American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War

[T]he dead men, piled in heaps, their broken limbs, and cold faces, distinctly seen by the light of the morning sun, still remained, amid the grass and flowers, silent memorials of yesterday's Harvest of Death.

George Lippard, Legends of Mexico (1847)

They are strangely superstitious, these wild men of the prairie, who, with rifle in hand, and the deep starlight of the illimitable heavens above, wander in silence over the trackless yet blooming wilderness. Left to their own thoughts, they seem to see spectral forms, rising from the shadows, and hear voices from the other world, in every unusual sound.

George Lippard, 'Bel of Prairie Eden:
A Romance of Mexico (1848)

In one of several scenes pictured in the complicated conclu sion to New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million (1853), George Lippard focuses on a band of "emigrants, mechanics, their wives and little ones, who have left the savage civilization of the Atlantic cities, for a free home beyond the Rocky Mountains" (284). As their leader, the socialist mechanic-hero Arthur Dermoyne, gazes on the moving caravan, he sees his followers as "three hundred serfs of the Atlantic cities, rescued from poverty, from wages-slavery, from the war of competition, from the grip of the landlord!" (284). For just a moment, the eastern US class divisions that Lippard foregrounds in his mysteries-of-the-city novels promise to recede as his sensational story moves westward. That is to say, when in 1852 Lippard finally finished the novel that he had begun in 1848, the year that the US-Mexican War officially ended, he tried to resolve the violent, tangled urban gothic plots of The Empire City, or, New York by Night and Day (1850) and New York by appealing to a utopian vision of a migrant band of white colonists moving across "the boundless horizon and ocean-like expanse of the prairies" toward "a soil which they can call their own" (283-84). ¹ But if this vision of a boundless expanse of vacant western land replaces the eastern class inequalities that loom large in New York, Lippard's two gothic US-Mexican War narratives, Legends of Mexico (1847) and 'Bel of Prairie Eden: A Romance of Mexico (1848), expose the scenes of empire building that supported this nationalist fantasy of white working-class freedom.

Lippard's two war novels are only part of a huge body of printed texts and visual images that circulated widely during the years of the US-Mexican War. The print revolution of the late 1830s and 1840s, which made it possible to reproduce and distribute newspapers and books at cheaper prices and in larger quantities than ever before, directly preceded the war. ² During the war, formulations of a fictive, unifying, Anglo-Saxon American national identity were disseminated in sensational newspapers, songbooks, novelettes, story papers, and other cheap reading material (Johannsen 45-67; Horsman 208-71). Through this popular literature a heterogeneous assortment of people imagined themselves a nation, staging their unity against the imagined disunity of Mexico, which was repeatedly called a "false nation" in the penny press. ³ But the existence of such a unified US national identity was anything but self-evident during this period, for the 1840s were also marked by increasing sectionalism, struggles over slavery, the formation of an urban industrial working class, and nativist hatred directed at the new, mostly German and Irish, immigrants whose numbers increased rapidly after 1845. If the war sometimes concealed these divisions by intensifying a rhetoric of national unity, it could also make differences of class, religion, race, and national origin more strikingly apparent. For while sensational war literature such as Lippard's may promote a unifying nationalism as well as the paradoxical idea of a nonimperial US empire, it also often unleashes uncanny, spectral forms that trouble exceptionalist fantasies of free soil, a vacant western landscape, and a united American people. ⁴

During the late 1840s...