The Antebellum Crisis and America's First Bohemians

Abstract

Historians of the mid-nineteenth-century United States face the challenge of countering creeping ossification of their human subjects into bloodless illustrative examples of academic doxa. Too many histories limn prim and proper stick-figure Victorians, frequently ridiculing them as uptight, naïve, or hypocritical. Even exceptions to the stereotypes are now commonly celebrated in stereotypical ways. The antebellum years’ cultural energy and dynamism seem particularly to elude writers. Consequently, perhaps, the number of books published with “antebellum” in their titles has dwindled from around 150 in 2000 to just over two dozen in 2010. Mark A. Lause's lively The Antebellum Crisis and America's First Bohemians bucks the trend. His tour of subliterary domains begins literally underground, in the vault of New York City's Pfaff's saloon beneath Broadway, from where he unearths for readers the “King of the Bohemians,” Henry Clapp Jr., the book's central, captivating character (p. 1). For Lause, this columnist was a practitioner of a new form of cultural politics arrayed not against simply the powers that be, but “unexamined conventional thinking in general” (p. 20). His brand of countercultural politics was connected by a figurative transatlantic cable to like-minded litterateurs in Paris and London, where Clapp had absorbed the sophisticated radicalism of the two cities’ demimondes. Bringing his critical sensibility home to New York, he specialized, like many subsequent bohemians, in conspicuous underachievement miraculously yielding incommensurably great subcultural influence.