Today, we are happy to bring you our conversation with Mark F. Ehlers, author of Napoleon in America: Bonaparte and the Rhetoric of US Empire

What inspired you to write this book? 

While working on another project I came across a story that made absolutely no sense to me: in 1819, two New York state senators (one of whom was future president Martin van Buren) nearly came to blows in the over naming a small hamlet in upstate New York. Van Buren wanted to name the town (located in the district of his political rival) Austerlitz, after Napoleon’s greatest victory. Previous to this, his rival had succeeded in naming a town in van Buren’s district Waterloo, after Napoleon’s greatest defeat. It was an amusing story, but I couldn’t help wondering why on earth two American politicians would be so invested in naming towns after battles in the Napoleonic Wars. After that, though, I began to notice references to Napoleon everywhere in the print culture of the early American republic. Without exaggeration, it’s fair to say that Napoleon was cultural touchstone for the first two generations of Americans. After doing a little digging, I found that no other historians seemed to have noticed this – or at least, to have written about it. Napoleon was hiding in plain sight. The more I looked, the more I found and the more interesting the story became.

What did you learn and what are you hoping readers will learn from your book? 

I hope my readers gain a more complete view of the cultural context in which Americans in the Early Republic developed ideas about empire -- including how contested the idea of “empire” actually was. The story of nineteenth-century expansion that most Americans are taught in school is one in which Americans monolithically supported what they saw as a divinely-inspired mission to spread democracy across the continent. My book shows this to be an incomplete picture at best. Napoleon was so ubiquitous in the rhetoric of the Early Republic precisely because he was able to serve as a cultural symbol that crossed class and geographic boundaries. Almost every American knew hundreds of stories about Napoleon, culled from newspapers or (later) from countless biographies. Because everyone was familiar with these stories, they were used rhetorically by Americans of very diverse opinions to debate the meaning of a republican empire. Stories about Napoleon could serve as justification for expansion in the name of national security; they could be held up as warnings about the dangers of imperial overreach; they could serve as examples of the kind of democratic imperial project that the United States should emulate.

What surprised you the most in the process of writing your book? 

In researching this project, I was struck by how much of the debate over American expansion took place in the popular press, rather than in elite political circles. I’m convinced that the newspaper editorials and biographical writings these often-anonymous Americans generated not only reflected the national debates on policy to the American people, but also helped shape that policy. We often fall into a trap of thinking that there is an unbridgeable divide between the people who make policies of historical significance and the bulk of the population who simply react to those policies. My work shows that, through newspapers, books, and other printed ephemera, the American public played an extremely active role in determining – not simply reacting to – American imperial policy during the Early Republic.

What’s your favorite anecdote from your book?

I think my favorite story from the book is one that occurred in 1846, at the very start of the Mexican-American War. Newspapers all over the country reported that among the American casualties from the Battle of Palo Alto was a veteran of Napoleon’s armies. This seemed too good to be true, but I was intrigued, so I contacted Palo Alto National Battlefield. It turns out that we know the exact names of the few American casualties of the battle. None of them were French emigres, and none was old enough to have fought in Napoleon’s wars. The story wasn’t true, and I suspect most Americans at the time knew that it wasn’t true – yet it was still published widely. This episode was an interesting opportunity to create meaning from a story even when the anecdote itself was not historically accurate. Why was it so important to Americans for their own battles for empire to be connected to those of Napoleon? My book provides an answer to this question.

What’s next? 

Most of my time these days is spent preparing for my high school courses; I’m always learning new things in the classroom. In addition, I’m beginning work on a project that investigates how Reconstruction, in addition to its political function, also worked as a mechanism for the reconstructing of individual Southern identities.