ABSTRACT
The Somers mutiny affair, which led the captain of an American naval vessel to execute three of his crew while at sea, usually comes to a reader through Herman Melville's last great masterpiece, the unfinished novella Billy Budd, Sailor. Fact and circumstance diverged over whether or not the Captain of the Somers, Alexander Slidell Mackenzie, had erred in summarily hanging aboard ship a midshipman, Philip Spencer, and two crewmen, Samuel Cromwell and Elisha Small, after accusing them of mutinous behavior. Mothers figured with astonishing frequency aboard a ship without mothers anywhere in sight. The key to the discrepancy came first in Captain Mackenzie's narrative of events. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had created middle ground over slavery while the nation argued over whether its peculiar institution was altogether right or altogether wrong. The narratives aloft in the Somers affair reveal how antebellum Americans used ideas in the 1840s.
