatment of this interesting problem. The Tribune would, at one time, admit unqualifiedly that Negroes were leaving the South in considerable numbers to escape slavery. “Were slavery dead tomorrow, the main current of negro migration would flow southward, not northward,” wrote Greeley in January, 1863.82 To the same effect he declared in March: “There is at present a very general exodus of poor people from the region cursed by the Slaveholders’ Rebellion ... Black men are fleeing to escape from Slavery to traitors.”83 Yet within a month of making this last assertion he said of liberated slaves: “It is quite certain that up to this time many thousands have been liberated, but as far as we can learn, very few have come among us.”84 This, however, was contradicted in January 1863 by Fincher’s Trades Review, which stated that a large number of colored persons had already reached the Northern states and that many of them were filling positions formerly occupied by white men. The leading labor paper of its time then proceeded to demand that the government place restrictions on the ingress of emancipated slaves into the North. It is doubtless true that by the summer of 1863 thousands of former slaves had left Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee and Mississippi for Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas and Minnesota, despite stringent laws passed by some midwestern states forbidding the immigration of contrabands lest whites be 78. Herald, October 6, 1862; Tribune, October 6, 23, 1862; Brummer, op. cit, pp. 238-240. 79. Tribune, October 7, 9, 22, November 24, December 5, 1862; Herald, October 8, 17, 1862. 80. Tribune, July 5, August 6, 1862; March 27, 1863. 81. Tribune, February 7, 1863; National Anti-Slavery Standard, February 14, 1863. 82. Tribune, October 17, 1862. 83. The idea of giving Negroes land confiscated from rebels was hailed by Greeley and Roscoe Conkling as removing the apprehension of white workers that the North would be swamped by an influx of freedmen. Tribune, February 12, March 21, 1863; Loyal National League, Opinions of Loyalists Concerning the Great Questions of the Times ... Mass Meeting on Union Square, New York, on the 1lth of April, 1863 (New York, 1863), p. 96. 84. Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln - the War Years (New York, 1941), I, 620, 621. 190 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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deprived of employment.85 So many Negroes left Missouri, in fact, that it was predicted that crops would perish or remain undeveloped for want of labor.86 The codes of these states which excluded former slaves but urgently needed agricultural workers to replace men serving in the army were hotly denounced by abolitionists as examples of the absurd lengths to which fear of Negro labor competition could carry white people.87 But the opposition to emancipation could still point to the northward movement of Negroes in the midwest and predict a similar influx into New York and consequent unemployment for white men.88 Into the Middle Atlantic states only a negligible migration of freed Negroes took place. The demand for colored labor in Washington, D.C., and on Maryland plantations exceeded the Supply.89 Three hundred contrabands did arrive in Washington in the summer of 1862 from various parts of Virginia, but the men among them were promptly hired about government hospitals and camps and on public works, while the women did washing for the soldiers.90 The advent of a small number of contrabands in Chester County, Pennsylvania, however, did cause some excitement, which was reported in the New York press. False rumors arose that they were so numerous that they took work away from whites and accepted employment for ten cents a day. These statements led to assaults upon Negroes in Northern cities.91 When about a hundred fugitives who came from the South by boat landed in Philadelphia in March, 1862, an immense crowd greeted them with shrieks of abuse.92 There was probably a trickle of Negroes into New Jersey also, for anti-administration forces there called upon the legislature early in 1863 to bar former slaves from the state.93 Some migration of Negroes to New York City did unquestionably occur, at least enough to give an appearance of validity to the predictions of politicians and press and the fear of the Irish proletariat regarding black labor competition.94 Refugees may well have settled in the Five Points neighborhood, in close proximity to the Irish.95 During the longshore strike a month before the draft riots it was reported that three carloads of contrabands had reached Jersey City and that the Negroes then took the ferry to New York.96 One source suggests that the colored workers used to break the strikes of longshoremen in 1863 were emancipated slaves, but there is no definite proof of that.97 It does, seem, though, that the Negroes sheltered in the

85. Woodson Is volume pioneered in this field. Carter G. Woodson, A Century of Negro Migration (Washington, 1918). 86. Tribune, January 12, 1863. 87. Tribune, March 27, 1863; Anti-Slavery Standard, March 7, 1863. 88. Tribune, April 16, 1863. 89. Fincher’s Trades Review, June 13, 1863. 90. Tribune, August 4, October 30, 1862; Herald, September 22, 1862; Anti-Slavery Standard, January 30, June 30, 1863. On the fear of an influx of contrabands into Kentucky, see Governor Robinson’s message to the Kentucky legislature upon the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. Tribune, January 12, 1863. 91. Anti-Slavery Standard, June 20, 1863. 92. Tribune July 9, 1862; Anti-Slavery Standard, May 9, 30, 1863. Minnesota farmers did employ contrabands in place of whites serving in the army. Anti-Slavery Standard, May 30, 1863. 93. Tribune, October 30, 1862. 94. Anti-Slavery Standard, January 10, 1863. 95. Tribune, August 11, 1862. 96. Tribune, July 11, August 6, 1962; Anti-Slavery Standard, March 28, 1863. 97. Tribune, April 3, 1862. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 191 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Seventh Avenue Arsenal during the draft riots included contrabands,98 and not to be forgotten is that shout by “someone with an Irish accent” who interrupted Archbishop John Hughes’s speech appealing to Catholics to abstain from rioting: “Let the niggers stay in the South!”99 The following day, speaking of Negroes “that float hither from the South,” the Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register urged that they be “driven out again, imprisoned or exterminated.”100 Such a furor could hardly have arisen without some pretext. But that the pretext was small is apparent from the available information on whether the Negros of the South did really wish to go north in 1862 and 1863. Although it was well known that General Hunter, commander of the army’s Department of the South, at Port Royal, South Carolina, gave passes to the North to all Negroes seeking them, he stated in July, 1862, that not more than a dozen had applied to him for such passes since his arrival.101 Hunter branded the idea of a general migration of Negroes to the North a “carefully fostered delusion.” The superintendent in charge of contrabands in Washington, D. C., made a special investigation into the supposed desire of former slaves to emigrate to the North and found it non-existent.102 Of those who came under his charge during his first four months in office, not thirty-five were willing to go farther north. The most thorough attempt to ascertain whether Southern Negroes wished to move to the North was made by a special committee of the Emancipation League.103 Late in 1862 this committee sent a questionnaire to the different superintendents of contrabands in the South containing the following query, among others: “Do they desire to go North? In the event of general emancipation, and fair treatment at home, would there, in your judgment, be any disposition to go North?” Even though the question was obviously loaded, the answers received leave little room for doubt that the contrabands did not wish to leave the South. The reply from Fortress Monroe, Virginia, was typical: Very few are willing to go North, except for safety. I have had applications from large numbers wishing servants, and offering good wages, lying over for months, because of the unwillingness of any to go.” The results of this survey were confirmed by a report of the American Freedmen is Inquiry Commission in June, 1863, that there was no disposition on the part of Negro refugees within Union lines in South Carolina and Florida to go north.104 The preceding pages have described the manner in which political leaders and journalists in New York played upon the fear of white workers that freed Negroes would compete with them for jobs. They have also discussed the extent to which there was a movement of contrabands from the South who could compete with them. It is now appropriate to look into the competition actually taking 98. Tribune, January 12, 1863. 99. Woodson’s work has an account of the migration of fugitives to New York City in the first half of the century. Woodson, op. cit., pp. 82-86. 100. Committee of Representatives of the New York Yearly Meeting of Friends upon the Condition and Wants of the Colored Refugees, Report (New York, 1862), P. 20. 101. Tribune, June 10, 1863; Committee of New York Meeting of Friends, op. cit., p. 14. 102. Spero and Harris, op. cit., p. 17. 103. Tribune, July 18, 1863; Herald, July 18, 1863. 104. Herald, July 18, 1863; Daily News, July 18, 1863; Irish American, July 18, 1863. 192 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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place between Negroes and whites before the draft riots of July, 1863. Such competition was omnipresent in the South, to be sure. It greatly heightened the tension between Negroes and poor whites, with slaves used in skilled capacities both on plantations and in towns and cities, as well, where their masters easily underbid white mechanics. It extended to almost all branches of manual labor.105 Everywhere the Southern white worker turned, the Negro seemed to deprive him of a job, except for the most dangerous occupations, in which it would be folly to expose a valuable slave to injury or death.106 In the North, some contrabands were competing with white workers by June, 1863, at least according to Fincher’s Trades Review, and this development drew a cry for restrictions by the Federal government upon the movement of emancipated slaves into free states.107 Although our information about racial competition in the longshore field, which will be explored below, is rather plentiful, the press was not very specific about other areas in which the new rivalry was occurring. Random reports did tell of trouble in Washington, D. C., where navy yard workers showed hostility toward twenty or thirty colored calkers brought from Baltimore,108 and of the replacement of white domestic servants by Negro contrabands in St. Louis.109 The agitation throughout the North during the Civil War for state laws banning the immigration of Negroes from the South can also be taken as a probable indication of job competition between blacks and whites. In New York, the ousting of the Democratic party from control of the Federal government in 1861 appeared ominously to bring even political patronage to Negroes. Colored men were appointed to positions in the custom house, replacing good Irish Democrats, said the newspapers, and depressing the wages paid custom house employees.110 When, in July, 1862, Negro workers were substituted for whites on a ferry line in New York harbor, and the press carried rumors of contrabands’ taking away the jobs of white men in Pennsylvania by agreeing to work for ten cents a day, it seemed high time to stop this trend.111 The method of doing so which was applied by a mob of Irishmen in Brooklyn in August, 1862, may well have been suggested by attacks in recent weeks upon Negroes in Cincinnati and Toledo, Ohio, and Evansville, Indiana.112 In the midst of an Irish neighborhood in south Brooklyn stood two tobacco factories.113 All the employees of one were colored, numbering from fifty to seventy-five and consisting mostly of 105. Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register, July 18, 1863. 106. Tribune, August 4, 1862. 107. Tribune, November 7, 1862. 108. Tribune, January 27, 1863; Anti-Slavery Standard, February 7, 1863. 109. R. Dale Owen et at, op. cit., p. 8. 110. Spero and Harris, op. cit., pp. 5-11. In an emancipation debate with George Francis Train in New York, Cassius M. Clay gave an excellent description of the underbidding of free labor by slave labor in the South. Herald, November 2, 1862. See also Charles Nordhoff, America for Free Working Men! (New York, 1865), p. 1. 111. Charles Nordhoff, America for Free Working Men! (New York, 1865), pp. 12, 13. 112. Fincher’s Trades Review, June 13, 1863; Frank Tracy Carlton, History and Problem of Organized Labor (Boston and New York, 1920), p. 64. 113. Herald, September 26, 1862. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 193 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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women and children. About 250 persons, colored and white, were employed in the other and worked harmoniously side by side. The resentment against the employment of the Negroes that had been smoldering among the Irish in that area finally broke into flames on August 4, 1862, when a mob of from two to three thousand whites, stirred up by pothouse politicians I talk of competition from contrabands, smashed their way into one of the factories, shouting “Down with the nagurs!” Many were drunk from liquor dispensed at the neighborhood’s numerous rum-shops, where the attack on the factory was planned. Failing to reach the Negro employees barricaded on the second floor, they prepared to set fire to the place and were prevented from doing so only by the arrival of a strong detachment of police, who quelled the riot, after a fashion, by clubbing the, Negroes. The rioters may be said to have won their point, however. Although one tobacco factory closed down entirely, the proprietor of the other promised not to hire any more colored workers.114 Thus the effectiveness of mob violence in reducing black labor competition was fully demonstrated. Greeley raged, but his editorial lectures to the rioters were scarcely of a type which would cause them to repent, conceding the very competition that had incensed them in the first place. In a characteristic piece he flayed Democratic leaders for playing upon the Irishman’s fear of black labor competition and then continued in this dubious manner: Least of all have the laboring white men of the United States, native or foreign, cause to hate the negro. He takes off from them the discredit of the lowest social place, and does offices which leave them free to compete for the higher rewards of industry.... The fugitive colored porter, waiter, or stevedore promotes some shrewd Irish lad to keep a shop, to become constable, or alderman, or to go to Congress.... The transformation of four million chattel slaves into four million free citizens ... will benefit no class so much as that whose tasks they assume and whose toils they relieve.115 In the weeks following the attack on the tobacco factory, there were a number of cases in Brooklyn and New York City in which gangs of Irishmen beat up individual Negroes.116 A secret organization of workingmen formed in New York at this time inserted in its otherwise radical statement of principles a warning about the danger of emancipated slave labor.117 In refusing to work with Negroes, the longshoremen, whose strikes and anti-Negro violence will be discussed presently, were not unique. The Tribune cited the typical experience of a Negro cooper, a refugee from the South, who had just been refused work at several barrel-making establishments in New York. The employer at each place told him: “Yes, I have work; I would like to employ you; but my journeymen would all leave me if I did, and I cannot.”118

114. Freeman’s Tourna, January 17, 1863. 115. Lee, op. cit., pp. 137, 138. 116. Lee, op. cit., p. 139; Tribune, August 6, 1862. 117. Tribune, August 8, 1862. 118. Tribune, August 5, 6, 1862; Lee, op. cit., pp. 139, 140. 194 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Another movement of workingmen at this time expressed apprehension about Negro competition. It consisted of whites concerned over the importation of cheap labor from abroad by employers, with the cooperation of the Lincoln administrations Iron and shipbuilding workers, in particular, faced the prospect of wage reductions occasioned by an influx of foreigners. Early in February, 1863, they held a mass meeting at Tammany Hall, primarily to protest the importation of foreign labor. It is noteworthy, however, that they also adopted an angry statement denouncing steps by employers “to bring hordes of blacks from the South, as well as whites from Europe, to fill the shops, yards and other places of labor, and by that means compel -us to compete with them for the support of our families.” To cope with this menace, they declared their intention “to effect a common organization of all the artisans and laborers throughout the country against the anticipated inundation of contrabands in Northern cities.” One speaker at this gathering of ironworkers charged that their masters had already started to introduce contrabands in their midst.119 But the fiercest competition, with the most violent and far- reaching results, occurred in the longshore field. The remainder of this article will be devoted chiefly to an analysis of longshore work, labor organization among waterfront workers, their strikes of 1855, 1862, and 1863, and their violence against Negro strikebreakers. Almost all longshoremen in New York City were Irish.120 Strictly speaking, it is incorrect to classify their work as unskilled labor.121 It required a degree of special competence to perform the more difficult branches of the work which could be acquired only by years of experience and which raised it above the level of what is ordinarily known as common labor. It was, however, an exhausting, hazardous, casual, and oversupplied occupation.122 The irregular employment of longshoremen resulted in unstable earnings which made a settled standard of living impossible.123 One of the persistent complaints of striking longshoremen in 1855, 1862, and 1863 was that they averaged only three or four days of work a week. At the October, 1862, pay rate of $1.50 a day, this meant that they earned between $4.50 and $6.00 a week, which was low even according to Civil War wage standards. Their irregularity of employment and hanging about piers in the hope of being hired also led longshoremen to drift into waterfront bars and encouraged drinking.124 Many of the waterfront assaults on Negroes by longshoremen during the spring of 1863 and at the time of the draft riots planned in groggeries on West Street and South Street, across from the piers.125 Press reports to that effect were borne out by the testimony of the 119. Tribune, January 24, 1863. 120. Tribune, August 8, 1862. 121. Tribune, August 21, 22, 29, September 4, 6, 1862. 122. Tribune, August 8, 1862. 123. Tribune, November 25, 1862; January 24, 1863. 124. Weekly Caucasian, February 14, 1863; Tribune, February 7, 1863. 125. Nor were urban occupations the only ones in which there were complaints of racial competition. A few days before the draft riots, contrabands obtained from a Government agent were reported working for no pay on farms near New York City. Daily News, July 10, 1863. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 195 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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police captain in charge of stopping fights between whites and Negroes along the waterfront in April, 1863: “The trouble is due more to the influence of rum than anything else.”126 Nevertheless, having no steady jobs to be endangered, longshoremen flared up at bad treatment more quickly than men in other trades. Hence their readiness to strike.”127 The first longshore strike in New York of which there is record took place in February, 1836, when for several days the men paraded through the streets and before the docks in what amounted to a kind of picketing’s.128 The strike of 1836 eventually became so violent that the civil authorities called out a regiment of soldiers, which, abundantly supplied with ammunition, established itself at City Hall, thereby intimidating the longshoremen. The earliest permanent associations of New York longshoremen were formed for benevolent purposes. The Longshoremen’s Union Benevolent Society, the organization of longshoremen most frequently mentioned by the press during the first two years of the Civil War, was founded in 1852 and had as its chief functions to provide relief to members who were injured or sick, to aid in the burial of deceased members, and to give financial assistance to their widows and orphans.129 It was overwhelmingly Irish in make-up. But although members complained at its meetings of the high cost of living during the war, calling for wage increases and threatening to strike, the Longshoremen’s U. B. Society, as it was called, never had any power as a labor union in the present-day sense of the term. Negro-white friction on the waterfront became pronounced in the middle fifties. In December 1854, the merchants of New York reduced the wages of longshoremen from $1.75 to $1.50, using as one reason for the slash the allegation that the Longshoremen’s U. B. Society had “attempted to dictate to them.”130 A strike, not led by the Society, broke out. Gangs of strikers visited ships from which other longshoremen were still unloading cargo, forced them to desist, and beat them as they came ashore. The merchants, however, called the police, under whose protection the work of loading and unloading vessels was resumed. When employers replaced striking Irishmen with colored labor, anti- Negro violence resulted, with the whites trying to prevent the blacks from working.131 But, handicapped by the fact that shipping was slow at the time, the strike petered out in the ensuing weeks.132 The Negroes, having served their strikebreaking purpose, were gradually discharged by the merchants, and by the middle of February, 1855, only a few were still working, in the employ of shippers who had taken the lead in the movement to reduce wages. There is no evidence that the Longshoremen’s U. B. Society called the strikes of 1862 and 1863. By the time of the Civil War it had evidently abandoned any pretense to trade union 126. Charles B. Barnes, The Longshoremen (New York, 1915), p. 5. 127. Charles B. Barnes, The Longshoremen (New York, 1915), pp. 51-54. 128. Charles B. Barnes, The Longshoremen (New York, 1915), pp. 129 ff. 129. Charles B. Barnes, The Longshoremen (New York, 1915), pp. 55-92; Tribune, January 19, 1855; Herald, October 22, 1862. 130. Barnes, op. cit., pp. 13 ff. 131. Herald, April 14, 1863; Anti-Slavery Standard, April 18, July 25, 1863. 132. Herald, April 16, 1863. 196 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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action and confined itself exclusively to benevolent, social and Irish functions, including annual balls and St. Patrick’s Day parades.133 Its members would turn out six hundred strong on the latter occasions, dressed in handsome green and gold regalia and carrying Irish and American flags and the Society’s imposing banners. Scattered items in the press in June and July, 1863, indicate the existence of one or two other organizations of longshoremen at the time of the draft riots. In June, 1863, a Longshoremen’s Association was established and within a week enrolled three hundred members.134 During the riots it was said that white workers, in driving the Negroes from the docks, were insisting that longshore jobs be held exclusively by members of the Longshoremen’s Association and such other whites as they permitted upon the waterfront.135 The only other longshore labor organization mentioned during the strike of June, 1863, was a Joint Committee of the North and East Rivers, which agreed upon a general rate of wages to be asked of the shippers.136 In the interval between the winter of 1854-1855 and October, 1862, no major labor disputes occurred on the city’s waterfront. In the autumn of 1862, however, the strain of having to buy with 1855 wages goods sold at war-inflated prices became too great for the longshoremen, who were then working only three days a week. On October 20 they struck. Through a representative committee they demanded that wages be increased from $1.50 a day to $1.75, overtime rates raised, and the working day reduced from nine to eight hours, giving as their reason for wanting more pay “the advanced prices of food, clothing, and other necessaries.”137 Alongside one editorial on the danger of an influx of Negro labor into the North, the Herald published another supporting the strike, which the next day brought fulsome praise from the chairman of a strikers’ meeting at the Battery.138 What role, if any, Negro strikebreakers played in this dispute is not clear, but it appears that the longshoremen failed to win an increase in wages at that time.139 For late in January, 1863, workers in one section of the waterfront were informed that thenceforth their pay would be only $1.12 a day instead of the $1.50 they had been receiving previously.140 This action of the merchants started a labor war on the docks of New York which, except for brief truces, continued till the draft riots in July. Upon reduction of their wages the longshoremen went on strike. They were willing to go back at $1.25 a day provided they were employed permanently, claiming that their irregular work on the waterfront often compelled them to seek jobs elsewhere or remain idle much of the time. Press accounts of two longshore strikes in March, 1863, 133. Barnes, op. cit., p. 93. 134. William Leete Stone, History of New York City (New York, 1872), pp. 486, 487. 135. Tribune, February 15, 1855; Irish American, March 22, 1862; March 28, 1863. 136. Tribune, January 18, 19, 1855. 137. Tribune, February 15, 1855; Charles Lionel Franklin, The Negro Labor Unionist of New York (New York, 1936), p. 25; Spero and Harris, op. cit., p. 197; Wesley, op. cit., pp. 79, 80. 138. Tribune, February 15, 1855. 139. Irish American, October 27, December 8, 1860; January 5, March 23, August 3, October 12, 10, November 2, 1861; February 15, March 15, 22, August 30, November 15, 1862; February 21, March 7, 14, 28, 1863. 140. Daily News, June 16, 1863. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 197 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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which refer to $1.12 a day as the prevailing rate of wages, indicate, though, that the cut was put into effect on a wide scale and that the January strike against it did not succeed.141 But on March 23, 1863, longshoremen working on the North River piers of the Erie Railroad Company, having previously won back part of the slash and restored their wages to $1.25 a day, struck for $1.50.142 When the company foreman refused to yield to their terms and announced that he would employ other workers in their places, a thousand men gathered in the street in front of the pier. No disturbances broke out until the foreman hired a gang of Negroes to move bales of cotton. Instantly the crowd fell upon the Negroes with sticks, stones, and fists and drove them from the waterfront. The company then agreed to pay $1.50 a day but declined to hire about half the strikers. At first some measure of solidarity was shown by the group, as those whom the company offered to take back held out for the reemployment of the others. By the next morning, however, this unity had disappeared. The company hired all but sixty of the most militant strikers, and work resumed under strong police protection.143 The example set by the Erie Railroad longshoremen was immediately followed by employees of the Hudson River Railroad, who struck for an increase in wages from $1.12 a day to $1.50 and notified the company’s directors that they would not allow any other persons to take their places for lower wages. Nevertheless, with a squad of police standing by, the company did hire both white and colored strikebreakers. Although here no violence actually broke out, the defeated workers seethed with resentment against those replacements whose dark skin made them stand out conspicuously and rendered them easy targets for revenge. The next month, April, new strikes broke out among the longshoremen of lower Manhattan. Their exact wage demands are not clear, but for three days mobs of Irish longshoremen, inflamed by drink, beat up Negroes found working on the waterfront and chased them from the docks, shouting “Drive off the damn niggers” and “Kill the niggers.”144 “They were determined, they said, that the blacks should not drive white labor out of the market, and remonstrated against the employment of negroes along shore.”145 Four or five hundred white longshoremen took part in these disturbances, and with difficulty the Metropolitan Police saved from lynching a couple of Negroes who tried to defend themselves. At least two hundred colored longshoremen were employed on the docks at that time, and according to police they did not receive less than the usual rate of wages. In the course of this outbreak, crowds of longshoremen also hunted down and stoned Negroes in other 141. Daily News, July 17, 1863. Speaking of the longshore and railroad workers strikes in 1863, McNeil says that “assaults were made upon the non-unionists who took the place of the men on strike.” (Emphasis added.) George E. McNeil, The Labor Movement- the Problem of Today (Boston and New York, 1887), p. 126. This implies the existence of a union conducting the strike. See also United States Commissioner of Labor, Third Annual Report (1887), p. 1048. 142. Herald, June 10, 1863. 143. Tribune, October 21, 22, 1862; Herald, October 21, 22, 1862. 144. Tribune 145. Wesley, op. cit., pp. 99, 100.

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sections of lower Manhattan besides the waterfront, pursuing all the colored porters, cartmen and laborers within sight until routed by the locust batons of the police. Greeley regarded the episode as the natural result of the persistent efforts of the pro-slavery press of New York to strengthen its readers’ prejudices and to persuade them that “white men were to be cheated out of work by an immigration of negroes.” Said he further: If longshoremen or any other class of laborers do not choose to work with negroes they need not. No law compels them. But the negro, as well as the white man, has a right to work for whoever will employ and pay him, and the law, and courts, and police, and public opinion ought to protect him in that right, and will.146 May was a quiet month on the waterfront, but trouble flared up again early in June, when the longshoremen of New York stopped work en masse, demanding an increase in pay to twenty-five cents an hour during the regular working day and overtime of fifty cents an hour after 6 PM. Five hundred of them marched from pier to pier, inducing men who were still working to quit. Their number swelled as they proceeded. When non-strikers at one pier balked at leaving work, they were attacked by the strikers and compelled to desist until the police arrived and gave them protection.147 After a week of fruitless negotiation between committees of strikers and shipowners, the United States government stepped in. It was a now-familiar story: Army transports, supposed to sail with cargoes of ammunition and other supplies, were being held up by the strike.148 Accordingly, about 150 deserters from Governor’s Island and sixty-five convalescent soldiers from Bedloe’s Island were put to work loading the transports, as a detachment of regular troops stood guard with fixed bayonets and nearly five hundred policemen patrolled the waterfront.149 But the strike grew despite this formidable show of might opposing it. By the middle of June three thousand longshoremen were idle.150 On June 18, however, a group of important shipping firms gave notice that they would pay $2.00 for a day of nine hours and twenty-five cents an hour overtime, and that was probably the formula on which the strike ended. One thousand of the strikers accepted it by returning to their jobs the next day.151 While the longshoremen were thus engaged in June, 1863, (with the impassioned support, it might be noted, of the pro-slavery Daily News), occupational groups closely related to them struck successfully for higher pay.152 These included workers on canal boats and barges in the lower part of the city and freight handlers on the Hudson River Railroad and the New York Central. 146. Tribune, February 2, 1863. 147. Tribune, March 25, 1863; Herald, March 25, 1863. 148. Times, March 24, 1863; Tribune, March 24, 1863; Herald, March 24, 1863. 149. Herald, March 25, 1863; Tribune, March 25, 1863. 150. Herald, April 18, 1863. 151. Herald, April 16, 1863. See also Herald, April 14, 15, 1863; Tribune, April 13-16, 1863; Anti-Slavery Standard, April 18, 1863; Lee, op. cit., pp. 141, 142. 152. Tribune, April 14, 1863. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 199 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Another strike of Erie Railroad employees for a wage increase occurred.153 Again the company hired strike breakers, although it is not certain that they were Negroes, and again the strikebreakers were assaulted by some of the old employees. Similar work stoppages for higher wages took place in other northern cities during the Civil War. Negroes were often used as strikebreakers, with uniformly violent results.154 Such strikes are important as a partial explanation of the draft riots in those places. Perhaps the most serious disorders broke out in Buffalo. In August, 1862, striking Buffalo longshoremen demanded higher pay and sought to keep non-strikers from continuing to work at the former rates, but the racial aspect does not seem to have entered into their struggle at that time.155 The same is true of another strike of longshoremen and grain shovellers in Buffalo in May, 1863, when they won an increase in pay to $1.50 a day.156 Only a week before the draft riots, though, some Buffalo shippers tried to replace Irish longshoremen with colored workers, and violence ensued, with three Negroes slain and twelve badly beaten.157 Not only did Irish longshoremen seek to prevent Negroes from working on the docks, but, in addition, mobs of other whites attacked colored inhabitants of the city generally. A prominent Democratic politician was heard to declare publicly that every Negro and every Black Republican ought to be driven out of town.158 More truthfully than they knew, the editors of Fincher’s Trades Review commented on the Buffalo situation two days before the draft riots began: “This, we fear, is but the beginning of the end.”159 The result of this labor strife was that when resistance to the draft started in New York on July 13, 1863, longshoremen formed the van of the mobs.160 Deputations recruiting rioters thoroughly canvassed the waterfront, so that by the second day of the upheaval the loading and unloading of ships in the harbor had stopped, except at a wharf here and there which happened to be under the guns of an armed vessel.161 No colored dockhands were to be found on any pier.162 Negroes who ventured on the streets near the waterfront or near saloons frequented by longshoremen were horribly tortured and beaten to death by bands of longshoremen and their bodies cast into the East River and Hudson River.163 One reporter described conditions about the

153. Herald, June 6, 9, 1863; Tribune, June 8, 9, 20, 1863. 154. Herald, June 15, 16, 1863; Herald, June 16, 1863. 155. Similar to the longshore situation in 1863 was the strike of New York longshoremen in October, 1945, at the end of World War II. At that time, Federal authorities, pleading the piling up of military cargoes on the docks, Sent two platoons of Negro soldiers with longshore experience to unload mail and baggage from the British transport, Queen Elizabeth. Times, October 10, 11, 1945. The Negro troops performed this task amid the hissing and booing of the strikers. 156. Tribune, June 15, 1863. 157. Tribune, June 20, 1863; Herald, June 20, 1863; Daily News, June 20, 1863. 158. Tribune, June 16, 1863; Herald, June 16, 1863; Tribune, June 17, 1863. 159. Daily News, June 20, 1863. 160. Spero and Harris, Op., Cit., pp. 197, 198; Wesley, op. cit., pp. 99, 100. For an interesting account of anti-Negro violence in a Toledo, Ohio, longshore strike, during which the members of the local board of trade were sworn in as special police, see Tribune, July 11, 1862. 161. Tribune, August 13, 1862. 162. Tribune, May 14, 1863; Herald, May 14, 16, 1863. 163. Fincher’s Trades Review, July 11, 1863; Tribune, July 8, 1863; Herald, July 8, 1863; Daily News, July 11, 1863. 200 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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piers thus: So determined and bitter is the feeling of the ’longshoremen against negroes that not one of the latter dares show himself upon the docks or piers even when a regular employee of the place. The white workmen have resolved, by concerted action, to keep colored men from this branch of labor, and have evinced, by their conduct toward their former comrades in work, a spirit as murderous and brutal as it is illiberal and selfish. It is a prevalent rumor, to which the authorities give full credence, and which the ’longshoremen seem proud of, that scores of these unfortunates have been thrown into the river and drowned, for no other reason than that they were obnoxious to the sensitive-minded individuals of a lighter color.164 Another observer likewise noted that longshoremen made no attempt to conceal their determination to keep negroes ... from that sort of labor. They insist upon it that the colored people must and shall be driven to other departments of industry, and that the work upon the docks, the stevedoring, and the various job-work therewith connected, shall be attended to solely and absolutely by members of the ’Longshoremen’s Association, and such white laborers as they see fit to permit upon the premises.165 The mobs along the waterfront which attacked other Negroes besides dock workers consisted, in all likelihood, of white longshoremen.166 Next to the colored dock workers, waiters and other Negro employees in downtown hotels and restaurants were the chief objects of the rioters’ fury.167 One firm, fearful that its property might be destroyed by demonstrators who believed it to have employed colored persons, sought to avert that fate by placing in the window a sign in conspicuous capitals: “No niggers in the rear.”168 It is not contended here that the competition of Negroes with whites ceased completely with the draft disturbances. Indeed, as early as Saturday, July 18, the last day of the riot week, a few colored workers began to pursue their usual vocations in public without being molested.169 On Monday, the 20th, more colored people, including waiters in several restaurants, summoned up enough courage to return to their jobs, and this trend continued in the succeeding days, to a point where even some Negro longshoremen returned to the docks of the Erie Railroad Company.170 But the committee of merchants formed to give relief to colored 164. Tribune, July 10, 1863. 165. Fincher’s Trades Review, July 11, 1863. 166. Emerson David Fite, Social and Industrial Conditions in the North during the Civil War (New York, 1910), pp. 189, 190; Spero and Harris, op. cit., pp. 197, 198. 167. Daily News, July 15, 1863; Weekly Caucasian, July 18, 1863; Stoddard, op. cit., p. 158. 168. Herald, July 17, 1863. 169. Daily News, July 17, 1863; New York Committee of Merchants for the Relief of Colored People Suffering from the Late Riots, 1863, Report (New York, 1863), pp. 20, 21; David M. Barnes, The Draft Riots in New York (New York, 1863), p. 24; Stoddard, op. cit., p. 239. 170. Times, July 17, 1863; Anti-Slavery Standard, July 25, 1863. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 201 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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victims of the riots was forced to admit that after this civil war within a Civil War many Negroes discharged by employers who feared destruction of their property because they had hired colored workers were not taken back in their old positions, despite years of service. White workers who wished to drive their competitors from the city were responsible, said the merchants, for pressure upon employers not to reinstate Negroes. They also persuaded the street railway companies to refuse colored persons permission to ride on their cars, making it difficult for or them to travel to work.171 To alleviate these conditions, the committee kept its office open as an employment agency after it stopped dispensing financial relief,172 in pursuance of a resolution, adopted at its first meeting, on July 18: That we will exert all the influence we possess to protect the colored people of this city in their rights to pursue unmolested their, lawful occupations.... That we will not recognize or sanction any distinction of persons of whatever nation, religion, or color, in their natural right to labor peaceably in their vocations in the support of themselves and those dependent upon them.173 Brave talk this, but its implementation was another matter. As the more timorous merchants and transportation companies continued to withhold jobs from Negro former employees, their brethren connected with the committee could only shake their heads and repeat that the whole sorry mess was the result of the merchants’ having tolerated months ago the dictation of striking longshoremen as to whom they should employ and on what terms.174 That many, Negroes were not restored to their old jobs is also clear from editorials in the Tribune after the riots. Greeley urged the merchants of New York to welcome Negroes back “to any work they are able and willing to do at a satisfactory price,” and, in a thrust at the Irish, urged that colored persons -- “American born and bred” -- be protected in the exercise of this right.175 Failure to do so meant capitulation to the demands of the rioters: The mob exults in the belief that, if it failed in its other objects, it [had?] at least secured possession of the labor of the city, and has driven the blacks to seek work elsewhere... . It is the duty of merchants and other employers to take pains to recall their workmen immediately, and assure them of permanent protection.176 Greeley observed, nevertheless, that reluctance to reemploy Negroes persisted.177 Of course, the great decrease in the city’s 171. Daily News, July 17, 1863. 172. Tribune, July 17, 1863. 173. Barnes, op. cit., p. 34; Stoddard, op. cit., pp. 80, 81, 91; Alexander, op. cit., 111, 68. Colored servants in private homes were another large class assaulted by rioters. Herald, July 17, 1863. 174. Tribune, July 20, 1863. When the danger abated, this concern denied the charge that it had disclaimed having any Negro employees, asserting that it sheltered a number of colored refugees during, the disorders. Tribune, July 21, 1863. 175. Tribune, July 20, 1863. 176. Tribune, July 21, 22, 1863; Herald, July 30, 1863; New York Committee of Merchants, op. cit., pp. 4-6. The claim of the committee that within a few weeks the demand for colored servants had increased tenfold must be treated with caution. Herald, p. 27. It is quite possible that new Negro domestics were being sought to replace those who had fled from the city during the riots. 202 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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colored population by 1865 also indicated a drop in the employment of Negroes.178 To review the main points of this article, Democratic leaders and newspapers in New York, from the secession crisis to the draft riots, constantly harped upon the note that if the slaves were freed, they would flock north and take away the jobs of Irish laborers. The election campaigns of 1860, 1861, and 1862 and Lincoln’s emancipation program were the occasions for their heaviest barrages of propaganda on this score. Republicans and abolitionists were slow to answer their opponents’ predictions. When they finally did reply, they argued that elimination of slavery would forestall any danger of an inundation of blacks. Although information about the actual movement of Negroes during the Civil War is sparse, it appears that some northward migration of contrabands did take place. It was small, to be sure, but enough seemingly to give point to the warnings of anti- administration politicians and journalists and to alarm the New York proletariat, despite surveys proving that the great majority of former slaves had no desire to leave the South. Rivalry for jobs between Negroes and Irishmen in New York had existed before the Civil War, and employers had occasionally hired black workers to break the strikes of white workers. During the war, with the numerous strikes for higher wages which it brought, the use of Negro strikebreakers by employers became much more frequent, particularly in the longshore field, dominated by the Irish. In the first half of 1863 the longshoremen of New York went On strike after strike for increased pay, only to see their places filled by colored men working for less money under police protection. While longshore wages gradually rose, white labor on the waterfront was, obsessed with the fear of competition from Negroes which needed only the commencement of the draft to be transformed into wholesale murder. The violence inflicted upon black workers on the docks and in other occupations by the draft rioters did, in fact, result in a decline for some years to come in the job rivalry which the former had offered. Thus the rioters partially achieved their aims. ALBON P. MAN, JR. New York, New York

177. Herald, pp. 12, 13. 178. Wesim op. cit., pp. 100, 101 136. Tribune, July 21, 1863. 137. Tribune, July 25, 1863. 138. Tribune, July 20, 1863. 139. Tribune, July 21, 1863. 140. Tribune, July 23, 1863. 141. See footnote 4 supra. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 203 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1866

August 17: In Berlin, A peace agreement was signed between Prussia and Baden.

Harper & Brothers issued Herman Melville’s BATTLE-PIECES AND ASPECTS OF THE WAR. This book, dedicated to the 300,000 Union soldiers who had died during the violence, made no mention of the roughly equivalent number of Confederate soldiers who had died roughly equivalent deaths during the violence: The fight for the city is fought In Nature’s old domain; Man goes out to the wilds, And Orpheus’ charm is vain. In glades they meet skull after skull Where pine-cones lay — the rusted gun, Green shoes full of bones, the mouldering coat And cuddled-up skeleton....

He pointed out that humans did not seem wise enough to leave war to WALDEN’s “red and black ants.”

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1870

While writing CLAREL: A POEM AND PILGRIMAGE IN THE HOLY LAND, Herman Melville drew upon a conversation which he had heard between a Frenchman and a Swede aboard the packetship Southampton while traveling to Europe in October 1849. The conversation had been about the repudiation of Alphonse de Lamartine as a leader by the French public after the Bloody June Days of 1848. Melville identified with the repudiated French leader and considered that revolutionary activity on behalf of the common man was futile.

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1871

Death of Edward Thompson Taylor, the famous chaplain of the Seamen’s Bethel on the Boston waterfront and prototype of Father Mapple in Herman Melville’s MOBY-DICK.

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1874

March: In an effort to maintain the confidence of its depositors, who had made “runs” on several of the branch offices, Freedmans’ Bank officials elected Frederick Douglass as president. The new president announced a personal deposit of $10,000 and urged people to have faith in the institution’s future. It would take Douglass a few months to realize that he had been “married to a corpse” and recommend to Congress that the bank be closed.179

Celia Thaxter, who had shortly before issued her AMONG THE ISLES OF SHOALS, a response to Herman Melville’s THE ENCANTADAS for sale to tourists on day trips visiting the bleak Isles of Shoals, commented in a letter that It takes Thoreau and Emerson and their kind to enjoy a walk for a walk’s sake, and the wealth they glean with eyes and ears. I cannot enjoy the glimpses Nature gives me half as well, when I go deliberately seeking them, as when they flash on me in some pause of work. It is like the pursuit of happiness: you don’t get it when you go after it, but let it alone and it comes to you. At least this is my case. In the case of the geniuses (now is that the proper plural?) aforesaid, it is different.

179. Abby L. Gilbert “The Comptroller of the Currency and the Freedman’s Savings Bank,” Journal of Negro History 57 (April 1972): 130-131. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 207 HDT WHAT? INDEX

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1876

Taking off from a remark that F. Scott Fitzgerald had made in “My Lost City,”180 that “I once thought that there were no second acts in American lives,” Robert Milder, in his REIMAGINING THOREAU, comments on page 202 about Thoreau’s and Melville’s regeneration in contrast with Emerson’s and Whitman’s depletion: Paradoxically, it was Thoreau and Melville, writers commonly supposed to have burned out by their thirty-eighty year, who enjoyed that rarity in nineteenth-century American literary careers, a second act, or what Thoreau would have called a second spring. Where Emerson had completed most of his important work by 1845 and Whitman most of his by 1860, Melville and Thoreau reinvented themselves in another genre, for another age: Melville as the poet of the vastly underappreciated CLAREL, Thoreau as the poet-scientist just beginning to discover his subject and angle of vision when he died. The English widow Anne Gilchrist, who had for some time been enamored of Walt, moved to Philadelphia in order to be near him (she would be there three years before giving up).

180. THE CRACK-UP AND OTHER ESSAYS, ed. Edmund Wilson. NY: New Directions, 1945, page 31. 208 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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Publication of Melville’s magnum opus CLAREL: A POEM AND PILGRIMAGE IN THE HOLY LAND.

I believe Clarel should be compared not to the poetry of Whitman and Dickinson but to texts truly parallel in form and content: the great theodicies of the Book of Job and the Apocryphal 4 Ezra (Second Esdras), the reverent scepticism of Ecclesiastes, the pain of Jeremiah’s complaints, or the laments of the Psalms. … The biblical idea and image that helped Melville articulate the paradox of divine distance and the difficulties of monotheism is called, in Hebrew, El Mistater or hester panim, the God that hides himself or the hidden face of God. This biblical idea of divine self-concealment is found predominantly in the great repositories of Wisdom literature in the Hebrew Bible: Proverbs, Job, Psalms, and Ecclesiastes. … Divine self- concealment has two different meanings in the Hebrew Bible. … [T]he one that captivated Melville … is related to the hiding of God’s face as a specific attribute of God’s nature. Isaiah also says, “verily, thou art a God that hides thyself” (45:15). Here the reflexive Hebrew verb mistater (“hides thyself”) indicates that God’s self-concealment is an attribute of His divinity. Such is the God of the Hebrew Bible: a God who hides Himself. Some may seek Him, but He will not be found; some may call upon Him, but He may not answer. Melville’s problem is that of other God-chasers such as Job: “Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him: On the left hand, where he doth work, but I cannot behold him: He hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him” (Job 23:8-9). God is present without being unquestionably manifested. He is hidden without being completely inaccessible. To find a clarification of God, to find Him in hiding, is at the heart of Melville’s twenty-thousand-line poetic testimony to the relationship between the human and the divine. Clarel is an original application and development of the biblical idea and image of the hiddenness of God and of the secondary acknowledgment of the silence of God. Clarel not only reveals the specific divine attributes of self-concealment and silence but also questions the effects of divine concealment: the ambiguity of a God of many faces and of the human limitations on the knowledge of nature, science, language, history, and wisdom. If God’s faces are hidden, His nature, His universe, and His purpose may also be hidden. In a sense, God plays hide- and-seek with His own creation. Most important, however, Clarel reveals the human as a mirror image of God’s hiddenness and silence — an unusual imitatio Dei.

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1886

BILLY BUDD was first conceived by Herman Melville, in the poem “Billy in the Darbies.”

1891

April 19: Herman Melville finished BILLY BUDD:

BILLY BUDD, Sailor

What befell him in the year of the Great Mutiny, etc.

DEDICATED TO JACK CHASE, ENGLISHMAN

“Wherever that great heart may now be Here on Earth or harbored in Paradise”

Captain of the Maintop in the year 1843 in the U.S. Frigate United States

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September 28: The New-York Times carried an obituary for one “Henry Melville” who had lived at 104 E. 26th St. and worked for 19 years as a $4-a-day deputy inspector out of the customs offices at 207 West St.181

DENQUE CAELUM

In the last year of his life Melville the long-time reader of Ecclesiastes had discovered it to be as easy to embrace pessimism as wisdom, and had taken consolation from a fragment of Schopenhauer:

[T]he more a man belongs to posterity, in other words, to humanity in general, the more of an alien he is to his contemporaries; since his work is not meant for them as such, but only for them in so far as they form part of mankind at large.

181. If it was Henry Melville who died, then Denque Caelum means “Thanks For All The Fish.” Humor aside, this inscription, so utterly at variance with anything Henry Thoreau would have chosen, reminds us of one of his later poems: “The Good Man pouring from his pitcher clear, / But brims the poisoned well.” And it reminds us of the quip of one of his more recent biographers, that rather than being a Transcendentalist Herman had been a Descendentalist. 212 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX

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In his copy of THE WORLD AS WILL AND IDEA Melville had underlined the following passage:

...the insight to which [Voltaire] attained in three respects, and which prove the greater depth of his thinking: (1) the recognition of the preponderating magnitude of the evil and misery of existence with which he is deeply penetrated; (2) that of the strict necessity of the acts of will; (3) that of the truth of Locke’s principle, that what thinks may also be material....”

1924

John Muir’s THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF JOHN MUIR.

Two belated events: •BILLY BUDD, FORETOPMAN, which Melville finished just before death in 1891, was finally published. • The United States of America conceded citizenship and constitutional rights (more or less) to individuals of the native American race.

1986

In 1846, while pursuing a Mexico blockade runner off Veracruz, the USS Somers had sailed directly into a sea gale and disappeared beneath the waves. When the wreck was located in this year its cannon were still loaded.182

Mayan peasants were being described as waiting for the date December 23, 2012 to roll around, in the expectation of great wars that would reduce the world’s armies to fighting with sticks and machetes. The prediction was that once again the Maya would rule over Central America. –Actually the people who were passing this New Age stuff around didn’t know anything at all about or care anything at all about what was going on among descendants of the Maya in Mexico. They were patching this stuff together out of a combination of Cold War propaganda with Christian eschatology, and timing it as falling at the completion of an ancient Mayan calendar “Great Cycle.”

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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: April 2, 2013

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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request we have pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining. To respond to such a request for information, we merely push a button.

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Commonly, the first output of the program has obvious deficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and do a recompile of the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place your requests with . Arrgh.

216 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith