AMASA DELANO AND FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT
Eleanor Roosevelt Seagraves says in an e-mail communication that an old story that her grandfather, FDR, purchased all existing copies of Amasa Delano’s memoir is not true. She has no recollection of any family member during her childhood discussing Amasa, though she did wind up editing an abridged edition of A Narrative (1994). According to documents found (thanks to Josh Frens-String) in Chile’s Ministry of Foreign Relations (Archivo General Histórico del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Fondo Histórico, vol. 1404), Roosevelt was made aware of Delano’s memoir in 1934, by his undersecretary of state to Latin America, who suggested buying a copy and donating it to Chile’s national university as a token of Good Neighbor diplomacy. Roosevelt agreed, apparently inscribing the book thus: “May the modest part which my kinsman played in the building of Chile encourage further fruitful cooperation between our two peoples who share common ideals of justice, peace and humanity.”
JUAN MARTÍNEZ DE ROZAS, LEMUEL SHAW, AND BILLY BUDD
Juan Martínez de Rozas and Lemuel Shaw played similar roles in creating their respective countries’ legal systems, helping to turn a mishmash of colonial jurisprudence into coherent bodies of modern republican case law (Shaw’s legal decisions, in particular, helped define norms related to commerce, free labor, mental capacity, and free speech). Likewise, Rozas’s 1805 ruling in the Tryal case is, in a way, comparable to Shaw’s 1851 upholding of the Fugitive Slave Act. The two men were personally opposed to slavery yet they both, when forced to adjudicate the struggle between justice and order, chose order (though Shaw’s ruling also upheld the nested levels of state sovereignty that is U.S. federalism, a jumble anathema to Rozas).
Melville would take up the question of whether justice was invested in “lasting institutions” or in natural rights that exist independently of those institutions in his last and posthumously published novel, Billy Budd, whose Christlike title character is condemned and executed by Captain Vere, master of a British man-of-war, for unintentionally killing an abusive officer. Some legal scholars believe that Melville based Vere on Shaw. The political theorist Hannah Arendt used Billy Budd to argue that since absolute justice can never be represented institutionally, the fight to obtain it leads to perpetual violence, to “war with the peace of the world and the true welfare of mankind,” as she quotes Melville’s summing up of Vere’s opinion. Writing in the middle of the insurgent 1960s, Arendt argued that the role of “virtue” in the institutions of law is “not to prevent the crime of evil but to punish the violence of absolute innocence,” since the drive to achieve perfection (or “perfect liberty,” as Amasa Delano saw the benighted goal of French revolutionaries) can destroy society as quickly as, if not quicker than, “elemental evil.”
For Rozas, see Domingo Amunátegui Solar, Don Juan Martínez de Rozas, Santiago: Universo, 1925; Manuel Martínez Lavín, Biografía de Juan Martínez de Rozas, Santiago: Imprenta Albion, 1894; Diego Barros Arana, Historia general de Chile, vol. 8, Santiago: Editorial Universitaria, 2002, pp. 10–15; and Julio Bañados Espinosa, Ensayos y bosquejos, Santiago: Librería Americana, 1884, pp. 255–66. Cristián Gazmuri Riveros, “Libros e ideas políticas Francesas durante la gestación de la independencia de Chile,” in América Latina ante la Revolución Francesa, ed. María del Carmen Borrego Plá and Leopoldo Zea, Mexico: UNAM, 1003, p. 99, describes Rozas as the “true ideologue of the first steps in the process of Chilean independence.” For Arendt’s discussion of Billy Budd, see On Revolution, New York: Penguin, 1965, p. 84. Following Arendt, legal theorists continue to debate the meaning of the novel. See Richard Posner, Law and Literature, 3rd ed., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009, pp. 211–28; Alfred Konefsky, “The Accidental Legal Historian: Herman Melville and the History of American Law,” Buffalo Law Review 52 (Fall 2004); and Robert Cover, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975.
THE EXECUTION
I’m sure it is reading too much into a mere accident of calligraphy, but it is worth noting, considering that Mori and probably many of the rest of the condemned were Muslims, that Rozas’s scribe, when he recorded the part of the execution order that sentenced the prisoners to be paraded through Concepción tied to the tail of a mule, misspelled the al-Andalus-derived bestia de albarda, or “beast of burden.” He split the last word in two and capitalized the article—bestia Al varda—which more clearly reveals the word’s Arabic origins.
It was standard practice in both Spain and Spanish America to publicly execute and then ritually mutilate the bodies of those convicted of parricide, of rebellion against the authority of king, Church, God, master, or family father, be they white or black. They might be burned alive or hung, like José María de España, a white creole charged with conspiring against Spain in 1799 in Venezuela. After his execution, España’s legs and arms were tied to four horses and his body was ripped to pieces; his “various quarters” were then displayed in prominent locations as a warning. Another style of execution was taken straight from first-century Roman law and entailed whipping the condemned until raw, hanging until dead, and then placing the corpse in a leather sack with the bodies of a dog, snake, cock, and monkey and throwing it into a body of water. The practice decreased in frequency, but it was still occasionally used in Spanish America, including Chile and Louisiana, through the 1700s (though by this time the animals were often symbolically represented through drawings). Later, republican rebels themselves would publicly execute royalists. In 1811, Juan Martínez de Rozas had a traitor to the patriot cause put to death and his bloody body and musket-disfigured face displayed for “public contemplation.” It is this legal tradition, which held public punishment to be a source of civic virtue, that was invoked in 1841 by the Spanish ambassador to the United States when he petitioned the U.S. government to return the African Amistad rebels to Spain so “public vengeance” could be served.
See Derek Noel Kerr, “Petty Felony, Slave Defiance, and Frontier Villainy: Crime and Criminal Justice in Spanish Louisiana, 1770–1803,” PhD dissertation, Tulane University, 1983, p. 154. See also Claudia Arancibia Floody, José Tomás Cornejo Cancino, and Carolina González Undurraga, Pena de muerte en Chile Colonial: Cinco casos de homicidio de la Real Audiencia, Santiago: Centro de Investigaciones Diego Barros Arana, 2003; José Félix Blanco, ed., Documentos para la historia de la vida pública del libertador de Colombia, Perú y Bolivia, Caracas: La Opinión Nacional, 1875, p. 366; V. Lastarria, M. A. Torconal, et al., Historia jeneral de la República de Chile desde su independencia hasta nuestros dias, Santiago: Nacional, 1866, p. 310.
MELVILLE AND MANIFEST DESTINY
It is impossible to track a simple movement in Melville’s writing from an embrace of the idea of manifest destiny to a more critical stance. His first extended engagement with the notion of the American West’s acting as a safety valve was in the novel Mardi, published a year before White-Jacket’s famous “ark of liberties” passage. Already in that work, Melville was skeptical: the “wild western waste” would not be “overrun in a day,” he wrote, “yet overrun at last it will be; and then, the recoil must come.” Even earlier, in 1846, in a letter to his brother Gansevoort, Melville was dubious about the U.S. invasion of Mexico. He playfully but cuttingly described the war “delirium” that had overtaken the country. The gentry were buffing the “wax red in their coat facings” and the “’prentice boys were running off to the wars by scores.” His generation was twice removed from the American Revolution, but its men longed to live up to their grandfathers’ heroics. War with Mexico, Melville feared, would only worsen the craving, increasing the nation’s tolerance for militarism. “Lord, the day is at hand,” he wrote his brother, when the Revolutionary War’s “Battle of Monmouth will be thought child’s play.” And he fretted about the consequences, worried that war would beget more war: “‘A little spark kindleth a great fire’ as the well known author of the Proverbs very justly remarks—and who knows what all this
may lead to.” Later, in 1876, Melville would celebrate in verse his navy cousin Guert Gansevoort’s heroic actions in the Mexican-American War. But the poem rotates seemingly jingoistic stanzas (with Guert “dashed splashing through / The blue rollers sunned” to take Veracruz and plant the “Starry Banner.” “Hi Santa Anna!”) with more skeptical ones, including one that questions the possibility of representing war at all: “But ah, how to speak of the hurricane unchained.” Interestingly, a decade after the Mexican-American War, Guert Gansevoort (who was the son of Leonard Gansevoort, the first and perhaps main target of Albany’s 1793 slave arson) was the commander of the USS Decatur when in 1856 it beat back an attack of two thousand Suaquamish and Duwamish peoples trying to retake what today is the Port of Seattle from white settlers.
Like his approach to most other political questions, Melville’s opinion of the Jacksonian democracy that drove manifest destiny was ambivalent: Moby-Dick’s famous chapter 26, “Knights and Squires,” seems to celebrate Jackson himself as a prophet of a “great democratic God” while Melville’s next novel, Pierre, implies that Jacksonian democracy didn’t do away with the old order but merely naturalized inequalities as part of the landscape. Melville consistently criticized the hypocrisy of Christian missionaries and the violence heaped on Native Americans, even at times approaching the level of cynicism that Amasa Delano had reached by the end of his days: “The Anglo-Saxons—lacking grace / To win the love of any race; / Hated by myriads dispossessed / Of rights—the Indians East and West. / These pirates of the sphere! grave looters— / Grave, canting, Mammonite freebooters, / Who in the name of Christ and Trade / (Oh, bucklered forehead of the brass!) / Deflower the world’s last sylvan glade!” But these are the opinions of one character in a well-populated poem. See Frederick C. Crews’s discussion of this passage in “Melville the Great,” New York Review of Books, December 1, 2005. See also the discussion in Parker, “Politics and Art.” For Pierre, see Samuel Otter, “The Eden of Saddle Meadows: Landscape and Ideology in Melville’s Pierre,” American Literature 66 (March 1994): 55–81.
THE EMPIRE OF NECESSITY
Melville identifies the epigraph he uses for his short story “The Bell-Tower” (“Seeking to conquer a larger liberty, man but extends the empire of necessity”) as coming from a private manuscript, presumably in his possession. Some Melvilleans, though, including Hershel Parker (in an e-mail communication), speculate that he wrote it himself. “The Bell-Tower,” which Melville published anonymously in Putnam’s Monthly, starts with two other quotations, both also said to be from the same private manuscript. One of them reads: “Like negroes, these powers own man sullenly, mindful of their higher master; while serving, plot revenge.” With three commas and a semicolon for sixteen words, it’s a wonderfully convoluted phrase, almost as difficult to decipher as the story that follows. “The Bell-Tower” takes place in Renaissance Italy and concerns a clockmaker who, in the process of casting an enormous bell, kills a worker, whose blood falls into the molten iron, embedding a fatal flaw in the finished bell. When the whole bell-tower apparatus is finished, it includes a cloaked, life-size ringer who moves forward on the hour and strikes the bell with a club, in effect a mechanical robot that Melville explicitly compares to a slave. The story ends with the figure clubbing his maker dead and the tower collapsing. Melville concludes: “So the blind slave obeyed its blinder lord, but, in obedience, slew him. So the creator was killed by the creature. So the bell was too heavy for the tower. So the bell’s main weakness was where man’s blood had flawed it. And so pride went before the fall.” The next story Melville published in Putnam’s was Benito Cereno.
Not all societies in the Americas founded on slavery have spent their postabolition history trying to escape the empire of necessity. Latin America’s strong social-democratic tradition, which guarantees to its citizens the right to health care, education, and a decent, dignified life, admits that there are limits to individual freedom. These pledges have often fallen short in practice, but the region’s rhetorical commitment to social rights at least acknowledges the debt liberty owes necessity. There are many reasons for the divergence between U.S. and Latin American political culture as it relates to social rights and not all of them are related to the history of slavery. But some are: in Spanish America, the fact that the market revolution powered by slavery occurred before its break from Spain meant that the movement for political independence and for the abolition of slavery could be seen by many republicans as one and the same thing. Following independence, political disenfranchisement and social domination based on racial categories continued, but race was not abstracted into a thing in itself (at least not as much as it would be in the United States). In Latin America, postindependence struggles for political democracy and social rights, for freedom and equality, were less likely to be understood in racial terms, or, if they were, it would be in a good way, with dark-skinned peoples throughout the region fighting for universal social democracy. In the United States, where the slave-driven market revolution occurred after the American Revolution, not only was the fight to extend more democratic rights to, and greater freedom for, white men seen as something distinct from the fight for abolition, it was understood by many as dependent on slavery, an understanding that saw its apotheosis in the Kansas-Nebraska Act and John Calhoun’s “positive good” vision of slavery. Then, after abolition, this slavery-forged freedom took new shape on the frontier, which allowed endless opportunities for millions of what Melville called “sovereign-kings” to flee forward, imagining themselves escaping the master-slave relation, escaping from the empire of necessity.
ARCHIVES CONSULTED
Slavery created the modern world. It’s a statement often made, easy to agree with, and hard to process since its truth is lost in its abstraction. But in writing this book, I’ve come to appreciate the assertion anew, to realize the ways that slavery insinuated itself into the soul and sinews of the West. The research for this history was conducted in archives, libraries, and museums in nine countries, including in Spain (in Madrid, Seville, and Calañas, the Andalusian village where Benito Cerreño was born), Uruguay, Argentina (Buenos Aires and Mendoza, Alejandro de Aranda’s hometown), Chile (Santiago, Valparaiso, and Concepción), Peru (Lima and Huacho), Great Britain (Liverpool and London), Senegal (Dakar and Port Saint-Louis), France (Aix-en-Provence), and the United States (Boston, Duxbury—Amasa Delano’s birthplace—Albany, New York, Providence, and Washington, D.C., among other places). I’ve traveled by bus across the pampas and over the Andes, roughly along the route Mori, Babo, and the rest of the West African captives were forced to move by foot and mule, and visited the Huaura Valley in Peru, north of Lima, where Cerreño, having given up sailing after barely surviving his ordeal, took possession of Hacienda Humaya, a sprawling sugar slave plantation. And I’ve taken an overladened ferry from Lota, Chile, to the Pacific island of Santa María, spending the three-day wait for the return ship with nothing much to do except reread Benito Cereno and contemplate the bay where Delano’s Perseverance met Cerreño’s Tryal (there wasn’t even beer to buy, since most of the island’s residents, it seemed, had converted to Pentecostalism).
Some of the locations on this itinerary have only a glancing relationship to slavery, through this particular history. Others, like Seville, Buenos Aires, Port Saint-Louis, Lima, Boston, and Liverpool, were central hubs in a network that financed, administered, and profited from the slave trade, a vast yet surprisingly intimate network, as the story of the Tryal illustrates. Along the way, I began to see traces of slavery everywhere, not just in the wealth it left behind, in beautiful Baroque buildings and stately landscaped cities and manicured gardens like the one in Buenos Aires that sits over the old slave market, El Retiro, but in the meaning it created.
Slavery was such an omnipresent institution that it produced its own kind of synchronicity, making chance events seem almost conspiratorial, as if some divine author fit them together into an intentional pattern, like, for just one exam
ple, the recurrent influence the Liverpool slaver John Bolton had on Melville’s literary production. In addition to dispatching his slave ship, the Neptune, to Bonny and raising funds to erect Liverpool’s monument to Admiral Nelson, he used his fortune made from slavery to entertain and support some of Britain’s greatest Romantic poets, including occasionally William Wordsworth. A friend of the rights of man and an opponent of slavery, Wordsworth had a strong influence on Herman Melville.* According to Hershel Parker (Melville: A Biography, vol. 2, p. 165), he taught Melville to find “the still, sad music of humanity” in nature, to look at a barren landscape and see its social as well as natural history (to look, perhaps, at the 23,000-foot Mount Aconcagua, which separates Argentina from Chile, and realize that a slave road once wound around it). Trying to make sense of some of these connections sent me off on tangents, following history’s hyperlinks from one thing to another. I began to feel a bit like Herman Melville himself, who in 1839 looked at Liverpool’s “Lord Nelson expiring in the arms of victory” and saw not a memorial to a man but the slave trade as the key to unlocking history.
Fourteen years passed between Melville’s first sight of the Nelson monument and the publication of Benito Cereno. But when I visited the statue while in Liverpool, there looking for information on Bolton’s Neptune, I couldn’t help but think Melville had “Death grim and grasping” in mind when he had Babo lash Aranda’s bones to the prow and tell his captives to keep faith with the blacks.
ARCHIVES
Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires, Argentina [AGN (Buenos Aires)]
The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World Page 30
