David Dixon Porter, Genre, and Imagining the Early Dominican Republic

Abstract

David Dixon Porter, Genre, and Imagining the Early Dominican Republic Maria A. Windell (bio) At the rather young age of ten, David Dixon Porter accompanied his father on a naval mission to fight pirates in the West Indies. As such a beginning might suggest, his subsequent career reads like an adventure story: he sailed in the Mexican navy, spent time in a Havana prison, served as a diplomat to the Dominican Republic, fought in the U.S.-Mexican War, imported camels to the United States, and became a U.S. Civil War hero. His military and diplomatic writings also often read like adventure narratives—and sentimental novels, gothic horror tales, and other stories difficult to place within a governmental realm. In the nineteenth century, his writings were seen as highly subjective and hyperbolic, and they are viewed that way today as well. This is not simply because, as secretary of the navy Gideon Welles put it, Porter was “given to exaggeration in relation to himself.”1 It is also because within Porter’s governmental writings, genres more familiar from literary fictions become a means of arguing for policy, establishing authority, and depicting an imperial but not imperious United States. This essay focuses on Porter’s 1846 diplomatic report on the Dominican Republic—a document that clearly demonstrates his use of genre and literary history to process hemispheric encounters. The result of a journey to Hispaniola to evaluate whether the United States should acknowledge the Dominican Republic’s recently won independence, Porter’s report brings several popular genres into the arena of national governance. Here romance, sentimentalism, sensation, and the gothic offer him ways of understanding the hemispheric and then presenting it within governmental realms. Porter uses genre—and draws on the authority of literary figures such as Washington Irving—to work toward practical ends: strengthening the United States’ international profile and placing the military [End Page 1] in what he considers to be the best possible position to protect the nation. Within his writings, generic strategies for processing otherness and navigating hemispheric politics exceed their ostensibly literary bounds, structuring official governmental documents on U.S. international relations. Even as Porter’s career partakes of certain largely forgotten national endeavors (this Dominican journey, camel importation, a plan for the relief of Fort Pickens that might well have triggered the Civil War), it engages some of the most familiar moments in nineteenth-century U.S. military history (the siege of Veracruz in the U.S.-Mexican War, the capture of New Orleans and the fall of Vicksburg in the Civil War). As a naval leader, military strategist, and diplomatic special agent during a period of national expansion and upheaval, Porter was a highly influential figure. He was the second officer to achieve the rank of admiral in the U.S. Navy, following his adopted brother, David Glasgow Farragut. Born in 1813 and raised on such tales as his father’s imprisonment by Barbary pirates, Porter became fluent in Spanish while serving as a midshipman in the Mexican navy when his father headed that force. After a number of years in the U.S. Navy Porter was eventually tapped as an envoy to the newly independent Dominican Republic, likely because of his Spanish fluency and his ability to evaluate seaports. During the U.S.-Mexican War, fighting against the country he had once fought for, Porter established his reputation as a crack naval strategist. He cemented that reputation during the U.S. Civil War, and later, after leaving active service, he turned to writing fiction, history, and memoir.2 His oeuvre is widely varied—this diplomatic report, military dispatches, ships’ logs, official and personal correspondence, memoirs, a biography, war stories, and novels—and covers events from Barbary captivity to the U.S. Civil War and after. Both his career and his writings map a nineteenth-century United States whose borders were still very much in flux. Porter’s report on the Dominican Republic appeals to genre and makes use of literary intertextuality as a way participate in governmental debates over the shape of the United States and the state of U.S.-Dominican relations. These elements form an alternative diplomatic logic within...