The Know-Nothing Party in Herman Melville’s Late Fictions

Abstract

The Know-Nothing Party—a radicalized, nativist, Anglo-Saxon wing of the disintegrated Whig Party—won a series of resounding victories across the nation during the 1854 elections, but nowhere was the Know-Nothing ticket more successful than in Massachusetts, Melville’s home state. In fact, “all state officers … all the congressmen, all the members of the state senate and all but three members of the lower house bore the Know Nothing stamp” (Mulkern 1). That Melville was aware of and depicting Know Nothing politics in his later fictions is made obvious in his final novel the Confidence-Man (1857) when an alarmist character in the chapter on “The True Character of the Herb Doctor” states, “I shrewdly suspect him […] for one of those Jesuit emissaries prowling all over our country” (142). In this essay, I look at the Know Nothing Party, its nativist and white supremacist features, and their representation in Melville’s Moby Dick, Benito Cereno, and “The Piazza.”