Melville the Yankee

City Journal: Ahab’s Democratic Despotism: The political lessons of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick by Will Morrisey

A preview of Will Morrissey's forthcoming book on "Melville's Ship of State."

Melville shows how Americans "might lose their republican civil liberty if they fail to understand, and stand up for, themselves under the laws of nature and of nature’s God."https://t.co/6fplOhOqPo

— Pavlos Papadopoulos (@pleonidasp) May 24, 2020

The Young Americans tried to settle the slavery controversy that threatened the Union by valorizing popular sovereignty in a way that the American Founders hadn’t done. The Founders located sovereignty in the people, but the people had to be ruled by the greater sovereignty of the laws of Nature and Nature’s God. Consistent with these principles, Congress had banned slavery in the territories that the Northwest Ordinance governed. By proposing that newly acquired territories west of the Mississippi be authorized to vote slavery up or down, and then be admitted as new states of the Union based on those majority decisions, Senator Douglas and Young America generally were “blowing out the moral lights around us,” as Abraham Lincoln put it in his debates with the senator, a decade later. Young America was arguing that majority rule—a form of might, not moral law—made right. Melville’s experience—and his greatest work—cast light on the potential costs of such a conception.

A Yankee appraisal of the Young Americans, and Vermeule would probably agree.

In none of his complaint about the passions of “the democracy” did Melville abandon the principles of the American regime itself, as articulated by the Founders—quite the contrary. A few years later, he wrote that he wished Shakespeare were alive now, in New York City. “For I hold it a verity that even Shakespeare was not a frank man to the uttermost,” needing to guard some of his thoughts in the dangerous political atmosphere of Elizabethan England, where Protestant and Catholic factions maneuvered for dominance and civil war threatened. “And indeed, who, in this intolerant Universe is, or can be,” entirely frank? But, Melville continued, “the Declaration of Independence makes a difference.” America, the regime that guaranteed natural rights of life and liberty, secured by the constitutional rights of freedom of religion and of speech, would at least enable a reborn Shakespeare to be freer than he was in the old regime of monarchs and clerics.

But Young America loosened the tie between democratic self-rule and respect for natural and civil rights. One of its most celebrated members, Senator Douglas, would soon begin his public campaign for settling America’s western territories based on “popular sovereignty”—which, in practice, meant that settlers would vote slavery up or down, irrespective of the Declaration’s principles. By the time he published Moby-Dick in 1851, Melville had grown thoroughly disenchanted with Young American political bravura and equally skeptical of the optimism about democracy displayed by many in its literary-intellectual wing.

Were Abolitionists like Melville proto-"Straussians"? Or did their interpretation of the founding have cultural antecedents? Perhaps in some sort of generic New England liberalism? Were the Young Americans guilty of this sort of belief in democracy over all other considerations, even considerations of the natural law, that is attributed to them by Melville? Or were they political realists who understood that some measure of compromise was necessary with slave-owners in order to avoid sectional conflict, and to facilitate the movement of Americans to settle the Louisiana Purchase and further Manifest Destiny?

The essay is an excerpt from a book and explains the allegory that is Moby Dick. I'm going to skip to the conclusion:

And so the two men on board who can clearly see the tyrant for what he is fail to stop him. One man fails because a soft individualism pervades his soul. The other fails because a soft, pacifist form, or deformation, of Christianity guides him. If democracy can incline men to weak individualism, and if Christianity was the first widely accepted public expression of natural human equality—as Tocqueville writes—Melville issues a prophetic warning to Americans, showing how they might lose their republican civil liberty if they fail to understand, and stand up for, themselves under the laws of nature and of nature’s God.

And what of the threat to republican civil liberty by a strong, central government that serves the oligarchy? Could republican civil liberty have been preserved if the North had let the South go their own way? Or was conflict inevitable in such a scenario?

Perhaps soft individualism is not the result so much of "democracy" but of prosperity and living in mass population centers with very little exercise of republican virtue, unless that virtue is just limited to the exercise of the vote. What was Melville's conception of republican virtue?

Related:
Cambridge University Press: The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828-1861 by Yonatan Eyal