In her book The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture, Amy Kaplan argues that nineteenth-century American foreign policy, with its abiding concern with the nation as empire, brought into close proximity foreign and domestic spaces. The cult of domesticity conceptualized these spaces as separate, safeguarding the purity and sanctity of the home, the domain of women, from the depredations and cruelties of the outside world, the battlefields and boardrooms of men. But American imperial expansion, which included recently conquered territories outside the domestic borders of the United States, gave rise to questions that forced the domestic, with its insular character, to contend with issues once maintained as exterior, alien, and blessedly distant. According to Kaplan, by this proximity “the idea of nation as home . . . is inextricable from the political, economic, and cultural movements of empire” (1). As American empire expands geographically, consuming other countries and cultures, the boundaries between the foreign and domestic become unstable and, much to the fears of nineteenth-century Americans, permeable.
As the line between home and abroad blurred, a coherent definition of the United States, one that differentiated it from those it conquered, was considered critical to the nation’s survival. This definition hinged on the legal status of a recently acquired territory, Puerto Rico, which had yet to be classified as either foreign or domestic. Puerto Rico was ceded to the United States by Spain in 1898, and the United States subsequently took administrative authority of the Puerto Rican government. So Puerto Rico could hardly be called foreign. Yet neither was it considered domestic. The legality of the issue was put before the United States Supreme Court, Downes v. Bidwell, in 1901. As argued by Justice Edward Douglas White, “whilst in an international sense Porto [sic] Rico was not a foreign country, since it was subject to the sovereignty of and was owned by the United States, it was foreign to the United States in a domestic sense, because the island had not been incorporated into the United States, but was merely appurtenant thereto as a possession” (2). Classifying Puerto Rico as domestic would have meant protecting it under constitutional authority, classifying it as foreign would have given it legal autonomy, and as Kaplan notes, “The court went to great rhetorical length to avoid both alternatives” (3). In order to protect America’s international interests while maintaining its republican character, the Supreme Court invented a new legal category for Puerto Rico, the “unincorporated territory,” which required “a separate act of Congress to incorporate it” (3). Puerto Rico was, thus, put in a “liminal” position: possessed by the empire but rejected by the republic, a property imperial but not domestic.
The Supreme Court’s decision was the articulation of poignant and pervasive national fears. Though imperial expansion spread the power and influence of America, the fruits of empire, the foreign territories acquired through conquest, threatened the integrity of the nation. This was primarily a problem of race. Foreign lands and their commodities were valuable; their peoples, on the other hand, constituted a dangerous threat. They practiced alien religions, were governed by alien laws, and displayed alien cultures. They were non-white and therefore incapable of self-government. They incited revolution and anarchy. To incorporate them in the republic, and protect them under the authority of the Constitution, “risked,” according to Kaplan, “absorbing aliens into the domestic sphere, and the resulting racial and cultural intermixing threatened . . . to make the United States internally foreign to itself” (6). On the other hand, some Justices argued that annexation without incorporation would destroy the character of American government, replacing democracy with the tyranny of absolutism. In either case, the integrity of the American republican body would be corrupted and turned into a “monstrous hybrid creature, either a mixture of alien races or a foreign form of government ‘engrafted’ on the republic” (7). White’s compromise, the category of “unincorporated territory,” leaves open the possibility of incorporation but does not require its eventuality, so that Puerto Rico, or any similar territory, can remain in the “hybrid liminal space” (11) between domestic and foreign indefinitely.
Kaplan sees the Downes v. Bidwell case, in which Puerto Rico was defined as an “unincorporated territory,” as a pivotal moment in U.S. history when the desires and fears of the nation were given their public, legal expression. This new legal category did resolve the issue of classification by creating a third term, but it did little to clearly demarcate the boundaries between domestic and foreign and, as Kaplan suggests, “heighten[ed] the very confusion it [was] meant to allay” (11). Kaplan argues that U.S. culture is created in this confusion, at the point where binaries and borders “collapse,” and is as much a product of incoherence as it is of stable, coherent meaning (15).
For my purposes in this essay I wish to explore this same confusion but in works that predate those examined by Kaplan. This presents a special problem. Kaplan begins with an article published in the April 1847 issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book, which is only three years before California was admitted into the Union as a free state. The United States is thus, in many ways, spatially complete and can begin conceptualizing itself as a geographically unified body. This body can then be described in its totality as domestic and, thus, interact with other bodies described as foreign. This conceptual, spatial integrity, which because it exists can be threatened, gives Kaplan a necessary figure in her domestic/foreign binary. The conditions of such a figure may not have existed before the annexation of California, and certainly not before the Louisiana Purchase, when the western frontier seemed an endless expanse of wilderness, a territory without limit and thus without a coherent, domestic body. The domestic cannot, therefore, be figured in the same way. After 1850 the body of the nation could be metaphorically coextensive with the body of the home and the body itself. All possessed a formal integrity, an inside and outside demarcated by definite though not indestructible borders. Before 1850, the body of the nation presented a terrifying infinitude, an ever-present chaos just at the edge of civilization, an incomprehensible sea of land that thwarted westward expansion and thwarted conceptions of domestic unity.
