While the real Israel Potter devoted half of his personal history to his years in London following the Revolutionary War, Melville retold these events in a few brief concluding chapters to his own volume, Israel Potter, His Fifty Years of Exile. Melville’s chapters are reproduced from the 1855 first edition to give a comparative view of the tragedy of Potter’s life as seen by himself and by Herman Melville, a quarter of a century later.
ISRAEL POTTER:
His Fifty Years of Exile.
By
HERMAN MELVILLE,
AUTHOR OF “TYPEE,” “OMOO,” ETC.
New York:
G. P. PUTNAM & CO., 10 PARK PLACE.
1855.
TO
HIS HIGHNESS
THE
Bunker-Hill Monument.
Biography, in its purer form, confined to the ended lives of the true and brave, may be held the fairest meed of human virtue—one given and received in entire disinterestedness—since neither can the biographer hope for acknowledgment from the subject, nor the subject at all avail himself of the biographical distinction conferred.
Israel Potter well merits the present tribute—a private of Bunker Hill, who for his faithful services was years ago promoted to a still deeper privacy under the ground, with a posthumous pension, in default of any during life, annually paid him by the spring in ever-new mosses and sward.
I am the more encouraged to lay this performance at the feet of your Highness, because, with a change in the grammatical person, it preserves, almost as in a reprint, Israel Potter’s autobiographical story. Shortly after his return in infirm old age to his native land, a little narrative of his adventures, forlornly published on sleazy gray paper, appeared among the peddlers, written, probably, not by himself, but taken down from his lips by another. But like the crutch-marks of the cripple by the Beautiful Gate, this blurred record is now out of print. From a tattered copy, rescued by the merest chance from the rag-pickers, the present account has been drawn, which, with the exception of some expansions, and additions of historic and personal details, and one or two shiftings of scene, may, perhaps, be not unfitly regarded something in the light of a dilapidated old tombstone retouched.