ABSTRACT
John Pendleton Kennedy treats American politics as part of a recurring struggle dating back to England in the days before Cromwell's commonwealth. Horse-Shoe Robinson, the novel's title character, is a strapping veteran in his mid-thirties. Modern commentators have found Horse-Shoe Robinson to be a problem novel. Commentators on Horse-Shoe Robinson have struggled with the question of principal characters, and to some extent, of central plot. Undeniably, Kennedy gave great attention to Arthur Butler and Mildred Lindsay Butler, and he at first referred to the work as "the story of Mildred Lindsay" in his journal. There are several families in Horse-Shoe Robinson that deserve fairly detailed consideration. It is important to recognize at the beginning, however, that these families represent three specific social classes. Kennedy's military Whigs in the novel are, for the most part, acting covertly and without much apparent coordination, just as the political Whigs of the 1820s had done and those of the 1830s were doing.
