by Owen J. Hurd
Melville turned his back on his audience, such as it was, and took a page from Hawthorne’s playbook, landing a job in the New York City customs house. His annual salary of $1,200 was equal to his lifetime earnings from Moby-Dick. It wasn’t stimulating work, but it wasn’t overly taxing either. The biggest problem Melville faced was how to preserve his integrity in a notoriously corrupt atmosphere. Melville quietly and resolutely fulfilled his duties, unfailingly refusing all bribes offered. Earning a steady living now, and no longer writing for publication, Melville fell into a comfortable routine. His marriage and family life seemed to improve, and his drinking diminished.
Each morning Melville and his eighteen-year-old son, Malcolm, would trudge off to their respective jobs. On one occasion, though, “Mackie” slept in after a late night out on the town. His mother called repeatedly through the locked door, but Mackie refused to come down for breakfast. Melville told his wife to let the boy sleep in and face the consequences at work. When Melville returned home that night Mackie’s bedroom was still locked. Melville kicked in the door to find his son reclined on his bed, a pistol near his hand, a bullet wound through the temple. His death was initially reported as a suicide, but the local newspapers revised their theory weeks later. Noting that the young Melville was in the habit of keeping a loaded pistol beneath his pillow, they characterized his death as a tragic accident. Regardless, the tragedy devastated the Melvilles, making Herman a more sullen and distant father to his remaining children.
The last work Herman Melville published, in 1876, was a two-volume, eighteen-thousand-line epic poem, Clarel, about his trip to the Holy Land. Melville actually gave away more copies than were sold. Years later, the remaining unwanted copies were destroyed.
The deaths of several relatives had improved the Melville family’s financial situation, permitting Melville to retire in 1886 after almost twenty years as a customs inspector. He was sixty-seven. At about this same time, several of Melville’s British fans made pilgrimages to New York, in search of the once-famous author. “I sought everywhere for this Triton, who is still living somewhere in New York,” remarked Scottish poet Robert Buchanan. “No one seemed to know anything of the one great imaginative writer fit to stand shoulder to shoulder with Whitman on the continent.”
When Melville’s obituary appeared in New York newspapers in 1891, many were surprised to find out that the author of Typee had not died years earlier. It speaks volumes that another notice erroneously called him “Hiram Melville.” Another obituary even misspelled the title of what would become his most famous book (calling it “Mobie Dick”).
Lizzie stored Herman’s unfinished work, including an unfinished manuscript about a young ingénue, the “handsome sailor.” “Billy Budd,” published in 1924, coincided with Melville’s critical revival. Unappreciated for seventy years, Melville’s work was suddenly rediscovered by a new generation of critics who placed Moby-Dick among “the greatest sea romances in the whole literature of the world” and declared it “undisputedly…the greatest whaling novel.”
In his critical biography published in 1929, Lewis Mumford laments, “For three-quarters of a century Moby-Dick has suffered at the hands of the superficial critics,” but now it can be agreed, “Moby-Dick stands by itself as complete as The Divine Comedy or The Odyssey stands by itself.” Herman Melville—and Moby-Dick—had finally reached the iconic status that had proved so elusive during the author’s lifetime.
LOOSE ENDS
Shortly after Moby-Dick was published in 1851, Herman Melville traveled to Nantucket Island, where he met George Pollard, the captain of the Essex, a whaling ship whose real-life encounter with a vengeful white whale was the inspiration for Melville’s Moby-Dick. Pollard had little in common with the monomaniacal Ahab. For one thing, he didn’t have a wooden peg leg. Unlike Ahab, Pollard obviously survived his ordeal, spending three months in a lifeboat with several other survivors, all of whom resorted to cannibalism. Pollard’s nephew was one of those consumed. This horrific experience did not stop Pollard from commanding another whaling vessel, the Two Brothers. Unfortunately this ship sank too after running aground on rocks six hundred miles northwest of the Sandwich Islands. Rescued again, Pollard gave up the whaling game for good and became a night watchman back on Nantucket. His sister never forgave him for eating her son.
CHAPTER SIX
THE CIVIL WAR
JUDGING from the immense number of books published on it each year, the War between the States continues to be one of our country’s most compelling dramas. Maybe that’s because the list of dramatis personae is long and colorful. Yet, the stories of what happened to some of that drama’s main characters remain obscure.
In this chapter we examine what happened to Harriet Tubman, who freed numerous slaves through the Underground Railroad, and John Brown, whose act of domestic terrorism incited moral outrage north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Finally, we’ll see what happened to the perpetrators and victims of, as well as witnesses to one of the most shocking crimes in U.S. history, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
Harriet Tubman, at the End of the Line
In 1849 Harriet Tubman escaped from a Maryland plantation, ending twenty-two years of enslavement, during which she routinely suffered beatings and other abuses. Over the next ten years, Tubman sneaked back into the South on multiple occasions, risking her freedom and life to liberate numerous other slaves—between fifty and three hundred, depending on the source. It would be nice to be able to say that after her days on the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman enjoyed the freedoms she had struggled so hard to win and that her efforts were recognized and even honored. Or, failing that, that she was at least compensated for services rendered to the nation during the Civil War. It would be nice, indeed, but it would be far from accurate.
Harriet Tubman’s career as a conductor on the Underground Railroad came to an end with the Civil War, but she remained a valuable weapon in the fight for black emancipation. Just after the war began, she reported for duty at a Union military camp in South Carolina. At first she was relegated to menial tasks, like cooking for officers and nursing sick and injured soldiers. Later, Tubman performed valuable espionage work, applying the knowledge and skills gained on the Underground Railroad to spy on the enemy, reporting on Confederate troop strength and movements. Teaming up with Colonel James Montgomery, a veteran of the Bleeding Kansas battles, Tubman even led a brigade of armed Union soldiers into battle.
According to a reporter on the scene:
Col. Montgomery and his gallant band of 300 black soldiers, under the guidance of [Tubman], dashed into the enemies’ country, struck a bold and effective blow, destroying millions of dollars worth of commissary stores, cotton, and lordly dwellings, and striking terror to the heart of rebellion, brought off near 800 slaves and thousands of dollars worth of property, without losing a man or receiving a scratch!
Her country expressed its gratitude by not paying her for any of the work she did on behalf of the Union Army. On several occasions, military officials or elected politicians made halfhearted efforts to win her some form of compensation, but to no avail.
On her way home after the war, Tubman was taking a train from Philadelphia to New York. A white conductor told her to go into the smoking car. Not one to suffer indignities lightly, Tubman refused. The conductor resorted to force, but Tubman grabbed hold of a handrail. It took three men to break her grip. She was shoved to the smoking car and tossed in like a sack of potatoes. Tubman suffered a broken arm in the scuffle. Friends encouraged Tubman to sue the train company, but she never followed through.
Tubman lived the rest of her life in poverty, dependent on the charity of abolitionist benefactors. She had many generous supporters, including Franklin Sanborn, Gerrit Smith, and William Lloyd Garrison. Back in 1859 New York Senator William Seward sold Tubman a house near Auburn, New York. With a barn and farmland, the property was offered at a price well below its market value and on very generous terms. On to
p of that, the mere act of entering into a contract with a female fugitive slave was notable, for the Dred Scott case had just declared that blacks did not enjoy any rights as citizens. After the war, Tubman managed to scratch out a mean subsistence at her Auburn home through farming and a modest brick manufacturing enterprise. But Tubman was generous to a fault, taking in poor relatives, acquaintances, and even strangers, at least one of whom repaid her kindness by robbing her. Thanks to her generous nature and her naïveté, Tubman was frequently in need of financial assistance. Her friends occasionally organized fund-raising efforts to support her.
One method devised to provide her with economic aid took the form of a Tubman biography. Written by Sarah Hopkins Bradford, the book was published in 1869. The cost of printing was underwritten by local benefactors, and all proceeds were earmarked for Tubman. The book sold well and royalties were used to pay off many of Tubman’s debts, including her mortgage to Seward, which was paid off in full by 1873.
Tubman herself was known to organize fund-raising drives, always for the benefit of others—namely, poor former slaves. Her old friend William Seward was chagrined by her limitless generosity. “You have worked for others long enough,” Seward admonished her. “It is time you should think of yourself.” Seward would gladly make donations to assist Tubman, but, he said, “I will not help you to rob yourself for others.”
One night in 1873, two white men showed up at her door with an interesting proposition. These men claimed to know of a secret cache of Confederate gold worth about five thousand dollars. In return for two thousand dollars in cash, the men would lead Tubman to the site. With money fronted by a wealthy white businessman, Tubman set off with the men. All she got for her efforts—and the two thousand dollars—was a bump on the head and a rather expensive lesson.
Tubman was also actively involved in the woman’s suffrage movement, speaking at various conventions. Though she would not live to see the vote extended to women, Tubman was an inspirational voice in the movement and helped to advance the cause, along with white suffragists Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott.
Poor health had plagued Tubman and her family for years. Her second husband, Nelson Davis, suffered from tuberculosis, making it difficult for him to play a significant role in supporting an extended family that tended to gravitate toward Tubman, seeking care and sustenance. In addition to blood relations, Tubman’s home was often filled with poor and feeble neighbors and acquaintances. Sarah Bradford, the author of Tubman’s biography, visited her once near the turn of the century. She was appalled to find an overwhelmed Tubman “surrounded by a set of beggars who I fear fleece her of everything sent her.” The paternalistic Bradford decided to manage Tubman’s royalty earnings for her, making direct payments to Tubman’s creditors and meting out small payments at a time. Tubman’s only other steady income at this time was a monthly government pension of twenty dollars. It had taken the U.S. government thirty-five years to finally begin compensating Tubman for her service to the country during the Civil War.
Considering Tubman’s compassionate nature, it was altogether fitting that she would seek to establish an institution to care for old and sick African Americans. She managed to raise enough money to make a down payment on a plot of land, but with no funding available for construction, Tubman donated the land to her church, which opened The Harriet Tubman Home for Aged and Infirm Negroes in 1908. Just a few years later, Tubman herself became too feeble to care for herself. She spent the last two years of her life in the home named in her honor, finally dying in 1913, at the age of ninety-three.
LOOSE ENDS
Harriet Tubman’s first husband, John, was actually a freedman living near the Maryland plantation where Harriet was enslaved. He stayed behind when Tubman fled North and eventually remarried. John Tubman was murdered in 1867 by a white neighbor over a petty dispute.
After passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, it became unsafe for runaways like Harriet Tubman to live in the free northern states, so she moved for a time to St. Catharines, Ontario. There she met John Brown, who was developing his plans for inciting a slave revolt. She also recruited black soldiers from the Canadian fugitive community to join in Brown’s raid, but none of them ultimately took part in it.
John Brown’s Trial, Execution, and Apotheosis
On October 31, 1859, two weeks after his stunningly ineffective raid on the Harpers Ferry arsenal, John Brown sat in a Charles Town, Virginia, jail cell composing a letter to his wife, Mary.
“I suppose you have learned before this by the newspapers that two weeks ago today we were fighting for our lives at Harpers Ferry,” he begins. “That during the fight Watson was mortally wounded; Oliver killed.” Watson and Oliver were the Browns’ sons.
Brown continued, “I have since been tried, and found guilty of treason, and of murder in the first degree.” Before mailing the letter a few days later, he appended what might be the most understated postscript in history: “P.S. Yesterday Nov 2d I was sentenced to be hanged on 2 Decem next. Do not grieve on my account. I am still quite cheerful.”
Brown bore his own hardships with ease, but he was clearly anxious about the consequences to be suffered by his surviving dependents, which included his wife, three young daughters, and a crippled son. “They have suffered much,” he wrote from jail, “and it is hard to leave them uncared for.” Without her husband around anymore, the soon-to-be-widowed Mrs. Brown would have to rely on others for financial support.
Many of the letters Brown wrote from jail included pleas for financial support for his family—as well as the families of his widowed daughters-in-law. Focusing entirely on his wife’s future without him, until they could be reunited in heaven, Brown rebuffed Mary’s offers to visit him in jail. He worried that her safety could be compromised by the high-strung proslavery mobs surrounding the jail. He also knew that a trip from North Elba, New York, to Virginia would strain his family’s tenuous finances. Financial considerations also led Brown to suggest that Mary leave her loved ones’ bodies in Virginia, rather than bearing the expense of shipping them to New York.
“Do not let that grieve you,” he wrote her in his characteristically unsentimental manner. “It can make but little difference what is done with them.”
As he often did, Brown found solace in his faith, saying that “God will be a husband to the widow, and a father to the fatherless.” He also knew that several wealthy supporters had already pledged donations to support his family.
Otherwise, Brown almost seemed to enjoy his imprisonment and trial. In numerous letters he wrote from jail, Brown claimed to be “of good cheer.”
“No part of my life has been more happily spent than that I have spent here,” he claimed. Part of this he attributed to the “kind” and “humane” treatment received from his jailer, one Captain John Avis. Brown went so far as to discourage accomplices from plotting an armed jailbreak, in part because he feared Avis might be injured or killed in such an attempt.
Brown derived most of his good cheer from a profound sense of having done God’s work, of having performed a service to humanity. Brown may have planned and executed an armed insurrection against the United States of America, but his felonies were perpetrated to topple the evil institution of slavery, in adherence to a higher law. In his final address to the court, just before his sentencing, Brown noted, “This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God. I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament.” The most important law contained in that book, according to Brown, was the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. “It teaches me, further to ‘remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them.’”
Of course, in military terms the raid was a dismal failure. Of the twenty-one soldiers Brown had assembled (sixteen white, five black) to ignite what he hoped would be a widespread slave insurrection, ten were killed during the raid. Several others later died of their wounds. John Brown was
wounded in the final scuffle—stabbed in the abdomen and slashed across the head by an officer’s blunt sword. In his haste to join the battle, the army officer had accidentally grabbed a ceremonial weapon; otherwise Brown probably wouldn’t have survived his ill-fated escapade.
But Brown was confident in the eventual success of his enterprise. Even though he failed to accomplish any of his military objectives, Brown hoped to score a public relations victory that would propel the nation toward a day without slavery. Others were less convinced. Today, it’s commonly accepted that Brown’s raid played a key role in the run-up to the Civil War and, ultimately, the abolition of slavery. At the time, however, many abolitionists were appalled by Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry. One by one, prominent abolitionists publicly disavowed Brown. William Lloyd Garrison, William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Abraham Lincoln among others deplored the attack as folly and possibly treason. Even Frederick Douglass—who consulted with Brown for years—and Henry Ward Beecher—who shipped rifles to Brown during the Bleeding Kansas campaign—publicly censured Brown.
From the start, Brown realized that he was worth more to the abolitionist cause dead than alive. He discouraged any talk of an armed rescue, “being fully persuaded that I am worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose.” Beecher—Harriet Beecher Stowe’s brother and one of the most renowned preachers of his day—agreed.
