Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville on Deck: An Introduction

Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville on Deck An Introduction ROBERT K. WALLACE Northern Kentucky University and IVY G. WILSON University of Notre Dame T he first publication in which Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville each appeared as featured subjects was the May 27, 1847, issue of the National Anti-Slavery Standard. A column by Charles F. Briggs, who signed his contribution “B,” defended Douglass against public attacks recently provoked by his return voyage on the steamship Cambria from his two-year lecture tour in England, declaring that “Frederick Douglass has already gained a name by his rare talents and most singular history which will save him from obscurity.” In the same issue Briggs, again writing as “B,” gave a glowing review of Melville’s Typee and Omoo, contrasting the Typee native who “craunches [sic] the tendons and muscles of his dead enemy. . . but inflicts no pain upon him” with “the Calhouns, Clays, and Polks [who] feed daily upon the sweat, the tears, the groans, the anguished hearts and despairing sighs, of living men and women.”1 The next publication in which the two men were featured with similar prominence was the November 1855 issue of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, formerly edited by the same Charles F. Briggs. In this journal, Douglass appears in a highly appreciative unsigned review of My Bondage and My Freedom, in which the reviewer acknowledged that he had read the new autobiography “with the unbroken attention with which we absorbed Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” but with the difference that this book is “no fiction.” Herman Melville appears in the same issue of Putnam’s as the unsigned author of the second installment of “Benito Cereno,” the one in which Babo choreographs the shaving scene as C
2008 The Authors Journal compilation C
2008 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 For the identification of “B” as Briggs, and further discussion of his two contributions, see Robert K. Wallace, Douglass and Melville: Anchored Together in Neighborly Style (New Bedford: Spinner Publications, 2005), 37-39; hereafter cited as Douglass and Melville. L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S 3 W A L L A C E A N D W I L S O N Captain Delano stands by oblivious to the actual power relation between Babo and Don Benito.2 For the rest of the century until their deaths in 1891 and 1895, respectively, Melville and Douglass followed widely diverging life trajectories. Melville lost his status as a public author, whereas Douglass became an increasingly prominent national figure. Neither author was read much in the early decades of the twentieth century, but the revival of interest in Melville by mid-century and in Douglass slightly later has since brought each to the center of the American literary canon. The first publication in the modern era to juxtapose Douglass and Melville as central figures was Eric Sundquist’s To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993). Sundquist put My Bondage and My Freedom and “Benito Cereno” at the heart of his bold reconceptualization of the central texts of American literary history. He did not explicitly or extensively compare these writers or their texts with each other apart from the degree to which each addressed the central theme of race in America, but he paved the way for those who would. Sterling Stuckey made several quick, probing connections between Douglass and Melville in essays in Going through the Storm (1994) and The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville (1998).3 Members of the Melville Society first brought Douglass and Melville together during the early stages of the formation of the Melville Society Cultural Project in New Bedford, Massachusetts. One of the first initiatives to test the possibility of an affiliation between the Society and the New Bedford Whaling Museum was a sequence of seminars during the summers of 1999 and 2000 on “Teaching Melville” for local high school teachers. The success of these led to the NEH Summer Seminar on “Melville and Multiculturalism” directed by Laurie Robertson-Lorant...