Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation-Making from Independence to the Civil War

“A Strange and Crowded History”: Transnational Revolution and Empire in George Lippard’s Washington and his Generals

249 “AStrangeandCrowdedhistory” Transnational Revolution and Empire in George Lippard’s Washington and His Generals = Tara Deshpande The children of the Revolution and countrymen of Washington, are thronging the vallies, darkening the mountains of this land, bearing in their front amid a tide of sword and bayonet the Banner of the Stars, which they have determined to plant on the Hall of Montezuma and Cortez, thus establishing in the valley of Mexico, a new dominion—the empire of freedom.1 In the midst of the U.S.-Mexican War George Lippard published a weighty volume of fictionalized historical tales of the American Revolution , which he ended with this call to arms. With this image and the accompanying promise of a sequel set in Mexico, Washington and His Generals ; or, Legends of the Revolution ensured that its readers would connect the ongoing war with their nation’s history and interpreted the American Revolution as a patriotic example that they should strive to live up to as they took its ideals to new lands. His efforts connected with a great many Americans. Lippard was an extremely popular, prolific, and commercially successful writer of scandalous fiction and sensational journalism, whose works reached a substantial working-class audience.2 Although he is now virtually unknown to the wider reading public and very few of his works are in print, scholars have established his significance to antebellum popular culture, including his important role in celebrating and sanctifying 250 TARA DESHPANDE Washington and his fellow founders and his works’ imaginative support for the annexation of Mexican land.3 Lippard’s writing made an important contribution to the many invocations of the American Revolution in support of the U.S.-Mexican War that appeared in fiction, histories, and paintings during the 1840s. Modern scholars have identified a surge in popular interest in the Revolution then, which included frequent comparisons of the two conflicts. For many Americans, the war had the potential to reinvigorate the ideals of the Revolution and thereby stimulate contemporary patriotism and national virtue. This was the case for volunteers—some of whose surviving writings refer to the Revolution—and also for those removed from the fighting.4 Michael Kammen, for example, argues that patriotic poems during this period aimed to justify expansion.5 Karsten Fitz’s analysis of the Revolution in visual art has identified celebratory analogies in paintings such as Caton Woodville’s Old ’76 and Young ’48 (1849), which depicts a young man’s return home from the U.S.-Mexican War, where he is reunited with his family, including his grandfather, a veteran of the Revolutionary War.6 Yet the cultural context that prompted such celebrations simultaneously engendered anxieties about the Revolution’s meaning and about the nation it had produced. As Kammen points out, works like John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “Yorktown” commemorate the Revolution to inspire Americans to continue its work, in this case by abolishing slavery and extending freedom to all.7 But slavery was not the only evil that appeals to the Revolution sought to combat: “Yorktown” goes on to condemn the war in Mexico in a similar mode, asking rhetorically, “Where’s now the flag of that old war?” and answering, “Where Mexic Freedom, young and weak/Fleshes the Northern Eagle’s beak.”8 For Whittier, the war too is a failure of Revolutionary promise, the subjugation of a new republic, rather than its fulfillment.9 For Lippard as well, there was a reforming impulse in his representations of the Revolution. He was a labor activist and drew frequent analogies between eighteenth-century British tyranny and the depredations of the nineteenth-century American capitalist elite. In his writing, the Revolution therefore becomes part of an ongoing struggle by the common people to throw off oppression.10 But there is much more to his representations of the Revolution than that. In this chapter I focus on the largely unexplored tension and complexity of the vision that Lippard created, 251 “A Strange and Crowded History” which both contributed to the construction of the war with Mexico as an opportunity to revive Revolutionary ideals and simultaneously problematized the idealization of the war as the Revolution’s sacred and inevitable consequence. Lippard constructed this vision in particular in his “legends,” which were fictionalized histories intended to show what he called the “spirit” of an age. This literary form gave Lippard great license to shape and revise the events he...