“He has
suffered somewhat in his health, as his friends believe, by devotion to study,
and a life of extreme solitude, and they fully believe, that with the
improvement to be derived from a mild climate, a more free social intercourse
with artists and men of letters and refinement, he would be able to perform the
duties of American Consul at Florence, with great credit to his country.”
Melville arrived
in Washington on March 22. Hershel Parker in the second volume of his biography
tells us Melville “chased Sumner about the capital.” That night, he attended
the new president’s second levee (a formal presidential reception) at the White
House. In a letter to his wife dated March 24-25, Melville wrote:
“The night
previous to this I was at the second levee at the White House. There was a
great crowd, & a brilliant scene. Ladies in full dress by the hundred. A
steady stream of two-&-twos wound thro’ the apartments shaking hands with `Old
Abe’ and immediately passing on. This continued without cessation for an hour
& a half. Of course I was one of the shakers. Old Able is much better
looking [than] I expected & younger looking. He shook hands like a good
fellow -- working hard at it like a man sawing wood at so much per cord. Mrs
Lincoln is rather good-looking I thought. The scene was very fine altogether.
Superb furniture -- flood of light -- magnificent flowers -- full band of music
&c.”
The meeting
otherwise goes unremarked. Lincoln made no mention of it. Melville was one of
thousands seeking patronage from the new administration. Hershel notes: “Melville’s
description of Lincoln as sawing metaphorical wood at so much per cord indicates
a high degree of fellow-feeling, since it was the image he used of himself in
1849 about the way he had composed Redburn
and White-Jacket.” What to us seems
like a meeting of giants, a rare convergence of two great American writers, turns
out to be a minor social function.
In “Lemuel
Shaw’s Meditation,” one of four dramatic monologues spoken by historical
figures and collectively titled “Crossing the Pedregal” (Taken in Faith: Poems, 2002), the late Helen Pinkerton has Shaw, in
January 1861, recalling his earliest awareness of Lincoln and meditating on the
threat of demagoguery:
“Then I
recalled a speech made years ago,
A strong
lyceum speech in Illinois
By a young
Western lawyer, a Whig like me,
That made my
point exactly: the risk we ran
In that
mob-ridden time, prelude to this,
That some
mad, towering genius, seeking glory,
Through
antislavery or its opposite,
Might overturn
our laws, for personal fame,
Might break
the Union to enhance his name.
The lawyer
urged obedience to law
Till laws,
if bad, as slavery’s code, be changed.”
Near the end
of the poem Lincoln reappears, this time as president. In Pinkerton’s retelling,
Shaw has read Moby-Dick:
“If this
young lawyer—no one-idea’d Ahab
Nor coward
Starbuck he – can find his way
As
President, during the coming conflict
To use his
war powers, citing the Union’s need
In mortal
danger, for black-soldier power,
Ending the
nightmare slavery has been,
Though he’ll
not change our human nature’s evil,
He might
permit a lessening of the wrong,
A small
increase of right.”
Lemuel Shaw
would die, age eighty, on March 30, 1861. On April 12, Confederate forces opened
fire on Fort Sumter and the Civil War began. Lincoln named T. Bigelow Lawrence
of Boston to the consulship in Florence. In 1866, more than a year after the
end of the war and Lincoln’s assassination, Melville wrote to Henry A. Smythe,
whom he had met in Switzerland and had been appointed collector of customs for
the district of New York in May of that year. Melville was sworn in as a
customs inspector at the port of New York on Dec. 5, 1866. He resigned
effective Dec. 31, 1885.
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