Brave Old Spaniards and Indolent Mexicans: J. Ross Browne, Harper's New Monthly Magazine, and the Social Construction of Off-Whiteness in the 1860s

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to examine J. Ross Browne's construction of racial identity in the territories acquired by the United States after its war with Mexico in 1846–1848. The intent is to reveal the interaction between a journalist's social identity and his construction of the social reality of race relations by examining the most widely circulated works, personal trajectory, surrounding cultural influences, and private correspondence by Browne, one of the earliest Anglo journalists to chronicle American development of the Mexican Borderlands based on firsthand experience. The research method was cultural contrapuntal reading, which employs a combination of Marion Marzolf's content assessment and Edward Said's contrapuntal reading. Browne cast Spanish California elites as bringers of European progress and helpers to the Anglo American government and business leaders, Mexican peons as a cheap labor force for mining interests, and Spanish ladies and mixed-race temptresses as objects of desire.

Notes

J. S. Holliday, The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience (New York: Touchstone, 1981). The nomenclature of race is complicated by misunderstandings about the meaning of race itself. Americans of the nineteenth century referred to people of dark but not Negro complexions as “Mexicans” even if they were citizens of the United States. Many

citizens of Mexico had light skin, owing to their Spanish ancestry and a hierarchy of race that put Mexicans of pureblooded Spanish descent at the top and pureblooded Indians at the bottom. Labels for indigenous people are complicated by similar factors. A person whom current American scholars might label “Native American” might actually be an indigenous person from Mexico, whereas indigenous Americans in a broader sense may be natives of an Indian nation in the United States, Mexico, or Canada. Even the nomenclature of Latinos in old California

is complicated by the shift from Mexican to US control. Thus, for purposes of this article, “Anglo” is used instead of “white,” “Spanish” is used for people of Iberian descent, “Californio” is used for Spanish- and Mexican-descended elites who are natives of California, “Mexican peon” is used to refer to less privileged poor working-class Californians of Mexican descent, and “Indians” is used to refer to indigenous people of North America. “Anglo” and “Indian” are referred to as “Anglo American,” “Anglo European,” “Mexican Indian,” “California Indian,” or by the names of their specific nations, such as Navajo, Apache, and so on, where such labels are needed for clarity. “Native Californians” is used to refer to non-Anglo natives of California who were citizens of Mexico before they were annexed under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican War. “Mestizo” is used to refer to people of mixed Spanish and indigenous ancestry.

Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, Frontiers: A Short History of the American West (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 86.

David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (London: Verso, 2007); Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Macmillan, 1938).

Michael F. Holt, The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004).

Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

Harper's New Monthly Magazine, established in 1850, served as a magazine of serialized novels, travel narratives, and other long-form nonfiction, poetry, and political commentary. It preceded Harper's Weekly, launched in 1857 as an illustrated family newspaper to compete with mammoth illustrated papers such as Brother Jonathan. Harper's Weekly is best known for its lavish illustrations and its campaign to bring down the Tweed Ring, the machine that controlled city government in New York in the 1860s and 1870s. Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History of Newspapers in the United States through 250 Years 1690 to 1940 (New York: MacMillan, 1941), 382–384.

James W. Carey, “The Problem of Journalism History,” Journalism History 1, no. 1 (Spring 1974): 1, 3–5, 7.

John Nerone, “Does Journalism History Matter?,” American Journalism 28, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 7–27.

Eugene Exman, The House of Harper: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Publishing (New York: Harper & Row, 1945), 71; 100,000 copies printed, Broadside, 1852. American Broadsides and Ephemera database.

Eugene Exman, The Brothers Harper: A Unique Publishing Partnership and Its Impact upon the Cultural Life of America from 1817 to 1853 (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), xiv.

Each of the editions is listed in the WorldCat database. Adventures in the Apache Country was also republished in Germany in 1874 and 1878 under the title Reisen und Abenteur im Apachelande.

Goodman, Western Panorama: 1849–1875: The Travels, Writings and Influence of J. Ross Browne on the Pacific Coast, and in Texas, Nevada, Arizona and Baja California, as the First Mining Commissioner, and Minister to China (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1966), 258. The National Intelligencer newspaper commented March 16, 1868, on Browne's appointment, “Every portion of the country has reason to congratulate itself upon a selection so eminently fit to be made.”

Joaquin Miller, a poet who lived in Browne's time, wrote of the influence of Browne's travelogue Yusef: Or The Journey of the Frangi on Mark Twain, “It is clear to the most casual reader that if there had been no Yusef there would have been no Innocents Abroad.” Quoted in Lina Ferguson Browne, J. Ross Browne: His Letters, Journals & Writings (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969), xix–xx. More recently, critic Duncan Emrich wrote, “There can be no question that Browne was one of the most widely traveled, observant, and versatile men of his time. It is unfortunate that his ability as a writer, and the influence he exerted on other writers of his time, has not been more widely recognized. His Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, for example, preceded Melville's Moby Dick and was known to Melville, while his Peep at Washoe and Washoe Revisited were clear forerunners of Mark Twain's Roughing It. His Yusef: Or The Journey of the Frangi also preceded Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad and the relation—even indebtedness—of the latter work to Browne's book is apparent.” Duncan Emrich, Comstock Bonanza: Western Americana of J. Ross Browne, Mark Twain, Sam Davis, Bret Harte, James N. Galley, Dan de Quille, Joseph T. Goodman, Fred Hart (New York: Vanguard, 1950), 5; Carl Edward Rollyson, Lisa Olson Paddock, and April Gentry, Critical Companion to Herman Melville: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work (New York: Facts on File, 2001), 130.

This method builds on Russell Barber's and Frances Berdan's “reality-mediation model” for interpreting evidence of past cultural interaction, which emphasizes that scholars must assess ethnohistorical sources’ authorial presence and intent and investigate whether those sources reflect external reality. Russell J. Barber and Frances F. Berdan, The Emperor's Mirror: Understanding Culture through Primary Sources (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998). Cultural contrapuntal reading is detailed in Michael Fuhlhage, “Prehistory of a Stereotype: Othering of Mexicans in the Era of Manifest Destiny,” in Identity and Communication: New Agendas in Communication, ed. Dominic Lasorsa and America Rodriguez (London: Routledge, 2013), 77–99.

John M. Coward, The Newspaper Indian: Native American Identity in the Press, 1820–90 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999).

Marion Marzolf, “American Studies—Ideas for Communication Historians?,” Journalism History 5, no. 1 (Spring 1978): 16.

Ibid., 15.

Raymund A. Paredes, “The Mexican Image in American Travel Literature, 1831–1869,” New Mexico Historical Review 52, no. 1 (January 1977): 12.

Ibid., 25.

Robert Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 180–185.

The bloodthirsty bandit character is exemplified in the legend of Joaquin Murrieta, the Californio who admired Americans until Anglo squatters jumped his claim, raped his girlfriend, and beat him, as described in Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas.

George Fitzhugh, “Acquisition of Mexico—Filibustering,” De Bow's Review, December 1858, 615. By the late 1850s, De Bow's Review had become the South's “semiofficial spokesman,” according to Robert F. Durden, “J. D. B. De Bow: Convolutions of a Slavery Expansionist,” Journal of Southern History 17, no. 4 (November 1951): 442.

J. D. B. De Bow, “Oregon and California,” De Bow's Review, January 1846, 64–69. Other De Bow's writers also defended the Catholics. See, for example, Amicus Featherman, “Catholicism,” De Bow's Review, November 1860, 583–598; George Fitzhugh, “Acquisition of Mexico—Filibustering,” De Bow's Review, December 1858, 613–626.

Leonard Pitt, Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the Spanish-Speaking Californians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 53; Douglas Monroy, Thrown among Strangers: The Making of Mexican Culture in Frontier California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 200–210.

Several authors reduced the people of the Southwest to ambiance for Anglo newcomers arriving in California from the Midwest and East, including Bret Harte, Joaquín Miller, Charles Warren Stoddard, Charles F. Lummis, Stephen Crane, and Carl Sandberg, as well as the illustrator Frederic Remington. Cecil Robinson, With the Ears of Strangers: The Mexican in American Literature (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1963), 145.

David J. Weber, “Here Rests Juan Espinosa: Toward a Clearer Look at the Image of the ‘Indolent’ Californios,” Western Historical Quarterly 10, no. 1 (January 1979): 61–69.

Tom Reilly, War with Mexico! America's Reporters Cover the Battlefront (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 214–218.

Pitt, Decline of the Californios; Robert F. Heizer and Alan F. Almquist, The Other Californians: Prejudice and Discrimination under Spain, Mexico, and the United States to 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971); David J. Weber, Foreigners in Their Native Land: Historical Roots of the Mexican Americans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973).

Browne, J. Ross Browne, xv.

Francis J. Rock, “J. Ross Browne: A Biography” (PhD diss., Catholic University of America, 1929), 12.

Thomas Egerton Browne was found guilty of seditious libel in 1833 for publishing prose and cartoons that ridiculed the king. “Our Artist-Correspondent At-Large,” Harper's Weekly, February 21, 1863, 125.

Ibid.

Browne, J. Ross Browne, xvi.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., xvii.

“Our Artist-Correspondent At-Large,” Harper's Weekly, 125.

Ibid.

Ibid.

David Michael Goodman, A Western Panorama 1849–1875: The Writings and Influence of J. Ross Browne on the Pacific Coast, and in Texas, Nevada, Arizona and Baja California, as the First Mining Commissioner, and Minister to China (Glendale, CA: Arthur H. Clark, 1966), 25.

Ibid., 27.

Browne, J. Ross Browne, 52.

US House. Message from the President of the United States, Transmitting Information in Answer to a Resolution of the House of the 31st of December, 1849, on the Subject of California and New Mexico. 31st Cong., 1 Sess., H. Exec. Doc. 17, 54–55.

John Ross Browne to Lucy Browne, August 27, 1849, J. Ross Browne, 128–129.

A thousand copies were printed in English and 250 in Spanish in the initial printing, but Browne wrote to Richmond Inquirer editor Thomas Ritchie that the Senate requested 2,000 copies and the House deliberated the purchase of 2,000 more. Goodman, A Western Panorama, 35.

John Ross Browne to R. B. Harris, March 13, 1865, J. Ross Browne, 312.

Browne's government service is summarized in Missing Pieces from the Mosaic of J. Ross Browne's Career (Washington, DC: US Customs Service, 1988) and painstakingly detailed in Goodman's A Western Panorama.

John Ross Browne to Lucy Browne, September 27, 1864, J. Ross Browne, 312.

John Ross Browne to Lucy Browne, May 28, 1865, J. Ross Browne, 312.

John Ross Browne to Lucy Browne, June 3, 1865, J. Ross Browne, 313.

John Ross Browne to Lucy Browne, July 19, 1865, J. Ross Browne, 316.

John Ross Browne to Lucy Browne, June 21, 1871, J. Ross Browne, 381; John Ross Browne to Lucy Browne, June 4, 1871, J. Ross Browne, 374.

L. Hamilton, “J. Ross Browne: Beautiful Tribute to the Memory of a Noteworthy Man,” Oakland Tribune, November 20, 1875, 3.

James D. Birchfield, “Banned in Dublin: The Parson's Horn-Book,” Journal of Library History 10, no. 3 (July 1975): 231–240.

John Ross Browne to Lucy Browne, October 13, 1844, J. Ross Browne, 46.

Browne railed against pantheism, which he viewed as “thinly disguised” atheism, in a section of his report as US mining commissioner in which he thanked the Creator for bestowing the riches of California upon the American people. US Treasury Department, Letter from the Secretary of the Treasury Transmitting Report upon the Mineral Resources of the States and Territories West of the Rocky Mountains (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1867), 319. Browne embraced the concepts of “God is in all” and “God directs all,” suggesting his beliefs were closest to panentheism, which is characterized by a belief that God is an eternal, animating force in the universe that is present in all things; it sees God as greater than but present in all the universe, making it distinct from pantheism, which sees God and the universe as the same thing. Mark Knight and Emma Mason, Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2006), 82.

John Ross Browne to Lucy Browne, April 15, 1849, J. Ross Browne, 106.

Ibid.

Goodman, Western Panorama, 160; “Lecture for the Catholic Orphan Asylum,” San Francisco Bulletin, March 14, 1859, 3.

For details on the genesis of American nativism, see Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Macmillan, 1938).

Oakland (CA) Weekly Journal Miner, April 2, 1870, 3; John Ross Browne to Lucy Browne, January 12, 1846, J. Ross Browne, 50.

J. Ross Browne, Resources of States and Territories West of the Rockies (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1867), 319.

The Harpers believed immigrants lacked the ambition to work their way out of poverty and lacked the initiative to leave the city and go to the country, where they could lead a purer life. Exman, House of Harper, 30. Harper's Monthly favored writers who warned the flow of Catholic immigrants must be stopped. Lorman A. Ratner, Paula T. Kaufman, and Dwight L. Teeter Jr., Paradoxes of Prosperity: Wealth-Seeking versus Christian Values in Pre-Civil War America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 52–53. James Harper was elected mayor of New York on a Nationalist Republican ticket that promised to restore native-born Protestant-American control of city government. Exman, House of Harper, 30.

Browne ran across the book while on his whaling voyage. John Ross Browne to Richard Henry Dana Jr., November 9, 1846, J. Ross Browne, 52. The book to which Browne referred was Richard Henry Dana Jr., Two Years before the Mast (New York: Harper Bros., 1840). Before the Mast was so popular it has never been out of print. An estimated 175,000 copies were sold from 1840 to 1849, making it one of the top sellers of the decade. Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (New York: R. R. Bowler, 1947), 303.

George Wilkins Kendall, in a passage that exemplifies his belief in Mexican indolence, wrote during the American occupation of Matamoros that “The Mexicans would never had made anything out of the country … more than a living.” Tom Reilly, War with Mexico!: America's Reporters Cover the Battlefront, ed. Manley Witten (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 39; George Wilkins Kendall, Dispatches from the Mexican War (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 54.

J. Ross Browne, “A Tour through Arizona. First Paper,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, October 1864, 556. Among the government documents Browne referred to Pacific Railroad Surveys, which informed his writing about Arizona and New Mexico, and John Russell Bartlett's description of the US–Mexico Boundary Survey Expedition. The boundary survey was widely available in the United States. John Russell Bartlett, Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora, and Chihuahua: Connected with the United States and Mexican Boundary Commission, during the Years 1850, ’51, ’52, and ’53 (New York: D. Appleton, 1854).

Barbara Cloud, The Business of Newspapers on the Western Frontier (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1992), 153–154.

The hybrid nature of Browne's career was not unheard of among journalists of his time, whether in the East or the West. Many journalists aided political parties, held office, and served as confidantes to party leaders in nineteenth-century America. See Hazel Dicken Garcia, Journalistic Standards in Nineteenth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 31; Cloud, Business of Newspapers, 225; David Dary, Blood and Black Ink: Journalism in the Old West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).

J. Ross Browne, “Down in the Cinnabar Mines,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, October 1865, 545.

J. Ross Browne, “Explorations in Lower California, First Paper,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, October 1868, 579.

Browne, “Explorations in Lower California, Second Paper,” November 1868, 746.

Most other Anglo American writers of his time agreed with Kendall, who interpreted Mexican belief in saintly intercession as evidence of superstition and impure faith that had been tainted by indigenous influence. George Wilkins Kendall, Dispatches from the Mexican War, ed. Lawrence Delbert Cress (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 182, 238, 252.

Browne, “Tour through Arizona. First Paper,” 568. This view of Catholic priests as bringers of civilization matched the attitude of Browne's contemporary George Fitzhugh, who wrote that the Spaniards would have maintained control of Mexico if they had not intermarried with indigenous Mexicans. George Fitzhugh, “Acquisition of Mexico—Filibustering,” De Bow's Review, December 1858, 613–626.

Browne, “Dangerous Journey, Part 2,” 11.

Dana, Two Years before the Mast, 172.

J. Ross Browne, “Dangerous Journey. In Two Parts—Part 1,” May 1862, 741.

Goodman, A Western Panorama, 222.

Ibid.

Ibid., 224.

Ibid., 225.

Ibid.

Browne, “Down in the Cinnabar Mines,” 553.

Ibid., 553.

Ibid.

George Wilkins Kendall, Dispatches from the Mexican War, ed. Lawrence Delbert Cress (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 267.

Browne, “Down in the Cinnabar Mines,” 553.

Browne, “Explorations in Lower California, First Paper,” 582.

Ibid., 582.

Ibid., 583.

Ibid.

Ibid.

John Ross Browne and Alexander Smith Taylor, Resources of the Pacific Slope: A Statistical and Descriptive Summary of the Settlement and Exploration of Lower California (New York: D. Appleton, 1869), 175.

Ibid., 175.

Ibid.

Browne, “A Tour through Arizona. First Paper,” 553.

Browne, “Explorations in Lower California, Third Paper,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, December 1868, 12.

Ibid., 13.

Browne, “Explorations in Lower California, Second Paper,” 740.

J. Ross Browne, “A Tour through Arizona. Fourth Paper,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, January 1865, 141.

Ibid., 141.

Ibid., 140.

Ibid.

Ibid.

J. Ross Browne, “Dangerous Journey. In Two Parts—Part II,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, June 1862, 16.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., 16.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., 17.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid., 561.

Browne, “Tour through Arizona. First Paper,” 558.

Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the US-Mexico Borderlands (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 41.

Browne, “Tour through Arizona. First Paper,” 559.

Browne, “Tour through Arizona. Third Paper,” 24.

Ibid., 32.

Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978).

Fred Rosen, Empire and Dissent: The United States and Latin America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

Ian F. Haney López, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996), xiii.

Ibid., 155. See also Richard Delgado, ed., Critical Race Theory: The Cutting Edge (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), and Ian F. Haney López, Racism on Trial: The Chicano Fight for Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003).

Ibid., 5.

Debra Merskin, Media, Minorities, and Meaning: A Critical Introduction (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 160–161.

Charles Ramírez Berg, Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002). For a survey of depictions of Mexican-Americans in novels and cinema, see Arthur G. Pettit, Images of the Mexican-American in Fiction and Film (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1980); Gary D. Keller, “The First Decades: Film Types,” Bilingual Review 18, no. 2/3 (May–December 1993): 70–111; and Charles Ramírez Berg, “Colonialism and Movies in Southern California, 1910–1934,” Aztlán 28, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 75–96.

Laura Gomez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 4. Almaguer argued that though Californios had European origins similar to those of the Irish, interlopers assigned the Spanish-descended elites of California to an intermediate position above blacks and Indians but below Anglos. Tómas Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 45.

Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), xi.

Daniel Hallin, The Uncensored War: The Media and Vietnam (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).