When Herman Melville was writing, capital punishment was a much more commonly used punishment than it is in our own time, and as much as modern death penalty opponents talk about the mistaken use of it in cases when the convict has been wrongly sentenced, the swiftness of the execution and the shoddiness of the evidentiary requirements in Melville’s time were comparatively barbaric. Captain Vere is typical of the sort of judge who would have rendered that sentence in that day, brought in at the last moment and then hearing a fairly swift (and legally shaky) summary of the allegations and then delivering a verdict in a matter of minutes. It is this kind of awful justice that leads to the death of Billy Budd. The way that Captain Vere moves through the arguments to his conclusion that execution is the only right answer is telling, and it is also indicative of the way that other figures viewed their role in administering what they thought was justice.
Claggart is the one who accuses Billy of the crime, but it is clear to all but the least observant on the ship (and Captain Vere might lead that list) that Claggart bears Billy an antipathy so strong that it virtually guarantees that he would augment the details of the allegations to make Billy’s guilt seem the most certain. There are some points that Claggart seems so drenched in his hatred for Billy that he could not even explain the reason for the ill will that he has. The simplicity of Billy’s view of the world makes it impossible for him to sense the trap that Claggart is constructing around him. The brute fatalism of the story seems headed to one dread conclusion when Captain Vere enters the narrative, and even though there is finally the suggestion of a choice in the matter of Billy living or dying, Captain Vere’s hamfisted handling of the case dooms Billy, just as surely as Claggart’s hatred as doomed him.
It is also true, of course, that Captain Vere feels like the choice to execute Billy is thrust upon him. When he notices that Billy has died, he says, “Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang” (Melville, web). This is an intriguing response to Billy’s corpse, because there is the word play of the word “angel,” referring both to the Avenger who made his way through the Egyptian nation on that awful night that the Hebrew nation would celebrate evermore as Passover but which also claimed the lives of every firstborn male in all of Egypt (Exodus 12:1-14). Of course, that fatalism that took Billy’s life was not the same as the divine hand that brought vengeance down on the Egyptians. Rather, it was the philosophy that served as the basis for the Articles of War. It was forbidden to argue with a superior officer, and anyone convicted of murder had to be executed. This law is what requires Vere to execute Billy. As Vere ruminates, “the essential right and wrong involved in the matter, the clearer that might be, so much the worse for the responsibility of a loyal sea commander, inasmuch as he was not authorized to determine the matter on that primitive basis” (Melville, web). In our own time, of course, judges and juries have some leeway as to whether they administer capital punishment in the instance of murder. However, there are other sentence possibilities as well, such as life in prison. Vere himself might have some philosophical notions as to whether the hanging is the right thing to do. The Articles of War, though, do not grant him any such flexibility. There is a difference between Vere’s moral consideration of the situation and the legal realities that he as the ship’s captain must enforce.
This takes all of the humanity out of Vere in a very important way at this point in the story. He stops being a reasoning human and becomes a cog in a larger machine, the machine of the military. He has to set his moral beliefs aside and carry out his duty as an officer in the military, and turn the words in the Articles into a grim reality for Billy. So when other people in the court dispute the justice of the sentence, he rebuts, “The prisoner’s deed – with that alone we have to do” (Melville, web). Of course, Vere has also spent a great deal of time at the study of philosophy, but that all comes to naught here. Instead, all that knowledge can do is give his conscience something to stew over. It does not help him in the sense that Billy’s fate cannot change.
Of course, there are quite a few smaller steps that lead to the final decision. One interesting decision that Vere made was to bring Claggart and Billy into his cabin together and allow them to confront one another, creating an atmosphere of secrecy by keeping the events from the rest of the crew as long as possible. Vere also could have allowed matters to wait until he had a chance to consult his superior about the situation. His awareness of the low morale in the British navy told him that any sort of disruption could lead to a fairly wide-scale mutiny, and he did not want to give his admiral any reason to discipline him by removing him from his position. There is also the reminder, near the end of the story, that “forty years after a battle it is easy for a noncombatant to reason about how it ought to have been fought. It is another thing personally and under fire to have to direct the fighting while involved in the obscuring smoke of it” (Melville, web). The implication is that it is easy to criticize Vere’s decisions after the fact, because the reader is not caught up in the stress and drama of the time.
This swift and flawed justice reminds me of the way that justice was rendered in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Hester Prynne’s husband sent her to the New World to set up housekeeping for them and then left her alone long enough to meet the town minister, fall in love, have an affair, conceive, have her baby, and then have that baby become an older child before the husband bothers to show up. The only evidence of her adultery (which was a crime in Puritan New England) was her pregnancy, and being a single mother would have kept that adultery a matter of public record, but even so the town makes her wear a scarlet “A.” This punishment is conveyed in a spirit of judgment; as one of the townspeople mutters, “let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart” (Hawthorne, web). The implication, of course, is that she will always feel shame because of the letter, and because of the fact of her adultery. Of course, she feels no such shame; in fact, she names her daughter Pearl, “as being of great price – purchased with all she had – her mother’s only pleasure” (Hawthorne, web). So she turns a symbol of shame into her greatest source of happiness. The similarity between Billy Budd’s tale and that of Hester Prynne is the swiftness with which both communities moved to justice, even though that justice seemed unjust. After all, where was the man who had joined Hester in that adultery?
When Melville read The Scarlet Letter, he was so in agreement with Hawthorne’s pessimistic view of the working of institutions of authority that he dedicated Moby-Dick to Hawthorne (Delbanco). One difference between the writings of Melville and Hawthorne is that, whereas Hawthorne is so heavy-handed with his pontificating that he almost bludgeons the reader over the head with the lessons he is trying to teach that the plot almost becomes secondary. The events in The Scarlet Letter could have been encapsulated in a novella, but the avalanche of figurative language (and lengthy explanations of that figurative language, lest the reader miss something) makes the novel much longer. In the case of Melville’s writing, especially in the case of Billy Budd, there is little in the way of moralization. In Moby-Dick, there are the two sermons (Father Mapple and the cook) to help the reader get Melville’s themes, but Billy Budd is a story that is more morally confusing than anything else, as the reader must parse the events and come to his own conclusion (Parker).
In many ways, the notion of justice was more arbitrary and less just in the time of Melville than it was in the time of ancient Rome – let alone our own time. The way in which Billy Budd so swiftly, so surely, heads to his own death thanks to the machinations of Claggart is tragic. There was such an emphasis, at that time, at using consequences to shame people into obedience that there was scant leeway at the application of those consequences, but there was not as much reluctance to render the consequences because the existence of the accusation pushed people more swiftly to an interpretation of guilt. One hopes that things have changed in that way, but the human race still has a long way to go in the rendition of justice.
Works Cited
Delbanco, Andrew. Melville, His World and Work. New York: Knopf, 2005.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. n.d. Web. 8 July 2016.
Melville, Herman. Billy Budd. n.d. Web. 8 July 2016.
Parker, Hershel. Reading Billy Budd. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press,
1990.
The Holy Bible. New International Version. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1984.
