Bartleby seemed a "dependable and willing worker," to recall David Brion Davis's words, in an office bounded by a "white wall" at one end and a "lofty brick wall" at the other. This "pallidly neat, pitiably respectable" young man, working at first with mechanical intensity, is a welcome contrast to the erratic scriveners his employer cannot control. "As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents," the lawyer remembers. Deprivation seems to have reformed Bartleby; the documents are his medicated milk. He soon withdraws from legal copying into "dead-wall reveries," however, and his "passive resistance" gives him a mysterious hold on the lawyer. Bartleby extends, and drains of its excess, Isabel's passive power over Pierre. His story depicts the reform project of reclaiming Ishmaelites as one which twins the benefactor with his victim.¹⁷

"How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall?" asks Ahab. "To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me." Hemp finally strangled Ahab, but his project shattered against the leviathan's wall. Ahab's "white . . . wall" now imprisons Bartleby. Ahab's aggression, smashing against the wall through which the captain tried to strike, has turned inward. It presses relentlessly agains the confined self.¹⁸

Gansevoort Melville's Jacksonian politics gave birth to Ahab. That democratic promise is a failure in Bartleby. On Wall Street, politics is a mere patronage affair, servant of economic advancement. The lawyer has a political appointment, one of his employees is a machine politician, and Bartleby's fate gets confused with an election-day wager. Bartleby himself, it reassures the lawyer to think, lost his Dead Letter Office job "by a change in the administration." (Bartleby, 99) A political change has also deprived the lawyer of his own patronage business. Jacksonian dreams offer meaning neither to Bartleby nor to his employer. Politics appears in the margins of this story. That failure of politics returns Melville to the fate of his brother.

Bartleby consigns the Wall Street lawyer to a Mastership in Chancery Court, the appointment from which Gansevoort Melville fled to political regeneration. Peter Gansevoort, soliciting letters which cited his nephew's "double revolutionary descent," obtained the chancery appointment for Gansevoort Melville. Gansevoort impressed upon his uncle the "vast importance of success in this matter to me." But Wall Street was hardly the arena in which a double descendant of revolutionaries could flower. If Pierre imagines what would have happened had Pierre Thomas Melvill returned to the Melvill house, Bartleby imagines Gansevoort Melville's fate had he never left his Mastership in Chancery.¹⁹

Bartleby imagines that fate, however, not at the explosive apogee of Jacksonian politics, but after its exhaustion. Jacksonian democracy was the vehicle through which both Melville brothers had risen and fallen. Each had hoped to use it to throw off external models and speak in his own voice. Bartleby issues from the gloom of a writer whose project of liberation had failed, and who was now pressed to copy the models he had once repudiated. There was a scrivener who linked Gansevoort to Herman Melville. His name was James Ely Murdock Fly.

Fly was a friend of the Melville brothers. He was a classmate of Gansevoort's in the Albany Academy, and an apprentice lawyer and copyist in Peter Gansevoort's law office. Fly went west with Herman Melville in 1840 on the visit to Thomas Melvill. Then Gansevoort Melville supported his brother and Fly while they looked for work in New York. Both failed to obtain jobs, but when Melville shipped out on the Acushnet, Fly remained behind. He acted as intermediary between Peter Gansevoort and his nephew in the matter of the chancery appointment, and also sought Peter Gansevoort's help in securing a position as a Commissioner of Deeds. Melville's uncle told Fly to "doff your gown and slippers and step into the world of the metropolis" on his own. But Fly was not able to do so. A decade later he was with Melville in Pittsfield, for Melville had replaced Gansevoort as Fly's protector. His "old friend," he wrote Duyckinck, "has long been a confirmed invalid, and in some small things I act a little as his agent." When Melville canceled his Literary World subscription after Duyckinck's chilly reception of Moby-Dick, he canceled Fly's, too. He made Fly the model for Pierre's devoted, ineffectual friend, Charlie Milthorpe. Fly died about the time Melville wrote Bartleby. This shadow of a man--Bartleby to Gansevoort Melville's lawyer--was bequeathed by the failed political activist to his writer brother. Fly supplies the missing history of Bartleby.²⁰

Melville deprives Bartleby of that history, however. "Confined within the limits of his own experience," as Georg Lukács says of the modern hero, Bartleby "is without personal history." Like the protagonist of a modernist fiction, he is existentially alone. "Beyond significant human relationship," in Lukács's words, Bartleby is "unable to enter into relationships with other human beings." "He does not develop through contact with the world; he neither forms nor is formed by it." Bartleby inhabits, beneath tangible appearance, "the ghostly aspect of reality." Outside of history, he is given no specific social fate. Bartleby's absence of qualities, however, does place him historically. Bartleby inhabits the mass society that Tocqueville feared would triumph in America if meaningful, free, political action decayed. The power of Melville's short story comes from its abstractness. By resituating Bartleby historically, we can see it as comment on the historical triumph of abstraction.²¹

The failure of political reform, alluded to in Bartleby, confines the scrivener and his employer in the office they share. Economic relations replace political dreams. Unlike realistic fiction, however, Bartleby is not brought to life by a move from the spiritual to the concrete. It neither places egotistic man in the social complexity of rooted relationships, nor does it chart the breakdown of those relationships. It does allude to them, however. The lawyer's title, Master in Chancery, evokes the personal ties of dependence between master and apprentice. It recalls a time when apprentices, slowly learning the skills of their trade, looked forward to becoming masters in turn. Major Melvill, for example, had learned his trade as a merchant's clerk. When Allan Melvill and John Adams praised the passion for emulation as the source of personal achievement in America, they were speaking from a setting of masters and apprentices, of personal models and family connected avenues of mobility. Maria Melville, deploring her nephew Peter Gansevoort's lack of ambition, complained that he was "devoid of emulation, which urges so many on to exertion." Registering the shift from paternal models to maternal love, Maria blamed Mary Ann Gansevoort for her son's failure. But she, too, still inhabited a personal network of imitation and advancement. Melville's Master in Chancery, alluding to the traditional household organization of work, underlines by contrast the anonymity of the modern office.²²

Bartleby's employer does not preside over apprentices, bound to him by learning a craft. He is master over a refractory slave, who first copies him "mechanically" (67) and then withdraws his labor. Bartleby could imitate the lawyer forever without acquiring either his employer's competence or his status. The "degraded . . . drill" of the unskilled worker, the drill in which Bartleby engages, is "sealed off from experience; practice counts for nothing there." Bartleby's "I have given up copying" (83) speaks to the changing character of work, the growing distance between master and employee, and the chasm separating imitation from maturity. Bartleby's jailer thought he was a "forger," (99) appropriating another's identity through imitating his handwriting. Bartleby actually does the opposite. He appropriates the lawyer's identity by refusing to copy him. The lawyer recognizes the "wonderous ascendancy which the inscrutable scrivener had over me." How account for his "cadaverous triumph"?²³ (86)

Bartleby protests, with "passive resistance," (72) against his condition. In refusing to copy, he is copying Thoreau. "I simply wish to refuse allegiance," announced Thoreau, "to withdraw." Bartleby's "l prefer not to" is an echo of "Civil Disobedience." But just as Bartleby appropriates the lawyer to discredit him, so he undermines the Thoreauvian alternative. The intent of passive resistance was to save the adversary as well as to triumph over him. It avoided the costs of direct aggression. Richard Lebeaux suggests that Thoreau's father's weakness and his brother's death influenced Thoreau to choose a nonviolent form of rebellion. Melville had a weak, dead father and a dead brother, and he also stepped back from straightforward, aggressive triumphs. But Bartleby exposed the passive aggression which lies behind nonviolent resistance. Bartleby punishes the lawyer by punishing himself. He avoids a straightforward triumph, as Thoreau does, but in a way that inverts Thoreau's project. Bartleby undermines his adversary and destroys himself.²⁴

Already pale and "motionless" (66) when he appears at the office, Bartleby successively detaches himself from each of his (already meager) social connections. He prefers not to read copy, prefers not to copy, prefers not to leave the office, haunts the office after the lawyer abandons it, and finally refuses to eat in jail. Turning aggression against himself, Bartleby refuses (by attacking the lawyer directly) to sanction the lawyer's anger at him. Bartleby exercises the power of weakness. The "young man" (66) taught obedience by the withdrawal of love (instead of by physical violence) is turning that lesson against this "elderly man." (59)

Bartleby is formed solely from within the walls by which he is confined. Emptiness without means emptiness within. There is no transcendent flight from Wall Street routine either to nature or to the interior. Thoreau's speech embodies the feelings with which he resists appropriation. Bartleby's silence at once creates a wall between interior state and external appearance, and suggests that the former is merely a pale reflection of the latter. Thoreau "was not born to be forced";²⁵ Bartleby was. Nevertheless, by refusing to explain himself, he protects himself from colonization. Bartleby has the power of negativity. He drains his surroundings of the humanity in which the lawyer would like to believe.

Bartleby is Tocqueville's democratic individual, cut off from family, class, and community. He is "locked in the solitude of his own heart." He is the man, "himself alone," "not tied to time or place," that Tocqueville imagined as the subject of democratic art. Bartleby is alone not in nature, as Tocqueville predicted the hero of American poetry would be, but in the lonely crowd. Melville uses the paltry details of American life, which Tocqueville thought were artistically refractory, to make an aesthetic form.²⁶

The lawyer introduces his office by calling "spacious" the skylight shaft between his window and the white wall. "What landscape painters call 'life,'" he remarks, is visible through the opposing window, in the "lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade; which wall required no spyglass to bring out its lurking beauties." No spyglass is needed because that wall "was pushed up to within ten feet of my window panes." (60-61) As the narrator finds life and variety in the view from his office, the words Melville puts into his mouth call that space a "cistern." The narrator's feeble, novelistic efforts, Melville is pointing out, are false to reality on Wall Street.

The lawyer's attempt to humanize his environment gives Bartleby his negative power. It is not so much the scrivener's withdrawal from life that needs explaining, as the way in which he draws in the narrator, the other employees, and the reader. The story hints at a social explanation for Bartleby's influence, and insists on a psychological one.

The routinization of work undermined the familiarly based set of master-apprentice relations. Employers and reformers claimed, in response, that their social institutions reproduced among strangers those shattered familial and communal bonds. As wage labor replaced household production, the employer insisted he was united to his workers by deeper ties than those of legal contract and market interest. Employers and their defenders spoke of workplaces as families. Reformers proposed asylums, modeled on the family, to reclaim the dangerous classes for useful work.

The office of a Master in Chancery was an appropriate place to test such claims. Chancery courts were centers of equity in the impersonal, rulebound legal system. Peter Gansevoort presided over a chancery court in Albany; Gansevoort Melville did so in New York. As Master in Chancery, Bartleby's employer would have heard family disputes and settled contested wills. He might have disposed of the suit between Maria Melville and her brothers-in-law over Allan Melvill's debts to his father's estate. He might have heard the case between Mary Ann Gansevoort and her brothers-in-law over her share of Colonel Gansevoort's inheritance. Chancery courts merged legal proceedings with familial ties.²⁷

The chancery court was one arena for philanthropy; the Indian Office was another. Indians lacked the principle of emulation, Lewis Cass believed; his friend, Thomas McKenney, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, sought to instill it in them. McKenney adopted a young Choctaw, in the name of the American government, and brought him into the Office of Indian Trade. "The U. States Govt. are doing the part of a kind parent for him," McKenney explained; he employed the ward to copy his letters. The Indian rose by emulation to become a lawyer. Then, repudiating the path on which McKenney had set him, he returned to his tribe and represented it against the commissioner. The Choctaw lawyer was no more successful a rebel than Bartleby. His tribal connections were broken, and he could not forge new ties. Calling himself a "degraded outcast" from white society, he died, like Bartleby, a suicide.²⁸

McKenney was haunted by his ward's fate, just as Bartleby haunted the lawyer. The reason was the same: both reclamation projects required the consent of their targets. Bartleby acquires his power by withholding himself from the lawyer. The lawyer, like McKenney, is a philanthropist. He does not treat his employees by the counting-room calculus of the marketplace, firing them for their idiosyncratic inefficiencies. Nor does he subject them to the traditional coercive punishment once used against refractory workers. The lawyer does not discipline Turkey for his insolence. Attributing it instead to the copyist's ragged old coats, he gives Turkey a "respectable-looking coat" of his own. (64) It fails to calm Turkey's obstreperousness, however, and so the narrator welcomes the pallid young man who soon after appears at his door.

When Bartleby also proves difficult, the lawyer seeks to reach him with understanding. Like Theodore Parker, he does not want to treat this Ishmael "as Abraham his base-born boy," but rather help him find his "place on the wall." He tries, in turn, the various liberal strategies for overcoming the resistance of society's "dangerous" and "perishing classes." First he hopes that his benevolent paternalism will "purchase a delicious self-approval." (72) That reform effort fails, as it generally did in Indian relations; it gives way (as in Indian policy) to cruder strategies. The lawyer tries to provoke Bartleby's active resistance, so he can justify aggression on his own. He tries to bribe him. He pretends that Bartleby does not exist. Finally he contemplates murder. But the lawyer draws back from these direct forms of aggression. Invoking Christ's injunction that "ye love one another" to stop himself from doing violence to Bartleby, he cites "self-interest" as a motive for "charity." (88) The lawyer's interest is in preserving his self; for that purpose he needs to feel he has not done violence to Bartleby.

Thoreau voices the question Bartleby puts to the lawyer, "How shall he ever know well what he is and does as an officer of the government, or as a man, until he is obliged to consider whether he shall treat me . . . as a neighbor and well-disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace." Bartleby disturbs the lawyer's peace, but the lawyer tries not to treat him as a maniac. He wants to nurture Bartleby, but his charity reveals the failure of his office to sustain human life. At every step the lawyer takes toward Bartleby, Bartleby withdraws more deeply into himself. "Formerly tyranny used the clumsy weapons of chains and hangmen," wrote Tocqueville. "Despotism, to reach the soul, clumsily struck at the body, and the soul, escaping from such blows, rose gloriously above it; but in democratic republics . . . tyranny . . . leaves the body alone and goes straight for the soul." The lawyer "might give alms to [Bartleby's] body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach."²⁹ (79)

Bartleby's withdrawals discredit the lawyer; they expose his bad faith. Unwilling to commit himself fully to the scrivener, he tries to set boundaries to the relationship. Those boundaries become Bartleby's targets. Contractual arrangements in the traditional workshop operated in a setting of tangible, specific, and customary reciprocal obligations. As persons and contracts separated, the bonds that would structure and limit Bartleby's expectations disappear. The lawyer needs to erect boundaries, for Bartleby is boundaryless and insatiable.³⁰

The lawyer is nothing but his office, and he needs to have Bartleby in it. He experiences Bartleby as an "incubus" clinging to him, (90) but he cannot let him go. Their intimacy goes beneath that of paternal employer and prodigal son; it extends beyond class and ideology to personality. Bartleby is not just a parable of capitalist trying to reclaim worker, or father seeking forgiveness from son. Though set in the workplace, Bartleby offers the barest description of white-collar, working-class life. Bartleby is social critique not as realistic story but as psychological parable. It gains its power from the virtual disappearance of society, swallowed up in a psychological symbiosis. Bartleby (who has neither history nor speech) and the lawyer (who has neither name nor interior) are two halves of a single, divided self.

Folding doors divide the lawyer's office in two. His scriveners are on one side, and he is on the other. The lawyer places Bartleby on his side of the folding doors, however, behind a screen and by a window facing a wall. The narrator is drawing "this quiet man" into his private space, and at the same time placing a division between them. He wants to "isolate Bartleby from my sight, though not remove him from my voice." (67) He wants Bartleby to do his bidding without having to look at him face-to-face.

The lawyer is drawn to this "pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn" young man. (66) Bartleby seems at once needier and more tractable than his other scriveners. Because Bartleby has almost no self of his own, the lawyer thinks he can more easily absorb him. But the very absence of self, which allows Bartleby and the lawyer to merge, also introduces the withdrawal from life in which Bartleby will implicate the narrator. The symbiosis between Bartleby and his employer is a residue of that which twinned Isabel and Pierre. Pierre and the lawyer both engage in rescue operations to reclaim a lost interior. But the passion which seduces Pierre, because it is secretly present within him, is absent in the lawyer. Bartleby is the "ghost" (90) left behind after the battle is over. He is the lawyer's interior, impoverished by a lifetime in contracts and deeds.

The lawyer is "an eminently safe man." He lives by avoiding risks; his "first grand point" is "prudence." (60) "The lawyer's truth is not Truth, but . . . a consistent expediency," Thoreau protested. "His quality is not wisdom, but prudence." Thoreau was attacking Daniel Webster. He was calling for civil disobedience against the federal law that legalized slavery and made war on Mexico. Like Webster, Bartleby's lawyer stands "so completely within the institution" that he "never distinctly and nakedly behold[s] it." The lawyer lacks heroic stature, or interior, personal authority. He is a "title-hunter" (66) without a title of his own. He abdicates authority to the walls on the outside and to Bartleby within. Bartleby forces him to behold his institution by withdrawing even further within it.³¹

The lawyer's lack of authority makes him long for Bartleby's approval. To find a place for Bartleby would redeem his own impoverished life. The very internal emptiness which makes him fear Bartleby, however, makes him fear public opinion more. Rumors that Bartleby is "denying my authority" make him decide to evict the scrivener. "Buttoning up my coat to the last button," the lawyer emphasizes his physical separation from Bartleby. Still, he cannot "thrust him, the poor, pale, passive mortal" away. "Rather would I let him live and die here, and then mason up his remains in the wall." (90) Theodore Parker had imagined that the outcast, once a "rejected stone," would find his "place on the wall, and his use." The lawyer would allow Bartleby his place, even if he had no use. In naming Parker's desire, however, the lawyer reveals it as a wish for death.

Public opinion forces the lawyer to abandon Bartleby; unwilling to use force and throw Bartleby out of his office, he "tore myself from him" instead. (92 ) The lawyer changes offices, but public opinion still connects him to the ghost that haunts his old quarters. "Fearful . . . of being exposed in the papers," (93) he takes what seems the final step toward intimacy, and invites Bartleby home. Bartleby prefers not to go.

The lawyer hopes that "humanizing domestic associations" (87) will nurture Bartleby. Bartleby prefers to underline the absence of those associations at work. The lawyer has fallen back on the separation of office from home; by making the office his home, Bartleby discredits that boundary, too. Like Andrew Jackson, Bartleby retreats to his "hermitage" for privacy, to escape being "mobbed" in the metropolis. (81) But Bartleby's "hermitage," as the narrator calls it half a dozen times (69, 71, 74, 80, 88), is in his office; the lawyer's screen has located it there. Unlike the home in Nashville where Gansevoort Melville stayed, Bartleby's hermitage is no escape from society.

Finally, Bartleby is taken off to jail. There he might have joined Thomas Melvill, whose "sensibility" became "morbid," he wrote his brother, from being consigned to debtor's prison by his family. Bartleby was, as Thomas Melvill wrote, secluded "within these walls." His keeper might have been Leonard Gansevoort (Guert and Stanwix's father), who served as sheriff of Albany. He might have been confined by Peter Gansevoort, when he was Albany county court judge, or by Lemuel Shaw. Peter Gansevoort, who served as chairman of the committee on prisons in the New York state assembly, might have investigated Bartleby's condition. Lawyers, judges, and prison-keepers were everywhere in Melville's family. Melville, in negative identification, gained the capability of imagining a prisoner whom their authority could not reclaim.³²

"Under a government which imprisons men unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison," wrote Thoreau. Thoreau chose prison to declare his freedom from society. "I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb to break through before they could be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined." Prison confirmed Thoreau's freedom; it confirms Bartleby's confinement. "Removed to the Tombs as a vagrant," (95) Bartleby turns his face to the wall. "Look, there is the sky, and here is the grass," the lawyer tells him. "I know where I am," Bartleby replies.³³ (96)

Bartleby is within the "walls of amazing thickness" that surround the prison yard. There the lawyer's wish to mason up his remains in a wall is fulfilled. The lawyer visits Bartleby one last time. He finds him "huddled at the base of the wall, his knees drawn up, and lying on his side." Assuming the foetal position, Bartleby has starved himself to death. The lawyer, however, finds rebirth even there. Within these "eternal pyramids," he observes, "through the clefts, grass-seed, dropped by birds, had sprung." (98) Melville had imagined himself a seed, which had bloomed when it was taken from an Egyptian pyramid, and then fallen to mold. He puts Bartleby back to die within the Egyptian tomb. The seed dropped "through the clefts," like the "fertilizations" of Mount Greylock, does not generate human life.

As Thoreau imagined castles on the Rhine from within his prison cell, so Bartleby is "asleep . . . with kings and counselors." (99) The narrator's reference is to Job. "Why died I not from the womb?" cries Job. "Why did the knees prevent me? Or why the breasts that I should suck? For now . . . I should have slept: then had I been at rest, with kings and counsellors . . . as infants which never saw light." "There the prisoners rest together," Job thinks, ". . . which long for death." Job's outcry, with its references to knees and to refusing suck, describes the prisoner Bartleby. Bartleby has had Job's wish, and died in the womb. The lawyer's language betrays him to the end, however, for his invocation of Job undercuts his sentimentalizing of Bartleby's death.³⁴

The lawyer makes one last effort to circumscribe the meaning of his scrivener's fate. He reports the rumor that Bartleby was fired from the Dead Letter Office in Washington. It is too late to explain Bartleby away by his specific, historical origins. The formal economy and self-sufficiency of this story, by freeing the text from its historical referents, free Bartleby from his textual confines. He haunts the reader forever.

17. Herman Melville, "Bartleby" (1853), in Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories, Harold Beaver, ed. (Baltimore, 1967), pp. 60, 66, 67, 78, 72. Subsequent page numbers in the text refer to this edition.

18. Melville, Moby-Dick, p. 139; Henry A. Murray, "Bartleby and I," in Howard P. Vincent, ed., Bartleby, The Scrivener: The Melville Annual (Kent, Ohio, 1965), pp. 15-17.

19. Testimonials to Governor Bouck, Jan. 3, 1843; Richard D. Davis to Governor Bouck, Dec. 28, 1842, MP; Gansevoort Melville to Peter Gansevoort, Feb. 18, 1843, GL; Gansevoort Melville to Allan Melville, Jan. 18, 1843, to Edward Sanford, March 31, 1843, BA.

20. ML, p. xxv; James M. Fly to Peter Gansevoort, Jan. 25, 1843, Peter Gansevoort to Fly, Jan. 28, 1843, Gansevoort Melville to Peter Gansevoort, Feb. 18, 1843, Fly to Peter Gansevoort, Jan. 16, 1844, GL; Leon Howard, Herman Melville: A Biography (Berkeley, 1951), p. 38; Davis and Gilman, pp. 122-23, 149.

21. Georg Lukács, "The Ideology of Modernism," in Realism in Our Time (New York, 1962), pp. 18-22; Douglas, pp. 316-17; Carolyn Porter, Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner (Middletown, Conn., 1981), pp. 57-90.

22. John Adams, Discourses on Davila, in George A. Peek, Jr., ed., The Political Writings of John Adams (Indianapolis, 1954), pp. 176-81; ML., pp. 6, 28-29.

23. Walter Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," in Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, ed. (New York, 1969), p. 176. I am indebted to Peter Schwartz for noticing the significance of the forger.

24. Henry David Thoreau, "Civil Disobedience," in Walden and Civil Disobedience, Owen Thomas, ed. (New York, 1966), p. 239; Richard D. Lebeaux, Young Man Thoreau (Amherst, Mass., 1977), pp. 175-78. Egbert S. Oliver, "A Second look at Bartleby," College English, VI (May 1945), 431-39, provides evidence that Melville read "Civil Disobedience" before writing Bartleby.

25. Thoreau, p. 236.

26. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Garden City, N.Y., 1969 [1835, 1840]), pp. 484, 488, 508.

27. William Bysshe Stein, "Bartleby: The Christian Conscience," in Vincent, p. 104; John D'Wulf et al. v. Priscilla Melvill et al., 1833, Mary Ann Gansevoort et al. v. Herman Gansevoort et al., Dec. 24, 1846, MP.

28. Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York, 1975), pp. 116-17, 207-08; Herman J. Viola, Thomas L. McKenney, Architect of America's Early Indian Policy: 1816-1830 (Chicago, 1974), pp. 40-42, 127-29, 198-99; Thomas L. McKenney, Memoirs, Official and Personal, 2 vols. (New York, 1846), II, 109-17.

29. Thoreau, p. 232; Tocqueville, p. 255.

30. Cf. Allan Silver, "The Lawyer and the Scrivener," Partisan Review, XLVII, 3 (1981), pp. 404-24.

31. Thoreau, p. 241.

32. ML, p. 9; Alice P. Kenney, The Gansevoorts of Albany (Syracuse, N.Y., 1969), p. 148; Circular to Judge Peter Gansevoort, May 21, 1845, Silas Wright to Peter Gansevoort, Jan. 25, 1830, Pierre Van Courtlandt to Peter Gansevoort, March 14, 1831, GL.

33. Thoreau, pp. 233, 236.

34. Ibid., p. 236; Job 3:11-18.

*By permission of the author.

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