The American Scene; The Somers Mutiny

Good morning. This is Howard Vincent viewing the arts for the American scene where Illinois Institute of Technology. In the past programs we have covered music, biography, intellectual history, and we hope to range around using the word art rather freely, rather liberally. Today is an example. Is history an art or is it a social science? But we are saved from trying to defend ourselves because the subject we have, the Summers' Mutiny, involves both history and literature. Most of you have probably never heard of the Summers' Mutiny, although it is still a significant subject in American life, American history, and has been made into an enduring subject by the art of one of our greatest writers. Herman Melville wrote a novel which many of you have read, Billy Bud, which is the story which grew out of the Summers' Mutiny, a story which he knew about

and brewed it about for over 40 years before returning to this fictional form, not of the Summers' Mutiny, but an adaptation of that, the problems involved. Now the Summers' Mutiny was one of the, well there have been many mutinies in Naval history in the United States, but this is one of the most dramatic and one of the touchiest because the issues were not clear cut. And the fascination of this book is the way it shows that these issues are ambiguous, and I think they'll bring some of this out. We're fortunate in having the author of this book, the editor of this book, perhaps it would be a better way of describing it. Dr. Harrison Hayford, who is a distinguished Melville scholar, Professor at Northwestern University, who has done this book, besides many articles on Melville, and quite contingent to this book, he is doing an addition of Billy Bud, the scholarly addition of Billy Bud, which should be out within

the next year. And Dr. Hayford is certainly well -qualified, not only to discuss Summers' Mutiny, but its relationships to the great author, the great American author, Herman Melville. Harry, I think first of all don't you think it'd be wise to tell everybody what the Summers' Mutiny was? Well let's take it from the title, the Summers' Mutiny Affair. The Summers is the name of the ship, which was the United States' Brig of War. In 1842, sailing home from a training crew to the coast of Africa. The crew was largely made up of young boys who were in training as naval cadets. There were only five or six officers aboard. On this ship, on November 26, one of the midshipmen, Philip Spencer, is alleged to have proposed to one of the enlisted men that he joined in a mutiny, which Spencer had concocted. The Spencer said to him, are you afraid of a dead man? Will you take an oath? Will you join with

us? And the fellow was scared nearly to death, but he swore. As soon as Spencer was out of sight, he ran to the mate told of this, who went and told the commander, Mackenzie, who at first made light of it, laughed. But by the next day, he had thought it over, and they had observed Spencer's activities, which seemed to them, rather sinister. He was talking with men, whispering, not paying attention to his duty. So, at general quarters, on the evening of November 26, a commander, Mackenzie, arrested Spencer, put him in an eye -earns, confined him on the deck. There was nowhere else to confine him. It's a very small vessel, only about a hundred feet long, was very narrow quarters below. Let's look at the picture of that. The picture of the break, the summers. Although this picture doesn't give an accurate sense of the size, because of the billowing sales, nevertheless, I think to have this picture would be useful in setting the scene. She was a very fast sailing ship. As a matter of

fact, she carried too much sail a few years later, she capsized, drowning half the crew, and a fated ship all along. Fated ship. Superstition had it that it was because of the execution for the mutiny. The ship was doomed. But you can see, even there, you get some sense of it's smallest. There was no room, you say. No room to confine the man. This is a very important factor. No break on the break. So Spencer was manacled, affed on a quarter deck. Within a couple of days, they had arrested several more men. The officers being greatly outnumbered and being convinced that a good many of the crew were enlisted in this mutiny, expected it to break out at any moment. There were several bad episodes. One of the top masks came crashing down, and the commander was convinced that this had been pre -arranged for the outbreak of a mutiny. After spending several sleepless nights, the commander and the other

officers decided that the only thing to do with these men was to hang them. They had no place to put them. They feared at any moment they would, the other men would seek to rescue them. Without any trial, except an examination of some of the men, purely hearsay, what do you think about this? What do you think? Without announcing to the midshipman and the two sailors who were, to whom it was proposed to hang, they came with this decision, announced to them that they would be hanged within 10 minutes, gave them an hour, and then they three were hanged. Philip Spencer, a man named Cromwell, a man named Small. Now Philip Spencer was the son of the Secretary of War, who had been in college. He'd been kicked out of a couple of colleges for being a clown. I know good, flunking out in effect. His father had, he had run away to sea on a whaler. His father had brought him back and had put

him into the Navy as they say to make a man of him. He had been cashiered once, had resigned his commission, but by his father's influence had gotten it back. He had been put on this training ship. I'm very much against the rule of command of Mackenzie, who was a brother -in -law of Commodore Perry, and it was a long -standing dream of Perry and Mackenzie to bring about good training in the Navy. They'd finally succeeded in having this brig named as a training ship. There was no West Point in those days. I mean, no, there was West Point. There was no Annapolis in those days for the training of naval officers, and this was to be a beginning. Unfortunately, this affair broke out on this break, which was supposed to be a model crew, a model enterprise. The three men were hanged. Now, what makes it an affair is what broke out in the newspapers

and in public discussion when the ship reached four. They were hanged on December 1st. They were hanged on December 1st, 1842. And this began to break in the press about two weeks later, is that right? They arrived in New York Harbor on December 14th, and the newspapers got hold of it immediately, and they took sides. Spencer's father was a prominent political figure, who was very much under fire at the time. It seemed likely that the newspapers chose sides on this in a purely political way. The wigs and the Democrats, as if it were a Democrat and a Republican argument now, just became a code celebrity. It became a code celebrity, which lasted two or three years, and then for years later, it was still debated. And as a matter of fact, part of the interest from the point of the affair is that it still isn't settled. You can still debate whether this was, in fact, whether there was any mutiny, whether it was purely a joke on the part of this young fellow Spencer, who was kidding around with the men, or whether it was a serious mutiny. Spencer was

very interested in reading about pirates and piracy and telling pirate stories, and he evidently had developed fantasies about this. That is that was there's enough evidence to that as a fact. As a fact, yes, that he had the plan, and he confessed before he was hanged that he had long intended to do this on a naval ship, but he thought he wouldn't have gone through with it. Yes. It would seem clear today that he was a juvenile delinquent, perhaps a psychotic case. Well, the event itself was pretty shocking. Of course, the hanging of three men, so summarily, and the hanging of a man who was the son of the secretary of war, and then the relationship to Perry, it's all extremely shocking. But it seems to me, well, your book, of course, made its distress upon what happened afterwards, after they arrived, and the news breaks, I believe you call one of your main sections. What about the news breaking here? What started to stir up, and how did it

kick up into a national issue? Well, as I say, the newspaper has got hold of the story prematurely, publicized it as a great mutiny. They certainly exaggerated what had gone on, defended the commander Mackenzie as a great hero. But within two or three days, the other side of the story began to come out. The newspaper shows up sides on this. Within a couple of weeks, the Navy had set up a court of inquiry, which is not a trial, but simply an investigation of what had gone on on command of Mackenzie. Testimony was taken from from everybody concerned, except the poor fellows that were hanging, of course. Got no chance to tell their side of it. And the naval officers who were sitting on the court of inquiry decided that it was, it was indeed a mutiny, a planned mutiny, which constituted the poor's mutiny in itself. And that commander Mackenzie was justified. Meanwhile, however, such a public row had been kicked up about it, that

Mackenzie requested a court marshal. A very shrewd move in his part, wasn't it? The father, John C. Spencer, secretary of war, pulled all kinds of strings to get this brought into the civil courts, where Mackenzie would be tried for murder. But the strategy of Mackenzie and his lawyers was to keep it as a service, a fair, because he felt that only naval officers were competent to judge the circumstances. Of course, his enemy said that it was a put -up job, his brother officers would defend him in any case. So there was a long court marshal which dragged on into from January through March, the result of which was that he was acquitted. But many people felt that he certainly was a coward, or that he was a psychopath himself, a sadist, as we'd say, or he was just rattled, or he was a fool, or a

numbscull, or whatever. Some of the leading writers of the time got into the argument. One was R .H. Dana, the author of two years before the mast, who defended Mackenzie. His chief point was the size of the vessel. It was so small that nothing else could be done that he was responsible for the lives of all these young boys, that if certainly if the mutiny had been allowed to happen, he would have been very blameworthy. On the other hand, James Phenomore Cooper, who was the leading sea writer of the time, most of us think of him for his leather -stocking tales, Indians, and the forests, but actually Cooper, who had himself served in the Navy and later resigned his commission, was a naval writer, written in Naval History of the United States, in the course of which he had not given all of our hazard parry sufficient credit for winning the Battle of Lake Erie. Well, this aroused Mackenzie, who was a literary man himself, and he reviewed and attacked

Cooper's naval history because it didn't give his brother -in -law sufficient credit, and Cooper, who was a very vigorous controversialist, had said that Mackenzie was a fool and a numbskull and had no judgment, and then within three months Mackenzie came back with his ship, having hanged a midshipman and two men, and Cooper said, look, this is just what I told you. And he wrote an attack on Mackenzie, which is actually what most people read, the source they have, so most people have had a pretty biased account of what went on. But the bias is that of a very intelligent and fairly despuctive job that he has on Mackenzie. But there is much to be said in the other side. Let's look at this picture that you brought along of, I think it's amusing, and yet it shows how bias arises even in the pictorial work, the picture of Mackenzie confronting Spencer. And there is Captain Mackenzie and young lieutenant thought Spencer.

Did you say that he was a big man and as big as a captain? Yes, this shows the captain, you see a grown man and the midshipman, just a little boy, bending over. The caption under this cartoon is the words that Mackenzie spoke to Spencer, actually, when he arrested him. Mr. Spencer, I understand that you aspire to the command of the summers. And this is ridiculous in this picture. Notice the bulwarks in the background. Those are the bulwarks of a, of a, say, of a frigate, or a 74, a large vessel like old iron sides. The cartoonist has loaded the picture by making Spencer small. He was actually 20 years old, a full -grown, large fellow, as tall as Mackenzie, certainly, and it was a very small ship with very low bombs. He's also loaded aesthetically by that dark, menacing picture in the foreground, big and this small light, light tones of the in the rear. This certainly begs the question. Well, the next picture has a, has a, is a captain Mackenzie. I don't, this is not propaganda. This next

picture is that you call it a one of the crude, the crude portraits. But it's not flat. That's a courtroom sketch of Mackenzie done at the court martial, and oddly enough, it's the only one we have. Although I, I found a record somewhere that Mackenzie's portrait was painted by Goya. Goya, but I wouldn't find that. That would be a, it would be great find. He looks a little bit like a fool there. I mean, Mackenzie does, I think, but then that's not, not just the people who met Mackenzie personally. He were very much impressed with him as a person. He was an intelligent officer who had served in the Navy since he was 12 years old. He was about 40 at this time. He had written a good deal on naval subjects. He had worked hard for the reform of the service. He was a quiet, unassuming, non -dominaring sort of man. All of the character references for him were very good. Didn't he kind of, he didn't really damage his own case by that long letter he wrote to the paper? His report that he wrote to the Secretary of the

Navy. That's it. Telling what happened was over dramatized. He had a literary flair and he played this up. I know, in reading it in your book here, I said, I thought, you idiot. Why are you hanging yourself here? If he'd simply stuck to an official communication, he would have been far better off. He thinks that Captain does protest too much. Something of that. Something of that, yes. You have here, don't you, in this fair, not merely a naval business, but do you have something to touch politics of the day deeply, didn't it? You said, we're sorry, but what about the whole democratic concept? The whole democratic idea. This was the era of Jacksonian democracy where the common man was really coming into his own for the first time. The business of a naval officer hanging three men without a trial on his own responsibility was pretty bad because it was

illegal for one thing. He had no right to hold a court marshal. He claimed that in the necessity of his situation, he found his law and he was born out in this. But many people felt that this was simply officers, aristocrats, persecuting the common man, paying no attention to his rights, and so many of the people who rallied against McKenzie were Jacksonian Democrats. Many of those who defended him were conservative people who were very much on the defensive anyhow, and took this as an assertion of authority. This, I think, is really the lasting issue in the case, the moral issue, the question of the individual against organized society. What rights does an individual have? It's the universal theme implicitly. I think this is the universal. That week is the right down to Billy Bud, doesn't it? I think what Melville saw in it. What was Melville's original connection? Melville's cousin was the first mate on the summers and was as much implicated in the execution. The great Ganservort. Yes, as

McKenzie was. Yes, and so the good Ganservort talked ever talked to him about it? There's no direct evidence on that, but since he talked to one or two other people, he may have done so. Melville wrote a poem which involved Gert Ganservort and which he represents him as, and not speaking, the people would apply him with liquor and try to pump him about this. This is a poem, as you well know, that occurs in Melville. He collected poems of Herman Melville, edited by Howard P. Vincent. Yes, but the too bad we don't have a more evidence of the relationship, but probably he didn't talk. But anyhow, he brewed it over at Dindy. The whole question of authority haunted Melville. But what is the connection, the genetic relationship between the summers and Billy Bud? After all, Billy Bud deals with the Mutiny in England and Spitt had another very famous Mutiny in Louis Navy during the French Revolution. Is he trying to bring together Mutiny as a concept by using the two? I think so, and to get away from the particular American scene. All this business of Cooper and so on, and to muster

that up again. Yes, I see. Well, it's a majestic novel from it, certainly. Yes, it is. Well, no, I don't want to rush away from Billy Bud because when your Billy Bud comes out, you come back and talk about it as a total novel. But I think the summer's Mutiny affair, this book itself, is fascinating, and it's fascinating in a way, which I'm sure nobody who is listening to us kind of realizes, or few people realize. And that is, it's a new phenomenon in American education. It's putting out of books like this. This is not a study of the summer's Mutiny affair by Harrison Hayford, who is sitting here with me, but is a collection of the basic materials. Now, Dr. Hayford is someday going to do a, and I hope fairly soon, do a book on the summer's Mutiny affair and be a fascinating book. There is only one other, the captain called it Mutiny by Frederick F. Van der Water, which is, as you say, and it's not a very good book. I think it's a good book, but it strongly takes one side of the case. And to me, the real interest of it lies in the conflicting, the moral ambiguity. The moral

ambiguity is the fact that it's a mayorsnast, you have a great difficulty really deciding what's right and what's wrong here. Well, we'll wait for that book, but the meantime you've done this, which is a collection of materials from the newspapers, from the reports, and so on, without editorial content, without much editorial content. This is a development in a freshman education, an education of freshman English in America. Go ahead and tell us about that. Not simply freshman English, it is there, but it is elsewhere, too. It is a book of primary source materials. That is that you gather and put in the hands of the students. The materials from that time, bearing upon the case, all the editor does is select and arrange these, trying to be as objective as he can. The student then studies the case, reads the materials for himself, draws his own conclusions. And this way he has to exercise his brain, he has to think, he has to reason, he has to decide matters of fact, there will be contradictions, errors in the fact, he has

to spot these, he has to get the facts out, and he has to interpret the personalities involved. He has psychological problems and moral problems, all kinds of problems. Yes, in the state of the work. In fact, an opinion, let's say, and evidence, and so on. This is work, which ordinarily the author of a book does for the student, and then the theory behind this movement is that a good part of his education would consist in learning how to do this for himself, not to rely on a pre -digested account of the affair. Well, in this rather encouraging tendency, because as you say by archivists, do pre -digest, and they must, they might just reach their own point of view. But, it's rather, I know, speaking from first -hand experience, I've read a number of these books, I went on a casebook of Ezra Pound, and this one, you are drawn into this vortex of situation, it's fascinating, and when I read your book, when I got to the end, I said, what is this situation? The more I knew, the less I knew. That's what all my friends have said, but what's the answer? What was wrong with you? Yes, exactly. No, it's up to you to figure out. And so the freshman student, or the student, not the freshman, some of the

seniors in high school sophomores used this, and they must come to their own, and they also learn about library techniques, don't they, footnoting techniques. Yes, it really stems from the case method in law, of course, and then it's carried over into social studies, into history, and now just currently coming into the study of literature. If you're reading Hamlet, you may be asked by the professor to buy a little book like this, which will collect the leading tenor -dozen interpretations of Hamlet, and you look these over, and you have to decide for yourself what you... And the source is of Hamlet, and maybe the source is of Hamlet. But some of these can be very, very complicated and difficult. We have one now out at Illinois Tech, the third day at Gettysburg, and this is a fascinating of the students. They all become civil war buffs, and they will argue whether Picket should have been here at this moment, or how many horses they should have had or didn't have, and it gets very much history and tends to swing away. Certainly, very lively

in the classroom, there's no doubt that it's a successful move in that respect. Yes, it gives them something to work with, and they, but they also still remain the problems of the writing. And it doesn't it relieve a big pressure on the libraries? I should think that it would, yes. Thousands of students, if you turn them loose, all the same months on the library, they're swamped. All working on different subjects. And more furthermore, how many libraries have copies of the New York Weekly Tribune for 1843, or the... Well, they don't have such valuable papers, what they want? Two hundred freshmen turned them off. They would not. No, there wouldn't be anything left of them, and it's a great relief to them. Some people feel that this collection of the materials relieves the student of the research job. I think in a way it does, but my feeling is that a freshman is too young to take on real research anyhow. I had to go all over the country and into dozens of libraries looking for these

materials, which are placed before them. It puts the emphasis now upon their making use of the materials, upon their thinking about them, rather than upon their merely finding them. When students are learning sensing, they don't, you don't get them pointed swords. You get them blended swords, while you give students these valuable materials and research, and you're there to ruin them. And so this is a fine development. I'll now come back to this book, not merely the teaching device, but the question of authority is raised here. Remember that discussion you were in with the Admiral when you were in the Army? Yes, he was fascinated by Billy Budden by this case, because he saw in it, in a pit of me, the whole question of authority. On the one hand, there are the rights of the individuals involved. On the other hand, is the immense responsibility that's carried by the man in charge to maintain order, to protect the lives of his man, to keep control of his ship, and to go about his business, which is the protection of American interests.

I think it really forms a kind of Rorschach test, perhaps. If you were a rebellious sort of person who resents authority and has been trotting down, you will see Commander Mackenzie here as a real villain and take your animus out on him. On the other hand, if you were a person who has responsibility yourself or who feels, because I'm reasoned, strongly about this, you will perhaps be very sad about what happened, but say nothing else could have been done. In other words, the whole cycle, well, psychological problems involved here, the identification with the father in Egypt, after all, you'll become frightened lately. Spencer wanted to become a pirate. All this as a piracy is involved here as well as mutiny. Many people wouldn't think the pirates still existed in the middle of the 19th century, but of course they did. All slave ships were pirate ships at that time, and one of the things the summers was doing

on its training crew to the coast of Africa was patrolling for we'd think of rum runners, but these were slave runners. Oh, sure, sure. There were several vessels that were carrying slaves on this crew. This is what Spencer intended to do to seize the ship, kill the officers, throw overboard all the little boys, and the ones he could convert to his purposes would become pirates, and they would engage in the slave trade. Isn't everyone who deserts a kind of mutiny or a small way? This is what was alleged about Spencer. This was clearly his fantasy, whether he would actually have done it. Of course, the desire he wants to break away and not take over power. This is wanting to take over the power. Maybe today the parallel will be something more like the case of it was written up in the second world war, the case of private Slovak, who was shot as a deserter. And it was a book raising the question of whether this was a just thing to do because they made a psychiatric study of him. They knew that he was a bad risk, a weakling, so forth. Doesn't the Cain Newton also come from this whole situation? The Cain Newton

is drawn from Novel's white jacket, and Billy Bud is brought up into modern terms. Herman Wolk poses the same problem. They take the ship over from the officer. Well, he just liked the summer spirit. Much like it. Well, thank you very much, Harrison. Hey, if we're talking to us about the summer's mutiny affair, and I hope everybody will buy it.