User:Jbinder/sandbox

Unlike many labor reformers of his time, Lippard was an enthusiastic supporter of the Mexican-American War. In an 1848 speech, he argued that Western expansion could provide working-class Americans with an opportunity to establish themselves as landholders, and thus to escape the oppressive conditions of urban factories. His novels Legends of Mexico: The Battles of Taylor (1847) and  'Bel of Prairie Eden (1848) used Gothic conventions to represent the war as a heroic fulfillment of the American Revolution's egalitarian promise,. Later in his career, Lippard seemed to grow more ambivalent about the war, and in 1851 he published a sketch called "A Sequel to the Legends of Mexico" in which he expressed a concern that the way he depicted the conflict in his novels might "lead young hearts into an appetite for blood-shedding."