Slavish Shore: The Odyssey of Richard Henry Dana Jr.

by Jeffrey L. Amestoy

Overview

In 1834 Harvard dropout Richard Henry Dana Jr. sailed to California as a common seaman. His account of the voyage, Two Years Before the Mast, quickly became an American classic. But literary acclaim could not erase the young lawyer’s memory of the brutal floggings he had witnessed aboard ship or undermine the vow he had made to combat injustice. In Slavish Shore, Jeffrey Amestoy tells the story of Dana’s unflagging determination to keep that vow in the face of nineteenth-century America’s most exclusive establishment: the Boston society in which he had been born and bred.

The drama of Dana’s life arises from the unresolved tension between the Brahmin he was expected to be on shore and the man he had become at sea. Dana’s sense of justice made him a lawyer who championed sailors and slaves, and his extraordinary advocacy put him at the center of some of the most consequential cases in American history: defending fugitive slave Anthony Burns, justifying President Lincoln’s war powers before the Supreme Court, and prosecuting Confederate president Jefferson Davis for treason. Yet Dana’s own promising political career remained unfulfilled as he struggled to reconcile his rigorous conscience with his restless spirit in public controversy and private life.

The first full-length biography of Dana in more than half a century, Slavish Shore reintroduces readers to one of America’s most zealous defenders of freedom and human dignity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674088191
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	08/01/2015
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Jeffrey L. Amestoy has served as Chief Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court and is a Fellow at the Center for Public Leadership, Harvard Kennedy School.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

1 True Spirit 7

2 Pilgrim 21

3 Alert 35

4 The Vow 50

5 The Book 60

6 Boston, Brahmins, and the Business of Law 68

7 The Masquerade 81

8 The Great Man of the Age 95

9 The Inheritance 109

10 A Monstrous Thing 125

11 Chains 136

12 Boycott 146

13 The Little Darky Lawyer 154

14 The Club 163

15 The Presumption of Freedom 174

16 Who Can Tell What a Day May Bring Forth 191

17 Duty 203

18 Breakdown 217

19 Around the World 225

20 The Supreme Court Argument That Saved the Union 237

21 The Duke of Cambridge 253

22 Treason 259

23 The Rating 273

24 One of Them Damn Literary Fellers 290

25 Last Voyage 300

Notes 307

Acknowledgments 348

Index 351

Editorial Reviews

The strongest element of Amestoy’s treatment in Slavish Shore is his dramatization of the intricacies and personalities of the growing Abolitionist fervor of Boston in the years of Dana’s flourishing…A fine new biography.

Open Letters Monthly - Steve Donoghue

How appropriate that the year 2015, the bicentennial of Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s birth, ushered in the publication of what will be considered for quite some time the definitive biography of the famed sailor, author, lawyer, and activist.

Journal of the Early Republic - Brian Rouleau

Amestoy’s biography is excellent: well written, comprehensive, empathetic, and well researched…Amestoy is at his best, better than any other biographer, when narrating Dana’s role in several of America’s crucial cases in which human rights were at risk and a moral compass was needed.

New England Quarterly - Rick Kennedy

Slavish Shore, Jeffrey Amestoy’s superb new biography of Dana—the first in more than 50 years—should make many more people familiar with him…Slavish Shore presents an insightful portrait of Dana as a man as well as a lawyer…An excellent book—never tedious and often gripping—and Dana deserves our renewed attention.

Federal Lawyer - Henry Cohen

[Slavish Shore] is a meticulous, engaging, and informative study of Dana’s life, which unequivocally defends its portrait of this significant American man of letters as an equally significant man of the law that will be of particular interest to both literary scholars and historians concerned with the intersections of maritime law, slavery, and aristocratic New England culture in the turbulent decades leading up to the Civil War.

Dan Waldenn Literary History

Slavish Shore is the first new biography of Richard Henry Dana in over fifty years, and rigorous attention to Dana is long overdue. Amestoy is an excellent writer who takes us gracefully through Dana’s fascinating life, providing much new insight into his defense of fugitive slaves and his work on the treason case against Jefferson Davis. It is an important story, very well told.

Steven Lubet

Both a richly detailed biography of Richard Henry Dana and a snapshot of American life at the end of the age of sail, Amestoy’s Slavish Shore is the perfect companion volume for anyone who has been captivated by Two Years Before the Mast. Amestoy’s book follows Dana as he carries home the lessons he learned at sea and shocks the hidebound world of upper-crust Boston by standing up for the rights of seamen and fugitive slaves. But Slavish Shore also gives us the story of a private man caught in the sometimes suffocating atmosphere of family life, charting a haphazard course between independence and duty, ambition and disappointment.

Wes Davis

Excellently reveals how Dana wrested from the text of the U.S. Constitution the acknowledgment that the African-American slave, a kind of property as far as the traditional reading went, also had rights.

Wall Street Journal - Carol Bundy

[Slavish Shore] is a meticulous, engaging, and informative study of Dana’s life, which unequivocally defends its portrait of this significant American man of letters as an equally significant man of the law that will be of particular interest to both literary scholars and historians concerned with the intersections of maritime law, slavery, and aristocratic New England culture in the turbulent decades leading up to the Civil War.

American Literary History - Dan Walden