3. Land, Labor, and Empire
in the Dime Novel
6. The Contradictions of Anti-Imperialism
Slaves of the South—arise! Clang ye your gyves to swell the cymbals' sound— Lift your exulting eyes! Lo! your white masters have new victims found— Comrades ye have—in war's red bondage bound: Ye shall hear answering cries, Swelling your gasping sighs.
White slaves of Northern gold! Build ye a Teocalli—where the foes Of our ambition bold May writhe beneath our Anglo-Saxon blows, And shriek their curses in expiring throes— Curses that shall be told Till Eternity is old!
Destiny! Destiny! Lo! 'tis our mission to pour out the tide Of our heart-blood and die, With foeman's corse stretched ghastly by our side; Or live and trample him in vengeful pride: This is our mission high— Gospel of Liberty! —A.J.H. Duganne, “Manifest Destiny” (1855)
Who hath ordained that the Few should hoard Their millions of useless gold?— And rob the earth of its fruit and flowers, While profitless soil they hold? Who hath ordained that a parchment scroll Shall fence round miles of lands,— When millions of hands want acres— And millions of acres want hands! ― 162 ―
'Tis a glaring LIE on the face of day— This robbery of men's rights! 'Tis a lie, that the word of the Lord disowns— 'Tis a curse that burns and blights! And 'twill burn and blight till the people rise, And swear, while they break their bands— That the hands shall henceforth have acres, And the acres henceforth have hands! —Duganne, “The Acres and the Hands,” The Iron Harp
In A.J.H. Duganne's dime novel The Peon Prince; or, The Yankee Knight-Errant. A Tale of Modern Mexico (1861), the Yankee who appears in the subtitle is Putnam Pomfret, an “offshoot of that great Anglo-Saxon stock, whose footsteps track the paths of empire from the pine woods of Arastook to California cañons; from the wild swash of icy seas upon Labrador's beaches, to the swell of undulating waves in Pacific har-bors.”[1] A native of Vermont who comes to Vera Cruz to sell clocks to Mexicans, he is an example of what Alexander Saxton calls a “natural Jacksonian … vernacular character of lower-class status to whom is at-tributed class consciousness in the form of egalitarian values.”[2] Like other popular comic vernacular characters such as the blackface min-strel and the Bowery B'hoy, or urban workingman, the Yankee speaks in a marked dialect, has jettisoned an older politics of deference, and fre-quently exemplifies, in Saxton's words, a “congruence between egalitar-ianism and the hard side of white racism.”[3] But although other comic vernaculars continued to defend slavery until the outbreak of the Civil War, Saxton argues, throughout the 1850s the “Westernized Yankee drifted toward the Free Soil persuasion and by the end of that decade stood as a political foe to his own original siblings, the blackface min-strels.”[4] For if blackface minstrelsy as a form of popular culture corre-sponded to a Jacksonian coalition that supported white egalitarianism and defended slavery, transformations in the Yankee character in the mid–nineteenth century responded to the formation of a new coalition—the Republican Party—which yoked white egalitarianism to ideologies of
Figure 10. Cover of Augustine Joseph Hickey Duganne's The Peon Prince. (Courtesy of the Hess Collection, University of Minnesota Libraries)
The U.S.-Mexican War no doubt played an important role in the Yan-kee's “drift” toward Free Soil politics and the formation of this new coalition, for debates about the war, the annexation of new lands, and the extension of slavery helped to polarize factions within both major political parties and ultimately facilitated the breakup of the party system
If, as Saxton argues, entrepreneurs in dime novel publishing “main-tained a linkage to the Republican party comparable to that of the im-presarios of blackface minstrelsy to the Jacksonian party,” then it might be expected that the dime novels of the early 1860s would reflect the re-alignments of the post-1848 period.[6] One of the premises of Part 3 is that a reconstructed white egalitarianism, which was reshaped by internal and inter-American imperial encounters as well as the battle over slavery, was indeed central to the ideological work of dime novels during the Civil War years. Throughout Part 3 I suggest that the imperial en-counter with Mexico and ideas about Mexican land policies and labor arrangements had formative effects upon ideologies of free land and free labor. But discussions of the Mexican hacienda and peonage also, as we shall see, raised questions about the Southern plantation and slavery, for writers who described these Mexican institutions often ended up com-paring Mexican labor and land arrangements to Southern institutions, as well as to the Northern “free labor” system. The Wilmot Proviso, which would have banned slavery and other forms of “involuntary servi-tude” in any new lands acquired from Mexico, provoked many of these comparisons, and it also anticipated and contributed to the popularization of a Northern anti-imperialism that identified “southward” impe-rial expansion into Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America with the U.S. South and with slavery extension.[7] Although, as we have already
In this chapter, I trace the prehistory of this sectionalization of Manifest Destiny in Northern antiwar literature published during the late 1840s. Despite the fact that many Southerners opposed the war and the annexation of large parts of Mexico, many New Englanders, especially, assumed even during these years that Southerners viewed the U.S.-Mexican War as an opportunity to fortify the institution of slavery. But although much of the Northern antiwar literature of the period focuses on the problem of slavery extension, ideologies of nativism and whiteness also shape a good deal of this literature. In chapter 8, I examine how these beliefs about empire, labor, and race were taken up and transformed by authors of dime novels in the early 1860s. In this chapter and in the next one, however, I also want to emphasize the possibilities and limits of a more radical version of this set of beliefs, a version that was promoted by some of the members of the land reform movement of the 1840s. Although most of the dime novel authors that I will discuss in chapter 8 emphasized a white egalitarianism that muted class differences among whites but stopped short of calling for a radical transformation of society, A.J.H. Duganne's writing was closely linked to labor and land reform movements that had significant ties to working-class communities. Assessing the significance of ideologies of nativism and white egalitarianism in the anti-imperialist literature produced by some of the land reformers, then, also helps us to understand how issues of empire affected reform and working-class cultures during these years.
Especially because of Duganne's long career as a popular writer and his involvement with the labor and land reform movements, his Yankee in Mexico provides an interesting point of departure for an analysis of race, labor, and empire in the dime novel during the early years of the Civil War. Born in Boston in 1823, Duganne first became famous as a popular poet, but after he moved to Philadelphia in the early 1840s he also began producing mysteries-of-the-city novels such as The Knights of the Seal (1845) and The Daguerreotype Miniature; or, Life in the Empire City (1846). These novels were urban melodramas in the tradition of Eugène Sue and George Lippard, who in fact dedicated the first edition of The Quaker City to Duganne. Like Lippard, Duganne also became involved with the land reform movement during these years, and much of his poetry was devoted to the promotion of that cause.
After the Panic of 1837, when the fledgling trade unions of the 1830s were destroyed by financial collapse and mass unemployment, many labor organizers turned to land reform as a solution for the problems that afflicted workers.[9] During the next decade, George Henry Evans used the newspapers he edited—including the Radical, the Working Man's Advocate, and Young America—to promote land reform as the key to realizing equality, solving the problem of nativism, and erasing class divisions in the United States, and these ideas spilled over into many other labor forums, including the National Industrial Congresses, which considered the ten-hour working day and land reform “the twin aims of all workingmen.”[10] In 1844, Evans organized the National Reform Association to advance these principles.
Evans was influenced, as was the antebellum labor movement more generally, by Jeffersonian and Paineite agrarianism as well as by the more radical agrarian theories of Thomas Spence. Struck by the problems of poverty, unemployment, and exploitation in Northern cities, Evans decided that the “great evil” that caused this and almost every other social problem was the monopoly of the land.[11] Because Evans and his followers believed that “all men have a natural and inalienable right to life, and, of consequence, to … the use of land and the other material elements necessary to sustain life,” they argued that policies governing the disposal of the public lands should be radically revised.[12] The basic principles of the National Reform Association were that the lands should not be sold to speculators but should rather be granted only to actual settlers; that limits should be set on the amount of land that anyone could acquire; that the right of occupancy should be transferable only to land-less persons; and that the homestead should be exempt from execution
During the 1840s, the land reform movement was a diverse coalition that included veterans of Jacksonian workingmen's organizations such as Evans, writers like Lippard and Duganne, and people of more Whiggish sympathies such as New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley. This movement became widely popular in part because its supporters successfully used a variety of cultural forms—including newspapers, almanacs, fairs, meetings, and songs—to promote it. Historian Jamie Bronstein points out that “the proliferation of print coincided with the attempt to create a land-reforming culture, an alternative political frame-work which included oral and participatory activities, and encompassed women and children along with men. Without access to publication this ‘imagined community’ of land reformers would never have been possible.”[13] As Bronstein suggests, National Reform also “had its own poet, A.J.H. Duganne,” whose poems “appeared in labor newspapers, in response to the clamorous requests of readers.”[14] During the 1840s, Duganne's poem “The Acres and the Hands” appeared in Young America and in the Voice of Industry, a weekly paper that was at first published in Lowell, Massachusetts, and was for a while edited by factory operative Sarah Bagley.[15] In 1847 the poem was collected in The Iron Harp, a book of Duganne's poetry that included titles such as “The Song of Toil,” “Earth-Sharing,” “Our Mother Earth,” “The Landless,” “Who Owneth America's Soil,” and “The Unsold Lands.” Many of these poems were also reprinted in reform newspapers.
Although both Lippard and Duganne were involved with the land reform movement, however, they took different positions on the U.S.-Mexican War and the question of empire. While Lippard, as we have seen, linked land reform to the Democrats' program of U.S. expansionism, Duganne wrote a long poem called “Manifest Destiny” that echoed many of the Whig objections to the war that I outlined in the previous chapter. On the one hand, Duganne saw the war in Mexico as an aggressive act of “lust, and wrong, and crime—/Branding us to endless time.” Comparing the United States to Rome, he warned that if the Roman empire fell, the fate of the rapidly expanding U.S. empire might
In criticizing the war, Duganne was certainly not alone, especially among New Englanders. Although the scattered sentences that express Thoreau's objections to the war in his essay “Resistance to Civil Government” constitute probably the most famous example of literary dissent
Sometimes dissenters invoked racial hierarchies to argue that the United States should take over the continent by peaceful rather than violent means. Even as the Boston Unitarian clergyman Theodore Parker opposed the war, for instance, he referred to the Mexicans as “a wretched people; wretched in their origin, history, and character.”[25] Parker delivered several powerful antiwar speeches, and his bravery in loudly arguing against the war in many public forums, despite the racialist framework that he assumed, comes through especially clearly in a
Similar contradictions appear in the antiwar literature of abolitionist poet James Russell Lowell. On the one hand, in the poems and letters that he published separately and then collected as The Biglow Papers, he developed a set of Yankee characters and deployed the Yankee dialect that was so popular in literature and on the stage in order to relentlessly lampoon the idea that the war was fought to extend the area of freedom. Adopting the persona of the Massachusetts Yankee Birdofredum Sawin, a private in the U.S. Army, for instance, Lowell writes:
| Afore I come away from hum I hed a strong persuasion | |
| That Mexicans wor n't human beans—an ourang outang nation, | |
| A sort o' folks a chap could kill an' never dream on't arter, | |
| No more 'n a feller'd dream o' pigs thet he hed hed to slarter: … | |
| But wen I jined I wor n't so wise ez thet air queen o'Sheby, | |
― 171 ― | |
| Fer, come to look at 'em, they aint much diff'rent from wut we be, | |
| An' here we air ascrougin' em out o' thir own dominions, | |
| Ashelterin' 'em, ez Caleb sez, under our eagle's pinions, | |
| Wich means to take a feller up jest by the slack o' 's trowsis | |
| An' walk him Spanish clean right out o' all his homes an' houses; | |
| Wal, it doos seem a curus way, but then hooraw fer Jackson! | |
| It must be right, fer Caleb sez it's reg'lar Anglosaxon.[30] | |
But although Lowell uses the Yankee persona to condemn the war and the dehumanization of Mexicans as well as to expose assertions of “anglosaxon” benevolence as a cover for thievery, another of these Yankee characters, the morally upright Hosea Biglow, also calls the Mexicans “poor half-Spanish drones” and views the contested area as “a grand gret cemetary/Fer the barthrights of our race.”[31] And while it would be a mistake to identify Lowell's own positions entirely with those of his Yankee personae, Lowell would later write in a letter that “it is the manifest destiny of the English race to occupy this whole continent and to display there that practical understanding in matters of government and colonization which no other race has given such proof of possessing since the Romans.”[32] This letter suggests that although Lowell despised the war and believed that it was fought to extend slavery, he also believed, like Parker, in a racial “destiny” that ultimately legitimated the control of the entire continent, though not through overtly violent means.
In his journalism during the war years, Frederick Douglass probably went further than any other U.S. commentator in condemning racial Anglo-Saxonism. In an editorial on the war published in January of 1848, as he catalogued some of the key words and phrases that circulated during the war years, he emphasized contradictions in the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny, most notably the contradiction between the abstract ideal of “free institutions” and a white supremacist pride in “Anglo-Saxon blood”: “[The people] are worried, confused, and confounded, so that a general outcry is heard—‘Vigorous prosecution of the war!’—‘Mexico must be humbled!’—‘Conquer a peace!’—‘Indemnity!’—‘War forced upon us!’—‘National honor!’—‘The whole of Mexico!’—‘Our destiny!’—‘This continent!’—‘Anglo-Saxon blood!’—‘More territory!’—‘Free institutions!’—‘Our country!’—till it seems indeed ‘that justice has fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason.”[33] Douglass thereby tracked the formation in newspapers, political discourse, and everyday life of the language of U.S. Anglo-Saxon national identity that became more pervasive, as we have seen, during the war
Douglass was one of only a few antiwar writers who explicitly singled out the ideology of Anglo-Saxon national identity as a cause of this imperialist war, but he also voiced many of the other arguments used by war opponents during these years. For instance, he complained that the war was expensive, that “excessive demands are made on the national treasury” that might be better used for other purposes. He worried that democracy would be undermined when “[m]ilitary chieftains and heroes multiply,” that the people would become accustomed to military hierarchies and authority and would forget the meaning of freedom. He connected such military, authoritarian values to the undermining of republican values when he denounced the “[g]rasping ambition, tyrannic usurpation, atrocious aggression, cruel and haughty pride [which] spread, and pervade the land.” He extended his sympathy to the Mexicans as he graphically portrayed the horrors of war and unmasked so-called U.S. heroism: “The groans of slaughtered men, the screams of violated women, and the cries of orphan children, must bring no throb of pity from our national heart, but must rather serve as music to inspire our gallant troops to deeds of atrocious cruelty, lust, and blood.” And
As he amplifies many of the antiwar arguments that were circulating during the war years, Douglass suggests that many of the soldiers who enlisted did so out of desperation or depravity rather than patriotism. Even though the penny press incessantly glorified the volunteer forces as virtuous citizen-soldiers inspired by love of their country, Douglass painted a very different picture of recruiters sweeping through rum shops and gambling houses, looking for “degraded men to vindicate the insulted honor of our Christian country.” Although Douglass's emphasis on the degraded nature of these recruits stops short of explicitly linking that degradation to lower-class status, other war opponents more readily blamed poor and working-class men for much of the prowar sentiment. When Emerson criticized the political culture that supported the war, for instance, he observed: “We see that reckless and destructive fury which characterizes the lower classes of American society, and which is pampered by hundreds of profligate presses.”[34] Other writers suggested that lower-class men enlisted in the war as an ill-advised way of achieving upward mobility. The popular author Grace Greenwood (Sara J. Clarke) opposed the war, for instance, by writing a story about a “poor, obscure boy” named Herbert Moore who volunteers to fight as a way of gaining “distinction” so that he can “stand on an equality” with his beloved, the wealthy Margaret Neale. Margaret herself, however, fiercely opposes this plan, emphatically denouncing the conflict with Mexico as “a war without one just cause, or one noble object; but waged against an unoffending people, in the rapacity of conquest, and for the extension and perpetuation of human slavery.”[35] Like Douglass, Greenwood calls it a “most unholy war against a sister Republic” (106). Although in his heart Herbert also “utterly condemned the objects and conduct of the war,” his fierce and fiery independence, which is here represented as an excessive and unfortunate masculine trait, prevents him from marrying Margaret anyway and being “lifted up” by her “dear arms” to a position he has “not earned” (103, 101). Herbert has to learn the hard way by experiencing the horrors of war and achieving none of its so-called honors that Margaret is right and that war service does not provide a legitimate
Emerson's linkage of the war to lower-class fury stoked by profligate presses and Greenwood's emphasis on a misguided ambition and desire for upward mobility among poor men raise the question: just what do we know about how poor and working-class people responded to the war? That is a difficult question to answer, however, in any simple way. Certainly many poor and working-class men signed up to fight in the war, but so, for instance, did many middle-class men and elites, for war service provided opportunities of fighting for a kind of “distinction” that was invaluable to future politicians. And if we turn to Emerson's “prof-ligate presses” for evidence, the response to the war there is decidedly mixed. On the one hand, as Saxton suggests, mass circulation daily newspapers such as the Baltimore Sun, the New York Herald, and the Philadelphia Public Ledger generally “applauded Polk's expansionist policies and supported the war to which those politics led.”[36] Their mass circulations make it clear, however, that these papers were also read by many people who were not of the “lower classes,” so although it can safely be assumed that many nonelite newspaper readers in Baltimore, New York, and Philadelphia supported the war, that support cannot be characterized as a uniquely or predominantly lower-class passion.
And yet, working-class advocates such as Philadelphia's George Lippard, as we have seen, as well as New York City's Mike Walsh and others defended the war. Walsh, a Protestant Irish immigrant, was a journalist and proslavery Democratic politician who during this period was, according to Sean Wilentz, “the one great political representative of the city's wage earners and struggling small producers,” a man who managed “to bridge the gap between labor radicalism and Bowery republicanism that the unionists of the 1830s had never fully overcome.” Wilentz suggests that out “of all the prominent local political figures of the early and mid-1840s, he spoke in an unvarnished language of class conflict, thrusting the labor theory of value into his listeners' faces, attaching the cause of the ‘wage slaves’ to that of the social democracy.”[37] In his newspaper, the Subterranean, Walsh also championed the war against Mexico, claiming to be the first and perhaps “the only prominent man to advocate an extension of our form of government over this whole continent first, and then over the whole habitable globe as speedily as our means
Fellow citizens! Or, if I may be allowed the expression, Compatriots in arms! You must all be aware of the great difficulty which exists among the “boys” at present of making, even by the sewerest application to business, anything like a nice stake. (marked sensation.) The truth of this here remark, fellow soldiers, is seen in the increasing brassiness of your plugs, in the dilapidated shabbiness of your general rig, and in the collapsed appearance of your stomachs, (breathless attention, followed by deep sighs). … Is such a state of affairs to be longer borne in silence by us—the most deserving and waluable portion of this community? (tremendous cries of no! never!) Shall we sit quietly, like an apple woman on a race ground, while there's one of the greatest chances ever known for making a stake, staring us in the wery face? (cries of no!) … Fellow citizens, shall it be said, or shall future ages be told that “old Rice” and the boys stood sucking their thumbs, for want of something more substantial to chawer upon, while Mexico, with her gold Jesuses, silver wash bowls, diamonds, and other little awailables, are almost a calling on us to come and take ‘em (tremendous cheering).
Following this appeal, according to Walsh, Rice “opened the roll list, which was filled up as fast as the names could be written.”[39]
Although Rice made visceral appeals to the hunger and avarice of his New York auditors, many scholars have attributed working-class support for the war to a desire for more land to support the extension of an agrarian democracy that could mitigate the evils of “wage slavery” in Northeastern cities and the West. Walsh himself championed land reform principles; in 1844 his paper the Subterranean was even merged
And yet, many land and labor reformers opposed U.S. expansion. Throughout the war years, the Voice of Industry, for instance, vigorously attacked the war and urged workers not to support it. During the first year of the conflict, at a time when enthusiasm for Polk's expansionist policies was at its zenith, Voice writers took a firm stand against them. On 15 May 1846, one writer argued that “Mexico is in a fair way to get soundly thrashed, simply because she will not lie still and quietly permit herself to be robbed of her rightful possessions. Our ‘army of occupation’ has not in fact occupied Texas, but has been pushed into the heart of a province of Mexico, and has threateningly pointed its cannon at the walls of one of its most important frontier cities.” In June, another article noted that those “who take the pains to preserve all anti-war papers ‘for future use’ should be careful and keep a file of the Voice.”[42] After detailing several moral and religious objections to the war, the writer concluded: “Fellow Reformers, are you ready to stand out now and be known as the uncompromising opposers of war in general, and of that piece of hellish iniquity, the present Mexican War in particular?” And at the end of the year, the Voice directed its remarks even more explicitly to workers: “Brother workingmen, at this time choose the lesser evil, and patronize that ‘peculiar institution,’ the prison, rather than pay a visit to that ‘human slaughter house’ and cripple manufactory in Mexico, to
The reasons given in the land and labor reform press for opposing the war were various, ranging from moral and religious objections to political and economic considerations, but many of the concerns detailed in antiwar articles echo some of the republican ideals articulated by writers such as Douglass, Greenwood, and Parker. For example, some suggested that the war was an invasion of a sister republic and explained that those who refused to volunteer “understand that it is as wrong to invade the homes of others as it is to refuse to defend our own.”[44] Others contended that the expansion of the military order required by the war effort imperiled republican ideals. In an article from the Herald of Freedom reprinted in Evans's Young America just before the war began, one journalist argued that governments viewed war as the remedy for the resistance of citizens and that war strengthened the authority of governments in ways that reinforced antirepublican hierarchies. “The hand of Government grows strong and its arm muscular with the exercise of battle. Its necessity becomes apparent, and manifest. Large armies show the need of subordination and command.”[45] In an address of the Industrial Congress to the citizens of the United States on the subject of the war, the authors similarly suggested that the army “endangers your liberty, keeps from you the enjoyment of your just rights, is a chief item in the expense of government, corrupts the morals of the people, encourages idleness, is a gross departure from the principles on which our government was founded, destructive of the social equality that ought to exist between citizens of a Republic, by all the difference there is in the absolute authority of the Officer, and the slavish obedience of the soldier.” Claiming that “the poor are mainly exposed to [war's] dangers, and receive few of its so-called honors,” the representatives of the Industrial Congress advised workers “never to fight for despots to en-slave you, or for territory which, without a change in our govermental [sic] policy, you will only be permitted to occupy as serfs or slaves.”[46]
This address is only one of many contemporaneous examples in which the republican freedom of the working classes is defined in opposition to forms of unfree labor such as slavery. Such attitudes, as David Roediger and others have argued, often implied a distancing disdain for the slave,
George Henry Evans, the leader of the land reform movement, tended to be wary about national expansion not so much because he believed that indigenous peoples or other governments might have prior claims, but rather because he believed that the United States already had enough land and that land speculators were likely to dominate in the new territories.[50] On the specific question of the annexation of Texas, the Working Man's Advocate argued that “Mexico can have no more claims upon Texas than Great Britain has upon the United States. The wrong is, that the Texians have taken with them to Texas the system of Land Plunder which had been imported here from Britain. The people of any part of the world have a right to go wherever there is uncultivated land and work it, as much as is necessary, for their own use; but they have no right to take more, either to sell it, or to make other men work it for them.”[51] Evans was especially disturbed by the prospect that Texas might become a slave state, and he feared that speculators were already dividing up the new lands, which he felt should have been handed out to settlers. “The people of Texas had a right to propose to come under our government,
Later, however, Evans began to explicitly and angrily denounce the war against Mexico. At the outset of an antiwar article published in November of 1846, he condemned the bad “conduct of the government in regard to the war upon Mexico for the extension of Land Monopoly and Slavery (for in no other light can it now be looked upon).” Focusing on the proposed sale of millions of acres of public lands, Evans demanded, “Is the war for the extension of Land Monopoly and Slavery, both wages and chattel, to be carried on at this cost? Are men sitting in their ease with fat salaries to send off poor lacklanders to be maimed and slayed for eight dollars a month, while their lands, and the lands and homes of their wives and children, are sold to the ‘grasping speculators’ in their absence?” After quoting a statement on the sorry condition of volunteers who were discharged in New Orleans, Evans advised Polk: “Better, by far, to stop the war at once, on the easiest terms you can, or even to back out. You are in the wrong!—The paltry dollars due to some of our rich capitalists might have been cause for non-intercourse, but could not authorize one mangled limb, much less all the slaughter that has been enacted. Those who were houseless and homeless in our midst far more demanded the protection of the Government than the speculators who could afford to send property out of the country.”[54]
In this article, Evans opposed the war partly because he feared that any new lands acquired as a result would become the property of speculators rather than “lacklanders.” He also suggested that the war was initiated in behalf of capitalists who had lost money by investing in Mexico, and he insisted that this was not enough of a reason to enact a
Although A.J.H. Duganne, the poet of National Reform, championed both nativist politics and changes in land policies, land reformers more often insisted that their program would make it possible to absorb many more immigrants into the nation. Evans argued, for example, that land reform would end the problem of nativism by encouraging immigrants to go West rather than compete in the labor markets of the East, so that “foreigners would be a benefit instead of an injury to the workingmen as well as to the country.”[55] Evans criticized the members of the Native American movement for seeking to divide workers rather than looking to land reform to solve the problem of labor surpluses, and he made fun of “the selfish exclusiveness of the party assuming (rather ludicrously) the name of Native.”[56] Instead of scapegoating immigrants, Evans suggested that foreign-born workers were the natural allies of native-born workers. In an article that appeared under the headline “To Native American Working Men,” he contended that “almost the entire body of foreigners who come to this country are Working Men, who have been schooled by oppression into a keen and lively sense of Human Rights, and who, therefore, would always be found on the side [of] Native Working Men on all great questions of public policy.”[57]
Although Evans welcomed new immigrants, his positions on race were more ambiguous. Sometimes Evans explicitly included blacks and American Indians within his definition of “the people” and argued that they also deserved to have a portion of land and a stake in the republic.[58] As Roediger has suggested, “Evans and his cothinkers did not argue for white supremacy—at times they bravely supported equal rights—but instead assumed that the position of white workers was central in any reform movement.”[59] This “prioritizing of the struggles of whites” was especially evident when Evans argued against the phrase “free labor” and expanded the meaning of the word “slavery” to describe the situation of landless whites. In a fairly typical passage, he insisted that “there is slavery at home as well as at the South; White slavery as well as Black; slavery here in New York city; slavery all over the State, and, in fact, all over the United States. We had deceived ourselves by calling it by other names, but we have awakened out of the delusion.”[60] Elsewhere he argued that
This prioritizing of whiteness also compromised Evans's defense of the land claims of North American Indians.[64] Evans opposed the war against the Seminoles in Florida, arguing that it was “a war of aggression on the part of the United States, evidently with the view of acquiring territory, without the shadow of reason or justice to support it.”[65] In addition, he denounced the removal of the Cherokees from their lands in Georgia as a “costly, cruel, and unnecessary expatriation.”[66] But he also wishfully maintained that the expulsion of the Indians from their lands “would have been entirely unnecessary but for land monopoly” and thereby failed to see how the movement of white settlers that he advocated also contributed to the displacement of the Indians.[67] A quotation on the masthead of his journals, which Evans attributed to the Sauk warrior Black Hawk, who fought a losing battle against the encroachments of settlers in Illinois and elsewhere, is a good example of this contradiction in Evans's thought: “My reason teaches me that land cannot be sold. The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon, and cultivate, as far as is necessary for their subsistence; and so long as they occupy and cultivate it, they have the right to the soil—but if they voluntarily leave it, then any other people have a right to settle upon it. Nothing can be sold, but such things as can be carried away.”[68] Here Evans invoked a dead Sauk warrior who resisted the westward movement of white settlers in
Generally, the land reformers held that if land monopolies were eliminated, whites and Indians would be able to coexist peacefully, because they believed that under those conditions there would be enough land for all. Evans himself usually ignored the possibility that ideas about property and land use might conflict. In an 1846 number of Young America, however, he explicitly addressed this problem. Writing about the dispute over Oregon, he asked: “Have a few natives, then, scattered over a large territory, a right to exclude all comers? Certainly not. If there is land more than is necessary for their use, others have a right to occupy it.” Evans recognized that the key word, the one that could reopen the debate about the justice of white settlement, was “use.” As he developed his argument, he even acknowledged that Indians and white settlers might have different ideas about what counted as use of the land. “But the natives want to hunt and fish, and the new comers want to cultivate,” he suggested. “There is no difficulty here. The new comers want less ground than they would otherwise, and they have a right to take what is necessary for their use, where the natives have not a settlement, but no more.” Here, Evans recognized incompatible ideas about land use only to override them with the optimistic explanation that farming required “less ground” than hunting and fishing. And although he seemed to accept the idea that hunting and fishing might constitute use of the land, the argument that whites could take up land where there was not an Indian “settlement” effectively defined land devoted to other purposes as waste, open to appropriation by white settlers who could “use” it. The position that hunting and fishing required more land than farming, which might conceivably limit the places where whites could settle were they to respect Indian claims, suddenly receded as Evans limited the sites of Indian land use to actual settlements. He concluded, however, that he had no doubt that “if land monopoly were prohibited, the native races would become cultivators of the soil.”[69] The official National Reform Association position that there was enough land for all thus crucially depended on naturalizing white liberal conceptions of property and use and usually included such a Jeffersonian vision of Indian hunters converted into yeoman farmers peacefully and happily cultivating isolated plots of land.
But the very idea that “waste” land should belong to those who could use it depended on a racialized conception of property. In other words,
And yet, although the National Reformers' ideas about land use generally supported the movement of white settlers into the West, a belief in the superiority of some Indian ideas about land prompted Evans to take an anti-imperialist position on the Indian uprisings in Yucatán in 1848. In part because of its distance from central Mexico and its closer proximity to Cuba and the United States, Yucatán had a tenuous and tempestuous relationship to Mexico in the postindependence years.[72] Yu-catán separated from Mexico several times during this period, and in 1839 the rebel forces relied quite heavily on Indian soldiers to fight their battles. Meanwhile, after independence from Spain and especially in the 1840s, according to one historian, “the acquisition of private property was facilitated by legislation limiting the size of Indian ejidos, allowing for easy purchase of public lands, and rewarding soldiers with land grants in lieu of wages.”[73] These incursions on Indian lands, which often facilitated the development of sugar plantations in the south, along with the arming of the Indians and the latter's resentment of onerous taxes, precipitated the rebellion known as the Caste War of 1847.[74]
In the summer of 1847, the Maya Indians rebelled against the creoles and quickly gained ground throughout the area. Because of the war with the United States, Mexico was not in a position to send forces to the area, and so in 1848 panicking creole elites appealed to several other nations, including the United States, for help. Many U.S. expansionists supported
Some of the opponents of military occupation, on the other hand, argued that the Mexican Indians were citizens, not savages, and compared them to the French revolutionaries of 1848. Notably, Democratic senator Niles, who just a few months later would join the new anti-slavery Free Soil Party, claimed that because the Indians were Mexican citizens, the conflict in Yucatán was a civil war in which the United States had no right to interfere. Since the United States had applauded the efforts of the “sons of toil” to overthrow “the higher and aristocratic classes of their society” in France, he continued, it should also applaud this “revolutionary movement” in “another part of the world” instead of supporting the efforts of “the higher classes in another country to overthrow and even exterminate the lower classes.”[78] In the House, Whig representative Joseph Root of Ohio, who was also about to join the Free Soilers, similarly feared that “we were sympathizing with the aristocracy of Yucatán” and were going to oppose “the democracy.”
Although advocates of intervention described the conflict as a battle between creole civilization and savagery, Root instead viewed it as “a case of the few opposing the many; of the aborigines of the country rising up for their natural rights.” Root also compared the French revolutionaries to the Mexican Indians, arguing that while “no doubt Louis Philippe would have been very glad if we had sympathized on his side. … [W]ho would have dared to propose that?” There was no reason at all to attack the “native Yucatanese,” he concluded, “unless, indeed, it was on account of their color.”[79]
In the Senate, Niles's comparison of the Mexican Indians to the French “sons of toil” was quickly attacked by his colleagues. Cass, for one, complained that when Niles compared the Indian rebels to the “workmen of Paris,” he “elevated” the Mexican Indians “much higher in the scale of humanity than they now are, or, I am afraid, ever will be.” Although Cass conceded that “a false philanthropy may have given them the political qualifications of citizens,” he maintained that they were “utterly unprepared to exercise political power—as much so as our Indians, whose conduct they closely imitate in this war of extermination.” Contemptuously dismissing the comparison between French republicans and Mexican Indians, Cass played upon white fears of slave rebellion as he argued that St. Domingo was instead “the exact prototype” of events in Yucatán.[80] Just a few days later Southern Democrat John C. Calhoun, who opposed intervention, nonetheless agreed with Cass that the conferral of political rights on Mexican Indians had been a terrible mistake that should teach the United States “a solemn lesson.”[81] It is important to note, however, that even the antislavery proto–Free Soiler Root invoked white egalitarian ideals. For even as Root argued that Mexican Indians were not savages but citizens, he also maintained that the creoles in Yucatán “were about equal to the Mexicans; and if there was anything under the face of heaven meaner than a Mexican ‘greaser,’ he should like to know it.” Root conceded that his “sympathies were, first, in favor of the white race; but those who went on this ground must show him better samples of the white man than these Spaniards before they would get up his sympathies very high.”[82] This example suggests that in the case of Yucatán, anti-imperialism could also be motivated by a white egalitarian disdain for and rivalry with “Spaniards” who, viewed through the lens of the Black Legend, were both marginal whites and the decadent, “aristocratic” oppressors of Indians.
The debate between the two factions came to an unexpected end in May of 1848 when news of a peace treaty between the creoles and Indians was reported to Congress, although that peace would soon be broken
It is noteworthy that the National Reform Almanac described as “noble” a conflict that the imperialists denounced as a threat to white so-called civilization, that Evans argued against the rampant expansionist spirit that was quickly being redirected to Yucatán and Cuba as the war with Mexico drew to a close, and that he was eager to draw parallels between the struggles of whites and nonwhites rather than assigning them radically different places in the scale of humanity, as Cass did. Although Evans tried to map connections between the agrarian movements of Indians in Yucatán and white land reformers in the United States, he of course radically simplified complex relationships when he identified the “system” faced by the U.S. “lacklander” with the one that the Indians in Yucatán confronted. Indeed, he remained silent about the differences between these two struggles even though his
But Evans's remarks on the uprising in Yucatán, as well as the reformers' responses to the war, at least make it clear that mid-nineteenth-century ideas about race, land, and labor must be placed in a global frame in order to be understood. I have argued that liberal and racialized conceptions of property limited the radicalism of the land reform project, and I have suggested that these beliefs about property were shaped by histories of both “westward” and “southward” expansion. But inter-American conflict and U.S. empire-building contributed to the racializing of ideologies of “free labor” as well as land. In Racial Fault Lines, Tomás Almaguer suggests that in postwar California nonwhites were associated with “unfree” labor systems that were supposedly threatening or degrading to whites. The U.S.-Mexican War no doubt played an important part in the dissemination of these kinds of ideas, for an emergent and racialized free labor ideology was prominently featured in debates over the Wilmot Proviso and in wartime representations of Mexican labor arrangements. During the 1850s, as the question of Manifest Destiny increasingly became sectionalized, issues of empire would continue to shape Northern Republican ideologies of race, land, and
7. The Hacienda,
the Factory,
and the Plantation
Thus a stranger, standing upon the table-land above the hacienda, might behold an illustration of the two extremes of Mexican existence. The mansion … was a perfect picture of rural luxury; while at a distance, the small gap of desert soil, crowded with miserable huts … denoted the absence of nearly all enjoyment, and the paralyzing effects of abject, unrequited servitude. … The tenants … were now toiling in their master's fields, or in a factory which he had established upon the river some three miles from the hacienda. To this factory, a novel experiment at that time, the greater portion of the debtors who inhabited this village repaired at early dawn, there to toil till sunset, when, receiving their rations of food, they were permitted to return home to their miserable rest.
—Duganne, The Peon Prince; or, The Yankee Knight-Errant. A Tale of Modern Mexico (1861)
I want no stronger witness of the bald injustice of all servile labor than the contrast of a master dwelling in his palace and the servant in his hut; one reaping riches faster than his lavish hand can squander it; the other drudging hopelessly from birth to death, with all his toil appropriated by an “owner,” and with even the offspring of his loins “sold off” to swell that owner's hoards.
—Duganne, Camps and Prisons: Twenty Months in the Department of the Gulf (1865)
Because Duganne's literary career bridged the transition from the labor newspapers, story papers, and periodical literature of the U.S.–Mexican War era to the dime novels of the Civil War years, his work is especially revelatory of the complex ways that race, empire, and labor and land reform were entangled from the 1840s through the 1860s, as the second “party system” broke down, the Republicans became the dominant party in the North, and the South seceded from the Union. During the 1850s, the Republicans gained support not only by appealing to Northern anti-slavery men who were fleeing both the Whig and Democratic parties but also by supporting a weaker version of the land reform platform that the National Reformers had advocated. Although the National Reformers had pushed for the reservation of public lands for landless actual settlers and for limitations on the amount of land that anyone could own, the Home-stead Bill that was finally passed in 1862 granted settlers 160 acres of land after five years' residency but did nothing to limit the size of tracts acquired through purchase by others. And in the years that followed, Congress allocated massive land grants for railroads and other purposes, effectively foreclosing the National Reformers' dreams that the West would become a utopia for impoverished workers and small producers.[1] Moreover, while many of the land reformers insisted more vigorously on the material underpinnings of democratic freedoms and used the language of wage or white slavery more than the language of free labor, Republicans usually glorified free labor and tended to define it as freedom of contract and “the opportunity to achieve economic independence.”[2] Still, by adopting the slogan of free soil, if not the more radical policies of the National Reformers, which they denounced as socialism or agrarianism, the Republicans appealed to a large body of urban workingmen and small farmers, many of whom viewed the Whigs as the party of the elite but did not endorse the alliance of the Democrats with Southern slaveholders. That this Republican hatred of slavery was quite compatible with a disdain for slaves and free blacks, however, is made clear by the frantic efforts of many Republicans to refute the Democrats' charges that the Republican program would mean equal social and political rights for black people.[3]
White egalitarian beliefs such as these influenced many of the efforts to keep slavery—and black people—out of the new territories. When Democrat (and future Free Soiler and Republican) David Wilmot of Penn-sylvania, a war supporter, defended his famous amendment in Congress, he argued, “I would preserve to free white labor a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings
In Wilmot's famous speech, freedom is no abstract term; instead, it is emphatically and repeatedly identified with whiteness:
Men of the North—Representatives of northern freemen, will you consummate such a deed of infamy and shame? I trust in God not. Oh! for the honor of the North—for the fair fame of our green hills and valleys, be firm in this crisis—be true to your country and your race. The white laborer of the North claims your service; he demands that you stand firm to his interests and his rights; that you preserve the future homes of his children, on the distant shores of the Pacific, from the degradation and dishonor of negro servitude. Where the negro slave labors, the free white man cannot labor by his side without sharing in his degradation and his disgrace.[6]
As Wilmot addressed his colleagues, the “Men of the North,” he hailed them both as citizens of the Northern United States and as part of a “race” that he identified with freedom. Wilmot thereby echoed the language of U.S. racial Anglo-Saxonism, which claimed democratic institutions and the ideas of freedom and equality as the particular inheritance of whites.[7] “Shall we give up free territory, the inheritance of free labor? Must we yield this also?” Wilmot implored his audience. “Never, sir, never, until we ourselves are fit to be slaves. … If we do, we are coward slaves, and deserve to have the manacles fastened upon our own limbs.”
Despite the ban on other forms of involuntary servitude as well as slavery in Wilmot's original amendment, in this speech he said nothing about other kinds of coerced labor but instead emphasized an opposition between white freedom and black slavery.[8] In a good deal of U.S.–Mexican War literature, however, free labor and chattel slavery are also often compared to Mexican labor arrangements. In Service Afloat and Ashore During the Mexican War (1851), for instance, Lieutenant Raphael Semmes compared chattel slavery to Mexican peonage as he commented on the unequal division of property in Mexico. At first he described the propertyless “five-sixths of the eight millions of the country” as “laborers dependent from day to day upon their exertions for subsistence.”[9] Although Semmes initially described this part of the nation as a class, however, in
This is the boasted freedom of the Mexican soil, about which there has been so much senseless declamation in our congress, since the conclusion of the war. The well-fed and well-cared-for dependent of a southern estate, with us, is infinitely superior, in point both of physical and moral condition, to the mozo of the Mexican hacienda. The “hewers of wood and drawers of water” are slaves everywhere, as I have found; and whether the slave is so, lege scripta, or lege necessitatis, is, as the lawyers say, a distinction without a difference. (249–50)
Here, Semmes implicitly defends the extension of slavery and attacks the Wilmot Proviso by arguing that labor systems that are worse than slavery are already in place in Mexico. Although his vision of the laboring classes as “slaves everywhere” suggests that white Northern “free laborers” would not escape his contempt, his special focus on the “degraded” state of nonwhite laborers identifies the latter with a natural and necessary system of slavery against which white freedom may be measured.
According to one historian, the term “debt peonage” first appears in English in the mid–nineteenth century as a way of describing an array of labor arrangements.[10] Alan Knight has suggested that in the late colonial period and the early nineteenth century there were two forms of peonage: the first form was coercive, while the second, which Knight calls “traditional” peonage, “rested upon non-coercive foundations.” Although “southern [Mexican] plantations” were the “great bastions” of classic, coercive debt peonage, he argues, “traditional” peonage, in which the worker was not necessarily tied to the hacienda by extra-economic coercion and in which debt did not always function as a bond,
Duganne's accounts of Mexico and of peonage in The Peon Prince and its sequel draw on these earlier forms of imperial knowledge, but they are also shaped by the events and concerns of the Civil War era. The dime novel was itself a new institution in 1861, although the pamphlet novels and story-paper fiction of the 1840s and 1850s provided many of the formulas, settings, and character-types used by the first dime novel authors. The story of how in 1860 Erastus and Irwin Beadle developed a format and a little later a distribution apparatus that turned the dime novel into one of the most successful forms of nineteenth-century mass culture has by now often been told. The introduction of these cheap novels, which were approximately one hundred pages long and which included sensational, eye-grabbing illustrations on the cover, was a landmark innovation in consumer culture that Bill Brown has suggestively compared to the chain-store system and the Five-and-Ten.[14] In an 1862 advertisement, Beadle and Company claimed that their novels were undoubtedly “the most popular series of books ever issued in this country,” and in their catalogue Duganne was described as “one of our most popular writers.”[15] The firm repeatedly issued a special page-long advertisement devoted to descriptions of each of Duganne's dime novels, a promotional tactic that they reserved for only a few of their most celebrated writers. In addition to his two dime novels about Mexico, Duganne also produced Massasoit's Daughter; or, The French Captives (1861), a story about conflicts between Indians and whites in New England, and The King's Man: A Tale of South Carolina in Revolutionary Times (1860).
As the titles and subject matter of these four stories suggest, the early dime novel included a variety of genres and focused on a range of time periods and settings. Philip Durham estimates that approximately three-quarters of Beadle's dime novels were about the frontier and that more than half were concerned with the trans-Mississippi West, but a catalogue published in the early 1860s also referred to numerous sea yarns,
As Brown suggests in the introduction to his recent anthology of dime novel Westerns, although the dime novel is “repeatedly cited to denote the sensationalist version of frontier adventure,” the novels themselves often remain unread and are too often “reduced to a mere stereotype.”[18] Especially because dime novels about Mexico and inter-American conflict have been underanalyzed in studies of this form of early mass culture, I want to consider in some detail these two popular examples of the “Mexico Western.” Because they were among the most popular of Beadle's productions, Duganne's novels were some of the most widely circulated stories of the period, and they therefore offer important evidence about the significance of Mexico and inter-American relations in an emergent mass culture.
What is more, these novels and others like them helped to establish many of the formulas and themes that would be taken up by the movie Westerns of the twentieth century. Although it has become a truism that
Figure 11. Cover of Augustine Joseph Hickey Duganne's Putnam Pomfret's Ward. (Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania)
In the opening chapters of The Peon Prince, which take place in the autumn of 1845, an Italian bandit and a Mexican creole soldier vie for the love of Inez, the beautiful daughter of Murillo the Rich, a farmer. The soldier, Antonio La Vega, is a hotheaded and disdainful cavalry officer; the bandit chief Marani, on the other hand, disguises himself as a wealthy gentleman in order to win Inez's heart. Both are described as harboring unruly passions and both plan to kidnap Inez and force a marriage, though she is in love with Lorenzo, a poor artist. What follows is a series of capture-and-rescue episodes in which the Yankee, Putnam Pomfret, and the peon prince, Zumozin, are intimately involved. Ultimately, the Yankee and Zumozin join forces with a Mexican officer, Nunez, and a priest, Padre Herrata, to rescue Inez and expose the malfeasance of the alcalde and hacendado Juan Garcia, Zumozin's master, who had contrived to mislead Zumozin about his true identity and to steal the vast property left to him by his father. And in the sequel, which opens just as the U.S.-Mexican War is about to begin, the Yan-kee, Herrata, and Zumozin are reunited in order to prevent an unwilling woman—Teresa Glinton, who is from New Orleans and whose mother was a Mexican creole—from being married to an unscrupulous
Both of these narratives feature devices and motifs that are typical of the dime novel: disguise, the exposure of secret identities, violence, cliffhanging chapter endings, beautiful endangered virgins, an intense focus on muscular male bodies, and patriotism. They also incorporate many of the conventions of the story-paper international romances that I described in Part 2. By making one of the protagonists a Yankee, Duganne deployed in his novel a regional type that had long been popular in the theater and in cheap fiction, including the story-paper romances set during the U.S.-Mexican War. In the cheap fiction of the earlier period, Mexico was frequently represented as a land of lawlessness and forced marriage, where banditry prevailed over government and where a woman's consent was all too often considered irrelevant by an aristocratic patriarch or a rapacious villain enthralled to his passions. In the 1840s, these representations were deployed to explain the U.S. presence in Mexico even though many of these novels also implied that the annexation of all or part of Mexico was undesirable. As we have already seen, many wartime novels focused on a possible romance between a U.S. soldier and a Mexican woman in which the relationships between lovers suggested possible postwar relationships between nations. In Duganne's novels, however, international heterosexual romance is almost entirely displaced by international homosocial bonding, as the Yankee helps his allies foil the villains who threaten the women.
Like most of the story-paper Yankees in the war novels of the 1840s, Putnam Pomfret is seemingly ineligible for romance. Although the role of romantic hero was usually reserved for U.S. officers in these earlier stories, in Duganne's novels the Yankee is the only U.S. hero who plays a leading part, and international romance is largely foreclosed. This may follow from the changing circumstances of the early 1860s. The United States had pressured Mexico for more land and for transit rights across northern Mexico and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec throughout the 1850s,
Many of these fears and beliefs are voiced by Duganne's Yankee. Although he joins forces with Officer Nunez, Padre Herrata, and Zumozin, his speech is full of racist invective against “greasers” and “Ingens.” This casual racism is characteristic of the Yankee character type. As Saxton argues, earlier Yankee characters tended to accede to class hierarchies, but by the 1830s “the Yankee was opportunistically employing white racism to justify his shift from deference to egalitarianism.”[21] Thus despite his relatively lowly origins and his status as a lower-class type, in The Peon Prince Putman Pomfret repeatedly asserts his superiority to the Mexicans on the basis of his race and national origin: “I cal'late you wont try to come Paddy over a live white man from the States,” “I'm a free born citizen of the States,” etc.[22] What is more, the affectionate references to him as “Our North American” (21), “our free American” (22), and “our Yankee” (32) all suggest that Duganne was constructing his Yankee as a point of identification for his Northern U.S. readers. But it is also important to note that the Yankee was rarely a completely positive character. As Francis Hodge observes in his wide-ranging study of Yankee theater, in many dialect comedies, “the Yankee is not often admirable or idealized; he belongs to a race of not-so-petty bargainers who win because they are more clever, more ‘slick’ than others.”[23] The cleverness and “slickness” of Duganne's Yankee help him to defeat his Mexican foes, but these qualities, as well as his hyperbolic slangy speech, also make him more than slightly ridiculous.
And the Yankee is not the only hero in these novels, for Zumozin, Herrata, and Nunez also play significant roles. When we are first introduced to Zumozin, the Peon Prince of the title, “one of a great class of his countrymen” who toil “in the most abject and hopeless servitude”
(48), Duganne figures him as a Romantic hero, standing on the “highest ridge” of a “sublime” mountain, contemplating his evil fate. Zumozin toils in the “degrading” (91) position of a herd-boy on the hacienda of Juan Garcia, the corrupt alcalde, and dreams of freedom. He is also, however, the leader of one thousand Indians, whom he convenes as part of a ritual at the base of the ancient pyramids, where each swears “to be true to Aztlan” (105). Although at the end of The Peon Prince it is revealed that Zumozin's father was “an Italian grandee” and his mother an Indian princess, “chosen to be [his] bride out of all the dames of Spain's trans-Atlantic empire” (122), Zumozin repudiates wealth and “station,” as well as Mexican “Society and the State,” in order to “redeem and exalt the race of [his] mother—the race of Zumozin” (127). When we next meet him in Putnam Pomfret's Ward, his plans for the “improvement and elevation” of “the Indian population” are already well underway, and he hopes to unite “the scattered and dissimilar tribes, who owned a common country, into a warlike, disciplined nation, federated by a single object, the preservation of their own rude independence.” To this, the Yankee replies that Zumozin should be president, and that the Indians “owned the land before any white feller ever set foot on 't.”[24]
The main villain in The Peon Prince is the alcalde Garcia, “one of the largest landholders in that part of the country, as well as an extensive speculator in mines, and a man, likewise, who was reputed to exercise no little influence in political affairs at the capital” (74). While the Yan-kee and those Mexicans who are represented positively in this novel favor President Herrera, the moderate Mexican leader who wanted to negotiate instead of going to war with the United States over the annexation of Texas, Garcia is an ally of the anti–North American Paredes, a conservative who deposed Herrera and became president in January of 1846, just before the war started. But although U.S. interests clearly govern these distinctions between Mexican heroes and villains, Duganne also denounces the Mexican conservatives allied with Paredes by accusing them, through the figure of Garcia, of ruling through racial tyranny. Garcia hopes that a youth of royal blood “backed by European armies” will marry his niece and rule Mexico as its king; his desire to subvert the republic is rooted in his conviction that Mexico's “unquiet races can be ruled only with an iron scepter” (119).
The Mexican heroes who oppose this vision of Mexico's future are Zu-mozin, the radical priest Padre Herrata, and the army officer Captain Nunez. Herrata, “a patriot, in the highest sense of the word” (91), had
The magnetic homosocial bond between Herrata, Nunez, and Zu-mozin seems to be Duganne's way of imagining an interracial, cross-class alliance between Mexican creoles and Indians as an alternative to the rule of anti-U.S. conservatives such as Paredes. This U.S. interest in Mexican political divisions was no doubt reanimated by Mexico's own recent civil war. In response to the reform laws of the 1850s and the new liberal Constitution of 1857, which banned the corporate ownership of real estate and abolished judicial privileges for the army, the conservatives rebelled, dissolved Congress, deposed President Comonfort, and took power themselves.[25] During the three-year-long war that followed, Benito Juárez, an acculturated Zapotec Indian, radical liberal, and minister of justice under Comonfort, declared himself president and led the struggle against the conservatives from his base in Vera Cruz. On 6 April 1859 the United States officially recognized the Juárez regime, but U.S. leaders refused to provide any support for Juárez unless Mexico granted territorial concessions and transit rights to the United States. In late December the McLane-Ocampo Treaty was agreed upon, which granted the United States transit rights in return for two million dollars, but this treaty was rejected by the U.S. Senate shortly thereafter. Nonetheless, by late 1860 the liberals had won the war, and in June of 1861—two months after the U.S. Civil War began and Duganne's The Peon Prince was published—Juárez was officially declared president of Mexico. A few months later France invaded Mexico and another long struggle on the part of Juárez and his liberal government began. From 1862 through 1867, the years of the war against Maximilian's empire, Juárez appealed to Lincoln for support, stressing “the identity of constitutional principles shared by Mexico and the United States” as well as Mexico's opposition to slavery, but U.S. leaders, who were wary of upsetting France
Given this international context, Duganne must have expected that readers would have thought of Juárez when they read about the Indian Zumozin, the Yankee's choice for president of Mexico. As an embattled liberal government that was friendly toward the Republicans of the North, the Juárez regime would have been preferred by many Northerners to Maximilian, who was courted by the Confederacy. The trio of priest, officer, and Indian “noble” that is featured in these two dime novels, then, is Duganne's way of imagining a Mexican coalition, no doubt in part inspired by the Juárez coalition, composed of Indian leaders and liberal factions within the church and the army, which would be friendly to the United States.
Still, however, given the long history of U.S. debates about the ability of nonwhites to participate in republican government, such as those about the status of the Maya Indians in Yucatán that I discussed in the previous chapter, the place of Indians within this coalition would have been, to say the least, controversial. Proslavery politicians such as John C. Calhoun and Lewis Cass seized upon the Caste War in Yucatán to support their position that the Indians were unprepared to exercise political power.[27] Duganne must have had arguments such as these in mind when he pointed out that “many instances have occurred of pure-blooded Indians attaining to high positions in the State, holding rank in civil and military affairs” (65). Although he suggested that these examples were exceptions, he argued that they served “but to exhibit more forcefully the injustice which creates social distinctions on account of the accident of birth.” Duganne concluded that
Mexico owed, probably, as much to the Indian and Mestizo portions of her citizens, during the struggle for independence, as to any other class. Guerrero, indeed, the first of her actual Presidents, and one of the bravest of her patriot commanders, was scarcely more a white than a negro in the quality of his blood. It is evident, therefore, that the inequality of political power is not the result of natural inferiority in the degraded classes, but rather the offspring of that injustice which repudiates all merit when opposed to prejudice. (65–66)
As Duganne argues against the “natural inferiority” of the “Indian and Mestizo” classes, the overlapping languages of class and race that he draws on lead him to break from the position, which was popular among many Northerners as well as Southerners, that nonwhites were unfit to exercise political rights in a democracy. After Vicente Guerrero,
Of course, the attempted liberal incorporation of Indians into the Mexican nation-state also depended on racial hierarchies, hierarchies that are referenced in The Peon Prince by Zumozin's self-sacrifice, his sense of unworthiness, and his subordination to Nunez within the alliance. If Garcia's niece stands in for the Mexican nation, which Garcia wants to wed to a European prince, then Zumozin's self-sacrificing desire for her and Nunez's marriage to her suggest a political situation in which liberal creoles lead the nation while Indians are cast in supporting roles. Even this representation, however, is a much too cheery rendering of how creole rule and liberal policies actually affected Indian communities. For liberal land laws ultimately aimed at the privatization of all corporate lands, including communal lands held by Indians as well as church property. The attempted liberal shift from particularist forms of community to a universalist, nationalist one also erased the status of Indian, replacing it with the abstract identity of the citizen.[29] That this was a violent, incomplete process which provoked violent responses is evidenced by the large number of uprisings that occurred when liberals tried to enforce the new laws.[30] Even before he became president, Benito Juárez, for instance, found that the liberal policies that he advocated were objectionable to Indian communities in Oaxaca. But according to Jack Spicer, when Juárez, as governor of Oaxaca during the 1850s, suppressed the revolt of the Indians of Juchitan in the Isthmus of Tehuante-pec, who were responding to the land provisions of the new reform laws, “he held that the existence of Indian communities based in the colonial system constituted a threat to the nation. They must be broken up at all costs, so that individual initiative and modern forms of representative government could prevail.”[31]
So on the one hand, Duganne's representation of a liberal Mexican coalition that included a Mexican Indian leader was an important intervention in U.S. debates about whether nonwhites were now, or ever
Wanting Mexico to be remade in the image of the United States, Duganne could not see in his construction of a possible Mexican future what the land reformers also failed to understand in the U.S. context: the role that liberal forms of property and government played in deepening inequalities. This does not mean that there were not significant differences among different liberal positions: the land reformers' emphasis on the importance of the diffusion of land ownership and the material under-pinnings of citizenship countered those aspects of an emerging free
The significance of this comparison between white Northern laborers and chattel slaves has been debated, as I have already suggested, by labor historians. Although David Roediger has argued that this comparison was intrinsically problematic and that those who deployed the wage slavery metaphor were often proslavery, Foner has suggested that despite its hyperbole and its use by some advocates of slavery, the rhetoric of wage slavery was also often used by artisans, factory workers, and others who opposed slavery, and he insists that it “suggested the superiority of a very different conception of labor relations than that embodied in contract thought.”[36] Comparisons among peonage, chattel slavery, and Northern “free” labor were similarly fraught, in ways that both Roediger's and Foner's analysis helps us to understand.[37] When these different labor systems are viewed as like each other, the comparisons can indeed seem strained and hyperbolic: the forms of coercion and control that the “peon” and the slave were subjected to were dramatically different from those endured by the Northern white laborer. That peonage and slavery were racialized labor systems may also disappear from view when these three sets of labor relations are all described as forms of slavery. But arguments that insisted on the differences between free and unfree labor were also problematic. The opposition that David Wilmot, for instance, constructed between free labor and slave labor depended on a white egalitarian belief that nonwhites were degraded and that their presence threatened to degrade whites. On the other hand, abolitionists who emphasized a dichotomy between slave labor and free labor and idealized the latter sometimes helped “to legitimize the wage relationship,” Foner suggests, “even as it was coming under bitter attack.”[38] As Foner argues, it is important to understand how the refusal of the term “free labor” and the use of the wage slavery metaphor by antislavery labor advocates could function as an attack on
This double bind forged by the context of racialized labor relations also affected Duganne's discussions of peonage on a Mexican hacienda. Even the fact that Duganne represents peonage as quasi-ubiquitous in Mexico is already an exoticizing, othering move. According to John Tutino, during the postindependence period the “decline of silver mining and the weakness of commercial elites combined to threaten the power of the dominant class of central Mexico—the great families that during the late colonial era had integrated commercial, mining, and landed activities to rule the core regions of the colony.”[40] In these circumstances, the hacienda became a less viable institution, and in many areas sharecropping and ranchero production expanded. Mexican liberals also almost universally attacked the hacienda in terms very similar to Duganne's, claiming that it was a feudal institution that encouraged dependency and impeded the formation of a class of smaller producers.[41] Finally, in his study of the hacienda during this period, D.A. Brading cites evidence that in the nineteenth century many workers avoided debt peonage; that in the northern province of San Luis Potosí resident peons were a relatively “privileged group within the work-force of the hacienda” who received wages as well as food rations; that tenants and sharecroppers were “more numerous and more deeply in debt”; and that debt was often more “of an inducement than a bond.”[42] All of this suggests that we must examine as an ideological construction Duganne's representation of peonage as an institution “which prevails more or less throughout the whole of Mexico, and by which thousands are held in the most abject and hopeless servitude, sold and transferred with the land they cultivate or the mines they work” (48).
As Duganne describes debt peonage, he represents it as the antithesis of liberal modernity: it is feudal and the peon is a serf, but his degradation is worse than medieval. “It is not generally known that although slavery, as it exists in the United States, was long ago abolished in Mexico, there still remains in that unhappy land a system of serfdom immeasurably more degrading than the vassalage of the middle ages, and at best on a level with the worst forms of African bondage” (48). Like Raphael Semmes, although to different purposes, Duganne sees debt peonage as a
But Duganne also suggests parallels between Mexican peons and Northern laborers, so much so that these representations of peonage could be described in Eric Lott's terms as “displaced maps or representations of ‘working-classness,’” with more sympathy for nonwhite laborers, despite the problems I've indicated, than can be found in the performances of blackface minstrelsy that Lott analyzes.[44] For as Duganne tries to represent debt peonage, he repeatedly adapts generic conventions from Eastern urban gothic fiction. First of all, as I suggested above, within urban reform literature it was not unusual for wage laborers to be described as serfs or slaves, so when Mexican peons are represented in these terms, comparisons between the two labor systems are not necessarily foreclosed. We have seen how writers such as Lippard relentlessly compared New York's “upper ten and lower million” by contrasting the mansions of the rich to the hovels of the poor. Duganne uses a similar rhetoric when he opposes the peons' “miserable huts” to their
Like early advocates of the working class in the United States, Duganne also invoked a distinction between producers and nonproducers by representing the nonwhite peoples of Mexico as a producer class, with Spanish colonizers and Mexican creole elites playing the role that Eastern capitalists occupied in urban reform literature. “While the Guadalupinoes [sic] and Creoles have enjoyed by turns the power and immunities of an aristocracy,” Duganne argues, “the Aborigines, Mestizoes, Mulattoes, and Blacks, in all their various shades, have always, since the Conquest, occupied inferior grades of life, as ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’” (64). Duganne describes the Spanish colonizers as “petty tyrants, who, by monopoly, extortion and rapacity, amassed the wealth which properly belonged to those whose labor and struggles had opened the avenues to industry and commerce” (92)—the nonwhite laborers of Mexico. Monopoly, extortion, and rapacity were key words in the languages of class developed by white workers in Northeastern cities, who often opposed the productive labor of the working classes to the non-productive idleness of the rich. Here, however, these languages of class are used to construct Spaniards and creole elites as an “aristocracy” that exploits the laboring classes and takes the wealth that “properly belongs” to the latter.
Even as Duganne deplores the cruel treatment of Mexico's nonwhite races and describes them as a class of producers, however, he also invokes the Black Legend, which held that the Spanish colonizers were more inhumane than other European colonizers in the Americas. Despite Duganne's opposition to the war and to U.S. empire-building, this position could fortify imperialist ideologies which suggested that U.S. expansion would bring liberty and enlightenment to the oppressed peoples of Mexico by displacing a tyrannical, largely Spanish ruling class. Such a set of beliefs could also reinforce the anti-Catholic nativism that
The possibilities and limits of Duganne's position are also revealed but in a different context—this time, he focuses on the plantation rather than the hacienda—in Camps and Prisons, a personal narrative that he published at the end of the Civil War. In 1862, one year after his two dime novels about Mexico were issued, Duganne helped to raise a company of New York Volunteers to fight in the Civil War, and he became the lieutenant colonel of the regiment. In the summer of 1863 he was forced by circumstances to surrender to the Confederates in Louisiana, and about half of his lengthy war memoir is about his time in prison. But the first half concerns Duganne's travels through the South, as he passes through New Orleans, “the empress city of the South,” observes ruined plantations, and comments on the differences between Northern and Southern life.[47] Again and again, Northern Republican ideas about land and labor provide the lens through which he interprets what he sees. When he stops among the plantations of Bayou Lafourche in Louisiana, for instance, he observes that half a century ago these lands
promised comfort and competence to a hundred thousand white men, who, settling here, with skill and toil, might build up homes for free-born families. But speculating Capital came also to this treasury of cotton and sugar; and thereafter the curse of “adding field to field” laid grasp upon the future. So
At the beginning of this passage, Duganne's language recalls the white egalitarianism of the Wilmot Proviso, with its emphasis on the debasement of laboring white men who suffer because of the slave system; slavery is condemned, in “free labor” terms, because it leads to Landlordism and the monopoly of the soil, which in turn crowds free white laborers into the swamp bottoms. As Duganne proceeds, however, he focuses more closely on the black laborers who worked these plantations, and he adapts Republican free labor ideology to argue that the plantations should not be returned to their owners but that instead the former slaves should be armed and allowed to run them.
After walking down the road of a sugar plantation, “passing through miles of rotting cane, decadence of ungathered crops” (33), he reaches the quarters of the blacks and encounters Uncle Phil, a plantation-preacher and former slave and overseer's assistant on the estate. Phil takes him on a tour through the abandoned sawmill and sugar mill and demonstrates a knowledge of their workings that proves he could easily run a sugar-plantation himself. Meditating on the fact that thousands of such plantations have been “given over to destruction” while “the toiling people who had made them Edens of productiveness, were cast out on the highways” (36), Duganne imagines
each broad plantation, with its vast machinery, confided to the hands which earned and paid for all the wide improvements. I fancy a “sugar-maker” like Uncle Phil still watching over every reservoir, and—backed by wise authority, assisted by selected men of science and of honesty—producing wealth for Government—large profits to the power that breaks his chain and gives him manhood in exchange for slavery. I see a grand militia, armed and drilled upon these green savannas; no longer chattel-souls, but conscious of their strength and numbers, marching to the cane and cotton-fields by tap of drum, and guarding bridge or railway line with ready rifles, and with surer knowledge of the ground than ever can be gained by Northern regiments. (37)
In this passage Duganne imagines the former slaves producing wartime profits for government; later, when he encounters field hands who have organized themselves into a “labor-phalanx” (62) to cultivate their old domain, he endorses this “free labor experiment” (63) and fantasizes about giving the men tools to work the land and guns to defend it: “I do not think a just or generous share in all the products of their toil would
Duganne offers these suggestions as an alternative to the Union military policy in Louisiana, which was coordinated by two Massachusetts Republican congressmen: first by General Benjamin Butler, a former factory hand who, according to David Montgomery, had been a “Negro-baiting Buchanan [Democrat] right down to secession,” and later by General Nathaniel Banks, who, like Duganne, had been affiliated with the Know-Nothings before the war and who was popular with Massa-chusetts workingmen.[48] In 1862, Butler began to require blacks to work for wages on the sugar estates of Unionist planters; his successor, Banks, “extended this labor system throughout occupied Louisiana.”[49] Banks demanded that the former slaves sign yearly labor contracts or risk being arrested for vagrancy; he also initiated a pass system and did not allow workers to leave the estates without permission.[50] To many observers, this “compulsory system of free labor” looked a lot like slavery, and debates about the meaning of emancipation and free labor increasingly threatened to divide Republicans.[51]
For his part, in early 1863, Duganne criticized the “policy of conciliating planters” (38) and the “kid-glove fingering of slavery-issues, whereby the Louisiana of General Butler is to be made the Louisiana of General Banks” (37). He repeatedly attacked Banks's vagrancy laws and labor contracts by arguing, for instance, that the “great black human Force, whose life-long strength has been expended, for a hundred years, in servile toil, is reckoned in the ‘labor-contracts’ only as the ‘stock,’ whose service is to multiply the gains of capital” (68), and by complaining that Union soldiers were used “to awe the blacks and hold them closely to the ‘labor contract’; to protect the ‘planter's interests,' by hunting straggling recusants, and generally to act as ‘overseers’ in pay of Federal treasury” (51). He concluded that the labor policy of General Banks “practically enforces thraldom worse than former slavery” (48) and worried that such a policy might impede serious attempts “to solve the mighty labor-problem of our nation's future” (68). Duganne made it clear that he hoped that the great estates would not be given back to their “traitor owners” or transferred to “perjured agents of their late proprietors” (37) or to the Northern speculators that “hover, like so many vultures, in our army's rear” (38).
But even though he attacked the Banks labor system and viewed the black workers as a producer class who deserved a just share in the products of their toil, he never went so far as to imagine transferring the land to “the hands which earned and paid for all the wide improvements.” Instead, he continued to imagine reconstructed Southern labor relations in paternalist terms, with black workers “backed by wise authority” producing for the government or, at best, receiving half of what they produced. But many freedmen wanted to grow subsistence crops on land of their own rather than working on plantations and producing for the market. And according to Eric Foner, at “the outer limits of Radical Republicanism, the idea of remaking Southern society produced a plan for national action to overturn the plantation system and provide the former slaves with homesteads.”[52] Pennsylvania Republican Thaddeus Stevens was probably the most passionate advocate of this view in Congress; he suggested that lands be taken from the wealthiest Southerners so that each adult freedman could be given forty acres.[53] But that was not to be. Instead, in 1865, President Johnson initiated various policies that resulted in the return of most confiscated Southern lands to their former owners, bringing an end to hopes of making the diffusion of land ownership the material and economic basis of Reconstruction. The “debate over the land issue illuminated both divisions within Radical ranks and the limits of the Radical ideology,” Foner argues. “Beyond equality, in other words, lay questions of class relations crucial to the freedmen and glimpsed in debates over confiscation, but lying beyond the purview of Radical Republicanism.”[54]
Of course, “beyond equality” lay questions of race relations as well. In Black Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois observes that the two great labor movements of the mid–nineteenth century, “Labor-Free Soil and Abolition, exhibited fundamental divergence instead of becoming one great party of free labor and free land” (21–22). Du Bois identifies the post-1848 battle for the West between opponents of slavery and Southern expansionists as an important chapter in this history. From the perspective of Southern champions of slavery, he suggests, the “foray into Mexico had opened an empire, but the availability of this land was partially spoiled by the loss of California to free labor.” Throughout the 1850s, and notably during the controversy over slavery extension in Kansas and Nebraska, there “was a war,” Du Bois argues, “to determine how far industry in the United States should be carried on under a system where the capitalist owns not only the nation's raw material, not only the land, but also the laborer himself; or whether the laborer was
As I have argued in this chapter and in the previous one, white egalitarianism limited the emancipatory vision of even the most radical of the reformers who hoped that the widespread diffusion of Western lands among small producers might provide a material basis for the political and economic independence that was threatened by Northeastern industrialization. On the one hand, the racialized conception of property assumed by the reformers was in violent competition with other ideas about land held by Indians in the United States and Mexico, and it thereby helped to legitimate the dispossession of the latter even though some of the reformers sympathized with Indians. On the other hand, a racialized conception of free labor and ideas about black “dependency” also impeded the formation of “one great party of free labor and free land” during the Civil War and Reconstruction. As Du Bois suggested, “[To] have given each one of the million Negro free families a forty-acre freehold would have made a basis of real democracy in the United States that might easily have transformed the modern world” (602). Instead, such a transformation was forestalled by widespread fears, which were also harbored by many radical Republicans, that the confiscation of Southern plantations and the redistribution of land to the freedmen would threaten the sanctity of private property and discourage blacks from laboring to earn money to purchase land.[55] Although the views of radicals such as Duganne on questions of land, labor, race, and government represented a meaningful departure from dominant responses to those questions, the white egalitarianism that often remained at the heart of such views prevented the emergence of a truly democratic and inter-racial labor and land reform movement during those years.
Du Bois's analysis conjoins three episodes that are still too rarely considered together: U.S. empire-building in Mexico and the West, the formation of white labor movements, and the battle over slavery and the Civil War. In other words, for Du Bois, “domestic” race, labor, and land issues in the nineteenth century are inextricable from questions of
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