After hijacking Shannon’s thread, thought I’d answer Foster in a separate post:
“Discontent foreran the Two Mutinies, and more or less it lurkingly survived them. Hence it was not unreasonable to apprehend some return of trouble, sporadic or general.”
Melville emphasizes the potential for mutiny: Billy and many others have been impressed & are therefore less likely to feel allegiance; the early Chapters 3 & 5 give the context: 1797, the British are at war with the French. And any captain of a British military ship would be all too aware of the Nore mutiny and the incidents at Spithead, which happened but a few months before. These are discussed in these chapters and hinted at in others (most specifically as Claggart makes his charge against Billy, a reference that irritates Vere). Indeed, the captain dies shortly later in battle with the French warship, the Athee. Setting it in 1797 also hints at the beginning of the British romantic movement, the effects of the French Revolution, and Vere’s Burke-like antipathy for both.
Melville’s cousin (a Google reference implies it – you see the level of my scholarship – was his older brother, but I suspect my memory is correct since he had the surname of his mother’s family) was one of the judges in the Somers affair; it affected him (and therefore his family) deeply. That was about 50 years after the time when the book was set & 50 years before it was written. Mutiny is, however, a context which intensifies the equation: Billy was not guilty – Vere didn’t believe nor did he lead the judges to believe Billy was mutinous. That was accepted as a fiction of Claggart’s, whose motivations remained murky to them (less so to us). However, the murder of an officer on a military vessel in a war zone has implications, one in which fears of mutiny are heightened.
Of course, the ship’s surgeon is of David Foster’s opinion and Melville hints that Vere was philosophically rigid, believing rules applied in realms beyond their dominion. Vere clearly feels that institutions, such as the Navy, provide a structure that more often leads to human happiness than not – so an innocent like Billy who has broken the rules must be sacrificed. (Billy’s spiritual innocence does not mean he isn’t guilty of murder. His act was an unconscious response but Claggart is no less dead from Budd’s blow.) Vere’s argument would not convince a romantic – and most of us would hesitate. (My copy of Billy Budd, bought used in 1971 or so, has an earlier reader’s note after Vere’s long speech convincing the drumhead court to bring in a guilty verdict – “What a Prick!”) But Vere is no straw man nor is his reasoning mysterious or vindictive.