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  • Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire
  • Mark Jaede (bio)
Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire. By Amy S. Greenburg. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiii, 323. Illustrations. Paper, $25.99.)

This book is a study of Manifest Destiny, imperialism, and especially filibustering in the period between the end of the U.S.–Mexican War and the Civil War. Its chief focus is on how the ideology of gender in the United States shaped views of conquest, expansion, and adventuring in Latin America and the Pacific.

Greenburg points out that, while it is self-evident that filibustering was a gendered phenomenon, historians of Manifest Destiny have until now failed to take gender into account as a category of analysis (22). This book fills that gap admirably. It is deeply informed by the existing scholarship on Manifest Destiny by historians such as Charles Brown, Reginald Horsman, Robert E. May; the gender history of Elizabeth Varon and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg; and a wealth of other scholarship in race, gender, and literary theory. One of the book's greatest strengths is the way it synthesizes a huge range of previous work and brings gender analysis into dialogue with the scholarship on race, class formation, religion, [End Page 325] sectionalism, and politics. It is no ghettoized study of gender alone. Even the most traditionalist political and diplomatic historians will find this book accessible because it is so deeply engaged with the questions they study.

Yet this is far more than a synthesis of previous work. Greenburg has made an extensive study of antebellum texts. She examines travel narratives, novels, newspaper articles, political speeches, geographies, cartoons, maps, personal letters, and the bombastic speeches of the filibuster boosters. From this she concludes that the debate over expansionism was shaped by a contest between two visions of masculinity. One, which she calls "restrained manhood," advocated self-control, moral uprightness, and devotion to family. This version of masculinity could lend itself to expansionism, but expansionism through the peaceful means of trade and religious missions. The other masculinity—"martial manhood"—emphasized glory, personal independence, and redemption through violence. It was this version of manhood, Greenburg argues, that sustained the filibustering captains and won them thousands of followers and supporters. She applies this argument convincingly to the overall logic of expansionism and to the specific cases of the greatest filibusters, William Walker and Narciso López.

Greenburg's gender thesis is clear and robust, and she argues persuasively for its explanatory power. For example, she shows the close connection between the rhetoric of territorial annexation and the rhetoric of the "personal annexation" of Latin American women by white U.S. men (19). Still, her book never lapses into reductionism. She acknowledges the existence of other visions of manhood, and at all points she emphasizes the complexities of the interplay among race, class, party, section, and gender. The construction of martial manhood is not placed in opposition to the construction of whiteness, Southernness, or Americanness, but integrated with them. Because of this, the book has the potential to inform the future scholarship of all these other aspects of the antebellum experience.

In contrast to the manifest strengths of this book, its weaknesses are modest. One shortcoming is its failure to come to grips with the slippery concept of "America" in a hemispheric context. Though she entitles one chapter "An American Central America," she never addresses the screaming irony of that phrase. Her treatment of expansion into the Pacific is another weak point. The one brief chapter devoted to Hawaii and Japan is not sufficiently developed to make useful comparisons with expansionism directed at Latin America. Greenburg argues that the gendered [End Page 326] logic of expansion was not fully applied to the Pacific before 1860, but she does not support this claim with the same depth of evidence she musters for her study of Latin America.

Another limitation, though not really a fault, is the book's tight focus on the period 1848–1860, with only brief discussion of other periods. The same analysis of restrained and martial manhood might have been profitably applied to the filibusters of 1810–1836, and the study of the 1850s...

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