"Benito Cereno" and the Failure of Law (1991)

SUSAN WEINER "Benito Cereño" and the Failure of Law Do the rights of nature cease to be such, when a negro is to enjoy them?—Or does patriotism in the heart of an African, rankle into treason .' Letter on Slavery, by a Negro, 1 7891 Where liberty draws not the blood out of slavery, there slavery draws the blood out of liberty. Walt Whitman, quoted by Herbert Aptheker2 The decade of the 1850S, in which Melville's short stories were composed and published, was turbulent. It generated both expressions of Southern panic over the possibility of slave revolts and numerous abolitionist tracts calling for the immediate overthrow of slavery. It was the period during which both the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and the Dred Scott decision (1857) were written. The pre-Civil War decade also encompassed the Kansas-Nebraska debates, an economic depression in 1854-1856, and extraordinary slave unrest. Controversy over the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 continued to increase, beginning with the return of Thomas Sims from Massachusetts to slavery in 1851 and intensifying with the case of Anthony Burns in 1854. 5 This latter event prompted Thoreau to write: "I wish my countrymen to consider, that whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it."4 Arizona Quarterly Volume 47 Number 2, Summer 1991 Copyright © 1991 by Arizona Board of Regents issn 0004- 1 6 10 Susan Weiner A segment of Melville's story "Benito Cereño" ran concurrently in the fall of 1855 with a review of Frederick Douglass's Autobiography in Putnam's, which was edited by Frederick Law Olmsted, an anti-slavery advocate. Yet contemporary reviewers of The Piazza Tales (1856) in which "Benito Cereño" was included, overlooked the connections between Melville's story of a slave rebellion at sea and controversial events of the time. Instead they attributed any disturbing qualities generated by the story to its Poe-like effects and its "thrilling weird-like narrative, which read at midnight, gives an uncomfortable feeling to a powerful imagination. . . ."5 Failing to see any relationship between the tensions contained within the story and the tensions within a republic that legally protected slavery, these early reviewers initiated a line of criticism that insulated the text of "Benito Cereño" from the context out of which it emerged. Rather than being dissociated from its social and political context, Melville's story is intricately connected to it, deriving both its content and its narrative form, as well as its unresolved contradictions, from its cultural background. Instead of avoiding the issue of slavery, the story confronts and explores slavery's moral and political dimensions in an attempt to disclose the "how" rather than the "why" of its persistence. Melville's concern with the problem of slavery represents a concern with fundamental flaws within a democratic society. The existence of slavery within American democracy highlighted several of the most glaring discrepancies between the principles and the facts of the founding of the nation. Did the laws of the nation tend towards the realization of a proposed but as yet unrealized ideal, or did these laws actually militate against the hypothetical ideal by upholding the status quo? Did slavery, by its stark negation of freedom, thereby reveal inadequacies in the ideal of freedom itself? How could a society which of necessity must be grounded in law permit the violation of law for a greater good? Could the concept of freedom embody the right to rebellion and if not, what was the basis for the United States itself? Ultimately, in times of crisis, when the most passionate instincts and interests of human beings collided, why did the law fail to move men towards justice rather than violence? What was it about the nature of the legal system that separated the spirit from the letter of the law and made of justice and law two different things? From the period of its first publication, "Benito Cereño" has always "Benito Cereño" been a problematical text to its critical readers. Interpretations of its content as...