On September 14, 1848, Abraham Lincoln converged on the city of New Bedford, Massachusetts, to campaign for the Whig presidential candidate, Zachary Taylor. On August 14, 2026, Sam Waterston – the eminent actor who often performed Abraham Lincoln’s words in venues across the nation – followed in Lincoln’s footsteps to New Bedford. This time, Waterston was not quoting Lincoln. He was reading an excerpt from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick to commemorate the unveiling of a new statue of Melville on the grounds of the Seamen’s Bethel Chapel in New Bedford.
In my book released earlier this year, Lincoln in New England: In Search of His Forgotten Tours, I related my own visit to New Bedford and the Seamen’s Bethel:
My old marine biology days flashed back as I toured the area around the Historical Park. Across the street from the visitor center was the Custom House, an important facility back in the whaling days and now shared by branch offices of the U.S. Customs and Border Control Agency and the National Marine Fisheries Service, that latter for which I had worked coming out of college. A block away was the New Bedford Whaling Museum and the Mariners’ Home built in 1795 and since 1850 housing and feeding poor, unskilled whaling crew back in port from their long voyages. Next door was Seamen’s Bethel Church, built in 1832 “to protect the rights and interests of Seamen, and to furnish them with…moral, intellectual and religious instruction.” A young man named Herman Melville joined one of these long-haul voyages in 1839, which led him to write the classic whaling epic, Moby Dick. While in the novel Melville writes that “the town itself is perhaps the dreariest place to live in,” he added “in the same New Bedford there stands a whaleman’s chapel and few are the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian or Pacific Oceans who failed to make a Sunday visit to this spot.” Today the Seamen’s Bethel church proudly highlights its whaling heritage and its connection to the giant white sperm whale that became Ahab’s – and Melville’s – obsession.
As noted in the city’s account of the statue unveiling, Herman Melville famously “worshipped at the Seamen’s Bethel almost 200 years ago before sailing out on the whaling journey that inspired Moby-Dick.” The new statue sculpted by Stefanie Rocknak it titled Melville and Jonah’s Journey and “was inspired by Chapter 9 of the literary masterpiece when Father Mapple offers a sermon about Jonah, who was swallowed by a whale but was saved after repenting and committing himself “to preach truth to the face of falsehood.” The bronze statue stands “7½ feet off the ground [and] captures Melville standing firm and composed with sea swirls around his feet as three large whale ribs emerge from the water “representing Melville’s own journey into and out of the whale. Yet, Melville rises above them, his mouth open, as though beginning to speak – to tell the story of Moby-Dick, this truth.” Waterston’s reading brought out the power and emotion of the passage that inspired the statue.
The full unveiling ceremony at the Seamen’s Bethel can be watched on YouTube below:
Lincoln and Melville would cross paths again. During the Civil War, Melville visited President Lincoln in the White House to lobby for government employment. Unfortunately for Melville, Lincoln could not accommodate him and Melville went away empty-handed. After the war, he became a customs inspector in New York City and wrote poetry, his most successful days as a writer behind him.
I discuss New Bedford more in Lincoln in New England, as well as his entire 1848 tour of Massachusetts and his later visits to Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire in 1860. The first trip made Lincoln the Lincoln we think of him as; the second trip made him president.
[Photo credit: Seamen’s Bethel by David J. Kent]
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David J. Kent is Immediate Past President of the Lincoln Group of DC and the author of many books on Abraham Lincoln, Nikola Tesla, and Thomas Edison.
Lincoln’s Whig Party passed on their traditional party leader Henry Clay to nominate General Zachary Taylor as their nominee for the 1848 presidential nomination. Taylor had been the hero of Buena Vista in the recently ended Mexican War, and the public was clamoring for the war hero to be the next commander-in-chief. Lincoln himself spoke out in Taylor’s favor at the Whig convention held in Philadelphia. To balance the ticket featuring the Southern Taylor, the Whigs chose northern Whig Millard Fillmore as the vice-presidential nominee. On July 27, 1848, congressman Lincoln rose in the House of Representative chambers (now Statuary Hall) to address the “presidential question,” i.e., why Taylor would be a good Whig.
Abraham Lincoln became nationally famous in large part because of the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, the series of joint political debates between himself and incumbent Senator Stephen A. Douglas in 1858. Lincoln lost that senate race to Douglas, but it positioned him as a potential presidential candidate. The following spring, Lincoln was invited along with other likely presidential contenders to attend an April 1859 dinner in Boston celebrating Thomas Jefferson’s birthday. That may have been a recognition of his minor celebrity status following the debates, but later that year, business magnate and influencer Jesse Fell coaxed Lincoln into providing an autobiographical sketch that was expanded and widely distributed across the country. In addition to enough viability to garner an invitation to give the Cooper Union speech, several of his New England hosts introduced him as presidential or vice-presidential material.
Abraham Lincoln is best known as the sixteenth President of the United States, long before the POTUS acronym was invented. He was elected in November 1860 and by the time he was inaugurated in March 1861, seven southern states had seceded, with four more joining them just over a month later after the new Confederacy attacked Fort Sumter. But this wasn’t the first time Lincoln had been put forward for executive office. In 1856 he was nominated by his fellow new Republican Party members for Vice President after the party had nominated John C. Fremont for President.
On June 11, 1848, congressman Abraham Lincoln arrived back in Washington, D.C. after having traveled all night from Philadelphia, where he attended the Whig National Convention that nominated Zachary Taylor for president. Upon his return he finds a letter from his wife Mary, who has been visiting her family in Kentucky for several months. These two events begin a campaign and a mystery.
Abraham Lincoln was not happy. He had worked hard to get Zachary Taylor elected as president as a Whig, and yet he was being passed over for the lucrative General Land Office job. Worse, he was being ignored, something the man who had been Whig leader in the Illinois legislature and recent representative to Congress. On May 16, 1849, he made his dissatisfaction with Taylor’s appointment of Justin Butterfield to the Land Office in Illinois.
Abraham Lincoln traveled through upstate New York in early 1861 on his way to Washington, DC for his inauguration, stopping in Westfield, Buffalo, Albany, Peekskill, and New York City. Twelve years before, in 1848, he stopped in Buffalo and saw Niagara Falls on his way home between sessions of congress after he toured around eastern Massachusetts giving speeches in support of Zachary Taylor as the Whig nominee for president [Spoiler: Taylor won] In late April of this year, traveled much the same route in northern New York on my way to the Lincoln Forum spring conference at Hildene in Manchester, Vermont.
