From the Top Mast
HOW DOES A CRITIC SPEAK within the self-reaffirming echo chambers of a nationalist culture? Sometimes in direct confrontation. Sometimes in disguise. But often by repurposing one of the circulating commonplaces so that a platitude turns suddenly into a barb and provocation. John Winthrop was no stranger to twists of language of this kind. Inverting the accustomed meaning of “city upon a hill,” he had taken a biblical line of encouragement and reworked it into a phrase of high anxiety. To dwell as in a city upon a hill, he had reminded himself and his fellows, was not to dwell on a mountain top of confidence but under the eyes of relentless scrutiny. Anxiety was the price of their chosenness. Break their covenant with themselves and God and the world would never forget their falseness. There was terror beneath the confidence of “A Model of Christian Charity,” and warning beneath its benedictions.
In the nineteenth-century age of nationalism, a great deal of Winthrop’s conditionality gave way before the inflowing tides of patriotism. Spread-eagle rhetoric set the standard for nationalist oratory. Giants of the age like Daniel Webster learned to make its cadences into anthems of self-congratulation. But the critical impulse did not go away. Some of it was clothed in the terms Winthrop had placed, for very different purposes, in the Model itself.
The double-edged potential within these movable metaphors has often been hard to perceive. The impulse to cut up the literature of American nationalism into truncated, quotable fragments, to thread them along a continuous string so that each of the extracts, from the Puritans to the present, amplifies and reinforces the others, has softened and repolished the words. But amidst the din of self-congratulation, critical turns on the theme of a chosen people dwelling in a city on a hill were never far from sight.
One of the now most celebrated nineteenth-century odes to the new chosen people of modern American times was a passage that Herman Melville injected into his novel of life aboard an American Navy frigate, a book he titled White-Jacket. The Americans bear “the ark of the liberties of the world,” Melville wrote impassionedly there. They were the world’s “predestinated” pioneers: “the Israel of our time.” Melville picked up the words from the currents of fervent affirmation around him. What is not so often noticed is that he put them into the top-mast musings of one of American fiction’s most striking, critical misfits.
Certainly in the literature of nineteenth-century American nationalism there is no stranger figure than the sailor Melville named “White-Jacket.” He took his name from the jacket he had stitched together himself when no proper sailor’s pea jacket could be had. Stiffly darned and quilted, with a “Quakerish amplitude” and “tumble-down collar,” patched with every kind of pocket for books, biscuits, an extra shirt or two, and other gear, all it needed was waterproofing.1 But the keeper of the ship’s paint room insisted that there was no more paint or tar to be had. So alone among his thousand other black-coated fellow crew members, White-Jacket stood out as conspicuously as a ghost in his sodden, homemade, albino outfit.
In this garb, White-Jacket worked the top-most sails of the U.S. naval frigate Neversink. A hundred feet above the ship’s main deck and its cannons below, he manned the stays of the royal mainsail. His brethren on the main top, if Melville is to be believed, were an elite cadre of sailors. They read Ulysses and Macbeth, Byron’s poetry and Scott’s romances. They carried Shakespeare in their pockets. They ribbed lesser sailors who knew only whaling ships and blubber. If they slipped at their tasks they fell in a horrifying instant to splinter their bones on brass and wood below or, like the luckier White-Jacket himself, to crash into the sea with a thunder-boom in his ears and the sensation of death flooding over him in billows, yet still alive. But at other times, White-Jacket would mount the mainmast not for conversation or for ship’s duty but, in a “meditative humor,” would wrap his strange costume around him and “muse.” He was, aloft, the ship’s loner, its detached conscience, its aerial ghost, its albatross.
One of White-Jacket’s extended monologues was to become one of the widely quoted expressions of what is routinely described as the optimistic, future-confident nationalism of the mid-nineteenth-century United States. “Let us leave the Past,” Melville has White-Jacket say. “The Past is the text-book of tyrants; the Future the Bible of the Free.” The Future was the proper realm for America.
Escaped from the house of bondage, Israel of old did not follow after the ways of the Egyptians. To her was given an express dispensation; to her were given new things under the sun. And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world.… God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls. The rest of the nations must soon be in our rear. We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours.… Long enough have we been skeptics with regard to ourselves, and doubted whether, indeed, the political Messiah had come. But he has come in us, if we would but give utterance to his promptings. And let us always remember that with ourselves, almost for the first time in the history of earth, national selfishness is unbounded philanthropy; for we can not do a good to America but we give alms to the world.2
Among the most eloquent passages Melville ever wrote, this hymn to the new chosen people, the American “Israel of our time,” quickly went into a circulation wider than the book itself. During the late nineteenth century, when Melville’s literary reputation had receded to a low ebb, White-Jacket’s lines celebrating the Future were imbedded in the quotation books that circulated in both England and the United States for ministers in need of sermon materials. It did not seem to jar on readers that they were there unlinked from American references and attributed to a different sea-yarn spinner, the British novelist Frederick Marryat. Detached from any American referents, they showed up as Marryat’s words in the early twentieth century as American newspaper quotation box filler as well.3 In the mid-twentieth-century flowering of American studies, the words came back into circulation not merely as Melville’s own but as the apotheosis of an emergent national optimism. Here, scores of commentators agreed, was the American Idea distilled to its essence. Here one heard the myth of America, the American creed, the distinctive terms of a nationalism that ran back to the Puritan past and forward to an unbounded future.
White-Jacket did not carry much in the way of a plot. Written in a headlong rush between April and September 1849 (“by the job, as a woodsawyer saws wood,” Melville apologized to his friends), the book was a pastiche made up of memories of Melville’s own naval shipboard experiences six years before, generously larded with vignettes taken from other writers. Reviewers praised it for its vividly penned glimpses into the social life aboard a man-of-war. Seamen’s quirks and habits, the strains and dangers under which they lived, the rituals of the deck and mess hall, the exaggerated character traits a ship’s environment incubated, the maelstrom of a sea storm and the dullness of life at anchor: all this Melville offered up with a skilled hand.4
But if White-Jacket did not have a plot, it had a theme that ran insistently through its pages. That theme was the barbaric exercise of authority in the American naval fleet. The “chosen people” passage that was to be so often extracted as distilling the extraordinary promise of America came at the culmination of three of the angriest chapters Melville would ever write: a condemnation of flogging in the U.S. Navy from which he would not let his readers avert their eyes. Tied and “stripped like a slave,” in full sight of the ship’s officers and entire crew who were required to witness it, the sailors whom the captain’s orders had condemned to punishment were whipped until their backs ran with blood, their bodies leaping and writhing under the cat-of-nine-tails’ dozen blows. Still worse was the punishment of being flogged “through the fleet,” by which an American sailor could be whipped a dozen times at each flogging station from warship to warship. These savage, body-breaking beatings were not only crimes against the Law of Nature, Melville insisted. They were the barbaric remnants of a feudal order, “monstrous graftings of tyranny” upon a nominally free people. Though flogging remained lawful in the English navy, some of England’s most admired naval heroes had proved that the governance of sailors did not require it.5
But in the U.S. Navy, Melville wrote in anger, the grip of the past was unyielding. Captains behaved like petty kings and tyrants, fortressed behind the “immutable ceremonies and iron etiquette of a man-of war.” The fleet’s commodore domineered over his ships’ crews as if he were an ancient emperor or sultan, “far more regal than any descendant of Charlemagne, more haughty than any Mogul of the East.”6 The Past wasn’t elsewhere. It lorded its sway over the American navy; it saturated the world White-Jacket lived in.
The Future—the dream of escaping the Past’s house of bondage to become the ark of the liberties of the world—was not a celebratory report on an emergent American culture, as it has too often been read. It was a dissent from America: a countervision in Melville’s and White-Jacket’s outraged imaginations of what America ought to have stood for. It turned the rhetoric of a New Israel on its head to flay the America of fact with the ideals it so blatantly failed to live up to.
Flogging on U.S. naval ships would, in fact, be abolished in the same year that White-Jacket was published. But nothing in the heat of Melville’s impassioned prose and the sense of betrayal that he vested in the “ark of the liberties of the world” passage suggests he anticipated that step. America, in its barbaric cruelties, was being acted out in the ship far below White-Jacket’s feet. The idea of America that Melville implored readers to believe in lay elsewhere, in a realm at cross-purposes to the institutionalized barbarism Melville himself had witnessed: in the dreams of a lonely top-mast man, America’s white-coated misfit, its detached critic, its ghostly albatross.
An edge of discomfort had always been part of the chosen people idea. But Melville’s dissent from the top mast differed from Winthrop’s call to a life of self-scrutiny. It differed, too, from the generalized laments with which later New England preachers would scourge their people’s moral and spiritual failings. The Jeremiad’s form was enveloping and yet, ultimately, redemptive. It amassed every sign of a chosen people’s accumulating weaknesses, every mark of moral and spiritual failure, every reason why God should lose patience and cut his people off entirely—before offering them one last chance at reform.
Critical nationalism of the sort Melville employed was different. It pressed the gulf between ideal and practice into a deeply cutting contradiction. Its power was dialectical, not merely hortatory. It used the rhetoric of nationalism to try to pierce the billowing conceits of national greatness. To wield the term “chosen people” in nineteenth-century America was, typically, to heap still more timbers on the celebratory bonfires of pride. A nation more blessed than any other was no mean object of affection. But with a different, critical turn of the words, the idea of a chosen people, blind to the hypocrisy of their conceits, could be wielded as a stinging critique.
Neither in his earlier, more celebratory pieces nor in his later, darker writings did Melville use these phrases to take up more broadly the cause of reform. But it should not be surprising that some of the most vivid uses of the “chosen people” motif in nineteenth-century America were penned by those who wielded it against what they took to be the nation’s most shameful contradictions.
“The Birth-day of Freedom,” not merely for this country “but for the world, for man universally,” the freelance radical Orestes Brownson called the day of American independence in a Fourth of July address in 1834. “There was more in that revolution than the American and British armies. The past and the future were there. The spirit of immobility and the spirit of progress met there in terrible conflict; humanity all entire was there.” But what had come of that struggle for freedom and the “soul-kindling truth” of equal human rights? Brownson went on. What did equality mean when some lived in luxury and idleness while others were riveted to the chains of labor, when starvation faced the working man, when the gap grew ever wider between “those who produce and are poor and those who produce not and are rich?” The promise of America—“Freedom’s chosen land,” he would call it in 1840—was the rhetorical set-up. The critical knife came in naming “the worm gnawing into the very heart of that tree of liberty which our fathers have planted.”7
The radical journalist Margaret Fuller proclaimed the greatness of America in the same double-edged way. “We doubt not the destiny of our country—that she is to accomplish great things for human nature, and be the mother of a nobler race than the world has yet known.… But she has been so false to that scheme made out at her nativity, that it is now hard to say which way that destiny points.”8 “What might she be?” a correspondent to the abolitionist Liberator echoed the theme. “But for this foul blot [of slavery] … she would be as a city on a hill for the admiring gaze of the whole world. Alas! alas! that she is … blind to the elements of greatness within her.”9
There was a still more radical stance for antebellum America’s critics to take, of course, which was to dissociate themselves from the city on a hill theme altogether. This was William Lloyd Garrison’s position well before, in dramatic fury, he publicly burned the Constitution that he called a covenant of death with slavery. “What is there in the character of this American Nation that they should be the especial charge of the Most High? Is it that we have extirpated the races He had planted here at first, with fire-water and sword? … Is it that we have promoted this System [of slavery] by blood and this fraud to the utmost of our power, and spread it where it did not exist, and still sigh for new worlds for its fatal victories? … And yet, to judge from the words of priests and politicians, we are His chosen people, on whom depend all the hopes of mankind!”10
Frederick Douglass, the most eloquent African American orator and writer of his day, took the same line, even after he had broken with Garrison on the efficacy of political action under a blood-stained Constitution. When fugitive slave hunters tracked down Anthony Burns in Boston and tried to force his return to slavery in Virginia, Douglass wrote with irony-dripping anger, “Now let all true patriotic Christian Republicans rejoice and be glad! … Let the churches be flung open and the pulpit resound with thanksgiving, that our beloved country has been saved, and that Republican Liberty is still secure, and the example of the model republic still shines refulgently, to the confusion of tyrants and oppressors in Europe.”11
And yet, even Douglass knew the critical potential of the chosen nation theme. He refused to think that the North could save its virtue simply by dissociating itself from the slave South. That would be akin to a pirate imagining that he could clear his crime by leaping into a longboat and leaving his crewmates and their tormented prisoners behind. Sooner or later, “by fair means or foul means, in quiet or in tumult, in peace or in blood, in judgment or in mercy, slavery is doomed to cease out of this otherwise goodly land, and liberty is destined to become the settled law of this Republic.”12 This stance was not a sign of passive resignation to the tides of history; it was not the voice of a writer unwittingly entangled in the “myth of America,” as Sacvan Bercovitch was to put it.13 To embrace the nationalist promise and insist that only when the nation’s deepest flaw had been excised would that promise be realized was a tool of powerful edge and potency.
When Abraham Lincoln came as close as he ever would to the chosen people trope, there is no evidence that he had read Douglass’s appeal to “this otherwise goodly land.” “This almost chosen people” was a phrase of Lincoln’s own improvisation. In the long, ceremonial train ride in early 1861 from Springfield, Illinois, to his inaugural in Washington, DC, during which Lincoln was called on to speak at every stop, even after his voice had grown hoarse and failed, he never used the phrase other than in his impromptu remarks at Trenton. You can read through the entire record of Lincoln’s writings, speeches, and remarks, public and private, without ever finding a variation on “chosen people” again.14
Of all the ways in which Lincoln made his own distinctive course through the crisis of war and disunion, his refusal to join the chorus of those who were certain they knew God’s intentions for the nation was one of the most striking. The “chosen people” phrase and its halo of patriotic sentiments erupted with the secession crisis itself, both in the North and the South. The rhetoric of a redemptive war thundered from pulpits on both sides. “Government is now become Providential,” Horace Bushnell declared. “If there ever was a war undertaken in the name of God in his service, at his command, under his approbation,” a Rhode Island clergyman greeted the coming of the war, this was surely it. “Our national deliverance has been wrought out for us, as a world-historical act, by God himself,” another Northern preacher heralded the final, bloody end of the war.15
In the states of the Southern Confederacy a mirror rhetoric ran just as strongly. The constitution of the Confederate States of America invoked the favor and guidance of almighty God in its very first sentence. “This is a holy war,” Southern preachers and politicians declared. The theme of chosenness swelled. “The analogy between the Confederacy and the chosen Hebrew nation was invoked so often as to be transformed into a figure of everyday speech,” Drew Faust writes.16 “The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” was the “God of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson,” a Confederate camp revivalist exhorted the troops. In both the North and the South, preachers searched the daily war news for signs of God’s providential hand at work. A sense of living in Old Testament time, amidst its typological emblems and signs, returned in force.17
This was surely God’s cause, Lincoln’s allies insisted. And yet Lincoln himself was never as certain as they. He believed unyieldingly in the imperative of preserving the union. He refused to compromise on secession or on the demand to open still more room for slavery in the territories, the knotted issues over which the politicians wrangled futilely in the interregnum months between his election and inauguration. When the war came, Lincoln prosecuted it with all the vigor at his disposal, egging on his generals to more aggressive action, wringing his hands at their caution, mourning the bodies that soon piled up in the tens of thousands on the battlefields, but never flinching from adding more.
But that this was God’s war, Lincoln was never convinced with the simplicity that others preached. Could one be sure that God was on either side? he confided to those closest to him. Could one know that he willed either side victory? Could anyone be certain that this immense catastrophe, this carnage, was not intended for some still more distant purpose? Could one be sure that these rivers of blood were not God’s punishment for the sin of slavery, in which both North and South had been so deeply complicit?
“The Almighty has His own purposes,” Lincoln confessed in his second inaugural address. “If God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,” that will would be done. Lincoln was immovable. But his God—“omnipotent, inscrutable, and mysterious,” in Richard Carwardine’s words—was no cosmic nationalist, no covenant maker, no straightforward chooser of sides.18
Holding to this lonely combination of certainty and doubt amidst the eruption of providential nationalism around him, Lincoln went through the war in a kind of a top mast of his own. But of one thing he was certain, that the promises of liberty embedded in the Declaration of Independence were the nation’s birthright. He was thinking about the Declaration as he made his way from New York City through Trenton to Philadelphia where he was to speak the next day at Independence Hall. “I have never had a feeling politically that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence,” he told a cheering crowd there.19 He was thinking, as he had since his turn to the Republican Party began, about slavery.
We have too often read Lincoln’s “almost chosen people” phrase too naively. We have not seen clearly the difference between Winthrop’s anxious hopes of realizing God’s providential scheme and the patriotic certainties of the Civil War preachers, and the distance between both these uses of the chosen people trope and Lincoln’s strikingly different, critical nationalism. By “almost chosen” as the crisis began to unfold in 1861 he did not mean “not quite.” He did not mean that, step by step, the nation might reach that favored place. He did not mean a nation that had been chosen once and then fell away from its promise.
Across a century and a half, we cannot read Lincoln’s mind any better than those who fretted and strained to do so at the time. Later, acquiescing in the pressures on his abolitionist flank to weaken the Confederacy by directly undermining the system of slavery, he seems to have regained momentarily a clearer sense of God’s providence in the unexpected maelstrom of the war. The Emancipation Proclamation—Lincoln’s pivot to an “emancipation war,” as Frederick Douglass called it—seems to have brought a certain catharsis. But in February 1861, none of this was legible in the future: not open war, certainly not a war this grindingly long and consuming of lives, and certainly not abolition of the regime of slave labor. In 1861, what he seems to have meant by “almost chosen” was something much more critical and, even now, more sobering. He meant a nation that might have been chosen—but for the deep, original sin of slavery.