In October 1844, on returning to the United States after the four years at sea which became the basis of the majority of his early novels, Herman Melville discovered that his elder brother Gansevoort had become a political orator of national notoriety and a major figure in the Democratic presidential campaign of that year. Gansevoort Melville's political preferences, as widely reported in the newspapers of the day, were for a post-Jacksonian populism which denounced the aristocratic foppery of the Whigs and urged the immediate annexation of Texas in the name of free, white labor. His patriotic invocations of the virtues of salt-of-the-earth republicanism and the American workingman were, that year at least, hardly matched. Described in contemporary reports as “the orator of the human race” and “the great New York orator” he addressed audiences of thousands throughout New York State and at Democratic meetings as far afield as Tennessee and Ohio. He coined the respectful, evocative and adhesive nickname “Young Hickory” for James Polk the Democrat's presidential candidate and in August made a symbolic visit to the ailing Andrew Jackson. According to Hershel Parker, Melville's most recent and most exhaustive biographer, Herman spent the final days of the campaign with his brother probably participating in a huge torchlight procession through Manhattan and listening to his climactic election-night address in Newark, New Jersey.