Central to this institutional order, however, was the disciplinary prerogative of flogging, and for naval reformers William McNally and John Lockwood, whose Evils and Abuses in the Naval Merchant Service (1839) and An Essay on Flogging (1849), respectively, galvanized support among Northerners for the eventual abolition of flogging in 1850, ships commanded by authoritarian "lords of the lash" resembled slave plantations. For others, however, flogging, whether at ship or social institution, remained a necessity; even prison reformer Dorothea Dix believed it "sometimes the only mode. . by which an insurrectionary spirit can be conquered." Dana, though highly critical of flogging, as he sympathetically imaged the flogged seaman as a type of slave, nonetheless argued for the right of captains to flog or even execute sailors in extreme situations. Increasingly suspicious of unchecked democratic energies among the masses, Fenimore Cooper, in his nautical romances of the 1840s, most notably Afloat and Ashore (1844), idealized captains as benevolent republican gentlemen for whom flogging or execution at sea were regrettable but ultimately necessary last resorts.
Melville's early sea fiction typically demystified the institutional ideals of the well-ordered ship — and, by implication, the well-ordered urban reform institution — by developing the analogy of the ship not only to the reform institution but also to the slave plantation. In White-Jacket, for example, Captain Claret, like the captain of Dana's Two Years, sadistically flogs an apparently innocent sailor while blasphemously asserting his shipboard supremacy: "I would not forgive God almighty!" Whereas the greenhorn of Two Years somewhat gen-149- teelly resists mutiny when faced with a similar situation, WhiteJacket's emergent belief that the captain's authority rests on "arbitrary law" leads him to develop a rationale for resistance that appeals, as many abolitionists appealed, to the higher law of God and Nature. Thus, when the captain subsequently orders him flogged following an unfair charge of not being in his proper place, WhiteJacket, on "plantation" Neversink, where "you see a human being, stripped like a slave," in effect entertains the possibility of a slave revolt. Through Melville's presentation of White-Jacket's "wild thoughts" — his meditation on resistance — the reader is taken inside to experience what it means to be subjected to the institutional authority of ship, reform institution, and plantation. Yet White-Jacket, thanks to the intervention of corroborating sailors, does not have to risk becoming a "murderer and suicide," a rebellious slave. Perhaps because Melville shares with elites some of the anxieties about the consequences of unleashed insurrectionary energies, he keeps WhiteJacket's anger under constraints. Though other abuses of authority are represented in the novel, an informing fear of revolutionary social disorder, nowhere more apparent than in the account of the riotous "head-beaking" of the skylark, suggests that even in this reformist text Melville adopts a politics of "nautical" order not so radically different from the more aggressively institutionalist politics of a Dana or a Cooper.
That said, Melville's abhorrence for chattel slavery is evident in all of his novels, and it is precisely his ability to provide an "inside" perspective on what it means to be victimized by arbitrary authority — a perspective lacking in much antislavery and reform writing — that makes his antislavery thematics so powerful and challenging. Yet in his novella Benito Cereno (1855), his greatest treatment of slavery, Melville denies readers the inside perspective of the rebellious slave Babo while tempting them inside the perspective of the racist Delano. Melville, it would appear, had come to see reform as a balm for the middle class, and thus, in situating the reader in "Benito Cereno" outside the slave revolt — thereby making the reader a victim of the plot — he implicates even self-proclaimed "good" whites in the perpetuation of slavery. In a novella published two years before Benito Cereno, Frederick Douglass, in The Heroic Slave (1853), similarly keeps the white reader at a distance from a -150- rebellious slave. Although a sympathizing white aids Madison Washington in his early prison escape, by the end of the novella, which culminates in Washington's successful engineering of an uprising on the slave ship Creole (the novella is based on the actual 1841 rebellion), the slave acts on his own. As in "Benito Cereno," the mutinous events are conveyed from the outside: the rebellion is narrated after the fact by an eyewitness, the Creole's mate, who remains impressed yet terrified by the slaves' intelligence and heroic rebellious energies. Like Melville, then, Douglass points to the limits of reform by situating blacks in a world marked by pervasive racism and slavery's institutional hegemony.
In such a world, "The Heroic Slave" and "Benito Cereno" both suggest, revolutionary action on the part of the slaves is perhaps the only sensible course of action. The African American activist Martin Robison Delany came to a similar conclusion. In his novel, Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859-62), serialized in the Anglo-African Magazine and The Weekly Anglo-African, he depicted white racism in America culminating in a proslavery plot to set up Cuba as a locale for reestablishing the African slave trade in the Americas. Rather than leaving matters for white antislavery reformers to address, Delany has his hero Blake — "a black — a pure Negro — handsome, manly and intelligent " — organize violent countersubversive actions: a black rebellion in Cuba, an attack on an African king who continues to sell his people to slave traders, and slave revolts in the American South. Slave revolt also has an important place in William Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter, first published in London in 1853, as Brown, in his account of the New Orleans cholera epidemic of 1831, metaphorically links the fever to the feverish insurrectionism of the rebel Picquilo lurking in the swamps. Modeled after Nat Turner and a possible prototype of Stowe's Dred, he "was a bold, turbulent spirit; and from revenge imbued his hands in the blood of all the whites he could meet." Yet Brown, who worked as a temperance reformer among Buffalo's free African Americans, can seem more moderate than Delany, as he presents the noble reformer Georgiana advising her newly freed slaves thus: "If you are temperate, industrious, peaceable, and pious, you will show to the world that slaves can be emancipated without danger." But while the freedmen pose no danger to the whites, whites continue to pose danger to them. -151-