LITMIR.BIZ

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only one, Mr. Bevan, who is capable of honest analysis. “I believe no satirist could breathe this air,” he says, in words that echo de Tocqueville. “If another Juvenal or Swift could rise up among us to-morrow, he would be hunted down.”⁸⁹ Americans were capable of censuring those who deviated from the will of the majority, maligning members of rival political factions, and readily identifying the splinter in their neighbor’s eye. But they refrained from speaking openly about the shortcomings of the nation as a whole.

      Europeans ridiculed this willful ignorance: “one of the most remarkable traits in the national character of the Americans,” wrote Frances Trollope, “[is] their exquisite sensitiveness and soreness respecting every thing said or written concerning them.”⁹⁰ With laser-like sharpness, her 1832 Domestic Manners of the Americans lacerated U.S. pretension to justice and gentility; her scathing criticisms were all the more damning for being so barbed and witty. “At every table d’hôte, on board of every steam-boat, in every stagecoach, and in all societies, the first question was, ‘Have you read Mrs. Trollope?’ ” reported a British traveler.⁹¹ Sensitivity to the opinion of foreign visitors persisted throughout the antebellum period: Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer, who toured the United States twenty years later (and also turned her experiences into a much-discussed travel narrative) everywhere met anxious natives who pestered her with questions, trying to make sure her impressions were positive. On one occasion she was denied passage on a boat because the captain “did not wish to have any authors on board his ship who would laugh to scorn his accommodations, and would put him in a book.… And for this I have to thank Mrs. Trollope and Dickens,” Bremer added drolly.⁹²

      Descriptions of Latin America written by U.S. travelers can be read as a response to these European snubs. As American patriots discovered in the 1830s through the 1850s, descriptions of their southern neighbors worked as a way to present issues of race and slavery before both foreign and domestic audiences without striking too close to home. By asserting the differences between the United States and the Latin American nations, U.S. nationalists hoped to ascribe the worst abuses of the slave system to others. If foreign critics commented on the brutality of labor in the cotton fields, they needed to compare it to the sugar plantations of Cuba. If European visitors remarked on the Quadroon population of New Orleans, writers in the United States hoped to distract them with the mixed-race chaos of Peru: “Instead of resulting in one common uniform race, [amalgamation] has multiplied races to such an extent as is hardly conceivable,” sniffed the Democratic Review in 1853. “The state of these colonies, both before and since their independence, so different from that of the United States, may be in a great measure traced to the amalgamation of different races in one, and the purity of blood in the other.”⁹³

      In some ways the limitations of knowing the region only secondhand, or allowing it to be mediated by familiar stereotypes, allowed Americans the freedom of uncritical and highly selective use of particular tropes.⁹⁴ They often emphasized what made the United States different (and better). Many Americans spoke confidently about conditions in Latin America with absolutely no direct acquaintance with the region. But even those who did encounter the region firsthand relied on common ways of seeing and interpreting what they saw. No matter how foreign and unfamiliar Latin America seemed on first glance, U.S. visitors fell back on a vocabulary that prescribed its own deterministic taxonomy. Mary Gardner Lowell left Boston for Cuba when her husband’s business took him there in 1831–1832. “I came upon deck just after the custom house officers were there, and never shall I forget the astonishment & delight experienced at the scene which burst upon my view. Every thing [—] buildings, trees, boats, men, costumes, were unlike any I had ever seen; the whole had the effect of magic,” she marveled. But upon reaching shore and settling in, she was soon describing the indolence of the women, the cockfights, and the mummery of the Catholic mass where “blacks and whites kneel together promiscuously”—all staples of the travel literature.⁹⁵

      To maximize its potential as a screen upon which portrayals of U.S. slavery could be projected, Latin America had to be characterized as incapable of living up to the U.S. model. Describing Latin America as a region of profligate racial mixing and political instability suggested a United States that was by contrast pure and well regulated. That this determined effort intensified in 1826 is perhaps not coincidental: only fifty years old, the country was nostalgic for a primal innocence and a racial integrity that had never existed. In the 1820s it could no longer be imagined that slavery was dying out in the United States; the abolition of the African slave trade did little to arrest the growth of the flourishing slave economy, and the profits from cotton cultivation promised no easy waning of enslaved labor in the future. If slavery could not be suppressed, it could perhaps be kept out of sight, banished from the nation’s capital, moved ever farther west while displacing the Indians.⁹⁶

      The assertion of U.S. preeminence colored discussion of Latin America throughout the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s. Latin America served as a negative example by which the comparative integrity and achievement of the United States was thrown into sharp relief. Latin American revolutions were smudged carbon copies of the U.S. war for independence; Latin American governments were unsteady and corrupt. From similar beginnings, the United States quickly vaulted ahead of Latin America economically. Preening comparisons with its southern neighbors defined a nation that, however fragmented by politics or sectional interest, was unified by its superiority.

      But complicating this easy display of difference was the fact that even as its people scorned Latin American culture, the United States progressively laid claim to Latin American land. No modern reader can escape the conclusion that, when people in the United States discussed Latin America in this, the age of Manifest Destiny, expansionism was frequently the subtext. From the earliest days of the republic, people in the United States looked to the eventual acquisition of territory south of its borders. “Our confederacy must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South is to be peopled,” Thomas Jefferson had written in 1786. “We should take care to not … press too soon on the Spaniards. Those countries cannot be in better hands. My fear is that they are too feeble to hold them till our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from them peice by peice [sic]. The navigation of the Mississippi we must have. This is all we are as yet ready to receive.”⁹⁷ When the navigation of the Mississippi—as well as the control of the vast Louisiana territory—fell unexpectedly into Jefferson’s grasp seventeen years later, the nation faced the task of absorbing not only land but people they immediately understood as foreign. Massachusetts Federalist Fisher Ames described them as a “Gallo-Hispano-Indian omnium gatherum of savages and adventurers” who could hardly be expected to “sustain and glorify our republic.”⁹⁸ In Louisiana, Washington politicians worked out—often through a process of improvisation—a blueprint for the future addition of non-English territory and non-English people into the national polity. In this project they were aided on the ground by federal administrators and local white Louisianans who saw benefits in incorporation rather than separatism or resistance.⁹⁹

      Louisiana similarly established an early precedent of Pandora’s box disguised as fabulous bargain. Rather than sating the desire for further acquisition, the purchase of this territory from France seemed to stimulate the nation’s greed for additional real estate.¹⁰⁰ And out of every acre of newly acquired ground sprang up the same question about its disposition. “The United States’ purchase of Louisiana and the expansion it engendered made slavery the issue of American politics—trumping partisanship, nationalism and nativism, and the tariff.”¹⁰¹

      Yet until territory was actually absorbed by the United States, Americans focused not on overcoming the differences they perceived, but expressing and reifying those differences. If anything, comparisons with Latin America in the antebellum republic served to unify and reassure rather than to fracture and provoke. Even as the displacement of domestic conflicts over slavery onto Latin American society provided a safe context in which these issues could be explored, the disparagement of Latin America proved to be something about which many disparate groups could agree. Writers from old families that had settled the original thirteen colonies and immigrants on the western edges of white settlement, black Northern abolitionists and anxious white Southerners, scholars hungering for fame and scribblers trying to earn the cost of their next meal, all

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