"A Condition Perpetuated in America": Race, Benevolence and Antebellum America Culture

Bruce Dain. A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. xii + 321 pp. Notes and index. $29.95.

Susan M. Ryan. The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. xii + 235 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $42.50.

The slight northeasterly breeze failed to clear the fog of the early morning, and the dismal weather mirrored the uneasy conditions onboard the Perseverance. A year and a half after first leaving home, the Perseverance was now unsuccessfully hunting seals among the coastal islands of Chile, and its captain, Amasa Delano, was beginning to despair. Three of his crewmen, escaped convicts he had taken on in New Holland, had recently deserted, and he feared the rest had similar designs. In late February of 1805, the Perseverance, as Delano recounts in his A Narrative of Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres (1817), was in no position, to "effect any important enterprise."

A little after sunrise on February 20, the deck officer awakened Delano to inform him that a sail had been spotted south of their current position; the vessel appeared to be haphazardly drifting toward a reef. Thinking the "strange ship was in danger," Delano filled his whale boat with fresh water and food and rushed to its aid. He found the Spanish slaver Tryal in disarray, with its scant crew famished and thirsty and its cargo of slaves freely roaming the decks. Delano dispensed his provisions to everyone on board and asked the vessel's captain, Don Benito Cereno, about the Tryal's circumstances. Cereno's answers were evasive, and feeling slighted by his reserve, Delano prepared to return to his ship.

As Delano's whale boat shoved off, Cereno and several sailors vaulted off the Tryal and raced toward the whaler. Delano assumed he was under attack until a Portuguese sailor translated the Spaniards' hysterical cries. The situation on the Tryal was topsy-turvy: the slaves had revolted, executing several of their captors, and had ordered the vessel to return to Senegal. Delano and his crew sprang into action. "In every part of the business of the Tryal," he writes, "not one disaffected word was spoken by the men, but all flew to obey the commands they received; and to their credit it should be recorded, that no men ever behaved better than they." Unskilled as seamen, the Africans aboard the Tryal posed no immediate threat to the Perseverance, yet Delano's crew acted as if they were in terrible jeopardy. Encountering rebellious Africans, the restive group of escaped convicts and destitute sailors cast aside their differences and acted with unity of purpose. In the face of a racial uprising, the benevolent hands bearing pumpkins, bread, and water quickly, and without question, became fists clutching knives, muskets, and shackles.

Fifty years after the meeting of the Perseverance and the Tryal, Herman Melville reinterpreted the incident in his novella Benito Cereno (1855). While seemingly of little historical consequence, the episode was for Melville emblematic of how social benevolence and racial classification were conjoined in antebellum America. Delano's experience provided Melville with an occasion to consider how the essentialism of racial identity subsumed—and redefined—other pressing social issues. For Melville, Delano's account is a cultural wellspring, a foundation for questioning the limits of Anglo-American benevolence and the extent of racially driven ideologies. Most pointedly, the historical record led Melville to ask why benevolence and revolutionary enfranchisement had such limited scope where Africans, African-Americans, and by implication, all "non-whites" were concerned.

Two recent books, Bruce Dain's A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic and Susan M. Ryan's The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence, address Melville's question. Both Dain and Ryan discuss the intersection...