Melville and the Negro

Jf NASMUCH AS MELVILLE PUBLISHED most of his best work in the years between the Mexican and Civil Wars-the years during which the interconnected problems of westward expansion and slavery reached crisis stage-it might seem, as Sidney Kaplan thinks, surprising that from Typee in I846 to the Battle-Pieces of i866 there is scarcely an important item in the Melville canon that does not contain Negro characters or touch in some way the question of bondage and revolt.' Yet the frequency and importance of the Negro's role in Melville's work is, in fact, surprising in view of the absence of black men from the work of his contemporaries. Though Negroes figure prominently in such abolitionist efforts as Uncle Tom's Cabin, they seldom appear in the nonpropagandistic writings of Melville's literary peers. Emerson, Thoreau, and Whittier, for example, may have spoken and editorialized against the evils of slavery and the wickedness of Daniel Webster and Judge Shaw, but Negroes as individuals have no place in their poetry. Negroes do, of course, figure in Whitman's work, but Leaves of Grass was published four years after Moby-Dick, and Whitman was not widely known until still later. Mention of Negroes and slavery is also conspicuously absent from the stories and novels of Melville's close friend and correspondent Nathaniel Hawthorne (though he discusses the slavery issue in his campaign biography of Franklin Pierce, whose administration was pro-slavery). Furthermore, Melville's correspondence makes no reference to the slavery issue. Even the letters to his father-in-law and confidant, Judge Lemuel Shaw, contain no mention of either Negroes or slavery, though Shaw was at the time embroiled in the fugitive slave cases

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