the fossil record

 

 

 

Shelley's grand declaration that "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" takes on a new resonance when considered with its obverse, namely, that legislators are the the world's unacknowledged poets. Poetry and lawmaking are both rendered in the medium of language, after all, and both aim at perpetuity, the first in memory and the second in practice. In the simplest terms, the poet pieces words together in the hope that they will be remembered for generations to come, while the lawmaker pieces words together in the hope that will be obeyed for generations to come. In light of the implicit connection between these two human endeavors, this essay will consider several texts by a lawyer and politician who famously dabbled in poetry and two famous poets who were each possessed by an abiding interest in politics.

During the decade of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville each tried to render a new vision of the Union that would not only survive the war and reconstruction but also enshrine itself in the memory and practice of the nation for generations to come. When the political and poetic texts that these men created during the 1860s are considered together, Melville emerges with a new vision of the Union that is the most complex and daring in its conception of the American polity, the most tragic in its assessment of the war, and the most expansive in its vision of the future.

There are three fundamental aspects of the Union that the Civil War settled by force of arms, as none of them could be confirmed by national consensus in the decades before the war.  The first is that the Union among the states is to be perpetual, even if the Constitution was not explicit in this regard. The second, a corollary of the first, is that any attempt to dissolve the Union will be met with overwhelming force by the Federal government and all the resources of the states that it controls.  The third aspect of the Union that was confirmed by the Civil War (and which took on added significance in the decades following World War Two) is the investment of “the proposition that all men are created equal” with something like the force of law, with the intended consequence that no person born inside the United States would be deprived of the status and rights of citizenship, merely on the basis of race.

Lincoln, Whitman, and Melville essentially agreed to all of these propositions, but their expressed visions of the Union's perpetuity, its right to use force, and the inclusion of former slaves among its citizenry were remarkably different.

Lincoln's conception of the Union's perpetuity is first expressed in the legalistic and vaguely tautological reading of the Constitution that he presents in the First Inaugural in the spring of 1861. With the resourcefulness of an experienced barrister, Lincoln posits that secession is unconstitutional for the simple reason that the framers would not have bothered to draft a fundamental law for the United States if they did not expect it to be binding in perpetuity. He cannot cite any specific reference to perpetuity in the Constitution, so Lincoln leans heavily on the phrase “to form a more perfect Union” from the Preamble and argues:

But if destruction of the Union by one or by part only of the States be lawfully possible, the Union is less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity.[1]

 

In essence, the new president, faced with a rapid series of secessions across the lower south, is claiming that supposed right of states to secede from the Union is in fundamental opposition to the spirit and purpose, if not the actual letter, of the U.S. Constitution. Because he claims to discern so much intent from syntactically peculiar phrase “more perfect” in the Preamble to the Constitution, Lincoln's vision of the Union in this address is as much an act of divination as of legal interpretation. The new president, faced with an unprecedented crisis as well as the prospect of war, closes his speech with a metaphysical appeal to “ the mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every heart and hearthstone all over this broad land.” For all of his previous emphasis on law and on the protections that the Constitution affords to slavery, even in the free states and territories, Lincoln believes that he must make something more than a merely legal and linguistic case for the Union if he is to keep allegiance of the upper south, especially Virginia.           

Walt Whitman's vision of the indivisible Union, rather than being grounded in a close reading of the Constitution or in a shared memory of the Revolution, is exemplified in his “Song of the Banner at Daybreak” by a child's brave and intuitive reading of a cherished national symbol. As a poet of the nation's emerging commercial and cultural capital, Whitman was very familiar with the idea, advanced by a number of prominent New Yorkers, including the mayor, that the southern states should be allowed to secede and that New York City should even contemplate its own secession in order to maintain its advantageous position in trade and finance.[2] In “Song of the Banner at Daybreak” Whitman personifies this pragmatic case for secession in the voice of the father who identifies the greatness of America with its material wealth: “Look at these dazzling things in the houses  . . . the money shops opening /  . . . the vehicles preparing to crawl along the streets with goods . . . How envied by all the earth.” In response to this appeal to prudence and materialism, the child identifies with the expansiveness and spirit embodied in the American flag flapping in the wind above them:

            O my father I do not like the houses,

            They will never be to me any thing, nor do I like money,

            But to mount up there I would like, O dear father, that banner I like . . .

 

And knowing that war will be necessary to save the nation that the banner represents, the child is willing to embrace the symbol of the coming struggle, “the sword-shaped pennant for war”. He concludes the stanza by declaring: “That pennant I would be and must be.”[3]

Whitman's political position is identical to Lincoln's, but the poet's argument is dramatic and symbolic where the president's is legal and linguistic; also, Whitman's patriotic child is forward looking while Lincoln hearkens back to the framer's intent and the sacrifices of the American Revolution.

 

            Herman Melville's vision of the Union is neither as legalistic as Lincoln's nor as ethereal as Whitman's.  In his crowning poem to Battle-Pieces, titled simply “America”, Melville employs an allegorical image of America that was common in the nineteenth century and which would find its apotheosis in Bartholdi's  Liberty Enlightening the World: the stern female bearer of light, law, and liberty. For Melville, the greatest emphasis here is upon law, and his poetic achievement here is to combine Lincoln's emphasis on law with Whitman's drive for mythmaking imagery. Where Whitman had found his strongest voice in a child's innocent declaration of loyalty, however, Melville's figure of America possesses a tragic wisdom that has been purchased at great price:

At her feet a shivered yoke,

And in her aspect turned to heaven

No trace of passion or of strife—

A clear calm look. It spake of pain

But such as purifies from stain—

Sharp pangs that never come again—

And triumph repressed by knowledge meet,

Power delicate, and hope grown wise,

And youth matured for age's seat—

Law on her brow and empire in her eyes.[4]

In light of the drive to attain overseas colonies at the close of the nineteenth century, it is worth noting here that Melville was never an advocate of colonialism; the “empire” he speaks of here is the vast nation between the seas, not beyond them.[5]

            The second premise about the Union, that its integrity would be maintained by military force if challenged by secession, is inherent in the first, but the consequences of this corollary became so severe as the war progressed that it deserves special consideration. Lincoln's most famous and concise expression of this premise was his eleven-sentence dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg in November of 1863.  While the first inaugural had reflected Lincoln's attempt to save the Union without recourse to war, the Gettysburg Address exemplifies his new position in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation: the war that he sees as necessary to save the Union will not only save it but transform it into a new entity with a global mission.  Where the president had initially attempted to use linguistic arguments and inspiring words to avoid the war, he now concedes, in a gesture of self-deprecation that is a standard trope of oratory, that the soldiers' deeds upon this battlefield have rendered his words practically superfluous. Nonetheless, the president employs the power of his words, as well as the power of the setting, to invest the opening phrases Declaration of Independence with the status of law and to invest the ongoing mission of the Union's armed forces with a new and universal significance: to insure that “government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”[6]  Instead of parsing the Constitution and its Preamble for reasons why slavery is constitutional but secession is not, Lincoln now emphasizes the shocking proposition made by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” and cites it, as no president had done before, as the fundamental proposition upon which the Union itself is based. As the old Union was consecrated by the memory of patriots who died in the Revolution, the “new birth of freedom” Lincoln hails here is consecrated by those who “gave their last full measure of devotion” at Gettysburg and the other battlefields of the war to save the Union.

            Lincoln's eleven sentences at Gettysburg are justly remembered as immortal, but they do not—and cannot, given their political function—acknowledge the cruel irony of a fratricidal war waged for the cause of brotherhood. Whitman's meditations on the human cost of preserving the Union through military force come closer to acknowledging the paradox of fratricide in the name of brotherhood, but they do not register its tragic irony, perhaps because irony is rarely, if ever, part of Whitman's register.  In “Over the Carnage Rose Prophetic a Voice” he declares, “If need be a thousand shall sternly immolate themselves for one”——a stunning and beautiful line in the context of this poem, but not one that indicates the whole truth: these thousands will immolate each other for the cause in question, not merely sacrifice themselves.[7] Whitman's “Reconciliation” is a haunting acknowledgement of the war's cost, but it portrays, without any sense of the scene's implicit irony, a solemn moment of reconciliation between a living northerner and a dead southerner.

            Herman Melville renders essentially the same scene with frank clarity and a bitter gallows humor in his poem “Magnanimity Baffled”: a Union soldier offers his hand to the defeated southerner, only to discover that his refusal to accept it is not the result of recalcitrance but of death. The poem offers a brilliant counterpoint to the magnanimous phrases that close Lincoln's second inaugural address: “With malice toward none, with charity for all . . .” which immediately follows the president's implicit promise to prosecute the war to the point of complete and unconditional surrender.[8]  As both a loyal Unionist and a committed Democrat, Melville perceived that the realities of total war, as evidenced by the siege of Vicksburg and Sherman's march to the sea, made such grand gestures of magnanimity echo with a cruel irony, even if they did spring from a sincere desire to move beyond the tragedy of the war and begin the work of national reconstruction.[9]

            The final and most revolutionary revision of the Union imperfectly begun by the American Civil War was the expansion of the concept of citizenship to include former slaves and their descendents. With the exception of a few Radical Republicans, it is safe to say that the vast majority of white America, in the north as well as the south, was unprepared for this final and most significant change in the laws and customs of the Union. By contemporary standards, Lincoln, Whitman, and Melville all show a remarkable reluctance to explore the meaning of the war for Americans of African descent, even though more than 200,000 black Americans took arms on behalf of the Union from January of 1863 until the end of the war.[10] 

In the one hundred and fifty years since the Civil War, this redefinition of the Union to include all citizens regardless of race has become the single ideal for which the struggle is best remembered, and Melville, among these three men, appears to have most instinctive understanding of this fact. His writing exhibits not only a greater empathy for black Americans, but also a greater intuitive sense of the vision that their unique experience would bring to the American drama.

            Lincoln, in his Emancipation Proclamation of January 1^st, 1863, is nearly as vague as the Constitution itself about who exactly constitutes the population of slaves in America.[11] This carefully crafted document promises to erase slavery as a legal institution in the rebellious territories, but, but remaining silent on the question of race, it does nothing to confront the practice of slavery as a social, economic, and political fact.  Furthermore, such vagueness about the system of racial caste that makes slavery practicable in all the states where it is practiced (north and south) threatens to conflate the slaves themselves with the evils of the institution in which they are enmeshed. This linguistic conflation is evident in Lincoln's second inaugural address, when the president almost appears to blame the Civil War on the slaves themselves, even as his explicit purpose is to condemn the institution of slavery: “These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew this interest was somehow the cause of the war.”[12] Slaves and slavery are referred to interchangeably to the effect that black Americans are implicitly confused with the tragedy of the war itself, while they are never acknowledged as active agents in its resolution.

            Like the president whom he admired with a frankly religious fervor, Walt Whitman portrayed the Civil War as essentially about the maintenance of the Union, and barely if at all about the expansion of citizenship to include Americans of African descent. In Whitman's poem “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors” which he added to Drum Taps in 1881, an old black woman in a turban who remembers being kidnapped from Africa as a child now takes in the sight of Union soldiers marching through the southern countryside. In the first and last stanzas, Whitman repeats the refrain that she is so old that she is “hardly human” and throughout the poem she has no insight to offer but her age, her memory (“they caught me as a savage beast is caught”), her bafflement at the sight of so many Union troops and, presumably, her gratitude.[13]

            Melville's “Formerly a Slave” also considers the visage of an old black woman, but instead of looking backward to the slave trade in Africa, she looks forward to the expansion of civil rights in America. Not only does Melville invest the woman with a humanity that is largely absent in Whitman's and Lincoln's portrayals of African Americans, but he also invests her with a sense profound wisdom and prophecy. Not the prophecy of one who is more than human, but of one who is fully human:

Her children's children they shall know

The good withheld from her;

And so her reverie takes prophetic cheer—

In spirit she sees the stir

 

Far down the depth of thousand years,

And marks the revel shine;

Her dusky face is lit with sober light

Sybilline, yet benign.[14]

 

This woman is neither a goddess, nor a sentimental archetype, but merely a soul who has found wisdom in long and bitter experience. Her “sybilline” vision of a future in which “her children's children” will know “The good withheld from her” shows a simultaneous and clear consciousness of two opposing things: the great promise of America, and its failure hitherto to meet that promise for all of its citizens. This ironic sense of America's promise viewed through the prism the racial divide is precisely what W.E.B. Du Bois defined as “double consciousness,” in his book The Souls of Black Folk.[15] When Du Bois argued in 1903 that this double consciousness was the basis for a new and important cultural contribution to the national culture, he was making the unprecedented argument that black Americans had something to teach to the rest of America, by virtue of their long and unique experience in this country. It is impossible to say whether Melville's poem fully prefigures this revolutionary idea, but it is interesting to note that other female visage that he presents as having been made wise through tragedy is the face of America herself. 

In his treatment the Union, of the war to preserve it, and of those who became its newest citizens in the war's aftermath, Herman Melville's poetic vision anticipated a number of trends in American literature and thought in succeeding decades and in the century that followed. His vision of an America “With Law on her brow and empire in here eyes” seems to resonate with the progressive vision Teddy Roosevelt's and Woodrow Wilson's generation, though he would not likely have approved of all that generation stood for. His bitterly ironic rendering of modern war in poems like “Magnanimity Baffled” seems to foreshadow the writings of Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane in later decades and the whole genre of hardboiled combat fiction that followed them. Finally, his rendering of race, though it occupied scant space in Battle-Pieces, far outshone the writings of Lincoln and Whitman and in some ways anticipated the thinking of W.E.B. Du Bois. And yet, as if to confirm Shelley's dictum, Melville's writings on the war and Union, compared to those of Lincoln and Whitman, were the least acknowledged in his own time.

R. S. Deese

           

 

 WORKS CITED

 

Du Bois, W.E.B. “The Souls of Black Folk” in The American Intellectual Tradition. Charles Capper and David Hollinger, eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

 

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989

 

Garner ,Stanton. The Civil War World of Herman Melville.  Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1993

 

Lincoln, Abraham. “The First Inaugural Address” (March 4, 1861). www.bartleby.com/124/pres31.html

______.“The Emancipation Proclamation” (January 1, 1863). www.bartleby.com/43/34.html

______.“The Gettysburg Address” (November 19, 1863). www.bartleby.com/43/36.html

______.“The Second Inaugural Address” (March 4, 1865). www.bartleby.com/124/pres32.html

McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Ballantine Books, 1988.

 Melville, Herman. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War  (1866). New York: Prometheus Books, 2001.

Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur M., ed. The Almanac of American History.  New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1993.

 Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002.

 

 

 

 

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