Madness and mastery in Melville's "Benito Cereno." - Herman Melville

Upon signing the contract, Babo and his men have already killed Don Alexandro Aranda (the owner of the ship and the "one hundred and sixty blacks, of both sexes" who were its primary cargo) and eighteen of the thirty-six Spanish crew by hatchet, and thrown seven more alive into the sea. Now in control of the ship, Babo experiences the kind of suspicion of his remaining captives that they had perhaps been "too stupid" to feel toward the slaves. Babo makes clear that his regime will not repeat the same mistake. As the deposition recounts it: ". . . they (the Spaniards), being then assembled aft, the negro Babo then harangued them, saying that he had now done all; that the deponent (as navigator for the negroes) might pursue his course, warning him and all of them that they should, soul and body, go the way of Don Alexandro, if he saw them (the Spaniards) speak or plot anything against them (the negroes)--a threat which was repeated every day...." (305) Don Benito shrewdly observes that the whites' only chance for survival under such a suspicious regime is to convince their captives-turned-captors of two things: first, the dependence of the blacks on the whites' technical shipboard expertise; and second, the whites' understanding that their lives depend on fulfilling the blacks' desire for freedom. The document he draws up is thus intended as a check against Babo's suspicion that the whites will try to rise up against him as he has done against them:

. . . that a few days after, the deponent, endeavoring not to omit any means to preserve the lives of the remaining whites, spoke to the negroes peace and tranquillity, and agreed to draw up a paper, signed by the deponent and the sailors who could write, as also by the negro Babo, for himself and all the blacks, in which the deponent obliged himself to carry them to Senegal, and they not to kill any more, and he formally to make over to them the ship, with the cargo, with which they were for that time satisfied and quieted. (305) What Don Benito recognizes in the situation is the importance for both sides of managing suspicion within the new power relations that have emerged on board the San Dominick. The contract thus defines a ground of common interest between the whites and the blacks, but Melville's dramatization of the signing exposes the field of absolutely naked (but unstated) power relations that create that common interest. Don Benito, it is true, draws up the document of his own "free" will, but he does so only as the final means to "preserve the lives of the remaining whites," who would otherwise be completely at the mercy of Babo.

Nothing, of course, could be further from a position of "equal bargaining power," the condition antebellum courts increasingly assumed to underlie the signing of contracts--a sort of default position of power relations. The new field of Contract Law was one of the chief areas in which the legal philosophy known as formalism was worked out. This philosophy, according to Morton Horwitz, reflected the new powers of a confident legal profession by creating the appearance of law as a "self-contained, apolitical, and inexorable" system and making "legal reasoning seem like mathematics," which conveyed "an air . . . of inevitability about legal decisions."(53) One of the supposedly apolitical assumptions underlying legal formalism was the formal equality of all subjects under the law. A worker, therefore, was considered to possess the same degree of "freedom" in drawing up a contract as an employer; this legal equality, according to Horwitz, thus masked the very real advantages that employers usually possessed.(54) When put into practice, then, the idea of "separation of law and politics" had a profoundly conservative political effect, in that it neutralized "the inevitably political and redistributive functions of law."(55)