Over the last century forensic document science has developed progressively more sophisticated pattern recognition methodologies for ascertaining the authorship of disputed documents. We present a writer verification method and an evaluation of its performance on historical documents with known and unknown writers. The questioned document is compared against handwriting samples of Herman Melville, a 19th century American author who has been hypothesized to be the writer as well as against samples crafted by several writers from the same time period. The comparison led to a high confidence result to the questioned document's writer ship, as well as gives evidence for the validity of the writer verification method in the context of historical documents. Such methodology can be applied to many such questioned historical documents, both in literary and legal fields.