For me, as a writer who spent 25 years at manual labor—in iron ore mines, foundries, and assorted sweat shops all over the U.S. —there is only one place to begin an essay on Melville: His co-workers. His values and outlook were shaped not just at sea but in a workplace at sea. His seaborne factory was a melting pot far in advance of the rest of society, an influence that set him apart as a writer and helped him see beyond other literary figures of his times.

Just think if this son of shattered fortunes had done something to support his bankrupt family besides going to sea, if he would have become a bank clerk in Boston ? Fortunately for us, he shipped out as a cabin boy. At age seventeen, the hot metal of his character as an author was about to be cast. He was, and would remain until his death, the author who had found not only the sea but a workplace filled with co-workers from the four-corners and the lower depths.

American authors to this day struggle with self-centered provincialism. After all, the United States is “the indispensable nation,” to use a phrase coined by the Clinton administration. But Melville learned a contrary lesson. “A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard,” he has Ishmael declare in Moby Dick . And on subjects of internationalism and multiculturalism, Melville's Yale and Harvard were far better schools than the New Haven or Cambridge varieties. Today, as in Melville's time, industrial workplaces in the U.S. are more diverse and international than places of higher learning. The assault on affirmative action in education has made certain this will not be changing any time soon.

My own experience is typical. In one foundry I worked with people from Tonga , Samoa , Poland , and Mexico . I stacked ingots with Native Americans, African-Americans, Chicanos, with prisoners on day-release from the county jail, and with a bankrupt farmer sending money home to Nebraska . What a wealth of experience I received during my six years with these men and women in that hell-hole, shrouded in chlorine gas!

But Herman Melville had me beat. His workplace had few if any women in it—so it is not surprising that his poetry and fiction are short on female characters. (That he learned about the exploitation of women workers is evident in his story, The Tartarus of Maids.) This important point notwithstanding, he attained a wide-ranging knowledge of humanity because of the composition of the workforce he sailed with. As he states in Moby Dick: “Not one in two of the many thousand men before the mast employed in the American whale fishery, are Americans born, though pretty nearly all the officers are.”

Melville properly appreciated his exposure to a multi-ethnic, multinational workforce. Is there a greater influence on his work? To read the opening chapters of Moby Dick is to savor Ishmael's growing friendship with Queequeg—the cannibal whose life-saving purity is not completely revealed until the last chapters. Melville treasured this experience with the polyglot, poly-hued working class of his day—and he drew on it for his entire writing life. His notion of the human race was not drawn from coffee shops, the spa, or their Nineteenth Century equivalents. He sailed the wide world with, as he described it in Billy Budd, the entire “assortment of tribes and complexions.”

I worked in thirteen states, from the iron ore mines of Northern Minnesota to the copper industry of Arizona , from the port of San Francisco (when there was a port there) to the port of Baltimore . I stepped into many fascinating workplaces, but Melville not only stepped into workplaces—he sailed around the world in them. He visited the South Sea Islands before the anthropologists did—and his memoirs of this experience, Typee and Omoo , could be studied by anthropologists as authentic source material—despite the fact that they are fictionalized, with literary accents and endings. This American sailor turned author has been described as a defender of the “noble savage” against the colonizing first world. For this reason (as well as for its eroticism), Typee was condemned and almost suppressed by the religious establishment. The reality, however, was that the “noble savages” had sheltered Melville and his shipmate Toby, probably saved their lives. From the close vantage of life among these people, he witnessed colonialism thrusting its missionary spearhead into the very heart of island civilizations—and he wrote about it.

In his few years at sea, Melville also gained an understanding of the tyrannical side of workplace discipline. Against the arbitrary law meted out by ship captains—strikes, desertions, and mutinies took place. In Omoo, the author describes a work stoppage, perhaps a mutiny, in which he played a significant role. In Moby Dick , he relates how Captain Ahab plots to bribe the sailors with gold, in order to divide them and win their cooperation in his monomaniacal hunt for the white whale. The cunning habits of a boss are intrinsic to Ahab's personality, as is his madness. Melville had learned from his own personal experience with the school of hard knocks how to write about authority and its abuse.

My own experience—job actions, picket lines, tense civil rights protests—is tranquil compared to the social turbulence Melville sailed through.

At his whale-ship college, Melville learned about back-stabbing as well as brotherhood. In the novella Billy Budd, he presents Claggart, the resentful and petty boss, and the stool-pigeon Squeak. These characters are first and foremost industrial types, as true to life today as they were then. I challenge anyone who has worked industrial jobs to say they have not met a Squeak or a Claggert!

Melville wrote as part of the motley crew of the world workforce, but he was not a propagandist or social realist. He had a human vision more than a social or political one. His stories turn on the failures of the workers he portrays as much as on the forces of evil they confront. A grand panorama is presented—from the viewpoint of heroes who are not noble or renowned but mere specks of the humble and millionfold obscure lower depths of humanity—anonymous, or even pseudonymous. The narrator of Moby Dick asks that we call him by the alias Ishmael because, like the son of Abraham, he has traveled a hard road without a father's protection. But another point is worth mentioning as well. The narrator is a nobody, a lost son of the working class—a tribe which, in Melville's view, has been tossing helplessly on the great sea of world events. Ishmael's humane philosophy is the only anchor.

Among the giants of nineteenth century literature, is there another who so completely discarded the conventional White-Black/Good-Evil symbolism? See Moby Dick , Chapter 42, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” for Melville's consciousness on this question. Notions of human equality were ripening in the decades prior to the Civil War, during Melville's formative years, and he expressed them in every stitch and thread of his giant tapestries.

We should love Melville's fiction—and should fight against him being relegated to the “dead white men” shelves in the library—because he gives voice to our everyday humanity, while mourning our tragic inability and alienation: “Ah Bartleby, ah humanity.”

“We are only statistics to them, only a number,” industrial workers say about their lowly position in relation to the masters of society. This sentiment, as well as unprintable ones, was expressed by my co-workers when, in one stunning blow, 2,000 of us were laid off by U.S. Steel from its gigantic Minntac iron ore mine—days before Christmas. This was many years ago, and it was hardly my last stint of unemployment. As the steel and iron ore layoffs were sweeping the country, then President Reagan and other CEOs mouthed their sympathy. Today, as the unemployed lose their benefits with no jobs in sight, the current president and a whole new batch of CEOs are equally full of sympathy for the flesh and blood statistics permanently sliced from the workforce.

Is the great mass of the world's humanity, those who face layoffs and far-worse occurrences—war, imprisonment, starvation—are we simply statistics? Do we have a dignity and humanity invisible to the upper crust of society?

To Melville, the humanity of his co-workers was a palpable thing. A maritime worker of the nineteenth century faced an intense experience, squeezed between typhoons and the tyranny of profit-seeking captains. As Melville's writing suggests, some sailors opted for a petty life of back-stabbing, like Squeak , “a rat in a cellar.” They succumbed to the view held of them by the captains of industry. But in order to maintain his dignity, a sailor had to fortify his own better side by trusting in and relying on the humanity of his fellows.

Melville's contemporaries considered whaling a weighty and important industry. It was also a controversial trade, especially in the pre-Civil War South. Hopefully not forgotten is the role of whaling crews and other maritime workers in the practical work of abolitionism. Frederick Douglass was one of many slaves helped to freedom by sailors. With maritime papers borrowed from an intriguing but almost unknown free Black man, Douglass escaped from slavery in 1838, a year before Melville set sail as a cabin boy. By 1841 Melville was shipping out of New Bedford . This working class port is where Douglass found shelter from slave-catchers when New York proved too risky a locale. Nantucket was the capital of whaling as well as abolitionism, and this spit of sand was Ishmael's port of choice. Melville almost certainly sailed with crews that included active abolitionists. And the price a sailor would pay for this type of activism was a bit higher than the price a transcendentalist would pay.

Lessons about human solidarity were undoubtedly being learned by at least some of the lowly, many-hued sailors. Claggart and Squeak were there to welcome back-sliders and back-stabbers of all stripes. But there were many who resisted, and they were strong and must have exerted a powerful influence on the young foretopman. The former school teacher was learning from them not to tolerate in himself that coldness of heart that views human beings of any hue as either statistics or chattel.

And yet after his maritime experience, Melville never became a man of action. Given Melville's egalitarian, ultra-democratic outlook, why wasn't he an abolitionist? People are awesomely complex, a fact that can lead to disturbing as well as joyful results. He made a subtle psychological point, on that could well be applied to himself, in his poem The Church of Padua when he described the personality as a place “where more is hid than found.” This man of strong views and imagination altogether lacked political insight and decisiveness. Whatever boldness he had was spent in a few years at sea.

For Melville, aging meant the gradual dimming not the complete loss of his chief inspiration, the workplace on waves. He clung to the fidelities he had learned as a sailor, and they are reflected in every line of the poems in Battle-Pieces. With this volume—following the total failure of Moby Dick, the increasing failure of all his prose since Typee— Melville was attempting to reverse his literary misfortunes—with a book of verses. Today's poets—and I count myself among that obscure throng—can find little humor in Melville's high hopes. In terms of literary success, his career as a poet was a thirty-year shipwreck.

What rewards us in Battle-Pieces today lies beneath the awkward versification. Melville's use of rhyme is compulsive, but the lines derive their power from the totally genuine and brooding mediation on battlefield death—death and the mechanics of death. He refused to be placated by the nobility of the cause, which he believed in, or the military glory, which he did not.

The grim experience of death at sea taught him to discard as an illusion the glory of patriotic death. In Shiloh , his lens scans the battlefield after a day of fighting in which 23,000 young soldiers were killed or wounded, Union and Secessionist together. “Foeman at morn, but friends at eve--/Fame or country least their care:/What like a bullet can undeceive!”

He viewed the battlefield with an eye influenced by the young art of photography. In Malvern Hill, he trains his gaze on the rust on a dead drummer's canteen. The fact that all dying troops, Confederate as well as Union, receive the same tender realism with which he treats this drummer boy was part of the reason that Battle-Pieces was not well received in the triumphant North.

Importantly, Melville supported the Union and opposed slavery, but he was not impressed by this war, or war in general. What was at work, however, was not simply a healthy skepticism. Pessimism and disillusion were beginning to choke him as a human being, silence him at a time when he was arriving at some of his most modern insights.

“All wars are boyish, and are fought by boys,” he declares in The March into Virginia . Or, in The Armies of the Wildernes , he strikes the brilliant lines: “A riddle of death, of which the slain/sole solvers are .”

Billy in the Darbies was found on Melville's desk after his death in 1891. This highly unusual poem is more than just a footnote to a well-known novella. In the lines of verse that conclude his story, he asks only that the moments before his hanging will be “eased.” He expresses the wish that his friend Donald will be there at the final moment and that the sentry ease the darbies (both seaweed and handcuffs). Although Billy is innocent, at least from a moral point of view, he seeks only those acts of comradeship that might be extended as well to the guilty.

They'll lash me in hammock, drop me deep

Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep.

I feel it stealing now. Sentry, are you there?

Just ease these darbies at the wrist,

And roll me over fair,

I am sleepy and the oozy weeds about me twist.

Although Melville probably conceived the poem first, he attached it to the end of the novella, describing it as the “rude utterance from another foretopman, one of [Billy's] own watch.” The poem represents the “rude” efforts by Billy's shipmates to provide a gentle easing more for themselves than for their dead comrade. It takes the form of a found poem, a sea-ballad. But the combination of rough rhymes and striking imagery is classic Melville, especially the haunting last line: “I am sleepy and the oozy weeds about me twist.”

The prose of Billy Budd is matter of fact, although the story marches compellingly along through the steps involved in Billy's frame-up. The ballad is our insight into Billy's death. It caps the prose and gives it power and humanity. When we look back to the events related by the prose, we do so through a lens tinted by the emotion of the concluding verses.

In the years that Melville struggled with this final work, the rate of executions in the United States was soaring. Espy's File , a compilation held by the University of Alabama Law Center, estimates the number of legally sanctioned executions in 1885 at 130, up from only 30 per year 15 years earlier. This time period follows the crushing of Reconstruction and corresponds with the brutalities of convict-labor and a blood-thirsty witch-hunt of working class militants. In 1877, 19 Molly Maguires were hung in the anthracite fields of Pennsylvania , six in one grisly day. This period was also marked by a great escalation of lynching, the extra-legal instrument of terror, whose victims were, of course, not recorded in the Espy figures.

Terror against the lowly was a familiar experience for Melville when he was at sea. His early readers were familiar with his views on corporal punishment from his novel White Jacket, which helped to expose and end some of the more brutal practices (and tortures) carried out on American ships. In one passage of this work, he records in chilling detail how the members of the crew were mustered against their will and forced to observe the flogging of a fellow sailor. They were “ breathlessly silent, as the keen scourge hissed through the wintry air and fell with a cutting wiry sound upon the mark.”

Billy Budd , a man of simple good nature, is impressed on the HMS Bellepotent, and this British vessel becomes more than a ship—it is a floating society of traps and treachery, Melville's vision of the modern world.

The aging writer was then eking out a living as a customs inspector in the seedy world of the New York harbor. From this angle, he had a clear view of the corruption that enriched gangsters, traders, and speculators. He was also not too far removed from the pitfalls and persecutions often awaiting the less fortunate. The terror of capital punishment crowned—and still crowns—the perplexingly involved statuary of the law and order system.

The death penalty in the U.S. in a little more than three decades claimed a thousand men and women. This barbaric practice has its roots in the brutality of lynching, which enforced Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction world. That is why it is accurate to refer to the death penalty as legal lynching. It is a weapon of terror. Innocence? Not a priority, as Troy Davis knows only too well.

In the U.S., the convict labor system has not been eliminated; one-quarter of the world's prison population is trapped in prisons in the United States; and then there are the other prisons—Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and secret prisons—where men and probably some women have languished under sentences imposed by drumhead courts impervious to democratic notions of due process, courts like the naval court that sentenced Billy Budd. We know about some of those who are wrongly condemned under the U.S. court system, a race and class injustice of epidemic proportions. And then there are the detained. Some—who knows how many—have no blood on their hands. They are more innocent than Billy Budd, who did kill someone, albeit inadvertently.

The process by which Captain Vere justifies the sentence of death dominates much of the novella, but it does not triumph over the human bond between Billy and his shipmates. The awkward beauty of the final ballad is the proof. The comradeship that Melville learned at sea is the surviving value. Solidarity in the face of death is the essential human act—mercy not arrogance. During an age when many of those who dominate society resemble either the excuse-making Vere or the treacherous Claggart (the monomaniac Ahab may be waiting in the wings), it enriches our own humanity to study Melville, this man who wrote of the condemned sailor, Billy Budd.