The War Before the War

Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War

by Andrew Delbanco

Penguin, 453 pp., $30

Herman Melville’s strangest and least successful novel is Mardi (1849), a South Seas adventure that gradually morphs into a philosophical allegory. Few have been able to make much sense of the whole, but there are moments of troubling clarity. As we travel with the protagonist through the archipelago of Mardi, we discover a pair of neighboring islands, a northern one that has abolished slavery and a southern one that lives by it. A long and intricate debate about these rival systems ensues, during the course of which a wise king says of slavery, “For the righteous to suppress an evil, is sometimes harder than for others to uphold it. Humanity cries out against this vast enormity:—not one man knows a prudent remedy.”