Opening paragraphs........................

He was born on August 1, 1819, into good circumstances.  But his parents lacked the money to stay there, and so they turned frequently, at no small cost to their dignity, to their elders for help.  On his mother's side, the benefactor had been Maria's late father, Peter Gansevoort, a towering man (six foot three in an age when six-footers were rare) famous for having commanded the defense of Fort Stanwix, and outpost guarding the trade route from the Great Lakes, during the British siege of 1777.  There is a tendency today to think of the Revolutionary War as a dispute among bewigged gentlemen who sent men into battle with inaccurate guns to the martial music of fife and drum; in fact, it was brutal war whose combatants literally tasted sweat and blood flung from the bodies of their enemies as they slashed at each other with bayonets.  It was not uncommon for wounded soldiers to be stabbed through and left to bleed to death, "like sieves," or to have their brains dashed out with "barbarity to the utmost" by the musket butts of the advancing enemy.  Melville was to write about this war in the novel Israel Potter, in which he described the Yankee defenders at Bunker Hill gripping their muskets by the barrel and beating back the British assault by "wielding the stock right and left, as seal-hunters on the beach, knock down with their clubs the Shetland seal."
-Andrew Delbanco,  Melville:  His World and Work