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201 Conclusion. The Labors of Emancipation Founded Law and Freedom Defined After Emancipation, Melville looked back on the long nineteenth century, to trace the ambiguities of modern freedom and the rule of law to that moment with which Bonds of Citizenship began, the Age of Revolution. Like Douglass’s “man from another country,” who looked beyond the forms of law to the history of labor struggles that made possible their founding, Melville in Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) (1888?–91) tells a suppressed story of this age, recovering the histories of slavery and servitude inhering in the revolutionary reconstitution of citizenship. Throughout Billy Budd, Melville reminds us of the class of men whose story he tells: “Passion, and passion in its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a palatial stage whereon to play its part. Down among the groundlings, the beggars and rakers of the garbage, profound passion is enacted.”1 As the inside narrative of “how it fared with the Handsome Sailor during the year of the Great Mutiny” (167), Billy Budd is a story of these bondsmen; and of the revolutionary threat posed by them as a class. Immediately after introducing Billy Budd, Melville emphasizes that historical context through which his inside narrative must be read: It was the summer of 1797. In the April of that year had occurred the commotion at Spithead followed in May by a second and yet more serious outbreak in the fleet at the Nore. The latter is known, and without exaggeration in the epithet, as “the Great Mutiny.” . . . To the British Empire the Nore Mutiny was what a strike in the fire brigade would be to London threatened by general arson. (112) 202 Conclusion Melville’s comparison of the mutiny and the strike is not a mere analogy . The two are different not in kind but in scale: where the strike is a danger to the capital threatened by arson, the mutiny is a danger to the whole of the empire threatened by revolution. This comparison of their dangers emphasizes, furthermore, that mutiny itself was a labor protest. It recalls that historical meaning of the labor “strike” discussed in the last chapter of this study, locating its origins in the seamen’s act of striking mast to announce their mutinous intentions. Framing Billy’s story with this specter of labor mutiny, Melville also historicizes the symbols of their revolt. Indeed, he traces the origins of Ahab’s red flag of defiance to the eruption of seamen’s revolts against the impressment of their labor: “at the mastheads of the three-deckers and seventy-fours . . . the bluejackets , to be numbered by thousands, ran up with huzzas the British colors with the union and cross wiped out; by that cancellation transmuting the flag of founded law and freedom defined, into the enemy’s red meteor of unbridled and unbounded revolt” (112). Thus striking the masts, the seamen appropriated the symbols of their rulers: wiping out the colors of the union and cross leaves only the red, transforming the “flag of founded law and freedom defined” into the symbol of their own defiance of that law. In describing these symbolic acts, Melville emphasizes another point elaborated throughout Bonds of Citizenship, that official histories suppress these facts: “Such an episode in the Island’s grand naval story her naval historians naturally abridge, one of them (William James) candidly acknowledging that fain would he pass it over did not ‘impartiality forbid fastidiousness.’ And yet his mention is less a narration than a reference, having to do hardly at all with details. Nor are these readily to be found in the libraries” (112). Billy Budd is a recovery of this lost history of class struggle, acknowledged as event but denied historical narration. Despite its aversion to providing details or narrative form to the Spithead and Nore mutinies, James’s Naval History of Great Britain acknowledged their origins in the seamen’s protest refusal of their labor: “The spirit of mutiny had taken deep root in the breasts of the seamen. . . . It appears that . . . Lord Howe . . . received sundry petitions, as from the seamen at Portsmouth, all praying an advance of wages,” and listing complaints regarding their working conditions. Receiving no answer, the seamen “could only attribute the silence of Lord Howe to a disregard of their complaints,” and so refused “to obey Lord Bridport’s signal to prepare for sea.”2 And although James’s History intends to provide only a brief account, its sketch cannot avoid...

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