Celebrated in verse, known around Boston as the "last of the cocked hats,"
Herman Melville's paternal grandfather was also remembered as a famous fake Indian. Oliver Wendell Holmes said so in later
commentary on The Last Leaf:
"He was
often pointed at as one of the "Indians" of the
famous "Boston Tea-Party" of 1774."
For corroboration see the following item, as reprinted in the New York Spectator from the
Washington Daily National Journal:
LAST OF THE MOHAWKS.
Major Melville, who was reformed out of the office of
Surveyor of the port of Boston, by Gen. Jackson, is said to be the only
surviving revolutionary patriot who was engaged in the tea chest affair. This
gentleman had signalized himself by his bravery and patriotism during the
Revolution. It is said that when he was unceremoniously and causelessly thrown
out of the little office he filled, he shed tears, not for the loss of the
office, but at the ingratitude of his country. He had looked upon his appointment
to the situation as a testimony of the respect in which his last services were
held, and was contented with it, although it was humble. The “Hero of two wars,”
in contempt of his revolutionary services, unfeelingly threw him out, in order
to pay a partisan, and the majority in the Senate, obedient to the imperial
mandate, confirmed the nomination of his successor. In the beautiful language
of a Senator from Kentucky, “the fine enamel of their sensibilities could not
be ruffled” by the cruelty of the act.—Nat. Jonr.
(New York Spectator, Tuesday, April 6, 1830; found in the Newspaper Archives at genealogybank.com)
This published treatment of Thomas Melville as a fake Mohawk, a Mock-Mohawk, calls to mind the dastardly Indian chief Mocmohoc in The Confidence-Man.
Who has noted that Mocmohoc = Mock Mowhawk?
James P. Kaetz in
Extracts Volume 79 ("Layers of Fiction," November 1989) summarizes William Ramsey on "The Moot Points of Melville's Indian-Hating," crediting Ramsey with the insight that
"the name of the treacherous Indian Mocmohoc can easily be seen as "mock mohawk" or "fake Indian."
Michael Rogin in
Subversive Genealogy is alert to the irony and potential significance of Major Melville's assumed identity:
“As Mohawks or the conquerors of Mohawks, in
the cause of American independence, the Gansevoort and Melvill grandfathers
acquired heroic power”
Some years back I quoted Rogin in a message on The Confidence-Man to the
Google group Ishmailites. Prompted by an earlier post from Clare Spark, I went on to offer a different way of reading the Mocmohoc episode as a kind of masquerade or upside-down allegory. Here it is again,
cut and pasted:
Clare rightly places the “Indian-Hating”
chapters in Melville’s Confidence-Man
“among the most difficult chapters in a difficult book.” Her
reading of the admittedly complex sequence as a critique of Rousseau, the Noble
Savage, and associated notions of human goodness and divine benevolence seems
plausible enough. More than a few readers take the whole Confidence-Man as a satire on American
optimisms, and with good reason. Still, one has to wonder why Melville the
deep thinker and gifted writer would take so much trouble merely to affirm a
hackneyed Puritan stereotype of Indians as devils and thereby implicitly countenance
the practical and historical annihilation of Native Americans with whom, as
Clare also rightly allows, Melville on principle must have regarded sympathetically
as brothers. The independent-minded and sensitive-souled writer does not, one
hopes, so readily embrace commonplaces.
Let me here propose another level of meaning. Not the
only level worth considering, obviously, but an important one that is consistent
with Melville’s characteristic aesthetic and humanist values, and
consistent also, as it turns out, with Clare’s perception of a satire on
smooth optimism. Try this out. Perhaps the most atrocious incident of Indian
savagery in the entire “Indian-Hating” section is the massacre
perpetrated by a devilishly treacherous Indian chief named
“Mocmohoc.” The tale is told in chapter 26 by a mysterious
stranger (identified later on as Charles Arnold Noble) who has adopted the
persona of James Hall, a real-life frontier celebrity in his own right. In
brief, Mocmohoc invites his new friends the Wrights and Weavers over for a
feast of barbecued bear and then slaughters them. This is too terrible. What
monster could be more fiendish than the host who kills his confiding guests?
But who is this Mocmohoc? As others before now have
noticed, the name “Mocmohoc” suggests a fake Indian, a Mock Mohawk.
Who then are fake Mohawks? The rebellious colonists who dressed up like
Indians during the famous “Boston Tea Party,” of whom
Herman’s paternal grandfather Thomas Melvill made one. After the Party,
ebullient Bostonians chanted “Rally Mohawks! Bring your axes, and tell
King George we’ll pay no taxes,” according to Michael Paul Rogin in
Subversive Geneaology (p49).
Rogin goes on to observe, “As Mohawks or the conquerors of Mohawks, in
the cause of American independence, the Gansevoort and Melvill grandfathers
acquired heroic power” (49).
Yow! A key, and the bolt turns. The story always
felt like allegory anyway, and so it is. In true allegorical fashion,
something stands for something else. THIS means THAT. This Mocmohoc stands
for those mock Mohawks the white English colonists and revolutionary founders
of America.
But the mistreated Wrights and Weavers, who are they? The Indians! Consider:
the strange backstory of the five cousins allusively recalls the “Five
Nations” and the Iroquois Confederacy. The word “covenant”
as employed by Mocmohoc suggests the “Covenant Chain” or alliance
between the Indians and English colonists. The “Albany Congress” convened
in 1754 to repair the chain which Mohawk leader Hendrick had declared was
broken in 1753. In the Confidence-Man
it is the white prisoner of Mocmohoc who accuses him of breaking
“covenant.”
In a larger view, Mocmohoc’s falsely offering
to “bury the hatchet, smoke the pipe, and be friends forever” mirrors
the long course of treaty making and treaty breaking pursued by the new
American government. For a glimpse of Melville on the official mistreatment of
Indians, we might go to Typee or, closer to home, the prairie as described in John Marr and Other Sailors:
“The remnant of Indians thereabout—all
but exterminated in their recent and final war with regular white troops, a war
waged by the Red Men for their native soil and natural rights, had been coerced
into the occupancy of wilds not very far beyond the Mississippi...”
Melville evidently likes to invert stereotypical
attributes of Indians and Whites. He imputes the noblest motives to the
Indians, using the noblest words and phrases. Indians are Men, fighting
heroically to defend “their native soil and natural rights.” The
motives that inspired the great revolutions of Europe and America, the
motives that inspired Melville’s grandfathers, likewise inspired the
Indians. The allegory of Mocmohoc similarly inverts the usual and expected
associations. By way of Judge Hall and Charlie Noble, Melville gives us a
remedial lesson in American History by turning it upside down, standing history
(as told by the victors) on its head.
To get the true drift, you have to own the whiteness
of Mocmohoc, and the Indian-ness of the Wrights and Weavers. (Ishmailites)
