The Antebellum Crisis and America’s First Bohemians by Mark A. Lause (review)

To read American bohemianism as a minor theme in the cultural history of New York City is to do a disservice to the intellectual richness of the former, a sprawling diversity of ideas stretching back more than a century and a half. Radical thought might thrive in Manhattan, but, as Mark Lause demonstrates here, its genesis can often be traced through events felt most acutely outside the city, and the influence it wields can be found even further afield. In practical terms, the roots of bohemia in the United States are often sought first in the protest offered by residents of the Seventh Village, Greenwich Village in the years leading up to the First World War. The importance of the cultural life that thrived elsewhere in the city in the 1850s and the 1860s is often ignored, and The Antebellum Crisis and America’s First Bohemians finds the legacy of European upheaval alive and well among a collection of colorful outcasts who converged on Charles Pfaff ’s Restaurant and Lager Beer Saloon on Broadway.

While this study seeks to chart a more complicated set of social and intellectual connections during the middle of the nineteenth century, the most compelling story at its heart is the discussion of the life of an intellectual now largely forgotten: Henry Clapp, son of a Massachusetts bookseller whose family’s true legacy may have been the wanderlust of the merchant seaman. Suffering chronic bronchitis in his early twenties, Clapp escaped to the American South and returned to Boston with a new view of his country and a renewed zeal for social reform that drew him into the abolitionist movement. Making his name as a newspaperman of independent thinking, Clapp lost any ardor for temperance while traveling in Europe, living in Paris as Henry Murger’s chronicles of the Latin Quarter echoed through the streets and in London as a growing demand for cultural artifacts emboldened a generation of writers and painters. When a more worldly Clapp returned to the United States, he settled in New York.

While The Antebellum Crisis and America’s First Bohemians fails to capture the tragic arc of Clapp’s fall, Lause draws New York as a legitimate outpost of bohemia, where conventional thought was challenged at one of the most critical points in American history. While Greenwich Villagers would, three generations later, interrogate the soul of Woodrow Wilson’s Democrats, Clapp’s bohemians came of age during the emergence of the Republican Party. Much more than slavery was discussed in the cellar at Pfaff ’s, of course, by outsiders who craved veneration but came from a background that promised no access to it, by outsiders who sought literary success but had little recourse to a cultural industry to nurture it. Ada Clare, the so-called Queen of Bohemia, appears across Pfaff ’s constellation, as does Walt Whitman, but the essence of their work fails to escape the shadow of the impending war that preoccupies Lause’s discussion.

Indeed, this is a book that buries its lead: the role in the rise of the Republican Party played by articulate, networked radicals who did have access to newspapers across the American Northeast. Clapp could never be described as an ardent supporter of Abraham Lincoln, and, for the bohemian, Lincoln’s fledgling party was too equivocal in its opposition to slavery. But while Republican conservatism was incompatible with the radicalism of Fourierist socialism, for example, other land reformers of Clapp’s acquaintance found much in common with many individuals who ran under the new party’s banner. Even as many of their best writers set to work undermining the Democrats, bohemians doubted that the ballot box would solve problems that would soon result in war, acknowledging at the same time that conflict would challenge other values, such as freedom of expression, held most dear. Indeed, it was the changed priorities of the 1860s that killed the Saturday Press, Clapp...