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...provoked return voyage on the steamship Cambria from his two-year lecture tour in England, declaring that "Frederick Douglass has already gained a name by his rare talents and most singular history which will save him from obscurity." In the same issue Briggs, again writing as "B," gave a glowing review of Melville's Typee and Omoo, contrasting the Typee native who "craunches [sic] the tendons and muscles of his dead enemy ... but inflicts no pain upon him" with "the Calhouns, Clays, and Polks [who] feed daily upon the sweat, the tears, the groans, the anguished hearts and despairing sighs, of living men and women." (1)
The next publication in which the two men were featured with similar prominence was the November 1855 issue of Putnam's Monthly Magazine, formerly edited by the same Charles F. Briggs. In this journal, Douglass appears in a highly appreciative unsigned review of My Bondage and My Freedom, in which the reviewer acknowledged that he had read the new autobiography "with the unbroken attention with which we absorbed Uncle Tom's Cabin," but with the difference that this book is "no fiction." Herman Melville appears in the same issue of Putnam's as the unsigned author of the second installment of "Benito Cereno," the one in which Babo choreographs the shaving scene as Captain Delano stands by oblivious to the actual power relation between Babo and Don Benito. (2)
For the rest of the century until their deaths in 1891 and 1895, respectively, Melville and Douglass followed widely diverging life trajectories. Melville lost his status as a public author, whereas Douglass became an increasingly prominent national figure. Neither author was read much in the early decades of the twentieth century, but the revival of interest in Melville by mid-century and in Douglass slightly later has since brought each to the center of...
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