The U.S.-Mexican War in James Russell Lowell's The Bigelow Papers

One reading of the u.s.–mexican war leads to a sobering conclusion: the United States of America is an ordinary country in an ordinary place, given to ordinary national ambitions, and typically violent expansionist methods. With few exceptions, most American historians of the war avoid this interpretation, preferring instead to chart the politics that led up to the conflict, the progress of battles, or the internal tensions that followed it. Rarely do they delve into its particular and massive contradictions, an elision attesting to the persistent narrative power of American exceptionalism. In the 1840s, that political mythology framed a dubious war against a sovereign country as an act of self-defense, justified by moral obligations, and grounded in America's putative role as a light of freedom. Many Americans of the era, infused with a surging nationalism, saw the conflict's necessity and justice as self-evident. Jingoistic war supporters like Walt Whitman unquestioningly declared Mexico's European anachronism to be by definition opposed to America's globally redemptive purpose.

But even before it began, contemporary politicians and writers were debating the war's morality and justice. Dubious at best, at worst a spectacularly unprovoked aggression, the war, fought from 1846 to 1848, required an imaginative re-arrangement into the framework of exceptionalist belief because it could so obviously demonstrate that America's national mythology could also be a veneer for greed and violence—perhaps not the redeeming enterprise of a republic dedicated to the advancement of democracy and freedom. Predictably, many writers wrote single-minded and jingoistic screeds, enthusiastic conflations of history and destiny which saturated a great deal of the era's nationalist poetry, war fiction, and patriotic music. Intriguingly, the mythology so exuberantly produced quickly faded into historical obscurity. Unlike the Alamo battle of 1836, retold ad nauseam, Americans largely have boxed away the U.S–Mexican War's exceptionalist narrative in the national attic. The reasons for this are complex, but they are rooted in the way Mexico and Mexicans as national military antagonists foreground the historical and mundane origins of American mythic identity and thus redefine it as a denial of reality, a fabrication intended in part to obscure the often murderous actions of Europeans set loose in North America. When historians and others do investigate the war's more worldly causes and effects, they find themselves delving into an America at odds with prevailing notions of national supremacy, an America of limitations and mutabilities. This is not to deny the power and efficacy of national myths, only to note that American ideals are enmeshed in quotidian realities, continually evolving into new forms.

Such complexity rarely finds itself in the histories, but it energizes much of the U.S–Mexican War's imaginative literature, which often grappled with national mutability, ideological contradiction, and cultural anxiety. Fervent nationalist poets, musical composers, dramatists, writers of pulp fiction, politicians and preachers all expressed optimistic variations of American triumphalism, but many others darkened their work with shadowing doubts and uncertainties. The war against Mexico generated not just the stabilizing narratives of racial or national dichotomies—not just monochromatic, racist American ethno-nationalism—but also intense counter-narratives wherein Mexico and Mexicans were either equivalent Americans defending their republic from invasion, or, in a further extension, and far more disturbing, agents of existential disturbance, standing against the very possibility of meaning itself. One of the clearest examples of this kind of agonistic U.S–Mexican War literature is The Biglow Papers of 1848, an anti-war satire by James Russell Lowell who, as a respected poet and literary critic, occupied a leading position among nineteenth-century Boston literati. The Biglow Papers are complicated and complicating, shaped as they are by a military collision that exposed American ideals not just as veils for hypocrisy, but also as evidence of mass delusion. At its core, Lowell's satire meditates somberly on national unease, a text situated perilously between America and non-America. Moreover, its concerns about Mexico reach into the present moment because, seen from a particular point...