8. The Dime Novel,
the Civil War, and Empire
Although issues of slavery, black/white race relations, and sectional division are central to Duganne's Civil War memoir, they hover ominously in the background of his two dime novel “Mexico Westerns.” In the previous chapter, I suggested that Duganne's representations of peonage and the Mexican hacienda in The Peon Prince implicitly and explicitly reference domestic debates over slavery extension and over free and unfree labor. In Putnam Pomfret's Ward, which was published in October of 1861 and which is set during the U.S.-Mexican War, Duganne also takes up questions of empire, slavery, and the relationship between North and South, though he addresses some of these issues in muted and displaced ways. In this novel's opening, Charles Glinton, a young man from New Orleans, kills himself because he has just lost all of his money in a Mexican gambling den. The Yankee Putnam Pomfret arrives at the scene shortly after the suicide and decides to become involved in the case when he discovers that Glinton was a countryman. Glinton turns out to be the son of a Mexican woman and a New Orleans merchant who had worked as “a consignee of the Mexican and Indian traders.”[1] After both of his parents died suddenly in New Orleans, young Glinton had been consumed by “an earnest desire to behold Mexico,” his mother's “native land” (44), and so he had persuaded his sister, Teresa, to accompany him there. Although the Yankee Pomfret had never met the Southerner Glinton, when he learns that Glinton's sister is still in Mexico, he resolves to protect his “countrywoman” and to see her safely back to the United States.
By trying to minimize the significance of the sectional conflict over slavery and by emphasizing the common bonds of nationalism, Duganne, it could be argued, attempted to transcend or displace the actual division between North and South that culminated in the Civil War. In other words, the foreign setting and the focus on empire in this novel could be said to fortify, by contrast, a Unionist sentiment that overrides sectional differences. Duganne's representations of ludicrously happy slaves reinforce such an interpretation, as does the Yankee's intensely patriotic response to “the claim which he recognized as sacred above all things—the kindred of country recognized in a strange land” (21). Although this interpretation explains much that is at stake in the novel, however, other aspects of the plot underline the differences between Yankees and Southerners. The Southerner Charles Glinton is, after all, identified as closely with Mexico as with the United States, for his mother was Mexican and he is possessed by an intense desire to travel southward to Mexico, though this visit proves to be his downfall. Once he arrives, he is easily seduced into a life of dissipation and gambling—vices that are strongly associated in this narrative with a disturbingly foreign Mexico, which is represented as a space of lawlessness and reckless passions. So Duganne also suggests that the U.S. South is perilously close to, and perhaps already fatally entangled with, other exotic “southern” spaces such as Mexico. Duganne's anti-imperialist position on the U.S.-Mexican War was partly motivated, as we have seen, by a nativist desire to protect the nation from foreign influences, but in Putnam Pomfret's Ward the Southerner Glinton's Mexican mother, along with his father's inter-American commercial relations and the geographical proximity of New Orleans to Mexico, all seem to make him especially vulnerable to the “ruinous influence” (25) of Mexican gamesters. Indeed, the Mexican libertine who ultimately leads him astray turns out to be his own half-brother.
Although the first series of Beadle's dime novels issued in the early 1860s overlapped with the Civil War, Bill Brown suggests that the dime novel typically avoids references to that conflict and to the issue of slavery; instead, it projects “a unifying story of the West in the midst of the nation's actual North/South divide” and thereby effectively suppresses “racial tension and social crisis.”[2] According to Brown, “the dime novel makes visible the ways in which the narration of the West aestheticizes the genocidal foundation of the nation, turning conquest into a literary enterprise that screens out other violent episodes in the nation's history.”[3] In this chapter I will agree that dime novel authors often try to unify their white audience by constructing demonized representations of Indians, but I shall also argue that the North/South divide, the question of slavery, and black/white racial tensions are not entirely screened out in these novels; they often resurface, as they do in Putnam Pomfret's Ward, even as dime novel authors struggle to manage and contain them. And in some dime novels these issues are central. Metta Victor's Maum Guinea (1861), for instance, which was issued as a special Beadle double number, focused on slavery and Louisiana plantation life. According to legend, Lincoln compared it to Uncle Tom's Cabin, and it was reprinted and widely circulated in England, where it was said to have “had a powerful influence in aid of the Union cause at a time when a large part of the people of that country favored the recognition of the independence of the Southern Confederacy.”[4] Victor also authored The Unionist's Daughter: A Tale of the Rebellion in Tennessee (1862), another double number that addressed near-contemporaneous events, in this case the violence directed at Unionists in Tennessee in the second half of 1861 and the winter of 1862, as well as the conflicts among slaves, secessionists, and Unionists that followed. And N.C. Iron, a local historian, wrote The Two Guards (1863), a novel about a slave who escapes from a New Orleans plantation and tries to build a free home in the Illinois wilderness. Along with heavy doses of romantic racialism, The Two Guards also includes a harsh representation of the Middle Passage, critical comments about the persistence of the illegal international slave trade in the Americas, and scathing depictions of Southern slaveholders. But even when early dime novels are not centrally about the North/South divide and the question of slavery, these issues sometimes emerge, often in displaced forms, to shape the plots of many of the novels.
They often resurface, moreover, within plots that are also about empire. And yet, many of these dime novels, which focus on an array of imperial encounters, call into question the explanatory power of the
Figure 12. “Caesar and Leo” illustration from N.C. Iron's The Two Guards. (Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries)
Novels, for instance, that are set in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands often address race relations among white U.S. Americans, Indians, and people of Mexican origin as well as the history of international geo-political conflict in that region, even as they try to legitimate U.S. control of the area. Rather than viewing these stories as simply internal to the U.S. “West,” we might instead read them as discursive weapons in an ongoing battle to subsume incidents of border warfare, which suggest a different North/South axis—that of the Americas—within a linear national narrative.[6] Notably, John Emerald's Cortina, the Scourge (1872) retells the story of Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, the hero of numerous border ballads, who in 1859 defended a ranchero from abuse at the hands of Texas marshal Bob Shears. After shooting Shears in self-defense, Cortina retreated to his ranch; when attempted murder charges were filed against him, he and his supporters took over Brownsville, Texas, and held it for six months. According to historian David Montejano, during the series of conflicts that became known as the Cortina Wars, “Cortina defeated the Brownsville Rifles and Tobin's Rangers from San Antonio, maintaining control of the region until the U.S. army sent troops in December 1859,” whereupon Cortina escaped across the border.[7] But before leaving for Mexico, he issued several proclamations to explain his actions, including one that set forth plans for a Texas secret society devoted to “the improvement of the unhappy condition of those Mexicans resident therein.” This proclamation also included the following appeal:
Mexicans! When the State of Texas began to receive the new organization which its sovereignty required as an integrant part of the Union, flocks of vampires, in the guise of men, came and scattered themselves in the settlements, without any capital except the corrupt heart and the most perverse intentions. Some, brimful of laws, pledged to us their protection against the attacks of the rest; others assembled in shadowy councils, attempted and excited the robbery and burning of the houses of our relatives on the other side of the river Bravo; while others, to the abusing of our unlimited confidence, when we intrusted them with our [land] titles, which secured the future of our families, refused to return them under false and frivolous pretexts; all, in
In his appeal, Cortina underlined as the cause of his rebellion the attacks on the property and persons of Mexican Texans, which dramatically increased in the years following the Texas Revolution and the war between the United States and Mexico. Montejano suggests that disbanded soldiers participated in raids on Mexican settlements, and the combination of terror and legal machinations aimed at transferring land to the new-comers caused many Texans of Mexican origin to flee the state, though some elite Mexican Texans, especially those who had formed alliances with Anglos, were able to hold on to their land.[9] But in the context of the increasing dispossession of Mexican Texans and the pervasive climate of racial terror, Cortina's revolt became an important symbol for people of Mexican origin of resistance to Anglo encroachments and to the use of law and violence as tools for the subjugation of a people.
Emerald's Cortina the Scourge hardly does justice to this social bandit, but the novel does register the racial tensions and social crises that scarred south Texas during these years. The opening paragraphs of the story remind the reader that in 1859, Cortina, “a Mexican guerrilla, with a band of Mexican adventurers, held possession of all that part of Texas extending from the Rio Grande to the Nueces; and from the mouth of the Rio Grande to Roma.”[10] At the outset, Cortina is blamed for levying taxes upon the people, raiding, and, more ambiguously, displaying “such desperate courage that the interior of the State of Texas became alarmed” (10). After he kidnaps an Anglo girl, Mary Barton, the U.S. heroes, who are positioned as the defenders of womanhood, pursue Cortina and his gang. For the most part, the national and racial antagonisms that drive the plot are condensed and recast as a narrative about gender and sexuality, where Anglos struggle to save the women who are threatened by the Mexicans. An important subplot of the novel involves the girlfriend of one of the white heroes, who had mysteriously disappeared years ago. It turns out that she had been seduced by a Mexican who became a member of Cortina's gang, whereupon she disguised herself as a man and joined the band as well. This disguise enables some intense protolesbian scenes, complete with “impassioned, vehement kisses” (91), between the disguised sweetheart and Cortina's daughter,
Novels about the U.S.-Mexican borderlands began to proliferate especially after the Civil War, when several authors started to produce stories about gold seekers in California and New Mexico, outlaws, U.S. traders in Mexico, the Alamo, the U.S.-Mexican War, Indian fighting in the Mexico-Texas border region, and a host of other topics. But issues of empire were central to the dime novel from the beginning, and during the Civil War years, questions of imperial expansion were difficult to separate from debates over slavery and Southern secession. In chapter 6, I suggested that although during the late 1840s Northern Democrats generally endorsed empire-building, after the debates over the extension of slavery and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, many Northerners viewed imperial expansion into Mexico, the Caribbean, and Nicaragua as a malign and specifically Southern project that threatened to extend the “Southern” boundaries of slavery. A split occurred in many popular representations of empire-building during the Civil War years: from a Northern Republican perspective, the “westward” movement of white settlers at the expense of Indians and people of Mexican origin was frequently viewed, especially in novels written by men, as a natural and preordained, if violent, process that confirmed free labor and white egalitarian ideals, while a “bad” imperialism was increasingly identified with the South and the project of “southward” expansion. In the rest of this chapter, I focus on three different visions of empire in Beadle's dime novels that were published during the early 1860s: first, representations of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 in Edward Ellis's 1864 novels Indian Jim and The Hunter's Escape; second, representations of race, land, and
IMPERIAL WHITE MANHOOD
AND THE U.S.-DAKOTA WAR (1862)
Although most scholars of the dime novel Western have suggested that its main focus was on conflicts between Indians and whites, few have registered how recent or even current—how “live”—many of these conflicts were. This may follow from the widely accepted premise that the earliest dime novels tell, in Brown's words, “a story of America's past,” emphasizing in particular the colonial and postrevolutionary eras.[11] But although it is true that many dime novels feature conflicts that are historically remote, such as King Philip's War and other colonial-era encounters, many other narratives deal with much more recent events, such as the Seminole wars and Black Hawk's War; ongoing conflicts with Comanches and Apaches on the border between the United States and Mexico; and the uprisings of Dakota Indians in Minnesota in 1862, to name just a few examples. The claim that the dime novel projects a unifying story of the West in the midst of the nation's actual North/South divide elides the extent to which resistance on the part of various Indian tribes to the encroachments of white settlers persisted throughout the nineteenth century. The pervasiveness of this opposition to U.S. expansion reinforced an East/West divide that followed the movement of the frontier or borderlands, which surely helps to account for the intense and repeated efforts made by early dime novel authors to narrate, redescribe, or otherwise justify the dispossession and violent displacement of the natives.
Within two years of the war fought against the Dakota Indians in Minnesota, for instance, three dime novels were written about it, including Edward S. Ellis's Indian Jim: A Tale of the Minnesota Massacre (1864) and The Hunter's Escape: A Tale of the North West in 1862 (1864), as well as Lieutenant-Colonel Hazleton's The Silver Bugle; or, The Indian Maiden of St. Croix (1864). The U.S.-Dakota War, which broke out three months after the Homestead Act was passed and just a few days before the Union army lost the second battle of Bull Run, was provoked by a host of Indian grievances: unpopular treaties through which most of the Dakota lands were transferred to the United States, late annuity payments, traders' exploitative practices, and whites' efforts to turn Indians into Christian farmers. Legal scholar Carol Chomsky suggests that although at one time the Dakota had inhabited large parts of the upper Midwest, between 1805 and 1858 most of their land had been ceded to the United States in exchange for annual cash payments, and by 1862 they retained “only a narrow strip of land—about one hundred twenty miles long and ten miles wide—along the Minnesota River in the southwestern part of Minnesota.”[12]
The Dakota were split into factions: while about a quarter of the seven thousand Dakota had tried farming, wore Euro-American-style clothing, and had converted to Christianity, many of those who would make up the “war party” continued to try to live by hunting and resisted the adoption of white ideas about land, labor, clothing, and religion. By the 1860s, however, game became harder to find, in part because the Dakota were confined to such a small area. More and more settlers poured into the region, especially after Minnesota became a state in 1858, and they fenced off land and put further pressure on resources. Meanwhile, because of these pressures, the Dakota increasingly relied on government payments, which were frequently late. To make matters worse, “Indian agents as early as 1860 had adopted the practice of handing out annuity money and food only to Indians who showed some inclination to become farmers,” and they also paid off traders for inflated claims of Indian debt before dividing what was left over among the Indians.[13] When in August of 1862, after a poor harvest that threatened many with starvation, Indians inquired about late annuity payments and asked traders for credit, trader Andrew J. Myrick replied, “So far as I am concerned, if they are hungry, let them eat grass.”[14] Then, on 17 August, after a quarrel, four Indian hunters killed several white settlers near Acton. Soon thereafter a war party composed of the members of a hunters' lodge declared war on the whites, and in the next six weeks
Agents of the state immediately sought retribution. A military court tried almost 400 Indians, and 303 were judged guilty of participating in the uprising and sentenced to be hanged. When President Lincoln reviewed the trial transcripts, however, he decided that the available evidence justified hanging in thirty-nine cases. As a result, on 26 December at Mankato, Minnesota, thirty-eight men were hanged (one man was given a reprieve) in what was, according to Chomsky, “the largest mass execution in American history.”[16] Chomsky reviews legal cases to support her argument that “the Dakota were a sovereign nation at war with the United States, and the men who fought the war were entitled to be treated as legitimate belligerents.” Not surprisingly, however, the representatives of the state of Minnesota and the federal government didn't see it that way. Instead, the whites' tendency to view Indians as children, wards, and dependents—as people who were “other” and yet somehow internal to the white nation, as is suggested by Chief Justice Marshall's designation of them as “domestic dependent nations”—supported the decision to try the defendants for the civilian crimes of murder, rape, and robbery instead of viewing them as legitimate belligerents and there-fore asking if they had broken “the customary rules of warfare.”[17] What should rightfully have been understood as an international conflict was instead legally constructed as multiple conflicts between the state and individual subjects within it who had broken its laws.
When New Jersey schoolteacher Edward Ellis took up the subject of the U.S.-Dakota War in two dime novels published in 1864, he had already become famous as perhaps Beadle's most successful author. Ellis was promoted by the firm in an advertisement as “the best delineator of Border and Indian life now writing for the press,” and his Seth Jones; or, The Captives of the Frontier (1860), which the ad bragged had “created a great sensation upon its first appearance,” eventually sold almost 600,000 copies, in part because of an innovative advertising campaign.[18] Orville Victor, a Beadle's editor, once called it the perfect dime novel, and according to Christine Bold it established “the story of male heroism” as “the dominant dime novel formula.”[19] In Seth Jones, male heroism is defined by white egalitarianism and Indian killing. Jones is a New Hampshire Yankee who encounters a pioneer named Alfred Haverland and his family in the borderlands of western New York sometime during the late
Indian Jim, Ellis's first novel about the U.S.-Dakota War, also features an upper-class male hero whose elite class position is offset by his whiteness and his newly discovered ability to both “imitate” and kill Indians. This story is one of the many male “maturation” stories that were featured in dime novels; typically, according to Daryl Jones, such stories marry a romance plot to a sensational story of Western adventure.[21] These kinds of novels are pedagogical stories for boys that teach lessons about the forging of white egalitarian manhood at the expense of Indian “savages.” In Indian Jim, Adolphus Halleck, a merchant's son and artist, travels to Minnesota to sketch pictures and to visit his cousin, Marian, who is herself visiting a family of settlers. Although Halleck is of upper-class origin, it is made clear to the reader that he is not a “‘snob,’ nor a ‘spooney,’ but possessed the sterling qualities of the true gentleman.”[22] But Ellis also insists that this Easterner has a lot to learn about Indians. Throughout the first half of the novel, Halleck repeatedly voices the opinion, based on his reading of literature by Cooper and Longfellow, that Indians are noble savages who, “as a race, are high-souled, brave, and chivalrous; above even ourselves, in such qualities.” Almost every other white character in the novel, however, refutes this opinion. Marian counters that “they are a treacherous, merciless, repulsive people, who are no more fit to live than tigers” (11), and she marvels that “any whites can bring themselves to live in the country” (11). She admits,
Although this novel and its companion piece, The Hunter's Escape, catalogue many of the Dakotas' grievances (unfair treaties, late annuity payments, poor reservation lands, the outrageous claims of the traders), and although both include representations of an exceptional “good Indian,” Christian Jim, both override these details by narrating the war as a horror story that reveals the “truth” of the Indian's “fallen nature.”[23] Even though the author suggests that this “nature” may possibly be redeemed by conversion to Christianity, it erupts anew whenever the Indians “relapse into their former barbarism.”[24] The war itself is explained as such a relapse—as a furious “tide of passion” (98)—and the lurid representations of “ghastly, swollen” white corpses “disfigured by all manner of mutilation” (80), which Halleck and young Brainerd repeatedly stumble across, are used to reinforce this explanation. When Indians trail and eventually attack Marian and the Brainerd family, who are trying to escape, even Halleck reluctantly has to accept this darker reading of the Indian's character. Meanwhile, each time that Halleck has to face an Indian foe, he surprisingly displays the skills of a “veteran woodsman” (68) and enjoys the “contest” more than his previous views of Indians might lead one to expect. The real turning point comes in the final chapter, when a war party captures the white women and one of the Indians stabs Maggie. “Infuriated beyond all measure, by the treacherous murder he had just witnessed, Halleck discharged his revolver directly into the breast of the savage; and after he had fallen, as rapidly as he could pull the trigger, dispatched the other five into the same dark bosom of sin and crime” (97). Transformed by his trials from a defender to a killer of Indians, Halleck also, it is implied, becomes a man in the process, one with a “realistic” view of Indians as well as masculine fighting skills that prove he is no “snob” or “spooney.” At the end of the novel, the “once fashionable and
Michael Rogin has suggested that in the nineteenth century whites imagined their relations to Indians on the model of a parent-child relationship. Although liberal culture claimed to eliminate “legitimate hierarchical authority and believed that ‘manly independence’ offered the only proper basis for relations among men,” Indians were viewed as recalcitrant children who needed the paternal assistance of whites (particularly to help them break their communal ties to the land) in order to grow up.[25] “Relations with the Indians,” according to Rogin, “permitted that domination over men forbidden but longed for in liberal society.”[26] In Indian Jim, Adolphus Halleck becomes a (white) man first by killing and then by becoming a sort of missionary “father” to Indians. Indians are also aligned with the flesh that he has to crucify and the passions that he has to master, and they are thereby imagined as an interior part of the white male self, a part that must be controlled before adult-hood can be attained. In both of these ways, whether Indians are figured as childish, dependent wards or as interior parts of a white male self, their status as members of a sovereign nation is ignored and erased.
Among white Northerners, then, the U.S.-Dakota War was widely understood as an internal conflict rather than an international one. This makes for an interesting comparison, for Indian Jim also contains several references to that other famous internal struggle that was taking place at the same time—that is, the Civil War. I have already suggested that Will Brainerd, the hardy young white settler, has just returned from that other theater of war when the novel opens. Although he was almost killed by Confederate soldiers at the first battle of Bull Run and has barely recovered from his wounds, he soon has to face another enemy—the Dakota Indians—in what he has come to think of as his home territory. “How sad it is,” he remarks to Halleck after the Indians destroy the family homestead, “that, when we have met with such severe reverses in the South, we should now have this blow added also” (72). When soldiers wearing Union uniforms show up toward the end to help save the day—though they can't save Maggie—it soon becomes clear that they happened to be in Minnesota because they were collecting recruits to fight in the Civil War. What is more, when the captain decides to help Brainerd and Halleck hunt the Indians, he enlists the aid of Indian Jim,
WHITE WOMEN WRITERS AND THE BORDERLANDS
Although the story of white male heroism defined by imitating, killing, or becoming a father to Indians became an influential dime novel formula, it was not, as Christine Bold reminds us, the only one. Ann Stephens, one of the most popular female authors of the period, wrote the first dime novel, Malaeska; The Indian Wife of the White Hunter, a “woman-centered frontier narrative,” as Bold puts it, which is set in colonial New York and which is about an Indian woman and the tragic fate of the child she has with a white man whom she marries but who dies soon thereafter.[27] Stephens, the daughter of a junior partner in a Connecticut woolen mill, was already very famous in 1860 when Beadle and Company paid her $250 for a revised and expanded version of the novel, which had previously been published in 1839 in The Ladies' Companion, a magazine that she had also edited.[28] By choosing her novel as their first, Beadle and Company courted a certain respectability, despite the sensational subject matter, style, and emotional pitch of many of their offerings. A publisher's notice that appeared at the beginning of the first edition of Malaeska announced that the “novel chosen to begin the list, is a proof of the high standard which the publishers have adapted. It is one of the best stories ever written by a lady universally acknowledged to be the most brilliant authoress of America, and cannot fail to insure the success of the series, and amply sustain the reputation of the writer.”[29]
Stephens went on to write several dime novels for the firm. Myra: The Child of Adoption (1860), the third dime novel published by Beadle, was based on the life of New Orleans heiress Myra Clark. Much of the novel takes place in Louisiana, but Stephens does not use that setting as an opportunity to criticize the institution of slavery. Since Stephens had
On the other hand, in Sybil Chase, the “savage” frontier threatens to racialize the white heroine. Before moving to California, Sybil had fallen in love with the fiancé of her best friend and benefactor, and in a fit of pique wedded a gambler, Philip Yates, after the friend and her fiancé married in Cuba. But Yates turns out to be a bad man who is cruel to Sybil, disdains labor, and hires others to work his gold claim. California is represented as a savage space where dark passions erupt; the men who inhabit “the El Dorado of the New World” are wild and reckless lower-class types who indulge “every species of excess.”[32] Sybil herself is no paragon of virtue, for she helps her gambler husband rob and cheat travelers of their wealth. Although there are no Californios—Californians of Mexican origin—in sight, Sybil herself undergoes a kind of “Spanish transformation” at several points in the novel, when she gives in to her
Although in Sybil Chase Stephens paints a much bleaker picture of U.S. empire-building than Ellis does in his novels, this “dark” representation of the movement of U.S. settlers also aligns Spaniards and non-white peoples with the passions and implies that expansion may be undesirable because it threatens to turn white people into savages. In other words, Stephens suggests that the move outside the pale of white civilization and encounters with nonwhites in the borderlands may undermine free labor and white egalitarian ideals instead of confirming them: in Sybil Chase the gold mines attract a brutish class of whites who are tempted to make their living by stealing and speculating rather than by laboring. Still, in several of these novels and in Malaeska, Stephens does expose, as Bold argues, some of the costs of U.S. expansion; while Stephens's dime novels often reinforce racial and ethnic hierarchies along several different axes—black/white, Indian/white, and “Spanish”/white—she is much less celebratory of violent U.S. empire-building than is Ellis, for instance. Bold claims that despite the popularity of Malaeska, however, the even more massive success of Ellis's Seth Jones provoked a “paradigm shift” from “a centrally female to emphatically male Western.” She suggests that in “direct contrast to Malaeska, Seth Jones and its imitators articulated the West in the optimistic, patriarchal terms of Manifest Destiny then in the ascendancy in public rhetoric.”[33]
But this shift did not happen immediately, and as we shall see, some of the many female writers who produced dime novels also invoked “the optimistic, patriarchal terms of Manifest Destiny” to narrate the story of westward expansion. Although in the late 1860s the number of female-authored Beadle's dime novels dropped precipitously, during the Civil War years women were clearly among the most prominent and successful writers for the firm. Female authors such as Ann Stephens, Metta Victor, and Mary Denison were repeatedly featured in full-page advertisements issued by Beadle and Company to promote dime novels. These women, along with others, wrote about one-third of the Beadle's dime novels that were published from 1860 through 1865, and a significant
Along with Stephens, Metta Victor and her sister, Frances Fuller Barritt Victor, were especially famous for their Western romances. During their childhood and young adulthood, the Fullers moved westward several times, first from Rome, New York, to northern Pennsylvania, then to Wooster, Ohio, and finally to Michigan. Frances Fuller Barritt Victor wrote two dime novels for Beadle and Company and then many years later she moved to California with her naval engineer husband and contributed to the Overland Monthly. She wrote several books on the history and geography of the Northwest, became one of Hubert Howe Bancroft's staff writers, and produced several volumes for Bancroft's histories of the Western states.[34] In Victor's East and West; or, The Beauty of Willard's Mill (1862) as well as Alicia Newcome, or, The Land Claim: A Tale of the Upper Missouri (1862), the only real conflicts about expansion arise among whites. Although in many other dime novels, such as Ellis's Indian Jim, the violent displacement of the natives remains a live issue, Alicia Newcome, however, which takes place in Nebraska, opens with the assertion that the “Indian Territory had given way before the advancing hosts of civilization, and surveyors, speculators, locaters, squatters, traders, and adventurers gathered where the red-man had been, to found new States.”[35] Later, the author notes approvingly that the “quiet beauty” of the area was no longer disturbed by the “coming and going of the Indian tribes who formerly traded there; these being removed to their ‘reserves’ by the Government” (55). For Victor, there is apparently little to regret about this violent history of removal and displacement, for she applauds “the new civilization” which brings with it “the best elements of health, wealth, and peace” (5). The dispute over land that is at the center of this novel does not involve conflicts between Indians and white settlers, as might be expected, but instead allows for the staging of a battle over property lines between white men. Although the novel reveals a good deal of anxiety about shifting class boundaries in the new settlements of the West, the author attempts to resolve the conflict by marrying the heroine—the product of what the author calls a “mesalliance” between the daughter of a noble English family and their gardener—to a young lawyer-pioneer who seems to represent middle-class republican “America.” In this way, she valorizes a “middle” position defined in opposition to both a foreign, un-American nobility and an unprincipled, dangerous lower class. Her white egalitarianism is therefore decidedly of the middling variety,
Fuller's sister, Metta, who married Beadle's editor Orville Victor, also wrote approvingly of westward expansion and articulated a more cautious and “middling” version of egalitarianism. The first two novels that Metta Victor wrote for Beadle, as well as several others that she produced during her career, were Westerns: Alice Wilde: The Raftsman's Daughter (1860) was the fourth dime novel issued by Beadle, and The Backwoods' Bride. A Romance of Squatter Life (1860) was number ten in the series. Like her sister, Victor generally elides struggles over land between whites and nonwhites and instead chooses to focus on conflicts between different groups of whites. In The Backwoods' Bride, the main conflict is between Harry Gardiner, a prosperous and handsome land speculator from the East, and a group of Michigan squatters who have settled on lands that Gardiner has purchased. Although the novel repeatedly reasserts Gardiner's “rights” over and against the “assumed rights” of the squatters, there is a certain amount of sympathy for the latter.[36] The heroine's father, the poor settler Enoch Carter, comes West because he hopes that with “a few years of labor” (17) he can make a better life for her, and he rearticulates land reform rhetoric and free labor ideals when he claims the land as his own: “God made this earth to be free to all; and whoever takes wild land, and clears it, and cultivates it, makes it his own—he's a right to it. What right have these men that never did a day's work in their lives, coming along and takin' the bread out of our mouths?” (18). Still, though the novel gives space to two competing positions on property, Victor ultimately upholds Gardiner's claims to the land but tries to mediate the conflict by marrying the wealthy land speculator to the squat-ter's daughter Susan. At the end of the novel, Gardiner gives all of the lands back to the squatters (who are now referred to more generously as “farmers”), who then decide to make him their candidate for Congress. With this unlikely and fanciful conclusion, Victor espouses a certain white egalitarianism—by marrying the lowly Western squatter's daughter to the wealthy Easterner—but she also affirms dominant liberal conceptions of property and reduces class conflict to an improper “envious hatred” of the rich on the part of the “lower classes” (31). Indians, on the other hand, are nowhere in sight in this novel, and this invisibility means that the problem of white entitlement to the land is never raised as such.
In these two novels Victor for the most part removes nonwhites from the Western scene and thereby avoids confronting questions about either slavery or empire. But in some of her other dime novels, such as The Two Hunters; or, The Cañon Camp. A Romance of the Santa Fé Trail (1865), these questions reemerge. In The Two Hunters, Northerner Louis Grason, the son of an old and elite, if not fabulously wealthy, Knickerbocker family goes to St. Louis on business for his father and is quickly fascinated by the “mingled southern and western grace” of the society there.[37] Much to the dismay of his family, he is especially drawn to a young woman from New Orleans, the beautiful Mariquita Mora, whose Spanish mother is rumored to be “not the ‘right kind of a woman’” (18). This rumor is based partly on speculation that she murdered her husband, and partly on the fact that her house “was a perfect Spanish In-quisition, whose victims were her colored people; that she had rooms and instruments of torture, where her slaves were ‘punished’—not for their faults, but at the instigation of her caprice—even unto death; that so great was the terror in which her servants held her, they dared not complain to the authorities, who would be slow to espouse their cause against that of the rich Madame, while, in the mean time, the slightest sign of revolt on their part would be followed by such tortures as awed the boldest into abject silence” (18). (In a footnote, Victor claims that this character is based on an actual New Orleans woman who escaped to Cuba after her “numberless murders” of slaves incited the horror of the public.) Nonetheless, Grason falls in love with Mariquita, even though his aunt tells him the rumors about the mother and warns him that Southern girls have “careless, indolent southern habits” (20). And Mariquita agrees to marry him, but when Grason later sees her kiss her brother Pedro, he assumes that the brother is a lover and immediately leaves town and heads southwest in order to try to forget her. One year later, however, on the road to Santa Fe, he and his Yankee companion Buell encounter Pedro and Mariquita making their way toward some gold mines that Pedro has inherited in northern Mexico. They decide to join the party in order to better defend themselves against attacks by the Comanches, who are on the warpath because, in the words of a friendly Wichita Indian, they are “very mad at the white people” and have “torn up the papers sent them by the Great Father” (40). For a while Louis masquerades as a Wichita so that Mariquita will not recognize him, and, still believing Pedro to be Mariquita's lover, he enviously notes that the “Spaniard” was “as graceful, haughty, careless a specimen of southern beauty and chivalry as the young northerner ever had beheld” (40). But
Like The Backwoods' Bride, The Two Hunters reveals a good degree of anxiety about the class boundaries that were threatened by new social formations in the borderlands. The lowly Connecticut Yankee and hunter Buell is paired with the blue-blood Grason, and they are able to meet on the common ground of imperial white manhood defined by their ability to both imitate and kill Indians. But the Yankee remains ineligible for romance, whereas the blue-blood is a romantic hero who can wed the wealthy “southern” heiress despite her mother's crimes. Although Mariquita's money seems to make up for her checkered family history and to make the match between herself and Grason roughly equal, a warning about the risks of cross-class marriages is embedded in Mariquita's history: her mother was an upstart peasant girl who married above her class and then murdered her husband. If the novel reasserts certain boundaries of class and status, however, it slightly revises emergent configurations of race as they are represented in the popular literature of the period. Although “Spanishness” was quasi-racialized in Stephens's Sybil Chase, and although to be “Mexican” was to be nonwhite in much of the Gold Rush and war-era literature of the mid–nineteenth century, Mariquita and Pedro are repeatedly described as white even though they are of Spanish descent and are frequently referred to as “Mexicans.”[38] By calling the wealthy Moras white and wedding Mariquita to an elite Easterner, Victor pulls back from the egalitarianism that characterized so many of the early dime novels—since for Victor class distinctions between whites still matter tremendously—but she slightly expands the boundaries of whiteness to include subjects who would have been viewed as marginally white or as non-white in many other popular texts. If, as Saxton argues, the “hard side” of white racism often accompanied egalitarian rhetoric, then the reassertion of class boundaries in The Two Hunters may have supported the somewhat “softened” white racism that allows for the assimilation of the wealthy Mariquita into the white European American family.[39]
This white racism is only slightly softened, however, for the Moras are welcomed into the white family in no small part through the defining contrast of Victor's harshly racialized representations of Indians. Although the Moras are marked as “southern” types several times in the first half of the novel, it is only later, when the Yankee and Grason see them on the Santa Fe trail accompanied by Indians, that they begin to call the Moras both “whites” and “Mexicans” (28). Whereas the Wichitas
If Victor tries to eviscerate the recent history of imperial, international, and interracial rivalries and warfare in the borderlands, however, traces of those conflicts resurface in the novel. The very focus on the South-western transfrontera contact zone of the Santa Fe trail already brings into view, although from a skewed perspective, a space that exceeds the boundaries of the nation-state, one where U.S. whites, Mexicans, creoles, and different groups of Indians mingle and fight. In the nineteenth century the Comanche ranged across national boundary lines, raiding and trading in Texas, New Mexico, and in the Great Plains, as well as northern Mexico; the Comanchería did not respect, though it often took advantage of, the international border between Mexico and the United States.[42] And although it is unclear exactly when the novel takes place, when the Moras and the two white hunters travel together on the Santa Fe trail they are described as being outside the space of the U.S. nation, for Mariquita and Grason must return to the States so their marriage can be properly consummated. This could reference New Mexico's long post-1848 status as a territory, or it could indicate a pre-1848 time frame,
The novel also addresses the North/South sectional divide and the battle over slavery, though the “South” takes on a variety of different meanings in this text. The Moras are “southerners” in part because they are from New Orleans, which is part of the Southern United States. But they are also “southerners” because they are of Spanish, and therefore of Southern European, descent. By drawing on the Black Legend—Mariquita's mother is a slaveholder whose treatment of slaves is compared to the Spanish Inquisition—Victor is able to blame the horrors of slavery on a “foreign” class of Southerners: it is also significant that Pedro inherits from his Spanish father not only New Mexican gold mines but also a Louisiana sugar plantation. At various times, though, the Moras are associated not only with Spain and New Orleans but also with Santa Fe and Mexico; they are called “Spaniards,” “southerners,” and “Mexicans,” and those terms all become jumbled together in the novel. This blurriness corresponds in part, I would argue, to Northern fears, especially in the late 1850s and at the beginning of the Civil War, of Southern expansion “southward” into the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America: everything “south” of the U.S. North was therefore, from a Northern perspective, potentially part of a southern slave empire, one that was also strongly identified by many Northerners with the history of Spanish imperialism in the Americas. But by 1865, the year that The Two Hunters was published, Victor was apparently ready to welcome the “South” back into the national family, despite its history of slavery and what is here represented as its almost foreign status: the marriage between the “northerner” Grason and the “southerner” Mariquita is certainly suggestive of such a reconciliation.
THE NORTHERN NIGHTMARE OF A SOUTHERN EMPIRE
If in 1865 Victor was willing to imagine the reconciliation of North and “South,” however, just a few years earlier she emphasized the differences between sections by appealing to a nightmarish vision of the South as an empire. In Victor's 1862 novel The Unionist's Daughter: A Tale of the Rebellion in Tennessee, Eleanor Beaufort, the daughter of
By mentioning William Walker, who led several filibustering expeditions into Mexico and Central America and who seized control of Nicaragua from 1855 through early 1857 before being shot in Honduras in the fall of 1860, Victor alludes to a figure who had become an important symbol of the sectional divide between the South and the North on the question of imperial expansion southward.[46] Earlier in his life Walker had been a Free Soiler, but during his embattled Nicaraguan presidency he appealed to the U.S. South for support by reintroducing
Of course by 1862, the year that The Unionist's Daughter was published, Walker was dead and the Southern dream of a slave empire had faded. Nonetheless, Victor not only represents Southern secessionists as villains by attributing imperial ambitions to them, but she also invokes a female version of free labor ideals in order to characterize the North/South divide. Although despite her wealth Eleanor abhors “absolute and vacant idleness” (25), Marcia, the daughter of the imperialist Le Vert, is “magnificently indolent”; her “only idea of labor was that it made a slave of a human being” (25), and her ideas about politics are summed up by her horror that “Lincoln has split wood with his own hands; mon ami, just think what his wife must be!” (26). Although by birth Eleanor and her father belong to the “wealthy classes” who welcome secession, fantasize about empire, and disdain labor, they eventually join forces with the “party of the middle classes, mountaineers, and small farmers” (25) who support the Union. And if the broken engagement
While this white egalitarianism is of the “softer” kind that Saxton identifies with the “whiggish core” of the Republican Party—which means both that it is softer on racial questions and also that its egalitarianism is more muted than that espoused by Republicanism's Free Soil constituency—racial hierarchies are still fundamental to Victor's vision.[51] Even though Beaufort refuses to endorse the secessionist break with the Union, Eleanor repeatedly insists that her father is a “consistent and conscientious slaveholder” (17), and Pompey, a heroic and unbelievably loyal slave, even feels insulted when neighbors call Beaufort an abolitionist. Victor includes one brief scene in which Pompey and his wife hope that they will soon be delivered from bondage, but through-out much of the novel, Pompey seems more concerned for the welfare of the Beauforts than for that of his own family. At the end he follows Captain Bell and Eleanor to Cincinnati, where he “clings to them; does the rough work of the little household, the marketing, etc. and a good day's work as a blacksmith steadily besides” (214)—and even wants to give them his wages, though Eleanor tells him to save the money so that his family can come to join him in the North. So although The Unionist's Daughter looks ahead to a postslavery world, severely hierarchical and
If questions of empire resurface in Victor's dime novel about the Civil War, in Mary Andrews Denison's The Prisoner of La Vintresse; or, The Fortunes of a Cuban Heiress (1860), which was published by Beadle and Company before the war broke out, questions of race and slavery provoked by the impending North/South divide shape a plot that is otherwise about filibustering and international romance in Cuba and New York. Before she started writing for Beadle, Denison had already become famous as a contributor to the Boston-based story papers the Olive Branch and Gleason's Literary Companion; as editor of the Lady's Enterprise; and as the author of several novels, including Gracie Amber (1857), which was about a working-class girl's resistance to the seduction attempts of an aristocratic libertine, and Old Hepsy (1858), an anti-slavery novel that focused on the experiences of the daughter of a white woman and a black man.[52] Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a center of abolitionist sentiment, Denison married the Reverend Charles Wheeler Denison, who edited the Emancipator, which Albert Johannsen claimed was the first antislavery journal in New York.[53] She accompanied her husband to British Guiana in 1853 when he was appointed consul general there, and that may have encouraged her to write a novel about Cuba.[54]
By making the plot of her Cuban romance, The Prisoner of La Vintresse, turn on the imprisonment of a U.S. American who is charged with being a spy for the filibusters, Denison alluded to a subject that had been very much in the news during the previous decade. As I suggested in chapter 5, especially after 1848 various imperial projects centered on the acquisition of Cuba. Presidents Polk and Buchanan tried to buy Cuba in 1848 and 1859; and in 1854, during Pierce's administration, foreign ministers Pierre Soulé, James Buchanan, and John Mason coauthored the
Figure 13. Illustration from Metta Victor's The Unionist's Daughter. (Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
Although the Republican national platform for 1856 scornfully called the Ostend Manifesto a “highwayman's plea” that “would bring shame and dishonor upon any government or people that gave it their sanction,” during this decade many other U.S. Americans became involved in plots to invade and “liberate” Cuba.[59] In chapter 5 we saw how the New York nativist and working-class advocate Ned Buntline endorsed filibustering and incorporated Cuban filibustering plots into The B'hoys of New York and The Mysteries and Miseries of New Orleans. Buntline's novels as well as the existing historical evidence about filibustering expeditions suggest that in the late 1840s and early 1850s they attracted large numbers of both Southerners and Northerners, especially Northerners from New York City and other Northeastern port cities.[60] One model for this convergence of largely proslavery Northerners and Southerners was the Democratic Party, which appealed to a trans-sectional coalition of voters by yoking together white egalitarianism, the preservation of slavery, and expansion; but a diverse and irreducible set of material and economic interests, such as investments in Cuban plantations, shipping, trade, and finance also motivated these often trans-sectional ventures; and ideologies of imperial white manhood certainly played no small part.[61] As the issue of “southward” expansion became more and more a sectional question rather than one of party, however, filibustering, especially with respect to Cuba, became a more overtly proslavery and distinctively Southern enterprise. In 1849 the strongly proslavery Narciso López moved the base of his ill-fated filibustering expeditions from New York City to New Orleans in order to attract more support from influential Southerners; in 1853 and 1854 former Mississippi governor and U.S.–Mexican War hero John Quitman tried to organize another invasion of Cuba; and in 1856, Walker reinstated slavery in Nicaragua and made his infamous appeal to Southern slaveholders for support.[62] Each of these notorious filibustering expeditions was given a good deal of space in the newspapers and magazines of the decade, and each, along with the intensifying intraparty splits along sectional lines, contributed to the increasingly common perception that filibustering was a Southern project.
This does not mean, however, that all Northerners opposed the acquisition of Cuba. Northern Democrats such as John O'Sullivan and Mike Walsh, for example, were embroiled in Quitman's schemes to invade Cuba in the middle of the decade, and many others continued to
In her dime novel, Denison returns to the conventions of the international romances of 1846–1848 as she builds her plots around the threat of a forced marriage, battles over consent, and inter-American love. The heroine, Minerva, the Cuban heiress of the subtitle, is “partly of Spanish, partly of English blood,” and this legacy means that she has “inherited some English tastes and traits” that Denison means for us to admire at the expense of the “Spanish.”[65] At the outset, her fiancé, Herman Goreham protects her “with lover-like energy” (10) as he secures a seat for her on a boat set to sail from Havana to New York City. But then he goes ashore to retrieve some papers almost immediately afterward and never returns. Later, we find out that Cuban authorities have arrested Herman after Don Carlos, the lover that Minerva had spurned, accused him of being a tool of the filibusters. It is unclear whether there is any basis for these rumors; while Denison uses the filibustering charge and the Cubans' subsequent treatment of Herman as proof of Spanish tyranny, the narrative never directly refutes the accusation either. In any case, Herman remains a prisoner for most of the rest of the novel, which quickly shifts to the United States to follow the story of the Cuban heiress in New York. Once in New York, Minerva tries to elude her Spanish uncle, the General, “one of the grandees of Cuba,” and his ward, Don
Carlos, “a fiery, passionate, and extremely elegant personage … possessing an immense fortune in sugar estates and slaves” (16).
Although the General has tried to force her to marry Don Carlos, she escapes to the Northern United States only to find the “Southern” General's agents, such as the evil Senor Velasquez, everywhere on the look-out for her as she negotiates the perils of the mysterious city, worries for the first time about money, dodges would-be lovers, dons a disguise, and ultimately contacts Herman's mother and hides out at the family farm near Saratoga. Next she is kidnapped by Senor Velasquez, who takes her on a ship bound for Havana but who suddenly dies on the way there. Before dying, however, he confesses his crimes and also reveals that Her-man has been imprisoned in the jail at the slave quarters of the abandoned plantation La Vintresse. When she arrives in Cuba, Minerva hurries to La Vintresse and ensures that the emaciated, nearly dead Herman is attended to by a doctor and placed on a ship bound for the United States. Then, at the end of the novel, Minerva marries Herman and goes to live on the family farm, where “the pale son and his beautiful bride, make the home an Eden” (98).
Reading this novel as a post-1848 international romance, the mar-riage between Goreham and the Cuban heiress, who inherits a fortune built on “houses, lands, and ships” (24), would seem to figure a more intimate relationship, perhaps even some form of political union, between the United States and Cuba. According to the pattern established by the U.S.–Mexican War romances, the Spanish General, the guardian of the heiress, who ignores questions of desire and consent, represents a tyrannical Spanish ruling class that is unfairly trying to control the wealth of Cuba. The passionate, handsome, but evil-looking Don Carlos, who resembles the rapacious villains in the sensational literature of 1848, is also clearly marked as an inappropriate mate for the heiress, which suggests that the political union between Spain and Cuba is unnatural and undesirable. On the other hand, the “manly” Herman Goreham, who is accused of being a spy for the Yankee filibusters and a “dangerous enemy” (22) to the Cuban state, inherits the place of the U.S. soldier who romances the girl in the U.S.–Mexican War era story-paper fiction. The fact that the heiress is represented as white (largely due, it seems, to her British “blood”) and that she ultimately goes to live on the family farm in New York may suggest that Cuba, too, might be incorporated into the United States, despite the fears of many U.S. whites that the Spanish “race,” let alone large numbers of black and mixed-race people, could not easily be assimilated.[66]
But we must also attend to the anxieties about imperial policies that structure the novel, anxieties that also frequently shape the plots of the romances of 1848. Denison sometimes suggests, for instance, that intimate contact with foreign spaces and peoples may be dangerous and enervating; the strong, protecting U.S. American (or as Denison describes him, “the self-reliant, dignified man”) is quickly transformed into a “pale, bowed down captive” (38) who must himself be rescued by the Cuban heiress. Although during this period, filibustering and imperial adventure were often identified, as they were for Buntline, with the reinforcement or enhancement of U.S. masculinity, here Denison implies that contact with the foreign actually threatens to weaken U.S. manhood. When Minerva rescues Herman, he is prostrate, weak, and wasted. “Language cannot convey an idea of his extreme emaciation” (95), Denison tells us. So even though “el Americano” Herman ends up married to the Cuban heiress, it is far from clear that the novel endorses territorial expansion. Indeed, as an abolitionist, Denison would most likely have been among those who feared that the annexation of Cuba would mean the addition of another slave state to the Union. This may help to explain why the scene of Herman's rescue is figured as the liberation of a slave: he is imprisoned, after all, in the jail of the slave quarters on an abandoned plantation, and in the illustration that accompanied the novel a severed chain lies in the foreground as the captive reaches out imploringly toward his rescuers and his black captor. This inverted representation implies that foreign entanglements threaten to turn white men into slaves even as it mobilizes antislavery sympathies in behalf of white men.
The “middling” version of white egalitarianism that frequently accompanied antislavery sentiments in dime novels written by women is also evident in The Prisoner of La Vintresse. The evil Spanish villains in this novel are, after all, fabulously wealthy slaveowning aristocrats. Their lavish, luxurious life, which is most explicitly lampooned when they visit Saratoga, is contrasted with the “plain” rural domesticity of the Gorehams. After the Cuban general has Minerva kidnapped, Herman's father confronts him, calls him a “rascally foreigner,” and boasts that “we American citizens do not allow even Spanish dons to insult us with impunity.” When the General asks whether he should call his slaves to show Goreham out, Herman's father threatens to pitch him and them out of the window and adds, “You had better take care how you insult a man who is king on his own soil” (87). By contrasting a passionate, evil, foreign, slaveowning class of Spanish aristocrats with a virtuous,
Figure 14. Illustration from Mary Denison's The Prisoner of La Vintresse; or, The Fortunes of a Cuban Heiress. (Courtesy of the Hess Collection, University of Minnesota Libraries)
And yet, the romance and marriage between Herman and the Cuban heiress suggests that some kind of intimacy between the United States and Cuba is desirable, even if that relationship does not take the form of territorial annexation. Denison's antislavery sentiments, combined with her representation of a racially darkened Cuba, suggest that her vision of the relationship between Cuba and the United States more closely conforms to that of the Northern commercial imperialists, for whom formal annexation and political incorporation were less important than the securing of trade routes and the maintaining of U.S. economic hegemony, if not political control, of the Caribbean. But although, as Martínez-Fernández suggests, Northern commercial interests mostly accepted the continuing existence of slavery and Spanish domination of Cuba as long as “Spain kept open the avenues of trade and maintained control of the slaves,” Denison is more critical of the Spanish slaveowning class in Cuba.[67] Indeed, her representation of Cuba predicts the new, post–Civil War “northern based and abolitionist” brand of expansionism that continued to seek “the establishment of new bases to protect trade routes and the region's markets” but which, according to Martínez-Fernández, “completely transformed the rules of the game in the Spanish Caribbean.”[68] That this new, abolitionist form of expansionism would also extend and support international, neocolonial racial hierarchies should come as no surprise given the anxiety about racialized constructions of the foreign that pervades Denison's dime novel.
In this chapter I have argued that issues of slavery and sectional division shape many of the dime novels of the Civil War period, and I have suggested that discussions of empire-building frequently provoke a consideration of these issues. But I have also tried to demonstrate that representations of empire and of the “West” in the dime novel Western must be placed in an inter-American frame and read in terms of multiple racial formations. Many scholars, especially in Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies, are currently doing work that might help us to attend to the entanglement of the “foreign” and the “domestic” in this fiction, rather than prematurely domesticating the space of the “West.” In Border Matters, José David Saldívar argues for a “remapping” of American cultural studies that would respect “the materially hybrid and often recalcitrant quality of literary and (mass) cultural forms in the extended U.S.-Mexican borderlands.”[69] And in a recent article called “From borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History,” Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron call for more attention to the “power politics of territorial hegemony”: “Absent