Reviews Slavish Shore: 1he Odyssey of Richard Henry Dana Jr. by Jeffrey L. Amestoy (Harvard University Press , Cambridge, MA, 2015, 365pp, illus, notes, index, ISBN 978-0-67408-819-1; $35hc) For my money, a skilled and nuanced biographer of a historical figure does three things: teaches us more about someone whose significance we've underestimated or oversimplified; leads us to reinterpret current events in the shadow of history; and carries us along with a story and voice that keeps us turning the pages. In Slavish Shore, a new biography of the iconic sailor and lawyer Richard Henry Dana Jr., Jeffrey Amestoy goes three for three. This is at least the fourth published biography of Dana, although it's the first in nearly forty years. If you're hoping to learn more about Dana's 1834-36 voyage to California aboard the brig Pilgrim, his time along the California coast, his return aboard the Alert, and then his authorship of Two Years before the Mast (1838), this biography is not for you. Two Years is a foundational text for the study of sea literature and American maritime history, in part because it was the first narrative oflife
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as a common merchant sailor. It was a bestseller at the time. Yet Amestoy breezes through young Dana's time at sea, barely questioning Dana's account of the events and using the young man's highly crafted narrative as nearly the only primary source. (See instead, for example, Robert Gale's 1969 biography of Dana.) Amestoy's concern is what Dana did afterwards. He shows that as a trial attorney and politician, Dana had a firm moral conscience and a relentless skill, drive, and idealism. Dana's career has been overshadowed by the influence and staying power of Two Years before the Mast. The son of a poet and born to blue-blood privilege with a direct line to US presidents and federal justices, Dana grew up at the edge of Harvard's campus. When he returned from his time at sea, Dana excelled in law school and was set up for a golden road. Yet, Amestoy reveals, from his first cases and throughout his professional life, Dana fought for what he believed to be the moral path, rather than the route of greatest personal gain. Amestoy argues that this path was influenced by what Dana saw while at sea, especially the famous account
of witnessing his shipmates flogged by the tyrannical and capricious Captain Frank Thompson. Throughout his career, Dana regularly represented penniless mariners right off the ship and rural clients with little money to pay him. In February of 1850 in Concord, Massachusens, with his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson in the audience, Dana spoke publicly against slavery as a member of the Free Soil Party. A month later, when he read that Daniel Webster-a man for whom he had previously had enormous respect-sought to placate the southern states by supporting the Fugitive Slave Act so that he could win the presidency, Dana wrote to his brother: "The truth is, with all his gigantic powers there is one thing [Webster] lacketh. He lacks the confidence in the moral sentiment of the people. He will run no personal risk for a principle." Dana's principles lost him money, friends, and nearly his life. His highest profile cases were a set of trials and arguments that rebelled against this Fugitive Slave Act. This not only placed him on the wrong side of Daniel Webster and the lawyers and politicians in Cambridge, but in opposition to his wealthy clients, who then boycotted Dana's practice. Undaunted, by research and skill of elocution, Dana won case after case. Amestoy, the former attorney general of Vermont and a member of the state's supreme court, recreates these scenes, both in and out of the courtroom, with masterful drama and suspense. Dana successfully defended fellow lawyers against a host of charges related to the attempted capture of slaves who had escaped and found homes in the Boston area. At one point Dana secured an acquittal for Robert Morris, the only black lawyer among the 24,000 licensed attorneys in the United States at the time. Then, in his losing defense against the rendition of the escaped slave Anthony Burns, Dana made, according to Amestoy, "one of the finest summations in the hisrory of American law" in what was "the most notorious fugitive slave case in American history." The case had Boston on the edge of riots and martial law. The night after the decision, Dana was walking near Stoddard Avenue with a colleague. Two men rushed after him and bashed him with a pipe over his right eye, knocking Dana, unconscious and bloody, to the street. SEA HISTORY 159, SUMMER2017