¹ Marrs’s work on re-periodizing the nineteenth-century literary history began with his essay, co-written with Christopher Hager. Cody Marrs and Christopher Hager, “Against 1865: Reperiodizing the Nineteenth Century,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, 1, 2 (2013), 259–84. In his two monographs that followed this essay, Marrs sought to rethink literary history by challenging the current position that the Civil War occupies. See Cody Marrs, Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Long Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Marrs, Not Even Past: The Stories We Keep Telling about the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020).

² Marrs, Nineteenth-Century American Literature, 12.

³ Notable recent attempts to re-periodize nineteenth-century American literary history include Cody Marrs and Christopher Hagar, eds., Timelines of American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019); and Christopher Phillips, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Attempts to see literary careers across the Civil War are limited, but some essays in Cody Marrs, ed., American Literature in Transition, 1851–1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), offer several case studies of such endeavors. Among others, Brian Yothers’s essay on Melville sees his career across the Civil War by attending to “the tension between pacifism and egalitarianism.” Brian Yothers, “Herman Melville,” in ibid., 58–73, 71.

⁴ In the past decade or so, Melville studies has undergone a poetic turn, with scholars increasingly reevaluating Melville’s poetry in his postbellum era. But this reevaluation of Melville’s late career does not mean bridging the antebellum and postbellum Melvilles. Instead, scholarship of Melville’s poetry presupposes an entrenched divide between the two Melvilles. However, the transbellum idea would allow us to see the author’s career across the Civil War, thereby revealing how the author’s literary imagination grew and transformed in response to the historical catastrophe.

⁵ Timothy Marr, “‘Nearer to Us in Nature’: The South and Melville’s Literary Lost Cause,” in Christopher Sten and Tyler Hoffman, eds., This Mighty Convulsion: Whitman and Melville Write the Civil War (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2019), 153–71, 154.

⁶ See Peter J. Bellis, “Reconciliation as Sequel and Supplement: Drum-Taps and Battle-Pieces,” Leviathan, 17, 3 (2015), 79–93, 89; Dennis Berthold, “Democracy and Its Discontents,” in Wyn Kelley, ed., A Companion to Herman Melville (Hoboken: Blackwell, 2006), 150–64, 150–54; Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson, “Fahrenheit 1861: Cross Patriotism in Melville and Douglass,” in Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter, eds., Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 329–48, 331; Gregory Jay, “Douglass, Melville, and the Lynching of Billy Budd,” in ibid., 369–95, 382; Carolyn L. Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville’s America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 277; Susan M. Ryan, “Slaves, Masters and Abolitionists,” in Kevin J. Hayes, ed., Herman Melville in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 106–15, 113; and Brian Yothers, “Melville’s Reconstructions: ‘The Swamp Angel,’ ‘Formerly a Slave,’ and the Moorish Maid in ‘Lee in the Capitol’,” Leviathan, 17, 3 (2015), 63–78, 63.

⁷ Karcher, 277.

⁸ Yothers, “Melville’s Reconstructions,” 65.

⁹ Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1968), 98.

¹⁰ Yothers, “Herman Melville,” 65.

¹¹ Herman Melville, Published Poems (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 2009), 186–87. Subsequent references appear parenthetically.

¹² As this essay builds on my past work that investigates Melville’s ethics of alterity, the following arguments on “Benito Cereno” and The Confidence-Man are largely quoted from my previously published essays. Yoshiaki Furui, “Transcending Distances: A Poetics of Acknowledgement in Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno’,” Canadian Review of American Studies, 44, 3 (2014), 450–70, 465–66; and Furui, “Secret Emotions: Disability in Public and Melville’s The Confidence-Man,” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, 15, 2 (2013), 54–68, 65–66.

¹³ Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno,” in Melville, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces: 1839–1860 (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1987), 46–117, 116, added emphasis.

¹⁴ Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1984), 11–12, added emphasis.

¹⁵ This paragraph is quoted from my previously published essay. Yoshiaki Furui, “Bartleby’s Closed Desk: Reading Melville against Affect,” Journal of American Studies, 53, 2 (2019), 353–71, 367–68.

¹⁶ Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 12.

¹⁷ Cody Marrs, “1866 and After: Melville, Jane Jackson, and the Literature of Emancipation,” in Kathleen Diffley and Benjamin Fagan, eds., Visions of Glory: The Civil War in Word and Image (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019), 219–28, 223.

¹⁸ For a religious interpretation of this poem see Brian Yothers, Sacred Uncertainty: Religious Difference and the Shape of Melville’s Career (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 145–47. Timothy Sweet provides a marked contrast between “Formerly a Slave” and “The Swamp Angel”: he regards the former as a sentimental representation of political optimism for Black people, which, Sweet argues, the latter calls into question. Timothy Sweet, Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 178–79.

¹⁹ In other poems, too, the cannon’s blastment is compared to spoken words. In “The Battle for the Bay (August, 1864),” the exchange of fire is presented as that of words: “Out spake the forts on either hand, / Back speak the ships where spoken to, / And set their flags in concert true, / And On and in! is Farragut’s command” (81, original emphasis).

²⁰ Richard H. Cox and Paul M. Dowling, “Introduction: Poetry and Politics,” in Herman Melville, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 2001), 15–38, 30.

²¹ Jay, “Douglass, Melville, and the Lynching of Billy Budd,” 386.

²² Marr, “Nearer to Us in Nature,” 156.

²³ Joyce Sparer Adler, “Melville and the Civil War,” New Letters, 40 (1973), 99–117, 114.

²⁴ Castronovo and Nelson, “Fahrenheit 1861,” 341.

²⁵ For discussions on the emotional detachment that informs Battle-Pieces as a whole, see Robert Arbour, “The Not-So-Modern Proto-modern: The Intertextual Geography of Herman Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 8, 1 (2010), 39–65, 48; Hsuan Hsu, “War, Ekphrasis, and Elliptical Form in Melville’s Battle-Pieces,” Nineteenth-Century Studies, 16 (2002), 51–71, 54; Elizabeth Renker, “Melville the Poet in the Postbellum World,” in Robert S. Levine, ed., The New Companion to Herman Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 127–41, 133; Eliza Richards, “Popular Networks in Melville’s Battle-Pieces,” in Cody Marrs, ed., The New Melville Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 186–99, 195; Milette Shamir, “Herman Melville and the Civilian Author,” in Coleman Hutchison, ed., A History of American Civil War Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 211–26, 211; and Paul M. Dowling, “Melville’s Quarrel with Poetry,” in Melville, Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War, 325–49, 325–26.

²⁶ Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, eds., Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1995), 527. Melville is, in the words of Paul M. Dowling, “a poet of emotional distance.” Dowling, “Melville’s Quarrel,” 326.

²⁷ Faith Barrett, “‘They Answered Him Aloud’: Popular Voice and Nationalist Discourse in Melville’s Battle-Pieces,” Leviathan, 9, 3 (2007), 35–49, 42.

²⁸ For a superb reading of Brown’s silence in this poem, see Tom Nurmi, “Shadows in the Shenandoah: Melville, Slavery, and the Elegiac Landscape,” Leviathan, 17, 3 (2015), 7–24.

²⁹ As John Stauffer argues, “while Melville often empathized with slaves and other social outsiders, and envisioned a radical notion of racial equality, he could never endorse the kind of immediate abolitionism and milliennialist faith of a John Brown or a Frederick Douglass.” John Stauffer, “Melville, Slavery, and the American Dilemma,” in Kelley, A Companion to Herman Melville, 214–30, 219.

³⁰ “Robert E. Lee’s Testimony before Congress (February 17, 1866),” at https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/robert-e-lees-testimony-before-congress-february-17-1866.

³¹ Reticence on political matters was Lee’s postwar principle. As Emory M. Thomas notes, “Circumspection, indeed, refusal to write or speak publicly any sentiments except in favor of cooperation and healing the sectional breach, continued to be Lee’s policy. He let his feelings surface from time to time, but never in such a way as to offer his enemies the opportunities to attack him.” Emory M. Thomas, Robert A. Lee: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995), 383.

³² William H. Shurr, The Mystery of Iniquity: Melville as Poet, 1857–1891 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1972), 23.

³³ Melville, “Benito Cereno,” 116.

³⁴ Butler, Giving an Account, 12.

³⁵ Herman Melville, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1982), 167.

³⁶ Clark Davis, After the Whale: Melville in the Wake of Moby-Dick (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), 116.

³⁷ Martin Griffin, Ashes of the Mind: War and Memory in Northern Literature, 1865–1900 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), 82.

³⁸ Maurice S. Lee, “The Coming Civil War,” in Marrs, American Literature in Transition, 273–88, 280. The speaker of this poem also seeks to render Lee’s existence poignant, presenting a portrait of a defeated, lonely figure who retired from the public sphere. In the poem, the speaker constructs a binary opposition between the victorious North and the defeated South by using the pronoun “they” to refer to the former and “he” to the latter. This opposition between the collective North and the singular South, represented in the solitary figure of Lee, accentuates the former’s aggressiveness and the latter’s vulnerable passivity to it. The defeated Lee in the poem is absolutely solitary, pitted against the collective, triumphant North. Attending to the speaker’s emotional investment in Lee, several critics have noted Melville’s sympathetic identification with Lee by projecting his own defeat as an author onto the defeated general. For example, Martin Griffin sees “some measure of identification, on Melville’s part, with Lee,” by observing that “Melville’s own buried career as a fiction writer, as it must have looked to him almost ten years after his last published book, could be read as a defeat.” Griffin, 82–83. Although this possibility remains a speculation, it is certainly viable that the speaker’s overt sympathy for Lee stems from Melville’s personal sense of defeat as an author. However, we should also note that Melville’s identification with the other in this way runs the risk of telescoping his distance from Lee. For Melville’s identification with Lee, also see Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography, Volume II, 1851–1891 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 613; Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,1973), 89; Karcher, Shadows on the Promised Land, 286; and Marr, Not Even Past, 159.

³⁹ Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1988), 16.

⁴⁰ Ibid., 106.

⁴¹ Ibid.

⁴² For an important discussion that sheds light on the South in Moby-Dick and Bulkington as its symbol see Tomoyuki Zettsu, “Captain Ahab’s Cabin: Melville’s Southern Connections in Moby-Dick,” in Arimichi Makino, ed., Melville and the Wall of the Modern Age (Tokyo: Nan–undo, 2010), 39–55.

⁴³ Another example of Melville’s identification with the South in the antebellum era appears in “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in which, by impersonating a Virginian, he tries to imagine a national whole by bridging the North (Hawthorne) and the South (Virginian). He writes, “But already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.” Herman Melville, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in Melville, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 239–53, 250. What is interesting here is that another southerner in Moby-Dick, Pip, is from Alabama, the Deep South. This might indicate that Melville’s southern identification goes no farther than Virginia, which he views as exceptional among the southern states. Melville never impersonates an Alabaman, a Mississippian, or a Texan. This may be connected to Melville’s background as a descendant of Revolutionary War heroes both on his father’s and his mothers’ sides, which may account for his close attachment to the place which was a major hot spot of the war and which was home to many of the Founding Fathers.

⁴⁴ Timothy Sweet, “Battle-Pieces and Vernacular Poetics,” Leviathan, 17, 3 (2015), 25–42, 29.

⁴⁵ Thomas Dikant, “Melville’s Battle-Pieces and the Environments of War,” ESQ, 60, 4 (2014), 557–92, 578.

⁴⁶ Melville’s limited imagination of the South becomes more apparent by examining companion pieces, “Stonewall Jackson: Mortally wounded at Chancellorsville (May, 1863)” and “Stonewall Jackson (Ascribed to a Virginian),” both of which offer meditations on the famous Confederate general, from the northern and southern perspectives respectively. What stands out in these companion poems is that the latter poem, spoken from the southern perspective, seems to lack the complexity and nuance that the former presents. For the northern speaker, Stonewall Jackson “stood for Wrong,” but he cannot help but praise and feel compassionate for the rebel general: “Justly his fame we outlaw; so / We drop a tear on the bold Virginian’s bier, / Because no wreath we owe” (59). Furthermore, this northern speaker compares Jackson to John Brown, a symbolic figure of the northern cause of the war: “True to the thing he deemed was due, / True as John Brown or steel” (59). In a radically subversive manner, Melville draws an equation between the radical abolitionist and the southern general, showing the speaker’s conflict between the northern and the southern causes. While the northern speaker shows such a complex perspective on the war and the South, the southern speaker in “Stonewall Jackson (Ascribed to a Virginian)” shows a much less nuanced outlook on the war, merely presenting his admiration for the general. Throughout the poem, the speaker straightforwardly eulogizes Stonewall Jackson: “One man we claim of wrought renown / Which not the North shall care to slur” (60). When compared to the northern perspective on the general, this poem seems too straightforward, suggesting that Melville had a very limited understanding and imagination of the South, in contrast to his ability to express the conflicted psyche of the northerner, who, though condemning the South’s misguided zeal as “error” (59), cannot but feel an admiration for the general who fought against the North.

⁴⁷ Marr, “Nearer to Us in Nature,” 163.

⁴⁸ Randall Fuller, From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War Transformed American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 203.

⁴⁹ Quoted in Higgins and Parker, The Contemporary Reviews, 509.

⁵⁰ Ibid., 526.

⁵¹ Fuller, 205.

⁵² Nina Silver, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 40. It is a historical irony that the reconciliation between whites at the expense of freed Blacks’ rights developed to a degree that Melville did not anticipate. Marrs argues, “Politically, Melville ostensibly renounces his antebellum predilections for subversion and egalitarianism and adopts what David Blight terms a ‘reconciliationist’ vision that posits the priority of national unity over civil rights and the authority of the state over the self.” Cody Marrs, “A Wayward Art: Battle-Pieces and Melville’s Poetic Turn,” American Literature 82, 1 (2010), 91–119, 92.