Civil Liberties and Military Justice in Billy Budd and Guardians

Introduction: Franklin's Paradox and the Military Exception

"People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither." Benjamin Franklin's statement is often invoked in times of warfare, when civil liberties tend to be most at risk of curtailment, yet it crucially fails to describe the one sector of the American population most involved in warfare: the military. Historically, military service has not exactly been the voluntary affair it currently is. During the U.S. Civil War, cities like New York and Philadelphia saw riots over Lincoln's imposition of a military draft; the First and Second World Wars witnessed the invention of "conscientious objector" status, and Vietnam made "dodging the draft" a generational meme among baby boomers.

Leaving aside the question of whether military conscription is a gross violation of civil liberties — to some extent, this depends upon the culture, as mass conscription continues in places like Switzerland or Israel with relatively little domestic controversy — it is worth noting that an army private has given up not only his or her freedom, but also his or her own personal security. The loss of freedom is literal: the soldier becomes subject to a code of military justice rather than the free and unrestricted enjoyment of customary civil rights, a code that includes substantial policies intended purely for reasons of social engineering — such as the exclusion until very recently of openly gay service members, or the continued status of adultery as a punishable offense in the army. But the loss of security is total, as the conscript is effectively ordered to kill or be killed in the defense of some larger idea of national security.

This essay considers the intersection of military justice and ideas of imprisonment as they occur in two texts by American authors. Herman Melville's Billy Budd is written after the Civil War as a consciously mythic invocation of a "press-ganged" sailor — the eighteenth-century naval equivalent of the military draft — dating from America's earliest days. Peter Morris's Guardians is a monologue drama about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, originally staged in New York in 2006, with L-Word star Kate Moennig playing a role based on PFC Lynndie England. Reading these two American authors — one writing in the nineteenth century and one in the twenty-first — illuminates the way each approaches issues of confinement, civil liberty, and public security. In the military, the trade of freedom for security results in the loss of both, and of life.

Billy Budd as Prison Narrative: Conscription and Confinement

Rothman, writing in the Oxford History of the Prison, notes the many ways in which the birth of the prison in the nineteenth century "followed the military model" in terms of its patterns of hierarchy and organization. Herman Melville's Billy Budd is therefore a sort of prison narrative: Billy has been "press-ganged" against his will and conscripted into naval service. Considering that naval service in 1797 entailed gender segregation and physical confinement within an actual naval vessel, it is close enough to be defined as a kind of imprisonment with a punishment of forced military servitude. In the eighth chapter of the novel, Melville characterizes the matter of these press gangs — which were hardly uncontroversial — in terms that sound like a mass suspension of civil liberties with ironic results:

But the sailors' dog-watch gossip concerning him derived a vague plausibility from the fact that now for some period the British Navy could so little afford to be squeamish in the matter of keeping up the muster-rolls, that not only were press-gangs notoriously abroad both afloat and ashore, but there was little or no secret about another matter, namely that the London police were at liberty to capture any able-bodied suspect, any questionable fellow at large and summarily ship him to dockyard or fleet. Furthermore, even among voluntary enlistments there were instances where the motive thereto partook neither of patriotic impulse nor yet of a random desire to experience a bit of sea-life and martial adventure. Insolvent debtors of minor grade, together with the promiscuous lame ducks of morality found in the Navy a convenient and secure refuge. Secure, because once enlisted aboard a King's-ship, they were as much in sanctuary, as the transgressor of the Middle Ages harboring himself under the shadow of the altar. (Billy Budd, VIII)

The irony here is that the lawless method of conscription means that naval service is taken advantage of by those who wish to escape the reach of the law. In other words, military service in Billy Budd is not just a form of prison — it is a form of escaping literal debtors' prison or worse penalty for those that "the London police were at liberty to capture."

Wartime Paranoia and the Logic of Military Justice

Melville is careful in the third chapter of Billy Budd to contextualize precisely the moment in which this tale of military justice takes place, in terms that sound more like the post-9/11 "homeland security" paranoia of a decade ago than they do like the 1797 of Melville's actual setting — when the Bill of Rights itself was only six years old:

It was the summer of 1797. In the April of that year had occurred the commotion at Spithead followed in May by a second and yet more serious outbreak in the fleet at the Nore. The latter is known, and without exaggeration in the epithet, as the Great Mutiny. It was indeed a demonstration more menacing to England than the contemporary manifestoes and conquering and proselyting armies of the French Directory. To the British Empire the Nore Mutiny was what a strike in the fire-brigade would be to London threatened by general arson. (Billy Budd, III)

The narrative takes place directly after a naval mutiny during an actual war between Britain and France. The newborn revolutionary democracy of France had come into rapid conflict with the imperialist monarchy of George III. Indeed, February of 1797 had witnessed an actual attempted French invasion of Britain, as part of the French Revolutionary Army's support of Irish insurrection under Wolfe Tone. The larger context involves not only the French but also the American revolutions. The society Melville depicts is one ripe for a kind of wartime paranoia about insurrections in general — and the military insurrection in particular, in which British sailors had risen up against the British navy itself. We are therefore meant to understand Billy's execution — death not for warfare but for a crime that would be easily justified in a civil court on the grounds of self-defense — as Captain Vere's defense of what he sees as civil order and stability.

Conclusion: The Loss of Both Freedom and Security

Reading Herman Melville and Peter Morris together extends the sense of Franklin's observation — in the military, the trade of freedom for security results in the loss of both, and of life. Whether in the form of an eighteenth-century press gang or a twenty-first-century military prison scandal, the institutional structures of military justice consistently subordinate individual civil liberty to the demands of collective security. Yet as both Billy Budd and Guardians suggest, that security is itself never guaranteed. Billy Budd dies not because the navy is made safer by his execution, but because the appearance of order must be maintained at any cost. The soldiers at Abu Ghraib did not produce actionable intelligence or genuine security; they produced photographs that damaged American credibility worldwide. In both cases, the forfeiture of freedom produced not security, but its opposite.