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1 6 0 Although Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor did not appear until 1924, when it was discovered during the Melville revival that established the author as a fixture in the canon of American literature, its depiction of the execution of “the Handsome Sailor” Billy Budd aboard the British vessel HMS Bellipotent has become the most famous and most discussed representation of a capital hanging in nineteenth-century American literature. Interestingly though, it has been only relatively recently that scholarship on Billy Budd has begun to consider the text as a statement about capital punishment on Melville’s part. H. Bruce Franklin’s 1997 essay “Billy Budd and Capital Punishment: A Tale of Three Centuries” has directed readers’ attention to the fact that “central to the story is the subject of capital punishment and its history” (337). Franklin asserts that the novella “derives in part from the American movement against capital punishment” and “dramatizes each of the crucial arguments and concepts from that movement ” (338). He notes a number of questions raised by Melville’s text that emerge out of the reform movement, questions about which crimes should be capital, about whether capital punishment functioned as a deterrent to crime, about the effects of public executions on their spectators , and about whether capital punishment existed merely as a tool for preserving state power over citizens. Six The Legacy of Antebellum Anti-Gallows Literature Herman Melville’s Billy Budd Melville’s Billy Budd 1 6 1 Franklin focuses most of his attention on placing Billy Budd into the context of the debates about capital punishment occurring in the late 1880s and early 1890s, including the emerging discussion of electrocution as a more humane method of execution than strangulation on the gallows. However, just as relevant are the debates of the 1840s and 1850s discussed in the previous chapters of this book. Melville’s text is not an antebellum text (he started writing it in 1886 and was still revising it at the time of his death in 1891), but placing it into the context of antebellum anti-gallows literature demonstrates its continuance of the work of the earlier writers into the later decades of the nineteenth century. Indeed, Billy Budd works as a postscript to the novels of Southworth and their imagining of a justice system that could incorporate sympathy and other tender feelings into its proceedings and become an engine of reform for criminals rather than only a means of ending their lives. Melville’s Antebellum Silence about the Gallows Melville is unique among the major writers of the antebellum period in having almost nothing to say in his work about the controversy over capital punishment and in not taking an explicit personal stand on one side or the other. Like some of his contemporaries, he does introduce the gallows as an ominous image in his work, specifically in Moby-Dick (1851) when Ishmael and Queequeg are struck by the foreboding décor of the Try-Pots Inn in Nantucket: The horns of the cross-trees were sawed off on the other side, so that this old top-mast looked not a little like a gallows. Perhaps I was over sensitive to such impressions at the time but I could not help staring at this gallows with a vague misgiving. A sort of crick was in my neck as I gazed up to the two remaining horns; yes, two of them, one for Queequeg, and one for me. It’s ominous, thinks I. A Coffin my Innkeeper upon landing in my first whaling port; tombstones staring at me in the whalemen’s chapel; and here a gallows! (66–67). This moment of gallows-terror, however, is not sustained in the text as it is in Poe’s “The Black Cat,” Lippard’s Quaker City, or countless examples of American Newgate fiction, and since it does not recur, it would be dif- ficult to say that Moby-Dick or any of Melville’s other pre–Civil War works were haunted by the gallows. 1 6 2 c h a p t e r s i x The most grisly depiction of an execution in his antebellum writing occurs in the novella Benito Cereno (1855) when the rebellious slave Babo is punished: “Some months after, dragged to the gibbet at the tail of a mule, the black met his voiceless end. The body was burned to ashes; but for many days, the head, that hive of subtlety, fixed on...

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