City of Hope and Fear: Douglass and Melville in the Nation's Capital

City of Hope and Fear: Douglass and Melville in the Nation’s Capital CHRISTOPHER STEN The George Washington University A mong several points of convergence in the lives of Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville, an especially notable one centers on the nation’s capital and the Federal Government. Both men were well-known authors and public figures who traveled to Washington several times before and during the Civil War; and in 1872, Douglass moved to the Federal City with his family for what proved to be the rest of his life. Both men had political ties in Washington and sought to use them to gain political appointments or influence on matters of personal interest or public policy: Melville four times between 1846 and 1864, and Douglass even more often as a frequent consultant, lobbyist, and spokesman on matters affecting African Americans for more than three decades. Both met or corresponded with Charles Sumner, the powerful abolitionist Senator from Massachusetts, and sought his support or assistance: Melville on personal matters and Douglass on matters of public interest. Both met Lincoln in the White House and formed first-hand impressions of the president: Melville on a single occasion during an open house, and Douglass several times as an invited guest or petitioner. And both men conversed with Ulysses S. Grant, in Melville’s case when Grant was in charge of the Army of the Potomac, and in Douglass’s when Grant was President. Clearly, they both moved in rarified political circles, or were capable of such, when the need arose. Despite the advantages of class and his family’s political connections, Melville never succeeded as an office-seeker, and in fact made only fitful attempts in that direction. He was a writer and thinker, not an orator-politician like his brother, and took only indirect interest in promoting larger social causes (or himself). He did, however, make imaginative use of his brief sojourns to the city, in several late chapters of Mardi (1849) and—following a final visit in 1864 to witness the war first-hand—a handful of Civil War poems from Battle-Pieces; or Aspects of the War (1866). By contrast and as few in the nation’s history have ever done, Douglass succeeded in a wide variety of political roles, as a journalist, spokesman on race, political activist, and C
2008 The Authors Journal compilation C
2008 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 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 23 C H R I S T O P H E R S T E N office-holder during his thirty-year career. From the beginning, he had a cause—first, the abolition of slavery, then equality before the law for black men and women—that kept him constantly challenging the Federal Government to change the laws that were destroying his people’s hopes and keeping them in servitude and poverty. Early in their lives, Melville and Douglass held dramatically different views of the city and its role as the seat of national government, views that tended to stay with them for much of the rest of their lives. Douglass, while still a young slave learning to read, encountered a speech by then-Congressman John Quincy Adams that contained the mysterious word, “abolitionist,” a word that changed his life.1 From that time on, he regarded Washington as the city of hope, a place where issues of slavery, racial equality, and suffrage could be “made right”—legislated or mandated by executive order—a view that sustained him through much of his adult life, though it often led to deep frustration. On the other hand, as an unsuccessful office-seeker, Melville was inclined to take a more distant view of the Federal City and be more skeptical. In his Mardi chapters, he portrayed Washington in satiric, surreal terms as a city caught up in its own self-importance; later, in Battle-Pieces, he viewed it in somber tones as a juggernaut of power that boded ill for the future of the country...