2. George Lippard's 1848
Empire, Amnesia, and the U.S.-Mexican War
[T]he dead men, piled in heaps, their broken limbs, and cold faces, distinctly seen by the light of the morning sun, still remained, amid the grass and flowers, silent memorials of yesterday's Harvest of Death.
—George Lippard, Legends of Mexico
They are strangely superstitious, these wild men of the prairie, who, with rifle in hand, and the deep starlight of the illimitable heavens above, wander in silence over the trackless yet blooming wilderness. Left to their own thoughts, they seem to see spectral forms, rising from the shadows, and hear voices from the other world, in every unusual sound.
—Lippard, 'Bel of Prairie Eden: A Romance of Mexico
In one of several scenes pictured in the complicated conclusion to New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million (1853), George Lippard focuses on a band of “emigrants, mechanics, their wives and little ones, who have left the savage civilization of the Atlantic cities, for a free home beyond the Rocky Mountains.” As their leader, the socialist mechanic-hero Arthur Dermoyne, gazes upon the moving caravan, he sees his followers as “three hundred serfs of the Atlantic cities, rescued from poverty, from wages-slavery, from the war of competition, from the grip of the land-lord!” For just a moment, the eastern U.S. class divisions that Lippard foregrounds in his mysteries-of-the-city novels promise to recede as his sensational story moves westward. That is to say, when in the early 1850s
Lippard's two war novels are only part of a huge body of printed texts and visual images that circulated widely during the years of the U.S.-Mexican War, for the print revolution of the late 1830s and 1840s directly preceded the war.[2] During the war, formulations of a fictive, unifying, “Anglo-Saxon” national identity were disseminated in sensational newspapers, songbooks, novelettes, story papers, and other cheap reading material.[3] Through this popular literature, a heterogeneous assortment of people imagined themselves a nation, staging their unity against the imagined disunity of Mexico, which was repeatedly called a “false nation” in the penny press.[4] But the existence of such a unified U.S. national identity was anything but self-evident during this period, for the 1840s were also marked by increasing sectionalism, struggles over slavery, the formation of an urban industrial working class, and nativist hatred directed at the new, mostly German and Irish immigrants whose numbers increased rapidly after 1845. If the war sometimes concealed these divisions by intensifying a rhetoric of national unity, it could also make differences of class, religion, race, and national origin more strikingly apparent. For although sensational war literature such as Lippard's may have promoted a unifying nationalism as well as the paradoxical idea of a nonimperial U.S. empire, it also often unleashed uncanny, spectral forms that troubled exceptionalist fantasies of free soil, a vacant Western landscape, and a united American people.[5]
Because this fiction was produced so quickly and because it is both highly formulaic and highly dependent on newspaper accounts, it has been largely dismissed by scholars. Even Richard Slotkin, who examined some of this literature in an excellent chapter of The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (1985), calls it “The Myth That Wasn't.” According to Slotkin, some
Lippard's sensational U.S.–Mexican War novels are also particularly interesting because they are a part of his body of work that is rarely emphasized, although there are many connections between this fiction and the other literature he produced. As I suggested in the introduction, critics such as Michael Denning and David Reynolds have focused on Lippard as an advocate of the working classes and as the author of sensational mysteries-of-the-city novels. But if Lippard is, as Denning suggests, “the most overtly political dime novelist of his or subsequent generations,” then it is important to address the significance of empire in his politics, especially since such questions have remained largely unasked because Lippard has most often been classified as a writer of urban literature.[7] In what follows, I attend to the double significance of 1848 in Lippard's journalism and fiction: the year 1848 marks the short-lived hope for a fundamental transformation of both European and U.S. society that was inspired by the European uprisings of that year, as well as by belief in “America's” imperial mission. Those hopes were both revivified and threatened by the U.S.-Mexican War and the incorporation of northern Mexico into the United States.
During the early 1840s, Lippard was a member of what Pierre Bourdieu, following Max Weber, calls the “proletaroid intelligentsia”—those who “make a living, however precarious, from all the minor jobs tied to ‘industrial literature’ and journalism”: he started out as a writer of news stories, political essays, literary criticism, and gothic narratives for local papers such as the Philadelphia Spirit of the Times and the Citizen Soldier.[8] In 1843 and 1844, however, Lippard's sensational novel The Quaker City was published as a series of pamphlets and quickly became one of the most popular and controversial novels of the age. Lippard was subsequently able to earn three thousand to four thousand dollars a year as a writer—a fantastic amount for an author in the 1840s.[9] As Denning
The Quaker City weekly was a five-cent paper with oversized pages, advertised as “A Popular Journal, devoted to such matters of Literature and news as will interest the great mass of readers.”[12] Although during the 1840s and 1850s most story-paper publishers, such as those that I will discuss in Part 2, tried to reach a mass audience comprised of multiple classes by focusing on stories and minimizing controversial political commentary, in Lippard's hands the story paper was a popular form with close ties to active communities such as the antebellum labor and land reform movements: Lippard addresses a diverse and internally divided print community as he “hails” male and female workers, promotes new working-class institutions, and comments on local and national politics. He decided to edit his own paper because he wanted to communicate more directly with his audience, to bypass “Model Editors, or Moral Editors, or Huckstering Publishers” and “to write no more for these mere Agents between the author and the Reader.” He claimed that his work for the Quaker City weekly was especially gratifying because it was “widely circulated and eagerly read in the Homes of the Poor, not only in New York, but in the city which is more directly the scene of our labors” (29 January 1849). Although he printed the work of a few other columnists and writers (especially in the 1850 issues), Lippard did almost all of the writing himself. The purpose of the paper, he said, was to promote the “development of certain views of social reform,” especially “the defence of the Laborer against the exactions of the Capitalist,” through “the medium of popular literature” (30 June 1849). “What is literature good for,” he reflected in another issue, “if it is not to be
Lippard's commitment to the dissemination of land reform principles was certainly one of the factors that encouraged him to see the U.S.-Mexican War in exceptionalist terms, as an opportunity to secure more lands for the landless and to bring freedom and democracy to other parts of the New World. But Lippard's anticlericalism and fears of Catholic conspiracies, both of which were conjoined to a radical Protestant republicanism influenced by French utopian socialists and German immigrants, also reinforced his willingness to find an imperial solution to the problem of industrial capitalism in Northeastern cities. In the next section, I explore some of the ways that sensationalism, Protestantism, and republicanism are reconfigured and recombined in Lippard's writing, especially in his short novel The Entranced; or, The Wanderer of Eighteen Centuries, which was serialized in the Quaker City weekly in 1849 and then published later in a slightly revised form under the title Adonai: The Pilgrim of Eternity in The White Banner, a collection of some of his more militant pieces that he circulated among the membership of the Brotherhood. Edited and published by Lippard himself in 1851, The White Banner contained “Legends of Everyday Life” (brief stories about corrupt rich men, the suffering poor, the demonization of socialism in the press, and other topics); a lecture on the history of Protestantism; various materials relating to the Brotherhood; and the text of Adonai, a wild and bloody historical and religious fantasy that moves from the time of Nero and the Roman Empire to the nineteenth-century United States by following the intermittent “awakenings” of Lucius, or Adonai, a Christian martyr who falls into a magnetic trance that lasts for centuries. Grafting a fictionalized history of Protestantism onto a dystopian, apocalyptic narrative that surveys key New World sites such as a prison, a
But Lippard's “sensational” focus on embodiment also has its costs. Although his emphasis on bodies and sensations responds to contemporaneous formulations of a disembodied soul and an abstract citizen, it also risks obscuring the constructedness of bodies and reifying “differences” of race, gender, and sexuality. Dana D. Nelson has argued, for instance, that in the seduction and raperevenge narratives that pervade his fiction, “Lippard locates questions of civic order in women's mysterious interiors” and maps male dramas “across female bodies.”[14] And as we shall see, antebellum ideologies of race drawn from a variety of sources, from nineteenth-century race science to the histories of William Hickling Prescott, also shaped his representations of racialized bodies. So Lippard's “body politics” are complicated and contradictory; they make the body, in Bruce Burgett's words, “both a ground and a site of political debate.”[15] Although on the one hand his emphasis on bodies may threaten to naturalize some forms of inequality insofar as he suggests that differences of gender and race are fixed and objective, his “sensational” focus on working-class and poor people's embodied relationship to power is on the other hand a meaningful response to the rise of body-transforming institutions such as the prison and the factory and disciplinary practices aimed at the body in the nineteenth century.[16] In what follows, I examine Lippard's Entranced and Adonai in relation to the emergence of such institutions and practices, as well as to the European revolutions of 1848. Then, in the concluding sections, I place Lippard's sensationalism and the events of 1848 in an inter-American frame as I focus on Lippard's two U.S.–Mexican War novels. In Legends of Mexico, Lippard makes manifest a sensational, racialized definition of the nation-people and labors to justify exceptionalist theories of U.S. empire as uniquely progressive and beneficent. The history of class conflict and aggressive empire-building that Lippard tries to disavow by projecting it onto Spain and Mexico erupts forcefully, however, in 'Bel of Prairie Eden, a romance that moves from the colonization of Texas in the 1830s to the invasion of Vera Cruz during the War and then to postwar Philadelphia, which is the focus of the final section of this chapter.[17] I conclude that Lippard's war literature makes especially evident the limits of his sensationalism—particularly as it racializes and genders individual and collective bodies—even as it foregrounds a history of U.S. empire
SENSATIONAL BODIES
In an editorial in the first issue of the Quaker City weekly, which was published on 30 December 1848, Lippard rejoiced that Louis Philippe had been “tumbled from his Kingdom and his wealth” in France, that other nations had caught “the electric thrill of Regeneration in their dead bosoms,” and that “the People of the world” were “in arms for their rights.” “Will 1849 tell a more sublime story than has been told by 1848?” he wondered. “Will the Kings be able to manacle the People, and tread them into slavery once more?” Then, turning his focus from Europe to the United States, he asked his readers: “And our land—is there no cloud upon its horizon? Does not Black Slavery sit brooding in our very Capitol—are not our Great Cities thronged with Armies of white slaves? Who shall tell the deeds which are to come—who shall read the mysterious scroll of 1849?” In the same issue, he began to serialize a sensational story, The Entranced, that addressed those very questions. Over the course of the next few years, the sections of the narrative that he continued to publish in his paper, and especially the revised version that he reprinted in The White Banner under the title Adonai, reflected both his disappointment at the containment of the European revolutions and his sense that the United States was far from free of the forms of inequality that had provoked the uprisings in Europe.[18]
Although, as we shall see, in his U.S.–Mexican War fiction Lippard tried to justify the war by promoting an exceptionalist interpretation of “America's” mission, in Adonai he suggests that the U.S. “Empire” uncannily resembles the Roman Empire; the “Senate of a free people,” for instance, has become “the Senate of a land of tyrants and slaves, governed by the Sceptre of some new Nero, who is counselled by Senators fond of human blood.”[19] Lippard's weird bloody allegory comes to an apocalyptic close on the Day of Judgment, which takes place in the wake of the failed European revolutions of 1848, when the poor of the world rise up against the priests, kings, and rich men of all nations. Although Lippard concludes by affirming that society is capable of social reorganization, this violent climax underlines a prophecy made earlier in the novel that “[w]hen the robbers of the Poor are not moved to mercy by the Book of God, or the Declaration of our fathers, then must the Poor teach unto these Robbers the Gospel of the Rifle” (79).
In Lippard's account, the “Book of God” and the “Declaration of our fathers” fail to protect poor and laboring people because the “robbers of the Poor” exploit, crush, and cannibalize their bodies and then interpret those two documents in self-serving ways by emphasizing a disembodied soul and an abstract citizen, the rewards of the afterlife and the sanctity of “Commerce and Manufactures.” Although elsewhere Lippard is more optimistic about the possibility of reinterpreting and reclaiming republicanism, in Adonai the disembodied abstractions of republican reformism are rejected decisively by Lippard's “Arisen People.”
In this narrative, the Christian convert Adonai falls into a magnetic trance after predicting that in sixteen hundred years Christianity will have transformed all men into brothers; that there will “not be a Priest or a King or a Rich Man left upon the face of the globe”; and that land will no longer “be held by the FEW, for the MANY to make fertile with their sweat and blood” (6 January 1849). When he awakens in 1525, however, he sees a world in which “Popes, Priests, and Kings” are “elevated into a horrible Godhead, while the great mass of mankind [are] brutalized into Devils.” When Adonai wanders on to Germany, he hears a crowd of people asking the reformer Martin Luther to preach “the freedom of the body” as well as “the freedom of the soul,” but Luther angrily responds that the “body is born to suffer and die” (13 January 1849) and that they must place their hopes in the next world. Exasperated, Adonai calls Luther's reform a Half-Way Gospel, predicts that it will strangle Luther's Reformation, and then returns to his cell in the catacombs to sleep again.
When Adonai awakens in 1848, he is pleasantly surprised to witness the uprising of the “People” in Rome. So he dons the Tunic of Labor and wanders around Italy, Germany, and France. Eventually he arrives in Paris, where he listens to the “Prophets of the Poor”—Georges Sand, the socialist Louis Blanc, radical democrat Ledru-Rollin, and others—argue with the “Men of Money” (20 January 1849) over the new form of government. Ultimately the latter take control and try to give new life to a dead social system, represented here by a corpse that the Men of Money try to rejuvenate by applying shocks from a galvanic battery. The lesson in all of this, Lippard suggests toward the end of The White Banner, is that “Europe cannot pass to Liberty but through the Red Sea” of revolution. “When her people rise again they must strike and spare not,” Lippard warned. “Mercy to the tyrants is death to the People. You were merciful in 1848, were you not brave People? How have you been rewarded? Europe dead in the night of despotism gives the answer” (146).[20]
In case any of his readers might imagine that the horrors he is describing are confined to Europe or that they are the relics of a superseded past, Lippard reanimates them in mid-nineteenth-century America as Adonai visits the New World. By comparing sites of struggle in the Europe of 1848 with similar sites in the United States, Lippard countered theories of American exceptionalism that posited the United States as a fluid society free of the inequalities that had plagued the Old World. Adonai expects America to be the land of a “free people, dwelling in Brotherhood, without a single slave to mar their peace, or call down upon their heads the vengeance of God” (42), but the first sight he sees in Washington, D.C., is a slavemart run by a man who proudly claims that his grandfather fought for liberty under Washington. Reeling from “a horror, too deep for words” (47), Adonai goes on to visit several different body-transforming republican institutions, including a prison—“embodiment” of “the Law of the New World” (65)—and a factory, a temple devoted to CAPITAL, “the God of the Nineteenth Century” (59), “whose worship is celebrated upon the very corses of murdered Labor” (61). While visiting the factory, Adonai recognizes the Executioner, a malign figure who has shadowed him through his various awakenings, performing a new role as the overseer of the factory. Reversing contemporaneous narratives that represented “America” as the culmination of a westward-moving history of perpetual progress, Lippard's strategic positioning of the Executioner within a U.S. factory suggests that the exploitation engendered by nineteenth-century U.S. liberal capitalism gives new life to old forms of oppression. As the Executioner puts it, “I am better off, as the Overseer of a Factory, dedicated to Capital, and kept in motion by the murder of Labor, than I have ever been, during the course of eighteen hundred years!” (60).
When Adonai moves on to the U.S. Senate, other republican institutions come under fire as Lippard suggests that capitalism, the state, and the men who foster the symbiotic relationship between the two effectively control the meaning of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, so that democratic-republican promises of equality and freedom become empty words masking the return of supposedly superseded forms of inequality.[21] Again, Adonai discovers that the old has returned in the guise of the new. If the Constitution establishes “a thousand and ten thousand petty tyrants, Lords of the Mart and Lords of the Loom” (53) in place of the king, the president is himself a force more powerful than a king, holding “a power such as no Monarch of the Old World ever grasped” (55). If Liberty is simply the
The solution as Lippard imagines it here is an apocalyptic world revolution. Near the end of the narrative, Adonai encounters “a multitude of people, gathered from all the nations and tribes of the earth” (84) on a plain in the desert. These people, “all the Poor of the world,” are gathered around a sepulchre containing Christ's body that is guarded by a circle of priests, kings, and “Rich Men of all Nations” (85). While the poor crave Christ's body and the healing rays of light that emanate from it, they are told that only the rich have the right to the body of the Lord. Even as Adonai wonders why the multitude don't thrust the kings, the rich, and the priests aside, one poor man runs up and hurls his body against the wall of men. Instantly, however, a priest zaps him with a cross and kills him, and in a satanic inversion of the Last Supper, the kings and rich men divide his body among themselves and feed upon the flesh. As others try to break down the human wall, they are “rent to pieces and devoured” (87). Finally, a man “clad in rags,” with limbs “distorted by labor,” knotted hands, and a face “covered with scars” exhorts the poor of the world to revolt against their masters: “You have prayed to these priests—they have answered you with death. You have shed your tears at the feet of these kings—they have fed upon your flesh. You have clutched the garments of these rich men—they have quenched their thirst with your blood. … NOW THE DAY OF PRAYERS AND TEARS HAS PASSED. THE DAY OF JUDGMENT HAS COME” (86). As the chapter ends, the Arisen People, inspired by a glimpse of the blood of Holy Revolution, advance upon the trembling rich men, priests, and kings. Although elsewhere Lippard focuses more narrowly on poor and working people in Northeastern cities, here his vision of the Arisen People includes “Negroes, Caffirs, Hindoos, Indians” as well as people from China, Japan, the “islands of the sea,” Europe, and the New World (84).
Although the contradictions and limits of this vision of world revolution must be emphasized, it is important to understand that the body
Lippard's sensational emphasis on the body and on a revolutionary interpretation of the New Testament was in part a response to the rigidly Calvinist doctrines of conservative, orthodox Philadelphia Presbyterians who, according to Bruce Laurie, championed “hierarchical social arrangements in which each man knew his place.”[25] In The White Banner, Lippard chose “John Calvin, with his hollow eyes, his granite heart, and hands dripping with the blood of souls” (135) as the exemplar of a “coldly intellectual form of Protestantism” (133). “If he presented an
At the same time, however, in Adonai Lippard's dark allusions to the pope as well as Henry VIII and Calvin, along with his references to the Priests who keep the People from Christ's body, should make it clear that this version of radical Protestantism brings with it a complex of anti-clerical and anti-Catholic beliefs. Even though he uses the word “priest” here to refer not only to Catholics but also to other religious leaders who use “iron books” or “crosses” or “images” to separate Christ from the People, these representations still align Catholicism with religious tyranny and the oppression of the poor. In part, this was a response to the intensified post-1848 conservatism of the Catholic Church in Philadelphia. According to Laurie, the European uprisings “ripened” the “inchoate political conservatism” of U.S. prelates: “They tarred radical republicanism with the brush of ‘red revolution’ and extrapolated the lessons of 1848 in Europe to the politics of their adopted city. They took a dim view of any tinkering with the established order or any form of collective action in redress of social injustice. Clerics insisted that the aggrieved resolve class conflict through ‘moral suasion.’”[29] Even if Lippard was trying to counter this political conservatism, however, such anticlericalism also had the power to divide working-class people, inasmuch as Philadelphia had repeatedly witnessed violent confrontations between working-class Protestants and immigrant Catholics during the 1840s.
In the Quaker City weekly, Lippard claimed to have “always opposed political and sectarian Nativeism” (11 August 1849). In response to a letter from a reader who sent him an article “abusing our citizens of foreign birth,” he replied that the “true American (whether native or adopted,) can never build up himself, by raising a prejudice, against a particular race” (28 April 1849). The Quaker City; or, The Monks of
In New York, the revised and expanded version of The Empire City that Lippard published shortly before his early death, he represents the Catholic Church as a rival empire that initially threatens to take over the Western lands that are settled by the socialist-mechanic Arthur Dermoyne and his white working-class followers at the end of the novel. One Catholic conspirator, a Prelate, argues that since the United States is certain to “finally absorb and rule over all the nations of the Continent,” the policy of the Church must be to “absorb and rule over the Republic of the North” (68), for “ours is not so much a church as an EMPIRE … which, using all means and holding all means alike lawful, for the spread of its dominion, has chosen the American Continent as the scene of its loftiest triumph, the theater of its final and most glorious victories” (69). When it is revealed that gold has been discovered in California, the struggle for the Western lands takes on even more significance. Although the Prelate hopes that the gold will fortify the earthly power of the Catholic Church, the pope's legate—who is really one of Lippard's heroes in disguise—vows that within this corrupt church “there is another Church of Rome, composed of men, who, when the hour strikes, will sacrifice everything to the cause of humanity and God” (73). Meanwhile Dermoyne, one of several possible heirs to these Western lands, dreams of taking a party of workmen to a spot in the West “unpolluted by white or black slavery,” where they can build a utopian community devoted to “the worship of that Christ who was himself a workman, even as he is now, the work-man's God” (108).
All of this helps to explain how the sensational, radical Protestant vision of world revolution that Lippard offers in Adonai could also be used
As I suggested above, Lippard's utopian investment in the project of land reform also predisposed him to favor the annexation of new lands as a way to provide more territory for landless workers. Although he frequently expressed his contempt for party politics, he was closer to the Democrats than the Whigs: he generally endorsed the Democratic policies of welcoming new immigrants and promoting imperial expansion as a way to reduce crowding and competition for jobs and other resources in the East. And even as he broke with Democratic orthodoxy by repeatedly denouncing chattel slavery, he also deployed the problematic metaphor of “white slavery,” which, as David Roediger argues, often led to an insidious “prioritizing of struggles by whites.”[33] Although both the fugitive slave Randolph Royalton and the socialist mechanic Arthur Dermoyne are portrayed sympathetically in New York, at the end of the novel Randolph and his sister go “abroad” (279) while the story of the white workingman moves to the foreground as Dermoyne and his followers find a “free home” in the West. In other words, Lippard concludes with a scenario (former slaves leave the country, white working families go West) that recalls the white egalitarianism of the Wilmot Proviso, the measure that would have banned slavery in newly acquired lands so as to preserve a “home” for free white laborers. Thus although in Adonai and in his other writings Lippard countered one version of American ex-ceptionalism—what could be called a Hartzian theory that the United States is a fluid society free from the forms of institutionalized inequality that plagued Europe—he placed his hopes in another version of (Turnerian) exceptionalism based on the premises that “free” Western lands might serve as a safety valve for such domestic social and economic
AMERICAN SENSATIONS
In Legends of Mexico, Lippard celebrated the bloody events that “aroused a People into arms,” “spoke to the hearts of fifteen millions people,” “startled a People into action, and sent the battle-throbs palpitating through fifteen millions hearts.”[35] In the first chapter, Lippard envisions the nation-people as a single human body that comes to life when it hears a “Cry, a Groan, a Rumor” “thundering” (11) from the shores of the Rio Grande. Lippard makes a sensational appeal to his readers, an appeal that records a visceral, mass response to war to which his Legends of Mexico also aims to contribute. This sensational appeal is meant to arouse and startle, to provoke a collective bodily response to the battles being waged over national borders. As Lippard mobilizes sensationalism in the service of U.S. empire, differences of class and status (the “hardy Mechanic” [12], the “working people” [13]) appear only to disappear within the collective body of the “free People of the American Union” (16), which is united precisely in opposition to the mixed-race peoples of Mexico. Here, Lippard's war sensationalism emphasizes intensely nationalist affects and feelings at the expense of class: he tries to subsume class within race and nation by urging his readers to identify with a fictive, white U.S. national body.
The mass response, the “wild excitement” (12) that Lippard both recorded and tried to reproduce, was a relatively novel sensation, made possible by the print revolution. As Robert Johannsen suggests, because of these changes in print culture, the U.S.-Mexican War would be “experienced more intimately, with greater immediacy and closer involvement than any major event in the nation's history. It was the first American war to rest on a truly popular base, the first that grasped the interest of the population, and the first people were exposed to on an almost daily basis. The essential link between the war and the people was provided by the nation's press, for it was through the ubiquitous American newspaper that the war achieved its vitality in the popular mind.”[36] In other words, the penny press and other forms of popular culture helped to produce feelings of intimacy, immediacy, and involvement in the war
The opening of Lippard's Legends of Mexico focuses on this very process whereby news of events in Mexico serves as the catalyst for a sensational, intensely nationalist response to the war. U.S. newspapers speculated about the possibility of war for months after Polk sent an Army of Observation in February 1846 to the Rio Grande, which the United States claimed on specious grounds as its new southern border after it annexed Texas in 1845.[37] Then in May 1846, when Polk declared war, prowar demonstrations were staged in every major U.S. city, including a rally attended by twenty thousand people in Philadelphia, Lippard's Quaker City.[38] But war supporters waited nervously for nearly two weeks for news about Zachary Taylor's forces. Lippard describes this situation in the beginning of Legends of Mexico: “In the spring of 1846, from the distant south, there came echoing in terrible chorus, a Cry, a Groan, a Rumor! That cry, the earnest voice of two thousand men, gathered beneath the Banner of the stars of a far land, encompassed by their foes, with nothing but a bloody vision of Massacre before their eyes” (11). Popular representations of embattled U.S. troops must have excited feelings of fear, anxiety, and identification in many readers. Thus when news of victories at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma finally reached the United States, nationalist celebrations erupted throughout the country. According to Lippard, as “thunder at once, convulses and purifies the air, so that Rumor [of U.S. victories in battle] did its sudden and tempestuous work, in every American heart. At once, from the People of twenty-nine states, quivered the Cry—‘To Arms! Ho! for the new crusade!’” (12). As Lippard represents it, war reports convulse and purify “American” hearts, engendering a unified national body.
Benedict Anderson suggests that representations of national simultaneity indicate a radically changed form of consciousness decisively linked to the spread of print capitalism. Newspapers in particular, he argues, encouraged readers to imagine themselves part of a national community reconstituted by the “extraordinary mass ceremony” of “almost precisely simultaneous consumption.”[39] During the 1840s, the invention of the telegraph facilitated the rapid transmission of news, supporting collective nationalist responses to the war on an unprecedented mass scale.[40] In Legends of Mexico, Lippard represents such a scene of national fantasy as he imagines the nation-people simultaneously responding, in different places, to news of battles in Mexico:
From the mountain gorges of the north, hardy birds of freemen took their way turning their faces to the south, and shouting—Mexico! In the great cities, immense crowds assembled, listening in stern silence, to the stories of that far-off land, with its luxuriant fruits, its plains of flowers, its magnificent mountains overshadowing calm lakes and golden cities, and then the cry rung from ten thousand throats—Mexico! The farmhouses of the land, thrilled with the word. Yes, the children of Revolutionary veterans, took the rifle of '76 from its resting place, over the hearth, and examined its lock, by the light of the setting sun, and ere another dawn, were on their way to the south, shouting as they extend their hands toward the unseen land—Mexico! (12)
Here, the “word” reaches the “mountain gorges of the north,” the “great cities,” the “farmhouses of the land,” and “the children of Revolutionary veterans” everywhere, linking together these diverse sites on the basis of their common response to the news of war. This vision of bodies in different locations simultaneously turning “south” and shouting “Mexico” seeks to reconcile differences of region and occupation within a larger national unity. Although Anderson understands this process of imagining the nation through the medium of print in relatively abstract terms, Lippard represents the national community as a collective body that convulses, quivers, and thrills to the news of the U.S.-Mexican War. That is to say, if for Anderson the nationalist “meanwhile” (25) produces a sense of “community in anonymity” (36) as it connects different parts of the nation, Lippard's war literature shows how nationalism works by also particularizing and foregrounding bodies rather than simply abstracting from and decorporealizing them. If the “skeleton” of national history must be clothed “with flesh and blood” (26) in order for people to respond to it, then nationalism as mediated by print capitalism also depends upon thrilling sensations of embodiment.
In the opening chapter of Legends of Mexico, these sensations of embodiment are distinctly racialized. Reginald Horsman argues that during the U.S.-Mexican War “the Americans clearly formulated the idea of themselves as an Anglo-Saxon race.” He adds that although many U.S. commentators thought of this “race” as primarily English and distinguished it from an inferior Celtic race, for example, others viewed the “American” as “a unique blend of all that was best in the white European races.”[41] In Legends of Mexico, Lippard rejects the identification of whiteness with Englishness as he defines the American people as fundamentally Northern European: “We are no Anglo-Saxon people. No!” Lippard asserts. “All Europe sent its exiles to our shore. From all the nations of Northern Europe, we were formed. Germany and Sweden and
As this passage suggests, Lippard attempts to identify “America” with a particular racially defined community in order to justify U.S. empire-building. That is to say, in Legends of Mexico the body of the nation-people is placed within both a sacred and a European lineage as Lippard appeals to a white democratic utopianism that he opposes to European monarchy. Unlike other past empires that have been subject to the vicissitudes of history, Lippard contends that U.S. empire will be unique, a holy, antimonarchical community dedicated to the brotherhood of man. But this conception of America as immanent utopia is fundamentally grounded on racial hierarchies and the dynamics of violent expansion: Lippard's radical Protestant millennialism sanctions U.S. imperialism as he imagines history culminating in a U.S. empire that he describes elsewhere as a Palestine for redeemed labor.[43] In this utopian fantasy, the contradictions of history, class conflict, and violent conquest are displaced by a vision of the American “race” as a chosen people and the U.S. empire as a sacred community.
Such a reading of U.S. empire as uniquely beneficent and egalitarian is foregrounded on the cover of the 1847 T.B. Peterson edition of Legends of Mexico, where a citation from Thomas Paine's The Crisis (1777) appears: “We fight not to enslave, nor for conquest; But to make room upon the earth for honest men to live in.” In 1847, in the middle of the U.S.-Mexican War, this reference to Paine's Revolutionary War writings suggested multiple meanings. First, it set up the U.S.-Mexican War as a repeat performance of the Revolutionary War (recall the “children of Revolutionary veterans” picking up the “rifle of '76” and setting out for Mexico). Although many opponents of the U.S.-Mexican War argued that it invited the extension of slavery and was an unjustified war of invasion, this citation implicitly appealed to the republican ideals of freedom and independence and explained the conflict with Mexico as another battle against tyranny.[44] Second, the use of this quotation supported the exceptionalist premise that U.S. empire was fundamentally different from the “shattered” New World empires of Britain, Spain, and Portugal. More specifically, it implied that the U.S.-Mexican War was a different sort of project than the Spanish conquest of Mexico, which had enthralled U.S. readers for years, most notably in the form of William H. Prescott's massive and massively popular History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843). The passage from The Crisis, however, is actually misquoted; the original reads: “We fight not to enslave, but to set a country free, and to make room upon the earth for honest men to live in.”[45] The substitution of the phrase “nor for conquest” for “to set a country free” shows how important it was to U.S. imperialists to establish distinctions between the U.S.-Mexican War and the Spanish conquest of Mexico, even as the parallels between the two remained a source of endless, if uneasy, fascination.
During the 1840s in the United States, the Spanish conquest of Mexico was generally interpreted as necessary, since it brought Christianity to the so-called New World. But it was also viewed as ultimately flawed because the Spanish were not Protestants but Catholics; because Spaniards as a people were said to be characterized by superstition, avarice, cruelty, and tyranny; because they were not considered racially pure, but rather were disposed to mix with conquered peoples; and because they were not the chosen people who, according to millennialists, were destined to lead the world to the utopia at the end of history.[46] Prescott was him-self deeply ambivalent about Spain: he opposed the annexation of Texas and the U.S.-Mexican War and seems to have worried that the United States was not exempt from history, that it too might be subject to the
And yet, this belief in the exceptional status of U.S. empire was by no means untroubled by doubts and contradictions. The ideological legacy of eighteenth-century republicanism, for instance, continued to power-fully shape ideas about empire in the 1840s. According to republican beliefs, the pursuit of empire always threatened a republic with corruption and decline through overextension and by engendering luxury, bringing in foreign populations, and encouraging the establishment of professional armies.[49] This republican “drama of imperial decline,” as Angela Miller calls it, is staged in Thomas Cole's famous series of paintings entitled The Course of Empire (1833–1836). Cole depicts what he and many of his contemporaries understood to be the five stages of empire: the Savage State, the Arcadian or Pastoral State, Consummation, Destruction, and finally Desolation. As one contemporary writer put it, Cole's paintings represented “the march of empire, or the rise, decadence, and final extinction of a nation, from the first state of savage rudeness through all the stages of civilization to the very summit of human polish and human greatness, to its ultimate downfall.”[50] Miller suggests that many of Cole's contemporaries responded enthusiastically to the paintings, even as they struggled to deny the relevance of this narrative for U.S. empire; they maintained that the “exceptional conditions of its expansion—peaceful, nonaggressive, republican, and blessed with an inexhaustible wilderness—guaranteed that the nation would avoid the fate drawn by Cole.”[51] But during the war years, the fiction of peaceful and nonaggressive U.S. expansion became much more difficult to maintain, and the rhetoric of republicanism often contributed to contemporary languages of anti-imperialism.
All of this suggests that assertions of American exceptionalism cannot always be taken at face value, but rather should often be seen as nervous at-tempts to manage the contradictions of ideologies of U.S. empire-building, contradictions that pervade war literature such as Lippard's. In other
First, he invokes the Black Legend. This system of beliefs was supported by anti-Catholic sentiments, accounts of the Spanish Inquisition, reports of Spanish atrocities in the New World, and ideas about the horrors of racial mixing. After the Black Legend traveled across the Atlantic with the early colonists, it was reinforced by the anti-Catholic nativism of the 1840s as well as the war with Mexico.[52] Lippard draws on the Black Legend when he identifies tyranny, luxury, and avarice with Spain, introduces rapacious Spanish villains, and contrasts an evil Spanish conquest with a liberating U.S.-American presence in Mexico. In the opening chapter, for instance, Lippard implicitly distinguishes northern European colonists of the Americas from the Spanish when he insists that the northern Europeans crossed the Atlantic “not for the lust of gold or power, but for the sake of a Religion, a Home” (15). By identifying Spanish conquerors with the lust for gold and power that he deplored in both journalism and urban gothic literature, Lippard struggles to distance him-self from the very analogy between Spain and the United States that his words repeatedly suggest.[53] Even though he tries to distinguish the two, however, U.S. empire becomes, as we shall see, an uncanny double of the Spanish empire in this text. For if the United States displaces and replaces the remnants of the Spanish empire in Mexico, it also inherits the curses heaped on Spain: as the violence depicted in this novel escalates, it becomes difficult to separate Spanish tyranny from U.S.-American freedom.
Lippard's second major strategy is to unify the U.S. nation-people by repeatedly sketching pictures of endangered, mutilated, or destroyed U.S. bodies. He often uses bloody, gothic language and imagery to illustrate the horrors of war. Lippard zooms in on gory scenes in which a Mexican cannonball is unroofing the skull of a U.S. soldier (55); or in which U.S. troops advance through a battlefield strewn with their comrades “in mangled masses” (82); or in which a soldier's lower jaw is torn away “by the blow of a murderous lance” (128). Like other prowar writers, he represents evil Mexican soldiers mangling and robbing the U.S. dead and wounded as they lie helpless after the fight. By representing Mexicans as a threat to the bodies of the nation-people, Lippard urges readers to unite despite their differences.
In one especially telling instance, he focuses on an Irish immigrant, a common soldier, who came “from the desolated fields of Ireland, across the ocean, then into the army” (55). As he often does in his war fiction, Lippard lingers on the manly body of the soldier, “attired in a blue round jacket, his broad chest, laid open to the light.” As he listens to the words of his commander, his “swarthy face is all attention, his honest brow, covered with sweat, assumes an appearance of thought.” Then suddenly, as one example among many of “the infernal revelry of war,” Lippard depicts a grotesque battle scene in which “the soldier is torn in two, by a combination of horrible missiles, which bear his mangled flesh away, whirling a bloody shower through the air. That thing beneath the horse's feet, with the head bent back, until it touches the heels, that mass of bloody flesh, in which face, feet, and brains, alone are distinguishable, was only a moment past, a living man” (54). The intentness with which Lippard focuses on the mangled body of the Irish soldier suggests a number of possible readings. The sensational excessiveness of this account may appeal, for instance, to a ghoulish voyeurism that takes pleasure in scenes of bodily destruction. Indeed, the scene might attract a reader who particularly enjoys reading about the destruction of the Irish immigrant body, a liminal figure serving as a scapegoat through which the fantasy of bodily destruction can be more easily staged.[54] But Lippard frames the incident with a sentimental narrative about the soldier's wife, who followed him with baby in arms from Ireland to the battlefield and who holds onto his festering body all night until the army gravediggers bury it. Lurid as even this detail is, the inclusion of it along with the initial description of the soldier suggests that Lippard is also trying to provoke sympathy in his readers by focusing on the bereaved family as well as the destruction of the “good” soldier's body.
Inasmuch as Lippard urges readers to feel for this Irish immigrant soldier, he implicitly responds to nativist prejudices against the Irish. That is, such a representation of the immigrant body could be said to symbolically incorporate marginal whites such as the Irish into the American “race,” since Lippard makes the soldier into a martyr for the white nationalist cause. Once again, however, this incorporation of marginal whites takes place at the expense of Mexicans positioned as a threat to the white family and the bodily integrity of the Irish soldier.[55] And if Lippard's repressentations of bodies endangered or shattered by Mexican forces extend Americanness to the Irish immigrant, they are also meant to unite readers at home. Lippard even pictures for his audience the sensations of nationalist unanimity that he wants them to feel in response to these war scenes: “At this very hour, in the American Union at least one hundred thousand hearts, are palpitating in fearful anxiety for us, afraid that every moment may bring the news of the utter slaughter of Taylor and his men” (77).
But as Lippard seeks to mobilize gothic sensationalism in behalf of U.S. nation and empire-building, the goriness of his battle scenes trans-gresses the very racial and national boundaries that he in other ways tries to establish. As the scene shifts from the first battles of the war at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma to the fighting in the city of Monterrey and then to the war's bloodiest battle, Buena Vista, Lippard represents more and more scenes in which Mexican homes are invaded, Mexican families are destroyed, and Mexican bodies are “splintered into fragments” (96) and mowed “into heaps of mangled flesh” (101). Instead of converting conquest into liberation, this focus on Mexican losses registers the spectacular acts of violent displacement that supported the nationalist dream of white freedom.
As Lippard labors to distinguish U.S. empire from Spanish empire, he often adapts rhetorical strategies from mysteries-of-the-city novels. In novels such as New York and The Quaker City, Lippard frequently contrasts the high life of the rich and powerful with the lowly life of the poor and oppressed. This strategy is so common in mysteries-of-the-city literature that it is one of its defining features. Mysteries-of-the-city novels also often attack wealthy nonproducers by misrecognizing capitalism as the intrusion of a feudal/aristocratic mode of production into liberal democratic America. Here, however, Lippard uses contrasts and the language of feudalism to cast Mexicans in the role of wealthy oppressor. When Lippard first introduces General Arista before the battle of Palo Alto, for instance, he uses the same kind of language, along with the supplement of a racialist orientalism, that he deploys to characterize evil rich seducers
Figure 1. Detail, “The Death of Ringgold,” from the Quaker City, 13 January 1849. (Courtesy American Antiquarian Society)
Lippard also maps a language of class onto nation when he moves from descriptions of battle scenes to the legends of “passion, of poetry, of home” (27) that “clothe the skeleton” of history “with flesh and blood” (26). In one of these legends, Lippard tells the story of a beautiful mestiza named Inez who has secretly married a U.S. soldier only to be separated from him by her tyrannical Castilian father. The extravagant luxury of the settings that Inez inhabits suggests parallels between the elite Mexicans and the mansion-dwelling capitalist aristocracy of Lippard's mysteries-of-the-city fiction. Inez's bedroom is paved with mosaic slabs of marble and includes a “fountain, bubbling from a bath, sunken in the centre of the place, while four slender pillars supported the ceiling” (28). And when she dreams of her marriage to the U.S. soldier in the Cathedral of Matamoras, we learn that the altar is made of solid silver, with a candelabra of gold above it and a balustrade of precious metals extending on either side. “Count the wealth of a fairy legend; and you have it here, in this solemn cathedral,” Lippard advises us. “And yonder—smiling sadly over all the display of wealth—stands the Golden Image of the Carpenter's Son of Nazareth, and by his side, beams the silver face of his Divine Mother” (29). Here Lippard's Protestant iconoclasm combines with a radical republican fear of luxury to position these Mexican Catholics, with their fashionable churches and excessive displays of wealth, as the counterparts of the “upper ten” that he attacks in his mysteries-of-the-city novels.
Despite the many parallels between the Mexican ruling class and the “upper ten” that Lippard demonizes in his mysteries-of-the-city fiction, his desire to unite the U.S. nation-people along racial lines prevents him from explicitly comparing the privileged classes of Mexico and the United States in Legends of Mexico. Instead, elite Mexicans take on the role almost exclusively of the evil rich, while elite U.S. officers, many of whom are the sons of wealthy and influential men such as Henry Clay, become heroes.[57] For the most part, then, Lippard's critique of U.S. class relations is rerouted as he foregrounds heroic regional, national, and racial types. For instance, the U.S. soldier that Lippard calls the Virginian, who is presented as a point of readerly identification and as the appropriate partner for Inez, is characterized only by his region, his race,
Although Lippard avoids making explicit comparisons between wealthy U.S. and Spanish oppressors in Legends of Mexico, his animus against the Spanish and his use of the mestiza Inez as a symbol of the Mexican nation might suggest parallels between the oppressed Indians, who are victimized by the Spanish dream of gold, and the exploited lower million in the United States. That is, even though Lippard struggles to redirect class identifications in Legends of Mexico, he evokes a certain amount of sympathy for Mexican Indians by placing them in a position that is symbolically similar to that of aggrieved groups within the U.S. These kinds of parallels are frequently explored, however tentatively, in the popular literature of the period. In many of the accounts of the conquest that circulated during these years, Mexican Indians were represented much more sympathetically than were the Spanish conquerors, even though many of these representations also included racist allusions to human sacrifice and other exotic rituals. These more sympathetic representations of Mexican Indians often, however, supported hispanophobic responses that justified U.S. intervention in Mexico. In Legends of Mexico, for instance, Lippard includes a romanticized representation of an Indian tribe that has fled to the mountains bearing torches that were lighted at the eternal flame of Montezuma: “When the Hero-Priest Hidalgo,—descended from the Aztec race—raised the standard of revolt, and declared the soil of Anahuac, free from European despotism,” Lippard writes, “that torch blazed in the faces of the Spaniards and lit them to their bloody graves” (34). In this passage, Lippard identifies the Mexican War of Independence with Indian struggles against Spanish despotism and thereby seems to endorse Indian resistance, though he quickly moves on and focuses once again on white North Americans as the agents of change in Mexico.
Even though Lippard extends some sympathy to Mexican Indians, he never represents them as equals. Instead, he tends to identify them with the dead past, so that his largely Prescott-derived pictures of Indian enclaves have a “land-that-time-forgot” feel to them; they also recall James Fenimore Cooper's “vanishing Americans” in novels such as The Last of the Mohicans.[59] The Indian tribe that he focuses on in Legends of Mexico is completely cut off from modern Mexico, “fenced in from civilization by impenetrable thickets swarming with wild beasts” (34); he describes them as “one of those remnants of the Aztec people, which have been hidden in the desert, from the eye of the white man, for three hundred years” (35). Even though Lippard is implicitly critical of “civilized” values here, his representation of Indians as relics of the past suggests that they will not play a significant role in Mexico's future. What is more, with the exception of Inez, Lippard usually represents the racial heterogeneity of Mexico negatively. For example, like most other writers for the penny press, Lippard describes “the Ranchero” as “that combination of the worst vices of civilization and barbarism” (25). Drawing on the dominant strain of the race science of the time, Lippard suggests in this passage that racial mixtures, particularly the mixture of Spanish and Indian blood, result in offspring combining the worst of both races.[60] Once again, Lippard appeals to racial distinctions to override the parallels between internal hierarchies in the United States and Mexico that his words might otherwise suggest.
Although Lippard generally condemns racial mixtures and tries to distinguish between the United States and Mexico on grounds of racial purity, however, his fantasy solution to the conflict between the two nations is a marriage between a U.S. soldier and the mestiza Inez. This plot device recurs in much of the war literature, although most of the heroines are creoles. International romances between U.S. soldiers and elite Mexican women were often represented in the popular literature as a benign form of imperial conquest or as an alternative to it: the romance plots of a good deal of cheap war fiction were echoed by contemporary calls to conquer Mexico by “whitening” it through transnational heterosexual unions. In November of 1847, a writer for the Democratic Review even suggested that a postwar U.S. army of occupation in Mexico could result in the “strong infusion of the American race,” which “would impart energy and industry gradually to the indolent Mexicans, and give them such a consistency as a people, as would enable them to hold and occupy their territories in perfect independence. … The soldiers succeeding each other for short terms would most of them, as they were
As popular writers fantasized about heterosexual union between a feminized Mexico and a masculinized United States, they appealed to narratives of gender and sexuality to turn force into consent and conquest into international romance.[63] In this way, they tried to establish distinctions between a rapacious Spanish conquest and an idealized, peaceful, and nonaggressive U.S. relationship to Mexico. But as we shall see in Part 2, these romances rarely conceal the coercive power relations that lie at their heart, and they also raise issues about racial mixture that undermine the precarious distinction between a united white American race and a racially heterogeneous Mexico. For if the mixture of Spanish and Indian blood is said to result in offspring that combine the worst of both races in the case of the demonized ranchero, then the marriage between the mestiza Inez and the Virginian, for instance, might well threaten to corrupt the fictive purity of white America, despite the optimism in some of the literature about the possibility of “improving” the Mexican “race” through pairings between U.S. men and Mexican women. Although Lippard never addresses this inconsistency, these kinds of contradictions plague his efforts to distinguish clearly the U.S. and the Spanish empires and therefore threaten to undermine his exceptionalist vision of “America.”
One of the most complicated convolutions of this distinction-forging logic occurs when Lippard tries to represent the U.S.-Mexican War as a just retribution for the atrocities committed during the Spanish conquest of Mexico. On the eve of the battle of Palo Alto, for example, an old Aztec priest in a remote Indian community lights a torch at the flame of Montezuma and proclaims the doom of the Spaniards. Just as the Spaniards conquered the Aztecs, the priest declares, so will “a new race from the north” defeat the Spaniards in battle. “That Murder done by the Spaniard, returns to him again; and the blood that he once shed, rises from the ground, which will not hide it, and becomes a torrent to overflow his rule, his people, and his altars!” (47). The gothic language of uncanny, bloody revenge heightens as the chant continues:
Montezuma, from the shadows of ages, hear the cry of thy children! Arise! Gaze from the unclosed Halls of Death, upon the Spaniard's ruin, and tell the ghosts to shout, as he dashes to darkness in a whirlpool of blood:
― 66 ―Montezuma, and all ye ghosts, sing your song of gladness now, and let the days of your sorrow be past! Even, above the ocean of blood, which flows from thy mouth, over the land of Anahuac, behold the Dove of Peace, bearing her green leaves and white blossoms to the children of the soil! (47)
In this passage, the ghosts of Indians who died during the Spanish conquest lurk in the shadows of the unclosed Halls of Death, mutely witnessing the preparations for the battle between Mexico and the United States. Lippard suggests that the victory of the U.S. forces will exorcise these ghosts by bringing about the Spaniard's ruin. He figures the United States as the savior of Montezuma's children; paradoxically, the ocean of blood that is spilled as the United States fights Mexico impels the Dove of Peace to greet the long-oppressed “children of the soil” with green leaves and white blossoms.
The irony of this passage is that the United States must imitate the Spanish conquerors in order to replace them and put the ghosts of the earlier conquest to rest. For if U.S. forces dash the Mexicans to darkness in a whirlpool of blood, what ghosts will this second bloody conquest engender? By raising the ghosts of conquests past, Lippard invokes specters that trouble the exceptionalist premise that the U.S.-initiated war was not an act of aggressive expansionism but rather the extension of freedom to oppressed peoples. For even as he tries to represent the United States as the redeemer of Mexico, bringing peace to the indigenous “children of the soil,” the paradoxes that he encounters and the bloody battle scenes that directly follow threaten the distinction he is trying to make between the Spanish and U.S. empires: Lippard's war pictures foreground the instability of empire, the contradictions of history, and the violence of U.S. conquest despite his desire for us to remember things differently.
WAR PICTURES
The going forth is beautiful. To see those flags flutter so bravely from the lances, like the foliage of those trees of death, to hear the bugles speak out,—but the morrow? The coming back? Hark! through the darkened air, did you not hear a sound, like the closing of a thousand coffin lids?
—George Lippard, Legends of Mexico George Lippard's 1848 67
Most of Legends of Mexico is devoted to the display of sensational pictures of battle scenes—it was even advertised in the pages of the Quaker City as “the most graphic and readable book ever written on the war with Mexico” (30 December 1848). The narrative moves from the opening border skirmishes in May 1846 to the first battles at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma and the attack on Monterrey in September 1846, before concluding at Buena Vista on 22 and 23 February 1847. Notably, Lippard leaves out other battles fought during this period, battles that were more difficult to glorify, including the “confused and costly” encounters at Contreras and Churubusco and the “ill-advised” battle of Molino del Rey.[64] Despite such telling omissions, however, his Legends of Mexico reveals much about popular responses to the war as it took place, for Lippard incorporates the language of contemporaneous newspaper accounts and frequently references war pictures that were staged as panoramas in theaters, reprinted as illustrations in papers, and sold on the street as popular prints.
Bill Brown proposes that Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895) “registers a shift in the mass mediation of war,” reinterprets the Civil War “through the cultural lens of the [camera] lens itself,” and thereby illuminates “a particular history of American seeing.”[65] It could be argued that Lippard's war literature also registers such a shift but at an earlier moment, a moment when improvements in communications and print technology made it possible for pictures, news, books, and other printed, warrelated material to circulate throughout the nation shortly after the important battles of the U.S.-Mexican War took place. We can glimpse the effects of these new technologies in Lippard's writing as they structure the framing of the visible in Legends of Mexico. He begins his long account of the battle of Palo Alto by painting a panoramic picture that resembles, in its representational strategies, the bird'seye views of battlefields and military lines that were also on display in popular lithographs and in moving panoramas, a new form of popular theatrical entertainment that featured scenes painted on giant canvases that were unwound on rollers.[66] As he leads the gaze of the reader from point to point through interjected instructions—“look yonder,” here “you see,” “there, you behold”—he describes the battlefield in terms of its vision-accommodating possibilities: “No hillocks to obstruct the view, no ravines for ambuscade, no massive trees, to conceal the tube of the deadly rifles… it seemed the very place for a battle, the convenient and appropriate theatre for a scene of wholesale murder” (49). And viewed from a distance, before the action has begun, he sees the “imposing array” of the armies as “very beautiful” (50).
This panorama of war clearly depends upon a proprietary aesthetic—a vision of the Mexican landscape as open and available to the reader's controlling, colonizing gaze. But Legends of Mexico also contains many scenes that focus on Mexican injuries and war losses, and often those passages lead in unexpected directions. For instance, as the battle of Resaca de la Palma nears its close, Lippard focuses on the road to Fort Brown, “paved with corses, roaring with thunder, blazing with the lightning of cannon.” Although earlier he invited the reader to gaze at the “beautiful” array of troops preparing for battle, here he directs us to “[g]aze there, and see the Mexicans go down at every shot, by ranks, by platoons, by columns. It is no battle, but a hunt, a Massacre!” As the U.S. troops set fire to the prairie, the movement of the flames “crushes and hurls and burns the Mexicans toward the center of death, the Rio Grande.” And yet, instead of describing this as a glorious sight, the narrator seems to shrink from it: “The heart grows sick of the blood. The chaparral seems a great heart of carnage, palpitating a death at every throb. Volumes would not tell the horrors of that flight!” (99). And then, when Mexican soldiers try to crowd onto a raft and escape down the river, the boat capsizes, “and where a moment ago was a mass of human faces, lancers' flags and war-horse forms, now is only the boiling river, heaving with the dying and the dead” (100). For days afterward, “those bodies, festering in corruption, floated blackened and hideous, upon the waters of the Rio Grande” (100). At this point, as the battle turns into a massacre, it becomes difficult to distinguish scenes of U.S. empire-building from the “blackest” legends of the Spanish conquest.
Although Lippard quickly moves to place this battle scene within the context of Zachary Taylor's march to “redeem” the continent, his panoramas of death undermine the already difficult to sustain distinction between an evil Spanish and a benign U.S. conquest. Indeed, the carnage suggests parallels between U.S.–Mexican War battles and infamous episodes of the Spanish Conquest such as the massacre at Cholula, where more than three thousand Indians were slaughtered. This is especially true when battles are fought in densely populated areas, such as the city of Monterrey, where almost ten thousand people lived. According to Prescott and other historians, the massacre at Cholula had been particularly horrible—an encounter that “left a dark stain on the memory of the Conquerors”—because it involved noncombatants, “townsmen” who “made scarcely any resistance” to the Spaniards who sacked and burned the city, leaving corpses “festering in heaps in the streets and the great square.”[67] During the four-day battle at Monterrey in late
September 1846, U.S. soldiers advanced through the city by invading the homes of townspeople, knocking down walls between connected dwellings, and then moving on through to the next house. This battle plan inevitably involved noncombatants and caused massive destruction. According to the fifteen Mexican writers of the war history that was translated into English in 1850 as The Other Side; or, Notes for the History of the War Between Mexico and the United States, after the battle “Monterey was converted into a vast cemetery. The unburied bodies, the dead and putrid mules, the silence of the streets, all gave a fearful aspect to this city.”[68]
Although most of the visual artists chose to ignore this aspect of the battle and to focus instead on remote views of the city or panoramas featuring the dramatic landscape, a few did try to picture the devastation that took place. In a lithograph entitled “Third Day of the Siege of Monterey” (1846) and in Nathaniel Currier's “Battle of Monterey” (1846), U.S. soldiers are depicted fighting in the streets and breaking through stone fortifications, with homes and the cathedral in the background.[69] But in Legends of Mexico, U.S. soldiers invade Mexican homes, and as Lippard pictures the fighting, images of rape, death, and violence directed at noncombatants dominate the narrative. For from his perspective, war on the battlefield “where the yell of the dying, rings its defiance to the charging legions, wears on its bloodiest plume, some gleam of chivalry, but War in the Home, scattering its corses, besides the holiest altars of life, and mingling the household gods, with bleeding hearts and shattered skulls—this, indeed, is a fearful thing” (116).
In the beginning of this chapter, as Lippard describes Monterrey and its environs, he adopts the representational strategies of the popular prints that offered panoramic views of the city's spectacular setting: “They tell me that Monterey is beautiful; that it lies among the snow-white mountains, whose summits reach the clouds.”[70] As he focuses on the lands surrounding the city, he emphasizes images of material abundance—tropical fruit and foliage, the green cornfields, and “the rich garniture of the soil”—that would appeal to prospective U.S. colonists. Lippard imagines the city as a woman, an “Amazon Queen,” with orange groves that “girdle her dark stone walls, with their white blossoms, and hang their golden fruit above her battlemented roofs.” “From this elevated grove, towards the south, around the sleeping city,” he writes, “winds the beautiful river of San Juan, now hidden among the pomegranate trees, now sending a silvery branch into the town, again flashing on, besides its castled walls” (107). As he speculates on the difficulties of conquering the city (it seems “impregnable,” “No arms can take it; no cannon blast its impenetrable
Figure 2. “Battle of Monterey” lithograph by Nathaniel Currier. (Courtesy American Antiquarian Society)
Lippard further emphasizes a gendered reading of conquest by pairing this picture of the transformation of the landscape with a story that takes the reader into a Mexican home where two young women, virgins of course, wait for their father and brother to return from the fighting. Lippard places the reader inside the house with the women, instead of with the U.S. soldiers, as the battle intensifies: “And the storm grew nearer their house; it seemed to rage all around them, for those terrible sounds never for one moment ceased, and the red flash poured through the narrow window, in one incessant sheet of battle lightning” (111). Finally, the door to their chamber gives way, “the red battle light rush[es] into the place” (113), and their dying father falls backward into their home, with blood pouring from a wound in his chest. Once again, Lippard figures the invasion of the homes of Monterrey as a symbolic rape. The U.S. volunteer who “fired for the first time, with the lust of carnage” (113), and who killed the father and receives the latter's dying curse, is thus figured as invader, rapist, and murderer all at once. For as the soldier “saw the unspeakable agony, written on each face,” he “knew him-self, a guilty and blood-stained man” (113).
While it might be possible for the U.S. reader to distance himself/her-self from the scene by reflecting that these horrors are happening to Mexicans, the volunteer does not make such a distinction. In fact, he compares this Mexican home to the home he left behind in Pennsylvania: “I have a father, too, away in Pennsylvania, and sisters, too, that resemble these girls” (114). As the Mexican home that he has invaded becomes an uncanny double of his home in Pennsylvania, the entire battle scene takes on a ghastly hue. Unable to bear the horror of the murder scene, “only wishing to turn his eyes away from that sight,” he escapes to the roof and witnesses the end of the battle of Monterrey. But even the panoramic view of the city that meets his gaze provides no real distance from the scene he has left, for, “sick of the battle,” he sees only “one great lake of carnage” as “three days battle rolls by every street and avenue, along these roofs, and through yonder smoking ruin” (114). Everywhere he looks, “the dead looked so ghastly up in his face!” (115). The violence extends to noncombatants, too, for the soldier also sees a dead woman, “clotted with blood, while her frozen features, knit so darkly in the brow, and distorted along the lips, told how fierce the struggle in which she died” (115). And when he returns to the room where he left the sisters and their dying father, it seems “like a death vault.” As he feels his way through the pitch-black chamber, his hands touch the cold faces of the dead, which leave his fingers wet with clotted blood. When finally the glare
Figure 3. “The Sisters of Monterey” detail in the Quaker City, 27 January 1849. (Courtesy American Antiquarian Society)
Lippard ends by trying to give the chapter a redemptive conclusion, one that rings resoundingly hollow after the pages of horror that preceded it. First, he pulls back from the battle scene, takes a remote perspective, and pictures the landscape restored and transfigured, the river no longer blushing with blood, the homes of the town framed in gardens of flowers. “Over the Bishop's palace waves the Banner of the Stars,” Lippard writes, “symbol of that Democratic truth, which never for a moment ceases to speak, ‘This continent is the Homestead of free and honest men. Kings have no business here. Hasten to possess it, Children of Washington!’” (119). Second, he marries the bereaved Mexican woman
But if Lippard repeatedly tries to turn force into consent, most of Legends of Mexico reveals that, as the Mexican writers of The Other Side argued, the age of U.S. empire-building, which was called “one of light,” was “notwithstanding, the same as the former—one of force and violence.”[71] And in Lippard's second novel set in Mexico, 'Bel of Prairie Eden, which was published the next year, representations of international romance are displaced by dramas of seduction, rape, and revenge as his utopia for redeemed labor becomes a haunted homestead in the Texas borderlands.
WHITE UTOPIA IS A HAUNTED HOMESTEAD
In the first chapter of 'Bel of Prairie Eden, Lippard initially represents the Texas prairies in idealized terms, as a boundless, utopian space where emigrants can escape the past and realize their dreams of freedom by settling on virgin, vacant land. In the opening chapter, two brothers, the sons of wealthy Texas colonist Jacob Grywin, gaze at a beautiful view: “the prairie, bathed in the light of the setting sun” (7). By calling their home Prairie Eden and by describing the Texas landscape in literally glowing terms, Lippard echoes the extensive literature written during the 1830s and 1840s to encourage prospective settlers from Europe and the United States to relocate in Texas.[72] During the 1820s, Mexico passed colonization laws allowing foreigners to buy land in Texas more cheaply than it could be purchased in the United States. For the next two decades, beginning in the Mexican period and continuing after the United States annexed Texas in 1845, emigrants from the southern United States, especially, but also from eastern U.S. cities, Ireland, Germany, and other parts of Europe flocked to the area, often settling in small colonies founded by land agents called empresarios.[73] In order to sell their vision of a colonized Texas to emigrants, land companies and speculators
From the beginning, many ominous signs indicate that all is not well in Prairie Eden. Grywin, the founder of the colony, is a “broken bank director of Philadelphia, who turned traitor to the trust of some thousand widows, and then fled the city, seeking refuge for his guilty wealth in the prairie of Texas.”[75] Instead of providing utopian spaces that allow immigrants to escape the capitalist relations of the city, Texas here serves as a refuge for the corrupt capitalist who wants to leave his crimes, but not the profits they yielded, behind him in the East. Although he is a Northerner, Grywin also brings slaves with him to Texas, and Lippard thereby references widespread fears that the incorporation of new territory into the Union would mean the extension of slavery. An empresario-like figure, Grywin arrives in Texas in 1840, accompanied by fifty “retainers,” including “forty white laborers—some civilized people from the States, others German emigrants—and ten black slaves” (8) who build a mansion for him on the prairie and surround it with their own “small huts” (16). The luxurious mansion resembles those described in urban gothic literature, especially when it is contrasted with the lowly huts on its borders; it could have been lifted from New York or The Quaker City and dropped on the Texas prairie. Lippard repeatedly uncovers uncanny resemblances and traces connections between the capitalist U.S. city and scenes of empire-building in Texas and Mexico in a novel which, as the book's cover tells us, “begins on the wild prairie—goes on in the city of Vera Cruz—winds up in Philadelphia.” But moss hangs like a silvery shroud around Grywin's mansion; the prairie is inhabited by spectral forms that prophesy “evil, nothing but evil” (13); eerie buzzards silently circle over the rooftops of Vera Cruz on the night that U.S. troops land in the city; and remorse for acts of seduction and revenge committed in Mexico pervades the gloomy conclusion that takes place in Philadelphia.
Even at the outset, this novel implies that this colony, and also perhaps the colonization of Texas, are based on shaky foundations. This premise haunts the narrative, suggesting that everything that subsequently happens to Grywin's house might result from his original guilty acts as well as from his attempts to escape their consequences. For Grywin's
Even though Lippard initially stigmatizes the Texas colonizer, he soon turns the tables by demonizing the Mexican Marin. We discover that Marin knew 'Bel and her family before, in Philadelphia, when he was the attaché of the Mexican legation. At that time, he had asked to marry 'Bel and was refused; to that refusal her father “added some words, at once needless and bitter” (22). But if this contemptuous refusal seems at first to partially justify Marin's vengeful feelings, attempts to represent him as anything other than monstrous disappear after he threatens 'Bel's virginity. Soon thereafter, he drugs her with opium, gets her to consent to have sex with him in order to save her father's life, and then hangs Grywin anyway. Later, Marin also orders his soldiers to murder Grywin's younger son, Harry. At these moments, Lippard blames Mexico for the war and encourages readers to feel for white settlers on the Texas borderlands. By making Ewen and the Mexican soldiers a threat to the white family and the homestead in Texas, Lippard mobilizes sensations of fear and horror in behalf of the Texas colonizers that may override his representation of the colonization of Texas as a morally tainted enterprise.
But the vengefulness of Grywin's remaining son, John, is just as monstrous, and it leads to an ending that is anything but happy. After John learns what has happened to his family, he begins to plot his sadistic revenge. First, as Marin and his father walk together one evening, a bullet from an unknown source pierces his father's brain. John, of course, is responsible. Second, John seduces Marin's sister, Isora, and then arranges it so that Marin is forced to watch from a hidden aperture while John has sex with her. Finally, John tricks Ewen into murdering Marin by plunging a knife into his heart as part of an initiation rite. But this “Satanic revenge” (70) returns to haunt John after he falls in love with Isora, even though she never learns that John's enemy was her brother or that her brother is dead. John marries Isora and takes her back to Philadelphia, but she soon becomes unhappy and thinks only about seeing Marin
As I have suggested throughout Part 1, Lippard's invocation of a panoply of gothic effects—“haunted houses, evil villains, ghosts, gloomy landscapes, madness, terror, suspense, horror”—to narrate the U.S. presence in Texas and Mexico has contradictory effects.[76] On the one hand, it contributes to the demonization of Mexicans and may thereby feed the war frenzy of readers. There is also plenty of lurid material here to stimulate a voyeuristic response at some distance from a well-defined, coherent position on the war. But the novel also suggests that romance cannot heal the wounds of war: the marriage plot that Lippard uses at the end of Legends of Mexico, and that so many writers employed to make the conquest of northern Mexico appear to be consensual, fails as a way of resolving international conflict. Force is never plausibly transformed into consent; the violence that structures most of the narrative does not disappear but instead fully implicates the Texas colonizer in the bleak conclusion. It is even possible to read this as an antiwar novel if one emphasizes the ending and interprets the escalating revenge plots as an allegory about the futility of the violence between the United States and Mexico.
Lippard apparently began to have second thoughts about his war fiction soon after the conflict ended. In the brief sketch “A Sequel to the Legends of Mexico” that appeared in The White Banner in 1851, Lippard worried about whether the “very pictures of war and its chivalry” that he had drawn a few years earlier “might not be misconceived and lead young hearts into an appetite for blood-shedding” (108). So a few years after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, he imagined Taylor and his army of conquest transformed into an “Industrial Army,” with spades instead of muskets, and plows instead of cannons, transforming the Pennsylvania desert “into a very garden, adorned with the homes of one hundred thousand poor men, who before the campaign began, had been starving in the suburbs of the Great Cities” (109). In this sketch, Lippard tries to make two haunting visions of war disappear: the class warfare threatened by poor men accumulating in North-eastern cities, and the violent, bloody scenes of the U.S.-Mexican War that he and other writers had drawn for the sensational press during the 1840s. Although he hoped to banish these disturbing images of U.S. expansion and domestic unrest by sketching a Jeffersonian picture of an agrarian republic transforming poor men and artisan radicals into virtuous
For if, as Amy Kaplan argues, the role of empire has been largely ignored in the study of U.S. culture, then efforts to foreground the construction of “American nationality” through “political struggles for power with other cultures and nations” must also focus on the war with Mexico.[77] Although scholars often locate the origins of U.S. imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century, the past that is reanimated in sensational war literature should provoke the re-examination of a longer history of empire in the Americas, because the events of 1848 make it clear that U.S. class and racial formations throughout the nineteenth century were decisively shaped by international conflict and both the internal and the global dynamics of empire-building.