Towering mothers

... the baffled lady-mother left (unceremoniously) full of towering and demonstrative rage....  --Scenes Beyond the Western Border March 1853; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army. 

Then, high-up, and towering, and all-forbidding before Pierre grew the before unthought of wonderful edifice of his mother's immense pride;—her pride of birth, her pride of affluence, her pride of purity, and all the pride of high-born, refined, and wealthy Life, and all the Semiramian pride of woman. 

--Pierre; Or, The Ambiguities, 1852.

Officers and social equals

"Hundreds go and come at my word; none are my "equals," so none are my social friends."

-- First installment of Scenes Beyond the Western Border, June 1851; and Scenes and Adventures in the Army (1857).

Southern Literary Messenger Vol. 17
June 1851

Concerning the officers of the whale-craft, this seems as good a place as any to set down a little domestic peculiarity on ship-board, arising from the existence of the harpooneer class of officers, a class unknown of course in any other marine than the whale-fleet.

The large importance attached to the harpooneer’s vocation is evinced by the fact, that originally in the old Dutch Fishery, two centuries and more ago, the command of a whale ship was not wholly lodged in the person now called the captain, but was divided between him and an officer called the Specksnyder.... in the American Fishery he is not only an important officer in the boat, but under certain circumstances (night watches on a whaling ground) the command of the ship’s deck is also his; therefore the grand political maxim of the sea demands, that he should nominally live apart from the men before the mast, and be in some way distinguished as their professional superior; though always, by them, familiarly regarded as their social equal.

-- Moby-Dick chapter 33 The Specksynder