The Roots of Modern America Blog

January 20, 2009

Lincoln’s First Inaugural and American History

Filed under: Civil War, politics, social experience — Tags: , , , , , — wthomas @ 2:19 pm

When Abraham Lincoln took the oath of office as President of the United States, he faced an unprecedented crisis. Seven states had already formally seceded from the Union, set up their own government in Montgomery, Alabama, and were actively recruiting more states to join them in forming a rival national government. Lincoln’s inauguration speech has often been admired for its moderation. The new President stated clearly that he would “hold, occupy, and possess” the federal government’s buildings and forts in the seceded states, but also that “there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere.” Lincoln tried to speak past the fanatics to “those who love the Union.”

We can admire Lincoln’s calm restraint, yet in retrospect Lincoln would seem to have misjudged the temper of the times and the resolve of the Southern whites. At the core of Lincoln’s first inaugural address was his assertion that “plainly, the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy.” Hundreds of thousands of white southerners disagreed, of course, and saw their nation as an independent republic, fully justified in peaceable separation from the Union. Lincoln asserted that “one section of the country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended.” Although he knew well that many Northerners found little wrong with slavery, Lincoln claimed that “physically speaking” the country could not be separated. And in his beautiful and poignant closing, calling on the “mystic chords of memory” and “the better angels of our nature,” Lincoln hoped Americans would set “passion” aside and renew their bonds of affection in the Union.

Lincoln had reason to believe in these feelings for the Union and that they might avert the looming conflict and violence; indeed, he probably had to have this faith on that day. His personal qualities and his political calculation led him to take a position of open invitation to the white South to return their hearts to the Union. He hoped time would cool off the angry response to his election, and with this expectation his inaugural address was genuinely offered as an attempt at reconciliation. Despite the elegance of his rhetoric, Lincoln’s idea that the American continent could not be physically separated into two or more republics was an assertion unsupportable by history or logic. Various empires had controlled large parts of the American continent and national identities in other parts of the world constantly changed the maps and atlases.Lincoln, however, challenged his “dissatisfied countrymen” to think twice about their actions. He vowed to uphold the constitution and his oath to defend the government, and he said that they in choosing secession bore the responsibility for a civil war. Most of all, Lincoln urged that both sides take time and move deliberately. With time, he hoped, these sad divisions might heal.

The difficulty Lincoln faced was in convincing white Southerners that these sentiments mattered. Few were listening. What happened to make such a distance of feeling, such alienation, possible? Lincoln likened the separation to a divorce, but all such analogies fail. Lincoln’s inaugural address, brave and elegiac as it was, was speaking into a hurricane. The white South in spirit and identity left the Union long before March 4, 1861. The divergence is difficult to time and locate in American history. Too often, our histories have followed Lincoln’s logic that separation was impossible, secession was a “sophism,” and the civil war was the product of discontented extremists–a set of arguments most forcefully made in his message to Congress on July 4, 1861. We might reconsider, however, the national purpose of the Confederate South and its origins. Historians, such as Drew Gilpin Faust, Anne S. Rubin, Peter and Nicholas Onuf, and Edward L. Ayers, have helped us see the white South’s national identity as deeper and more complex that Lincoln might have admitted. These historians and others suggest a white South whose Confederate national loyalties proved durable, even advanced and logical, drawing on the same sources of American nationalism in the Revolution and early national history. They knew what they were doing. We need to retain Lincoln’s sense of historical contingency, for he (almost alone) in his inaugural held out the possibility that things might be different, that persuasion and good will might be reciprocated, and that a reservoir of Unionism might save the nation from war and bloodshed. But we also might consider how sectionalism reinforced its own logic by slowly recasting forms of national identity, and in the process how two modern nations of Americans emerged ready to fight one another on modern scale of conflict. Then we might understand how Lincoln’s eloquent first inaugural fell on deaf ears.

July 29, 2008

Why Did Virginia Secede?

Filed under: Civil War, U. S. South, politics, slavery — Tags: , , , , — wthomas @ 5:04 pm

Today it seems almost inconceivable. Eleven states, in the Southern region of the United States, called constitutional conventions and in a matter of months formally withdrew from the nation. In breathtaking speed they had established an entirely new and separate nation with a capital at Montgomery, Alabama. What made this possible?

After all, secession seems entirely counterintuitive. Why would the most wealthy individuals, the men with the most to lose in society, risk everything, including slavery, as well as their lives, peace, property, prosperity, position, and inheritance? Why would they knowingly bring on a war with the United States by creating a new and risky republic in the South, and then throw everything into its defense until their capital lay in ruins, their population half-starved, and every army battered into total submission? 

Historian and leading scholar of the Civil War, James McPherson answers that secession was a “counter-revolution” not a “revolution.” White southerners, he argues, saw the Lincoln administration and the Republican Party as the revolutionaries. The move to secede was a counter-revolution, a conservative  effort designed to protect what they had and stem the tide of change sweeping across the nation. All of their resistance, he argues, was aimed at maintaining slavery and their position in society. To McPherson the answer is straightforward–they saw a greater risk in the Union and perceived themselves as the inheritors of the true republican virtues of the Revolution. Their new republic was, therefore, modeled on the “union as it was” before the slavery issue threatened their principles and prosperity. McPherson indicates that the South was in a way seeking to turn back the clock or at least stop time. Their vision was not progressive but regressive. 

When you read the four volumes of The Proceedings of the Virginia State Convention of 1861, or an updated history of what the southern delegates said to the Virginia convention (Charles Dew, Apostles of Disunion), however, a number of further considerations become equally important. Virginia, of course, included West Virginia at the time and so delegates came from the far western, mountainous counties too where slavery was less prominent. The convention met for weeks in Richmond and those favoring immediate secession maneuvered to keep the convention in session, hoping for a dramatic event that might tip the votes their way. Eventually, the got their wish, as President Abraham Lincoln called for troops from Virginia and the other states after the firing on Fort Sumter. Lincoln clearly intended to suppress secession in the South and Virginia’s delegates voted the next day 88-55 to secede with the South and join the Confederacy.

Let’s reconsider, though, what these delegates said. 

First, not a single Virginia delegate criticized slavery. Indeed, many of the western delegates were slaveholders and those that did not spoke in support of the institution. No delegate wanted to be branded an abolitionist. Delegates outdid one another to voice their commitment to slavery. Slavery and its protection was clearly in the forefront of their motivations.

Second, slavery was not just an abstract or political issue, but one that for these white men was centered on “property.” When Thomas Branch of Petersburg offered his constituents’ views in the form of a resolution to the Convention, it was to affirm that “negro slaves are property.” Somehow, these white Southerners thought, the North had lost sense of slavery as a form of property and needed to be reminded of the bare, essential nature of the rights the South was going to defend. Branch for his part only needed to state that he would represent the will of his constituents and that meant immediate secession.

Third, the debates read as if they took place outside of time, and indicate that the delegates, however duly constituted, had few ways to articulate what was happening in the spirit of the white South. Despite the fast pace of events and the complex political and diplomatic issues at stake, the Virginia delegates spent hours and days parsing words such as “sovereignty” and “person” and “vital” and “social institution.” The delegates gave long-winded explications of constitutional history and read into the record as evidence the speeches, letters, and proclamations of Lincoln, New York U. S. Senator William H. Seward, Massachusetts U.S. Senator Henry Wilson, and others. There was remarkably little discussion of the real events taking place, the possibilities of war, the nature of the conflict, or the resources at their command. The delegates were assembled to debate “secession” as a legal right and to craft an ordinance that would tender Virginia’s withdrawal from the United States of America.

Fourth, despite the close votes in February 1861 and the reluctance of some to cause a war, the majority of these delegates already understood themselves as part of a Southern, modern nation on equal footing with the North, as well as Britain, France, Russia, and Italy. Indeed, a number of delegates placed the idea of the Confederacy in the context of newly forming nation-states in Europe. They saw themselves as part of the vanguard of modern state formation. Their sense of Southern progress, civilization, and modernity may be the most surprising aspect of the debates.

This last point is critical. The state conventions and legal machinations that flowed from them structured the debates over secession in very specific and circumscribed ways, especially in Virginia. Unlike the deep South states where the procedures moved quickly in December 1860, Virginia with its long history of Revolutionary heritage stood in the breach for months, the decisive tipping point, and the Virginia delegates knew it. It was no wonder they acted cautiously.

Only when we take the debates for what they were–a constitutional forum burdened with the history of Virginia’s role in the United States–can we begin to see the underlying frameworks that made secession not only possible but likely. The view of slaves, of course, as property offered the decisive common ground for these white Virginians. But confidence was equally important. Not confidence in a constitutional right worthy of defense, but instead confidence in the capacity to hold up a modern nation-state on the world stage. In this respect nothing about Virginia’s secession might be considered counter-revolutionary. “Nations act on their interests,” one Virginia delegate argued, “not on their sentiments.” (Vol. II, p. 673)

The idea itself is strikingly modern. As for the South, and indeed Virginia, it could not do otherwise if it purported to be a nation, to be sovereign to itself, to be a civilization worthy of the world’s respect. “It is a fact, Mr. Chairman,” the delegate concluded, “that there is a separate national existence at Montgomery.” (Vol. II, p. 675) The question was when, not if, Virginia would join it.

July 25, 2008

Top Five Summer History Tours–New England

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — wthomas @ 1:18 pm

Where do you go to find the best history? There are so many choices! Museums, battlefields, exhibits, galleries, and walking tours. It is summertime and that means a chance to explore American history sites and tours. Sometimes, we experience the past more directly when we walk through an old house or see a historical object or stand in a historical place. This feeling is something that children experience intensely as they begin to see that they are part of a continuous flow of time and space, and they are often especially willing to be “transported” in time through history. So, take your children and visit a historic place this summer. Or go visit a historic place and get into the landscape of the past.

Here are my top five history tours for New England, a region rich in landscapes of the past where you can feel the history:

1. The Robert Gould Shaw Monument, Boston, Massachusetts

This is a must see stop on any history tour of New England. Shaw led the 54th U.S. Colored Troops in the American Civil War. He and the 54th are the subject of the film Glory (1989, directed by Edward Zwick, starring Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington, and Morgan Freeman).The bronze monument by Augustus Saint-Gaudens stands near the State House in downtown Boston on the Boston Common. Although area near the site is busy with traffic and tourists, few take the time to stand directly in front of the large memorial monument and look at it closely. The monument evokes all sorts of emotional responses and as you stare at the men, Shaw, the horse, and the weaponry, you might be overcome with the meaning of history, the war, and the scale of the conflict. Stand on the edge and look at the relief of Shaw and the horse and you will see half of them exposed, as if they are stepping out of time into our present.

Before you go, take a look at the only available letters from regular soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts to get a sense of the war from their perspective–the letters of the Demus and Christy Family. Five of these young men enlisted in the 54th at the first opportunity. Their story of the Civil War makes the monument even more powerful.

(One of the best ways to see Boston is a neat organization of volunteers called Boston by Foot–you can get your exercise and your history at the same time!) 

2. Deerfield, Pocumtuck, Massachusetts

There are few sites from the colonial period so well-preserved. In and around one of the nation’s best prep schools, Deerfield Academy, are the historic buildings of the old village of Deerfield. The settlement was a frontier outpost in the seventeenth century and repeatedly attacked by Mohawk Indians determined to hold off white encroachment on their lands. The museum includes one of the most extensive collections of material culture and decorative arts in New England.

Before going, you might take a look at Richard J. Melvoin’s terrific book, New England Outpost: War and Society in Colonial Deerfield (W. W. Norton, 1989), an excellent study of the multicultural blend of people in the region and their difficult struggles on the border between and among native and English aggressive societies. The Pocumtuck Indians in the Connecticut River Valley first settled there, and yet these Algonquians faced constant pressure from their Mohawk Iroquois neighbors. and English settler moved into the village. The English society at Deerfield collapsed in King Phillip’s War (1676) as the Algonquian Indians fought across New England. Eventually, the English settlement returned and the Mohawk (with French support) attacked the village in 1704. As English settlements spread up the Connecticut River Valley and west into the mountains, the English settlement stabilized and grew.

While there, walk up the ridge near Eaglebrook School, to the top of the “rock” and see the whole Pocumtuck Valley below and the village (ask for directions at Historic Deerfield–this is a one mile, unmarked hike, straight up a mountain, but the view is worth it).

3. Litchfield, Connecticut, The Tappan Reeve School of Law

Litchfield, though not as uniquely preserved as Deerfield, is home to one of the most important pieces of American history, the Tappan Reeve School of Law.  The school was at the center of the legal and political battles of the early republic. John C. Calhoun and Aaron Burr attended the school, and hundreds of others who went on to become U.S. Congressmen and Senators. The school was particularly important as a seedbed of Federalism.

Much of this setting remains remarkably intact and you can see the rooms, libraries, materials, and organization of the school. Historic Litchfield also includes period houses, exhibits of material culture, and the Litchfield Female Academy where Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe attended.

4.  Walden Pond, Concord Massachusetts

Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 Walden  stands as one of the greatest American works of nature writing and history. Walden Pond is part of a Massachusetts State Recreation Area and has been designated a National Historic Landmark. You can visit a replica of Thoreau’s cabin, and you can walk the pond and fields he planted. Don’t forget to read Walden before going! In fact, take it with you and read passages as you walk the pond and woods.

5. Newport Historic Homes, The Breakers, Newport, Rhode Island

This is a close call. Do you go to Lowell, Massachusetts, to the excellent National Park Service site to see the factory or do you take a walk through the Gilded Age society of America? The Breakers was the home of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, railroad president of the New York Central lines and heir to his father’s fortune in steamship and railroad businesses. The architect Robert Morris Hunt’s design featured 70 rooms and an ornate Italian Renaissance style. The views of the Atlantic Ocean are immense, the gardens sprawling, and the house lavishly ostentatious.

You can tour many other homes in Historic Newport and appreciate the Gilded Age’s displays of extreme wealth. Any visitor might also want to read Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence as a guide to New York high society and the changes underway at the turn of the century.

In August New England is lovely, full of bright blue skies and cool Atlantic breezes, and for any history traveler the sites are rich and rewarding.

July 21, 2008

Top Five Summer History Tours–Virginia

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , , , , , , — wthomas @ 10:50 am

Where do you go to find the best history? There are so many choices! Museums, battlefields, exhibits, galleries, and walking tours. It is summertime and that means a chance to explore American history sites and tours. Sometimes, we experience the past more directly when we walk through an old house or see a historical object or stand in a historical place. This feeling is something that children experience intensely as they begin to see that they are part of a continuous flow of time and space, and they are often especially willing to be “transported” in time through history. So, take your children and visit a historic place this summer. 

This week we feature Virginia. Next we will cover New England, and then the West.

Here are my top five places or sites this summer for an encounter with history that really means something (with a brief explanation why)–Jamestown, the Moton civil rights museum, Monticello, Chancellorsville battlefield, and the Tredegar Civil War Center and Museum: 

1. Jamestown

American colonial history really begins at Jamestown, the first permanent English colony, settled in 1607 (much earlier than Plymouth). Here, on the James River in the great Chesapeake Bay, English, Indian (Algonquian), and African societies encountered one another at the edge of what some are now calling “the Atlantic World.” The place is undeniably important and you can stand right in the ruins.

Go to the Island first, the original site of the fort: what is called Jamestown Rediscovery. Begin there not the Jamestown Settlement reproduction and museum nearby. The island is owned jointly by the National Park Service and the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities (APVA). The history-making archaeological dig underway at the island, led by William Kelso, has discovered the original Jamestown fort, and this work is transforming the way historians think about the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. You can tour the dig as well as the new, beautifully displayed artifacts at the “Archaearium” (that’s right). The Archaearium display is a powerful look at the work of archaeologists and features the process of what happened in the dig at Jamestown Fort.  Although the exhibit at the Archaearium downplays English-Indian conflict too much, and generally does not explain the Algonquian experience, children will be fascinated with the artifacts that Kelso and his team uncovered. The well, into which Jamestown’s first colonists seemed to have thrown everything, is a marvel.

The experience of standing in the original footprint of the fort along the James River is powerful. You can look right down the river and see where the signal posts were to guard the tiny colony from any approaching Spanish fleet. Because Spain’s military governor in Havana had sailed right into the Chesapeake in 1571 to search for a missing Jesuit mission and because Roman Catholic Spain was Protestant England’s enemy on the seas, the idea of a Spanish attack was not fanciful. The line of sight down the James River today from the fort is still remarkably unbroken by modern structures, so the effect of this view is well worth the trip. 

The Jamestown Yorktown Foundation’s site (The Settlement) and its museum and reproduction of the fort is near Jamestown Island, and its exhibits are also worth visiting. Although many visitors think this is the original site, you should bear in mind that the entire creation is a reproduction, and if you have visited the original site first you will not be confused about this. The Settlement exhibit includes a carefully reproduced Algonquian village. Living historical actors dress in Indian clothing and use Indian implements to cook, grow corn, and treat deer hides. Although children may find the site fascinating for this reason and although the huts and equipment are reproduced faithfully (largely based on the drawings by John White from 1585 and the writings of John Smith that describe Indian towns and structures in some detail), the site is placed so close to the fort that it appears as if Indians lived next door to and in feudal vassalage to the English fort’s colonists. They did not, of course. The best part of the Settlement is the reproduction ships, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery. 

Before any tour of Jamestown you might look online at the biggest archive of Jamestown materials, The Virtual Jamestown Project. Here you can read John Smith’s accounts, letters from the period, and important original documents.

2. The Moton Museum in Farmville, Virginia, Prince Edward County

This site is a historic place in the Civil Rights Movement, and the little museum is a gem. In 1951 students at the segregated, black Robert Russa Moton High School staged a strike to demand that the school board build a new black high school. The leader of the student strike, Barbara Johns, organized the student body to walk out of school down to the county building and make their demands known. The students did not go back to school for several weeks as they sat out “on strike.” The event prompted civil rights attorney Oliver Hill to visit the community, and he and the NAACP eventually took on the case. The case became one of the five included in the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. In reaction to the landmark Brown decision striking down segregated schools, local white leaders in Prince Edward County shut off all funding for public schools and closed the schools rather than integrate them. The schools remained closed for five years, from 1959 to 1964. These circumstances make the site especially important and dramatic. You can stand in the small, cramped auditorium where Barbara Johns rallied the students for the strike and see the “tar paper shacks” that the school erected because it had no funds. The effects of segregated schools become instantly clear and the improbable effects of the student strike of 1951 intensely felt.

You should contact the Moton Museum before going to make sure of its hours. You can walk from the museum on the same roads that the students took when they walked en masse in May 1951 down to the county office building. This one mile walk past the historic black church where NAACP meetings were held gives you an important view of the early beginnings of the civil rights movement. I encountered this story through the work on original films from local television stations–you can see these films too and look at the Prince Edward situation at: http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/civilrightstv.

3. Monticello

There are few places like this in the United States. Any summer history tour should visit the historic home of Thomas Jefferson. His epigraph says it all, or at least all he wanted to say about himself: “author of the Declaration of Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Founder of the University of Virginia.” President for two terms, Secretary of State, Envoy to France, Governor of Virginia, and political party founder, Jefferson could claim much more on his tombstone. He valued liberty, religious freedom, and learning above all. Of course, he designed his home at Monticello in the middle of all of this, and it is an exquisite statement of his values and aspirations for the nation.

Monticello has firmly placed slavery in the story of Jefferson and his life. The site includes tours of the slave living and working sites, and the team of archaeologists and historians are continually uncovering new evidence about this experience. Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemmings is clearly explained and affirmed in the tours. Slavery, freedom, and the political basis of the American republic were at the heart of Jefferson’s life and experiences. Jefferson’s wrestling with all three are on display in the design of Monticello and the material objects found there. Jefferson had great faith in us, the generations to come after him in the American republic. And it is humbling to be reminded just how much faith he had and how much trust he placed in our democracy.

4. Chancellorsville Battlefield

No summer history tour is complete without a Civil War battlefield experience. There are, sadly, many to choose from. The war tore through the heart of America and killed hundreds of thousands. It is far too easy to forget the consequences of war and to glorify set-piece battles as if they were played like a game. But when you visit a battlefield and see the ground on which armies fought, the war and its destruction take on a new meaning.

The great battlefields include Gettysburg, Petersburg, Vicksburg, Shiloh, Antietam, Manassas, and of course Chancellorsville. All are run by the National Park Service and have extensive, high quality historical interpretation. You will find expert park rangers and historians at all of them.

I chose Chancellorsville for several reasons. First, the battlefield landscape is rapidly changing, as housing developments, golf courses, and commercial strip malls have taken the place of farms, fields, and barns. It is increasingly difficult to see the battlefield, so go now.

Second, the battle was huge, extending over dozens of square miles and had tremendous importance in the flow of the war, giving the Confederacy vitality and energy at a key turning point. The best tour is to begin at Zoar Baptist Church where Stonewall Jackson’s troops first encountered Hooker’s Federal forces and in the first hours of the engagement changed the dynamic of the battle with an aggressive attack. Then, you can follow Jackson’s long march route around the Federal right flank and his surprise attack on the 11th Corps. You can do this in a car, but on bike is also fun. And if you take a car, stop along the way and get out to walk the route because the Wilderness effect is still there. Another good walk to do is the short distance from the Hazel Grove to the Chancellor House ruins. The high ground of the Hazel Grove and the open sight lines to the House give you a sense of the desperate stakes in the artillery battle there.

5. The American Civil War Center at Historic Tredegar

Tredegar Iron Works cast iron before the Civil War for railroads and during the war supplied the Confederacy with much of its cannon and other armaments and ammunition. The works were extensive and have been preserved in downtown Richmond. Few sites give a feel for the work of nineteenth-century industry and how it operated. Tredegar holds added importance because so many slaves were employed in heavy industry here. The Civil War center has been dedicated to explain the experiences of Confederate, Union, and African-American soldiers and civilians in the Civil War. Few museums attempt such an interwoven set of exhibits. And few treat the experience of the U.S. Colored Troops with any degree of completeness, but Tredegar has made that effort its main mission. Although the exhibits are useful, informative, and interesting, the grounds, buildings, and equipment at Tredegar offer visitors a window into the nineteenth century and into the machinery that was at the heart of the Civil War and its destructiveness. You will not be disappointed.

So, enjoy these great sites. Next, we take a tour of New England and then the West for the best summer sites to visit.

April 25, 2008

Death and Dying in 19th c. America

Filed under: Podcasts, Uncategorized, social experience, women — Tags: , , , , , , , , — wthomas @ 11:47 am

This podcast with Will Thomas and Leslie Working considers the experience of death and dying for 19th century Americans and the significance of changing ideas about death in American society. Sarah Sim and her husband Francis Sim migrated to Otoe County, Nebraska Territory, in 1856 to start a farm. Their trials included the death of three of their children, the near suicide of Sarah, the difficulties of moving to and farming in the Great Plains in the 1850s, and the death of Sarah from breast cancer in 1880. Their letters are online at Railroads and the Making of Modern America.

April 10, 2008

Moby Dick and the Problem of Slavery

Filed under: Civil War, Uncategorized, art, literature, social experience, technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , — wthomas @ 2:47 pm

Deep in the midsection of Moby Dick (1851), in chapter 55 to be precise, on “Of the Monstrous Pictures of Whales,” Herman Melville takes his readers on a little tour of the various blunders that scientists, painters, and sign makers have made in attempting to represent the whale accurately. They have all erred, Melville suggests, because the “living Leviathan has never yet fairly floated himself for his portrait.” In fact, to see a whale out of the water accurately enough to represent it would be impossible. “Mortal man” can’t lift the whale out of the water “so as to preserve all his mighty swells and undulations.” The only way for men to hoist the whale out and to get a look at him is to kill him first, and, of course, then all of the whales “undulations” are lost.

In a startling summation, Melville tells you that “there is no earthly way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him. Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your curiosity touching this Leviathan.”

So, what does this whale symbolize? Is it the modernity of capitalism and industry, which we can only glimpse in parts? Is Captain Ahab’s ship the United States heading toward sectional break up in the pursuit of wealth, power, and violence? Is Ahab John C. Calhoun, bent on taking the U.S. down in a twisted quest of revenge, pride, or self-loathing?

Early on in Moby Dick, we learn that the whale and the whaling industry has extended its network across the seas to distant lands. It has created wealth and power and shaped lives far beyond those who set out at sea to harpoon the creatures. “Nowhere in all America,” Melville’s narrator tells us, “will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came they? How planted upon this once scraggy scoria of a country? Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion, and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.”

The wealth of America, then, was extracted, pulled out of the ocean, or the soil, or the forest, or the mine. Melville was up to something new here with his vision of the ships of the whaling fleet and the homes of New Bedford as part of a vast, complex, dark system, a network extending to the far corners of the earth.

While Melville was writing Moby Dick, a New England merchant born in Massachusetts, named Asa Whitney, was lobbying Congress to pass legislation to promote the building of a transcontinental railroad. In his detailed treatise on the subject, A Project for the Pacific published in 1849, Whitney emphasized the global networks of trade that seemed to him to be governed by Nature. To explain the “geographical division formed by nature” that kept the Pacific’s economy distant from the Atlantic’s, Whitney turned to whaling as his chief example.

Like Melville, Whitney sensed that whole economies were shifting in the wake of capitalism, but unlike Melville, Whitney had unbounded optimism in the modern changes all around him and in technological progress specifically. In fact, Whitney’s faith in the railroad and telegraph technology was so deep that he thought the transcontinental railroad would work exclusively to the United States’ advantage. Technology would fundamentally alter the dominant geographies that Nature determined–the flow of rivers, the aridity of certain zones, the mountainous barriers between regions.

Whitney saw Nature’s limitations all around him. With the opening of California as a base of operations, whaling as an industry, “that important branch of commerce,” would inevitably pick up and move to the Pacific coast. Whitney predicted the whaling fleet would shift wholesale from New Bedford to the Pacific for ease of access to the whales, and the East Coast would lose a powerful industry to the natural arrangement of geography and commerce. By 1849, he argued, the transition was already underway. Only through a planned and massive intervention–a transcontinental railroad–could Nature’s hold be broken and the flow of change be redirected, not just in whaling but in other industries as well.

Whitney’s brief mention of whaling, however, was less significant than his outright defense of free labor. Whitney thought that the railroad would create an independent class of free men, citizens who were not dependent on anyone or any institution–in other words, who were not enslaved. The railroad workers would be laborers for a transitional period only, as they would inevitably set up in homesteads along the railroad line. Working on the railroad would be a stepping stone for immigrants to move toward independence. Whitney’s long commentary to assuage any concerns about the problem of immigrant laborers, especially Irish and Germans, reveals just how widespread these concerns were. White Americans, especially Northerners, thought that racial difference, dependency, and destitution spawned slavery and threatened government.

The Pequod sets sail with a crew from all corners of the earth. With Captain Ahab at the helm the ship plunges forward into the seas with one overriding purpose, to hunt the one white whale in the ocean and exercise vengeance on it, casting aside all concerns for individuals who might alter this course. The crew includes Ishmael, the New England adventurer, his bunkmate Queequeg, a dark-skinned South Pacific islander, a man who came from a place “not down on any map.” As well as Pip, the young cabin boy, possibly born a slave, possibly free born.

“Who ain’t the slave,” Melville’s main narrator and protagonist Ishmael reminds us. Andrew Delbanco’s recent biography of Melville (Melville, His World and Work, Knopf 2005) stresses the importance of slavery for Melville’s outlook in the years he wrote Moby Dick. The Pequod’s labor system was not terribly different from slavery in its force, brutality, danger, and punishment. Delbanco compares it to the American army and the construction crews used to build the American railroads and canals of the 1850s and earlier. Melville in Moby Dick tells us of the terrible consequences of enslavement and power. What Ahab wants are tools, to do his work and to bend to his indomitable will. What he has on his ship are men, of course, but they are used in Ahab’s service nonetheless.

Like the leviathan, slavery proved remarkably difficult to render accurately. It was almost impossible to paint a portrait of such a diverse, global, exploitative, and complex institution. Killing it would lose its “undulations.” Nevertheless, the only way to get a fair picture of the whale–or perhaps slavery–was to go “a whaling yourself.”

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