What to Israel Potter is the Fourth of July?Melville, Douglass, and the Agency of Words

What to Israel Potter is the Fourth of July?Melville, Douglass, and the Agency of Words

ANNE BAKERNorth Carolina State University

The Fourth of July was problematic for many Americans from themoment it became the United States’s national holiday. It provokedrancorous debate over how the nation’s founding should be celebrated,

over what exactly was being celebrated, and even over whether celebrationwas merited at all. Class was one key component of this strife. As W. CalebMcDaniel has pointed out, American elites frowned upon noisy, often drunken,working class celebrations of the Fourth, which exacerbated their fears thatthe nation’s experiment in democracy was doomed to failure as a result of itsenfranchisement of what the upper classes saw as the lowest common denom-inator in American society. Upper-class Americans preferred to celebrate theholiday with speeches and dinners, which highlighted their sense of themselvesas part of a decorous republican tradition dating back to Rome.1

Slavery, of course, was another key element in the controversy overIndependence Day. As slavery itself became the subject of increasingly heateddebate over the course of the decades leading up to the Civil War, the Fourthof July came to be seen by abolitionists as a day ideally suited to pointing outthe nation’s failure to live up to its promise of liberty for all. By the 1850s,fiery anti-slavery speeches had become a Fourth of July tradition. In 1854,in what can be seen as the culmination of abolitionists’ rhetorical uses of theFourth of July, William Lloyd Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution inFramingham, MA at an Independence Day celebration organized to protestthe return of Anthony Burns, an escaped slave, to his southern master. Atthis same rally, Henry David Thoreau gave the speech known as “Slavery in

C© 2008 The AuthorsJournal compilation C© 2008 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

1 W. Caleb McDaniel “The Fourth and the First: Abolitionist Holidays, Respectability, and RadicalInterracial Reform,” American Quarterly 57 (March 2005): 129–51. Additional studies of theFourth of July are Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalismin the Early Republic (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997) and David Waldstreicher,In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

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Massachusetts.”2 Meanwhile, some northern African-American communities,incensed by the hypocrisy of the holiday, refused to celebrate it at all, preferringinstead to celebrate other anniversaries, such as New York state emancipationon July 5, Crispus Attucks’s death on March 5, the abolition of the slave tradeon July 14, or West Indian emancipation on August 1 (McDaniel 137).

It is in the context of these debates about the Fourth—which arealso attempts to harness the emotional power of the nation’s anniversary topromote particular political agendas—that we can best understand FrederickDouglass’s 1852 Fourth of July oration and Herman Melville’s Israel Potter,originally subtitled A Fourth of July Story when it was first published, as aserial, in Putnam’s Magazine in 1854.3 Both texts are part of a larger Fourthof July conversation, and both use the holiday to expose the ways in whichthe nation fell short of the promises made at its founding. Douglass’s focus,obviously, is the injustice suffered by slaves held in bondage in the South,those “bleeding children of sorrow” whose “chains . . . are . . . rendered moreintolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them” on the Fourth. In IsraelPotter, Melville suggests that the ideals of the Revolution have also failed toimprove the lot of the white working class. As Carolyn Karcher suggests, thenovel’s eponymous hero, who undergoes a series of unfortunate experiencesthat include incarceration, forced labor, dire poverty, and a lifetime of exile,“stands for America’s slaves, both black and white.”4

2 For more on the Fourth of July celebration in Framingham, see Albert J. Von Frank, The Trialsof Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1998), 276–85.3 Walter E. Bezanson points out that the subtitle was dropped after the second installment andwas not part of the title of the book when it was published early in 1855. Based on his guessthat the subtitle was the result of the serial’s “largely fortuitous initial appearance in the Julyissue of Putnam’s, as a patriotic story,” Bezanson speculates that “the decision both to supply theFourth of July reference and later to omit it may have been made in the magazine offices withoutconsulting Melville” (“Historical Note,” in Israel Potter, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, andG. Thomas Tanselle [Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The NewberryLibrary, 1982], 208; hereafter cited as NN IP). Even so, the subtitle, in conjunction with Melville’spossible awareness of the Framingham rally suggests that we may read his serial as a sustainedmeditation on the meaning of the Fourth of July and on the promises of individual agency thatunderwrote the holiday. Melville may have read Douglass’s Fourth of July speech, which wasreprinted as a pamphlet under the title Oration, Delivered in Corinthian Hall, Rochester, July 5, 1852(Rochester: Lee & Mann, 1852). Certainly Douglass was aware of Israel Potter. On December 8,1854 in the “Literary Notices” section of Frederick Douglass’ Paper, Douglass recommended theDecember issue of Putnam’s to his readers and noted the presence in that issue of “a new edition ofISRAEL POTTER.” On March 2 he praised the March issue of Putnam’s, which also contained aninstallment of the novel (Robert K. Wallace, Douglass and Melville: Anchored Together in NeighborlyStyle [New Bedford, MA: Spinner Publications, 2005], 60).4 Carolyn L. Karcher, Shadow Over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville’sAmerica (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 107.

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There are illuminating similarities between Douglass’s Fourth of Julyspeech and Melville’s eighth book, as I will show momentarily. Ultimately,however, the differences between their responses to the Revolution and tothe Fourth of July offer the more penetrating insights into each writer andhis work. For while Douglass employs his self-described “scorching irony”to indict the hypocrisy of the United States and to help bring an end toslavery, Melville’s irony poses philosophical questions. His “Fourth of JulyStory” asks whether an accurate record of history is possible and whetherindividuals have the power to shape their own lives when confronted by largerhistorical forces. As an occasion for political speeches, the Fourth of Julyin the nineteenth century was every bit as much a tribute to the power ofrhetoric as it was a commemoration of the Declaration of Independence. BothDouglass and Melville engage the assumptions about rhetoric that underpinthe holiday, but they do so in very different ways. Beneath the verbal fireworksof “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” lies the premise that languagecan change people’s hearts and minds and thus change the course of history.On the other hand, beneath Melville’s narrative of an ex-soldier in the war forindependence lies a fear that language obscures the truth rather than providesaccess to it and that the Industrial Revolution negates America’s politicalrevolution.

To be sure, Douglass and Melville employ similar strategies to humanizetheir subjects and to link them to the fate of the nation as a whole. Animalimagery is everywhere in Israel Potter, especially when Israel is on the run inEngland and using his wits to escape imprisonment. Israel is “a hunted fox”followed by soldiers who are like “bloodhounds,” and he describes himself toJohn Paul Jones as having been “hunted like a dog” (NN IP 32, 92). WhileIsrael is held captive in an inn, the narrator observes that the locals “seemedto think that Yankees were a sort of wild creatures, a species of ‘possum orkangaroo” (15). Such epithets do not apply only to Israel, however. Two rusticEnglish farm workers, whom Israel addresses as “gentlemen” (much to thebewilderment of the two men), are described as “human steers” (18). For themost part, these animal metaphors are designed to emphasize Britain’s dehu-manizing treatment of its colonists as well as its own peasant class. In the largercontext of Melville’s narrative, however, such metaphors imply a differencethat fails to materialize. The Revolution in which Israel is participating doesnot, in fact, lead to a more fully human life for our hero, one in which he wouldhave the power to shape his own destiny or to speak to and be understood byfellow human beings.

The animal imagery in Israel Potter resonates with similar images inDouglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in which “merciless

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manhunters” seize escaped slaves “as the hideous crocodile seizes his prey.”5

In his Fourth of July speech, too, Douglass raises the issue of slaves’ humanityby addressing the line between humans and animals. He does so, however, byrefusing to argue such a self-evident point. Noting that it is against the law toteach slaves to read or write, he observes, “When you can point to any suchlaws, in reference to the beasts of the field, then I may consent to argue themanhood of the slave.” He then adds that “When the dogs in your street, whenthe fowls of the air, when the cattle on your hills, when the fish of the sea, andthe reptiles that crawl, shall be unable to distinguish the slave from a brute,then will I argue with you that a slave is a man!”6 Whereas Melville’s narrativeas a whole suggests that the line between animal and human is not as clear aswe might like to believe, Douglass insists on the difference by declaring it notworthy of his consideration.

Douglass and Melville also invoke biblical stories to add historical reso-nance and pathos to their subjects. Israel Potter’s name calls to mind the storyof Israel’s exile in Babylon, a connection Melville makes explicit in “Israel inEgypt.” Here, on his way to London, Potter finds work making bricks in a placeso dreary that it is compared to the Dismal Swamp, thus linking Israel not onlyto the biblical Israelites but to American slaves, who were also known to escapeto the Dismal Swamp (NN IP 154). The episode is doubly ironic. First, thereis the unexpected outcome of the young Israel’s actions. He, who “as soldierand sailor had joined to kill burn and destroy” the English, now finds himself,in the narrator’s words, “serving that very people as a slave . . . [a] bondsmanin the English Egypt.” In addition, unlike the Israelites, Israel is at no pointtruly delivered from exile. Even when he manages to return to the UnitedStates in 1826, he is unable to get the pension he has earned, due to “certaincaprices of law,” and when he returns to his old family homestead in WesternMassachusetts, he can barely recognize the place. His family, having “goneWest,” is no longer remembered there. Unlike the biblical Israel, Melville’sIsrael returns home to find only broken promises and a continuing sense ofexile, even in his birthplace.

Despite his declaration that the historical moment is a time for “scorch-ing irony” rather than “convincing argument,” Douglass’s use of biblical storiesis, in contrast with Melville’s, significantly lacking in irony. For Douglass,

5 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written byHimself , ed. David W. Blight (Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1993), 99.6 Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?: An Address Delivered in Rochester,New York, on 5 July 1852,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, andInterviews, Volume 2: 1847–54, ed. John Blassingame (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982),369–70; hereafter cited as Douglass.



scripture is a genuine scripting of human and personal response. He quotesthe familiar lines of Psalm 37, which begin “By the rivers of Babylon, there wesat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion.” The Psalm then tells thestory of how the Israelites were carried into captivity and how they were askedto sing the songs of Zion. Douglass’s quotation establishes a parallel betweenthe captive Israelites and America’s slaves, a commonplace of African-Americanculture. In communicating this parallel, Douglass hopes to elevate slaves inthe minds of his listeners. His use of the biblical passage invites Americans tosee slaves in light of their own religious beliefs and traditions, rather than asunassimilatable others.

But in continuing to quote, Douglass concludes with Psalm 37’s mostfamiliar lines, even though they at first seem superfluous: “If I forget thee, OJerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee,let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth” (Douglass 368). Speaking asthe psalmist himself, Douglass supplants American slaves as the quotation’sreferent. He is no longer linking American slaves to Israel; he is also promisingnever to forget his people in captivity while at the same time alluding tohis own remarkable oratorical skills. This assertion of himself and his ownobligation to remember and advocate for his people is a key part of hisrhetorical strategy in the speech, and, in fact, stands as the most significantdifference between Douglass and Melville’s use of the Fourth of July to explorethe nature of individual freedom and agency in relation to history.

Douglass begins his Fourth of July speech with a declaration of his ownanxiety about addressing his audience. “I do not remember,” he says, “everto have appeared as a speaker before any assembly more shrinkingly, nor withgreater distrust of my ability, than I do this day.” While such a claim of modestyis a common opener, one recommended by oratorical handbooks, it also makesan ideal beginning for Douglass’s rhetorical strategy of initial self-effacementfollowed by dramatic self-assertion of his capacity to speak out against slavery.Douglass’s declaration of “distrust” in his own ability is not merely conven-tional, but is also emblematic of his tenuous position as historical agent. Asa black man, he was expected to have little power to influence his own fate,and even less to shape the course of history. However, the gradually increasingforcefulness of the speech—created in part by Douglass’s canny manipulationof audience preconceptions about his identity—becomes an assertion of hiscapacity to use language designed to effect change.

After performing the modesty topos, Douglass continues as if the Fourthof July had nothing to do with him personally. He repeatedly addresses hisaudience as “you” rather than “we” (a form of address typically used in theFourth of July sermons on which Douglass models his speech). He also refers


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to the Founding Fathers as “your fathers” [emphasis added], and he offersan assessment of America’s youthful inadequacies that sounds as if it couldhave been written by a foreign travel writer, a Tocqueville or a Dickens: “Youare even now still lingering in the period of childhood . . . America is youngand . . . still in the impressible stage of her existence. Were the nation older,the patriot’s heart might be sadder and the reformer’s brow heavier” (Douglass360–61).

Throughout this portion of the speech, Douglass maintains the fictionthat he believes the purpose of a Fourth of July speech is to glorify the memoryof the Founding Fathers. But he then switches gears, making clear that histrue purpose is to address the wrongs of slavery. He makes this transitionwith a clever sentence that both shifts the focus to his own identity and callsinto question the unalloyed integrity of the Founders: “I leave, therefore, thegreat deeds of your fathers to gentlemen whose claim to have been regularlydescended will be less likely to be disputed than mine!” The implicationhere—emphasized by the exclamation point at the end of the sentence, whichsuggests an arch delivery of the line—is that Douglass is making a joke. Nodoubt he expects his more naı̈ve auditors to chuckle indulgently at the ideathat the speaker before them (defined always by his appearance first and hiswords second) could be descended from a Founding Father. But the point, ofcourse, is that some of the Founding Fathers did father slave children and thatsince Douglass’s father was reputed to have been a white man, he has aboutas much right to claim a connection to the Founders as most of his audiencewould have had.7

Having implicitly made such a claim, he concludes by asserting his ownright to be seen and heard. Douglass notes that he is not “included within thepale of this glorious anniversary,” giving “pale” a double meaning as not only aspatial metaphor but also a reminder that the holiday celebrates freedom onlyfor people of a certain color. After this pun, however, Douglass uses “I” and“we” far more frequently and addresses his listeners now as “fellow citizens.”In doing so, Douglass foregrounds his own presence and identity; he alsounites black and white, speaker and audience. His assertion of himself, in otherwords, is part of a larger project of persuading Americans to reconceptualizetheir nation. As the speech progresses, Douglass repeatedly references his rightand obligation to speak out against slavery. Fulfilling now his earlier gloss on

7 For more on Douglass’s paternity and on the way this shaped his rhetorical use of the foundingfathers, see Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature(Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993): 83–112. Sundquist arguespersuasively that “Douglass masked his search for patrimony and master in an identification withthe fathers of the Revolution” (100).



Psalm 37—“If I do not remember those bleeding children of sorrow, . . . maymy tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth”— he relates an abbreviated versionof his life, thus establishing his authority as an eyewitness.

In certain respects, the Fourth of July speech is a recapitulation of thestory Douglass tells in his autobiographies: the story of “how a slave was madea man.” Melville’s Israel Potter, on the other hand, tells the story of how a manbecomes a piece of debris tossed about on the sea of history. Critics have longcomplained about the passivity of the novel’s main character, seeing him as“an almost featureless recipient of experience” and as a “perpetual victim andwanderer . . . the man things happen to.”8 But it is important to recognize thatIsrael is not “featureless,” passive, or victimized at the beginning of the novel.For much of the narrative, he is a man of action: he runs away from home, goesto sea, fights at Bunker Hill, repeatedly outwits his British captors, undertakesa dangerous mission delivering messages from pro-American sympathizersin England to Benjamin Franklin in Paris, and serves heroically under thecommand of John Paul Jones.

Only after a remarkable display of initiative and daring does he becomethe “featureless” character critics describe. As Paul Jones battles a British ship,Israel springs on board, expecting to be followed by others from his own ship.At that moment, however, the English enemy abruptly sails off, leaving Israelstranded on board. He then tries to pass himself off as a member of each of theship’s various crews, but fails. At this key turning point in the novel, Israel slipsthrough the cracks of both England and America’s institutionally sanctionedsets of identities and becomes a kind of ghost figure. After being interviewedby the officer of the deck, who cannot determine his identity or origins, Israelis even addressed as “my ghost” by the master-at-arms. No longer able to takean active part in history, as he did in the first part of the novel, Israel becomeshistory’s victim, incapable of communicating his plight to others.9

How can we account for such a shift in the novel’s main character?The Fourth of July, as we have seen, provided Douglass an opportunity tostage a dramatic shift from hesitant outsider to outspoken activist and insiderin order to advance his political agenda. Why, then, does the same nationalholiday function for Melville as the backdrop for his protagonist’s movement

8 The two quotations are from Newton Arvin and Alfred Kazin, respectively as qtd. by Bezanson(NN IP 229, 232).9 For a compelling rebuttal of various critical dismissals of Israel’s passivity, see Russell Reising,Loose Ends: Closure and Crisis in the American Social Text (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996),117–85. Reising sees Israel’s character as anticipating “the notion of a fragile (if not decentered)subjectivity more fully developed in the writings of American naturalism” (121). He also suggeststhat in Israel Potter Melville questions “the validity of a notion of American history intimatelybound up with the valorization of [a] putative ‘American Self ’” (123).


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into passivity, a story in which an intrepid warrior becomes, by his owndescription, a “nobody,” a pauper trapped in a hellish foreign city? Is the novelsimply an inconsistent narrative based on the vagaries of the real Israel Potter’sbiography? Or are there reasons for its dramatic shift? Is this a narrative aboutthe failure of the Revolution?

Although the shift in Israel’s character follows a shift in Melville’ssource—the real Potter did in fact go from hero to pauper—that fact does notfully account for the tone and atmosphere of Melville’s fictionalization, or forthe way that the change in circumstances in the original narrative becomesa fundamental change of character in Melville’s rewriting of the biography.One possible explanation for the way Melville transforms the narrative is itselfbiographical in nature. In 1854 Melville was torn between a financially drivenneed to write marketable fiction and a powerful desire to express the darkervision of the world that increasingly dominated his writing and his life. Hisprevious two novels, Moby-Dick and Pierre, had not been well received, eitherby critics or the marketplace. One critic, after praising the lighter tone ofMelville’s first five books, had even called Pierre an “inexcusable insanity.”10

When Melville delivered the first sixty pages of Israel Potter to Putnam’s Maga-zine, he guaranteed not only that he would provide “at least ten printed pagesin ample time for each issue” but also that “the story shall contain nothing ofany sort to shock the fastidious. There will be very little reflective writing init; nothing weighty. It is an adventure.” No doubt he fully intended to fulfillthis promise. But one way of reading the change in Israel from active war-heroto passive, forgotten exile, as well as the corresponding shift in genre fromDefoe-like serialized adventure to despair-laden chronicle of a homecomingso long deferred that it ceases to deserve the name, is that Melville abandonshis pledge to Putnam’s and allows his narrative to become “weighty.” The finalparagraph of the novel supports such a reading by informing the reader thatIsrael “dictated a little book” but that it “long ago faded out of print—himselfout of being—his name out of memory.” Israel’s own writing failed to make animpact on the world, and Melville’s final words about that failure may also bea self-referential commentary on the failure of his books to have the impact hedesired.

Although such an explanation is compelling, it is by no means the wholestory. The novel registers more than the intrusion of the author’s depressionupon the narrative; it is also a trenchant critique of the claims of IndependenceDay. The main character’s transformation is a deliberate commentary on the

10 Fitz-James O’Brien, “Our Young Authors—Melville,” as qtd. in Bezanson, “Historical Note,” NNIP 181.



fate of the individual in post-Revolutionary society. For Douglass, the Fourthof July was an occasion for asserting his hard won capacity to speak out andchange history. For Melville, it was a means of dramatizing the way thaturbanization and industrialization prevent the citizen-subject from enactingthe ideals of the Revolution.

Israel’s fictional birthplace in the Berkshire mountains is an importantcomponent of Melville’s critique of industrialization and urbanization, for itrepresents a kind of pastoral paradise that in the decades of Israel’s exilecomes to look “like countries depopulated by plague and war” (NN IP 4).The primary purpose of devoting the entire first chapter to description of thesublimely depopulated landscape is to render the Revolutionary generationheroic. Though the narrator notes that abandoned houses appear every mileor two, he points out that “[t]he strength of the frame-work of these ancientbuildings enables them long to resist the encroachments of decay.” The framesof the houses imply the fortitude of their builders, as the narrator makeseven more explicit in his description of numerous stone fences “of uncommonneatness and strength.” These “tokens of ancient industry” suggest that:

The very Titans seemed to have been at work. That so small an armyas the first settlers must needs have been, should have taken suchwonderful pains to inclose so ungrateful a soil; that they should haveaccomplished such herculean undertakings with so slight prospect ofreward; this is a consideration which gives us a significant hint of thetemper of the men of the Revolutionary era. (4–5)

Both the sublimity of the landscape and the heroic traces of its earlier settlersare meant to reveal the source of Israel’s intrepidity and patriotism: “Norcould a fitter country be found for the birthplace of the devoted patriot, IsraelPotter” (5). The reference to the small “army” of settlers further emphasizes theconnection between the settlers and the war for independence to come. LikeDouglass, Melville begins his Fourth of July text with the obligatory invocationof the revolutionary generation found in the typical Independence Day speech.But where Douglass obliquely calls into question the integrity of the Founders,Melville instead represents the ordinary soldiers of the Revolution as thepossessors of extraordinary qualities. These qualities do not, however, lead tothe genuine implementation of revolutionary ideals.

It is the strength of will that he inherits from his forefathers and imbibesfrom the landscape that leads Israel to abandon his family and birthplace. Evenbefore he joins the army to throw off “the yoke of his king,” he “on equallyexcusable grounds emancipate[s] himself from his sire” (NN IP 7). In doingso, he becomes an embodiment of the revolutionary spirit; this first rebellion


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not only foreshadows the later one, but also enables Melville indirectly toconvey more about the nature and consequences of 1776. Like the colonialrebellion against England, Israel’s departure from his family home “on a sultrynight in July” in response to his father’s “tyranny” seems entirely justifiable.Although the neighbor girl to whom Israel has formed an “attachment” isbeautiful, amiable, and of a respectable though poor family, his father opposesthe match and has even “taken secret means to thwart his son with the girl’sconnections, if not with the girl herself, so as to place almost insurmountableobstacles to an eventual marriage” (7). His father’s conduct, as Israel regardsit, is “unreasonable and oppressive.” But while the decision to strike out on hisown and declare his independence from paternal oppression seems reasonable,its outcome is by no means positive.

At first, Israel’s independent endeavors are successful: he becomes awilderness hunter, buys land on the frontier, and trades with the Indians. AsRuss Castronovo has suggested, “Israel stumbles across an American identity inhis restlessness, falling into generic company with the archetypal Yankee folkhero, the jack-of-all-trades.”11 Despite his entrepreneurial success, however,Israel’s rebellion ultimately fails. When he returns home, his father remainsopposed to the match, and his beloved, like the Revolutionary goals of free-dom and individual agency, seems “somehow mysteriously withheld” (NNIP 9). After another sojourn, this one a whaling voyage in which Israel as aharpooner hones the marksmanship that will prove so useful at Bunker Hill,he returns to find that his beloved has betrayed him: “[t]he dear false girl wasanother’s.” Israel’s “hopes were not destined to be crowned with fruition,” andthe narrator’s word “crowned” reinforces the various ways in which Israel’srebellion parallels the colonists’ rebellion against England: just as the colonists’ideals fail to materialize fully, so, too, Israel will never supplant King Georgeto become the ruler of his own destiny.

Ultimately, Israel’s unnamed beloved is not merely symbolic of theRevolution’s failure, an ironic, literary version of the female figures wearingliberty caps that dominated revolutionary iconography. She is also a sort ofEve, whose betrayal brings about Israel’s departure from the pastoral, pre-revolutionary Eden of his birthplace. The New World wilderness of Israel’syouth enables him to profit from his entrepreneurial spirit: in addition totrading with Indians, he bought land, cleared it, and then sold it back to theoriginal owner at a profit. But the old world in which Israel finds himselfan exile is an urban, industrial nightmare. The capitalism and poverty of

11 Russ Castronovo, Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1995), 143.



post-Independence London keeps him struggling to survive, with no way toget ahead.

Read alongside “Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853) and “The Paradise ofBachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855), Israel Potter reveals a funda-mental shift in Melville’s imagination. His writings from this period convey anincreasing preoccupation with the ways that historical forces like capitalism,industrialization, and urbanization diminish or even destroy individuals. InIsrael Potter, of course, Melville focuses on the conflict between such forcesand the ideals of the Revolution. As we will see, however, the historical novelshares with “Bartleby” an additional concern that language may be inadequateas a means of genuine communication or as an agent of change.

The dehumanizing effects of industrial capitalism first appear duringIsrael’s sojourn at the brick factory. Like the labor in “The Tartarus of Maids,”the work here is depressing and tedious: “Half buried there in the pit . . . poorIsrael seemed some grave digger, or church-yard man, tucking away dead littleinnocents in their coffins” (NN IP 155). But the most pernicious effect of thework is that it causes the workers to see their own fates as insignificant:

This continual, violent, helter-skelter slapping of the dough intomoulds begat a corresponding disposition in the moulder; who,by heedlessly slapping that sad dough, as stuff of little worth, wasthereby taught, in his meditations, to slap, with similar heedlessness,his own sadder fortunes, as of still less vital consideration. To thesemuddy philosophers, men and bricks were equally of clay. (155)

The conditions of mass production objectify the workers as if they becomethe products they so monotonously create. The “continual . . . slapping of thedough” at the brick factory stands in contrast to the squeezing of the sper-maceti in Moby-Dick’s “A Squeeze of the Hand” (Ch. 95), revealing Melville’sdarkening view of industrial labor. While both forms of work are repetitiveand unvarying, the rhythmic squeezing of the spermaceti leads Ishmael tofeel an ecstatic sense of camaraderie with his fellow sailors. Israel’s continualslapping of the dough, on the other hand, is dehumanizing and isolating. InNature, Emerson had declared the primacy of the individual as well as theindividual’s capacity to resist the industrial age’s commodification of nature byclaiming that “there is a property in the horizon that no man owns but he whocan see the whole.” But Melville is careful to distinguish this isolation fromEmerson’s Transcendental version of individual freedom by situating Israel’sbrick factory on “a wild waste moor, belted round by bogs and fens” where“[t]he blank horizon, like a rope, coiled round the whole.” In Israel Potter,Emerson’s “horizon” becomes a noose, suggesting that no inhabitant of the


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modern world has access to the personal freedom to which Emerson urges hisreaders.12 By the end of “Israel in Egypt,” all sense of the worth of individualshas been lost, as Israel declares, “What signifies who we be, or where we are,or what we do? . . . [W]ho ain’t a nobody?” (157).

In London, capitalism’s dehumanizing effects are more tangible. Afterthe Napoleonic wars, the city is flooded with “hordes of disbanded soldiers;thousands of whom, rather than starve, or turn highwaymen . . . would workfor such a pittance, as to bring down the wages of all the laboring classes”(NN IP162). Living in the sewer and “wandering through the black kingdomsof mud,” Israel has “three corporals and a sergeant for company.” Aboveground, London Bridge is a nightmarish pathway to the underworld. In aDantesque vision, Israel sees crowds pouring into the city like “an endlessshoal of herring”; the arches of the Bridge look like ant-hills, crawling with“processions of carts, coaches, drays, every sort of wheeled, rumbling thing”(158, 159). Significantly, he arrives in London on Guy Fawkes Day, whichfunctions as an ironic counterpoint to the Fourth of July. Whereas the latterholiday celebrates what Americans take to be a successful revolt against theBritish crown—one resulting in greater freedom and individual agency—thelatter commemorates a failed conspiracy against the same institution.

Israel’s pastoral birthplace is the antithesis of the grimy city, where“[w]hichever way the eye turned, no tree, no speck of any green thing wasseen” (NN IP159). After years in exile, continually longing for the “virginclime” of his mountain home, Israel begins to have hallucinatory visions of thefarm where he grew up. In the first, he imagines himself feeding clover to “OldHuckleberry,” his mother’s favorite horse. In the second, he hears “a confusedpastoral sort of sounds; tramplings, lowings, halloos” and imagines himselfhelping to drive a herd of cattle. “[N]ow an old man,” Israel is “bewitchedby the mirage of vapors” and “dream[s] himself home into the mists of theHousatonic mountains; ruddy boy on the upland pastures again” (164, 165).These episodes drive home how far Israel has descended and how differentthe world of his old age is from that of his youth. In both visions he istending livestock. In his pastoral youth, his relationships with animals hadlinked him to the natural world in positive ways. His role as caretaker of “OldHuckleberry” and the herd of cattle emphasizes his difference from them anddenotes his humanity. But in London, these are memories, and he himself hasbecome a sort of work animal.

12 Both Castronovo and Reising suggest that in Israel Potter Melville is arguing with Emerson.Neither, however, specifically addresses the horizon passage of Nature.



After years spent as an anonymous London pauper, Israel returns toAmerica on the Fourth of July and is nearly run over by a “patriotic triumphalcar” in a holiday procession. Ironically, the car that nearly kills the old manis designed to memorialize him and his fellow soldiers at Bunker Hill; it fliesa banner “inscribed with gilt letters,” that reads “Bunker Hill. 1775. Glory tothe Heroes that Fought!” With this conceit, Melville suggests that the mythol-ogy of the Revolution has completely eclipsed the more complicated lives ofindividuals like Israel, whose stories, if told (and listened to) would call intoquestion some of the national self-satisfaction associated with IndependenceDay celebrations. The “gilt letters” of the banner represent an inflated rhetoricthat fails to match up with the disappointing reality of the post-revolutionaryworld.

Additional details in the final chapter of the novel suggest that indeed,language is at best a problematic means of exposing or correcting the falsemythology of the Revolution or even for calling attention to or remedyingIsrael’s plight. In “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Melville’s narrator concludes withthe rumor that Bartleby was once employed at the Dead Letter Office, wherehis work had been to assist in the burning of letters that never reached theirintended readers, and thus never provided the help or relief from isolationthey intended. This detail reinforces the reader’s sense that genuine humancontact is impossible, that language—including the narrator’s charitable appealto Bartleby and the words of comfort in the dead letters—proves ineffectual.As already noted, Israel Potter’s dictated record of his life “fade[s] out of print”just as he fades “out of being—his name out of memory.” This grim referenceto the ephemeral nature of printed texts suggests that Melville may see hisown novel as a kind of dead letter, whose words will never have their intendedeffect.

Melville’s account in the novel’s dedication of his first encounter withPotter’s original text may imply some residual, faltering faith in the printedword. Melville first notes the inauspicious circumstances in which the texthad been created and circulated: Potter’s text was “published on sleazy graypaper,” was sold by peddlers rather than more reputable booksellers, and maynot even accurately represent Potter’s words. (Melville rightly speculates thatit was “written, probably, not by himself, but taken down from his lips byanother.”) Even so, the text manages to find its way into Melville’s hands,“rescued by the merest chance from the rag-pickers,” and there it moves him,or at least interests him, enough to inspire the penultimate novel before hislong abandonment of fiction. The fact that Melville chooses to rewrite IsraelPotter’s story for a prominent periodical might suggest some limited hope forthe agency of words, if only to convey the truth about the lack of personal


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agency. If this is the case, it seems peculiarly appropriate that, because it wasthe editorial policy of Putnam’s Magazine not to identify contributors, Melville’sname was not affixed to the serialized version of Israel Potter.

The faint hope in the power of the printed word expressed by Melville’spublication of Israel Potter is a far cry from Douglass’s faith that technologicalprogress will enable better communication, which in turn will bring aboutmore enlightened ways of life. In the final paragraphs of “What to the Slaveis the Fourth of July?,” Douglass asserts that “Intelligence is penetrating thedarkest corners of the globe” and that “Wind, steam, and lightning are itschartered agents” (Douglass 387). “Thoughts expressed on one side of theAtlantic,” he adds, “are distinctly heard on the other,” and “[l]ong establishedcustoms of hurtful character” can no longer “fence themselves in.” Douglasscelebrates the fact that improvements in transportation make it possible forBritish anti-slavery sentiment to be conveyed to American readers and for ac-counts of slavery like his own to find a sympathetic (and ultimately influential)overseas audience. Melville’s text, by contrast, suggests no such faith in thepower of technology to augment the effects of language.

A deep ambivalence about the power of words to effect change is ulti-mately what most sharply distinguishes Melville’s “Fourth of July Story” fromDouglass’s Fourth of July oration. Recognizing that difference is the first steptoward identifying both texts as part of a vibrant antebellum debate about themeaning of Revolution and America. At the same time, attention to the Fourthof July texts of two of the nineteenth-century’s most talented writers bringsmore clearly into focus two separate but intertwined worldviews. For Melvillein 1854, the voice of the individual was drowned out by forces beyond his orher control. For Douglass in 1852 the “unalienable rights” insisted upon by thefounders and celebrated on Independence Day could still be asserted throughthe power of language.


What to Israel Potter is the Fourth of July?Melville, Douglass, and the Agency of Words

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