April's cruelest ship of fools

[Terrance]

On this day, April Fools 1857, Melville published his masterwork. 

Meanwhile, Melville had begun perfecting a very different
literary style, exemplified at its best by "Bartleby" (1853),
"Benito Cereno" (1855), and "The Paradise of Bachelors
and The Tartarus of Maids" (1855). In these stories,
Melville depicted the victims of capitalism and slavery no
longer through the eyes of a sympathetic sailor narrator,
but through the eyes of an obtuse observer representing
the class of "gentlemen" whose smug prosperity rested on
the extorted labor of the workers they dehumanized-the
class constituting Melville's public and closest associates
in the social milieu he had rejoined. Mouthing their racist
clichés, mimicking their social snobbery, echoing their
pious platitudes, and exposing their sublime obliviousness
to the suffering on which they fattened, Melville mercilessly
anatomized the readers he had given up hope of converting.
Yet he also jarred them out of their complacency through
language that insistently provoked discomfort, and through
the warning vision he held up again and again of the
apocalyptic doom overtaking their society.

That vision culminated in The Confidence-Man: His
Masquerade (1857). An allegorical apocalypse set on April
Fools' Day, it imaged nineteenth-century America as a
soot-streaked steamer heading down the Mississippi
toward the financial capital of slavery, New Orleans, which
the passengers have mistaken for the New Jerusalem.

http://college.hmco.com/english/lauter/heath/4e/students/index.html