Herman Melville published his autobiographical novel Redburn in 1849. The work proved to be one of his best, and in many ways remains his most quintessentially American novel. Redburn lacks the exoticism that typified Typee and Omoo, both set in the South Pacific. Likewise Redburn never rises to the heights of metaphysical contemplation that made Moby Dick so attractive after its rediscovery in the 1920s. Melville told his publisher he had “shifted my ground from the South Seas to a different quarter of the globe—nearer home—and what I write I have almost wholly picked up by my own observations under comical circumstances.”

A novel set nearer home led Melville to contemplate the United States in an era when the republic changed drastically, and quickly. Irish and European immigration—the latter included liberal Germans escaping monarchical reaction to a series of liberal democratic nationalist movement in the German states and the Austrian Empire—changed the political and social fabric particularly of northern cities. Irish and German immigrants weren’t meaningfully white in the 19^th century. Russell Kazal in his Becoming Old Stock notes that a distinct otherness differentiated German Americans from their Anglo neighbors until the beginning of the 20^th century. As late as 1897 New York still officially delineated Irish Americans from “Native”—native born—Americans in the New York Police Department. [1]

Racial separation and by proxy religious separation typified the free states in the 1850s, but Puritan-stock Americans like Herman Melville recognized that historical processes that created the American republic in the late 18^th century separated it irrevocably from the conditions that secured ethnically driven nationality in Europe. The United States started as a white Protestant republic, but Melville understood even in 1849 that the American republic could not stay a merely a white Protestant republic. Even the initial Puritan so-called founding, argued Melville, never exhibited a unitary racial or religious founding. “Our ancestry”, wrote Melville, “is lost in the universal paternity; and Cæsar and Alfred, St. Paul and Luther, and Homer and Shakespeare are as much ours as Washington, who is as much the world’s as our own. We are the heirs of all time, and with all nations we divide our inheritance.” In the Western Hemisphere “all tribes and people are forming into one federated whole; and there is a future which shall see the estranged children of Adam restored as to the old hearthstone in Eden.” [2]

Melville noted that mid-19^th century America represented a hope that preceded the formation of the American republic in the 18^th century, the creation of the Puritan Commonwealth in New England in the 17^th century, and Columbian contact at the end of the 15^th century. “The other world beyond this, which was longed for by the devout before Columbus’ time, was found in the New; and the deep-sea-lead, that first struck these soundings, brought up the soil of Earth’s Paradise.” Melville never hoped for utopia. The New World was “not a Paradise then, or now; but to be made so, at God’s good pleasure, and in the fullness and mellowness of time. The seed is sown, and the harvest must come; and our childrens’ children, on the world’s jubilee morning, shall all go with their sickles to the reaping.” Melville echoed the millenarian hopes of Calvinist Protestants, even if he never practiced particularly churchly piety. Melville believed–hoped even–there might be a world in which America turned in to a racially and religiously pluralistic society. “Then shall the curse of Babel be revoked, a new Pentecost come, and the language they shall speak shall be the language of Britain. Frenchmen, and Danes, and Scots; and the dwellers on the shores of the Mediterranean, and in the regions round about.” This pluralistic American Pentecost would have all the properties of a religious society, but it would not be white by the measure of the 19^th or 21^st centuries. “Italians, and Indians, and Moors; there shall appear unto them cloven tongues as of fire.”[3]

[1] Russell Kazal, Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1-10; David Roedinger, Working Towards Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2005), 21-22.

[2] Herman Melville, Redburn: His First Voyage (New York, NY: Albert and Charles Boni, orig 1849), 191

[3] Ibid.