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.
2
There is something paradoxical in the fact that Melville’s concern over slavery and his fervour for the union should have come into play during a period when he had become indifferent to most of the nearest issues of life and convinced that existence itself was a form of slavery. But one must not forget the anomalous nature of war itself. In its instrumentalities, war is a denial of life: but in mood and spirit war partly achieves all the things a humane or religious mind cherishes: selflessness, contempt for creature habits and animal comforts, nonchalance in the face of death, a willingness to give up life cheerfully for an ideal end. If it is a sin, war is an heroic sin; and who, exclaims Melville in Pierre, does not feel more warmly to the Lord of Evil himself, than towards a petty shopkeeper, who daily practices all the discreet and serviceable virtues? War is a malign, ambiguous fulfilment of the things men permanently want in life--and in its first flush, men forget its sordid accompaniments and its disastrous results, and respond, not meanly, to its immediate stimulus.
There is no doubt that the prosecution of the war quickened Melville and made him feel a purpose instead of the dull, fearful hollow of an empty and respectable life. At forty-two, broken down in health, unfit for active service, he watched these young men go forth in their blue uniforms, with flushed faces and eager tread, a little enviously: comradeship was a warm thing, even among the precious rapscallions one might find in a whaler: it was an even deeper and warmer matter among these young men who had shared sport together in their village, or courted the same girl, or studied together under the same lamp at college. These happy faces might be going to a picnic, to be pelted with blossoms, not shrapnel:
Forever they slumber, young and fair, The smile upon them as they died: Their end attained, that end a height; Life was to these a dream fulfilled And death a starry night.