In 1850 the northern states were opposed to slavery, but The Fugitive Slave Act effectively drug the north into slavery’s messy affair. They could no longer turn a blind eye. Melville clearly comments on the unjust process that the act enforces in chapter 89 of Moby Dick: Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish. This chapter seems to aim at southerners, ridiculing their conception of property. He calls for the transfer of the uncontentious laws of the sea to become a law of the land. But Melville pushes his inquisition towards the entirety of the country in Chapter 92. For even if northerners abhorred the idea of slavery they still tended to hold racial prejudice. Melville criticizes ingrained racism when he addresses the smell of whales: “They hint that all whales always smell bad. Now how did this odious stigma originate?” (448) In his explanation of the origination of a stigma Melville confronts all of his readers to rethink their indoctrinated beliefs. By turning the lens of criticism from southern readers to the whole of the United States, Melville forces his readers, as much as the Fugitive Slave Act does, to acknowledge that they are part of the problem. He affirms that accepting stigma as fact when stemming from a societal lens most likely comes from one isolated incident, or from a bygone civilization. And the reader’s participation in racial stigma is participation in slavery. Melville attempts to reason with all of America by introducing the notion that all men, like whales, “that living or dead, if but decently treated, whales as a species are by no means creatures of ill odor” (449).

What is significant about this contention is the chapter that follows it, The Castaway, continues to chronicle the north’s participation in the slave industry. Stubb “hints” to the reader when he warns Pip of his potential life at sea: “man loves his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.” (452). Melville replicates the United States. Deserting their fellow man to live by the exploits of slavery is Stubb’s boat leaving Pip to die, or worse, go mad at sea while chasing the bankroll of the whale. America’s capitalistic society fuels the intentional oversight of the oppressed.