Go Vols! State Military Volunteerism and _Magdalena, The Beautiful Mexican Maid_

As I sit here unavailingly wearing my Tennessee Volunteer orange game day shirt—An ESPN headline today reads “Auburn whips Tennessee”—I am reflecting on an aspect of Buntline’s novel that informs its status as an example of what Robert Johannsen calls “war-literature.”  While Magdalena, The Beautiful Mexican Maid seems to offer a complicated approach to glorifying the violence of the US-Mexican War, I was struck by the narrator’s preoccupation with the identity of state-based regiments, particularly during the battle sequence at Buena Vista in Chapter 17: “the volunteer regiments to his right and left, the mounted men of Arkansas and Kentucky close at the mountain’s base” (91); “supported by the Indiana regiment on foot” (92); “The enemy, now cheered by its success, poured down in full force upon the Mississippi and Illinois regiments” (93); “”Oh, my brave Mississippians!’ cried the excited Taylor” (93); “tell him that with his squadron, Bucker’s company, and Pike’s Arkansas boys, he must ‘head off’ those lancers!” (93); “close upon his left was Vaughn of Kentucky” (94); “more to the left, where, also, Marshall’s Kentucky and Yell’s Arkansas calvary had prepared to meet them” (94).  The Mexican army, while outnumbering Taylor’s forces 4:1, not only faces individuals on the field of battle, they must face soldiers whose identity is emblemized by the force of the republican system of statehood.

By focusing so strongly on state-based war volunteerism at the Buena Vista battle (and subsequently in reflections of Palo Alto elsewhere in the text), Buntline further affirms the status of American Republicanism contrasted with Mexico’s “stifling oppression of state and church” (Johannsen 189).  In The Halls of the Montezumas, Robert Johannsen accounts for the attention to volunteerism paid by writers of Mexican war-literature, particularly Buntline, as a device of formulaic, popular sensational fiction: “[These novels] were passive reflectors of notions and attitudes that were current, popular and salable, rather than innovators or leaders.  Their portrayal of the war reinforced the way many Americans saw, or wanted to see, the conflict.”  The volunteer, “superior, good, and patriotic” is contrasted with “the dark, skulking, ‘inferior’ Mexican ranchero” (189). 

I agree with Johannsen that Buntline’s volunteers (more directly featured in his earlier novel The Volunteer) serve to contrast with the flatly charactered Mexican soldiers (particularly in battle scenes).  However, it seems to me that by underscoring the state-affiliations of these soldiers, Buntline also stood to please and attract a wider audience by mentioning a reader’s home state in the story.  Narratively, this would make a reader more directly identify with the soldiers in battle experientially and root for their state’s “boys,” although I notice my Tennessean forebears are nowhere to be seen (save brief mention of Sam Houston, Tennessee’s seventh governor).  Johannsen eventually concludes that the Mexican War’s role in these mid-century popular novelettes (such as Buntline’s) “simply became an element of their formula, alongside such other topics as the American Revolution, the mysteries of urban life, frontier adventure, piracy on the high seas, and so on” (195-6).  Yet, it seems to me that Buntline’s figuring of specific state volunteers, when considered an experiential device aimed at popular readers strongly identified with their state, echoes more of what Johannsen concludes regarding the role of Charles Wilkins Webber’s war articles in the American review as potentially “foster[ing] a spirit that made the war all the more popular” (186).  In this sense, Buntline’s is truly a “war-literature” published in the midst of the conflict in 1847, ideologically supporting the idea of state-identified citizens fighting to further the US imperial conquest of North America.