SOURCE: “Indian-Hater, Wild Man: Melville's Confidence-Man,” in Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 2, Summer, 1996, pp. 21-35.

In the following essay, Matterson discusses Melville's use of the Indian Hater character, claiming that Melville considered him a central figure in American attitudes toward Native Americans and implicated the government, the judicial system, and organized religion as participants in these attitudes.

The last novel Herman Melville published in his lifetime has been considered his most problematic. The Confidence-Man (1857) is especially difficult because four chapters, 25-28, are concerned with Indian-hating, and offer a profile of the legendary (and possibly fictional) “diluted” Indian-hater Colonel John Moredock of Illinois. These chapters have generated a substantial body of criticism, and almost everyone who has written on The Confidence-Man has addressed them. One assumption made about the chapters is that they provide a center to an otherwise fragmented novel, a work which one of the standard reference works...