1. Peter Buckley, “The Case against Ned Buntline: The ‘Words, Signs, and Gestures’ of Popular Authorship,” Prospects 13 (1988): 256; and Jay Monaghan, The Great Rascal: The Life and Adventures of Ned Buntline (New York: Bonanza: 1951), 48, 55. The information about Buntline's literary career in the 1840s is drawn from these two sources. [BACK]

2. On popular romances of the 1890s and the recasting of the Spanish-Cuban-American War as a “rescue mission for American manhood,” see Amy Kaplan, “Romancing the Empire: American Masculinity in the Popular Historical Novel of the 1890s,” American Literary History 2, no. 4 (winter 1990): 659–90. [BACK]

3. Ned Buntline, The Volunteer: or, The Maid of Monterey (Boston: F. Gleason, 1847), 9. Hereafter cited in text. [BACK]

4. On the Romantic privileging of the country over the city as a response to industrialization, see Raymond Williams Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). [BACK]

5. On Whittier's antiwar poetry, see Robert Johannsen To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford, 1985), 215–17. [BACK]

6. Ned Buntline, Magdalena, the Beautiful Mexican Maid: A Story of Buena Vista (New York: Williams Brothers, 1846), 33. Hereafter cited in text. [BACK]

7. On the stereotype of men of Mexican origin as “idle squanderers,” see Tomás Almaguer Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 51–53. [BACK]

8. Monaghan, The Great Rascal, 150. [BACK]

9. Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (1987; London and New York: Verso, 1998), 85. [BACK]

10. Ned Buntline, The Mysteries and Miseries of New York: A Story of Real Life (New York: Berford and Co., 1848), part 1, 11. Hereafter cited in text. [BACK]

11. Buntline, Mysteries and Miseries, part 5, 14–15. [BACK]

12. Albion, 19 February 1848; cited in Peter Buckley, “To the Opera House: Culture and Society in New York City, 1820–1860,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1984, 389. [BACK]

13. Buckley, “To the Opera House,” 298–99. [BACK]

14. Buckley, “The Case against Ned Buntline,” 251. [BACK]

15. Monaghan, The Great Rascal, 175. [BACK]

16. Scrapbook Volume G, Charles Patrick Daly Papers, New York Public Library. [BACK]

17. Ibid. [BACK]

18. Ned Buntline, The B'hoys of New York: A Sequel to the Mysteries and Miseries of New York (New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, n.d.), 72. Hereafter cited in text. [BACK]

19. Tom Chaffin Fatal Glory: Narciso Lopez and the First Clandestine U.S. War against Cuba (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 49–50. [BACK]

20. Charles Brown Agents of Manifest Destiny: The Lives and Times of the Filibusters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 45–47. [BACK]

21. Robert E. May, “Young American Males and Filibustering in the Age of Manifest Destiny: The United States Army as a Cultural Mirror,” Journal of American History 78, no. 3 (December 1991): 863. [BACK]

22. Monaghan, The Great Rascal, 194. Former employee Thomas Paterson, who wrote a scathing and vindictive biography of Buntline, argued that “[h]is own account is, that being in Havana, he made the acquaintance of Don Manuel de Candelario, who had a daughter called Dona Seberina, living in the palace of her aunt, the Countess Escudera, and that he no sooner appeared in his sailor's toggery, and combed redrusty hair, than Duchess and Countess prostrated themselves before him.” He was rumored to have abandoned her when she became ill and was also said to be having an affair with a married woman in Nashville while Dona Seberina was still alive. Since in the course of his lifetime he was charged with bigamy and was married several times, it would not be surprising if this were true. See Thomas Paterson The Private Life, Public Career, and Real Character of that Odious Rascal NED BUNTLINE!! (New York: Thomas Paterson, 1849), 7. [BACK]

24. Ibid., 99. [BACK]

25. Ibid., 110. [BACK]

26. Ibid., 109–10. [BACK]

27. Buntline, The Mysteries and Miseries of New Orleans (New York: Akarman and Ormsby, 1851), 24. Hereafter citations appear in text. [BACK]

28. Luis Martínez-Fernández Torn between Empires: Economy, Society, and Patterns of Political Thought in the Hispanic Caribbean, 1840–1878 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 26–27. See also Gerald Poyo “With All and For the Good of All”: The Emergence of Popular Nationalism in the Cuban Communities of the United States, 1848–1898 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989), 7. [BACK]

29. Ned Buntline, The Convict: or, The Conspirator's Victim (1851; New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1863), 22. Hereafter citations appear in text. [BACK]

30. Sean Wilentz Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 344. See also Bruce Laurie Working People of Philadelphia, 1800–1850 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 174–77. [BACK]

31. Monaghan, The Great Rascal, 165. [BACK]

32. Ned Buntline's Own, 8 February 1851. [BACK]

33. Ibid., 27 August 1853. [BACK]