The Ghost of Anacharsis Cloots

Abstract: This essay explores the references to Anacharsis Cloots in Melville's Moby-Dick or The Whale (1852), The Confidence-Man (1857), and Billy Budd, Sailor (1924). Cloots, a Prussian aristocrat who fancied himself the "orator for mankind" figures in Melville's work as an avatar for both the ideals of revolutionary philosophy and its failures. Yet his appearances in these texts are so glancing as to not have inspired much in the way of sustained analysis. It is my contention that one can only begin to understand the Cloots references if one considers the manner in which they appear adjacent to key Black characters: Pip in Moby-Dick , Black Guinea in The Confidence-Man , and the unnamed Black Sailor in Billy Budd . This placement allows Melville to simultaneously call out Cloots's grand delegation for its exclusion of any African nation and highlight the as-yet unrealized grand aims of revolutionary rhetoric. Cloots's specter haunts these texts the way that the American, French, and Haitian revolutions haunt the decades before and after the Civil War. This haunting, I argue, is Melville's way of exploring both the limits and necessity of Revolutionary idealism.