Alarums and Retreats

Between the provincial society into which Herman Melville was born and the America in which he found himself at the time of the Civil War there was a vast difference. The Civil War may in one sense be looked upon as an attempt to preserve the ideological framework of the United States at a time when its institutions were in a state of disruption, and all its typical ways of life were being transformed. In that the Civil War preserved this framework, upholding the Constitution, confirming the union of the states, concentrating the powers of government, it was successful: the union was saved. But the very act of prosecuting the war confirmed the chaos and hastened the disruption, so that what was saved was not freedom and equality, the freedom of voluntary association and local initiative, the equality of access to an unlimited amount of utilizable land: what was left was just the opposite of these things, servility and inequality. Land and natural resources, scattered broadcast during the Civil War under the Homestead Act, and under various acts to promote railroad building, were turned into exacting monopolies; and the government itself became the principal agent for establishing and extending privilege. In less than half a generation Walt Whitman was forced to modify many of his fondest hopes for America: for with all these new agents of exploitation dominant, there was no longer any way of distinguishing the American proletariat from that of Europe, except in their independent manners—a relic of an equality that had once been real.

The disruption symbolized by the Civil War was expressed in a hundred ways; and when one examines these manifestations carefully they can all be characterized by a single figure: the failure to achieve form. One sees the difference between provincial and industrial America in the political definition of their units: New England, for example, is a natural region, like Brittany and Provence, with a mode of thought and an institutional form based upon certain common geographic features and cultural history; the new states and territories that were founded beyond the Alleghenies had no form other than that expressed by the arbitrary lines drawn by the surveyor: their content was simply so many blank square miles. The older cities of the seaboard, with the exception of Philadelphia, had a central nucleus which had grown out of local needs and habits: the size of the blocks was determined by the depth of the houses, the amount of garden space in the rear, the traffic that would pass in the streets: in the new cities no customs and habits played a part in the configuration of the city except those of realty speculation: by 1850, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Chicago had all forfeited to the land-gambler sites originally set aside for civic centres. In architecture, the failure to achieve form was equally conspicuous: windows, doors, rooms, façades, even apart from their grotesque efforts at decoration, all became gawky and ill-proportioned.

The energies of the country went into purely quantitative achievements: their only formal equivalent was money. The production in tons of iron, miles of steel rails, bushels of wheat, went up: cities increased in size: but the iron was used for the preposterous fronts of office buildings, the railroad served to deplete the hinterland, and the cities were dingy firetraps of wood or dingier prisons of brownstone. The war itself tore up and shot to pieces vast quantities of iron and many miles of railroad, and sundry towns and villages: but that was the true destination of all these quantitative efforts even in peace: for industrialism produced only an occasional genuine form, like the Eads Bridge, and for the most part its products were fit only to be consumed hastily and replaced and destroyed again. No wonder this civilization sweated day and night, without holidays, to produce its evanescent goods; while, in the Middle Ages, the great cathedrals and town halls were erected, without labour-saving machinery, in a rude agricultural society which spent a third of its year in holidays devoted to prayer, meditation, or festival. Where there is form and culture, there is true conservation of energy through the arts: where there is only energy, without end or form, the mechanism may be speeded up indefinitely without increasing anything except the waste and lost motion. Southern society, in which a provincial system of caste and culture held together, produced factories and slave barracks, in Charleston, for example, that maintained, uncorrupted, the forms of its classic past: but outside these aristocratic backwaters, chaos was dominant—and even in the South, one feels, it was only postponed.

In this sprawling, undisciplined America, a new type of character was uppermost. Melville described this new type when he touched on Ethan Allen in Israel Potter: “Allen,” he said, “seems to have been a curious combination of a Hercules, a Joe Miller, a Bayard, and a Tom Hyer. He was frank, bluff, companionable as a Pagan, convivial, a Roman, hearty as a harvest. His spirit was essentially Western; and herein is his peculiar Americanism; for the Western spirit is, or will yet be (for no other can be) the true American.” It was a sign of the waning of provincial faith that before the war everybody was eagerly looking for this individual, this type, who would serve as a symbol of unity. Even Emerson and Thoreau looked wistfully toward the rough fellows of the frontier to express what was common to all Americans. A provincial culture glories in its differences: the power to mould and express them is its unique quality: a Jefferson, a Franklin, an Adams were not only as far apart as Virginia, Philadelphia, and Boston: they were as far apart, in many ways, as London, Paris, and Weimar. But in the period before the war, the frontier type, Jackson, Harrison, Clay, Frémont, Lincoln, was put forward as the sum of all our possible Americas—albeit these figures were as far from the Swedes of Minnesota or the Germans of Wisconsin as they were from the Gansevoorts and the Randolphs. In a period of dissolution a false unity seems preferable to no common bond at all; and in the uncertainty, the disintegration, the dispersion of American society, under the vast tides of immigration and the inexorable flow of the coal-and-iron civilization, political Union became a compensatory symbol for all the social and cultural fragmentation that existed.

The political and social results of the Civil War, as they have worked out during the last two generations, have made us a little sceptical of the sacred, unchallengeable shibboleths under which the war itself was fought: we see that the prime issues of the great conflict were silenced, rather than settled, by the decisive victory of the North. Unfortunately, the South’s political contentions, which were partly valid, were vitiated by the issue of slavery. Mid all the decisive statesmanship displayed south of the Mason and Dixon line, no one was firm enough or far-sighted enough, after Jefferson’s time, to see that the holding of human beings in bondage, without hope or means of escape, was an untenable anachronism: even the Russian autocracy recognized that. The French Revolution had made this particular form of human degradation unpalatable; like incest or tribal revenge, it could not be related to a modern society. The burden of that institution, indeed, belonged to the whole country: the great mistake of the South, from 1830 onwards, was to assume as a divine necessity or benefit what should have been shared with the rest of the country as an intolerable evil—to be disposed of by some direct economic adjustment.

Melville had his misgivings about current political institutions; in Mardi he pointed out that many of the boasted freedoms of America were the product of free land and an uncrowded domain; and though he was a republican, he recognized inequality, and had no hope of doing away with those distinctions between man and man in a functional capacity, which separate captain, mates, and crew. His own outlook was emotionally patrician and aristocratic; but his years in the forecastle had modified those feelings, and one needs some such compound word as aristodemocracy to describe his dominant political attitude. Melville may have had his moments of admiration for the gracious ways of the South; but, quite properly, he regarded the United States as a place where narrow tribalisms had been successfully dropped, where the entire blood of Europe joined together from a thousand sources, the country being not so much a nation in the old sense, as a world, a neighbourly world; and he doubtless looked upon the Southern claim to independence as a return to tribalism and narrowness.

Like most men of good will, Melville looked forward to a time when the world itself would be federated into a whole, so that the conflicts between peoples and tribes and communities, the inevitable and salutary conflicts, would not take place on the physical plane—where they are disastrous and prove nothing—but on the plane of culture. With this in view, the breaking up of a federation is a mode of political atavism: and the attempt reinforced Melville’s natural repugnance to slavery. Unfortunately, the maintenance of a union by compulsive methods leads to an enthronement of the powers of the central government, and a diminution of a regional independence; the military strength of the central government and its impudence in serving special groups within the state, in turn becomes an obstacle to the pacification of the world. Melville could scarcely anticipate this result; but his philosophy had a place for the evil which dogs the footsteps of the good, and when he said that America might turn out to be the Paul Jones of nations, intrepid, unprincipled, reckless, predatory, with boundless ambitions, civilized in externals but savage at heart, he may partly have anticipated the outcome of that political supremacy he expected the United States finally to attain. By the time the war opened, there was established a certain fatalism in Melville’s mind which made him lenient to the forces that seemed to him evil: they, too, in their inscrutable way were obedient to another power.

Melville’s attitude towards the Civil War was, in sum, just the opposite of Hawthorne’s; and if the men had been still in communication during this period, it would probably have opened a final breach between them. For Hawthorne, New England was as large a piece of earth as he had any affection for, and whatever happened next, he asserted in the early days of the conflict, he rejoiced that the old Union was smashed. “We never were one people, and never really had a country since the Constitution was founded.” There spoke the shrewd, unshaken provincial. Hawthorne looked upon John Brown, moreover, as a poisonous nuisance: for Melville he was a prophetic figure, whose death made it impossible for the stabs of controversy to heal, whose streaming beard was the very meteor of war. One may sum up Melville’s political character by saying that his breeding and instincts were those of a provincial; his superficial beliefs and attitudes were those of a political unionist; and during the Civil War the latter were uppermost, but not wholly so. Well might Walt Whitman describe the war itself, and the temper of the society that ushered it in, by the word “convulsiveness.” There was something arcane and uncontrollable in these partisanships and antipathies: each fragment was thrown about erratically, tangentially. It was war that produced war; and when the active state at last came about, men settled to it with a sigh of relief. War polarized these fragments: it gave an appearance of high order to this chaos.