comparison

Love and Th eft

RACE AND AMERICAN CULTURE General Editors:

Arnold Rampersad and Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Bordering on the Body Th e Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture Laura Doyle

Love and Th eft Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class Eric Lott

“Who Set You Flowin’?” Th e African-American Migration Narrative Farah Jasmine Griffi n

Race, Rape, and Lynching Th e Red Record of American Literature, 1890–1912 Sandra Gunning

Scenes of Subjection Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America Saidiya V. Hartman

Th e Dialect of Modernism Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature Michael North

Psychoanalysis and Black Novels Desire and the Protocols of Race Claudia Tate

Black Hunger Food and the Politics of U.S. Identity Doris Witt

Th e New Red Negro Th e Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930–1946 James Edward Smethurst

Conjugal Union Th e Body, the House, and the Black American Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Neo-slave Narratives Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form Ashraf H. A. Rushdy

Racechanges White Skin, Black Face in American Culture Susan Gubar

Th e Melancholy of Race Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief Anne Anlin Cheng

Race and the Writing of History Riddling the Sphinx Maghan Keita

Mercy, Mercy Me African-American Culture and the American Sixties James C. Hall

Love and Th eft Bl ackface Minstrelsy and the

American Working Cl ass

Eric Lott

1

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lott, Eric.

Love and theft : blackface minstrelsy and the American working class / Eric Lott.—20th-anniversary edition pages cm.—(Race and American culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-532055-8 (pbk.)—ISBN 978-0-19-971768-2 (updf )

1. Minstrel shows—United States—History. 2. Working class—United States. 3. United States—Race relations. 4. United States—History—Civil War, 1861–1865. I. Title.

ML1711.L67 2013 791 ′ .12097309034—dc23 2012048853

Portions of chapter 2 and chapter 6 originally appeared as “Love and Th eft : Th e Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy.” © 1992 by the Regents of the University

of California. Reprinted by permission from Representations, no. 39.

Chapter 5 originally appeared as “‘Th e Seeming Counterfeit’: Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy,” in American Quarterly, 43, no. 2 (1991). Reprinted by permission.

Quotations from the promptbook manuscript of H. J. Conway’s stage adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin are reprinted courtesy of the Th eatre Arts Collection,

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Th e University of Texas at Austin.

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

To Susan Fraiman

Judith Lott Richard Lott

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{ Contents }

Foreword to the 20th-Anniversary Edition, by Greil Marcus ix Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 3

Part I

1 . Blackface and Blackness: Th e Minstrel Show in American Culture 15

2 . Love and Th eft : “Racial” Production and the Social Unconscious of Blackface 39

3 . White Kids and No Kids At All: Working-Class Culture and Languages of Race 66

4 . Th e Blackening of America: Popular Culture and National Cultures 92

Part II

5 . “Th e Seeming Counterfeit”: Early Blackface Acts, the Body, and Social Contradiction 115

6 . “Genuine Negro Fun”: Racial Pleasure and Class Formation in the 1840s 140

7 . California Gold and European Revolution: Stephen Foster and the American 1848 174

8 . Uncle Tomitudes: Racial Melodrama and Modes of Production 218

Aft erword to the Original Edition 242 Aft erword to the 20th-Anniversary Edition 247 Notes 251 Bibliography 291 Index 319

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{ Foreword to the 20th-Anniversary Edition, by Greil Marcus }

Very early on in this study of blackface minstrelsy, focusing especially on per- formances in New York City in the 1840s, Eric Lott drops a quiet, as-we-will- see academic sentence—“We will have occasion to return to the juxtaposition of American blacks with the idea of governance, particularly the notion of slaves as poet-legislators”—that can go off like a bomb, revealing, in that mo- ment or much later, just how radically unconventional the book will be, and how rich its ambitions are. What did he just say? Slaves as poet-legislators? What parallel universe is he talking about?

Th at parallel universe is the recreation of the minstrel stages, and the opening of its psychic backstages, that Lott presents, or in deeper sense per- forms, in Love and Th eft . He focuses on New York in the 1840s—the center of a pop explosion in which the North, staging a version of the South, created, for the fi rst the fi rst time in the United States, a national art culture, a frame of reference that everyone understood. “From the nobility and the gentry, down to the lowest chimney-sweep in Great Britain, and from the member of Con- gress, down to the youngest apprentice or school-boy in America,” the reporter J. K. Kennard wrote in 1845 in the Knickerbocker , taking up the minstrel pro- genitor Th omas “Daddy” Rice’s original shout-and-stomp as the signpost for minstrelsy’s every manifestation, “it was all: ‘Turn about and wheel about, and do just so, /And every time I turn about I jump Jim Crow.’” Th at there is nothing obvious about this story can be glimpsed in a joke Lott quotes from 1849, from White’s New Book of Plantation Melodies (a minstrelsy handbook of the sort so popular, and so enduring, that into the 1930s the federal government was printing how-to minstrelsy guidebooks): “Why are minstrel companies like midnight robbers? Because they live by their deeds of darkness”—“a kind of disappearing act,” in Lott’s own words, “in which blackface made ‘blackness’ fl icker on and off .”

As a breach in the dialogue the American vernacular conducts with itself, in its way Love and Th eft was its own pop explosion. Th ough starting out in the ground cleared by Constance Rourke in her 1931 American Humor , where the blackface minstrel was set at the heart of American culture, less as a parody or mockery of blackness than, at times, an almost metaphysical transmission of black soul and black consciousness through white mediums, Lott retrieved minstrelsy from the museum of racist embarrassments, and he opened up a

Forewordx

fi eld—a fi eld not only of study, but of action. Th at Bob Dylan took Lott’s title for his 2001 album “Love and Th eft ” —Dylan placing the words in quotation marks to fl ag the borrowing, letting the title double back on itself as he rewrote bits and pieces of old songs from all across the landscape of American popular music—is only a hint of the ripples that continue to spread.

Following the appearance of Love and Th eft in 1993, in 1996 there was Michael Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (with, on the cover, the comedian Eddie Cantor blacking up, in the mirror, an expression of shock and surprise on his face—is that me?). In 1998 came W. T. Lhamon’s Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop , and in 2003 his vast compendium Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics, and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture . In 2000 Spike Lee con- trived the shocking present-day blackface fi lm Bamboozled , where the fi rst act was comedy and the second was tragedy; a year later Nick Tosches published Where Dead Voices Gather , a ghostly history starring the 20th-century black- face artist Emmett Miller. Th e next years saw Bart Bull’s revelatory Does Th is Road Go to Little Rock?—Blackface Minstrelsy Now and Th en, Th en and Now , David Wondrich’s Stomp and Swerve: American Music Gets Hot, 1843–1924 (2003), Nelson George’s Blackface: Refl ections on African-Americans and the Movies (2003), Josh Kun’s Audiotopia: Music, Race, and America (2005), Ger- ald Early’s slithering “Dancing in the Dark: Race, Sex, the South and Exploit- ative Cinema” (2006), John Strasbaugh’s Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult & Imitation in American Popular Culture (2006), and Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen’s Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop (2012). Th ere was the second coming of Bert Williams, the black blackface comedian whose 1906 recording “Nobody” remains a still mostly invisible turning point in American music: Louis Chude-Sokei’s Th e Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora (2006), Daphne Brooks’s Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (2006), Camille F. Forbes’s Introducing Bert Williams: Burnt Cork, Broadway, and the Story of America’s First Black Star (2008), and, most indel- ibly, Caryl Phillips’s disturbing novel Dancing in the Dark (2005).

Th e current went in every direction, through Ed Harris’s perfect blackface headshake in the 2003 Bob Dylan fi lm Masked and Anonymous (“I saw one of the last blackface minstrel shows at a country carnival,” Dylan wrote in 2006 of growing up in Hibbing, Minnesota) [ Chronicles , 234], Bruce Springsteen’s recording of the minstrel show-stopper “Old Dan Tucker” (2006), the outra- geous “Face Wars” episode of Th e Sarah Silverman Program (2007), Kara Walker’s racially cross-dressed panorama My Complement, My Enemy, My Op- pressor, My Love (2007), and the Broadway musical Th e Scottsboro Boys , in which the trials of nine young black African Americans, falsely accused of rape in 1931, all but one, who was twelve, convicted and sentenced to death, were formally presented as a minstrel show—with all the conventions of the

Foreword xi

form strictly in place. In the change in the weather of discourse that it set off , Love and Th eft allowed people to see what they might not have seen without it: the reappearance of the African-American blackface minstrel show in the Goats’ 1992 album Tricks of the Shade ; the coded and accursed nature of the blackface masquerade in Percival Everett’s novel Erasure (2001); the true cor- ruption of Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival , Margaret B. Jones’s 2008 account of her life as a white girl growing up with the Bloods in blackest Los Angeles, celebrated with a fl orid review in the New York Times by lead book critic Michiko Kakutani and a fawning Times lifestyle profi le in which Jones, now in her sylvan Oregon redoubt, swore that if it weren’t for her kids she’d be back in South Central in a minute; all of it, down to the author’s name, a complete fraud.

Love and Th eft does not need, here, a rehearsal of its theories, its arguments, its reshaping of the migrations of class in the United States, or the particular New York milieu it recreates so powerfully. What perhaps needs to be brought out is the weight of Lott’s title itself: the way in which, as white men stole the songs, speech, and gestures of American slaves or free African Americans, as they profi ted by turning black people into infantilized monsters of stupidity, they were, some of them, like Tom Rice, trying to speak with wit and dignity not only for but as African Americans, while others, less conscious or less noble, were caught up in an always shift ing drama of attraction in which the fl oor of any minstrel stage held an invisible trap door through which the per- former might plummet at any time. “When the white man steps behind the mask of the [blackface] trickster,” Lott quotes Ralph Ellison, in his 1958 “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” “his freedom is circumscribed by the fear that he is not simply miming a personifi cation of his disorder and chaos but that he will become in fact what he intends only to symbolize; that he will be trapped somewhere in the mystery of hell.” Th e test Lott sets for himself is whether he can live up to Ellison, in writing and thinking, and so oft en he does.

Sometimes this happens in the stories Lott has mined: the blackface per- former Ben Cotton recalling, in 1897, how, studying black people for the tricks of his trade—looking, in other words, for moves to steal—“I used to sit with them in front of their cabins, and we would start the banjo twanging, and their voices would ring out in the quiet night air in their weird melodies. Th ey did not quite understand me. I was the fi rst white man they had seen who sang as they did; but we were brothers for the time being and were perfectly happy,” or recalling how, in Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , her “escape to the shed where she would spend seven years is made in a blackface disguise; even ‘the father of [her] children’ does not recognize her,” or high- lighting the 1833 minstrel song “Sambo’s ‘Dress to He’ Bred’rin,” which in its cadence and its words is the precursor, even the source, of the almost un- bearably eloquent anti-slavery song “No More Auction Block.” Sometimes it

Forewordxii

happens in phrases that jump out of the pages like buried epigraphs: “the cul- tural commodities of human commodities”; “the moment at which the intended counterfeit failed to ‘seem,’ when the fakery evaporated”; “musematic repetition in the minstrel show was linked in purely formal terms to blissful, ‘unraced’ moments of ego loss, and discursive repetition to ego-preserving feelings of racial mastery and self-assurance”; or a phrase as seemingly weight- less as “the frisson of trouble that clung to the minstrel show,” which opens up into realms of what Lott calls “panic, anxiety, terror, and pleasure”: the count- less minstrel versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as “a kind of prelude to the Civil War on stage,” or those moments, in the heat of performance, where, for the players, or the audience, or both, the separation between the impersonator and the impersonated collapsed, and the whites in the crowd found themselves speaking of the actors as “Negroes,” and the actors found themselves unable to believe that they were not.

Th e heart of the book—the heart of the continuing story of the minstrel deformation, the minstrel dramatization, of American life—might be found, again, in that 1845 Knickerbocker article by J. K. Kennard. He was attempting a jape: “Th e Jim Crows,” he wrote, “the Zip Coons, and the Dandy Jims, who have electrifi ed the world, from them proceed our ONLY TRUE NATIONAL POETS.” As Kennard goes on to “echo Shelley,” as a joke, as the sign of an of- fense to decency, as a patent absurdity, Lott excavates the piece as if it were the lost mine—or the lost mind—of minstrelsy: “Th is strange piece, he says, in wonder at his own archival discovery, “is absolutely unfl inching.” “Th e popular song-maker sways the souls of men; the legislator rules only their bodies,” Kennard wrote. “Th e song-maker reigns through love and spiritual affi nity; the legislator by brute force. Apply this principle to the American people. Who are our true rulers? Th e Negro poets, to be sure! . . . Let one of them, in the swamps of Carolina, compose a new song, and it no sooner reaches the ear of a white amateur , than it is written down, amended (that is, almost spoilt), and then put upon a course of rapid dissemination, to cease only with the utmost bounds of Anglo-Saxondom, perhaps of the world.”

It is here, Lott says, that Kennard is “mastered by his own irony.” Th ose are the few words that allow all of Love and Th eft , the odyssey of the blackface minstrel and the land that the minstrel traversed for a century—in disguises more ambiguous, and harder to remove, than simple burnt cork, that the min- strel traverses now—to fall into complete relief. When a critic’s ear is as tuned as Lott’s is, a stray piece of research can speak in strange tongues, and then the critic speaks back. Mastered by its own irony : that is blackface, and that is America, the motto for a tombstone that’s yet to be.

{ Acknowled gments }

Walter Rodney once wrote that the authorial habit of absolving a book’s friends and helpers from responsibility for its shortcomings was “sheer bourgeois sub- jectivism.” Fortunately, any errors or nonsense I have committed will scarcely tarnish the example of those whose contributions I do not pardon. I acknowl- edge, above all, the collective settings in which I have been privileged to work. Th e Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies granted me a fellowship during which much of this study was written; many thanks to its director, Armstead Robinson, its staff —particularly Gail Shirley and Mary Rose—and its fellows for critical talk, prodding, and jovial abuse. Th anks are due as well to colleagues and students at the University of Virginia and at the Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change. As the book was taking shape, the UVa Feminist Th eory Group was an indispensable space of intellectual and political support and exchange, as, at an earlier stage, were the various Union Square Marxist study groups at Columbia University. I must thank Columbia’s Center for American Culture Studies and its director, Jack Salzman, for the chance to try out early notions in various settings. John Short and fellow teachers in the literacy workshops at the Borough of Man- hattan Community College’s Writing Center provided a formative example of collective academic work.

I owe a great debt to the staff s of the Harvard Th eatre Collection; the music, dance, and theater collections of the New York Public Library; the Harry Ran- som Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas–Austin; the Free Library of Philadelphia; the Music Collection at the Library of Congress; and the Barrett Collection at the University of Virginia. At Harvard Joe Keller and curator Jeanne T. Newlin provided aff able and expert help and advice; at the University of Texas Melissa Miller-Quinlan crucially expedited some microfi lming.

I am also grateful to my teachers; it is a pleasure to thank them aft er all this time. Jackson Lears, Tom Quirk, Albert Devlin, and Robert Bender got me interested in the study of culture, and Ann Douglas enlivened that interest. Steven Marcus made it impossible to think about cultural products separately from history, theory, and society. Th is study had its beginnings in a seminar paper for Jane Tompkins. Later, Andrew Delbanco, Steven Marcus, and Arnold Rampersad worked with me on the dissertation from which this book has grown, and made invaluable suggestions about its scope, procedure, and method—unawares in many cases.

Acknowledgmentsxiv

Several people gave me materials of various kinds, oft en from their own research and writing, for which I am much in their debt: Bluford Adams, Paul Cantor, Patricia Cline Cohen, Joe Donahue, Ken Emerson, Arnold Fraiman, Barbara Green, Noel Ignatiev, Gail Karp, Hal Kolb, Nancy Loevinger, Mary Mackay and Edward Wheatley, George Rehin, Lucy Rinehart, David Roediger, Jack Salzman, and Lillian Schlissel. Others read all or part of the manuscript and off ered extremely helpful criticism, sarcasm, encouragement, and advice: Stanley Bailis, Michael Bérubé, John Blair, T. J. Clark, Carol Clover, Dale Cock- rell, George Cunningham, Steve Cushman, Kathleen Diffl ey, Jonathan Freedman, John Frick, Michael Frisch, Saidiya Hartman, Gary Kulik, Jack Levenson, David Levin, Rip Lhamon, Chris Looby, Karen Lystra, Don Pease, Chuck Perdue, David Roediger, David Scobey, Alan Trachtenberg, Susan Willis, and above all Elizabeth Blackmar, Robert Ferguson, Eric Foner, and Michael Rogin. A grant from the University of Virginia’s Small Grants Committee aided me in gathering the illustrations for this book, and a gen- erous subvention from Columbia University’s Bancroft Dissertation Prize has been much appreciated. Virginia Germino and Elisabeth Crocker were of enormous help in preparing the manuscript. Liz Maguire and Susie Chang at Oxford University Press provided incalculable support and enthusiasm, and I thank them.

Friends and family kept me going all down the line. Th e long-standing comradeship of Benj DeMott has taught me much of what I know about moral and intellectual passion. Michael Denning and Hazel Carby have long been advisers and exemplars; my work would have been far more diffi cult without them. Over the past few years Debbie McDowell has clarifi ed my thinking about a host of matters great and small. Conversations and excursions with Austin Quigley and Pat Denison brought to life the British music hall, close cousin (I subsequently realized) of the minstrel show. Tera Hunter mercifully took this project seriously; Andy Bienen’s understanding of rock ’n’ roll added dimension to it; Harry Stecopoulos’s interest and (constant) interrogation kept me at it. Mark Edmundson and Jahan Ramazani off ered a rich fund of encour- agement and sage counsel. Late in the day my brother, Brian, joked about the book going into “Chapter 11,” for which, as for so much else, he knows he has my thanks.

Th e dedication barely begins to repay the debt I owe my parents. As for Susan Fraiman, comrade and co-conspirator, she knows this book by heart— which says as much about her heart as it does about her importance in my life and work.

Love and Th eft

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Introduction

It was at this epoch that Mr. T. D. Rice made his debut in a dramatic sketch entitled “Jim Crow,” and from that moment everybody was “doing just so,” and continued “doing just so” for months, and even

years aft erward. Never was there such an excitement in the musical or dramatic world; nothing was talked of, nothing written of, and nothing dreamed of, but “Jim Crow.” Th e most sober citizens began to “wheel about, and turn about, and jump Jim Crow.” It seemed as though the

entire population had been bitten by the tarantula; in the parlor, in the kitchen, in the shop and in the street, Jim Crow monopolized public

attention. It must have been a species of insanity, though of a gentle and pleasing kind . . . .

— New York Tribune (1855)

Despite their billings as images of reality, these Negroes of fi ction are counterfeits. Th ey are projected aspects of an internal symbolic process

through which, like a primitive tribesman dancing himself into the group frenzy necessary for battle, the white American prepares himself

emotionally to perform a social role. —Ralph Ellison

Th e race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect

the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.

—C. L. R. James

Blackface minstrelsy was an established nineteenth-century theatrical prac- tice, principally of the urban North, in which white men caricatured blacks for sport and profi t. It has therefore been summed up by one observer as “half a century of inurement to the uses of white supremacy.” 1 While it was organized

Love and Th eft 4

around the quite explicit “borrowing” of black cultural materials for white dis- semination, a borrowing that ultimately depended on the material relations of slavery, the minstrel show obscured these relations by pretending that slavery was amusing, right, and natural. Although it arose from a white obsession with black (male) bodies which underlies white racial dread to our own day, it ruth- lessly disavowed its fl eshly investments through ridicule and racist lampoon. Yet I am not so sure that this is the end of the story. In light of recent discus- sions of race and subjectivity, we probably ought to take these facts and pro- cesses as merely a starting orientation for inquiry into the complexities of racism and raced subjects in the United States. 2 In doing so we shall fi nd that blackface performance, the fi rst formal public acknowledgment by whites of black culture, was based on small but signifi cant crimes against settled ideas of racial demarcation, which indeed appear to be inevitable when white Ameri- cans enter the haunted realm of racial fantasy. Ultimately I am aft er some sense of how precariously nineteenth-century white working people lived their whiteness—a matter of the greatest consequence in the history of America’s racial cultures and their material or institutional transactions.

Th is study grew out of a dissatisfaction with erstwhile modes of racial critique, which in their political disapprobation, dovetailing with aesthetic disdain, were unwilling to engage with the artifacts and social realities of popular life, too ready to dismiss the mentalité of the popular classes, fi nally impatient with politics itself. Cultural critics have recently become more aware of the uneven and contradictory character of popular life and culture, the ambiguities or contradictions that may characterize the pleasures of the masses. 3 It is one of the arguments of this book that in blackface minstrelsy’s audiences there were in fact contradictory racial impulses at work, impulses based in the everyday lives and racial negotiations of the minstrel show’s working-class partisans. Indeed, there are reasons for thinking of blackface in the years prior to the Civil War as a far more unsettled phenomenon than has been supposed; critics of minstrelsy have too oft en dismissed working- class racial feeling as uncomplicated and monolithic, and historians of work- ing-class culture have usually concurred—or made apologies. 4 It seems particularly clear that in the pages of recent social history the antebellum potential for a labor abolitionism has not been adequately explored nor its failure accounted for, and that the minstrel show crucially helps address this question. 5

Th is agenda may seem an undue burden to place on a “counterfeit” cultural phenomenon such as the minstrel show. One ought, though, to take seriously Ralph Ellison’s ironic image of whites racially girding themselves by way of rit- uals that mirror rather than distance the Other, in which whites are touched by the blacks they would lampoon and are in the process told on, revealed. Studying the most popular entertainment form of the nineteenth century together with its characteristic audience is perhaps the best way to understand the aff ective

Introduction 5

life of race in that time and in ours. Th e minstrel show has been ubiquitous, cultural common coin; it has been so central to the lives of North Americans that we are hardly aware of its extraordinary infl uence. Minstrel troupes enter- tained presidents (including Lincoln), and disdainful high-minded quarterlies and rakish sporting journals alike followed its course. 6 Figures such as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Bayard Taylor were as attracted to blackface perfor- mance as Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany were repelled by it. From “Oh! Susanna” to Elvis Presley, from circus clowns to Saturday morning cartoons, blackface acts and words have fi gured signifi cantly in the white Im agi nary of the United States.

Without the minstrel show there would have been no Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), no Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); investments as various as Norman Mailer’s “White Negro” (1957), John Howard Griffi n’s Black Like Me (1961), or certain of John Berryman’s Dream Songs (1955–69) would likewise have been impossible. 7 Leslie Fiedler’s thesis in Love and Death in the Ameri- can Novel (1960) that our white male writers have been obsessed with white male–dark male dyads (Huck and Jim, Ishmael and Queequeg) fi nds intimate material expression in the blackface performer’s assumption of familiarity with “blackness.” Th e early history of motion pictures was bound up with blackface—witness its importance to such major cinematic developments as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903), Birth of a Nation (1915), and Th e Jazz Singer (1927) 8 — and the movies have regularly returned to it since then, whether in Fred Astaire’s blackface tribute to Bill “Bojangles” Robinson in Swing Time (1936), Melvin Van Peebles’s ironic Watermelon Man (1970), or the egregious post— affi rmative action Soul Man (1986). Bill Monroe, Jimmie Rodgers, and other early country music stars routinely “blacked up,” as did ethnic vaudevillians such as Sophie Tucker; as Armond White has written, “some form of darkie mimicking has been the strongest musical tradition in pluralized American culture.” 9 Indeed, in minstrelsy’s cultural force, its racial crossings, and what the New York Tribune called its pleasing “insanity” (June 30, 1855), its emer- gence resembled that of early rock ’n’ roll. Every time you hear an expansive white man drop into his version of black English, you are in the presence of blackface’s unconscious return.

For an index of popular white racial feeling in the United States, one could do worse than minstrelsy. I am concerned in this book with its shape and resonance in the decades before the Civil War. Th e tone and format of the early minstrel show, with its knee-slapping musical numbers punctuated by comic dialogues, bad puns, and petit-bourgeois ribaldry, should seem familiar to anyone who has seen American television’s “Hee Haw.” (Th e resemblance is apparently not coin- cidental, for one scholar has speculated that the rural white tradition, and its commercial issue in modern bluegrass music, inherited much from the minstrel show—not least the black style of banjo playing on which minstrelsy partly traded.) 10 Although the makeup of minstrelsy changed continually aft er its

Love and Th eft 6

emergence at the beginning of the 1830s, it was confi gured at the height of its popularity as a semicircle of four or fi ve or sometimes more white male per- formers (there were very rarely female performers in the antebellum minstrel show) made up with facial blacking of greasepaint or burnt cork and adorned in outrageously oversized and/or ragged “Negro” costumes. Armed with an array of instruments, usually banjo, fi ddle, bone castanets, and tambourine, the per- formers would stage a tripartite show. Th e fi rst part off ered up a random selec- tion of songs interspersed with what passed for black wit and japery; the second part (or “olio”) featured a group of novelty performances (comic dialogues, malapropistic “stump speeches,” cross-dressed “wench” performances, and the like); and the third part was a narrative skit, usually set in the South, containing dancing, music, and burlesque.

Th is “ethnographic miniature,” in Cliff ord Geertz’s phrase, jumbled to- gether a dramatic spectacle based on an overriding investment in the body, a fi gural content preoccupied with racial marking and racial transmutation, and a social context of white working-class proximity to blacks (21, 444). We might almost call it a precognitive form: not, as in Geertz’s study of the Balinese cockfi ght, a story one people told themselves about themselves, but an encap- sulation of the aff ective order of things in a society that racially ranked human beings. What the minstrel show did was capture an antebellum structure of racial feeling, in Raymond Williams’s phrase, “social experiences in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available.” Minstrelsy brought to public form racialized elements of thought and feeling, tone and impulse, residing at the very edge of semantic availability, which Americans only dimly realized they felt, let alone understood. 11 Th e minstrel show was less the incar- nation of an age-old racism than an emergent social semantic fi gure highly responsive to the emotional demands and troubled fantasies of its audiences. 12 By looking at the formal aspects of minstrelsy in the context of its time, we may see its historically new articulation of racial diff erence.

Th is articulation took the form of a simultaneous drawing up and crossing of racial boundaries. Minstrel performers oft en attempted to repress through ridicule the real interest in black cultural practices they nonetheless betrayed— minstrelsy’s mixed erotic economy of celebration and exploitation, what Homi Bhabha would call its “ambivalence” (“Other” 18) and what my title loosely terms “love and theft .” Th e very form of blackface acts—an investiture in black bodies—seems a manifestation of the particular desire to try on the accents of “blackness” and demonstrates the permeability of the color line. I depart from most other writers on minstrelsy, who have based their analyses on racial aver- sion, in seeing the vagaries of racial desire as fundamental to minstrel-show mimicry. It was cross-racial desire that coupled a nearly insupportable fascina- tion and a self-protective derision with respect to black people and their cul- tural practices, and that made blackface minstrelsy less a sign of absolute white

Introduction 7

power and control than of panic, anxiety, terror, and pleasure. As it turned out, the minstrel show worked for over a hundred years to facilitate safely an exchange of energies between two otherwise rigidly bounded and policed cul- tures, a shape-shift ing middle term in racial confl ict which began to disappear (in the 1920s) once its historical function had been performed. 13 It appears that during this stretch of American cultural history the intercourse between racial cultures was at once so attractive and so threatening as to require a cultural marker or visible sign of cultural interaction. Th is requirement would eventu- ally wither away, or in any case transmogrify, not least because of the minstrel show’s success in introducing the cultures to each other. Th e blackface mecha- nism of cultural control, as John Szwed has suggested, also provided a channel for the black cultural “contamination” of the dominant culture: “Th e fact that, say, a Mick Jagger can today perform in the same tradition without blackface simply marks the detachment of culture from race and the almost full absorp- tion of a black tradition into white culture” (27). In the mid-nineteenth cen- tury, however, culture was “attached” to race with some tenacity; blackface acts both enforced and, in the end, remapped this regime.

As I point out in chapter 1 , writing on the minstrel show has been inordi- nately partial. Minstrelsy, of course, was long enveloped in a reactionary nos- talgia that desperately needed debunking; partisans of blackface have always longed for the imaginary day of the strumming Sambo. 14 A superfi cially sim- ilar (and still very questionable) tradition, however, has celebrated minstrelsy for its “blackness,” seeing the phenomenon as a public forum for slave culture which might have liberating eff ects. Constance Rourke’s chapter on minstrelsy in American Humor (1931), for example, gave modern force to what might be termed a “people’s culture” position—one whose sources, as I show, can be found in the writings of Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, and others. Th e revival of this impulse had everything to do with a 1930s reclamation of the “folk,” if not, as Warren Susman has suggested, with a new defi nition of “culture” itself (150–210): the extraordinary success of Marc Connelly’s near- minstrel show Th e Green Pastures (1929), the anthropology of Franz Boaz, Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934), the novels of John Steinbeck, Zora Neale Hurston’s Th eir Eyes Were Watching God (1937), James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), and so on. Rourke’s genial view is a relatively benign, and to that extent unhistorical, one, though it has the virtue of acknowledging both the extensive eff ect of black cultural practices on blackface performance and the public eff ects of blackface itself. Th is position, in fact, was partially defended in Robert Toll’s Blacking Up: Th e Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (1974), and some have ventured it in refur- bished form, but it has not been a position to which scholars regularly recur. 15

Harking back to a tradition of minstrel-show criticism that began with Frederick Douglass’s articles in the North Star, scholars and writers initiated a long-awaited political revisionism in regard to minstrelsy beginning in 1958

Love and Th eft 8

with Ralph Ellison’s “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke” and crystallized— with attitude—in LeRoi Jones’s brief remarks in Blues People (1963). Th e most notable instances of this revisionism include Nathan Huggins’s powerful chap- ter on minstrelsy in Harlem Renaissance (1971) and Toll’s Blacking Up. Th ese works can indeed be taken as representative of the reigning view of minstrelsy as racial domination. James Dorman, for instance, writes: “Th e arrival of Jim Crow was to provide the fi nal ingredient in the total pattern of antiblack prej- udice” (“Strange” 118). In retrospect this necessary critique seems somewhat crude and idealist; in reading off from a text the stereotypes that a historical moment is presumed to have required it is typically presentist, and in viewing minstrelsy as the nail in the coffi n of cultural containment it is rather narrowly functionalist. Based on a politics of “positive” black images, images meant to replace racist types with what Stuart Hall terms the “essential black subject,” this strategy still, in certain instances, off ers the terms in which cultural struggle ought to be waged. At the same time, however, the engagement on the part of cultural critics with poststructuralist discourses, and a dismantling of binary racial categories in favor of multiply determined and positioned sub- jects, has begun to trouble the notion of “racial” representation itself. We must now recognize, as Hall argues, “that the central issues of race always appear historically in articulation, in a formation, with other categories and divisions” (“New” 28). To do so will require a much more sensitively historicist look at the uneven class, gender, and racial politics of forms such as the minstrel show. And it will require as well a subtler account of acts of representation. Where representation once unproblematically seemed to image forth its referent, we must now think of, say, the blackface mask as less a repetition of power rela- tions than a signifi er for them—a distorted mirror, refl ecting displacements and condensations and discontinuities between which and the social fi eld there exist lags, unevennesses, multiple determinations. It will take a good deal of decoding to get at the meanings of blackface minstrelsy. 16

In contrast to both the populist and the revisionist views, which see min- strelsy’s politics as univocal, my study documents precisely the historical con- tradictions and social confl icts the minstrel show opened up. It fi rst reconstructs the antebellum cultural formation in which minstrelsy did its work (part I). One of our earliest culture industries, minstrelsy not only aff ords a look at the emergent historical break between high and low cultures but also reveals popular culture to be a place where cultures of the dispossessed are routinely commodifi ed—and contested. Th e heedless (and ridiculing) appropriation of “black” culture by whites in the minstrel show, as many contemporaries recog- nized, was little more than cultural robbery, a form of what Marx called ex- propriation, which troubled guilty whites all the more because they were so attracted to the culture they plundered. Indeed, for a time in the late 1840s min- strelsy came to seem the most representative national art. In this way minstrelsy became a site of confl ictual intensity for the politics of race, class, and nation.

Introduction 9

Th is interpretation is particularly suggested by my readings of blackface minstrel forms (part II). Each of the last four chapters concerns itself with a particular social and political situation, set of texts, and theoretical problem. Reading minstrel music, lyrics, jokes, dances, burlesque skits, and illustrations in conjunction with working-class racial ideologies and the sex/gender system, I show how blackface minstrelsy embodied and intervened in Jacksonian racial politics. Underwritten by envy as well as repulsion, sympathetic identi- fi cation as well as fear, the minstrel show continually transgressed the color line even as it made possible the formation of a self-consciously white working class. Th ere was a good fi t, for example, between the confl icted nature of the shows and the racial tendencies of their audiences, such that the artisan aboli- tionist constituency could rather benignly enjoy the same form of leisure that supported racist, antiabolitionist ridicule. Th is situation was aided by ideolo- gies of working-class manhood, which shaped white men’s contradictory feel- ings about black men. Because of the power of the black penis in white American psychic life, the pleasure minstrelsy’s largely white and male audi- ences derived from their investment in “blackness” always carried a threat of castration—a threat obsessively reversed in white lynching rituals. Notwith- standing that this threat was itself part of the fascination, or at least a price white men appear to have paid gladly in patronizing blackface performances, the minstrel show was constructed along several lines of defense against it. Th is is not at all to claim that the defenses worked—only that their intermittent failure provided blackface with its longevity and power.

Th e moment of minstrelsy’s greatest popularity (1846–54) was marked by a variety of bitter political controversies: labor struggles in New York and other major cities, the Wilmot Proviso debates over the extension of slavery, the Sen- eca Falls women’s rights convention, the Astor Place theater riot, the Fugitive Slave Law and its aft ermath, the Kansas-Nebraska bill, and others. In signifi - cant ways this historical moment suddenly made the misappropriations and distortions committed in minstrelsy politically dangerous. Th e confl ictual character of minstrelsy only deepened with the approach of the gravest pre– Civil War threat to the social order of the Union, the debates over slavery that led to the Compromise of 1850. Stephen Foster’s “Plantation Melodies” unwit- tingly conjured up the hydra-headed confl icts; these melodies, and the vast dissemination of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in various politically divergent blackface theatrical productions—a kind of prelude to civil war on the stage—off er a lens through which to read a political crisis Michael Rogin has called “the American 1848,” a revolution on American soil.

Given this formal and historical complexity, it is no surprise that minstrelsy has overwhelmed most attempts to study it in all its variousness and diffi culty. Th e minstrel show was an entertainment form that called in turn on a variety of elements: folklore, dance, jokes, songs, instrumental tunes, skits, mock ora- tory, satire, and racial and gender cross-dressing or impersonation. From a

Love and Th eft 10

variety of locales, including city, backwoods, small town, and frontier, it impinged on a history of intense class, racial, national, and gender formation. Scholars understandably most oft en take one or another aspect of minstrelsy for focused study rather than the whole; and the few comprehensive treat- ments of the minstrel show have without exception read the printed record (songsters, playlets, and so on) of what was in fact a negotiated and rowdy spectacle of performer and audience. 17 I have restricted this study to the ante- bellum decades, and to the minstrel show’s performance amid the social and political life of (for the most part) New York City. Yet I have also attempted to do justice to minstrelsy’s various constituent parts as well as to its audience and its historical role, and in this I make no plea for my own sagacity. I have un- questionably poached on academic territory in which I can claim at best ama- teur competence. Writing this book has convinced me, however, that such an interdisciplinary attempt is worth the gamble and, especially given the habits of specialists and subspecialists, is an opportunity rather than an embarrass- ment. In addressing my study to a variety of fi elds and disciplines, I mean not only to properly portray a complex phenomenon but to help solidify the claims of cultural studies as a practice.

Accordingly, this book has been oriented by several specifi c debates. One of these is, of course, the discussion of blackface minstrelsy, in particular its po- litical status and eff ectivity as public performance. Also important are theoret- ical questions regarding the (post-Freudian) study of humor, the political interpretation of commercial popular music, the uses of folklore, the cultural exhibition of the body, and the political effi cacy of melodrama. A related debate concerns the usefulness of fi lm theory in the study of theater, a highly problematic but potentially generative development. Recent theoretical and political investigations of race, especially those oriented by psychoanalysis, are fundamental concerns, as are questions about the place of race in working- class culture and in the development of American nationhood.

Implicit in any work of this kind is also the question of American Studies as a fi eld in (perhaps perennial) crisis and its relationship to cultural studies. Th e American Studies of a generation ago cast its vision over a wider expanse of American culture than is now sometimes recognized; and it oft en functioned as a left -liberal “culturalist” alternative to American New Criticism, however much it may now seem like the literary equivalent of the Truman administra- tion. In fact there was a great deal of interchange between the British New Left and certain American Studies scholars, whether in the interested stateside re- ception of Raymond Williams’s and Richard Hoggart’s early work or the impact of Leo Marx’s Machine in the Garden (1964) on the early fi gures of British cul- tural studies. 18 Of course, the older American Studies emphasis on “representa- tive” texts and problems is out of date, while E. P. Th ompson’s (contemporaneous) defi nition of culture “as a whole way of confl ict” (“Long” 33) has off ered a deci- sive reorientation to a generation of cultural studies practitioners, including

Introduction 11

myself. Indeed, my focus on a highly elaborated if crudely executed popular stage form has arisen from the immense importance, in such a defi nition of culture, of cultural texts requiring relatively few “inherent resources” such as literacy or education and therefore off ering relatively unmediated access to those whose struggles make history. 19 Sorely neglected in the academic study of cultures until very recently, such forms have usually been central to their time—certainly more infl uential than the great literature so oft en taken as cul- turally representative. Although American Studies has in some sense been a pioneer (e.g., Constance Rourke’s American Humor, Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land ), it has restricted itself to addressing what is “most American” and excep- tional about such forms rather than the richer questions of how cultures work, are contested, divide and cohere, or how transpersonal historical structures consort with human activity to produce social and political change. 20

I try in these pages to help reorient the traditions of American Studies by asking questions about the role of culture in the political development of a specifi c national entity. Th e challenge here is to resist the tendency in American versions of cultural studies to examine culture apart from political structures and movements—an airless “politics” of the cultural rather than social and political cultures. 21 To this end the signifi cance of current work in cultural studies lies in making it possible to situate the analysis of cultural forms, the various sorts of textuality and subjectivity most closely related to human agency, with regard to the analysis of social and cultural formations, the orga- nizations, processes, and overdetermined conjunctures that bear most signifi - cantly on political life. Th e greatest yield of this work is an understanding of “historical forms of consciousness and subjectivity,” in Richard Johnson’s words (43)—as I see it, the chief concern and special ability of cultural studies.

If at this juncture we are to understand anything more about popular racial feeling in the United States, we must no longer be satisfi ed merely to condemn the terrible pleasures of cultural material such as minstrelsy, for their legacy is all around us. As Antonio Gramsci once remarked, the “starting-point of crit- ical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself ’ as a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in you an infi nity of traces, without leaving an inventory” ( Prison 324). Only by beginning to inventory the deposits of feeling for which blackface perfor- mance has been responsible can we hope to acknowledge the social origins and psychological motives of “racial” impulses, reckonings, and unconscious reactions that lie so deep in most Caucasians as to feel inevitable and indeed natural. An equally urgent outcome of this undertaking will be to make our- selves aware of the resistant, oppositional, or emancipatory accents of the racial bad attitudes residing in American working-class culture today.

Love and Th eft is thus perhaps a product of its political times in investi- gating the ironies of cultural reaction, the potential reversals in a context of defeat. 22 Like much of the recent cultural theory on which it draws, it has been

Love and Th eft 12

marked by our age of “authoritarian populism,” as Stuart Hall has termed it, in its tea leaf–reading documentation of culture-industry contradictions and subversions in the face of overwhelming odds. 23 Th ere is, I would rush to add, justifi cation for this anxious attention: not only was blackface minstrelsy a pe- culiarly unstable form, but the social realities to which it in part contributed demand careful sorting out. Th e left has too oft en construed black Americans as saboteurs of class-based politics, their presence acting as an impediment to “real” social change. No less than writing off white working-class racial feeling, blaming black people themselves for being obstacles in the path of the Ameri- can experiment has been a nasty habit. 24 Th e story has usually taken the form of an imagined conspiracy of white liberals and black “extremists” who have foisted civil rights demands onto left initiatives and in the process aff ronted working-class whites. But, as Adolph Reed and Julian Bond observe, this tale presumes a prior equality between black and white, and consequently “denies the reality of explicitly racial stratifi cation within the working class and a his- tory of white working-class antagonism toward blacks—coexisting, certainly, with many exemplary instances of interracial solidarity—that stretches back through the 1863 New York draft riot” (733–34). Th is gnarled history stretches back indeed into the antebellum decades I consider here, and I advance a revivifying attention to its contradictions: the competing but sometimes col- lateral claims of black and white labor. Th e source of post–World War II con- fl icts in those of white workers versus black slaves and their abolitionist allies indicates the need to study carefully a moment when a possible interracial labor alliance went awry. Any vision of a renewed socialism demands that we consider race as more than merely “incidental” (as C. L. R. James urges) to the motors of political change. And if it is culture rather than shared work experi- ence that primarily creates the conditions for social movements, one critical task is to achieve a renovated public culture through inquiries into popular forms such as the minstrel show. 25

{ Part I }

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{ 1 }

Blackface and Blackness The Minstrel Show in American Culture

In the theatrical world, as in the aesthetic world more generally, ideology is always in essence the site of a competition and a struggle in which the sound and fury of humanity’s political and social struggles

are faintly or sharply echoed. —Louis Althusser

Th e current consensus on blackface minstrelsy is probably best summed up by Frederick Douglass’s righteous response in the North Star. Blackface imitators, he said, were “the fi lthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complex- ion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the cor- rupt taste of their white fellow citizens,” a denunciation that nicely captures minstrelsy’s further commodifi cation of an already enslaved, noncitizen people (October 27, 1848). From our vantage point, the minstrel show indeed seems a transparently racist curiosity, a form of leisure that, in inventing and ridiculing the slow-witted but irrepressible “plantation darky” and the foppish “northern dandy negro,” conveniently rationalized racial oppression. Th e culture that embraced it, we assume, was either wholly enchanted by racial travesty or so be- nighted, like Melville’s Captain Delano, that it took such distortions as authentic. I want to suggest, however, that the audiences involved in early minstrelsy were not universally derisive of African Americans or their culture, and that there was a range of responses to the minstrel show which points to an instability or con- tradiction in the form itself. My project is to examine that instability for what it may tell us about the racial politics of culture in the years before the Civil War.

Writing in Horace Greeley’s antislavery New York Tribune in 1855, an anon- ymous advocate of blackface minstrel songs celebrated the “earliest votaries of the colored opera”:

Why may not the banjoism of a Congo, an Ethiopian or a George Christy [one of the most famous blackface performers of the 1840s and 1850s], aspire to an equality with the musical and poetical delineators of all

Love and Th eft 16

nationalities? .  .  . Absurd as may seem negro minstrelsy to the refi ned musician, it is nevertheless beyond doubt that it expresses the peculiar characteristics of the negro as truly as the great masters of Italy represent their more spiritual and profound nationality . . . . [And] has there been no change in the feelings of the true originators of this music—the ne- groes themselves? . . . Plaintive and slow, the sad soul of the slave throws into his music all that gushing anguish of spirit which he dare not other- wise express. (“Black” 107)

Surprising lines, these, from a writer sympathetic to the idea of African- American art. We tend not to associate an approving view of minstrelsy with a determination to take slave culture seriously, let alone a determination to take minstrelsy as slave culture. Moreover, the writer’s egalitarian rhetoric links one of the strongest antebellum cases on behalf of minstrel songs with a sympa- thetic (if typically condescending) attitude toward black people. Th e moti- vating idea here is a Herdeŕian notion of the folk, articulated in the year of Leaves of Grass for much the same reason: to celebrate the popular sources of a national culture. It is possible, of course, to take such lines as evidence of the incomprehension that greeted minstrelsy, a position that is certainly defen- sible. But it does not fully account for the frequency of responses such as the one just quoted—the ready imputation of folk authenticity to patently “impure” songs such as “Ole Dan Tucker,” “Jump Jim Crow,” and “Zip Coon.” Nor does it explain the desire to put moderate racial attitudes and minstrel shows together.

Indeed, Margaret Fuller spoke in a similar vein about this cultural form. In “Entertainments of the Past Winter,” published in the Dial in 1842, she claimed that Americans were “beggars” when it came to the arts of music and dancing:

Our only national melody, Yankee Doodle, is shrewdly suspected to be a scion from British art. All symptoms of invention are confi ned to the African race, who, like the German literati, are relieved by their position from the cares of government. “Jump Jim Crow,” is a dance native to this country, and one which we plead guilty to seeing with pleasure, not on the stage, where we have not seen it, but as danced by children of an ebon hue in the street. Such of the African melodies as we have heard are beau- tiful. But the Caucasian race have yet their rail-roads to make . . . . (52)

We will have occasion to return to the juxtaposition of American blacks with the idea of governance, particularly in the notion of slaves as poet-legislators. Interesting here, in addition, is the assumption that the only music and dance which are not false coin are those found in blackface minstrelsy, which repre- sents, Fuller hints, something like the folk culture of an American peasantry. Th ese comments begin to suggest that when, in the decades before the Civil War, northern white men “blacked up” and imitated what they supposed was

Blackface and Blackness 17

black dialect, music, and dance, some people, without derision, heard Negroes singing.

Blackface minstrelsy as an African-American people’s culture: this may seem an odd view. But it is one perception of the minstrel show that has been understandably repressed in antiracist accounts of it. Most scholars have yet to appreciate W. E. B. Du Bois’s belief that Stephen Foster compositions such as “Old Black Joe” and “Old Folks at Home” were based on African-American themes; Du Bois included them in his assertion that black music was the “only real American music” (“Negro” 231; Souls 382). In Black Manhattan, James Weldon Johnson similarly remarked that minstrelsy originated on the planta- tion, and constituted the “only completely original contribution” of America to the theater (87). Th ese judgments appear terribly misguided now, given that blackface minstrelsy’s century-long commercial regulation of black cultural practices stalled the development of African-American public arts and gener- ated an enduring narrative of racist ideology, a historical process by which an entire people has been made the bearer of another people’s “folk” culture. We ought nonetheless to know how such positive assessments of the minstrel show were possible as well as wrong. Without a fuller understanding of black- face performance, one that includes the intensely confl icted set of responses it called forth, we miss the part it played in the racial politics of its time—the extent to which, for that matter, it was the racial politics of its time—from its northern emergence as an entr’acte in about 1830 to the various New York stage versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the mid-1850s.

In the pages that follow I return the minstrel show to a northeastern polit- ical context that was extremely volatile, one whose range can be seen in the antinomy of responses I have identifi ed, themselves anticipatory of twentieth- century debates about the nature of the “popular.” On one side there is a dis- dain for “mass”-cultural domination, the incorporation of black culture fashioned to racist uses; on the other a celebration of an authentic people’s culture, the dissemination of black arts with potentially liberating results. 1 Let me suggest that one fi nds elements of both in early minstrelsy: there is as much evidence to locate in it the public emergence of slave culture (as Constance Rourke argued in American Humor ) or pointed political protest (as David Grimsted and William Stowe have written) as there is to fi nger its racism, this last needing little demonstration. Ultimately, however, this stubborn dualism is an impoverished, not to say obsolete, way of thinking about one of America’s fi rst culture industries. Our simplistic (and almost completely ahistorical) un- derstanding of minstrel shows comes partly as a result of swinging between one position and the other—or at least of the notion that these are our only choices.

Recent research into popular culture has allowed us to see the popular instead as a sphere characterized by cultural forms of social and political con- fl ict, neither, in Gareth Stedman Jones’s terms, entirely the “social control” of

Love and Th eft 18

the ruling classes nor the “class expression” of the dominated. Because the popular is always produced, capitalized, it is hardly some unfettered time-out from political pressures, a space of mere “leisure”—a clear enough distinction in the case of minstrelsy—nor does it arise in some immediate way from col- lective popular desires. But, as Stuart Hall has insisted, neither does it passively mirror political domination taking place in other parts of the social formation, as though it were only epiphenomenal—a form of dominant-cultural “rein- forcement,” as commentators on the minstrel show have oft en said—or, in the Frankfurt School scenario, wholly administered and determined. Since the popular emerges at the intersection of received symbolic forms, audiences’ ex- periences of authority and subordination in workplace, home, and social ritual, and new articulations by various producers of symbolic forms—local teachers and labor organizers, storytellers and journalists, theater managers and actors—it is itself a crucial place of contestation, with moments of resis- tance to the dominant culture as well as moments of supersession. Talking about the minstrel show this way reveals the most popular American enter- tainment form in the antebellum decades as a principal site of struggle in and over the culture of black people. 2 Th is struggle took place largely among ante- bellum whites, of course, and it fi nally divested black people of control over elements of their culture and over their own cultural representation generally. But it was based on a profound white investment in black culture which, for a time, had less certain consequences. My study documents in early blackface minstrelsy the dialectical fl ickering of racial insult and racial envy, moments of domination and moments of liberation, counterfeit and currency, a pattern at times amounting to no more than the two faces of racism, at others gesturing toward a specifi c kind of political or sexual danger, and all constituting a pecu- liarly American structure of racial feeling.

So far are we from any idea of what the vagaries of this structure of feeling might have been—the relationship of blackface to “blackness”—that it is useful to generate some sense of the contradictions and ambiguities in blackface rep- resentation and its place in American culture. Let me, for instance, elaborate what I mean in calling minstrelsy a popular form by returning briefl y to the symptomatic moments of the debate I have sketched. Each position has its partial force, and taken together they defi ne the range of possible forms and eff ects that could be produced in the minstrel show. To be sure, minstrelsy was an arena in which the effi cient expropriation of the cultural commodity “black- ness” occurred, demonstrated in what this Atlantic Monthly writer (writing in 1867) supposes is a hilarious account of “originator” T. D. Rice’s fi rst blackface performance in Pittsburgh around 1830:

Rice prepared to take advantage of his opportunity. Th ere was a ne- gro in attendance at Griffi th’s Hotel, on Wood Street, named Cuff ,—an exquisite specimen of his sort,—who won a precarious subsistence by

Blackface and Blackness 19

letting his open mouth as a mark for boys to pitch pennies into, at three paces, and by carrying the trunks of passengers from the steamboats to the hotels. Cuff was precisely the subject for Rice’s purpose. Slight per- suasion induced him to accompany the actor to the theatre, where he was led through the private entrance, and quietly ensconced behind the scenes . . . . Rice, having shaded his own countenance to the “contraband” hue, ordered Cuff to disrobe, and proceeded to invest himself in the cast- off apparel . . . . [Onstage] the extraordinary apparition produced an in- stant eff ect . . . . Th e eff ect was electric . . . .

Now it happened that Cuff , who meanwhile was crouching in disha- bille under concealment of a projecting fl at behind the performer, by some means received intelligence, at this point, of the near approach of a steamer to the Monongahela Wharf. Between himself and others of his color in the same line of business, and especially as regarded a cer- tain formidable competitor called Ginger, there existed an active rivalry in the baggage-carrying business. For Cuff to allow Ginger the advan- tage of an undisputed descent upon the luggage of the approaching ves- sel would be not only to forget all “considerations” from the passengers, but, by proving him a laggard in his calling, to cast a damaging blemish upon his reputation. Liberally as he might lend himself to a friend, it could not be done at that sacrifi ce. Aft er a minute or two of fi dgety wait- ing for [Rice’s] song to end, Cuff ’s patience could endure no longer, and, cautiously hazarding a glimpse of his profi le beyond the edge of the fl at, he called in a hurried whisper: “Massa Rice, Massa Rice, must have my clo’se! Massa Griffi f wants me,—steamboat’s comin’!”

Th e appeal was fruitless. Massa Rice did not hear it, for a happy hit at an unpopular city functionary had set the audience in a roar in which all other sounds were lost . . . . [Another appeal went unheeded, when,] driven to desperation, and forgetful in the emergency of every sense of propriety, Cuff , in ludicrous undress as he was, started from his place, rushed upon the stage, and, laying his hand upon the performer’s shoul- der, called out excitedly: “Massa Rice, Massa Rice, gi’ me nigga’s hat,— nigga’s coat,—nigga’s shoes,—gi’ me nigga’s t’ings! Massa Griffi f wants ’im,— steamboat’s comin’ !!”

The incident was the touch, in the mirthful experience of that night, that passed endurance. (Nevin 609–10)

Th is passage, in all its woozy syntax and headlong rush, is probably the least trustworthy and most accurate account of American minstrelsy’s appropria- tion of black cultural practices. Indeed this eulogy to the minstrel composer Stephen Foster reads something like a master text of the racial economy encoded in blackface performance. For one thing, it calls on minstrel devices (ventriloquized dialect, racial burlesque) to narrate the origins of minstrelsy,

Love and Th eft 20

as if this particular narratable event generated or secreted “naturally” the for- mal means appropriate to it; its multiple frames (minstrelsy within minstrelsy) amount to so many techniques of black subordination. True to form, a dimin- ished, not to say “blackfaced” Cuff has replaced Rice as this account’s center of attention. And its talk of opportunity and investment, lending and ownership, subsistence and competition is more preoccupied with cultural value than we might have expected. Its social unconscious, we might say, reveals a great deal of anxiety about the “primitive accumulation” it ostensibly celebrates. 3 Perhaps this is also why the passage is fully a third longer than what I have just quoted. Th e fascination with Cuff ’s nakedness, moreover, highlights the aff air as one of male bodies, in which racial confl ict and cultural exchange are negotiated between men. Cuff ’s stripping, a theft that silences and embarrasses him on- stage but which nevertheless entails both his bodily presence in the show and the titillating threat that he may return to demand his stolen capital, is a neat allegory for the most prominent commercial collision of black and white cul- tures in the nineteenth century. Cultural expropriation is the minstrel show’s central fact, and we should not lose sight of it. 4 But it is also a fact that needs explaining, for in itself it establishes little about the cultural commerce sug- gested by one performer’s enthusiasm as he gathered material for his blackface act: “I shall be rich in black fun.” 5

Even in expropriation there was a strong white attraction to the material which surfaced in less malign ways. White people believed the counterfeit, oft en sympathetically, as I have begun to suggest; the blackface hieroglyph so fully unpacked in the Atlantic Monthly account went largely unread. Th ere were, it is true, nudges and winks folded into claims like that of the Apollo Minstrels to be the “only original Negroes travelling,” or in the New York Her- ald ’s coy references to Christy’s Minstrels as “the very pinks of negro singers.” 6 But oft en, in the minds of many, blackface singers and dancers became, simply, “negroes.” How else explain the tireless references to “these amusing darkies” ( New York Herald January 21, 1848), as if the originals had somehow gotten lost? Early audiences so oft en suspected that they were being entertained by actual Negroes that minstrel sheet music began the proto-Brechtian practice of picturing blackface performers out of costume as well as in (see Fig. 1 ); and there are several existing accounts of white theatergoers mistaking blackface performers for blacks. 7 Even Mark Twain’s mother, at her fi rst (and presumably only) minstrel show, believed she was watching black performers. Like Marga- ret Fuller (and, as we shall see, Walt Whitman), Mark Twain was himself intrigued by what he called the “happy and accurate” representations of the minstrel show. 8

Of course, belief in the authenticity of blackface hardly ruled out racial rid- icule; the oscillation between currency and counterfeit in the minstrel show was related to but oft en discrete from the oscillation between sympathy and ridicule toward its representations. Indeed, the wayward valuations attached

Blackface and Blackness 21

both to irony toward the fakes and belief in them make the task of gauging audience response a dizzying one. What was the precise mix of irony, false consciousness, interest, and interracial recognition in a white Union soldier’s perception that two blacks in his barracks “look[ed] exactly like our minstrels” (Howe 91)? We are back where we began, but with a diff erence: although min- strelsy was indeed in the business of staging or producing “race,” that very enterprise also involved it in a carnivalizing of race, as the range of critical response has begun to suggest, such that the minstrel show’s ideological pro- duction became more contradictory, its consumption more indeterminate, its political eff ects more plural than many have assumed. It is worth asking what those eff ects could possibly have amounted to. Ultimately I would like to make some sense of the dialectical relationship noted in Constance Rourke’s obser- vation that “little Jim Crow appeared at almost the precise moment when Th e Liberator was founded” ( American 98). What was the brief shared history of blackface minstrelsy and racial ideologies of liberation? And was their relation- ship a story of racist compensation, or were there unsuspected similarities?

A Genealogy of Jim Crow

I begin with a brief genealogy of Jim Crow. 9 Th is will off er a glimpse of black- face’s ambiguous modes of authority based on certain of its earlier, as well as its minstrel-show, manifestations. Th e virtue of the genealogy, as Fredric Jameson suggests, is that it defamiliarizes the cultural object, revealing from a dia- chronic perspective, as in an X-ray, functional elements in forms such as min- strelsy that probably seem transparent enough ( Political 139). Although it will be necessary to trace the formal contradictions noted here in the various ap- pearances of blackface through to the American cultural contradictions they fi gure, this genealogy begins to suggest the range of purposes the black min- strel mask could serve, both onstage and in public. It thus constitutes a certain groundwork for that dialectic of white responses to “blackness” which I believe traversed not only the early minstrel show but antebellum racial feeling as well. 10

It would certainly be a mistake to see the minstrel types that began to emerge in the late 1820s as continuous outgrowths of slave tales à la Constance Rourke, though there exist certain similarities. Th ey should rather be placed at the intersection of slave culture and earlier blackface stage characters such as the harlequin of the commedia dell’arte, the clown of English pantomime and the clown of the American circus, the burlesque tramp, perhaps the “black- man” of English folk drama. Th is intersection establishes the political and emotional range within which minstrel songs characteristically worked. Th e twin infusion of these antecedents in minstrel representations lends a highly uncertain status to an already ambiguous stage tradition. 11 Clowns and

Love and Th eft 22

harlequins are as oft en lovable butts of humor as devious producers of it; slave- tale tricksters are frequently (though not always) champions, heroes, backdoor victors for the weak over the strong. Early minstrel fi gures overlapped with each tradition, tending more or less toward self-mockery on the one hand and subversion on the other. Th e overlap was registered, fi rst, in British produc- tions such as Cowardy, Cowardy, Custard; or Harlequin Jim Crow and the Magic Mustard Pot (1836), which marked a trend beginning in the 1830s of appending

Figure 1 Th e Virginia Serenaders, 1844 Courtesy of the Harvard Th eatre Collection

Blackface and Blackness 23

the name Jim Crow to all sorts of British clowns and Punch-and-Judy fi gures; 12 and, second, in the animal tales early blackface performers set to music, not to mention the alleged black derivation of the “Jim Crow” tune itself (about which more in chapter 2 ).

Th is contradictory lineage, the stage trickster overdetermined by the slave trickster, highlights some hint of danger in the earliest blackface types which few have been willing to grant them. Consider T. D. Rice’s mid-1830s version of “Clar de Kitchen”:

A jay bird sot on a hickory limb, He wink’d at me and I wink’d at him; I pick’d up a stone and I hit his shin, Says he you better not do dat agin.

A Bull frog dress’d sogers close, Went in de fi eld to shoot some crows; De crows smell powder and fl y away, De Bull frog mighty mad dat day. 13

Such small victories were won continually in early minstrelsy. Small and un- doubtedly self-diminishing though they were, the coded triumphs of black men over sinister jaybirds and black crows over patrolling bullfrogs were tri- umphs all the same, reminiscent indeed of certain slave tales. It might even be said that part of the triumph lay precisely in their recalling slave lore, in which foxes fl ee roosters, goats terrorize lions, and Brer Rabbit gleefully taunts Wolf.

Other early minstrel characters veered much more toward an intentionally ridiculous blustering, inherited less from the slaves or conventional stage fi g- ures than from the Mike Finks and Davy Crocketts of southwestern humor. Whether plantation rustics (Jim Crow) or urban dandies (Zip Coon), these fi gures of exaggerated strength and overwhelming power, as Lawrence Levine has suggested, have little in common with the slave tricksters’ underhanded manipulations and deceits ( Black 104). Th ere was thus a third tradition in- fusing the most common characters of antebellum minstrelsy, who, Nathan Huggins argues, were oft en little more than blackfaced versions of heroes from southwestern humor. 14 Characters based on those heroes, however, sometimes took on “black” lineaments as well (Toll 42); and there was in any case an inherited power that came with the bluster, however culturally fraudulent that bluster may have been. Selected verses from the fi rst song sheet edition of “Jim Crow” (published by E. Riley in the early 1830s) capture this ambiguity:

Come listen all you galls and boys I’se jist from Tuckyhoe, I’m goin to sing a little song, My name’s Jim Crow.

Love and Th eft 24

Weel about and turn about And do jis so, Eb’ry time I weel about And jump Jim Crow.

Oh I’m a roarer on de fi ddle, And down in old Virginny, Th ey say I play de skyentifi c Like Massa Pagannini.

I’m a full blooded niggar, Ob de real ole stock, And wid my head and shoulder I can split a horse block.

De great Nullifi cation, And fuss in de South, Is now before Congress, To be tried by word ob mouth.

Dey hab had no blows yet, And I hope dey nebber will, For its berry cruel in bredren, One anoders blood to spill.

Should dey get to fi ghting, Perhaps de blacks will rise, For deir wish for freedom, Is shining in deir eyes.

An if de blacks should get free, I guess dey’ll fee some bigger, An I shall consider it, A bold stroke for de nigger.

An I caution all white dandies, Not to come in my way, For if dey insult me, Dey’ll in de gutter lay.

(Dennison 51–57)

Th is is hardly the stuff of which revolutions are made; it was easy enough to patronize such happy-go-lucky bravado. Still, references to sectional confl ict (Andrew Jackson’s 1832–33 nullifi cation fi ght with John C. Calhoun over states’ rights) and to a black desire for freedom (only a couple of years aft er the Nat Turner insurrection), all in a context of general insolence, were cer- tainly nothing to be laughed off . Like most of the potentially subversive mo- ments of early minstrelsy, they are qualifi ed by “darky” dialect (in the theater) and orthographic derision (on the page); but in the mouth of the very fi gure

Blackface and Blackness 25

who had begun to make the question of national unity an issue, such lyrics could be dangerous, even if it was understood that the singer need not be taken seriously. One ought not immediately assent to the anthropological truism that social formations are always buttressed by the permission of certain experiences not normally permitted. With regard to antebellum minstrelsy so much remains to be seen. As Barbara Babcock-Abrahams notes, “Any form of symbolic inversion has an implicitly radical dimen- sion” (183). We should in any case avoid the essentialist notion that such representations are inherently anything, for given the right context, Peter Stallybrass and Allon White imply, they may indeed take on a transforma- tive capacity (14).

Th ese ambiguities were owing in part to the iconography such fi gures employed—that of blackface and male transvestism—features also commonly found together in public uses of blackface. Quite strikingly, many minstrel performers began their careers in the circus, perhaps even developing Ameri- can blackface out of clowning (whose present mask in any case is clearly in- debted to blackface), and continually found under the big top a vital arena of minstrel performance. Clowning is an uncanny kind of activity, scariest when it is most cheerful, unsettling to an audience even as it unmasks the preten- tious ringmaster. Blackface performers, oft en inspiring a certain terror as well as great aff ection, relied precisely on this doubleness. Ralph Ellison locates their specifi cally American resonance:

When the white man steps behind the mask of the [blackface] trickster his freedom is circumscribed by the fear that he is not simply miming a personifi cation of his disorder and chaos but that he will become in fact that which he intends only to symbolize; that he will be trapped some- where in the mystery of hell . . . and thus lose that freedom which, in the fl uid, “traditionless,” “classless” and rapidly changing society, he would recognize as the white man’s alone. (“Change” 53)

Th e black mask off ered a way to play with collective fears of a degraded and threatening—and male—Other while at the same time maintaining some symbolic control over them. Yet the intensifi ed American fears of succumbing to a racialized image of Otherness were everywhere operative in minstrelsy, continually exceeding the controls and accounting, paradoxically, for the min- strel show’s power, insofar as its “blackness” was unceasingly fascinating to performers and audiences alike. Th is combined fear of and fascination with the black male cast a strange dread of miscegenation over the minstrel show, but evidently did not preclude a continual return to minstrel miming.

Far from simple indulgence, however, the returns began to take on the aura of attempted mastery, of a culture trying to contain what Ellison calls “disorder and chaos” but which could more historically be called intermixture and in- surrection. 15 Th e eff ete but potent black “dandy” fi gure incarnated these threats, as in “Long Tail Blue” (1827):

Love and Th eft 26

As I was going up Fulton Street, I hollerd arter Sue,

Th e watchman came and took me up, And spoilte my long tail blue.

If you want to win the Ladies hearts, I’ll tell you what to do;

Go to a tip top Tailor’s shop, And buy a long tail blue. 16

“Raw, undomesticated bodily and collective power,” as Victor Turner would have it, the blackface trickster, “long tail blue” or not, suggests white men’s obsession with a rampageous black penis (“Myth” 580). As Ellison puts it, “Th e mask was the thing (the ‘thing’ in more ways than one)” (“Change” 49). Bold swagger, irrepressible desire, sheer bodily display: in a real sense the minstrel man was the penis, that organ returning in a variety of contexts, at times ludi- crous, at others rather less so. 17 Such contexts were contradictory in any case, invoking the power of “blackness” while deriding it, in an eff ort of cultural control, through the very convention that produced its power—the grease- paint and burnt cork of blackface.

Transvestism, of course, is subject to similar instabilities, though, as Marjo- rie Garber has powerfully argued, male cross-dressing can resist the stasis of ambiguity and thoroughly undermine traditional gender categories. 18 Garber herself admits, however, that women oft en become the target of such hu- morous disguises. Th is is certainly the case with minstrelsy’s many “wench” characters (played by men at a time when women regularly appeared on the legitimate stage), which off er one of the most revealing discourses on male sexuality in America at midcentury. 19

Gal from the South.

Ole massa bought a colored gal, He bought her at the south;

Her hair it curled so very tight She could not shut her mouth.

Her eyes they were so bery small, Th ey both ran into one,

And when a fl y light in her eye, Like a June bug in de sun.

Her nose it was so berry long, It turned up like a squash,

And when she got her dander up She made me laugh, by gosh;

Old massa had no hooks or nails, Or nothin’ else like that,

Blackface and Blackness 27

So on this darkie’s nose he used To hang his coat and hat.

One morning massa goin’ away, He went to git his coat,

But neither hat nor coat was there, For she had swallowed both;

He took her to a tailor shop, To have her mouth made small,

Th e lady took in one long breath, And swallowed tailor and all. 20

Th is portrait is fairly typical of the representation of black women on the min- strel stage, whether simply narrated or fully acted out; the two modes occurred simultaneously as oft en as not, the narrative detailing the jokey blazon, the oblivious “wench” ridiculed in person on another part of the stage. Th e anxi- eties aroused by such fi gures are also typical: the empowering insistence of the two “boughts” attempts to cancel the threatening open mouth (later to be “made small”), while the phallic nose and the engulfi ng, vaginal throat fi nally wreak revenge on the master.

White men’s fear of female power was dramatized with a suspiciously dra- conian punitiveness in early minstrelsy, usually in the grotesque transmuta- tions of its female fi gures. It is as if that fear were so fundamental that only a major eff ort of surveillance—like a dream, revealing its anxieties even as it devises its censors—would do. Th e widespread prostitution in the theater’s no- torious third tier, the literal analogue of the song’s wish to buy women, comes to seem an ugly kind of compensatory space given the unruliness of these stage fi gures, if the fi gures did not themselves contain the female threat. 21 Th ese “female” bodies, it is true, were “also” male, and minstrel performers did not hesitate to fl irt with the homosexual content of blackface transvestism (the master’s hat on the black “woman’s” nose), which no doubt created an atmo- sphere of polymorphous license that could blur conventional gender outlines (for men). But a fl ight from such “compromising” subtexts may in fact have produced the reassertion of masculinity in misogynist representations, which usually constituted the reactionary face of a perhaps more “undecidable” racial masquerade.

When we turn from these dramatic roles to the public display of the black- face convention, we fi nd as long a history. Victor Turner defends such dis- plays—in parades, protests, carnivals, processions—as a mode of “public refl exivity,” during which societies think in sometimes displaced and con- densed ways about their forms and functions. He links them to “times of rad- ical social change,” when they can form part of the “repertoire of prophetic leaders who mobilize the people against invaders or overlords threatening their deep culture” (“Frame” 36). For this reason Barbara Babcock-Abrahams

Love and Th eft 28

has likened stage tricksters to E. J. Hobsbawm’s “primitive rebels,” those back- ward, marginal antinomians who demonstrate quite literally that “oppression can be turned upside down” and who inspire myths and legends about their lives (Hobsbawm 24). Natalie Davis has more dialectically described these public performances as both harmless communal “safety valves” that defl ect at- tention from social reality and proposals of new social paradigms or models; they “can on the one hand perpetuate certain values of the community (even guaran- tee its survival), and on the other hand criticize political order” (97). In conjunc- tion with transvestism, the blackface mask has indeed been worn as an equivocal emblem of popular resistance, on behalf, variously—even simultaneously—of tradition and innovation. (Th e Boston Tea Party, with its howling “Indians” and “blacks,” is only the most famous American occasion.) In her essay “Women on Top,” Davis describes several instances of “ritual and festive inversion.” In the Beaujolais of the 1770s, for example, “male peasants blackened their faces and dressed as women and then attacked surveyors measuring their lands for a new landlord” (147). Th e “Whiteboys” of Ireland, for about a decade (the 1760s), dressed in long white frocks and blackened their faces, setting themselves up as an “armed popular force to provide justice for the poor, ‘to restore the ancient commons and redress other grievances’” (149); they tore down enclosures, pun- ished greedy landowners, and forced masters to release unwilling apprentices. Th ey referred to themselves as “fairies,” and signed themselves “Ghostly Sally”— prototypes, says Davis, of the Molly Maguires and Ribbon Societies of the nine- teenth century (149).

In each of these instances the “unruly” resonances of blackness and female- ness emerged from the dramatic frame into public, where they were put to new uses by men in a political realm that obviously excluded both blacks and women. Davis observes:

On the one hand, the disguise freed men from the full responsibility for their deeds and perhaps, too, from fear of outrageous revenge upon their manhood. Aft er all, it was mere women [or mere blacks, or indeed black women] who were acting in this disorderly way. On the other hand, the males drew upon the sexual power and energy of the unruly woman and on her license (which they had long assumed at carnival and games)—to promote fertility, to defend the community’s interests and standards, and to tell the truth about unjust rule. (149)

Th ere was no immediate internal racial context for blackface in these exam- ples, but the European slave trade provided the broadest conditions of possi- bility; and the assumed inferiority, sexuality, license, and perhaps even sense of injustice associated with women were clearly ascribed to black people as well. Davis does not mention whether blackface was seen as representational rather than abstract or “metaphysical” (recall the diabolical associations with black- ness that Winthrop Jordan extensively documented in White over Black ), but

Blackface and Blackness 29

there is no question that by the late eighteenth century blackface had taken on representational force, as the many sentimentally “noble” black characters on the British stage illustrate. Th e dynamic of the processional mask in these in- stances thus preserves the ascription of certain detested qualities to “black- ness” while momentarily paying tribute to their power, a power that even in peasants’ or workers’ movements is compromised by such ascription. Herein lay the meaning of blackface in the American context of rioting and revelry, though it is perhaps not surprising that in such a confl ictual racial scene the mask was increasingly used for reactionary purposes.

Susan Davis has demonstrated that in militia burlesques and Christmas street festivities, public “masking”—the assumption through disguise of a new or inverted identity—became common in northern American cities aft er the 1820s, precisely contemporary with the rise of minstrelsy (and over against similar traditions of black pageantry). 22 During carnivalesque Christmas Eve celebrations, for instance, roving young working-class men parodied the mili- tia, marched to the rough music of kitchen-utensil instruments, and brawled on street corners. On one occasion in Philadelphia in 1834, one hundred men in intentionally makeshift uniforms conducted elaborate sham maneuvers, ac- companied, one newspaper said, by a masked band of “Indians, hunters, Fal- staff s, Jim Crows and nondescripts.” Women and blacks, as usual, were the most frequent sources of disguise. While only public transvestism, not black- face, brought a stiff fi ne—a fact that underscores both the permissiveness of the popular theater and the possible radicalism of men in drag during this period—blackface cross-dressing, as in its extended European history, was a popular favorite. Such disguises appear to have served similarly duplicitous purposes as those of Natalie Davis’s peasants, but the American context added an even more troubling dimension. Gang attacks on blacks, mobbings of black churches, and battles between black and white gangs were commonplace hol- iday occurrences. 23 Other racially motivated mobs repeated the pattern: during the 1834 Philadelphia race riot in the Moyamensing district, some of the anti- abolitionist rioters who attacked the homes of well-to-do blacks, burned black churches, and destroyed racially integrated places of leisure wore black masks and shabby coats (Runcie 209).

Th is “blackface-on-Black violence,” as David Roediger has called it, would seem to indicate a fairly direct correspondence between racial hostility, public masking, and the minstrel show ( Wages 106). In many instances we fi nd this to be the case, but such a notion generally underrates the complexity of both antebellum racial politics and minstrelsy itself. Susan Davis suggests of the Christmas celebrations, for instance, that “masking made an ambiguous state- ment about race despite its violent mocking tone, for blackface found use as a way to play with racial identity, important in a city where black inferiority was taken for granted yet segregation was incomplete” (“Making” 193). Stage black- face was to be called on to negotiate just such contradictions in the culture of

Love and Th eft 30

the antebellum American popular classes—between “white egalitarianism” and interracial urban practices, 24 or between antislavery and antiabolitionism— called on so frequently, in fact, that its primary purpose appears to have been to provide “imaginary” resolutions to intractable social confl icts. Moreover, if minstrelsy was a theatrical celebration of how deeply American racism is “em- bedded into a sense of racial and class aff ection and even envy” (Grimsted and Stowe 95), this contradictory structure occasionally witnessed unexpected returns of indentifi catory desire. 25 At the very least, symbolic crossings of racial boundaries—through dialect, gesture, and so on—paradoxically engage and absorb the culture being mocked or mimicked (Szwed 27–28). Acting black: a whole social world of irony, violence, negotiation, and learning is con- tained in that phrase. 26

Minstrel representations, then, were not continuous with either earlier dra- matic blackface fi gures or the deployment of blackface in rioting and revelry; although in certain cases there clearly were borrowings and affi nities, these were scarcely all structurally “the same.” Such traditions do, however, highlight a feature of American blackface masking that critics have been slow to recog- nize: an unstable or indeed contradictory power, linked to social and political confl icts, that issues from the weak, the uncanny, the outside. Above all, the slippery political valences of the traditions I have outlined are instructive. For it was with precisely this slipperiness that the minstrel mask resonated: a deri- sive celebration of the power of blackness; blacks, for a moment, ambiguously, on top.

People’s Culture or Cultural Domination?

To put it another way, the early minstrel show was a Janus-faced fi gure for the cultural relationship of white to black in America, a relationship that even in its dominative character was far from self-explanatory. Th e duplicity of this cultural form is suggested not only by my genealogy, minstrelsy’s formal makeup, but also by its role in American racial discourses. In many kinds of racially fraught cultural production—novels, cultural histories, and minstrel commentaries no less than antebellum blackface performance—minstrelsy has been a ground of American racial negotiation and contradiction, based on the antebellum collision course of competing modes of production and the various historical transformations in its aft ermath. From this perspective cer- tain representative critical engagements with the minstrel tradition turn out to be little less than furtive serial positions in a debate on American racial poli- tics. Th e critical problem announced in this section’s title—people’s culture versus cultural domination—is thus an ideological problem of the broadest import, and it bears so much on the minstrel show’s place in American culture that we ought to do what we can to unpack it before we attempt to supersede

Blackface and Blackness 31

it. Th e fact is that these two positions both have their paradigmatic nineteenth- century instances: Mark Twain’s vexed relationship to the minstrel tradition and Frederick Douglass’s various writings on it in the North Star. In their nine- teenth-century guises, however, these perspectives are actually more ambiva- lences than positions, betraying slippages, coming off confl icted. Like the traditions they exemplify, they are worth examining for what they tell us about minstrelsy’s role in the racial politics of American culture.

As I have said, the position favoring minstrelsy as a people’s culture typi- cally celebrates the minstrel show’s folk authenticity, its elevation of black types and black culture through blackface to a place in the national my- thology. 27 Th e rather revealing problem inherent in this position, however, is that it regularly slips into an indulgence of racist typing. Mark Twain’s avowed love of minstrelsy—“if I could have the nigger show back again in its pristine purity and perfection I should have but little further use for opera” ( Autobiog- raphy 59)—is contradictory in just this way. Twain first saw rural minstrel productions in early-1840s Hannibal, where they burst on the unwitting town as a “glad and stunning surprise”:

Th e minstrels appeared with coal-black hands and faces and their cloth- ing was a loud and extravagant burlesque of the clothing worn by the plantation slave of the time; not that the rags of the poor slave were bur- lesqued, for that would not have been possible; burlesque could have added nothing in the way of extravagance to the sorrowful accumulation of rags and patches which constituted his costume; it was the form and color of his dress that was burlesqued. ( Autobiography 59)

Th is perception is far from incautious. Twain even observes that minstrels had “buttons as big as a blacking box,” collapsing blackface masquerade, the means of its artifi ce, and an echo of one of its literal sources—Negro bootblacks—in a single self-conscious fi gure. His involvement here, however, soon outstrips all moderation:

Th e minstrel used a very broad negro dialect; he used it competently and with easy facility and it was funny—delightfully and satisfyingly funny .  .  . . [Minstrels’] lips were thickened and lengthened with bright red paint to such a degree that their mouths resembled slices cut in a ripe watermelon .  .  . . Th e minstrel troupes had good voices and both their solos and their choruses were a delight to me as long as the negro show continued in existence. ( Autobiography 59–61)

Twain’s response marks a real (and perhaps typical) attraction to and celebra- tion of black culture. Indeed, in Following the Equator (1897) he notes his love of beautiful black bodies and his disgust for white ones. But when such obser- vations do not fall into derision, they are clearly the patronizing obverse of it, and at the very least signify an unexamined investment in exoticism. Ralph

Love and Th eft 32

Ellison’s remark to the eff ect that Huckleberry Finn’s Jim rarely emerges from behind the minstrel mask is to the point here. 28

Huckleberry Finn (1884), as more than one critic has observed, was not only written but situated in minstrelsy’s boom period. Anthony Berret has argued that this fact accounts for the odd indebtedness of the novel’s language, rhetor- ical strategies, and structure to blackface minstrelsy: the preponderance of comic dialogues between Jim and Huck (much of the comedy at Jim’s expense); the burlesques of both elite and popular literature; and the tripartite comic dialogue-olio-burlesque structure. 29 In the spring of 1882 Twain visited George Washington Cable and Joel Chandler Harris in New Orleans, and suggested that they do a lecture tour (which he called a circus or menagerie) to include William Dean Howells and Th omas Bailey Aldrich. As Berret points out, this authorial circus was, in conception at least, little more than the variety acts of a minstrel show; and the reading tour that fi nally materialized, with Cable’s straight man countering Twain’s comic, found both authors reading the roles of black characters onstage, Cable even singing songs (Berret 38). It was during this tour that American audiences fi rst heard parts of Huckleberry Finn, nota- bly the “King Sollermun” and “How come a Frenchman doan’ talk like a man?” passages, scenes whose fi t with the minstrel tradition is rather close. Th ese passages may even have been expressly written, aft er the novel’s completion, for readings in just such a context (Woodard and MacCann 5). Th e ideological complexity of this aff air is compounded by the fact that Cable rather remark- ably wrote a stinging rebuke of southern racism, “Th e Freedman’s Case in Eq- uity,” which appeared during the tour in the same issue of Century Magazine that printed an excerpt from Huck Finn. But this perhaps collective commit- ment did not prevent blackface tones from creeping into the readings, or Twain from naming one of his off erings “Can’t Learn a Nigger to Argue,” a title he changed only at Cable’s behest. 30 Th ese events no doubt put a highly ambiguous spin on America’s greatest nineteenth-century political novel, but they indicate as well that the contradiction between the book’s overt politics and its indebt- edness to the minstrel show was much less cumbrous in the nineteenth cen- tury. Many antiracist arguments, that is, were unfortunately not so far from the exoticism and hierarchical assumptions of the minstrel tradition. Th e ideolog- ical cement of such a seemingly outrageous yoking was of course nineteenth- century sentimentalism—“romantic racialism,” as George Fredrickson has termed it—which underwrote the widespread and arguably radical attraction of an African-American people’s culture even as it postulated innate diff er- ences between the “Anglo-Saxon” and “African” races.

Regrettably, the recent major histories of sentimental or women’s culture fi nd no place for racial categories. Neither Ann Douglas’s Feminization of American Culture nor Mary Kelley’s Private Woman, Public Stage, for example, pauses over the centrality of the passive, sentimentalized, oft en male slave in the mid- nineteenth-century culture of feeling; even Jane Tompkins’s soteriological

Blackface and Blackness 33

reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin deemphasizes the racial component of that novel’s power. In fact Tompkins’s reading is compelling because the sentimentalist strategies for representing white women and blacks were oft en identical, each image lending the other emotional and political force. “Blackness” was indeed a primary site of the religious appreciation of the emotions that came with the decline of Calvinism. In the 1830s, Fredrickson observes, theories of Negro per- sonality were in a state of relative fl ux; the debate was largely one between “envi- ronmentalist defenders of a single human nature and proponents of deep-seated racial diff erences” ( Black 101). With the emergence of the “American school of ethnology” in the 1840s and 1850s, however, which argued the case for “polygen- esis,” or the separate creation of the races as distinct species (there were biblical versions of this argument as well), both sides of the dialogue increasingly as- sumed the fundamental diff erence of the races. A new kind of theoretical fl u- idity now entered the picture. On the polygenetic view, blacks were intellectually inferior because in thrall to the emotions. But since this notion was closer to a racial relativism of the Herderian variety—that the various races make contri- butions of their special “gift s” to humanity—than to a hierarchical racism, both evangelical religion and literary romanticism could virtually recuperate such a belief into an ideology of black superiority. As William Ellery Channing put it in 1840: “We are holding in bondage one of the best races of the human family. Th e negro is among the mildest and gentlest of men” (50). Like women, blacks were considered creatures of feeling at a time when feeling was paramount in the culture; what fund of emotion the “go-ahead-ative,” aggressive Anglo-Saxon lacked, blacks would surely supply. Th us, stereotypes and arguments of this kind already in place in the plantation school of fi ction tended to be taken over, but revalued: slavery was evil, for example, because it destroyed the great good nature, the blithe innocence, and above all the family structure of, in Methodist Bishop Gilbert Haven’s words, “the choice blood of America.” Blacks, it came to be argued, were not only exemplars of virtue but natural Christians. 31

Nor was the antislavery movement exempt from such condescension. Awk- ward attempts to rewrite what were believed to be natural diff erences into spe- cial racial capacities resulted in notions of racial “variety without inferiority,” as Lydia Maria Child, editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, put it: “Flutes on diff erent keys . . . will harmonize the better.” 32 Although the idea was to move “feminine” values to the cultural center, such arguments relied on the black inferiority they sought to displace. Karen Sanchez-Eppler has suggested that this tendency derived in part from the fi nal asymmetry of white women and blacks in such rhetoric. Child’s story “Mary French and Susan Easton” (1834), for example, urges the sentimental ideal of equality-in-diff erence, but can imagine even this outcome only by obliterating the racial lineaments of the good Negro fi gure, as though blackness, even when feminized, were inferior by defi nition (Sánchez-Eppler 39). Black leaders themselves, it should be said, did little to contest such unwittingly hierarchical thinking. Martin Delany,

Love and Th eft 34

perhaps the most vehement of midcentury black nationalists, spoke of his race on several occasions as a repository of natural aestheticism and morality; thus it fl ourished in music and oratory, while whites “probably excel in mathe- matics, . . . commerce and internal improvements.” Frederick Douglass attrib- uted his implicitly feminized “love of letters” to the Negro ancestry of his mother rather than to his Anglo-Saxon paternity. 33 Such widespread attitudes, Wilson Moses argues, may have been responsible for the emphasis of black leaders from Douglass to Booker T. Washington on specifi cally industrial training (46).

Th e key text of explicitly antislavery romantic racialism is of course Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). With the character of Uncle Tom we are already on our way to the gentle, childlike, self-sacrifi cing, essentially aesthetic slave Mark Twain created in Jim and thought he recognized on the minstrel stage; and it is instructive to remind ourselves that Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Huck Finn were among the most powerful antislavery or antiracist novels of the nineteenth century. All the more remarkable, then, that Tom bears so much resemblance to the many sentimental slaves of Stephen Foster’s compla- cent “Plantation Melodies”: Old Uncle Ned, Old Black Joe, and so on. Very little distinguishes the types in such minstrel songs from those in Stowe or Twain. Loosed from Stowe’s rhetoric into stage tableaux, they are quite contin- uous with the minstrel tradition; T. D. Rice, who began his career in the 1830s playing Jim Crow, ended it in the 1850s playing Uncle Tom on the stage. And Huckleberry Finn, as Anthony Berret observes, seems nowhere closer to the sentimental ethos of Foster’s songs than during Huck’s many fi ctional tales of disunited families, or his returns to the raft and an emotional Jim (42–43). If Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” or “Oh! Susanna”—somewhat better versions of staple minstrel themes in the 1840s—depend for their eff ect on the pathos culled from black families forced to split up or attempting to reunite, Twain’s novel relies on similar “familial” reunions whose resonance derives from the stereotyped emotionality of the black slave.

Notwithstanding the desperate ambiguity contained in the sentimental makeover of these black types, in their culture they were capable of wielding enormous power. As William Taylor has written, “To attribute to someone the simplicity of a child, . . . especially in the middle of the nineteenth century, was a compliment of the fi rst order, and dangerous, too, if the child were to be mistreated and sympathy was not the response sought for” (305). Hence the somewhat backhanded power of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and, in a more vestigial way, Huckleberry Finn. And yet, obviously, such a racial philosophy very quickly fell into one of white supremacy. Romantic racialist thinking, George Fredrickson notes, “was one aspect of the retreat from environmentalism and the Enlightenment view of a common human nature” ( Black 125). At this point the minstrel show rears its ungainly head; but precisely because it reveled in the contradictions I have outlined, unmistakably present in the work of Mark

Blackface and Blackness 35

Twain, among others, we must attend to the rather gnarled eff ects of blackface performance in the context of nineteenth-century racial ideologies.

To be sure, the ambiguity easily empties out of this perspective, and its later nineteenth-century instances represent little more than the ritual, reactionary celebration of an ideologically rigidifi ed minstrelsy meant to counter Ameri- can antislavery practice. 34 (In intention at least Huckleberry Finn is something of an “immanent critique” of this tradition.) In the guise of what has come to be called “scientifi c racism”—a set of post-Darwinian explanations for the arrested development of blacks—this period’s anthropology straitjacketed the relative fl uctuations of earlier racial ideologies. Th us legitimized, white histo- rians and memoirists in the nostalgic mood frequently recounted stories of the minstrel show’s origins, tales of famous performers, even formal histories of the representation of blacks on stage, assuming (when they thought about it at all) that minstrelsy’s scurrilous representations of black people were scrupu- lously authentic. “Th eir gibes, their gambols, their songs, their fl ashes of mer- riment,” wrote one such historian, “still linger in our eyes and in our ears; and before many readers scores of quaint fi gures with blackened faces will no doubt dance to half-forgotten tunes all over these pages” (Hutton 144). Th e nostalgia of this view is ultimately for a simpler, pre-emancipation America: “Th at such [distinguished men] should have appeared at a leading theatre, between the acts, in plantation dress and blackened face, shows perhaps better than anything else the respectable position held by the negro minstrel half a century ago” (Hutton 140). By 1915 Brander Matthews of Columbia University was sadly detailing minstrelsy’s decline, which he attributed to the fact that blackface performers were less and less true to life, increasingly “content to be comic without any eff ort to catch the special comicality of the darky” (758). Th is emphasis—deriving just as much as Twain’s from the idea of blackface as a people’s culture—is racist either by default or design, and it has infected its share of modern theater historians. Th e important point about this tendency is not only that it deserves censure but that it, no less than the others, stands for the historical existence of a certain kind of audience response.

It was thus critical that a revisionist corrective, denouncing minstrelsy’s patent inauthenticity, its northern white origins, its self-evidently dominative character, should have come to displace the more complacent views. 35 Th is critique, inaugurated by Frederick Douglass, later sustained treatments of the minstrel stage in novels such as Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Sport of the Gods (1901) and Wallace Th urman’s Th e Blacker the Berry (1929); both fi ctionalize black stage performances derived from the minstrel tradition to represent some version of racial false consciousness—in Dunbar the facile, corrupted world of northern urban Negroes, in Th urman an indulgence by color- conscious blacks of racial caricature. In certain ways, however, this position is least satisfactory as historical and cultural analysis when it works best as anti- racist politics. Th is is not to urge a position that, somehow avoiding politics,

Love and Th eft 36

might get the emphases right for once. On the contrary, the minstrel tradition is still too present for us to take antiracist critiques of it for granted. Rather, we must better historicize the minstrel show, for in fact we remain ignorant of exactly what its antebellum political range happened to be. It strikes me as tautological to catalogue racist stereotypes from a time when slavery existed in fi ft een states. In their indispensable focus on minstrelsy’s oppressive dimen- sion, revisionist accounts leave perfectly intact the cultural dualism—wholly authentic or wholly hegemonic?—that I want to complicate. Outmoded anti- racist strategies of reversal and inversion, of simply turning the polarities of racist discourse around, must give way to a wider recognition of the complex- ities of white subject formation and subjectivity, and of the multiple determi- nations that make race such a complex lived social reality. 36

Among these determinations number primarily social class and the sex/ gender system. One might return briefl y here to Huckleberry Finn. Pap’s noto- rious rant about a “free nigger . . . from Ohio” who, in his wealth, his knowl- edge of languages, and his right to vote, threatens the status of Pap’s own working-class whiteness instances one way in which class overdetermines if not overrules race in my account. 37 Conversely, Twain’s sly construction of this scene so that Pap, covered with mud aft er a drunken night in the gutter, is ac- tually blacker than the hated “mulatter” free man suggests the underlying “racial” equations between black and working-class white men that occasion- ally called forth in the minstrel show interracial recognitions and identifi ca- tions no less than the imperative to disavow them. And the fact that Twain’s fantasy of racial harmony, of Jim and the adolescent Huck, could occur only by excluding conventional manhood altogether reminds us here of the gender dynamic through which the intersections of race and class, in the minstrel show as elsewhere, were lived. When one notes as well that those who “blacked up” and those who witnessed minstrel shows were oft en working-class Irish men, the complex picture of the blackface institution and its audiences is complete. Minstrelsy’s role as a mediator of northern class, racial, and ethnic confl ict—all largely grounded in a problematic of masculinity—has much to do with the equivocal character of blackface representations. Th is confl ict can be seen to underlie the minstrel show’s most politically productive and politi- cally regressive moments. Th at moments of each kind occurred has not yet been adequately accounted for.

Certain nineteenth-century revisionists were, however, aware of this com- plexity. James Monroe Trotter, for example, though cognizant of what he called the “oft en malicious caricaturing” of the race to which he belonged, posed the “fi ne musical achievements” of the black Georgia Minstrels against “severe and somewhat sweeping” denunciations by other critics. 38 Th is, too, at the most virulently racist moment (the late nineteenth century) in the history of black representation. Th e most careful assessment of this kind, however, was also the earliest. As I began with one of Frederick Douglass’s disdainful comments

Blackface and Blackness 37

from the North Star, so I will end with his 1849 article on a short-lived black minstrel troupe, Gavitt’s Original Ethiopian Serenaders. I believe he has the clearest sense of any contemporary as to what was at stake in early minstrelsy— its limitations, possibilities, and ultimate importance—and has therefore guided my own interpretations. Douglass begins:

Partly from a love of music, and partly from curiosity to see persons of color exaggerating the peculiarities of their race, we were induced last evening to hear these Serenaders [in Rochester, New York]. Th e Com- pany is said to be composed entirely of colored people; and it may be so. We observed, however, that they, too had recourse to the burnt cork and lamp black, the better to express their characters, and to produce unifor- mity of complexion. (141)

Conscious or not, there is a doubleness in that word “characters” (inner self? dramatic role?) which begins to capture Douglass’s insight into blackface performance: that “blackness” is a matter of display or theater, as Melville would dramatize in “Benito Cereno” (1855). 39 It is reiterated in his charge that the Gavitts’ singing was “not even a tolerable representation of the character of colored people”; indeed, Douglass signifi es, “their attempts at it showed them to possess a plentiful lack of it” (141). “Blackness,” then, is not innate but pro- duced, a cultural construction. Douglass inverts the racist logic of minstrelsy and locates its actual function of staging racial categories, boundaries, and types even when these possessed little that a black man could recognize as “authentic.” Th at is to say, Douglass also clarifi es the way the blackface conven- tion disguised “blackness,” marking this black troupe’s race fi rst as hearsay (“said to be”), and then as latent possibility (“it may be”). 40 But this disguise did not close down the political play of blackface; in a culture where “blackness” was construct and exhibition, blackface kept it on display and up for grabs, politically speaking. Although Douglass does not extend his argument to white performers, he does concede that the production of “blackness” remains a potential source of political advantage:

We are not sure that our readers will approve of our mention of those persons, so strong must be their dislike of everything that seems to feed the fl ame of American prejudice against colored people; and in this they might be right; but we think otherwise. It is something gained, when the colored man in any form can appear before a white audience; and we think that even this company, with industry, application, and a proper cultivation of their taste, may yet be instrumental in removing the prej- udice against our race. (142)

Douglass defi ned blackface minstrelsy, a few months before the 1850 Com- promise debates, as a site of political struggle for representation, debased and suspect though it may have been. “Blackness” in the minstrel show indeed

Love and Th eft 38

generated a confl ictual intensity, occasionally unsettling the notion to its roots—as the complexities in the foregoing traditions of response suggest. We might have expected nothing less than confl icted messages from such a cul- tural mediator, despite the fact that minstrelsy attempted precisely to mute confl ict. Th e story that follows is one of dissension as much as domination, although we will need to specify its outlines, uncover the codes that clashed.

Writing on minstrelsy has failed to move very much beyond the debate over people’s culture versus cultural domination. But as my genealogy and close examinations of Mark Twain and Frederick Douglass reveal, this dualism, like that of class expression versus social control, may be a fabrication. Already encoded in these antinomies are the political confl icts and cultural contradic- tions early minstrelsy was devised to repress. Modern writing on the minstrel show turns out to have been an unwitting accomplice in this repression. By foregrounding the minstrel show’s position as one new working-class enter- tainment industry in the embattled formation of northeastern American cap- italist culture, a racially loaded form situated in the most politically explosive moment of the nineteenth century, I hope to show the shift ing contours of this racial counterfeit, as well as its currency.

{ 2 }

Love and Th eft “Racial” Production and the

So cial Unconscious of Bl ackface

Motives of race, status, economics and guilt are always clustered here. —Ralph Ellison

Where, literally, did the minstrel show come from? What black cultural forms did it reference, and how were they taken up and eclipsed by minstrel perfor- mances? What social relations were mapped in the blackface mask? One might begin by recognizing that the minstrel show most oft en glossed not white encounters with life on the plantation (minstrel-show mythographers to the contrary) but racial contacts and tensions endemic to the North and the fron- tier. Th e chiefl y working-class orientation of cultural interchange in the North and Southwest was responsible both for installing this new entertainment in its northern class context and for the kinds of racial representation to be found there. Th is regional subtext was ignored, denied, and repressed by its contem- poraries (and has been ever since); national divisions soon became too pressing not to fi nd a plantation referent for minstrelsy’s displays of “blackness.” Fan- tasies about the Old South certainly shaped white reinventions of black culture as a whole. But southern venues always had a troubled relationship to minstrel performance, some cities in the South even banning it as the slavery contro- versy escalated in the 1850s. It was largely the industrializing North that was the minstrel show’s immediate cultural purview, political referent, and context of performance. 1 So it is to the North—“North of slavery,” in Leon Litwack’s memorable phrase—that we must turn our attention.

In doing so we necessarily stress cultural practices and racial aff ect rather than discrete, bodiless texts—an emphasis that will not allow us to study blackface’s production of public “blackness” by juxtaposing slave lore with minstrel lyrics and noting the diff erence. Our subject properly becomes his- torical forms of white racial subjectivity as they were worked out in various arenas of cultural contact. For blackface artists minstrelized racial encounters

Love and Th eft 40

into imitative entertainments that were homologous with northern racial fe eling. Rather than off er an account of exactly what was black about blackface, a kind of balance sheet of authenticity (a task that has in any case been ably attempted by Hans Nathan and Robert Toll, among others), I want to highlight the social rela- tions of “racial” production, the structural and emotional pressures that helped to produce the cultural commodity “blackness.” Of course, to do so will mean developing some sense of the black forms available to white observation, and of the transformations that were worked upon them. We simply need a greater un- derstanding of the confl icts and accommodations that lay behind the transfor- mations, their “social unconscious.” Accordingly, I will look at the social spaces that tended to host racial “interaction rituals,” as Berndt Ostendorf has termed them, and at the blackface artists who were the major expropriators and benefi ciaries of black cultural capital. I take as normative a long, confl icted his- tory of racial exchange that signifi cantly “blackened” American culture as it cre- olized African cultural imports, a history that in one sense makes it diffi cult to talk about expropriation at all. Yet it is also true that in the antebellum years a kind of raw commodifi cation lay behind and in turn resulted from cultural exchange; we are dealing, in many cases, with the cultural commodities of human commodities. Th is commercial context mediated cultural mixing, whatever the latter’s routineness or the intentions of the individuals involved. 2

It is nonetheless crucial to acknowledge the intricacies of the process by which black performative practices were recruited into blackface minstrelsy, a process that is only partly accounted for in the notion of a static and reifi ed “black culture’s” removal into the pocketbooks of white imitators. Black per- formance itself, fi rst of all, was precisely “performative,” a cultural invention, not some precious essence installed in black bodies; and for better or worse it was oft en a product of self-commodifi cation, a way of getting along in a con- stricted world. Black people, that is to say, not only exercised a certain amount of control over such practices but perforce sometimes developed them in tan- dem with white spectators. Moreover, practices taken as black were occasion- ally interracial creations whose commodifi cation on white stages attested only to whites’ greater access to public distribution (and profi t). At the same time, of course, there is no question that the white commodifi cation of black bodies structured all of this activity, or that the cultural forms of the black dispos- sessed in the United States have been appropriated and circulated as stand-ins for a supposedly national folk tradition. 3 We merely ought to be clear about the enormous complexity of this process, in which partly shared, partly black cultural practices were circulated as authentically black, with whites profi ting outright to the extent that they were in fact black, while obstructing the visi- bility of black performers in any case. In minstrelsy these practices were fed into an exchange system of cultural signifi ers that both produced and contin- ually marked the inauthenticity of their “blackness”; their ridicule asserted the diff erence between counterfeit and currency even as they disseminated

Love and Th eft 41

what most audiences believed were black music, dance, and gesture. Th e fi rst appearance in U.S. history of black culture as property was blackface minstrel- sy’s marketing of an internally diff erentiated cultural “blackness.” My subject here is its aff ective sources—an aff air of copies and originals, theft and love.

Minstrelization

Blackface was the most visible part of a process by which black practices were appropriated and regulated in Jacksonian America. I assume less that this “min- strelization” came about as a result of some stark political intention than that its dominative character, already bound up with the kind of familiarity and interest that brought “black” culture to minstrel acts, was also the only way such an in- terest could possibly have been staged. As Cliff ord Geertz has written, cultural forms are seldom devised simply to reinforce social hierarchy in societies whose every act proclaims it (448). Th e minstrel show was, on the one hand, a socially approved context of institutional control; and, on the other, it continually acknowledged and absorbed black culture even while defending white America against it. 4 Just here, then, we are looking for the contradictory motives and conditions of exchange that might have inspired commodifi ed minstrel forms.

Because it was less visible there to whites, black culture in the North had perhaps a lower public profi le than southern slave culture; but it was no less present or persistent. Th e growing importation of Africans into the North in the mid-eighteenth century, writes Ira Berlin, gave new direction to a previously highly creolized African-American culture (“Time” 53). New arrivals provided direct knowledge of West African societies, and, as we shall see, northern blacks adopted a variety of African-derived forms and practices in this period, deci- sively shaping black life. Because of the greater proportion of whites to blacks in the North, blacks were acculturated more quickly and more completely, but it also gave whites more hegemonic self-assurance, which, along with a variety of segregated practices, off ered blacks autonomy to develop their own cultural in- stitutions. Th e fi rst African Free Schools and African Methodist Episcopal churches, for instance, date from around the turn of the nineteenth century. In addition, the very circumstances of the North, including densely populated urban spaces and residences with separate access, helped generate autonomous black association. By the early nineteenth century free blacks and slaves alike gathered in taverns and dance houses, engaged in festivals and parades, and generally constituted an acknowledged (and occasionally threatening) public presence. Shane White has suggested that distinctively “black” linguistic pat- terns, naming practices, hairstyles, and physical demeanor—a world of stylistic diff erence—characterized northern blacks as well as southern ones. 5

Th e chances for white involvement in this culture were routine, if rather variable and occasional. Th e vast quantity of black dialect, habit, and mannerism

Love and Th eft 42

regularly reported in almanacs and newspapers evinces the variety and fr - equency of interracial contact, and no doubt provided a readily imitable out- line of white fantasies about black behavior; its material extension was indeed the massive output of dime minstrel songbooks that buttressed the theatrical popularity of minstrelsy (see Fig. 2 ). Print caricature was probably a necessary but not a suffi cient condition for racial burlesque, for it lacked the crucial pres- ence of the body. Eileen Southern has broadly and succinctly phrased one view of minstrel performers’ theft of black cultural forms:

To obtain materials for their shows, the minstrels visited plantations, then attempted to recreate plantation scenes on the stage. Th ey listened to the songs of the black man as he sang at work in the cotton and sugar cane fi eld, on the steamboats and river docks, and in the tobacco fac- tories. Th e melodies they heard served as bases for minstrel songs, and they adapted the dances they saw to their needs.

The musical instruments originally associated with plantation “frolics” became “Ethiopian instruments”—banjos, tambourines, fiddles and bone castanets. ( Musīc 91–92)

Although this description overstates the performers’ diligence (as I have said, much of their material, and certainly much of its force, came out of northern interracial contexts), it is an advance over those critics who wrongly hew to the line that white minstrels had no investment in black culture, no idea what they were doing. And it captures the physical immediacy of their investment, as well as the diff use array, perhaps the disarray, of spaces open to cultural ex - change. If we substitute northern, mostly working-class places of labor and leisure for cane fi eld and tobacco factory, and more casual and random instances of observation for plantation “frolics,” we come closer to actual circumstance. We might say that minstrel men visited not plantations but racially integrated theaters, taverns, neighborhoods, and waterfronts—and then attempted to recreate plantation scenes. We will see in later chapters how minstrel-show versions of the South mediated northern political confl icts. Here let me briefl y isolate certain activities in postrevolutionary America that made black culture available to whites in a way that permitted its insertion into a burgeoning leisure industry.

Even the purest white “interest” in black cultural practices literalized the fi nancial metaphor: it was always implicitly structured by an economics of slavery. Street scenes such as the white butcher Th omas De Voe witnessed early in the nineteenth century near the lower Manhattan grocery store of Micah Hawkins (author of one of the very fi rst blackface songs, “Backside Albany” [1815]) 6 off er ample evidence:

Th e fi rst introduction in [New York City] of public “negro dancing” no doubt took place at this market. Th e negroes who visited here were

Love and Th eft 43

principally slaves [emancipation came in 1827] from Long Island, who had leave of their masters for certain holidays, among which “Pinkster” was the principal one; . . . then, as they usually had three days holiday, they were ever ready, by their “negro sayings or doings,” to make a few shillings more. So they would be hired by some joking butcher or in- dividual to engage in a jig or break-down, as that was one of their pas- times at home on the barn-fl oor, or in a frolic, and those that could and would dance soon raised a collection; but some of them did more in “turning around and shying off ” from the designated spot than keeping to the regular “shakedown,” which caused them all to be confi ned to a “board,” (or shingle, as they called it,) and not allowed off it; on this they must show their skill; and, being several together in parties, each had his particular “shingle” brought with him as part of his stock in trade. Th is board was usually about fi ve to six feet long, of large width, with its par- ticular spring in it, and to keep it in its place while dancing on it, it was held down by one on each end. Th eir music or time was usually given by one of their party, which was done by beating their hands on the sides of their legs and the noise of the heel. Th e favorite dancing-place was a cleared spot on the east side of the fi sh market in front of Burnel Brown’s Ship Chandlery. (344)

Th e rather umbral distinction between butchers and other “individuals” in this remarkable passage alerts us to the white working-class connection with paid black performance long before the advent of minstrelsy. Rather more inspiring is the resourcefulness with which these slaves invented and commodifi ed black performative practices for their own gain in an already frightfully com- modifi ed setting, momentarily dominating “by the superior powers of grace and invention” a world that attempted to “drain every atom of life and feeling” out of them. 7 But the extensive marketing of “negro sayings or doings”—the services for hire, the raising of collections—is so pressing here as to seem itself a major impetus to blackface acts. While the slaves are certainly playing for some control, it is clear that black culture was frankly on display in the North as well as the South, and that such display adhered to a commodifi ed logic whose roots inevitably lay in slavery and whose outcome was eventually the minstrel show. No amount of evidence as to the aff ection of white performers and spectators for black people and their culture, or the “authenticity” of min- strel representations, or the generalized (as opposed to racially specifi c) char- acter of minstrel burlesque can contravene this fact. Th e passage suggests that turning black forms into “stock in trade” was not merely an unconscious ex- tension of antebellum economics but itself an expression of white interest in black performance; and that interest was indeed a matter of ownership. I will speculate later as to why such rituals were not in this period simply extended to the stage and black performers exploited for white profi t. In 1837, for

figure 2 Minstrel Songbook, 1849 Courtesy of the Butler Library, Columbia University

44

Love and Th eft 45

instance, the New Orleans Picayune urged “scheming” Yankees to engage that city’s most popular black vendor and street musician, Old Corn Meal, prom- ising “a fortune to any man who would start on a professional tour with him” (quoted in Kmen 32); such a move might well have outrun minstrelsy. Instead, complexly commodifi ed blackface acts such as that of J. W. McAndrews made their way to the minstrel stage: McAndrews’s “Watermelon Man” skit, his ra gged costume purchased and his distinctive cry taken from a black water- melon vendor, paid his rent for over forty years (Leavitt 31). Th e ironies attending this best-selling counterfeit sales pitch, which continually gestured back to its originator’s commodities (watermelon, cry, costume), were only more savage than those of most minstrel appropriations.

Th is economy, apparently responsible for the fi rst blackface tunes and dances which began to appear aft er the War of 1812, was played out in some- what subtler ways in black theatrical performance. To the striking conver- gences of this period—the twin births of minstrelsy and Garrison’s Liberator at the beginning of the 1830s—may be added the demise of black theatrical insti- tutions such as New York’s African Grove Th eatre. If the Liberator ’s historical relationship to the minstrel show is in the nature of an open question, the shutting down of the African Grove seems a rather more direct result of the caricatures that went some way toward replacing it. Initially an ice cream plea- sure garden, the African Grove was opened by William Henry Brown in 1821 in response to the uncongenial atmosphere of most theaters to black patrons (not to say black actors), particularly their restriction of blacks to the upper galleries. Organized around talent such as James Hewlett and Ira Aldridge, the enterprise was for a brief time very successful, off ering mostly productions of Shakespeare but other pieces as well. As in white theaters, hornpipes were danced and comic songs sung between the acts of Othello and Richard III. Black men and women immediately crowded the shows, as did whites (many of them hecklers), who were confi ned to a separate section—because, a hand- bill said, “whites do not know how to conduct themselves at entertainments for ladies and gentlemen of color” (quoted in Ottley and Weatherby 73).

Th is success apparently inspired a venture that reveals the limits—and dangers— of black performance in this period. Gunning for larger crowds and profi ts, and “determined to rival the great Park Th eatre,” the managers of the African Grove hired out the hotel next to the Park for performances of Richard III. Th e National Advocate reported:

Th e audiences were generally of a riotous character, and amused them- selves by throwing crackers on the stage, and cracking their jokes with the actors, until danger from fi re and civil discord rendered it necessary to break up the establishment. Th e ebony-colored wags were notifi ed by the police that they must announce their last performance, but they, de- fying the public authority, went on and acted nightly. It was at length

Love and Th eft 46

considered necessary to interpose the arm of authority, and on Monday evening a dozen watchmen made part of the audience . . . . Finally they plead so hard in blank verse, and promised never to act Shakespeare again, that the Police Magistrates released them at a very late hour. (quoted in Marshall and Stock 35–36)

Th is audience behavior, as we shall see, was indistinguishable from that in white theaters; but the spectacle of revolt loomed large. Neither was the out- come of this enterprise remarkable: according to an 1821 playbill, the African Grove was “the third attempt of this kind in the City, by persons of Colour” (Odell 3:35). Brown’s parting blow appears to have been an 1823 production of “the Drama of King Shotaway, Founded on facts taken from the Insurrec- tion of the Caravs in the Island of St. Vincent, Written from experience by Mr. Brown” (Odell 3:71). Th e insurrection was put down. At least one more attempt in the 1820s to establish an African-American theater followed; but owing in no small part to the market for minstrelsy—the determination that blacks should profi t only from street, not theatrical, performance—there would for some time be no more. 8

Th e minstrel show as bulwark against insurrection: if it was not consciously planned, it nevertheless had that eff ect on the cultivation of public black arts, though with the irony that it became, over the course of two decades, a rather threatening black counterfeit in its own right. Th e intervention of blackface into the brief early run of black theater may be gathered from the way that whites, incurring a familiar racial debt, were quick to latch onto it. Chief among these was the British actor Charles Mathews, a kind of Rameau’s nephew variety star whose American caricatures included black preachers and other such types—the fi rst popular antecedents of blackface acts. Ma - thews is of interest to us not only for this reason, and for the evidence he of- fers of the northern black cultural display available to the attentive observer, but also for his trip to the African Grove Th eatre, where he allegedly got the idea for one of his foremost caricatures, a lampoon of the black Shakespear- ean Ira Aldridge. Mathews had happily been picking up scraps of song and dialect from several black sources, usually from the street; on one occasion he allegedly saw a black man driving a stagecoach with the reins around his neck, urging the horses on with his fi ddle. But he longed to dig deeper, and complained that his class exemption from spaces of interracial contact ham- pered the eff ort: “Th e stage-driver says, ‘Yes, sir,’ and ‘no, sir,’ to the ostler, but to a question from a person who has a clean neckcloth, he instantly draws up, and, in the most repulsive manner, answers, ‘No,’ ‘ay,’ or ‘very well.’” Neverthe- less, Mathews exulted in his prospects: “I shall be rich in black fun . . . . It is a pity that I dare not touch upon a preacher. I know its danger, but perhaps the absurdity might give a colour to it—a black Methodist!” (Anne Mathews 1:237, 235, 239). He was answered with a trip to a black church, from which he culled

Love and Th eft 47

the kind of “stump speech” that would not grace the minstrel stage for an- other twenty years. 9

But an African Grove Hamlet yielded more enduring results. One account off ers this record of the occasion, though it is no doubt closer to the skit Mathews manufactured:

“To be or not to be, dat is him question, whether him nobler in de mind to suff er or lift up him arms against a sea of hubble bubble and by opos- sum (oppose ’em) end ’em.” At the word Opossum, the whole audience burst forth into one general cry of “Opossum, Opossum, Opossum.” On enquiring into the cause of this, Mr. Mathews was informed that “Opos- sum Up a Gum Tree” was the national air, or sort of “God Save the King” of the Negroes .  .  . . Th e cries of “Opossum, opossum” increasing, the sable tragedian [Aldridge] comes forward, and addressing the audience, informs them that he will sing their favourite melody. (quoted in Mar- shall and Stock 40)

Mathews continued to perform the skit until his death in 1835. He did not say so, but the public assumed that it was a parody of Aldridge, an assumption Mathews did nothing to correct, performing it on occasion in the very theater in which Aldridge happened to be appearing. Aldridge coolly disavowed the imitation: “Th e truth . . . is that I never attempted the character of Hamlet in my life, and I need not say that the whole of the ludicrous scene so well and so humorously described by Mr. Mathews never occurred at all” (quoted in Marshall and Stock 43–44). Yet what is astonishing about this skirmish is that Aldridge, besieged by whites with requests for the song Mathews had popularized, soon incorporated “Opossum Up a Gum Tree” into his own performances, making himself, in a morbid play on Sartre, of what he had been made. We are thus confronted with the perverse spectacle of one of Mathews’s most profi table caricatures becoming one of Aldridge’s most profi table performances. Its infl uence is a foretaste of the way the minstrelization of black practices helped to obscure them. 10

Th is process extended to more public kinds of exchanges. For instance, black festivals and pageantry in northern cities were commonly visible even to unad- venturous whites. Th e performative zeal of celebrations such as Pinkster, Elec- tion Day, and John Canoe was observed with interest and oft en recorded (constituting in itself a minor genre of “black” cultural circulation). Pinkster— derived from the Dutch name for Pentecost—was, from around 1750, increas ingly a black celebration over several days in early June, during which community restrictions were eased and revelry of all kinds took place. James Fenimore Cooper seems to have been intrigued by Pinkster, and in Satanstoe (1845) evokes its atmosphere:

Nine-tenths of the blacks of [New York City] . . . were collected in thou- sands in those fi elds, beating banjoes, singing African songs, drinking,

Love and Th eft 48

and worst of all, laughing in a way that seemed to set their very hearts rattling within their ribs. Every thing wore the aspect of good-humor, though it was good-humor in its broadest and coarsest forms. Every sort of common game was in requisition, while drinking was far from being neglected. Still, not a man was drunk. (60)

As this seesawing account suggests, white interest in such bodily effl orescence was not untinged with doubt. One critic said of a Pinkster dance in Albany that it “partook so largely of savage license that it gradually came to be shunned by respectable whites” (quoted in Emery 143). Sometime between 1811 and 1813, as if on schedule with Micah Hawkins’s “Backside Albany,” the Albany Common Council outlawed the gaming and drinking common to Pinkster Day, pretty much consigning it to history.

For its part, Election Day (also dating from about 1750) positively traduced the norms of many communities. On this day blacks chose their own govern- ing offi cials, who had real power among themselves and, for the space of the celebration at least, symbolic power over whites. Part appropriation of similar white ceremonies, part African survival, this political ritual openly burlesqued the dominant culture. Certain of the festivities of Election Day seem prescient inversions or perhaps even counterparodies of blackface buff oonery, especially of the sort I have observed in white working-class parades and revelries. Amid the usual celebratory excess, culminating in the election of black kings, gover- nors, and judges, blacks enacted rituals of reversal in which they lampooned their masters, wore their masters’ clothes, and mounted their masters’ horses. Some of these events must have seemed quite unnerving; an 1853 description of a Hartford Election Day—safely set in the seventeenth century but bor- rowing its force from contemporary example—depicted “a troop of blacks, sometimes an hundred in number, marching sometimes two and two on foot, sometimes mounted in true military style and dress on horseback .  .  . with drums beating, colors fl ying, and fi fes, fi ddles, clarionets, and every ‘sonorous metal’ that could be found, ‘uttering martial sound’” (Stuart 49). As with Pink- ster, however, whites indulged and even participated in such events. For this reason Ira Berlin has suggested that the celebrations were perceived as less dangerous than their southern counterparts, which were in fact outlawed (“Time” 54). Yet if the widespread negative reactions to Election Day are any indication, the practice unsettled even as it fascinated whites. At the very least, these events set off a train of racial burlesque and counterburlesque that surely helped inspire blackface miming, a less effi cient control of independent black practices than proscription, perhaps, but more lucrative and engaging. 11

Most of the antagonism and negotiation that occurred here, however, was based on increasingly routinized white familiarity with black culture. In nor- thern cities, or on the levees of northern and southwestern frontier towns, working-class whites and blacks in many instances shared a common culture

Love and Th eft 49

of jokes, games, and dances. Th e Five Points section on the Lower East Side of Manhattan was one such milieu of mixed-race enthusiasms; river ports in the West, where, for example, black and white boatmen both knew “Opossum Up a Gum Tree,” were another (Woodson 10; Nathan 48). Long before emancipa- tion, writes Eric Foner, lower-class subcultures in northeastern cities saw extensive elbow-rubbing among apprentices, servants, slaves, journeymen, sailors, and laborers; bullbaiting and footracing, masques and street fi ghting were indulged in by black and white together. Th e Philadelphia grand jury, at a loss for language to describe the mixed-up goings-on in that city, oft en com- plained that “many disorderly persons” were wont to gather at the courthouse, “and great numbers of negroes and others sit there with milk pails, and other things, late at night, and many disorders are there committed” (Foner, Paine 48–50). Th is kind of activity was especially common in frontier towns—not coincidentally the most important early centers of blackface innovation. 12 Whether in Louisville, Pittsburgh, or Cincinnati, the fi rst performances of blackface’s “originator” T. D. Rice, the musical education of minstrel-show in- novator Dan Emmett, and the fi rst attempts at composition by Stephen Foster all took place in these settings. Th e minstrel show is one instance in American commercial culture of an outland form exported to the northeastern city, rather than vice versa; and its cultural logic—its “mulatto” character, its imita- tive thrust—owes much to the interracial embrace of the milieu from which it originally sprang. 13

Lafcadio Hearn captures something of this culture in his postwar transcrip- tions of black Cincinnati stevedores’ songs, which include a variation of the blackface verse I have already quoted:

Jay-bird sittin’ on a swinging limb, Winked at me an’ I winked at him. Up with a rock an’ struck him on the shin, G—d d—n yer soul, don’t wink again.

(224)

Perhaps these black workers appropriated the minstrel verse; the admitted plausibility of this direction of cultural exchange has sustained a tradition of racist commentary bent on proving black culture’s ultimate derivation from white. 14 Or perhaps the verse was black to begin with and remained so even aft er its widespread dissemination in blackface acts. Either alternative, or indeed the possibility that such songs were interracial inventions, makes the point about the racial contact common to frontier cultures. So does the fact that Cincinnati Negro singers could, as Hearn notes, “mimic the Irish accent to a degree of perfection which an American, Englishman or German could not hope to acquire” (226). Or that, according to a scornful circus manager, Dan Emmett learned to play the black style of banjo from a white man named Ferguson, “a very ignorant person, and ‘nigger all over’ except in color” (quoted

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in Nathan 110). As Robert Cantwell writes, wherever “social and economic marginality had created conditions favorable to cultural interpenetration . . . the racial barriers so familiar to us, which closed so suddenly and so resound- ingly aft er Emancipation, had, by the middle of the nineteenth century, begun to dissolve in the American heartland” (259).

Victor Turner has argued that cultural performance originates in “social drama” such as I have outlined and continues to draw force and meaning from it, constituting, in essence, “performances about performances” ( Anthropology 107). Th is notion is particularly helpful in thinking about a context in which the original dramas themselves held such a complicated mix of racial impulses, interracial imitations, and economic facts. Th e development of blackface miming out of primarily working-class rituals of racial interaction suggests that blackface performance reproduced or instantiated a structured relation- ship between the races—racial diff erence itself as much as black cultural forms. Th is relationship included its share of interest and fascination, but it was built on an antebellum racial economy, not to mention a nimbus of racist ideology, as the minstrel show, true to the character of the culture industry, proceeded to make quite plain. Its circulation of black cultural practices—more accu- rately the racially mixed forms that both did and did not read as “black”— operated through burlesque or humiliation, that is, the metaphorical restriction of them to the white man’s shingle. For this reason Susan Willis has written of the blackface mask as precisely a fi guration of the commodity, a sort of trade- mark assigned to the “black” images white people paid to see (189). In sum, the cultural logic of blackface preserved that of the spaces I have surveyed, opening to view the culture of the dispossessed while simultaneously refusing the social legitimacy of its members, a truly American combination of acknowledgment and expropriation.

Th e White Negro

“Lucy Long” was sung by a white negro as a male female danced. — new york tribune (1853)

Minstrelization did not give rise in any immediate way to developed forms of racial mimicry. It was left to a small class of eccentric performers, galvanized by cultural interchange, to work up symbolic ideological articulations that, fol- lowing Pierre Bourdieu, we should see as “doubly determined” (“Symbolic” 81)— owing not only to the class milieu that encouraged cultural exchange but also to the specifi c interests of the men who devised blackface caricatures. While I am ultimately interested in a white working-class structure of feeling, it will not do to dismiss the particular concerns of minstrel performers themselves. For though these artists called on common ways of feeling, thinking, and

Love and Th eft 51

living their whiteness, they also infl ected it with a specifi c set of attitudes and preoccupations before giving their racial fantasies back to the class arena from which they had been drawn. Th e reader will have noted that much of the cul- tural negotiation I have outlined depended on encounters between a white man and a black man: master and slave, white minstrel and black vendor, Charles Mathews and Ira Aldridge. A certain dynamic of masculinity or, con- versely, “unmanning” seems to have been at work here, making the theft of black forms more urgent, if not indeed more pregnant. Codes of black and white manhood gave the exchange its force, a fact enlarged upon in the min- strel show itself. A look at white minstrel performers reveals that a gendered logic of exchange, a kind of commerce between men, facilitated the cultural expropriation central to blackface minstrelsy. 15

One might fi rst remark, however, that the men who began to “black up” in the years around 1830 were in some cases close to the center of Jacksonian po- litical power. Th us, the temptation has been to read the minstrel show as a fairly pat instance of cultural manipulation in which the prejudices of benighted audiences are secured from above by a fully administered form of leisure. Th ere is, to be sure, a “Frankfurt School” case to be made here, and Alexander Saxton has made it most persuasively. 16 Saxton surveys the social origins of certain major minstrel fi gures, among them T. D. Rice, Dan Emmett, E. P. Christy, and Stephen Foster. Many of the major innovators were northern- ers of urban origin (none from New England) who were raised in families with intimations of upward mobility. All of them rejected the Protestant ethic and escaped into the latitudes of the entertainment world. In the course of such escape they came into contact with the music and dance of slaves and free blacks, and fi rst tasted theatrical success in blackface performances. While these “professionals” were sometimes class mutineers, passing up opportu- nities at a clerkship or better to immerse themselves in the underground world of blackface theater (“initiated into the mysteries of cork,” as one contempora- neous theater historian put it), 17 they nevertheless shared with their families certain political ties to the elite of the Democratic party, the party of Andrew Jackson, antimonopoly, expansionism—and white supremacy. Henry Wood of Christy and Wood’s Minstrels was the brother of Fernando Wood, southern- sympathizing mayor of New York; another brother served three terms as a Democratic congressman from Buff alo and one term as a state senator. Ste- phen Foster belonged to a family of ardent Democrats related by marriage to President James Buchanan’s brother, and Foster himself helped organize a local Buchanan for President club. On the basis of such evidence, Saxton and other writers have rather hastily denied the political contradictions self-evident in minstrelsy, by which of course I mean more than the many examples of Whig (specifi cally pro-Henry Clay) songwriting, although these exist. 18 And while connections tell only a partial story, there were also other connections: the black nationalist editor, organizer, and novelist Martin Delany, a physician and

Love and Th eft 52

the fi rst black to attend Harvard, began his medical studies in the 1830s under Dr. Andrew McDowell, Stephen Foster’s future father-in-law (Austin 68).

Moreover, as I have begun to suggest, evidence from performers themselves points to a more complex dynamic in which such dominative tendencies coex- isted with or indeed depended on a self-conscious attraction to the black men it was the job of these performers to mimic. Billy Whitlock, a banjo player with Dan Emmett’s Virginia Minstrels, on his fi rst tour of the South would, as the New York Clipper put it, “quietly steal off to some negro hut to hear the darkeys sing and see them dance, taking with him a jug of whiskey to make them all the merrier” (April 13, 1878). More revealingly, the performer Ben Cotton claimed that he would sit with and study blacks on Mississippi riverboats: “I used to sit with them in front of their cabins, and we would start the banjo twanging, and their voices would ring out in the quiet night air in their weird melodies. Th ey did not quite understand me. I was the fi rst white man they had seen who sang as they did; but we were brothers for the time being and were perfectly happy” (“Interview”). Self-serving as this account is, it indicates that a major strain of American bohemia has its origins in blackface per- formers and enthusiasts. So much the worse for bohemia, perhaps; but in ad- dition to the minor disasters bohemia has perpetrated, from Walt Whitman to Carl Van Vechten to Jack Kerouac, there is in its activities an implicit tribute to, or at the very least a self-marginalizing mimicry of, black culture’s male repre- sentatives. To say this hardly addresses the social results of such activities, which may be more or less harmful than the exoticism that generated them. But with antebellum blackface performers a set of racial attitudes and cultural styles that in America go by the name of bohemianism fi rst emerged, and there was a utopian or emancipatory moment in their oft en clumsy courtship of black men. I am not interested in romanticizing these performers. While I believe they were to some extent drawn to “blackness,” this fact should also interrogate the racial logic usually hidden in our romantic notions of the bohemian, the Beat, the hipster. We ought to recognize, in other words, the degree to which blackface stars inaugurated an American tradition of class abdication through gendered cross-racial immersion which persists, in histor- ically diff erentiated ways, to our own day.

Histories of American bohemia, among them Albert Parry’s engrossing Garrets and Pretenders (1933), have always disregarded this racial and sexual narrative. Th ough occasionally sensitive to the declassing that underlies bohe- mia’s “spirit” of revolt, they follow Henri Murger’s Scènes de la vie de bohème (1851) in emphasizing, as Parry puts it, the literary tradition of “vitriolic criti- cism with a frankly personal tinge and twist, of making taverns into rendez- vous of arts, and of dying drunk and delirious in a gutter, an attic, and the backroom of a saloon” (7). Minstrel performers and writers not infrequently lived up to such a script, the most spectacular being E. P. Christy, who in a fi t of madness threw himself from a high window in 1862. But this defi nition

Love and Th eft 53

amounts to a formalism of dissipation. T. J. Clark, for example, has pinpointed the class content of midcentury French bohemia:

Th e Bohemian caricatured the claims of bourgeois society. He took the slogans at face-value; if the city was a playground he would play; if indi- vidual freedom was sacrosanct then he would celebrate the cult twenty- four hours a day; laissez-faire meant what it said. Th e Bohemian was the dandy stood on his head: where the dandy was the bourgeois playing at being an aristocrat (hence his pathos), the Bohemian was the bourgeois playing at being a bourgeois . . . . ( Image 34)

Minstrel performers gave this pattern an American spin. Most of them were minor, apolitical theatrical men of the northern artisanate who pursued a newly available bourgeois dream of freedom and play by paradoxically coding themselves as “black.” Marginalized by temperament, by habit (oft en alco- holism), by ethnicity, even by sexual orientation, these artists immersed them- selves in “blackness” to indulge their felt sense of diff erence. It was an avenue that allowed them certain underground privileges (and accrued many de- merits) which a more legitimate course would not have provided. Indeed, if for men sexuality is where freedom and play meet, “blackness” was for antebellum bohemians its virtual condition—that fascinating imaginary space of fun and license outside (but structured by) Victorian bourgeois norms. 19

Coming from areas of much cultural commerce, the men who became blackface minstrels had many opportunities to engage the black practices to which they were drawn. According to legend—the closest we are going to get to truth in the matter—T. D. Rice used an old black stableman’s song and dance in his fi rst “Jim Crow” act. Dan Emmett had left his Mount Vernon, Ohio, home by the age of eighteen (in 1834) and joined the military, where he learned to play the infantry drum from a man nicknamed “Juba”—a black name, if not a black man, perhaps earned for the style of drum he played. Appearing as a banjo player in various circuses, Emmett very soon teamed up with the dancer Frank Brower, who had learned his dances directly from black men (Nathan 107, 110). Stephen Foster no doubt had contact with black wharf workers and boatmen in his hometown of Pittsburgh, but according to his brother, he expe- rienced black church singing fi rsthand through a family servant, Olivia Pise, “member of a church of shouting colored people.” 20 Ralph Keeler, who ran away from his Buff alo home at the age of eleven, wrote that as a dancer with Johnny Booker’s minstrels in the 1850s he “wandered all over the Western country” (77), keeping continual company with that troupe’s black baggage handler, Ephraim. E. P. Christy reportedly drew material in the late 1830s from One-Legged Harrison, a black church singer in Buff alo; Christy said the two had oft en traded “down home talk” (Toll 46). Within the institution of minstrelsy itself, as we will see, the renowned black dancer Juba (William Henry Lane) provided a link between the cultures, fi guring centrally in many

Love and Th eft 54

challenge dance contests between black and white dancers. Th e tableau reiter- ated in many of these scenes—a white man and a black man becoming, as Ben Cotton put it, “brothers for the time being”—is the bohemian encounter that interests me here. It shows up oft en enough to be a defi ning interest of these “white Negroes,” and we might pause over its enabling role in cultural theft .

What appears in fact to have been appropriated were certain kinds of mas- culinity. To put on the cultural forms of “blackness” was to engage in a complex aff air of manly mimicry. Examples of this dynamic since the heyday of min- strelsy are ready enough to hand—Elvis, Mailer—but in the early nineteenth century it had yet to be given an available public form. To wear or even enjoy blackface was literally, for a time, to become black, to inherit the cool, virility, humility, abandon, or gaité de coeur that were the prime components of white ideologies of black manhood. 21 Rice, said his friend F. C. Wemyss, in the event of an empty house fell into a kind of black homespun when negotiating with theater managers, as if indeed into a black-white dyad that reproduced his own felicitous exchanges with black men: “Lookye here, my master, this has been a bad job—I don’t think you ought to suff er to this tune; live and let live is a good motto—hand over—, and I will give you a receipt in full, and wish you better luck another time” ( Th e Life 179). How interesting that Rice should assume this humbled sense of masculinity precisely at the guilty moment of receiving pay- ment for expropriated goods, in the process authenticating his claim on the material. 22 And how fi tting, too, that this disturbing moment of conventional masculinity in the public sphere—the hard bargain, the deal—could, with a ventriloquial shift , be evaded or at least better managed.

It is worth remarking the way minstrelsy marketed racialized images of masculinity if only because they have become so familiar, indeed ritualized. In North Toward Home (1967), white Mississippian Willie Morris remembers “a stage, when we were about thirteen, in which we ‘went Negro.’ We tried to broaden our accents to sound like Negroes, as if there were not enough si milarity already. We consciously walked like young Negroes, mocking their swinging gait, moving our arms the way they did, cracking our knuckles and whistling between our teeth” (81). I would maintain that this dynamic, persist- ing into adulthood, is so much a part of most American white men’s equip- ment for living that they remain entirely unaware of their participation in it. Th e special achievement of minstrel performers was to have intuited and for- malized the white male fascination with the turn to black, which Leslie Fiedler describes this way: “Born theoretically white, we are permitted to pass our childhood as imaginary Indians, our adolescence as imaginary Negroes, and only then are expected to settle down to being what we really are: white once more” ( Waiting 134). Th ese common white associations of black maleness with the onset of pubescent sexuality indicate that the assumption of dominant codes of masculinity in the United States was (and still is) partly negotiated through an imaginary black interlocutor. If this suggests that minstrelsy’s

Love and Th eft 55

popularity depended in part on the momentary return of its partisans to a state of arrested adolescence—largely the condition to which dominant codes of masculinity aspire—one must also conclude that white male fantasies of black men undergird the subject positions white men grow up to occupy. Th is dynamic is, further, one whose results are far from given; its appropriations of “black” masculinity may or may not have racist results. But in thus mediating white men’s relations with other white men, minstrel acts certainly made cur- rency out of the black man himself, that obscure object of exchangeable desire. Th e stock in trade of the exchange so central to minstrelsy, that is to say, was black culture in the guise of an attractive masculinity. 23

In contrast to such homosocial relationships, as Eve Sedgwick has termed them 24 —exchanges that buttressed the social relations of patriarchy, however variable their racial results—there is evidence that performers and audiences also found in blackface something closer to a homoerotic charge. Sedgwick has argued that nineteenth-century bohemia was a space not of infi nite het- erosexual appetite but of ambiguous sexual defi nition, through which young bourgeois men passed on their way to the “repressive, self-ignorant, and ap- parently consolidated status of the mature bourgeois paterfamilias” (“Beast” 251; emphasis in original). Something of this situation applied in the case of minstrel men, certain of whose female impersonations appear, in the context of rough-and-tumble Jacksonian manliness, to have grown out of a sense of sexual ambiguity. Th e actress Olive Logan wrote that “some of the men who undertake this [“wench”] business are marvellously well fi tted by nature for it, having well-defi ned soprano voices, plump shoulders, beardless faces, and tiny hands and feet. Many dress most elegantly as women” (698). Although she is referring here to postwar female impersonation—which as an American show business tradition may have gotten its start in minstrelsy—there is no reason to believe that the wide renown of antebellum “wenches” (George Christy, Barney Williams) owed any less to their aptitude for or predisposition to such roles. And while it is inaccurate simply to read off homosexuality from eff em- inacy or indeed transvestism, same-sex desire does seem to have been regis- tered by these performers (see chapter 6 ). “Heaps of boys in my locality don’t believe yet it’s a man in spite of my saying it was,” said a Rochester critic of Francis Leon, the most famous postwar female impersonator. Leon was seduc- tive enough, this writer remarked, “to make a fool of a man if he wasn’t sure.” 25

Other performers evinced homosexual attractions more obliquely. “A minstrel show came to town and I thought of nothing else for weeks,” said Ben Cotton (“Interview”)—this from the man who recalled the broth- erhood of black and white singers. George Th atcher, a well-known per- former later in the century, said of his fi rst encounter with blackface performance in Baltimore: “I found myself dreaming of minstrels; I would awake with an imaginary tambourine in my hand, and rub my face with my hands to see if I was blacked up . . . . Th e dream of my life was to see or speak

Love and Th eft 56

to a performer” (“Only”). We might speculate a little as to the referent of the imaginary tambourine; the fantasy of racial conversion enacted in blackface seems to gesture at least toward sexual envy of black men (tambourine as penis), if not desire for them (tambourine as anus). Th e fantasy may indeed direct us to a process I will explore later, in which homosexual desire is defl ected by identifying with potent male heterosexuality. Perhaps the fan- tasy indicates only the usefulness of blackface in mediating white men’s desire for other white men. In any case, though it overlapped with appropri- ations of the sexualized mantle of black masculinity, this was a “feminizing” outcome of cultural exchange. Of course it did nothing to redirect myths of black masculinity, not to mention white men’s attitudes toward women; and it only confi rmed black men’s status as bearers of black culture or objects of exchange. But it brings to the surface a more submerged motive for racial intercourse, and it was probably one aspect of most white men’s enjoyment of black caricature.

Norman Mailer’s essay “Th e White Negro” (1957), a text whose mythologies are as telling as its analysis, is of course the twentieth-century reinvention of these homosocial and homosexual fascinations. Mailer codifi es the renegade ethic of male sexuality, conceived out of and projected onto black men—and always “compromised” by white men’s evident attraction to them—which con- stituted the more than metaphorical racial romance of the minstrel show. Early minstrel performers would not have been able to articulate it, but Mailer’s dream of the black male may stand as a fairly close description of their own fascination:

Knowing in the cells of his existence that life was war, nothing but war, the Negro (all exceptions admitted) could rarely aff ord the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization, and so he kept for his survival the art of the primitive, he lived in the enormous present, he subsisted for his Satur- day night kicks, relinquishing the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body, and in his music he gave voice to the character and quality of his existence, to his rage and the infi nite vari- ations of joy, lust, languor, growl, cramp, pinch, scream and despair of his orgasm. (314)

Mailer and other white Negroes down the years inherited a structure of feeling that no doubt preexisted but was crystallized in the responses of the fi rst min- strel performers to the allure of black men. Underwritten by various kinds of public cultural interaction, minstrel men appropriated styles of racialized masculinity as much as any particular cultural product, a gendered obsession easily converted into profi table minstrel-show counterfeits. Its modern reso- nance is articulated in white guitarist Scotty Moore’s remark to Elvis Presley at one of the recording sessions in which Elvis fi rst found his voice: “Damn, nigger!” 26

Love and Th eft 57

Beginnings

Contrary to expectation, perhaps, the production of the minstrel show out of gendered commodity exchanges, or what I have called its social unconscious, tended oft en to disrupt nineteenth-century perceptions of blackface. Most commentators believed minstrelsy to have derived at least in part from slave culture, and found affi nities between the two that eff ectively displaced the diff erences. Given this perception of origins, anxieties arose about the precise nature of the cultural relationships encoded in minstrelsy, a problem that was fl eeting and murky but unmistakably present to most of those who wrote about the minstrel show. “How much of the wonderful success and popularity of the negro minstrel is due to the minstrel, how much to the negro melody he introduced, and how much to the characteristic bones, banjo, and tambou- rine upon which he accompanied himself, is an open question,” wrote the theater historian Laurence Hutton, rather typically (144). 27 It was in the ob- sessive accounts of minstrelsy’s origins that these anxieties were most extreme. In what follows I hope to convey something of the beginnings of blackface, not by means of yet another mystifi ed account of them, but by looking at how even offh and contemporaneous narratives of the minstrel show’s origins attempted to legitimate or resolve pressing ideological questions raised by their subject. For all positions on the origins and makeup of blackface minstrelsy implicitly or explicitly rely on a theory of the racial politics of American culture. 28

In these tales of minstrelsy’s “ancestry,” the moment of “racial” exchange between white and black men returns with a vengeance. We should under- stand this fi xation as the desire to hold the object of study in the moment of its emergence, as if to uncover the pure thing (unadulterated by later, superfl uous changes or events) were fi nally to grasp its essence. Th e great nineteenth- century narratives of origin all rely on this kind of depth model, whether Marx’s work on capitalism, Engels’s account of the industrial city, James Feni- more Cooper’s and Frederick Jackson Turner’s narratives of the frontier, or Nietzsche’s books on morals and tragedy. Properly speaking, writes Edward Said in Beginnings, what such narratives pursue are principles of diff erence or diff erentiation rather than essences, which make possible or inaugurate the “knowledge” they intend (51). Th e slightly ridiculous return of such principles of diff erentiation in tales of the origins of minstrelsy nevertheless highlights the kind of project taking place there: narratives of cultural acknowledgment by one race of another, the development of a discourse on cultural “blackness,” accounts of a relatively trivial cultural form that fi nd themselves worrying the minstrel show’s racial economy. Th ey reveal how white performers and audi- ences conceived of what they were doing in minstrelsy, and the extent to which ventriloquized cultural forms confronted them with a rather more troubling prospect than has been recognized.

Love and Th eft 58

Th e moment that interests me in these narratives is the one in which black sounds fi ll the air and fascinated white men understand for the fi rst time that there are fame and money to be made. We have already seen an account of Rice’s fi rst performance, but the same Atlantic Monthly writer fi xes this earlier moment as well:

As [Rice] sauntered along one of the main thoroughfares of Cincinnati, as has been written, his attention was suddenly arrested by a voice ring- ing clear and full above the noises of the street, and giving utterance, in an unmistakable dialect, to the refrain of a song to this eff ect:—“Turn about an’ wheel about an’ do jis so,/An’ ebery time I turn about I jump Jim Crow.” Struck by the peculiarities of the performance, so unique in style, matter, and “character” of delivery, the player listened on. Were not these elements—was the suggestion of the instant—which might admit of higher than mere street or stable-yard development? As a national or “race” illustration, behind the footlights, might not “Jim Crow” and a black face tickle the fancy of pit and circle, as well as the “Sprig of Shilla- lah” and a red nose? Out of the suggestion leaped the determination; and so it chanced that the casual hearing of a song trolled by a negro stage- driver, lolling lazily on the box of his vehicle, gave origin to a school of music destined to excel in popularity all others. (Nevin 608–9)

Rice is credited here with the higher development or logical conclusion of the culture of street and stable yard. Minstrelsy is claimed as the completion of black culture, its professional emergence—“like the music of the Bermoothes [coming alive under] the magic wand of Prospero,” as another account has it. 29 For all the belief in the minstrel show as authentic “national illustration,” then, there is also in this account a submerged melting-pot version of American culture avant la lettre, of cultural intercourse almost unconsciously acknowl- edged, and hastily forgotten. Th ese narratives, in other words, are riveted by the moment of cultural expropriation, and we should look to them, as Pierre Macherey’s work suggests, as much for what they do not say as for what they do—for the way they construct, and then sometimes blur, racial boundaries. 30

Th e cultural mixing in these narratives, however, usually takes place, as it were, en l’air; there is rarely any actual meeting between racial representatives (unlike the exceptional, harrowing, and probably fanciful account of Rice and Cuff in chapter 1 ). When there is such a meeting, issues of ownership, cultural capital, and economics arise (as in the Rice and Cuff account). Th ese are the two narrative paradigms of minstrelsy’s origins: one in which mixing takes place by an elision of expropriation, through absorption (in both senses); the other in which it takes place by a transfer of ownership, through theft (or oc- casionally payment). In the accounts I have come across the story is nearly always told one way or the other—obvious attempts to master the relationships I have just sketched. Both paradigms, it is safe to say, share an anxiety over the

Love and Th eft 59

fact of cultural “borrowing.” And both, I suggest, have as their purpose the resolution of some intractable social contradiction or problem that the issue of expropriation represents. Th at of the fi rst is miscegenation; that of the second slavery itself. If, as Joseph Litvak has suggested, “anxiety itself has a narrative (i.e., implicitly history-making) structure,” both anticipating and deferring the “deconstructive cancellation of its sustaining techniques” (127), these narra- tives of love and theft are manipulations of historical anxiety meant to over- come the threatening implications of their primary concerns. 31

It should hardly seem strange that miscegenation is suggested (if in oblique and displaced form) in accounts of white men’s fascination with and attraction to black men and their culture, for these are accounts in which the cultures merge. Th e logic of such accounts is that fascination may be permitted so long as actual contact is avoided; that is the way the passage just quoted works. Th e white man is “arrested” and “struck” by a voice only. At the end, when we do fi nally see the black man “lolling lazily on the box of his vehicle” (by what means? through whose eyes? where was he before?), this suggestive appear- ance indicates the reason for his absence throughout: black male sexuality is one component of his arresting voice. In accounts like this we read a relatively transparent white male attraction to and repulsion from the black penis, for which the preoccupation with miscegenation serves as a kind of shorthand. Th ese two concerns—a jealous guarding of the prized white female body and a fascination with black male sexual potency that either precedes or follows it—amount in any case to the same thing: the twitchy “love” of this chapter’s title. Th e discussion by James Kennard, Jr. (in an 1845 Knickerbocker ) of the racial mixing attendant upon minstrelsy (he is careful to say that it happens “by proxy,” i.e., in blackface performance) clarifi es the nature of the threat. A brief account of the origins of T. D. Rice’s “imitative powers” is given, and then whimsy turns to distressed irony:

From the nobility and gentry, down to the lowest chimney-sweep in Great Britain, and from the member of Congress, down to the youngest apprentice or school-boy in America, it was all: “Turn about and wheel about, and do just so,/And every time I turn about I jump Jim Crow.”

Even the fair sex did not escape the contagion: the tunes were set to music for the piano-forte, and nearly every young lady in the Union, and the United Kingdom, played and sang, if she did not jump, “Jim Crow.” . . . [Negroes themselves] were not permitted to appear in the theatres, and the houses of the fashionable, but their songs are in the mouths and ears of all . . . . (332–33)

“Contagion” indeed. Th e author’s peremptory desire later in the article for the ubiquitous minstrel music (personifi ed as “Dan Tucker”) to disappear alto- gether runs against the same problem, here too anxiety-inducing to avoid its representation:

Love and Th eft 60

Depend upon it, he will do no such thing, so long as the young ladies speak to him in such fascinating tones, and accompany their sweet voic- es with the only less sweet music of the piano. Dan takes it as an invita- tion to stay; and doubtless many a lover would like to receive a similar rejection from his lady-love; a fashion, by the way, like that in which the country lass reproved her lover for kissing her: “Be done, Nat!” said she, “and ( soto voce ) begin again!” (335)

For some, the mixing of minstrelsy apparently meant the eroticized return of Nat Turner. If only it had been the “young ladies” who could not resist.

No wonder, then, that in this fi rst paradigm minstrelsy’s origins are ordinarily so displaced and disembodied; talk of cultural merging is too dangerously close to a discourse of “amalgamation.” A bizarre “amalgamaphobia” infects even the briefest of accounts: “Th ese songs, spawned in the very lowest puddles of society, at length found their way, like the frogs of Egypt, into places of admitted respect- ability. On so dark a subject it can hardly be expected that we should be quite precise in reference to dates” (“Obituary” 118). Th e repetitive, even obsessive insistence on black sexuality in these encounters and in descriptions of their “off spring” has a vaguely unconscious or unmotivated quality; it is less a rhetor- ical tic or standard reference than something that has slipped by. In an article sympathetic to minstrelsy, one writer imagines “the hum of the plantation”:

I listen with attentive ears—for I know by experience the gratifi cation in store for me—and soon catch the distant tones of the human voice—now more faintly heard, and now entirely lost .  .  . . [N]ow, anew, I hear the sound of those manly negro voices swelling up upon the evening gale. Nearer and nearer comes the boat, higher and higher rises the melody, till it overpowers and subdues the noise of the oars, which in their turn become subservient to the song, and mark its time with harmonious beating. (“Negro Minstrelsy—Ancient and Modern” 76–77)

If black men could do this with their voices, imagine what they could do in the fl esh! But they remain voices, without presence, imaginative projections, and these accounts seem to require that they remain so, even as the black male is referred to compulsively. Th e accounts all suggest fears and desires in the shape of a social narrative involving overpowering black men. Th at narrative sur- faces in many contexts, but refers us in the end to the unresolved—and, to these writers, fascinating—threat of intermixture suff using the minstrel phe- nomenon. Emblems of a relationship between the races that has been cultur- ally repressed, minstrel songs, like the mulatto child of Th omas Jeff erson in William Wells Brown’s Clotel, or Th e President’s Daughter (1853), returned to haunt the most respectable of places.

But miscegenation and/or homoerotic desire is not the only kind of rela- tionship whites would rather have forgotten. Th e other narrative paradigm

Love and Th eft 61

that organizes tales of the origins of minstrelsy expresses an overriding con- cern with exchange value, the economics of race, with slavery itself. Recall that in Robert Nevin’s Atlantic Monthly account Rice gets the minstrel idea without meeting any black man; it is only later that “Cuff ’s” clothes come in handy, and the issue of ownership, and value generally, emerges. (Th is is the only account containing both paradigms.) Th e central issue of the second paradigm is so pressing that a later writer, in retelling Nevin’s account nearly word for word, nevertheless amends it in a striking way. Nevin writes that “Cuff was precisely the subject for Rice’s purpose. Slight persuasion induced him to accompany the actor to the theatre” (609; emphasis added). Amidst an almost verbatim ac- count, H. P. Phelps writes that “a darkey . . . was induced, for a slight consider- ation, to go with the actor to the theatre” (166; emphasis added). Given the monotony and the cheerful plagiarism of the general run of these accounts, such minute shift s are quite revealing, slips of the tongue in a public discourse. And what they disclose is white guilt or anxiety about minstrelsy as a fi gure for the plundering of black culture. I hinted just now that whites would like to have imagined the expropriations of minstrelsy to be nonanalogous to those of slavery, to have forgotten or displaced the latter in accounts of the minstrel show—a form, aft er all, meant to reassure them that everybody was happy down on the plantation. Th at is indeed what occurs in the payment imagined by Phelps, and it happens in other ways as well. While occasionally the min- strel show becomes a narrative substitute for slavery, a comfortable alternative to the idea of free black labor, generally the intention of this second paradigm is a denial or forgetting of the unremunerated labor of slavery, a denial oft en diffi cult to sustain as repressed economic facts return.

In the most benign of these accounts, there can be no meeting between racial representatives without some kind of reparation made by whites to blacks:

One spring season of the Louisville Th eatre, on a clear, bright morning, during the rehearsal of some play in which Mr. Rice had but little to do, as he was standing on the stage, at a back door that looked out upon the rear of a stable-yard, where a very black, clumsy negro used to clean and rub down horses, he was attracted by the clearness and melody of this negro’s voice, and he caught the words, the subject of his song; it was the negro version of “Jump, Jim Crow.” He listened with delight to the negro’s singing for several days, and fi nally went to him and paid him to sing the song over to him until he had learned it. (Ludlow 392)

Th is is obviously a legitimating story of cultural “borrowing”: all accounts have been paid in full. Th e mention of a “negro version” of “Jim Crow” is no doubt a nice touch, implying as it does the neutrality and simple diff erence of ver- sions. But its willful reversal of the cultural relationship here—its reading of blackface songs as originary and black songs mere versions—reveals, even as it

Love and Th eft 62

attempts to disguise, precisely the diff erence of versions, the implied inaccu- racy of blackface minstrelsy’s appropriating “delineations.” Even in accounts that would deny the notion of imbalance, whether in the evaluation of cultures or in cultural indebtedness, that imbalance, perhaps inevitably, returns.

Since, as we have seen, the cultural commodities of blackface were defi ned by this diff erence, references to the monetary or commodity status of minstrel songs, as well as that of their black “inventors,” are routine in these narratives. Most accounts take up at some point the issue of minstrelsy’s authenticity, and are therefore littered with defenses against or assertions of its “counterfeit” nature: “Base counterfeits as they are, they pass current with most people as genuine negro songs” (Kennard 336). Hence the false currency implied in the same writer’s quip that “white men have blacked their faces to represent [Negroes], [and] made their fortune by the speculation” (333). Th e disapproval of this practice suggests an uneasiness with the surplus value thus generated; its falseness seems to stem from the fact that its black “owners” are not equal buyers and sellers on the market but are “represented,” bought and sold by brokers. And yet the disapproval may not have to do directly with slavery. A distrust of the “speculation” of minstrelsy may be only a cautious approach to the main chance, made risky in the aft ermath of the panic of 1837 perhaps. But though the “blackness” that minstrelsy peddles may be a commodity like any other, it ultimately derives, as these references continually remind us, from a certain southern commodity: “Th ose of us who have for so many years been looking anxiously forward to the advent of the coming poet who is to take away from America the sin and the shame of never having produced an epic, or a lyric, commensurate with Niagara and the Rocky Mountains, will do well to get up a subscription and buy the author of [these songs], if his owner can be persuaded to part with him.” 32 Th e cultural nationalism of Young America notwithstanding, one wants to reply that the sin and shame lie some- where else. Th e underlying suggestion, in any case, is that blackface minstrelsy fi gured less as a palliative to the economics of slavery than as an uncomfort- able reminder of it.

In this context we should recall the most horrifi c of the accounts organized by this second paradigm. It is Nevin’s narrative in which outright theft and public embarrassment are indulged; but here too, as I have suggested, simply narrating the “primal scene” introduces issues of economy, value, and ownership almost behind the author’s back. A great deal of space is allotted to Cuff ’s mode of sub- sistence, too much in fact for the part he plays as the lender of his “blackness” to Rice. He carries passengers’ trunks from steamers to shore; he is, moreover, in active competition for business with another black man, Ginger. Revealingly, it is midway through Rice’s performance in Cuff ’s clothes that the “near ap- proach of a steamer”—Cuff ’s livelihood—intrudes and requires the song somehow to end. And it must end because, as Nevin writes, “liberally as [Cuff ] might lend himself to a friend, it could not be done at that sacrifi ce” (609).

Love and Th eft 63

Th is allegorically suggestive scene—suggestive against the grain of what its author wants to convey—is yet marked by certain complex displacements. Th e fi rst is the odd overemphasis on Cuff ’s free labor, here located not in slave- holding Louisville but in Pittsburgh, a swerve away from most other accounts, such as those of Noah Ludlow, T. Allston Brown, and Edmon S. Conner, which make the cultural “donor” a Louisville slave. It is as if, in this fi rst displace- ment, the fact of slavery is jettisoned in favor of industrious black men “lib- eral” enough to “lend themselves” to white friends. But the shape of that last phrase, in which black people off er up their selves like the talking commod- ities in Das Kapital or in Th eodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, already suggests the slave economy that “lending” exists to cover over. 33 And indeed the scene as a whole, with its successive subordinations of Cuff in Rice’s minstrel perfor- mance and in Nevin’s use of dialect, enacts a second displacement, this time from the free labor by which the passage initially sought to distance itself from slavery. It narratologically reenslaves a black man who has evidently turned out to be more competitive and enterprising than he should be. Th is rather desperate shift ing indicates the ambivalence that minstrelsy’s debt to black cultural production called forth—and which this origin paradigm, I believe, was invented to mediate or “manage.”

But we have yet to deal with the most curious detail of this scene, that in which Cuff “let[s] his open mouth as a mark for boys to pitch pennies into”— suspiciously close to white fantasy, but possibly observed. Th en again, perhaps Nevin had read Melville’s Confi dence-Man (1857). In the third chapter Black Guinea, a “grotesque negro cripple, in tow-cloth attire and an old coal-sift er of a tambourine in his hand,” makes his appearance:

Shuffl ing among the crowd, now and then he would pause, throwing back his head and opening his mouth like an elephant for tossed apples at a menagerie; when, making a space before him, people would have a bout at a strange sort of pitch-penny game, the cripple’s mouth being at once target and purse, and he hailing each expertly-caught copper with a cracked bravura from his tambourine. To be the subject of alms-giving is trying, and to feel in duty bound to appear cheerfully grateful un- der the trial, must be still more so; but whatever his secret emotions, he swallowed them, while still retaining each copper this side the oesopha- gus. And nearly always he grinned, and only once or twice did he wince, which was when certain coins, tossed by more playful almoners, came inconveniently nigh to his teeth, an accident whose unwelcomeness was not unedged by the circumstance that the pennies thus thrown proved buttons.

While this game of charity was yet at its height, a limping, gimlet- eyed, sour-faced person .  .  . began to croak out something about his deformity being a sham, got up for financial purposes, which

Love and Th eft 64

immediately threw a damp upon the frolic benignities of the pitch- penny players. (17–18)

By the end of the scene we realize with a jolt that this is probably a blackface performance; 34 the attentive reader recognizes another of the confi dence man’s disguises. Th is is more than the Fidele ’s passengers do. Hence the dramatic irony here: Melville lift s the mask for the reader only. Indeed, a “purple-faced drover,” by implication a slave trader, actually hints at capturing what he takes to be a black man (thus casually linking minstrelsy with the human traffi c of slavery). Th e accusation of fraud extends only to Black Guinea’s lameness. Melville here exposes the minstrelization of Cuff in Nevin’s account: what these passengers and Nevin himself take as “blackness” Melville reveals to be part of a white discourse undergirding the minstrel phenomenon.

Th is turn, however, takes place only when the limping man levels his accu- sation. Before that the reader sees a pitiable cripple doing his best amid a brutal “game of charity,” though Ann Douglas has rightly noted that our sentimental- ized pity is itself being savaged here (361). (Melville, I need hardly note, was not one to truck in “benevolence,” northern or southern, as Captain Delano in “Benito Cereno” makes perfectly clear.) 35 We soon pay the price in embarrass- ment, but Melville briefl y tries to make us as sympathetic as he possibly can. For all its fakery, the passage just quoted is mightily eff ective. We have no way of knowing that Black Guinea’s “secret emotions” are probably those of a white man pretending to be black, and so we are shocked, drawn in. His is an act of blackness as “target and purse,” object of derision and repository of market value. Only then does the accusation break up the illusion: “got up for fi nancial purposes.” But that, of course, is what Melville has himself been so careful to construct—a sham that works, if only to embarrass—and he has done it by commodifying the blazes out of Black Guinea. In a curious echo of the black shingle dancers in lower Manhattan, the consciousness of black commodifi ca- tion which the writing forces on us works all the more to make blackness into a marketable object of white interest, this time for the reader. In order for the passage to possess any eff ect, the racial economy so bitterly exposed here must arouse before it is revealed. Commodifi cation is, in a sense, Black Guinea’s at- traction; it is what seems “blackest” about him. It is precisely what is calculated to evoke the foolish pleasure of our pity, and Melville’s grim irony only con- fi rms that the attempt to reveal minstrelsy’s fi nancial purposes has itself proved to be an act of minstrelization.

Blackface here is one more con game. But Melville’s rejection of it accords in striking ways with the thing itself. Far from a happily secured distribution of cultural needs and desires, in other words, racial counterfeiting in Jackso- nian America appears actually to have defeated the eff orts to master it— whether by mystifi cation or by exposure—no less than it haunted its partisans. Th e writings I have surveyed were variously ineff ectual plays for control of the

Love and Th eft 65

questions minstrelsy apparently raised and tried to resolve. What these narra- tives seem to have realized is that the minstrel show fl aunted as much as it hid the fact of expropriation and its subtexts, enslavement and intermixture. Such seemingly coherent and purposive accounts, in short, constituted part of a vol- atile discourse on “blackness”—examples in themselves of “racial” produc- tion’s social unconscious.

{ 3 }

White Kids and No Kids At All Working-Cl ass Culture and L anguages of Race

Th is may be the music for the million, hurly burling, We will not hear it for a million sterling.

—anonymous

As the minstrel show situated itself in the urban North, its debased cultural position, no less than its racial economy, made its representations politically volatile. Its racial meanings were inextricable from its class argument, and one must therefore attend to the shift ing class formations, and minstrelsy’s shift ing place within them, in the antebellum North. It was in rowdy theatrical spaces that an emergent racial politics was both registered and created, and that the racial feeling underlying and shaping but many times eluding the offi cial narratives of race in these years began to appear. Rather than locate in disem- bodied minstrel types some coherent, intentional politics (derived from our present notions of nineteenth-century racial matters), one ought, as Gareth Stedman Jones’s work suggests, to examine the complications in the minstrel show’s languages of race with reference to antebellum social and political developments ( Languages 8). Th e popular theater was itself an increasingly crucial though less and less respectable part of those developments, and for a time this status enabled minstrelsy to become an oppositional, almost under- ground cultural form. As a result, it told a story less articulate yet perhaps more revealing than the taunts and ripostes of polemicists.

To get at this story I will sketch the outlines of a new kind of “popular” sphere in the urban Northeast (primarily in New York) that began to emerge aft er 1830. Th e disparate meanings of blackface found their material basis in the various concrete ways certain popular domains engaged black culture, in the physical spaces and cultural institutions where it was produced for and enjoyed by predominantly working-class audiences. Leaving to one side the minstrel show’s more baroque transgressions, I am aft er some sense of why this suitably racist cultural form generated so much disdain, why its critics

White Kids and No Kids At All 67

found it so distasteful, an objection that oft en had little to do with race. Rather, in its appropriations of “blackness” the Jacksonian popular theater—along with the penny press, the saloon, and the public museum—appears to have reproduced and revitalized a set of class values. It was the way it staged class that was most oft en the objection, the way the stale patter and bad puns and achieved grotesquerie kept sliding from racial burlesque into class affi liation or affi rmation. It was through “blackness” that class was staged, and to some observers, at least, the combination could not have been more irksome.

Th e Great Divide

Th e minstrel show, eclectic in origin, primitive in execution, and raucous in eff ect, virtually announced itself as one of our fi rst popular institutions. Th e nineteenth-century debate about it seems familiar perhaps because minstrelsy helped constitute a break (and thus an anxious discourse about that break) between elite, genteel, and low cultures which would be fundamental by our century. In fact, the dual emergence of the fi rst remarkable body of (black and white) American imaginative literature and of such notable popular phe- nomena as minstrelsy, melodrama, and the dime novel neatly demonstrates Fredric Jameson’s point about the dialectical interrelatedness and opposition of high and low cultural forms; in capitalist societies they presuppose and depend on each other, are twin responses to a common, class-divided history (“Reifi cation” 133–34). Many writers (such as the dime novelist George Lip- pard) put a broadly class-related face on the opposition in terminologies of the scandalous “upper ten” and the abused “lower million.” Indeed, by the early 1840s minstrelsy—alongside lower-million amusements such as the public lecture, the public museum, and melodrama—was ranged explicitly against the opera, the “legitimate” theater, and the concert hall, the American begin- nings of what Andreas Huyssen has called the “great divide.” 1 In this sense minstrel shows actually resembled the nineteenth-century dime museum, as George Rehin has observed. On the one hand, they constantly defl ated the pretensions of an emerging middle-class culture of science, reform, education, and professionalism, while on the other, they disseminated information about technology and urban life for working people very oft en new to the city: “Min- strel ‘darkies’ were conned and swindled, run down by trolleys, shocked by batteries, and jailed for violating laws they didn’t understand.” 2 Th ey ulti- mately assuaged an acute sense of class insecurity by indulging feelings of racial superiority.

Yet minstrel companies unquestionably had a defi ant sense of both their own and their audiences’ compromised cultural position. Part of a general emergence of artisan culture into national view, the minstrel vogue, along with mass political parties and the penny press, helped to create or organize a new

Love and Th eft 68

public whose tastes the popular amusements now represented for the fi rst time (Henderson 103). As one popular song put it:

Music now is all de rage; De Minstrel Bands am all engaged; Both far and near de people talk ’Bout Nigger Singing in New York.

Barnum’s Museum can’t be beat: De Fat Boys dar am quite a treat. Dar’s a Big Snake too, wid a rousing stinger; Likewise Pete Morris, de Comic Singer.

De Chatham keeps among de rest— Entertainments ob de best. In public favor dis place grows, ’Specially on account ob Mose .

De Astor Opera is anoder nice place; If you go thar, jest wash your face! Put on your “kids,” an fi x up neat, For dis am de spot of de eliteet! 3

By the time this song was published in 1849 (it was probably performed some- what earlier), the minstrel show had long since found its urban northeastern audience: the Bowery milieu whose more vehement representatives rioted at the Astor Place Opera House later that year. We might, in fact, take this variety of song as a rallying cry for that event, inasmuch as both riot and songs marked the end of an earlier fl uidity and intermixture of class-identifi ed entertainments and institutional sites.

One does not quite yet fi nd this song’s sentiments consolidated in, for instance, the early 1830s (though of course blackface always bore a fi ercely pop- ular stamp). First performed in those years between the acts at “respectable” theaters, minstrelsy in New York steadily retreated over the next decade to lower Broadway, and lower-class, houses. Th e long-accepted (and somewhat permeable) internal division of theater audiences into cheap gallery, fashion- able box, and middling pit seats—the so-called gods, gentlemen, and ground- lings—gradually became rough external divisions between class-specifi c theaters. In 1820 the “internal situation” of a Boston house still looked this way to one patron:

It appeared that the gallery was the resort of the particoloured race of Africans, the descendants of Africans, and the vindicators of the ab- olition of the slave trade; that the tier of boxes below it in the center was occupied by single gentlewomen who had lodgings to let, and who were equally famous for their delicacy and taciturn disposition. Th e

White Kids and No Kids At All 69

remainder of the boxes, I was given to understand, were visited by none but the dandies, and people of the fi rst respectability and fashion; while the pit presented a mixed multitude of the lower orders of all sorts, sizes, ages, and deportments. 4

“Africans,” “vindicators of abolition,” and “mixed multitude,” one surmises, are shorthand for the rabble; but the rabble (at least its white members) soon had its own playhouses, and made its triumphant mark on existing ones. Th is division was not a simple matter of newly specialized theaters, as Raymond Williams has reminded us; the specialization itself was produced by, and in a range of ways mirrored, the social structure and tensions in metropolizing northeastern cities (“Social” 131). Exemplars of a new cultural sphere, minstrel shows were unrelentingly self-conscious, continually inscribing audiences’ allegiances in the form of the show: you would never go to the Astor Place Opera because you came here (recall that Margaret Fuller hadn’t actually gone to the theater to hear those “African” melodies). Th e result, however, was in one sense to equate “low” audiences with the racial ritual that defi ned their cultural position, that is, implicitly to identify the Bowery constituency with the blackness they “put on.”

Th ey were, in any case, understood to inhabit the bottom. Th e Philadelphia Public Ledger (May 16, 1849) conceded the class character of the audience for minstrelsy and melodrama in its response to the Astor Place riot: “It leaves behind a feeling to which this community has hitherto been a stranger—an opposition of classes—the rich and poor—white kids and no kids at all; in fact, to speak right out, a feeling that there is now in our country, in New York City, what every good patriot has hitherto considered it his duty to deny—a high class and a low class.” If this is vague sociology it is better cultural geography. For not only in the theater but in the public sphere generally, as Peter Buckley has shown, a bifurcation had indeed occurred between the 1830s and 1849. From the late 1820s, when audiences and entertainments were still broadly representative of the social totality, northern urban culture had begun to de- velop along two lines—in New York, one following Chatham Street and then up the Bowery, the other marching fashionably up Broadway to the Astor Place Opera House. “Th ese two cultural axes were not initially in opposition,” Buckley writes, “yet gradually there developed, especially aft er 1837, two dis- tinct idioms, two audiences and two versions of what constituted the ‘public’ sphere of communication and amusement” (31). In 1849 the cultures clashed where the axes nearly met, at Astor Place.

Th e Astor Place riot proved a full-scale eruption of national and class ten- sions into the sphere of culture. With some help from the press, and from na- tivist Bowery agitators such as the dime novelist Ned Buntline (E. Z. C. Judson), himself a direct link between the new culture of amusements and growing social fi ssures, a lengthy rivalry between the British “legitimate” Shakespearean

Love and Th eft 70

actor Charles Macready and the air-sawing American Edwin Forrest entered a new register as the two actors portrayed Macbeth in concurrent New York pro- ductions. To their respective constituencies this was a struggle for political le- gitimation fought out in the cultural terms that the “great divide” had made available. If Forrest had for more than twenty years created various incarna- tions of a Jacksonian hero (Metamora, Jack Cade, Spartacus), 5 Macready, as the feud developed, came to signify an aristocracy of “taste,” the “upper ten,” the Dickens of American Notes . On May 7 Macready’s New York opening at Astor Place was interrupted by boos, a hail of rotten lemons, and ultimately a row of chairs thrown by a conspiratorial claque of Forrest’s Bowery “b’hoys.” A pub- lished list of signatories (including Washington Irving and Herman Melville) quickly responded, vowing order and urging Macready to continue his perfor- mances. Th ree nights later similar demonstrations plagued Macready’s Macbeth; refusing to be bullied, however, and buttressed by some well-placed police, Macready pressed on. A crowd of over fi ve thousand, further angered by admis- sion restrictions and the show of police force, now gathered outside the opera house, assaulting the structure with paving stones and yelling slogans such as, “Burn the damned den of the aristocracy!” and “You can’t go in there without kid gloves on!” Th e militia, two hundred anxious troops, readied themselves for this assault, which was soon turned against the troops themselves. First they fi red over the heads of the crowd, and then directly into it; twenty-two were killed, over one hundred and fi ft y wounded. As Buckley puts it, “Th e Astor Place riot appeared to be a moment when the mob became a class and when the classes seemed in irreconcilable opposition.” 6 Th e minstrel show, in other words, inhabited—and began actually to signify—not an undiff erentiated “mass” cul- ture but a class-defi ned, oft en class-conscious, cultural sphere.

But while the broadest structural outlines of minstrelsy’s class character are sharp enough, the details are rather less so. One should note, for instance, that its audience’s class makeup was oft en contradictory; while the audience was made up predominantly of young male workers, there was also a fair number of men and women from other classes, not only in the more mixed audiences of the 1830s but later as well. Th e journeyman craft smen and semi- skilled or unskilled workers (teamsters, boatmen, barbers, and so on) who increasingly constituted the minstrel show’s audience when theater prices plummeted aft er the 1837 panic were oft en joined by people from “contradic- tory class locations,” to use Erik Olin Wright’s term (19–63): shopkeepers, clerks, small master artisans. Regarding even the class-bound audiences of the 1840s, there was some confusion among commentators about just who was out there in the pit and the gallery. As I will argue later, one of minstrel- sy’s functions was precisely to bring various class fractions into contact with one another, to mediate their relations, and fi nally to aid in the construction of class identities over the bodies of black people. Emerging splits within the working class (between artisans and proletarianized workers, for instance, or

White Kids and No Kids At All 71

between “natives” and immigrant Irish) were oft en made manifest in terms of these groups’ diff erential relations to racial privilege, even as the formation of a northern working class depended on a common sense of whiteness. In short, the new milieu that blackface occupied came unevenly into being, cut- ting across the popular classes and constituting in itself a fi eld of confl ict over which “public” would in fact turn out to defi ne it. Nor was the minstrel show simply created out of nowhere; consisting partly of appropriations of extant institutions, partly of new inventions, it grew up right alongside the more respectable entertainments. 7

Th ese unevennesses were enough to tilt the “lower million’s” rhetoric of class in the direction of a populist sensibility, as the phrase itself suggests, but they hardly mitigated the minstrel show’s class basis. As David Montgomery has observed of the people who were minstrelsy’s adherents: “Th e praise they bestowed on the ‘honest mechanics’ of their communities echoed through the popular songs and dime-novel literature of the day . . . . Although this culture was infused with a populist, rather than a strictly class consciousness, it clearly separated the nation into ‘the producers’ and ‘the exploiters’” (“Labor” 94). Ideologically the minstrel show was a “popular” or “producer’s” form, mightily class-infl ected but unstable in its class ideologies and shift ing in its class makeup; structurally it was a working-class form, fi rmly grounded in the insti- tutional spaces and cultural predispositions of workers. 8 Christy’s Minstrels had their longest New York run at a theater named Mechanics’ Hall. Working- class values and desires were aired and secured in the minstrel show. Its racial “narrative” dovetailed with its class sources in surprising and sometimes con- fusing ways. Th eatrical displays of “blackness” seemingly guaranteed the at - mosphere of license so central to working-class entertainment in this period. And blackface provided a convenient mask through which to voice class re- sentments of all kinds—resentments directed as readily toward black people as toward upper-class enemies. But as we have seen, there was also a historical logic in glossing working-class whites as black, given the degree to which large sections of these groups shared a common culture in many parts of the North. Certain minstrel forms attested to this fact; moreover, as David Roediger has shown, many popular racial slurs both onstage and off (“coon,” “buck”) also referred to whites ( Wages 97–100). Occasionally these facts resulted in positive identifi cations between black and white, however quick the minstrel show usually was to forestall them.

All of which evidence may begin to suggest that blackface, in a real if partial sense, fi gured class—that its languages of race so invoked ideas about class as to provide displaced maps or representations of “working-classness.” Th us it was said of T. D. Rice’s English tour that his burlesque skits were “vulgar even to grossness,” and captivated “the chimney sweeps and apprentice boys of London, who wheeled about and turned about and jumped Jim Crow, from morning until night, to the annoyance of their masters, but the great delight of

Love and Th eft 72

the cockneys.” 9 Th e submerged equation here of slaves and white workers (ap- prentices and perennially blackened sweeps ranged against their “masters”) was not at all unusual; it was popularized, as we shall see, in radical artisans’ rhetoric of “wage slavery.” Nor was the implicit (and opposing) claim that car- icatures of blacks culturally represented workers above all. Blackface quickly became a sort of useful shorthand in referring to working men. New York’s Castle Garden, noted the Journal of Music , nightly featured a variety of distin- guished musical off erings, “and two or three songs by anna zerr, who (shame to say) stooped to pick up one night and sing ‘Old folks at home,’ for the b’hoys; one would as soon think of picking up an apple-core in the street.” 10 Indeed, the overlapping of racial and class codes probably made the minstrel show’s audiences seem more homogeneously working class than they actually were; in this way as in others, minstrelsy helped resolve internal diff erences within plebeian culture, creating notions of white working-classness and blackness at one and the same time. 11

Certainly this rhetorical situation only hardened observers of the theater against blackface’s constituency. “Th ere must be some . . . place for a certain class of people to eff ervesce in their excitements of pleasure,” said one wit of the Chatham Th eatre, a primary site of minstrelsy and by all accounts the “lowest.” “It has been useful as a kind of sewer for the drainage of other estab- lishments” (Northall 152–53). Th e sporting paper Spirit of the Times produced a clipped taxonomy: “Firemen, butcher-boys, cab and omnibus drivers, ‘fancy’ men, and b’hoys, generally” (February 6, 1847). Yet while the minstrel show was too mediated or overdetermined a form to have been simply the creation of a workers’ culture, or enjoyed solely by it, the “sheer weight of numbers,” as Gareth Stedman Jones has argued of the English music hall, “the preoccupa- tions and predilections of workers” did impose a “discernible imprint” on min- strelsy’s racial imagery ( Languages 9–10). Conversely, racial rhetoric became instrumental to ideas about working people themselves. How, exactly, did this situation come about?

Historians agree that American culture in the Northeast underwent pro- found changes between 1825 and 1835. Among other things, a bourgeoisie wor- thy of the name came into being. As many recent historians have in diff erent ways constructed this history, an unprecedented separation and discrete self-defi nition of classes occurred aft er the mid-1820s. For Burton Bledstein, an emerging “professionalism” constituted the “cultural process by which the middle class in America matured and defi ned itself ” (ix); for Karen Halttunen, antebellum sentimentalism was “central to the self-conscious self-defi nition of middle-class culture” (xvii). Mary Ryan’s account places the family at the cen- ter of middle-class formation—the child-rearing practices, familial values, and domestic ideologies that became, in her striking phrase, the “cradle of the middle class.” Paul Johnson and Paul Boyer, like David Brion Davis before them, both see a culture of moral reform as crucial to the middle class’s

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self-making; as Boyer has it, a phalanx of temperance reformers, advocates of industrial morality, and the like, concerned to instill good Christian principles in an undisciplined work force, in fact helped “an embryonic urban middle class defi ne itself ” (61). Th is work undoes an earlier historiographic tradition (the “consensus school”), still alive in the writing of scholars such as Sacvan Bercovitch, which saw a hegemonic culture of liberalism at work in all walks of American life, summed up in Louis Hartz’s remark that America is “a kind of national embodiment of the concept of the bourgeoisie” (51). As Stuart Blu- min has argued, “However broad the bourgeois consensus may have been in comparison to European societies, it was not so broad that it precluded the formation of distinct classes within American society” (“Hypothesis” 304). For what is implied in the notion of middle-class formation is precisely the forma- tion of a distinctive working-class culture or way of life—though of course the development of each class (and its class fractions) was uneven, halting, not necessarily synchronous with the others. 12

Th e specifi c results of working-class formation, particularly with regard to popular racial consciousness, will necessarily be foregrounded in my readings of the minstrel show in part II. Here, however, the broadest social eff ects on male workers of a new free-labor economy may be briefl y noted. Th e craft s were fairly quickly proletarianized, splitting formerly self-suffi cient artisans into masses of wage workers on the one hand and select groups of industrious mechanics and industrial entrepreneurs on the other; control over the trades went to merchant capitalists who had in some cases been artisans themselves. Th e word boss was coined in these years, Paul Johnson observes, a sign that the interests of master and worker were now diff erent and opposed. 13 In many trades, de-skilling accompanied this keener sense of social hierarchization, and increasingly rigid practices of industrial discipline were instituted. Making and selling for the fi rst time became distinct activities; employees in the front rooms of, say, shoemakers’ shops were separated from—and as “clerks” came eventually to occupy a higher class than—the artisans who made the shoes. 14 Housing practices mimicked these new divisions. Master craft smen, men on the way up, moved away from their places of business and into residential neighborhoods, while workers moved themselves and their families out of their masters’ homes—if, that is, they had been lucky enough to live in them in the fi rst place. In a host of new journeymen’s societies and more informal col- lectives, workingmen implicitly set themselves off from a supposedly harmo- nious community of “the Trade.” Massive Irish and German immigration soon segmented that community even further, transforming the American working class, by the mid-1850s, into a largely foreign-born population. 15

Th e minstrel show’s cognitive equation of black and white working class had its origins here. In Policing the Crisis , Stuart Hall and others argue that disarticulations of hegemony accompany periods of extreme capitalist crisis, generating fresh repertoires of domination. Th e strained class relations that

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resulted from the explosion of capitalist energies in early nineteenth-century America produced various such languages and practices. A new discourse of crime and lower-class criminality in these years was one example, although journals such as the Police Gazette also admitted of more populist, “republi- can” accents, resulting in a war of defi nition between, as Dan Schiller puts it, “rogues” and the “rights of men” (377). Similarly, a new discourse of race, employed largely by workers themselves, also helped mute newly created class confl icts, particularly in the postdepression 1840s. 16 Th e insecurity that attended class stratifi cation produced a whole series of working-class fears about the status of whiteness; working-class white men, Richard Slotkin points out, began to perceive “the form of labor degradation in racial and sexual terms,” rejecting such degradation by affi rming positions of white male superiority (150).

Sandwiched between bourgeois above and black below, respectable artisans feared they were becoming “blacker” with every increment of industrial ad - vance, and countered with the language and violence of white supremacy. But the very vehemence of their response indicated the increasing functional and discursive interchangeability of blacks and working-class whites. Th e neigh- borhoods to which white workers moved, for example, were oft en racially in- tegrated, eff ectively negating the cushion of diff erence, and this condition, along with workers’ fears of being displaced from work by blacks, seems to have given rise to much of the racist violence in the antebellum United States. 17 Likewise, “blackleg” was used to describe what later strikers would call a “scab,” its racial overtones further evidence of black and white working-class compet- itiveness and interchangeability, for blacklegs were in fact in some cases black. An extreme instance of working-class “blackening” was that of the immigrant Irish, whom antebellum native whites widely equated with blacks as an alien, subhuman, and brutal species. 18 Th e rhetoric of race that was a specifi c product of antebellum America’s capitalist crisis thus equated working-classness with blackness as oft en as it diff erentiated between them, an antinomy with prop- erly equivocal results. For while it gave “the cutting edge of racial feeling,” Slot- kin writes, to working-class disdain for both Lords of the Loom and Lords of the Lash, it also produced “artifi cial and ultimately destructive distinctions within the working classes” (150). Blackface minstrelsy, I would argue, was founded on this antinomy, reinstituting with ridicule the gap between black and white working class even as it reveled in their (sometimes liberatory) identifi cation.

Th is dynamic surfaced not only in the minstrel show but in a variety of popular domains of discourse 19 —largely because they constituted one major way in which working people resisted the constricting demands of metropol- itan industrialization. It should come as no surprise that social confl icts in which race and class interpenetrated and contradicted each other were acutely registered in the cultural forms and spaces that arose to ease them.

White Kids and No Kids At All 75

Domains of Discourse

In the early 1830s changes in the northern American class structure urged the need for a discrete sphere of working-class sociability just as an urban culture industry started to emerge. Th e classes began to forge social lives indepen- dent of one another; drinking became a staple of working-class boarding- houses as abjuring drink became a badge of respectability. Goaded by these developments and accelerating them in turn, amusements of all kinds sprang up in New York’s Bowery. Unsympathetic observers noted the connection, and one blamed boardinghouse life itself for the upsurge in New York amuse- ments. “Th ere is no bond of union among the lodgers of a boarding-house,” wrote the popular playwright William K. Northall; in the absence of fi reside enjoyments boarders were forced on their own resources, and “public places of entertainment off er the readiest means to these poor undomesticated ani- mals” (7). At least the animals appear to have gotten what they wanted. Although the city had decided in 1823 to regulate an already alarming array of novelty acts in the commercial summer gardens, Peter Buckley speculates that these restrictions only drove such “minor” amusements onto the com- mercial stage (141). Th e Bowery Th eatre opened in 1826; and while it had begun with “legitimate” fare, by 1830 its innovative manager, Th omas Hamb- lin, was booking melodrama, performing animals, jugglers, minstrel acts, and more—that theater’s contribution to a whole new downtown milieu. Scores of cheap dance halls, billiard rooms, saloons, and amphitheaters for bare-knuckle prizefi ghts and cockfi ghts, as well as prime minstrel show sites such as the Olympic, Franklin, and Chatham theaters, had all established themselves by the late 1830s, more or less in spite of the panic. Not only the- ater managers but also entrepreneurs such as P. T. Barnum revolutionized commercial forms of leisure. Barnum developed in his Great American Mu- seum the variety acts that were coming to characterize many downtown “vaudevilles.” Th e fi rst organized minstrel troupe in New York City, Dan Emmett’s Virginia Minstrels, grew out of this context in 1843; while accounts confl ict, the troupe was probably born in a hotel across the street from the Bowery Th eatre. 20

Th ese domains of popular discourse together constituted a new, largely masculine ideological fi eld separate from both bourgeois culture and that of the trade unions, as Sean Wilentz suggests, in its own way connecting “work- ingmen’s pride, resentments, and simple pleasures to the language of republi- can politics” (263)—a sensational street version of the radical artisan’s emphasis on liberty, egalitarianism, and cultural independence. 21 Th e uses of race in this antiauthoritarian culture, however, have not been properly examined; labor historians have done little, beyond apologizing for white workers’ racial atti- tudes, to clarify the aff ective results of American “freedom’s” dependence on American slavery and racism. 22 Th e fact is that these new amusements were

Love and Th eft 76

also primary sites of antebellum “racial” production, inventing or at least main- taining the working-class languages of race that appear to have been crucial to the self-understanding of the popular classes, and to others’ understanding of them as well. In minstrel acts and other forms of “black” representation, racial imagery was typically used to soothe class fears through the derision of black people, but it also oft en became a kind of metonym for class. Even then it usu- ally referenced only a cherished working-class relationship to its objects of fun; yet one occasionally fi nds in this imagery the tones of racial sympathy. Indeed, the popular theater, the saloon, the museum, and the penny press—to name the institutions I look at here—prominently displayed the ambiguities that resulted from the grounding of much racial discourse in working-class culture.

It is diffi cult to capture both the unevenness and the peculiar coherence of this popular sphere in the antebellum years. Th e character of the minstrel show in particular appears to have shift ed slightly at least once in each of the three decades under consideration, and these shift s refer us not only to ch anging historical formations or conventions of racial representation but also to the earliest development of the culture industry itself. Beginning as an entr’acte aff air of solo songs and dances in legitimate theaters and certain pop- ular sites, minstrelsy remained an art of brief burlesque and comic relief throughout much of the 1830s. But from its development into a full-fl edged show in the post-panic early 1840s until its partial absorption into the Uncle Tom’s Cabin melodramas in the early and mid-1850s, minstrelsy formed one major part of urban popular culture, settling into a rather lifeless, and enormously profi table, institutionalization in the late 1850s.

Produced in theaters that hosted the whole range of popular amusements, blackface performance was marked by the new styles of staging and com- mercial organization that were only one example of this theatrical culture’s internal continuity. In 1839 Mitchell’s Olympic Th eatre, mid-panic, halved its admission prices; and it focused almost exclusively on what William Mitchell described as “tragico-comico-illegitimate” productions—essentially trav- esties of local events and amusements (Buckley 383). Th ese innovations sus- tained minstrel companies as well. Th eir topical commentary, Shakespearean or operatic burlesques, and stock companies (useful in generating famil- iarity between actors and audiences) resulted in extended runs. Shakespear- ean burlesque proved particularly long-lived, so intimate were even popular audiences in the antebellum years with what one minstrel parody called “de Bird of Avon.” Shakespeare’s plays became Hamlet the Dainty , “Bad Breath, the Crane of Chowder,” Julius Sneezer , “Dars-de-Money”; while, as Lawrence Levine has shown, Shakespeare was truly an author for the million, such travesties defi ned even more clearly this culture’s diff erence from that of the upper ten. One Hamlet parody refused to distinguish between hawk and handsaw:

White Kids and No Kids At All 77

Oh! tis consummation Devoutly to be wished, To end your heartache by a sleep; When likely to be dished, Shuffl e off your mortal coil, Do just so, Wheel about and turn about And jump Jim Crow.

Owing to the popularity of such fare, theaters devoted solely to blackface began to appear by the late 1840s, and many troupes eventually, if briefl y, supported their own “Ethiopian Opera Houses.” 23

Th e coherence of this class-based culture, as I have noted, was also to be found in its self-conscious relationship to its own amusements. Many minstrel songs amount to little more than narratives of the audience’s preferred enter- tainments, and much of the playing time of productions such as Benjamin Baker’s wildly popular A Glance at New York in 1848 was taken up, Peter Buckley notes, with the “vigorous consumption of popular amusement and commodities—the popular fi ction, the ‘waudevilles,’ . . . corner rolls and fried liver” which defi ned this culture’s everyday life (390). Like other popular plays in this period, New York As It Is (1848), an updated version of A Glance at New York , features scenes set at the Chatham Th eatre itself, as well as a bout of “nigger” dancing reminiscent of the black Catherine Street shingle dancers. Th is commercial self-consciousness was, like minstrelsy, one result of an aes- thetic of local travesty; it was also an obvious product of culture-industry cun- ning, a self-serving roll call of brand names. But it served, again, to equate working-class audiences with the arts, notably blackface, that they patron- ized—the most immediate reason, perhaps, for the overlay of racial and class imagery. As the Young America writer Cornelius Mathews was one of the last to point out, the more popular pleasures and their characteristic audiences were in some sense interchangeable metaphors for each other. In A Pen-and- Ink Panorama of New York City (1853), Mathews boards a Hudson River steamer and is soon surrounded by a “group of Bowery pit inhabitants” who “begin to dance to the banjo and triangle” (89). (A plantation frolic on the Hudson!) By 1853 the signifying chain linking workingmen to Bowery amusements and through these to blackface performance was little more than a cliché of social observation. What concerns us here are the chain’s uncertain racial outcomes.

Perhaps its strongest link, in these times of temperance, was alcohol. As early as the 1820s, saloons and grocery-grog shops had become the centerpiece of an emergent culture (Wilentz 53), despite the attempts of protoindustrialists and other elites to police working-class habits and amusements through the revival, the Sunday school, and the temperance society—that “middle-class obsession,” as Paul Johnson calls it (55). It is true that drinking was so central

Love and Th eft 78

to this culture that journeymen and laborers hardly needed a separate place to indulge the pastime. E. P. Th ompson remarked the “alternate bouts of intense labour and of idleness, wherever men were in control of their own working lives” (“Time” 73), and although employers were increasingly in a position to insist on abstemious codes of industrial behavior, shop-fl oor traditions such as brandy tippling and hangover-induced, inoperative “Blue Mondays” pro- vided the readiest means of worker control (Gutman 33–39). Yet saloons were not simply more and better space for saturnalia; they were semioffi cial working-class institutions. Th eir function was oft en proclaimed in various bold inscriptions hung above the entrance:

1 . King —I govern all. 2 . General —I fi ght for all. 3 . Minister —I pray for all. 4 . Laborer —And I pay for all. 24

Custodians of a sometimes overtly politicized cultural style, tavernkeepers nourished camaraderie, mutuality, and solidarity among their patrons. For immigrant workingmen especially, friendly saloons were upholders of tradi- tional customs and rituals, or political halfway houses; the Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell was a regular toastee. Major fi gures of immigrant life, among them the prizefi ghter Yankee Sullivan and politician David Broderick, organized constituencies and maintained their position by owning saloons. Broderick actually named his Th e Subterranean aft er the radical news sheet of his friend, fi rebrand Mike Walsh. 25

A wide variety of amusements was to be found in the saloon, from cock- fi ghts to minstrel acts; for every T. D. Rice making his fortune on the stage, we might suppose several or even dozens of imitators worked the local taverns. Some of these, like the men who formed the Virginia Minstrels in 1843, went on to fame of their own; and many of the taverns began an upgrading to the status of “concert saloon” by the late 1840s. Yet the presence in this particular milieu of a Mike Walsh—who, however radical in his class sympathies, went so far as to form an alliance with proslavery Calhoun Democrats in the early 1840s— perhaps affi rms the racist intentions behind the casual presence of blackface in the saloon. 26 It is nevertheless clear, as we will see in chapter 4 , that Repealer O’Connell and Liberator William Lloyd Garrison frequently corresponded in the 1840s, attempting for a time an “internationalist” labor abolitionism that could not have left many Irish-American saloon patrons untouched though it ultimately failed in its project. Indeed, writes Bruce Laurie, one tavern in Phila- delphia sported a placard with a bust of O’Connell and a snippet from Byron’s Childe Harold that may have permitted a variety of political investments: “He- reditary bondsmen! who would be free,/Th emselves must strike the blow” (“Nothing” 100), instancing again the potentially positive equation of white working-class and black. (Signifi cantly, Frederick Douglass appended this

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couplet to the end of the Covey chapter [chap. 17] of My Bondage and My Free- dom [1855]; he also used it to argue in favor of black enlistment in the Civil War [ Life 339].) Th e confl icted intimacy American racial cultures shared is certainly present in a detailed account of saloon life later in the century, in which a black man is said to have sung songs “of many kinds, comic, sentimental, pathetic, and silly,” inducing tears and a respectful hush with his “strange, wailing refrain” (Harrison 178–88). Th is response was of course only another kind of conde- scension, and it set the terms of interracial association, but in the mid-ninteenth century productive working-class political ties across racial boundaries usually had no other base of support.

If the saloon was a more “organic” component of this culture, the museum marked the extent of early American “cultural industrialization.” Future University of Michigan president Henry Tappan in 1851 delineated the diff er- ence between its British and American versions: “Museums—a place for the Muses,” he wrote, a “fi t appellation” for an institution such as the British Mu- seum. In New York, however, the word denoted only “a place for some stuff ed birds and animals, for the exhibition of monsters, and for vulgar dramatic performances—a mere place of popular amusement” (quoted in Harris 33). Although we should be much more careful in assessing the attraction of land- marks such as Barnum’s American Museum, this remark indicates, from the point of view of the educated classes, the adjectives they called forth. Yet they were of no slight lineage. Historians have emphasized the importance of such plebeian places of learning to revolutionary-era artisans, rationalist Paineites whose thirst for knowledge was slaked by scientifi c exhibits and astronomical lectures. From a certain angle, indeed, the story of the museum is one of de- clension, Jeff ersonian republicanism vulgarized into Jacksonian democracy. 27 Neil Harris, however, has argued that Barnum’s relation to his audiences was underwritten by an “operational aesthetic,” an active intellectual responsive- ness on the part of patrons who were delighted with issues of truth and falsity and were as ready to be fooled by an ingenious humbug as to be thrilled by a genuine curiosity. Yet, as Peter Buckley argues, this more sympathetic view still tends toward an ahistorical idea of undiff erentiated cultural predisposition. “Barnum’s pieces of management,” rather, “were concrete responses to the need to create a paying reliable public at a time when this ‘public’ was a con- tested political category and when the market for popular amusement was typed by its plebeian origins and attitudes” (489). Barnum was helping this popular sphere defi ne itself, that is to say, by putting it in his pocket. A new public was being won over in every sense by the same culture-industry inno- vations it was beckoning into existence. 28

Race fi gured prominently in the spate of amusements the museum off ered, most obviously in blackface acts but in other productions as well. One way to evade the genteel prejudice against theatrical vice was to provide the same entertainments under the roof of a seemingly more respectable institution.

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Henry James, one of Barnum’s early customers, later wrote that Barnum’s “‘lec- ture room,’ attached to the Great American Museum, overfl owed into posters of all the theatrical bravery disavowed by its title” (162). Barnum, whose early enterprises (dwarfs, minstrel dancers, foreign jugglers) planted him fi rmly within the Bowery setting, was himself a sometime blackface performer, and, he wrote, “to my surprise was much applauded” (90). Th e showman’s fi rst major success was the exhibition of a blind, paralytic black woman named Joice Heth, a slave Barnum purchased in 1835—a particularly gruesome instance of the economics of minstrelization. Barnum claimed Joice Heth to be one hundred and sixty-one years old, and to have been the nurse of George Washington. “She was apparently in good health and spirits, but from age or disease, or both, was unable to change her position; she could move one arm at will, but her lower limbs could not be straightened; her left arm lay across her breast and she could not remove it.” Yet she was “pert and sociable,” Bar- num wrote, oft en breaking suddenly into hymn (74–75). His display at New York’s Niblo’s Garden of the gnarled old woman, who combined patriotic ap- peal (she spoke of dressing “dear little George”) with circus monstrosity, brought Barnum an estimated $1,500 a week (Werner 31). It was in Barnum’s use of such appalling spectacles that the tastes of his plebeian audiences were represented—in the sense both of satisfying their desires and of raising them to public view.

Joice Heth was only the beginning of Barnum’s intrigues with “blackness.” He exhibited a skillfully constructed mass of animal parts as the “Fejee Mer- maid” in 1842; he hosted blackface acts throughout the antebellum years; and in the 1850s the American Museum ran stage productions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dred . Like his audiences, Barnum seems to have been fascinated with the mystery of color. In 1850 he hired a black man who claimed to have discovered a weed that would turn Negroes white. True to form, Barnum the future Republican trumpeted this discovery as the solution to the slavery problem, while newspapers daily reported any changes in the black man’s hue. 29 Barnum takes obvious relish in mimicking this very process in his enlarged autobiography, Struggles and Triumphs (1869). Someone mis- takes the young Barnum for a querulous black man aft er one of his blackface performances and makes a move for his revolver; nothing daunted, Barnum, as he wrote, “rolled my sleeve up, showed my skin, and said, ‘I am as white as you are, sir.’ [Th e man] dropped his pistol in positive fright and begged my pardon” (90). Th ese instances of imaginary racial transmutation literalize one train of thought responsible for the minstrel show. 30 Th ey are less articulations of diff erence than speculations about it. Th ey imagine race to be mutable; very briefl y they throw off the burden of its construction, blurring the line between self and other, white workingman and black. (Here blackface actors approached certain fi ctional uses of the mulatto fi gure.) 31 Th ey obviously devalue black- ness, canceling racial boundaries only to (triumphantly) reinstitute them:

White Kids and No Kids At All 81

through biology with the weed, through makeup with blackface. But they per- form this whole operation with a kind of ludic, transgressive glee. One also fi nds this spirit in, for instance, minstrel-show stump speeches, themselves a species of infl ated Barnum-speak. Indeed, stump speeches occasionally paro- died certain popular practices devoted to the fi xing and classifying of racial boundaries—phrenology, for instance, or the midcentury “science” of racial ethnology.

Th ere was indeed a revealing continuity among these discourses. Th e Egyp- tologist George Gliddon, who in Ancient Egypt (1844) argued that the great- ness of the Egyptians owed to their Caucasian (not Negro) origins, made lecture tours carrying an extensive collection of Barnum-like artifacts; Samuel Morton’s Crania Americana (1839), which gauged the mental capacity of dif- ferent races by skull size, was at least as indebted to phrenological techniques as to controlled experiment. Th e class-based character of blackface perfor- mance went some way toward making these discourses seem absurdly similar, or just plain absurd. “On dis side ob me, you may obserb, I hab a cast ob de head ob a gemman ob color; on de udder side, I hab a cast ob de head ob a common white feller,” goes a “lecture” on phrenology. A series of perambula- tory speculations follows, coming to rest in the observation that all great men are “brack”: blacklegs, blackguards, and so on. As to the diff erence, fi nally, between the two specimens, “Julycum Cezar Pompy Dan Tucker” and the “dam white rascal”: “You see den, dat clebber man an dam rascal means de same in dutch, when dey boph white; but when one white and de udder’s brack ‘dat’s a grey hoss ob anoder color’” ( De Susannah 80, 83–84). It is no doubt re- markable to discover in a minstrel act an inquiry into the construction—by language, no less—of racial diff erence; but this speech and the minstrel show generally share with Barnum’s antics an urge, nonetheless real for its derisive humor, to investigate the boundaries of race established by “respectable” sci- ence, to play with, even momentarily overturn, their placement. Th is was so even when there was fundamental accord as to that placement: lower-million impatience with the discourses of learned authority, not to mention the com- plexities of working people’s everyday negotiations with race, might result in assaults on the color line itself.

Class prickliness usefully infl ected the production of “race” in the penny press as well, which was sometimes capable of outright contradiction. New York newspapers such as the Transcript and the Sun , for instance, oft en printed both self-consciously egalitarian antislavery material and lurid accounts of white assaults on blacks. 32 Perhaps the most interesting product of this cul- ture’s racial paradoxes was the urban journalist Walter (subsequently Walt) Whitman. As a reporter for the New York Aurora in the early 1840s (where he was, in fact, a colleague of Mike Walsh), the author of a temperance dime novel Franklin Evans; or, Th e Inebriate (1842), a columnist at the Brooklyn Star in the mid-1840s, and, shortly aft er, a many-hatted editor at the Brooklyn Daily

Love and Th eft 82

Eagle , Whitman stands out in his attention to the various modes and media of “racial” representation, from minstrelsy to painting to politics itself. He too registered the contradiction between white supremacy and staunch egalitari- anism, and while it can scarcely be said that Whitman always found himself on the better side of this problem, he at least has the virtue of having wrestled with it. Th ere were surely complacent moments, such as the racialist-gothic subplot of Franklin Evans in which the protagonist, aft er a drunken binge, fi nds himself married to a Creole woman, herself a fi gure for his profl igacy. Worse yet, “Is not America for the Whites?” Whitman wrote in 1858. “And is it not better so?” On the other side were Whitman’s antislavery views, his cele- brations of black English (about which more later), and his praise of William Sidney Mount’s paintings of black life, which, he wrote in William Cullen Bryant’s New York Evening Post , “may be said to have a character of American- ism.” 33 Falling somewhere between these instances was Whitman’s interest in blackface minstrelsy.

Whitman was a great lover of the minstrel show, seeing in it an American example of what he had found in opera, but he could never quite decide whether it represented the best or the worst America had to off er in the way of a national art. He avidly attended blackface performances, as he did many Bowery productions, and he praised them in print. One troupe, the Harmo- neons, said Whitman in 1846, proved that much could be done with “low” material: “‘Nigger’ singing with them is a subject from obscure life in the hands of a divine painter: rags, patches and coarseness are imbued with the great genius of the artist.” Before long I hope to clarify what nourishment our dem- ocratic poet might have gotten out of blackface coarseness and obscurity; he certainly seems to have taken them for a people’s culture, representative not only of black life but of the Bowery pit as well. Yet Whitman later excoriated minstrelsy, not for its racism but for its vulgarity—“I must be pardoned for saying, that I never could, and never will, admire the exemplifying of our national attributes with Ethiopian minstrelsy”—a judgment whose evident distaste for black people themselves refl ects a somewhat common split in working-class culture between antislavery beliefs and personal abhorrence of blacks, not to mention of abolitionism as a movement. (Th ere were also, of course, other sorts of disjunctions and contradictions.) We do know that at the time of Whitman’s greatest enthusiasm for the minstrel show he was ex tensively engaged in Free-Soil politics, that late 1840s challenge to the pro- southern De- mocracy which would shortly grow into the Republican party. But the ambi- guities of Whitman’s culture inhered even in the relatively egalitarian Free-Soil movement, for, as Eric Foner observes, it was ideologically broad enough to encompass those opposed to slavery on moral grounds as well as those op- posed to the presence of Negro slaves in newly acquired territories and those worried about fugitive slaves fl eeing North—in short, “the most vulgar racists and the most determined supporters of Negro rights, as well as all shades of

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opinion between these extremes.” Whitman is a salutary reminder that there is no simple correspondence between individual racial feeling, cultural predis- position, and political ideology. In this he is perhaps a representative case; and he is representative as well in demonstrating both the potential and the real limits of class egalitarianism as a wellspring for antiracism. 34

It is an ambiguity one fi nds even in working-class forms such as the dime novel. Although black characters (and black writers) were seldom featured in such fi ction, Michael Denning has argued that certain of its favorite class plots could result in surprisingly radical racial stories. George Lippard’s New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million (1853) uses the familiar trope of a lowly me - chanic’s inheritance to narrate the fortunes of one of its black protagonists, Randolph Royalton. Born of a black slave mother, Randolph is the half-brother of the white Harry Royalton. Both have a claim on the Van Huyden inheri- tance; seeking it for himself, Harry hires a slave catcher to abduct Randolph and his sister into slavery. Th e inheritance takes on symbolic weight when Lip- pard reveals that Randolph’s mother was the daughter of a great “leader of the American people”—Th omas Jeff erson, perhaps, since stories of his purported slave children were well known (William Wells Brown called on them the same year in Clotel ). Th e story thus becomes, writes Denning, “an allegorical assertion of the Black Randolph’s rightful share in the inheritance of the Republic” ( Mechanic 116); derived from stories of noble white mechanics, the plot suddenly accommodates a sympathetic tale of black people’s fate in America. (Neither Randolph the black hero nor Arthur Dermoyne the white mechanic receives his inheritance.) Lippard certainly shared the racism of much of the antebellum labor movement, and in his novel Th e Quaker City; or, Monks of Monk Hall (1844) he uses race as a metaphor for corruption: the swindling, pretended southern aristocrat Colonel Fitz-Cowles turns out to be the son of a Creole slave. But the lineaments of Randolph’s story reveal that when structured along acceptable class lines—when, that is, there was an im- plicit twinning of blacks and working-class whites—black characters in such writing, as in popular culture at large, could be portrayed in liberatory ways. As it turned out, the converse was equally true: more than once, and increas- ingly as the 1840s went on, the presence of “blackness” in this culture would pose a signifi cant class threat.

“No Dainty Kid-Glove Business”

It was, most of all, as a “culturalist” class ideology, a manifestation of class values in audience rites and cultural self-presentation, that blackface spon- sored a sense of incipient class trouble. Th e social tenor of the new amuse- ments very quickly became fodder for the critics, who began to light on the defi ning—ideological—behavior of this emergent “public.” Even as early as the

Love and Th eft 84

1830s, T. D. Rice’s performances of “Jim Crow” at the Bowery Th eatre routinely brought crowds onto the stage (see Fig. 7 ):

When Mr. Rice came on the stage to sing his celebrated song of Jim Crow, they not only made him repeat it some twenty times, but hemmed him in so that he actually had no room to perform the little dancing or turning about appertaining to the song; and in the aft erpiece, where a supper-table is spread, some among the most hungry very leisurely helped themselves to the viands. It was a rare treat, indeed, to the audience. 35

Now this was theater for the million. Even when they did not partake of stage viands, audiences made their demands plain. Th e New York Mirror noted of one 1833 Bowery performance:

A few evenings since [the orchestra] were performing an overture, which did not exactly suit the cultivated taste of some worthies in the pit. “Yan- kee Doodle,” being more in unison with the patriotic ideas of propriety, was loudly called for, and its melting tones forthwith breathed forth in mellifl uous harmony. Th e pit were gratifi ed, and evinced their satisfaction by a gentle roar. (quoted in Buckley 156–57)

Th is is by no means the last we will see of such demonstrations; nor is it the last of stage reports whose irony, in a kind of homeopathic reaction to the events they describe, is barely under control.

Yet as many have pointed out, it is at fi rst baffl ing that such audience activ- ities should in the 1830s have taken on class-related signifi cation, for they had marked the experience of theatergoing as early as the turn of the nineteenth century. In 1802 Washington Irving (as Jonathan Oldstyle) was assailed by “thunderbolts” from the gods in the gallery:

Some how or another the anger of the gods seemed to be aroused all of a sudden, and they commenced a discharge of apples, nuts & gingerbread, on the heads of the honest folks in the pit . . . . I can’t say but I was a little ir- ritated at being saluted aside of my head with a rotten pippin, and was go- ing to shake my cane at them; but was prevented by a decent looking man behind me, who informed me it was useless to threaten or expostulate. Th ey are only amusing themselves a little at our expence, said he, sit down quietly and bend your back to it. My kind neighbour was interrupted by a hard green apple that hit him between the shoulders—he made a wry face, but knowing it was all in joke, bore the blow like a philosopher. (12)

So there was nothing especially new about the “gentle roar” of later years. Why, then, the access of irony in accounts of theater in the 1830s? As in so many instances, the irony says less about theatrical events than about the iro- nists themselves, particularly their increasing social distance, both within the

White Kids and No Kids At All 85

theater and without, from an emerging self-conscious class culture unheedful of the vulgarity of racial display. Th eater audiences and performances were becoming more diff erentiated, not more rowdy. 36

By the 1840s rowdiness had begun to seem a working-class style. If “legiti- mate” productions in this period aspired to a new restraint, popular amuse- ments cultivated a sort of demonstrative excess through which cultural allegiances were formed and class values negotiated. Th is ethos was briefl y crystallized in the post-panic street and stage appearance of the Bowery b’hoy (see Fig. 3 ), that “compound of East Side swell, gutter bum, and volunteer fi re laddie,” in Richard Dorson’s words, who parodied the styles of the “upper ten” and posed the greatest cultural challenge to uptown mandarins (288). Termed “Mose” aft er the stage character that set forth his popular image, the b’hoy aff ected a brusque manner, peculiar lingo, and extravagant costume, oft en capped by hair in “soap-locks” plastered to the temple and a shiny stovepipe hat. In many ways he exemplifi ed the fi rst U.S. working-class subculture—the volunteer fi reman bent on class travesty, the butcher wise in the ways of cul- tural bricolage. Although the b’hoy’s rubric invoked Irishness, no single ethnic profi le defi ned him, nor was he (contrary to later myth) a partisan of nativism. As one member of the subculture later recalled: “I was at that time what was known as a ‘Bowery Boy,’ a distinct ‘gang’ from either the ‘know-nothing’ or ‘Native American’ parties. Th e gang had no regular organization, but were a crowd of young men of diff erent nationalities, mostly American born, who were always ready for excitement, generally of an innocent nature” (quoted in Buckley 316). “Generally,” of course, makes room for the Astor Place riot—a phenomenon not only concurrent with the emergence of the b’hoys but in many ways a result of their conscious cultural self-defi nition. By about 1847 their arrival was being announced in various fi ctional forms, but it was secured by A Glance at New York in 1848 , one of the greatest melodramatic successes of the nineteenth-century New York stage.

“Mose’s” reception on opening night made it clear that the b’hoys’ time had come. As a near-contemporary wrote:

He stood there in his red shirt, with his fi re coat thrown over his arm, the stovepipe hat . . . drawn down over one eye, his trousers tucked into his boots, a stump of a cigar pointing up from his lips to his eye, the soap locks plastered fl at on his temples, and his jaw protruded into a half- beastly, half-human expression of contemptuous ferocity . . . . Taking the cigar stump from his mouth and turning half-way round to spit, he said:

“I ain’t a goin’ to run wid dat mercheen no more!” Instantly there arose such a yell of recognition as had never been

heard in the little house before . . . . Every man, woman, and child rec- ognized in the character all the distinctive external characteristics of the class. 37

Love and Th eft 86

A Glance at New York and sketches like it were riotously egalitarian, off ering a kind of plebeian heroism against the dangers of downtown New York. As with Davy Crockett, one of Mose’s frontier antecedents, pugilism was his avocation: “I’m bilein’ over for a rousin’ good fi ght with some one somewhere .  .  . . If I don’t have a muss soon, I’ll spile” (Baker, Glance 15). But the urban (and oft en pugilistic) business of fi re fi ghting was his central preoccupation:

Seys I, “What’s de matter, good woman?” Seys she, “My baby’s in de house, and it’s burnin’!” Seys I, “What!”—I turned my cap hindside afore, and buttoned my old fi re-coat, and I went in and fetched out dat baby . . . . Ever since dat time I’ve had a great partiality for little babies. Th e fi re- boys may be a little rough outside, but they’re all right here. ( Touches

Figure 3 Mose and Lize, 1848 Courtesy of the Library of Congress

White Kids and No Kids At All 87

breast .) It never shall be said dat one of de New York boys deserted a baby in distress. (20) 38

Th e fi gure of Mose, with his “g’hal” Lize or his partner Sykesy, focused an urban style that gave visible, class-resistant expression to the Bowery milieu. 39 Yet few writers have noted how much this expression owed to the accents of race.

I have mentioned that productions such as A Glance at New York did not stint on narratives of leisure time. One scene fi nds Lize on her way to work; she and Mose meet, and the two plot the evening’s fun:

Mose : Say, Lize, you’re a gallus gal, anyhow. Lize : I ain’t nothin’ else. Mose : What do yer say for Waxhall [the Vauxhall] to-night? Lize : What’s a-goin’ on?—is de wawdeville plays there? Mose : No—there’s goin’ to be a fi rst-rate shindig; some of our boys will be

there.

Lize : . . . I’d rather go to Christy’s. Did you ever see George Christy play the bones? ain’t he one of em?

Mose : Yes, he’s some.

Lize proceeds to sing one of the Christy’s Minstrels’ songs, to Mose’s demotic approval, thus attesting again to the frequency with which blackface was used in nineteenth-century discourse to locate white working people. And it is almost predictable that minstrel acts would appropriate Mose himself, one of the many fi gures of white American humor that underwent a telling sea change on the minstrel stage. 40 Th e b’hoy appears not to have been compromised by this disguise. Mose’s mechanic accents already tend toward the dialect repre- sented as black on the popular stage; some minstrel songs merely blackened a Mose conforming in all other respects to the outlines of the stage b’hoy:

Wake up, Mose! De Fire am burning; Round de corner de smoke am curling. Wake up, Mose! the engine’s coming; Take de rope and keep a running!

“Fire, Fire, Fire” (1848) moves the titular confl agration to the plantation for heroism in black; “Work! Niggers, work!” (1849) celebrates b’hoy culture in sepia tones:

I like to see de engines fl y Th rough streets and ober ditches; And when de b’hoys get in a row, Dey fi ght like sons of—Freedom! 41

Such were the ready class associations of “blackness” that even this transmuta- tion came with little eff ort. As the Journal of Music wrote, “What magnifi cent

Love and Th eft 88

basses and tenors may be heard among our fi remen, when making merry to- gether and singing [blackface songs such as] “Uncle Ned,” “Old Dan Tucker,” or “Lovely May!” (“Letter from A. W. T.” 170). To be sure, the rowdiness that gave rise to chants of freedom was achieved by way of oppressive racial carica- ture, and in this the minstrel show mimicked Jacksonian social relations all around. What is surprising is the degree to which the blackness of the oppressed could itself become an idiom of class dissent—a fact that implied some sense of cross-racial identifi cation. Th e danger was, of course, that the b’hoys’ black- face conquest of the theater foretold greater disasters than those at Astor Place.

An indication that “black” practices routinely conveyed this kind of danger appears in an 1849 account of saloon dancing by George Foster, the most famous urban chronicler of nightlife and amusements in this period. Retrac- ing Dickens’s steps (in American Notes ) on a Saturday night slumming trip to New York’s depressed Five Points section, Foster describes the entertainment at Pete Williams’s saloon, now renamed Dickens’s Place. Th e performers are black, not blackfaced; they number a fi ddler, a trumpeter, and a bass drummer. Th e dancers are racially mixed: “Th ieves, loafers, prostitutes and rowdies, as well as . . . honest, hard-working people” ( Gas-Light 73). Th e orchestra strikes up a blackface minstrel tune, “Cooney in de Holler”:

Th e dancers begin contorting their bodies and accelerating their move- ments, accompanied with shouts of laughter and yells of encouragement and applause, until all observance of the fi gure is forgotten and every one leaps, stamps, screams and hurras on his or her own hook. Aff airs are now at their hight [ sic ]. Th e black leader of the orchestra increases the momentum of his elbow and calls out the fi gure in convulsive eff orts to be heard, until shining streams of perspiration roll in cascades down his ebony face; the dancers, now wild with excitement, like Ned Buntline at Astor Place, leap frantically about like howling dervishes, clasp their partners in their arms, and at length conclude the dance in hot confusion and disorder. (74) 42

Th e point here is not merely that black cultural forms and their minstrel coun- terfeits evoked the riotousness that had lately riven the city. It is also that the language of revolt and the language of amusement were impossible to separate; they bled into each other, the same words referring eff ortlessly to two, now necessarily related, phenomena. What Foster is describing is in fact the riot—a fl ing beginning merrily enough and descending, urged on by the leader, into hot confusion and disorder. If the Astor Place riot had itself manifested social divisions in the sphere of culture, it now made a language of eruption available for revolutionary cultural events. Th e inference that blackface forms, despite all appearances, might have been included among these is hard to resist, given that the revolution then brewing under William Lloyd Garrison’s slogan “No Compromise with Slaveholders” was adding a racial component to the threat

White Kids and No Kids At All 89

of social breakup. Fervid cultural forms, oft en “black” ones, sustained the sense of blood and revolution that came to be associated with Astor Place.

It is clear at least that high-toned commentators directed a broad vocabu- lary of distaste at these possibly insurrectionary developments. Following the riot, the Home Journal wrote that if Macready wished to see those he had off ended, he had only to “follow a well-dressed idler down Broadway and observe the looks he gets from Mose and the soap-lock-ery as he goes along.” Th e article went on to say: “Let but the more passive aristocratic party clearly select a favorite . . . and let there be but a symptom of a handle for the B’hoys to express their dissent, and the undercurrent breaks forth like an uncapped hydrant” (May 12, 1849). But the b’hoys themselves found the “aristocratic party” far from “passive.” Said one speech maker at a rally the day aft er the riot: “For what—for whom was this murder committed? . . . To please the aristoc- racy of the city, at the expense of the lives of inoff ending citizens . . . to revenge the aristocrats of this city against the working classes.” 43 Th ese were, perhaps, the same “sons of freedom” that blackface acts were so apt to celebrate. In any case, such talk kept the class ardor of this plebeian culture in full view, even before the riots. Th e standard account of Bowery patrons usually repeated the familiar metaphors, which, though they very quickly assumed the status of narrative convention, lost little of their power to disturb. Whitman, whose early journalism, if not his early poetry, is in the b’hoy manner, late in his life celebrated the 1830s Bowery Th eatre:

Pack’d from ceiling to pit with its audience mainly of alert, well dress’d, full blooded young and middle-aged men, the best average of American-born mechanics . . . the whole crowded auditorium, and what seeth’d in it, and fl ush’d from its faces and eyes, to me as much a part of the show as any— bursting forth in one of those long-kept-up tempests of hand-clapping peculiar to the Bowery—no dainty kid-glove business, but electric force and muscle from perhaps 2000 full-sinew’d men. (“Old” 595)

And in 1847 the Spirit of the Times observed

a vast sea of upturned faces and red fl annel shirts, extending its roaring and turbid waves close up to the foot-lights on either side, clipping in the orchestra and dashing furiously against the boxes—while a row of luck- ier and stronger-shouldered amateurs have pushed, pulled and trampled their way far in advance of the rest, and actually stand with their chins resting on the lamp board, chanking peanuts and squirting tobacco juice upon the stage. (February 6, 1847)

What, fi nally, are we to make of howling dervishes, uncapped hydrants, electric force, turbid waves? First, this was indeed a “manly” preserve, a sphere of traditional male prowess and bravado whose turf loyalties were as likely to result in individual or gang violence as in the camaraderie of the saloon. 44

Love and Th eft 90

Th ere is no doubt that it was a newly contested space: since it drew its focus from leisure activities rather than the experience of work, it had to make a certain amount of new room for “its” gals; and a gay male subculture was just beginning to come into view in the Bowery, as Christine Stansell has noted (90–92). But its masculinism traversed the minstrel show’s representations of women and black men both. Whitman’s account captures the homoerotic mo- ment of the usually misogynist male bonding that took place—over women’s bodies, between the men onstage and those in the audience—in the minstrel show’s “wench” characters. Th is homosexual-homosocial pattern persisted all through minstrelsy’s antebellum tenure, structuring in white men’s “imagi- nary” relation to black men a dialectic of romance and repulsion. 45 If min- strelsy was based on an extreme though contradictory white fascination with black(faced) men, there was no less a white male solidarity over against them that obviously inspired racist ridicule. In any case, we shall see how insistently blackface performance concerned itself with matters of the body—gender anxieties, unconventional sexuality, orality—which mediated, and regulated, the formation of white working-class masculinity. 46

Second, we ought to take seriously the more or less explicit threat regularly imputed to this culture, despite the temptation to see its collective fervor, like the violence at Astor Place, as little more than American farce to European tragedy—all we could muster, perhaps, in the way of revolutionary barricades. Th is view is unfortunately encouraged by the infl uential typology Alan Daw- ley and Paul Faler devised to account for the range of nineteenth-century working-class cultural predispositions. Charting workers’ varied responses to an increasingly rigid code of industrial morality, Dawley and Faler found a basic cleavage between “traditionalists” and “modernists.” Traditionalists were those men we might expect to see in minstrel theaters; they “refused to give up their casual attitudes toward work, their pursuit of happiness in gaming and drinking, and the raucous revelry that accompanied fi re and militia musters.” Modernists, by contrast, shunned the “warm sociability of the drinking club [and] the ‘wasteful’ amusement of the circus and the Jim Crow show,” whether they were “rebels” who involved themselves in industrial militancy or “loyal- ists” who in the name of respectability held aloof from both spirits and class confl ict (468).

Yet, as Sean Wilentz has stressed, there was intentionality even in the b’hoys’ traditionalist vehemence. Wilentz does not see in their pursuit of pleasure the passivity of workers dulled by a consolidating culture industry and uninter- ested in radical organizing; on the contrary, he construes “the republicanism of the Bowery and the republicanism of the unions” as “diff erent but at times overlapping expressions of the journeymen’s fears and aspirations—one focused on the economic and political sources of inequality and exploitation, the other stressing cultural autonomy and manly independence” (270). In many ways the b’hoy was a rebel in traditionalist disguise; and this is a matter

White Kids and No Kids At All 91

worth being clear about, given the advent in the postdepression 1840s of ap- parently more “cultural” responses to class confl ict (nativism, temperance, and so on) and the decline of organized, 1830s-style class militancy. Certainly one sees a marked class accent in most minstrel acts’ racial representations. Th e dictates of autonomy readily enough produced blackface butts of derision for white men on the bottom; yet, perhaps as a result of minstrel fi gures’ sexual or sentimental power, they were occasionally objects of white male envy as well, even fi gures of interracial identifi cation, providing in imaginary ways the labor abolitionism that failed to materialize in the Northeast before the Civil War. Minstrelsy’s use of racial license to map class revolt was one gesture in the sphere of culture toward what remained undone in the realm of politics.

With the eruption of class into the cultural arena—in the modality of race— the lower million had certainly shattered the mirror held up to nature, the universally representative character of “the” theater. As the actor William Davidge complained in 1866 (in a ritual mode by then at least twenty years old), “Th e rapid increase in the population in newly formed cities, produces a style of patrons whose habits and associations aff ord no opportunity for the cultivation of the arts” (202). In 1850 that would have been far the best face to put on it. By then the minstrel show was off ering class turbulence with a racial accent, one element of a cultural revolution that made correlate use of grave racial confl icts. Minstrelsy was a prime example of the sometimes contestatory character of plebeian culture, articulating class diff erence, intentionally or not, by calling on the insurrectionary resonances of black culture. To put this an- other way, popular entertainments in which race was foregrounded yielded up a sense of unrest waiting to be tapped at its class source. For a brief time in the nineteenth century it seemed that the blackface impulse, based so fi rmly on the association of “blackness” with the white working class, was backfi ring. As certain traditions of racial exchange were “elevated” into an art of black humil- iation, that art fed in turn off class energies which resisted containment—and which had the unintended eff ect of marking the public threat of black culture. Th ere was no other conclusion, wrote an exasperated New York Herald in 1848: “Th ere is a revolution going on in theatres. Th e legitimate drama is down for ever, buried and entombed twenty feet under ground” (January 3).

Culture was now politicized in the most spectacular ways. Th e class anger of the Astor Place riot was strangely confl uent with the struggles over slavery that were coming, that same year, to characterize the state of the Union. And this twin threat was no mere satire of the Paris June days. It was, in a sense, our 1848. In just what sense, exactly, is the subject of the next chapter.

{ 4 }

Th e Blackening of America P opul ar Culture and National Cultures

American opera—put three banjos (or more?) in the orchestra . . . . —Walt Whitman

Jim Crow and Zip Coon seemed unlikely candidates for a national cultural form. And yet, as the Democratic Review admitted in 1845, the idea had a certain plausibility. “Th e lowest description of American farce,” to be sure, “still in its elements, not without originality, considerable invention, and a rich vein of bur- lesque humor, is the Æthiopian drama” (“American” 219). (Perhaps an ortho- graphical adjustment would take care of everything.) In what possible way could a host of white men in blackface and motley rags, given to unvarnished ob- scenity and anticipating the phallic hucksters of Huckleberry Finn’s Royal None- such, be considered representative of a national art form? Th is question was bound to be debated in the 1840s, the years of blackface minstrelsy’s greatest popularity as well as of an intense investment on the part of many Americans in the idea of cultural and political nationalism.

Unfortunately, the American theater was much slower than the country’s literature to develop what one might call a postcolonial sensibility. While Irving, Bryant, and Cooper could already be said to have given unique expres- sion to America in the major literary genres, playwrights, as David Grimsted has emphasized, sustained themselves mainly through rewritings of August von Kotzebue and other European melodramatists. America had its players (Edwin Forrest, Charlotte Cushman) and its thematic and formal proclivities (Forrest’s Jacksonian stalwarts; antiarriviste comedies of manners such as Anna Cora Mowatt’s Fashion ), but little that could stand as distinguished na- tional drama. Th e appearance of Mose on the Bowery stage, as we have seen, was no consolation to anyone but the class of New Yorkers he purported to represent; and to parvenu Whig fashioners of bourgeois taste such as Nathan- iel P. Willis, the whole Bowery scene was a bad dream the country might never shake off . Th e Whiggish preference for imported opera and the general infl ux

Th e Blackening of America 93

of European talent, including Ole Bull and Jenny Lind, only reiterated the dearth—and were rivaled anyway by less respectable competition. “While even [the] attempt to establish an Italian Opera here, though originating with the wealthiest and best educated classes, has resulted in bankruptcy, the Ethio- pian Opera has fl ourished like a green bay tree,” Putnam’s Monthly sardonically observed. “Th e only places of Amusement where the entertainments are indig- enous are the African Opera Houses, where native American vocalists, with blackened faces, sing national songs, and utter none but native witticisms” (February 1854). Th e main misfortune was perhaps that the confi rmed social divisions in American culture produced lively popular theatrical forms at the very moment when nationalist fervor was reaching its highest peak.

It appears rather self-evident to us, as it did to antebellum partisans of the slave narrative, that slavery and race were matters which particularly defi ned America, and which might have been expected to furnish it with politically expedient and emotionally charged cultural material. Th at the minstrel show took up these issues at all is perhaps more signifi cant than that it did so in an objectionable way; yet the fact that it shoved racial matters to the fore made it even less palatable to elites than the usual run of “low” comedy. Th e legitimate stage’s colonial hangover looks from this perspective like avoidance and sup- pression rather than inadequacy of talent or ambition, for it broached such matters only in minor or superfi cial ways until the 1850s. But it must also be said that this avoidance was part of a generalized inverse provincialism in mid- century American life, characterizing even those intellectuals most engaged in defending a new kind of national democratic culture. Andrew Ross observes that a major component of the national culture in the United States has in fact been its dependence for cultural authority on borrowed foreign capital, owing to the absence of intellectual “formations of prestige” relatively independent of the canons of European taste ( No 62–63). Th is situation had more specifi c results than Emerson’s failed “original relation with the universe,” most notably an intelligentsia unable to address the elements of its own national-popular cul- ture. Th us, in the battle between the Knickerbocker writers and the striplings of Young America over the defi nition of an “American” culture, the antagonists— excepting Melville—were united in looking to Europe for legitimation, whether the particular quest was for “Rabelaisian” wit or intellectual Teutonism. 1

Melville was nearly the only elite cultural fi gure to recognize the centrality of racial confl ict to whatever national culture might be on the horizon. For the most part, addressing the American dilemma was left to less legitimized cul- tural spheres, such as genteel women’s fi ction ( Uncle Tom’s Cabin ) or popular entertainment forms (the minstrel show), themselves united in Uncle Tom ’s stage tenure. Th is is one context also for the brief engagement with race by that least respectable of now canonical writers, Walt Whitman. It seems to me no accident that the writer who took up literary nationalism just as Young America was abandoning it did so partly through an encounter with the

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cultural politics of race—helped, perhaps, by the fact that he would have been quite out of bounds in Evert Duyckinck’s library in Clinton Place.

Indeed, the project of cultural nationalism was fi nally to be tripped up by the racial diff erence it had repressed, a diff erence registered most insistently and popularly in the minstrel show. But this issue was complicated even more by a brief fl ourishing of competing national cultures. With the massive swell of immigrants from famine-ridden Ireland in the mid-1840s, subcultural institu- tions set up to organize Irish concerns (among others the Catholic church), not to mention varieties of nativist resistance to them, gave new visibility to nationality and ethnicity. Later in the decade, Martin Delany and other black nationalists, in political tracts and projected African expeditions, began ur- gently moving toward some new sense of black nationhood. In a kind of post- colonial chain, “Anglo-Saxon” Americans distanced themselves from Britain as new ethnic formations combated one another in their turn. Far from being abstract inquiries, however, these movements were lived by working people who were bound up with the culture in which blackface moved and had its being. Th e point is that this jostle of cultures opened a national-popular space that was to be vigorously contested in the 1840s, quite fi ercely as it turned out, and oft en in the arena of blackface minstrelsy. Ultimately, the measure of its cultural power in this period is the claim the minstrel show made, against all the odds, on the idea of a national culture.

Th e National Popular

In his great essay on the British music hall singer Marie Lloyd, T. S. Eliot raised certain issues vital to the notion of what Antonio Gramsci called a national- popular culture. 2 Eliot refused to see her popularity as mere commercial success: “It is [rather] evidence of the extent to which she represented and expressed that part of the English nation which has perhaps the greatest vi- tality and interest” (172). Lamenting the “listless apathy” characteristic of viewers of the “rapid-breeding cinema,” Eliot (in curiously Whitmanesque tones) argues that the “working man who went to the music-hall and saw Marie Lloyd and joined in the chorus was himself performing part of the act,” engaged as he was in “that collaboration of the audience with the artist which is necessary in all art” (174). Embedded in these already atypical refl ections is a passage that is worth quoting at length:

It was her understanding of the people and sympathy with them, and the people’s recognition of the fact that she embodied the virtues which they genuinely most respected in private life, that raised her to the position she occupied at her death . . . . I have called her the expressive fi gure of the lower classes. Th ere is no such expressive fi gure for any other class. Th e middle classes have no such idol: the middle classes are morally corrupt.

Th e Blackening of America 95

Th at is to say, their own life fails to fi nd a Marie Lloyd to express it; nor have they any independent virtues which might give them as a conscious class any dignity. (173)

If there is here a certain degree of nostalgie de la boue , these remarks, venom and all, strike me as a largely persuasive formulation of the place of successful popular arts in the life of the popular classes and of the relation of both to “re- spectable” society. Although I have no impulse to champion the minstrel show in similar terms, 3 Eliot’s essay suggests at least two major emphases in regard to that phenomenon, emphases my whole study is concerned to investigate. First, blackface artists did give voice (if not in unitary or stable ways) to the most private “virtues” of the popular classes, regarding not only race but a whole range of meanings and values. Th is is the fairly straightforward sense in which minstrelsy off ered a national stage for confl icts and concerns peculiar to some of the people who suff ered most immediately the eff ects of the industrializing metropolis in the earliest years of its development. Second, however, the min- strel show’s adherents also occupied, culturally, something of the position of Eliot’s middle classes, for their values were expressed through fi gures drawn not from their own lives but from another part of the social formation. Th e black- face performer is in eff ect a perfect metaphor for one culture’s ventriloquial self-expression through the art forms of someone else’s.

To say so seems merely to state the obvious. Perhaps the sheer strangeness of this predicament is—aft er the Jazz Age, aft er early rock ’n’ roll—now lost to us. Some of its reasons, or at least some of its eff ects, will, I hope, eventually become clear. What I mean to suggest about the character of popular culture in America is how unstable an entity it has been—a site of confl icting interests, appropriations, impersonations, indeed “nationalities,” even in its allegedly national forms. Little wonder, then, that the question of whose “national” cul- ture best expressed American life emerged around the popularity of the min- strel show, or that one sees a constant struggle for control—encompassing black, white, immigrant Irish, and other cultures—within blackface forms themselves. Th e problem of minstrelsy and national cultures at midcentury, that is to say, comprised both a continual struggle over and an unceasing struggle within the popular. Th e contest between cultural forms for national hegemony was matched only by that among various “national” cultural ele- ments for control of particular forms. If the issue of the national culture is, as I believe it should be, at the center of U.S. cultural studies, this volatile enga- gement and internal self-diff erentiation of cultures, rather than consensus models of cultural assimilation or unity-in-diff erence, must become our fo - cus. 4 Popular forms and popular audiences are less fi xed referents than sites of continual reconstitution, the popular less an object than a space: in the case of blackface acts the most accessible place of public interaction and confl ict between and among dominant, subordinate, and enslaved “national” cultures

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at a crucial moment in our history. 5 Th is tangle of involvement occurred at many levels: blackface performers’ relations with the black artists from whom their material was “collected”; these (oft en Irish) performers’ engagement with the material itself; the mix of white material and black material; the reception of this mixed material by variegated white audiences; those audiences’ atti- tudes toward the small number of black performers; and fi nally, the struggle between minstrelsy and other contenders for the status of national art form. It is important to stress the confl ictual nature of these relationships, which has for the most part been neglected. Th e complexity of the confl icts is evident above all in the way competing “national” vernaculars were housed within the minstrel show, around which certain lines of historical force begin to emerge.

One must beware the fi gural status of national entities—those “imagined communities,” in Benedict Anderson’s phrase. Th is is not to say that they are “inauthentic,” or always irredeemably hypostatized; any community whose mem- bers are not immediately present to one another is necessarily constituted by some idea of itself, indeed by elaborate performative strategies of rhetorical self- constitution. As Anderson puts it, “Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (15). In nineteenth-century post-Herderian vogues of the folk, this “style” most oft en included raising a “people’s” vernacular to view, usually in print, but also in popular songs and theatrical forms. (Th e dubiousness of the claims for authentic “folk” culture need not detain us here; I will return to this question later in the chapter.) As has oft en been argued, the part played by the inven- tion of “folk” cultures in the constitution of nationality cannot be overesti- mated, and is a chief means by which “indigeneity” may be constructed by postcolonial societies. 6 It was in the nineteenth century, as Hugh Seton- Watson shows, that the vernacularizing drive was linked to the fl orescence of European nationalisms; and it was in this period as well (not immediately aft er the 1776 Revolution) that the United States went through a peculiarly “European” phase of vernacular self-discovery. True to the nation’s inter- nally contradictory makeup, however—or to the contradictions of any national self-defi nition, as Homi Bhabha suggests (“DissemiNation” 299, 301)—America witnessed a simultaneous hybridization and proliferation of vernaculars, in which frontier lore, European elements, and various local or regional forms merged into an “American” vernacular even as the outlines of each of these elements sharpened—in, for instance, Major Jack Downing broadsides, the stage Yankee, southern Cavalier mythology, immigrant Irish and German stories and songs, Davy Crockett almanacs, and slave culture’s oral and performance genres. Indeed, if the newspaper is a distinctive factor in the organization of national self-consciousness, the expansion of the penny press in America in the 1830s, with its broad emphasis on artisan con- cerns, as well as its splintering into ethnic, political, and racial publics, is another instance of this dual phenomenon. 7 Th e minstrel show was a major

Th e Blackening of America 97

exponent of such simultaneously creolizing and individuating developments. Based, however uneasily, on the blending of “national” cultures—off ering indeed a primary channel for cultural interchange—minstrelsy, with its per- ceived “blackness,” became a competitor for control of the national popular.

Th is ambiguity gave minstrelsy much of its resonance. For the play of ver- naculars within the form of the minstrel show helped make it a mediator of ethnic confl ict in the antebellum North, which in turn reinforced its formal polyphony. Th is, it seems to me, is the best way to map what is usually seen as its cultural “mix.” Th e mix itself is genuine. As we know, some minstrel per- formers claimed they did “fi eldwork” among southern blacks while on tour, though in fact this required at most a trip to the East River waterfront; it was to their professional advantage to make such claims. In any case, there was no reason for performers not to lift black material when they came across it. Th e constant public references to minstrel performances as “unique” can probably be accounted for by this blending of black and white elements (Toll 43–45). Th e researches of Hans Nathan, Robert Toll, and others suggest that the minstrel show’s humor, songs, and dances were so culturally mixed as, in eff ect, to make their “racial” origins quite undecidable—black lore interspersed with south- western humor (itself oft en an interracial creation); black banjo techniques and rhythms interrupting folk dance music of the British Isles (as it had been taken up by whites in the United States); the vigorous earth-slapping footwork of black dances warring with the Irish lineaments of blackface jigs and reels. 8 Th e very instrumentation of minstrel bands followed this pattern: the banjo and jawbone were black, while the fi ddle, bones, and tambourine (derived per- haps from an instrument called the bodhran) were Irish (Cantwell 258). Most critics, then and now, agree that a certain amount of mixing characterized the music and the dances, but much less the lyrics on which most of the burden of racial burlesque rested. 9 In T. D. Rice’s act alone one might have seen some version of a predominantly black dance style performed to manifestly Euro- pean (oft en Irish) music, with lyrics of a more or less satirical and racist nature. 10 Th e creolized character of black forms themselves, of course, not to mention their casual and undocumentable infl uence on white ones, muddies this whole question considerably and makes all cultural labeling a provisional matter. Indeed, the heated debate about black secular music’s “origins” (as with min- strelsy) turns up highly speculative, straining, even bizarre arguments as to its defi nitive (white or black) “source,” arguments that unmask nothing so much as the arguments themselves, self-evident plays for rhetorical (and racial) mas- tery over a very confused and confusing history of cultural intermixing. 11

As they became entrenched in a rough and rowdy urban sphere, particularly aft er the fi rst halting decade of entr’acte performances and theatrical experi- ments, such miscegenated minstrel acts came to negotiate interethnic tensions among working-class Irish and blacks, the history of which could in part be written from the history of minstrelsy. Th is history incidentally displaces both

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the binary emphasis on “the” black-white relationship in America and roman- tic models of ethnic pluralism in favor of black-ethnic white relations, and highlights the necessarily exploitative making of the Irish as “white” even as that privileged category oft en oppressed the Irish themselves. Th ese tensions, of course, would fi nally prove disastrous in the bloody 1863 draft riots, when Irish draft ees, angry at a conscription law that allowed men of means to buy their way out of military service, unleashed their frustrations on New York City’s blacks. But there was in fact a quite ambiguous history of Irish-black re- lations behind this violence. Indeed, evidence exists that in these years black- face provided a means of displaced immigrant self-expression; another strain of white ventriloquism through black art forms begins to make sense here.

Even before the vast waves of immigration (one came in the late 1820s, an- other in the mid-1840s), Irish and black tended to share the same class niche, resulting in confl icts of all kinds, but also in interracial friendships and even marriages. Robert Cantwell observes that “smoked Irishman” was nineteenth- century rural slang for “Negro” (262)—a phrase that indicated the fundamen- tal affi nity in the popular mind between these groups. As this phrase also suggests, there were surely uncharitable equations of black and Irish: during her stay on a Georgia plantation, the actress Fanny Kemble wrote in her diary of the remarkable resemblance between the “low Irish” and southern slaves (105), an equation exploited, as Dale Knobel points out, in stage productions such as William Macready’s Irishman in London (1853), in which Murtoch Del- aney fi nds his perfect match in “grinning Cuba,” the African (93). More sym- pathetically, however, Frederick Douglass once remarked that the only songs which came close to the pathos of slave songs were those he had heard in Ire- land in 1845–46, during the famine. 12 Some of these strains may have infected the work of the many Irish-American minstrel composers and performers— Stephen Foster, Dan Emmett, Dan Bryant, Joel Walker Sweeney, George Ch - risty, and others—who were also on intimate terms with local black cultural forms. (To take but one example, Foster’s family’s consciousness of its heritage kept alive the poems and songs of Th omas Moore, whose sentiments would inform Foster songs such as “Old Folks at Home” [Hamm 214–15].) Th e Irish elements of blackface, including the fact that minstrel characters were surely infl uenced by Irish low-comedy types from the British stage, no doubt made possible the Irish ascendancy within the minstrel show, aff ording immigrants a means of cultural representation from behind the mask. Th ey probably ac- count as well for the ease with which blackface songs and skits incorporated Irish brogues and other ethnic dialects, with absolutely no sense of contradic- tion; blackface, bizarrely enough, was actually used to represent all ethnicities on the antebellum stage prior to the development of ethnic types (Flynn 426). Th e classic expression of this racial-ethnic overlap would come with the post- war skits of the Irish team Harrigan and Hart, but the frequency of titles such as “Tis Sad to Leabe Our Tater Land” (early 1850s) and “Ireland and Virginia,”

Th e Blackening of America 99

or of blackface Irish nationalist tunes, attested to the potential embrace of Paddy and Jim Crow. 13

As Fanny Kemble herself remarked, however, the closer the affi nity, the greater the hostility between Irish and black. Th e violent confrontations of these years point to less cheery interpretations of Irishmen’s involvement in minstrelsy. An English observer noted in 1833 that “nearly all of [the Boston Irish], who have resided there any length of time, are more bitter and severe against the blacks than the native whites themselves. It seems as if the disease were more virulent when taken by inoculation than in the natural way” (quoted in Runcie 198). Many antiabolitionist and anti–black temperance riots in the 1830s and 1840s (particularly in Philadelphia) have been seen as angry correctives on the part of Irish and other workingmen to their own sense of political powerlessness and economic disenfranchisement—their resem- blance, in both class and ethnic terms, to “blackness.” At the polls the Irish typically resisted this resemblance by voting for proslavery Democrats and decrying abolition as “niggerology.” 14 Th is evidence would appear to support Robert Cantwell’s notion that blackface acts had the eff ect of promoting so- cially insecure Irishmen (actors as well as audiences), an “Americanizing” ritual by which they distanced themselves from the people they parodied (265). Yet I have shown that the class aura of minstrel shows was scarcely ele- vating; and performers’ contradictory relations with those from whom they appropriated black arts, and their social proximity to black culture, considerably complicate Cantwell’s idea.

As with their relationship to American blacks generally, a social antinomy characterized Irish immigrants’ involvement in minstrelsy. Its clearest political analogue was the equivocation of Irish nationalists in regard to antislavery. In the 1840s the Garrisonians, on the basis of the nationalist and antislavery pres- tige of Daniel O’Connell’s anticolonial Repeal movement, tried to forge an al- liance that would garner immigrant Irish support for abolitionism. In the mouth of Wendell Phillips, the equation of the sorry conditions of Irish peas- ants and southern blacks became an emancipatory strategy. While this eff ort was briefl y successful (with Hibernian Anti-Slavery Society enthusiasm riding high), the Garrisonians’ entrepreneurial outlook, and what Gilbert Osofsky terms the “dilemmas of romantic nationalism,” fi nally alienated immigrant workers necessarily more attuned to the wage envelope and (for all their sym- pathy with Ireland) their own position within the American nation—hardly a concern of the Garrisonians. As Irish miners in Pennsylvania put it: “We do not form a distinct class of the community, but consider ourselves in every respect as citizens of this great and glorious republic.” 15 Th e immigrant Irish identifi cation with both marginal and “native” Americans epitomized by this episode was institutionalized in, for example, the Catholic church, which, as Mike Davis argues, joined plebeian ethno-religious commitments to a liberal republican nationalism so as to acculturate “millions of Catholic immigrants

Love and Th eft 100

to American liberal-capitalist society while simultaneously carving out its own sphere of sub-cultural hegemony” (24). Minstrelsy’s mix of “national” vernac- ulars was situated at the precise juncture of these confl icts; it resolved the con- tradictory “national” impulses into a popular art form. Blackface was at one and the same time a displaced mapping of ethnic Otherness and an early agent of acculturation. A song such as “Ireland and Virginia” depended on an ex- pression of Irishness through the medium of “blackness,” itself also an institu- tion of “Americanizing” whitening. 16

Th e irony, however, is that this confl ictual sphere was so oft en taken as the domain of a newly fascinating “negro” or “African” culture, and in this guise blackface minstrelsy threatened to lay claim to the title of native American genius.

Oh, white folks, I’ll revibe to you, Dem good old songs dat once was new; De fust I’ll name, was all de go, ’Bout de dancing nigger dey call Jim Crow

But de greatest one in de sable crowd, Was a rich old man dey called him proud; He made great Norway Ole Bull stutter, For a champion ob de string, was ole Dan Tucker 17

With its cool inscriptions of racial diff erence (“Oh, white folks”) and national chauvinism (against Ole Bull), such material launched “black” culture into the nationalist fray. No matter how distorted or weak this material may appear, one must take seriously the frequent public perception of the minstrel show as black. For it was in this way that it became not just an ethnic mediator but a civic presence—to some a foretaste of revolution. (“Th e basic paradox” of peo- ple’s attachment to a nation, writes Slavoj Žižek, is that it is “conceived as some- thing inaccessible to the other, and at the same time threatened by it” [54].) Notwithstanding the sometimes withering irony of the blackface counterfeit, its troubling, or just as oft en attractive, “black” aspects competed for public attention. We have already seen several accounts of the minstrel show as a black “people’s culture,” as in Margaret Fuller’s “African” melodies; German ob- server Moritz Busch similarly took certain blackface songs for a genuine black Volkslied , capable, moreover, of culturally representing America as a whole. 18

It is further striking that blackface performers became “negroes” in the playbills, daily newspapers, and song sheets that registered their careers. In all but the most self-conscious of discourses, it was always implied that black men now nightly purveyed black dialect, dance, music, and humor in a theatrical form invariably called “negro minstrelsy.” It must have been these tropes that accounted for the belief of many early observers that they were in fact watch- ing blacks onstage. Th e power of blackface, indeed, must be understood as in part a media creation:

Th e Blackening of America 101

Th e performances at the New York Museum are unparalleled in the annals of exhibition. For the sum of one shilling you see Master Frank Diamond [white dancer Francis Lynch], the great negro dancer, Mr. Alden, the unrivalled Ethiopian melodist and banjo player, Mr. Nellis, the wonder of the world, born without arms, Miss Rosalie, the lovely songstress, Mr. Delarne, the much admired mimic, and Mr. Col- lins, the popular comic singer. 19

We must ask why in the world a culture so fearful of “blacks on top” would indulge that very fantasy in reports of the stage. Th e phenomenon of min- strelsy itself was an admission of fascination with blacks and black culture. Why then rub it in with this suspension of disbelief? From the beginning there seems to have been a general forgetting of the fact of white impersonation, a thrilling pretense of breaking the taboo against black performers on the pop- ular musical stage which prevailed into the 1850s. In eff ect, this meant trading one equivocal cultural relationship for another: momentarily preserving the idea of blacks onstage as the price of denying one’s own mimicry of them. Th is was hardly a satisfactory trade; if it was mesmerizing, it was also perilous, as we shall see. But it was compelling in any case, or this fi ction of black performers would not have been extended into the daily papers, eff ectively creating for the fi rst time a sense of popular black cultural representation.

In spite, that is, of the greater or lesser hegemonic intentions of the types, and in spite of audience awareness of the counterfeit, the advent of minstrelsy was still read as a new infusion of “blackness” and black cultural practices into American life. Perhaps the journalistic convention of referring to blackface “negroes” merely paid confl icted tribute to that infusion. As for the types, they probably could not have taken a very diff erent shape. I have noted the ideolog- ical ferment around racial theories in this period (perhaps more complex than “scientifi c racism” later in the century); nevertheless, a set pattern of racial traits tended to be present in representations of black people. Th e traits them- selves were hardly open to question. What were debated were the kinds of explanation (religious, metaphysical, anthropological, and so on), and indeed valuation, given those traits. 20 As for the counterfeit, it is clear enough from the evidence that consciousness of the copy did not foreclose on a variety of responses to its “blackness.”

Indeed, if by the mid-1840s it was generally held true, as Whitman wrote in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle , that “the subtlest spirit of a nation is expressed through its music—and the music acts reciprocally upon the nation’s very soul” (“Th ought” 345), then a minstrel-loving America was caught in some- thing of a cultural hailstorm. As we have seen, part of the tony disgust that grew up around minstrelsy was simply a revulsion against the popular, the vulgar and sentimental tastes of what J. S. Dwight rather typically referred to as the “clapping classes” (“Music” 94). In his Journal of Music , Dwight on one

Love and Th eft 102

occasion tried to defl ect his critics’ (accurate) charges of Europhilia: “Why as- sume that the term ‘German’ was applied to [a piece of music under review] by way of praise? ” he feinted. His logic is somewhat tortuous:

To have said nothing would but have left the door open to the inference that the piece had a style new and original, peculiarly its author’s, or peculiarly American; which would have been true only in a limited de- gree. Indeed the motive of the term “German” partly was to save it from the questionable praise of classifi cation with what are commonly under- stood to be songs of the American stamp, that is to say “negro melodies,” or namby-pamby sentimental ditties . . . . (“Complaint” 94)

Apparently the demotic “American” came inevitably to mind as the inverse of European; though Dwight had high hopes for a national music, he was no Young American. On the contrary, there is an interesting set of equations here, of American music with “negro” music, and of “American” with debased art forms generally, as if minstrelsy were the most natural example of both. 21 Many commentators implicitly relied on this kind of equation in lamentations to the eff ect that American culture was turning out to be not only “question- able” but black.

“Th e Jim Crows, the Zip Coons, and the Dandy Jims, who have electrifi ed the world,” trumpeted Knickerbocker writer J. K. Kennard in 1845, “from them proceed our only truly national poets” (332). Kennard, like many Anglo- philes, was less than sanguine about the prospects of a national culture. By seizing on the newly available “black” idioms of the minstrel show as the most typically national cultural form, he intended to lampoon Young America’s quest for a national art with what he (probably correctly) assumed was its log- ical consequence. By their logic, Kennard implies, a truly national culture—in his terms provincial, untutored, and close to the soil, aft er the manner of Rob- ert Burns—would be made by slaves. Th e article’s mismanaged reactionary irony reaches straight to the heart of the problem, fueled inexorably by cultural anxiety and dread. For the outcome of such a national culture, as Kennard demonstrates, would amount to little less than insurrection. Finally mastered by his own irony, Kennard echoes Shelley:

Th e popular song-maker sways the souls of men; the legislator rules only their bodies. Th e song-maker reigns through love and spiritual affi nity; the legislator by brute force. Apply this principle to the American peo- ple. Who are our true rulers? Th e negro poets, to be sure! Do they not set the fashion, and give laws to the public taste? Let one of them, in the swamps of Carolina, compose a new song, and it no sooner reaches the ear of a white amateur , than it is written down, amended, (that is, almost spoilt,) printed, and then put upon a course of rapid dissemination, to cease only with the utmost bounds of Anglo-Saxondom, perhaps of the world. (340)

Th e Blackening of America 103

Th is strange piece is absolutely unfl inching: it imagines, negatively and some- what convolutedly, the very end of antebellum America’s attraction to black culture as it was presented in the minstrel show—a national culture owing to “Ethiopia,” not Europe. 22

Kennard was only the most hysterical observer of this “blackening of America.” 23 Dwight notably reprinted an article from London (no doubt echoing American concerns) citing “the great grievance of the metropolis—it is inundated by the ‘blacks.’” Part of the article’s interest is its utter confusion of blackface and blackness in describing the great grievance—an indication itself of national blackening. While “‘blacks’” probably referred only to black- face performers, it is not clear whether actual black people are being invoked. Th e reference to an increase of “nigger minstrels” and “sable musicians from America” (as indeed in the newspapers’ “negroes”) thus functioned as a dominant-cultural fi guration of black people that covered up the people them- selves; it collapsed blacks into itself and held them captive, both suggesting and withholding their presence. Th is doubleness indeed seems pretty much to have been the mode of the inundation. Cities experienced cultural blackening as a vast profusion of ambiguous signs that, like the minstrel mask itself, off ered the experience of “blackness” even as they absented it.

Th ey [the referent is unclear] infest our promenades and our concert halls like a colony of beetles. If we avoid their presence in street or music-room, their names and designations stare us out of countenance from dead walls, boardings, lamp posts, and the interior of omnibuses. If we read the advertising columns in the journals, our eye is arrested by a long list of musical performances to be given, aft er the most approved fashion, by these ebony artists from the regions of the sun . . . . Th e great Derby race is run amid a salvo of bones and banjos, and the Surrey and Middlesex Stakes are contested to the accompaniment of “Dandy Jim from Caroline,” or “My old massa tol’ me so.” 24

Blacks were suddenly everywhere—captive countenances paradoxically on the loose, bringing dead walls to life and crowding the omnibuses. It is no wonder that in these years Whitman the budding poet speculated in his note- books on the ideal number of banjos to be included in an American opera orchestra, or felt compelled to sketch a modifi cation of English pronunciation, suitable for a “native grand opera in America,” to be based on what he called “nigger dialect.” 25 Sometimes it was remarked with hysteria, sometimes with interest, but it was always remarked: “blackness,” despite the extremely com- promised form in which it was represented, had made inroads into the na- tional culture. Th e poet Bayard Taylor caught the mood:

Th e Ethiopian melodies well deserve to be called, as they are in fact, the national airs of America. Th eir quaint, mock-sentimental cadences, so well suited to the broad absurdity of the words—their reckless gaiety

Love and Th eft 104

and irreverent familiarity with serious subjects—and their spirit of an- tagonism and perseverance—are true expressions of the more popular sides of the national character. Th ey follow the American race in all its emigrations, colonizations and conquests, as certainly as the Fourth of July and Th anksgiving Day. 26

Th e invocation of minstrelsy together with American national expansion amid the cataclysms of 1850 was no idle conceit; as we shall see, the two were unexpected intimates.

Popular Counterfeits

In the preceding chapters we have seen how minstrelsy’s crude racial appropri- ations entered a confl ictual male class arena and almost became shorthand for a national-popular culture. Let me briefl y review what I think was going on here, and then gesture toward the historical and political shape of part II.

It is insuffi cient, I have been arguing, merely to read off racial oppression from minstrelsy’s inauthenticity. As with all popular forms, I am concerned with what is best thought of as a realm of counterfeits—contradictory popular constructions that were not so much true or false as more or less pleasurable or politically effi cacious in the culture that embraced them. Popular culture, as Gramsci once remarked, “takes the place of (and at the same time favors) the fantasizing of the common people”: a realm neither of populist desire nor of commercially imposed distraction, but a stage on which appropriated goods and manufactured daydreams are transformed into culture. 27 It is true that, while blackface sometimes seemed an authentic instance of black culture, its “black” simulations were even less a populist product than popular arts usually are. Yet we have also seen that its dominative intentions were continually com- promised by the return of unwanted meanings, gestures, and relationships. Indeed, according to Gramsci’s formulation, this will always be the case with the “popular”; in steering us away from its status either as failed “folk” art or as “mass” cultural manipulation, he suggests we focus on the social fantasies and historical confl icts that the minstrel show inspired and to which it gave a tem- porary home.

Th e minstrel show was a signal instance of the popular because its black materials, or at least its black models, were worked over, transformed, rein- vented, and re-presented by its white practitioners and adopted by white, mostly male and working-class audiences with some familiarity with the cul- ture being represented. What was on display in minstrelsy was less black cul- ture than a structured set of white responses to it which had grown out of northern and frontier social rituals and were passed through an inevitable fi l- ter of racist presupposition. What is vitally important is that minstrel per- formers reproduced not only what they supposed were the racial characteristics

Th e Blackening of America 105

of black Americans (minstrelsy’s content) but also what they supposed were their principal cultural forms: dance, music, verbal play. 28 In their rise to pop- ularity, blackface actors let loose an iconography of racial diff erence, clearly graphing diff erence as inferiority, but at a time when diff erence itself could be a dangerous fact, particularly when set down in a class-infl ected sphere of belly laughs and brawling. Th e social complexities of this counterfeiting, how- ever, only rate minstrelsy among many other forms of the popular. Where critics have gone wrong is in assuming that the political designs so apparent in the minstrel show were unique to it. It is no doubt astonishing that for a period of more than one hundred years white people were so politically, historically, emotionally, and sexually bound up with black culture that they directly mim- icked and displayed it for their own enjoyment (and, in various ways, still do). But popular culture in capitalist societies is always so “produced.” It begins in the reprocessing and containment from above of traditional, oral, or “folk” cultures, but at certain historical conjunctures it can have untoward eff ects. Stuart Hall puts the matter this way:

Th ere is a continuous and necessarily uneven and unequal struggle, by the dominant culture, constantly to disorganise and reorganise pop- ular culture; to enclose and confi ne its defi nitions and forms within a more inclusive range of dominant forms. Th ere are points of resistance; there are also moments of supersession. Th is is the dialectic of cultural struggle. (“Notes” 233)

Th e minstrel show’s commercial prominence gave it the widest possible berth for doing its work. Born of social confl ict, blackface sometimes usefully inten- sifi ed it; based on the social violence of cultural caricature, it paradoxically resulted in the blackening of America.

I hasten to add that it is obviously in the interest of the dominant classes to have a measure of control over the culture of those they dominate, especially when other forms of control threaten to evaporate, as seemed to be happening in these years. And here, whatever the short-term eff ects, the minstrel show had disastrous consequences—particularly since black people had little room to contest publicly the social meanings generated out of their culture. Yet we might as well acknowledge the peculiarly unstable way in which these mean- ings were generated. Th e process of counterfeiting can never be a simple matter of bread and circuses, activities dreamed up by state functionaries to ensure that subalterns stay in their places. Varieties of appealing ventriloquism are most eff ective; indeed, had the minstrel show not pleased, it could not have achieved even its worst eff ects. An instance in white culture of this ventrilo- quism was the popular Davy Crockett almanac, in which, as Carroll Smith- Rosenberg has demonstrated, Whig publicists used frontier dialects to tell lurid tales underwritten by bourgeois mythologies for “vernacular” readers (108), and which, it is pertinent to note, also gave authentic headaches to many

Love and Th eft 106

an earnest moral reformer. 29 I would defi ne the minstrel show precisely as a case of popular racial ventriloquism, which, because it was spoken in vernac- ular accents, could never be counted on to stifl e undesirable responses. Despite the oft en hegemonic intentions or beginnings of popular forms, they can oc- casionally retain subversive dimensions, or for a time be invested with them. Th at is why the hegemony of what Gramsci termed the historical bloc is never secure, has constantly to be reconquered, and why there is a continual state of play in and over the popular sphere. Blackface performers, voices of the dom- inant racial culture, had to take care in these volatile years to check the subver- sive elements of their art—the mischief or ire that inhered in an appropriated black song or set of images; the wayward, oft en disturbing fantasies that clung to many attempts at black caricature—even as they amused the million. Nevertheless, there were excesses, overfl ows, resistances to the intended con- tainment of the form, both in the material it reworked and in the responses of its popular audiences. 30

Th is instability has been obscured by a refusal to recognize in the minstrel show the sort of cultural mediations with which we are very familiar. For one thing, cultures of the people, even “folk” cultures, are always constructed, in this particular case by a postromantic ideology of the folk—hence the charac- teristic comparison in nineteenth-century discourse of minstrelsy and black secular song to the English ballad tradition. 31 It is of course essentialist to ignore the extent to which our understanding of any culture is determined in the fi rst place by a particular ideology of culture. Just such an ideology worked to make the elements of black culture purveyed in minstrelsy—watered down, humiliated, but unmistakably present—seem all the more naturally elements of a national “folk.” Moreover, ideologies of culture have most oft en been pro- duced by those who do not belong to the culture that is defi ned, variously, as folk, traditional, popular, or oral. Which is to say that cultures of the dispos- sessed usually, for better or worse, come to us mediated through dominant- cultural fi lters, whether it is Th omas Percy’s compilation of Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), Henry Rowe Schoolcraft ’s renderings of Chippewa po- etry in his infl uential history Indian Tribes of the United States (1851–57), or even Carlo Ginzburg’s resurrection of a sixteenth-century miller, “Menoc- chio,” in Th e Cheese and the Worms (1976), distanced once by the court records of the Inquisitors who fi nally put him to death and then again, as Stanley Aronowitz has suggested, by Ginzburg’s bourgeois novelistic devices. 32 As with these effi cacious documents, minstrelsy mediated elements of a vernacular tradition, bringing to the surface, like some nonscientifi c anthropology, the culture of black people. Given this period’s scientifi c anthropology, one is hard- pressed to choose the lesser medium. Th at this is so indicates the counterfeit’s potential to have disturbed when it most sought to soothe.

My assumption that the new centrality of “black” forms and representations in American culture precipitated a corresponding instability in American racial

Th e Blackening of America 107

feeling might seem somewhat dubious. For the dominant culture today is quite at home with the visibility of certain forms of black culture, in athletics and en- tertainment, for example, or in advertising. Th e ways in which envy, aff ection, and sentiment are folded into racist modes of feeling are of course prominent; negrophobia and negrophilia, as Berndt Ostendorf has remarked, are not at all contradictory (81). By the same token, however, it is clear that certain kinds of cultural conquest—Jackie Robinson’s entrance into major league baseball, Elvis Presley’s explicit dismantling of “racial” music—are far from harmless allow- ances on the part of white-supremacist capital. 33 They amount to cultural struggle, and one must be wary of foreclosing on them, for the spectacle of revolution, as T. J. Clark has observed, does occasionally lead to revolution proper: “[T]he circuitry of popular art in capitalist society does appear to be delicate, and therefore to stand in need of fairly constant overhaul if it is not to produce undesirable eff ects . . . . What begins as a process of control and con- tainment is too oft en liable to end in mob rule” ( Painting 227, 229, 236).

In the long run, of course, black repossession of the means of cultural rep- resentation was a tragically halting aff air. Th e historical evolution of the con- texts in which blackface did its work unquestionably diff used the struggle to redeem black cultural forms. Yet this matter is a complicated one, shot through with fakery and organized around reappropriation rather than redemption. Particularly aft er minstrelsy, but also because of the nature of the national pop- ular in America, there could be no simple restoration of black authenticity. Such were the circumstances of nineteenth-century racial ideology that even when black performers took the stage aft er the Civil War, black representation was not immediately returned to self-present fullness. Robert Toll makes it clear that blacks in blackface, far from providing an immediate corrective to minstrel types, actually reinforced them, lent them credibility, no doubt because the newcomers had to fi t the ideological forms the minstrel show had itself helped to generate, but also because of the impact of racial ideology on even black performers (196, 228). One thinks again of the black shingle dancers in lower Manhattan; and nothing in Frederick Douglass’s account of black per- formers in 1849 suggests that “inauthenticity” was merely white men’s share. We lose no quotient of historical outrage in recognizing these conditions of popular counterfeiting, which in the case of blackface depended as much on American racial ideologies as on the political tendencies of popular culture. Such a recognition does require us finally to see the fallen character of culture—culture as agonistic, not a preserve of purity—in which political outcomes are by no means guaranteed in the forms of popular culture or in their historical conditions.

Th is recognition might also help us resist the widespread tendency to pro- ject white racial hostility onto the working class, the duped “masses.” Hence the thrice-obvious conclusion that, as a counterfeit popular form indulged by the vulgar mind, blackface stroked its audiences’ racist common sense.

Love and Th eft 108

Consider, as an extreme case, the words of an Irish-American leader of the interracial New Orleans longshoremen’s strikes of 1907:

I wasn’t always a nigger-lover. I fought in every strike to keep Black labor off the dock. I fought until in the white-supremacy strike your white-supremacy governor sent his white-supremacy militia and shot us white-supremacy strikers full of holes . . . . [T]here was a time when I wouldn’t even work beside a nigger . . . You made me work with niggers, eat with niggers, sleep with niggers, drink out of the same water bucket with niggers, and fi nally got me to the point where if one of them .  .  . blubbers something about more pay, I say, “Come on, nigger, let’s go aft er the white bastards.” 34

Allowing for regional and historical diff erences, this statement captures some- thing of the racial complexity we fi nd in the antebellum United States. Present- ing sequentially what was probably a simultaneous and overlapping set of responses, it clarifi es white workers’ privileged and yet disenfranchised rela- tion to capital, and the racial perspectives that followed from it. Th e displace- ment of solidarity from white, cross-class alliances to interracial ones was a tortuous aff air, continually made and then unmade, replete with unevenness and scarcely limited to concerted activity such as strikes. It was complicated by workingmen’s perceived position in the sex/gender system as wage-earning patriarchs whose “manliness” was perpetually at stake, and in terms of which racial confl icts were usually fought out. Th is variable compromise formation, involving masculinity, class, and racial feeling, was responsible for the initial potential and ultimate failure of an interracial labor radicalism in Jacksonian America, and its contours are still virtually unexamined. Alongside casual working-class racism, in other words, one must insist on the complex racial negotiations that took place in the everyday lives of working people, negotia- tions foreign to denizens of the counting room, the study, and the front offi ce. Th e minstrel show is one legacy of those negotiations.

Minstrelsy therefore briefl y became an object of “live social intelligibility,” to borrow V. N. Volosinov’s notion of the ideological sign, an internally riven form whose “inner dialectic quality” bursts fully into the open “only in times of social crises or revolutionary changes” (23; emphasis in original). America’s crisis came in the form of what I call (aft er Michael Rogin) the American 1848. Th e minstrel show had no little part in the crisis.

Th e American 1848

It is worth pondering to what extent the national-popular confl icts in and around the minstrel show—above all its creation of a sense of popular “black” cultural representation—helped foster the struggles of America’s midcentury

Th e Blackening of America 109

“revolutionary turn” (in Karl Marx’s phrase): the Wilmot Proviso debates, the 1850 Compromise, Bleeding Kansas, the Civil War. 35 Certainly this situation was worthy of the name 1848. Michael Rogin has demonstrated the similarity the Compromise of 1850 bore to the class struggles in Europe, particularly France. 36 As Marx wrote that history, the “beautiful revolution” of February, when the monarch was deposed in the interests of political equality, was shat- tered during the “ugly revolution” of the June days, when the working class took the rhetoric of equality seriously and went to the barricades to fi ght for it. In June, as “the fi reworks of Lamartine . . . turned into the war rockets of Cavaignac” ( Class 57), the interests of civil society were defi nitively revealed to underlie the “imagined content” of the political sphere (39); the proletariat was challenging the class character of “political equality” and demanding that it extend beyond the confi nes of the bourgeoisie. Th at challenge, of course, was fi nally stifl ed and social order restored in 1851, when the accession of Louis Bonaparte solidifi ed the interests of the middle class, still in the guise of political equality.

In America a similar struggle took place, and the similarity did not go un- remarked. “[S]et off the names of Cavaignac and Cass, of Ledru-Rollin and Van Buren . . . [of ] Napoleon . . . [and] Webster,” wrote the Democratic Review in 1852, “and the histories of the French and American republics for these four years . . . have been identical.” In the political arena, the expansionism of the Polk administration embroiled the United States in the Mexican War in 1846, a war meant to conquer territory for an enlarged national entity. Manifest Des- tiny, it appeared, was egalitarian ideology gone west. As in France, however, this “beautiful” evasion of both wage labor in the North and slavery in the South, a political solution to confl icts in civil society, only served to open those confl icts all the more, for it posed in ever starker form the question of whether the new territories would be slave or free. In a telling irony, the myth of poten- tially endless frontier expansion actually exposed rather than disguised pat- terns of class confl ict and racial oppression which American democracy was supposed to have done away with. Civil war loomed: with slavery an issue even in the masterless West, the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny and California gold was every bit as ominous as that of secession. 37

Th e crisis began with the 1846–47 debates around the Wilmot Proviso, Pennsylvania Representative David Wilmot’s bill urging that all land newly acquired from Mexico—namely California and much of the Southwest—be considered territory for nonslaveholding white men. Sectional tensions imme- diately ran high, opposing Wilmot supporters and Young America expansion- ists against southern secessionists and conservative, proslavery Unionists, while various strained cross-sectional coalitions rushed to counter them. In 1848 a group of radical Democrats and antislavery Whigs bolted their respec- tive parties and formed the Free-Soil party, based largely on Wilmot’s pro- posals; Martin Van Buren was their (unsuccessful) presidential nominee.

Love and Th eft 110

Hardly the antiracist vanguard, the Free-Soilers at the very least threatened the stability of the party system. Certainly there was room in the Free-Soil party for dangerously radical sentiments. Wrote one Barnburner Democrat, “Shall we, in view of these struggles of all Europe, with our model before them, renounce the doctrine of our fathers, and the sentiment of the civilized world, that slavery is an evil?” (quoted in Schlesinger 462; emphasis in original). Th is moment witnessed the greatest threat to social order the United States had ever experi- enced, analogous to the turmoil in France but centered on the politics of slav- ery, as well as class struggles such as the 1849 Astor Place riot and the 1850 New York tailors’ strike. Whitman split several diff erences at one stroke in language that clinched the interpenetration of race and class— “the grand body of white workingmen, the millions of mechanics, farmers, and operatives of our country , with their interests on the one side—and the interests of the few thousand rich, ‘polished,’ and aristocratic owners of slaves at the South, on the other side” ( Gathering 1:208; emphasis in original). Very shortly, of course, America had its own Louis Bonaparte. Th e Compromise of 1850 (passionately advocated by Daniel Webster) and the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1851 (tanta- mount to the federal sanction of slavery) temporarily preserved the social order of the Union. But disorder would continue to erupt, in 1854 with the Kansas-Nebraska Act (the fi ght over the right to take slaves west), in 1857 with the Dred Scott decision (which ruled that blacks were not to be considered U.S. citizens), and fi nally in 1861 over the future of the Union.

In the broadest political sense we might say that blackface artists all at once found themselves staging a sort of unintended play about the slavery crisis, a play that pointed up rather than papered over cracks in the historical bloc of midcentury America. Th e ground beneath the minstrel show shift ed quickly. From the beginning minstrelsy was an arena in which class confl ict and racial strife continually intersected and contradicted each other. In a variety of clashes in the 1830s and early 1840s—pervasive rioting, abolitionism and its counterresponses, labor strikes—class resistance and racial feeling were imbri- cated in displaced and distorted ways that the minstrel show duly registered. Th e depression following the 1837 panic, however, defl ected these complex en- ergies into more “cultural” responses: temperance, evangelicalism, nativism. Th e “industrial” character of 1830s class confl ict was increasingly displaced in the 1840s onto struggles against “preindustrial” foes, in Paul Faler and Alan Dawley’s terms, whereby workers who had fought their masters now allied with them against backsliders and foreigners (477). As a result, the minstrel show abutted and addressed what had become, by the mid-1840s, a somewhat more racially hardened audience of “white egalitarians,” journeymen and small masters both, who sought to preserve the republic against preindustrial incursions of all kinds. As we have seen, class antagonisms that persisted could now be mapped as ethnic, moral, or indeed racial matters, and it was here that minstrelsy found one of its major historical uses.

Th e Blackening of America 111

Yet with the crises of 1848 this racially homogeneous cross-class alliance produced as it were its opposite. Th e most visible cultural signifi er of northern white egalitarianism, the rush to California, suddenly signifi ed a sectional breach that pitted northern capitalists and western farmers against southern slaveholding landowners. In the partial transformation of class confl ict into racial and ethnic struggles against preindustrial drags on capital formation, the South became the chief “preindustrial” foe, and blackface performers found themselves invoking a national controversy—on behalf of the North— which they had always intended to elide. Th e urban dandy Zip Coon and the rustic slave Jim Crow now doubled as sectional types, not the kindest fate for an art form that had sought to stifl e such matters. Th e centrality of “black” arts to the national culture had a political referent aft er all. Th e minstrel show’s intimations of American expansion were no longer innocent celebrations of Manifest Destiny; they were a portent of the war to come. Th is was only the largest of the authenticating ironies that attended the blackface counterfeit.

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{ Part II }

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{ 5 }

“Th e Seeming Counterfeit” Early Bl ackface Acts, the Body, and So cial

Contradiction

Jim Crow . . . is made to repeat nightly, almost ad infi nitum, his balderdash song . . .

—Philip Hone

In January 1831 William Lloyd Garrison founded the Liberator in Boston, set- ting in motion one of the great radical movements in American history. A little more than a year later, twenty-four-year-old T. D. Rice toured the northeastern seaboard with his celebrated “Jim Crow” act, landing in New York in Novem- ber 1832. 1 Th ese twin instances of white racial discourse, one middle class and one working class, were dialectical partners not only in their literal coinci- dence but also in their shared ambivalences. For just as Garrison’s abolitionism was marred by a good deal of paternalist condescension toward the people he wished to liberate, so Rice’s blackface acts mixed equal parts of ridicule and wonder in regard to blacks and black culture. Both ambivalences, moreover, arose from class as much as racial feeling, and it was indeed the way these social categories merged with and repelled each other that defi ned the political moment in which abolitionism and blackface minstrelsy appeared.

As the blackface acts of Rice, George Washington Dixon, and others hit northeastern cities, they began to register and reaccent the varieties of social unrest that were already the hallmark of industrializing centers. Th e decade that followed, as historians have constructed it, was one of virtual class war, marked especially by working-class militancy—vehement, collective responsiveness to a class structure that was rigidifying at an alarming rate. In this setting minstrel representations in their inaugural fi ft een years aft er 1830 told a complex tale of gendered class and racial subjectivity. Before the depression at the turn of the 1840s helped mute and redirect class resentment, white male workers targeted both employers and black workers, reformers (oft en wealthy or evangelical whites) and their “fashionable” black associates—the historical referents of

Love and Th eft 116

minstrelsy’s oft -remarked capacity to ridicule upward in class as well as down- ward in racial direction. 2 Yet these very spatial metaphors inscribe the interpen- etrations of race and class that, as we have seen, constituted the political struggles of this period no less than minstrelsy’s mediations of them; indeed, it was never completely clear just who at any given moment was being combated. Even in the antiabolitionist rioting that gives this decade another claim on our attention, concerns of class and race were jumbled together. In fact, the political confusions of these years seem to me largely ones of representation, and I will argue that the complexities of minstrelsy are to be discovered in its distorted attempts to graph a situation fi nally quite resistant to such attempts.

By the same token, the distortions and displacements of minstrel represen- tations acknowledged the possibility of a working-class racial radicalism even as they diagnosed the factors making it unlikely. A central fi guration of this unlikelihood in public discourse and in minstrelsy, as we shall see, was the urban black “dandy,” an ideological fi ction through which certain of this decade’s confl icts were lived. Th e broadest context for all of this, however, was the simple, undeniable presence of “black” male bodies in the public sphere, and it is with this new presence that I begin.

Th e World’s Body

Until the fi rst blackface band formed in 1843, minstrelsy was an interstitial art: performers appeared between the acts of “respectable” theatrical productions, or as aft erpieces to them; they also shared the stage with many comic acts in the pleasure gardens, circuses, museums, and “vaudevilles” newly sprung up to meet the demands of a growing urban working population. Accordingly, the phenomenon consisted largely of solo dancers, banjoists, singers, burlesque playlets, comic impersonations, and various kinds and combinations of duos.

Yet we have seen that for all their scattered presentation, minstrel acts im- mediately secured “blackness” a public hearing. Th e urgency that attended its appearance is notable in P. T. Barnum’s tussle with the blackface convention in 1841. Th omas Low Nichols (Walt Whitman’s editor at the New York Aurora in the early 1840s) tells the story of the blackface dancer John Diamond’s quitting Barnum’s organization and leaving the cultural entrepreneur, early in his career, with a problem:

In New York, some years ago, Mr. P. T. Barnum had a clever boy who brought him lots of money as a dancer of negro break-downs; made up, of course, as a negro minstrel, with his face well blackened, and a woolly wig. One day Master Diamond, thinking he might better himself, danced away into the infi nite distance.

Barnum, full of expedients, explored the dance-houses of the Five Points and found a boy who could dance a better break-down than

“Th e Seeming Counterfeit” 117

Master Diamond. It was easy to hire him; but he was a genuine negro; and there was not an audience in America that would not have resent- ed, in a very energetic fashion, the insult of being asked to look at the dancing of a real negro. To any man but the originator of Joyce Heth, the venerable negro nurse of Washington, and the manufacturer of the Fiji Mermaid, this would have been an insuperable obstacle.

Barnum was equal to the occasion. Son of the State of white oak cheeses and wooden nutmegs, he did not disgrace his lineage. He greased the little “nigger’s” face and rubbed it over with a new blacking of burnt cork, painted his thick lips with vermillion, put on a woolly wig over his tight curled locks, and brought him out as the “champion nigger-dancer of the world.” Had it been suspected that the seeming counterfeit was the genuine article, the New York Vauxhall would have blazed with indignation. (369–70)

It is easy to remark here that blackface was simply less objectionable than the appearance of black people onstage, particularly given the caricatures that resulted. Yet I would emphasize two things: not only that the idea of black representation had defi nite limits, was considered off ensive or outrageous, worked against the grain; but also that it was possible for a black man in black- face, without a great deal of eff ort, to off er credible imitations of white men imitating him. Th at is to say, some blackface impersonations may not have been as far from this period’s black theatrical self-presentation as we tend to believe—and so much the worse, the reader might add: no doubt the standard was set by whites. On this occasion, however, far from easily falling into a prefi tted stereotype, the hired black “boy” seems to have been Juba (William Henry Lane), who would a few years later become the most famous—and, signifi cantly, nearly the only—black performer to appear in white theaters in the mid-1840s (see Fig. 4 ). Dickens celebrated him in chapter 6 of American Notes (1842) as the best popular dancer of the day; even “Master Diamond” (aft er an 1844 dance competition with Juba that left Diamond the loser) believed him to be the preeminent dancer in antebellum America (Winter 47).

Th e primary purpose of the mask, then, may have been as much to main- tain control over a potentially subversive act as to ridicule, though the double bind was that blackface performers’ attempts at regulation were also capable of producing an aura of “blackness.” Th e incident suggests the danger of the simple public display of black practices, the off ering of them for white enjoy- ment. Th e moments at which the intended counterfeit broke down and failed to “seem,” when the fakery evaporated, could (as we have seen) result in acts of unsettling authenticity, even if a white man were inside. From this perspective we might say that the elements of derision involved in blackface performance were not so much its raison d’etre as an attempt to “master” the power and in- terest of black cultural practices it continually generated. As a fi gure for early

Love and Th eft 118

blackface acts, “the seeming counterfeit” is perfectly apt. To the extent that such acts merely seemed , they kept white involvement in black culture under control, indeed facilitated that involvement; but the power disguised by the counterfeit was also oft en invoked by it, suggesting the occasional ineff ectiveness, the mere seeming, of the counterfeit itself.

It is well known that Diamond, Rice, and other early blackface performers laid claim to such power through the predominantly black dances in their acts. Even those most skeptical of the blackface phenomenon commonly accepted the authenticity of the dances (though these, too, as we have seen, were predictably miscegenated). We should notice, however, that whites subtly acknowledged the greater power of the genuine article, a fact that also illumi- nates the purpose of the diminished copy. Again, the counterfeit was a means of exercising white control over explosive cultural forms as much as it was an avenue of racial derision (though to say the one is perhaps also to say the other). Advertising himself as the “best dancer living,” Diamond boasted in early 1840s playbills of his “skill at Negro Dancing,” which audiences surely enjoyed more than mocked. But in challenge dance contests he would tempt only “any other white person” (perhaps foreseeing his defeat by the expert Juba), a particularly good way of regulating the black threat to his own reputa- tion and to that of his profession while making a living from just that threat. It was paramount that the culture constantly being called up also be kept safely under wraps. Th is was made plain in a playbill for a New York performance in 1845, by which time Juba’s already legendary stature allowed him to appear regularly on the stage: “Th e entertainment to conclude with the Imitation Dance, by Mast. Juba, in which he will give correct Imitation Dances of all the principal Ethiopian Dancers in the United States. Aft er which he will give an imitation of himself—and then you will see the vast diff erence between those that have heretofore attempted dancing and this wonderful young man.” 3

Th is performance seems, and probably was, astonishingly bold: the trusted counterfeiters mocked in return by a representative of those from whom they had stolen; a public display of black irony toward whites, all stammers and jerks and gracelessness, who had tried to become better blacks. Yet it also fore- grounds minstrelsy as a safely imitative form: the notion of the black dancer “imitating himself ” indicates minstrelsy’s fundamental consequence for black culture, the dispossession and control by whites of black forms that would not for a long time be recovered. Dickens catches this simulacral dilemma almost unawares in his account of Juba when he says, in a fi nal fl ourish, that the dancer “fi nishes by leaping gloriously on the bar-counter, and calling for something to drink, with the chuckle of a million of counterfeit Jim Crows, in one inimitable sound!” (139). It was hard to see the real thing without being reminded, even unfavorably, of the copy, the “cover version” that eff ectively did its work of cultural coverage. 4 Nor, just as surely, could the copy be seen without reminding one of the real thing; as Eileen Southern has remarked,

Figure 4 Juba (William Henry Lane) Courtesy of the Harvard Th eatre Collection

119

Love and Th eft 120

“No one forgot that the black man was behind it all” ( Music 92). Th is simulta- neous production and subjection of black maleness may have been more than a formal consequence of wearing blackface; it may indeed have been the min- strel show’s main achievement, articulating precisely a certain structure of racial feeling. Th e very real instability of white men’s investment in black men, however, seems oft en to have exceeded this happy ambiguity, giving rise to a good deal of trouble. Much of the trouble, as in Dickens’s account, had to do with the black male body.

Dickens, among many others, marked the male body as the primary site of the power of “blackness” for whites. All that separates his record of Juba from other such commentary (on both white and black performers) is literary skill, by which I mean the ability to disguise his own skittish attraction to the danc- er’s body. In New York City, circling toward the center of the wretched Five Points district, Dickens “descends” into Almack’s, “assembly-room of the Five Point fashionables” (138). A lively scene of dancing begins to fl ag, when Juba makes his appearance:

Suddenly the lively hero dashes in to the rescue. Instantly the fi ddler grins, and goes at it tooth and nail; there is new energy in the tambourine; new laughter in the dancers; new smiles in the landlady; new confi dence in the landlord; new brightness in the very candles. Single shuffl e, double shuffl e, cut and cross-cut; snapping his fi ngers, rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, presenting the backs of his legs in front, spinning about on his toes and heels like nothing but the man’s fi ngers on the tambourine; dancing with two left legs, two right legs, two wooden legs, two wire legs, two spring legs—all sorts of legs and no legs—what is this to him? (139)

Th e brilliant dancing calls forth a brilliant mimetic escalation: a sharp focus on simple steps of the feet shift s to jump cuts of fi ngers, eyes, knees, legs, and bodies that blur into fi ngers, then to curious industrial metaphors (legs of wood, wire, spring) for the dynamo energy of this “heroic” display. All of it is of course a tribute to such display; the escalation is one of enlarging circles or areas of kinesis. But the energy and artistry are fi nally distanced; the escalation is away from the dancing; the metaphors dwarf what they are called on to describe. Th e whole passage reads as though Dickens did not really know what to do with such energy, where to put it. He ends up producing an account that lacks an immanent purpose. All he will venture is that the dance is so dazzling that everything fi nally seems like something else, not itself—body into fi ngers, legs into no legs. And once this move is made, the black man’s body has been contained even as it is projected into public, something minstrel performers themselves had somehow to accomplish.

Th e “black” body’s dangerous power was remarked by nearly all observers of the minstrel phenomenon; it was probably mainly responsible for minstrelsy’s already growing reputation for “vulgarity.” Th ose conscious of minstrelsy’s

“Th e Seeming Counterfeit” 121

counterfeit, for example, resorted to suggestive language to describe its distance from the true coin. Th e actress Fanny Kemble, in her plantation memoirs of the 1830s, clinched such an observation—that “all the contortions, and springs, and fl ings, and kicks, and capers you have been beguiled into accepting as indicative of [blacks] are spurious”—by ending the list of adjec- tives with the inevitable sexual parry “faint, feeble, impotent—in a word, pale Northern reproductions of that ineff able black conception” (96). It required little imagination from the audience to make blackface itself “ineff able,” for dancers made much of the sexual exaggeration that came so easily to such performances, and song sheet illustrations unfailingly registered, in muted form, this recurring preoccupation. Dancers relied on vigorous leg-and foot- work, twists, turns, and slaps of toe and heel. Th e body was always grotesquely contorted, even when sitting; stiff ness and extension of arms and legs an- nounced themselves as unsuccessful sublimations of sexual desire (see Fig. 9 ). (In “Coal Black Rose” [1827], the cuckolded lover sings, “Make haste, Rosa, lubly dear,/I froze tiff as poker waitin here.”) 5 Banjos were deployed in ways that anticipated the phallic suggestions of rock ’n’ roll (see Fig. 5 ). Kemble’s frank fascination with what “these people [slaves] did with their bodies” (96) was carried to the stage, where, for instance, dancers would exploit the accents of sexuality and of sexual ambiguity; the “jaybird wing,” perhaps similar to a frontier dance of the same name, was considered highly indecent for someone in skirts—perhaps even more so if this someone were male (Nathan 91).

We are justifi ed in seeing early blackface performance as one of the very fi rst constitutive discourses of the body in American culture. Certainly min- strelsy’s commercial production of the black male body was a fundamental source of its threat and its fascination for white men, anticipating Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous “vision” that the whipping of Tom would prove the most potent image of Uncle Tom’s Cabin . Th e problem this cultural form faced was how to ensure that what it invoked was safely rerouted, not through white meanings —for even the anarchic, threatening associations of black male sexu- ality were created by white cultural meanings—but through a kind of disap- pearing act in which blackface made “blackness” fl icker on and off so as simultaneously to produce and disintegrate the body. Nineteenth-century ob- servers of the minstrel show off er a clue to this dialectic. Aft er a fl urry of evi- dence documenting the authentic nature of early minstrel songs, theater historian T. Allston Brown suggests that most of them (“Long Tail Blue,” “Sich a Getting up Stairs”) “were taken from hearing the darkies of the South singing aft er the labor of the day was over on the plantation. Th e verses and airs were altered, written and arranged as I have described” (“Origin” 6). Another com- mentator believed minstrel songs to be the “veritable tunes and words which have lightened the labor of some weary negro in the cotton fi elds, amused his moonlight hours as he fi shed, or waked the spirits of the woods as he followed in the track of the wary racoon” [ sic ]. 6 Th e fact is that minstrel songs and

Love and Th eft 122

dances conjured up not only the black body but its labor, not only its sexuality but its place and function in a particular economy.

Th e body, Richard Dyer has argued, becomes a central problem in justi- fying or legitimating a capitalist (or indeed slave) economy. Th e rhetoric of these economies must insist either that capital has the magical power of multiplying itself or that slaves are contented, tuneful children in a planta- tion paradise; in reality, of course, it is human labor that must reproduce itself as well as create surplus value. In these societies the body is a potentially subversive site because to recognize it fully is to recognize the exploitative organization of labor that structures their economies. Cultural strategies must be devised to occlude such a recognition: reducing the body purely to sexuality is one strategy; colonizing it with a medical discourse in which the body is dispersed into discrete parts or organs is another. Shackling the

Figure 5 Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia

“Th e Seeming Counterfeit” 123

body to a discourse of racial biology is still another, and in western soci- eties the black body in particular has, in Dyer’s words, served as the site of both “remembering and denying the inescapability of the body in the economy,” a fi guration of the world’s body and its labor, easily called up and just as easily denied. 7 In antebellum America it was minstrelsy that per- formed this crucial hegemonic function, invoking the black male body as a powerful cultural sign of sexuality as well as a sign of the dangerous, guilt- inducing physical reality of slavery but relying on the derided category of race fi nally to dismiss both.

Th e minstrel show as an institution may be profi tably understood as a major eff ort of corporeal containment—which is also to say that it necessarily trained a rather constant regard on the body. Indeed, performers still took care to defl ect the wayward valences of the body as they were off ered, for there was certainly more at stake than fl ushes and heavy breathing. Specifi cally, there were the twin threats of insurrection and intermixture, the consequences, to white men’s minds, of black men’s place in a slave economy. Blackface per- formers accordingly devised further strategies to counter the various bodily powers they wanted to, and did, evoke.

It will surprise no one familiar with minstrel-show origin tales that insur- rection and intermixture eff ectively mapped minstrelsy’s transgressive range. Early minstrel songs simultaneously produced and muted the physical power of black men coded by such events. Exaggerations or distortions of dialect, for example, or gestures meant to underscore the complete nonsense of some songs might eff ectively dampen any too boisterous talk, such as that which characterizes one of the earliest versions of “Jim Crow.” And all of the unspo- ken connotations of this bodily power were clearly wedded to an “inferior” people, played moreover by white men who could easily demarcate the ironic distance between themselves and their personae. Still, the power was made quite available, and could be provocative. “Ching a Ring Chaw,” or “Sambo’s ‘Dress to He’ Bred’rin” (1833), in a caricatured West Indian dialect, marks a white fascination with the insurrectionary imperative:

Broder let us leabe, Bucra Ian for Hettee [Haiti]. Dar you be receibe Gran as La Fayette; Make a mity show, wen we lan from steamship I be like Munro, You like Louis Philip.

Oh dat equal sod, hoo no want to go-e Dare we feel no rod, dar we hab no fo-e

No more carry hod, no more oister ope-e, No more dig de sod, no more krub de shop-e

No more barrow wheel all about de street-e, No more blige to teal, den by massa beat-e. 8

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I am not one of those critics who see in a majority of minstrel songs an unal- loyed self-criticism by whites under cover of blackface, the racial parody nearly incidental. Nevertheless, it is hard to resist seeing this invocation of the Hai- tian republic (whose revolution in the 1790s resonated long aft er as “a symbol of wild retribution,” as T. W. Higginson termed the Nat Turner insurrection [“Nat” 326]) as anything but a kind of ineff ectually controlled historical anx- iety; and the song is structured by a burden of “no mores,” not a form designed, it would seem, to control the fantasies of revolt it probably unleashed. A con- temporary ominously said of it that it had “the ringing sound of true metal” (“Black” 107): currency again. Th is is one of the frankest early minstrel tunes about the weight of slavery, more a reminder than a denial of the black male body in the economy. 9

More oft en the reminders came in sexual form. White men were routinely encouraged to indulge in fantasies about black women—which, however, highlighted, and implicitly identifi ed them with, the salacious black male characters who “authored” the fantasies, confusing the real object of sexual interest. Consider the tantalizingly titled “Jumbo Jum” (1840):

Th ere was a nigger wench and I thought I’d die, For when she looked at me she give such a sigh, I made an impression on the wenches feeling, Th at I set the coloured lady in a big fi t a reeling.

She dropt right down on the fl oor, In a state of agony you know, I kissed her gently on the chin, Says she pray do dat agin.

(Dennison 79)

It might be diffi cult to add any more insinuations of orgasm than already pack these two stanzas. No doubt performers were adroit at manipulating their bodies in order to bring forth the sexual weight of black men’s “impres- sion” on “colored wenches” (played, again, by men). Song sheet illustrations captured the phallic sources of such lyrics over and over by showing coat- tails hanging prominently between characters’ legs, and personae were oft en pictured with sticks or poles strategically placed near the groin or with other appendages occasionally hanging near or between the legs (see Fig. 6 ; see also Fig. 11 ).

However strong the attempts at suppression, then, and whatever the osten- sible song content, black men were conjured up for the various delectations of white male audiences (even the female characters off ered an ambiguous sexu- ality). Implicit or explicit appreciation of black male sexuality could always slip into homoerotic desire. But the very fact that virulently heterosexual “black” stand-ins were pictured here, and in the theater committed such acts on behalf of the audience, tended further to complicate the whole business. Their

“Th e Seeming Counterfeit” 125

potency may have been momentarily attractive (or merely racist typing); but it oft en shaded inevitably into a suggestion of the “wrong” kind of miscegena- tion, as in one version of “Zip Coon” (1834): “O my ole mistress is very mad at me,/Because I wouldn’t go wid her and live in Tennessee” (Dennison 61). And in the famous “Long Tail Blue” (1827), a song that refers to the “Uncle Sam” coat of the black dandy, the persona sings:

Figure 6 Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia

Love and Th eft 126

Some Niggers they have but one coat, But you see I’ve got two; I wears a jacket all the week, And Sunday my long tail blue.

Jim Crow is courting a white gall, And yaller folks call her Sue; I guess she back’d a nigger out, And swung my long tail blue. 10

Safe enough pieces of language to us, perhaps; but anyone who has sift ed through minstrel song sheets and songbooks knows the seeming scandal, the jealous white male fears, of miscegenation. And since the black male seems the real object of scrutiny here, it is diffi cult (perhaps even pointless) to distin- guish those fears from homosexual fantasies, or at the very least envy, of black men. I have remarked before that white men’s investment in the black penis appears to have defi ned the minstrel show. As in “Jumbo Jum,” however, that investment took varied and overlapping forms, encompassing homosexual at- traction, male identifi cation, and male rivalry, for which the apparent concern with miscegenation is a kind of summa. Ideologies of miscegenation were indeed the primary defense against this psychic tangle, and they surfaced in minstrel songs so oft en as to suggest repeatedly the unconscious material they strained to master.

Worse yet, stage devices such as malapropism, used to control the black male body’s threat, could themselves become threatening agencies. Given the popularity of women and blacks as sources for public masking, it is interesting that stage malapropism has historically been associated with working-class white women and black men. From Sheridan’s Mrs. Malaprop in Th e Rivals (1775)—“Sure, if I reprehend any thing in this world, it is the use of my orac- ular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs!”—to minstrel-show stump speeches, malapropism fi gures as a kind of witless orality signifying nothing beyond itself. But such self-conscious orality usually has a sexual subtext, as in Mrs. Malaprop’s remark; and the real interest (though perhaps not the literal sense) of this blackface “lecture” on phrenology is fairly transparent: “Colored frens, dar’s one bump dat ought to be on toder side ob de head. ( pointing to the nose .) Now, sir, if you keep yourself perfectly docile, I will felt ob your semi- intellectual organs ob your organic, galvanic, elifantic, horse-marine, mud- puddle, fl ounder-fl atten, sculpology.” 11 Working-class women (white and black) and black men in bourgeois cultural fantasy are fi gures for a thrilling and repellent sexual anarchy. If in an age of separate spheres women were re- sponsible for household order and spiritual hygiene, all that was dirty, disrup- tive, and disorderly was projected onto working-class women. The 1870s cross-class relationship of Arthur J. Munby and a domestic servant, Hannah Cullwick, which fully exploited men’s erotic interest in social domination, female dirtiness, and sexual debasement—not least in Cullwick’s occasional

“Th e Seeming Counterfeit” 127

blacking up for Munby, the man she called “Massa”—amply demonstrates the attraction of this kind of Otherness. 12 If in an age of industry men were sup- posed to be frugal and productive, black men quite evidently came to repre- sent laziness and license, the determining factor in white men’s dread of miscegenation; Faulkner’s Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom! is prob- ably America’s greatest literary product of this obsession. Onstage these fan- tasies were partly represented by a vexing and unmeaning linguistic creativity, a proliferation of huge, ungainly, and onomatopoeic words that were meant to ridicule the speaker but which also called attention to the grain of voices, the wagging of tongues, the fatness of painted lips. Th rough them could be relived the forgotten liberties of infancy—the belly and the sucking of breasts, a wal- lowing in shit. And while the equation of sexual anarchy with political disor- der is an overworked and easy one, it is nevertheless true that minstrelsy’s liberties had varied social and political eff ects. Which is to say that one of the devices that was supposed to dissolve the more threatening, chaotic, and sub- versive aspects of the black body could instead provide an avenue through which they returned.

Contorted Artisans

It is equally clear, however, that the cultural form responsible for the insur- rection had a built-in structure of disavowal. If the black threat became too grave, audiences merely amplifi ed the insult. A continual acknowledgment of minstrelsy’s counterfeit obviously accompanied the illusion of “blackness” onstage—not only accompanied it but was politically necessitated by it. As Philip Cohen has written in another context, denigrated features (like the re- duction of black men to sexuality) could all too easily become secret sources of male identifi cation, cultural myths reversed into male fantasy; the irony of the counterfeit was therefore necessary to construct and preserve the hegemonic “misrecognition” of black people. 13 Th e desperate racial ambivalence that min- strelsy’s audiences shared, in other words, depended on ridicule to counter the sort of attraction or fear we have repeatedly witnessed. To get at the structure of racial feeling exemplifi ed by this dialectic of response, it is fi rst necessary to clarify it, and then to fi nd a social history to account for it.

In the third chapter of Melville’s Confi dence-Man , as I have noticed, a sple- netic, limping man accuses the beggar Black Guinea of being a counterfeit. Several chapters into the book the confi dence man, now disguised as a col- lector for a “Widow and Orphan Asylum,” engages the accuser in a tête-à-tête, defending what we suspect is one of his earlier disguises:

“Tell me, sir, do you really think that a white could look the negro so? For one, I should call it pretty good acting.”

“Not much better than any other man acts.”

Love and Th eft 128

“How? Does all the world act? Am I , for instance, an actor? Is my reverend friend here, too, a performer?”

“Yes, don’t you both perform acts? To do, is to act; so all doers are actors.”

“You trifl e.—I ask again, if a white, how could he look the negro so?” “Never saw the negro-minstrels, I suppose?” “Yes, but they are apt to overdo the ebony; exemplifying the old

saying, not more just than charitable, that ‘the devil is never so black as he is painted.’” (39)

Moments such as this recall Harry Levin’s remark that Melville’s novel is struc- tured like a cross between the minstrel show and Lucian’s Dialogues of the Dead (192). I for one am not sure that the limping man trifl es at all. It is indeed this novel’s strategy continually to dissolve the various meanings of “act” into one another, such that all doers become fakes, role players in a competitive marketplace. 14 But in an aporia that locates the power of blackface counterfeits, this very logic undercuts the man’s argument: if all doers are mere masquer- aders, minstrels are no diff erent from anyone else; their falseness is the only reality there is. Th e confi dence man’s argument likewise self-deconstructs, for he cites the impossibility of a convincing minstrel performance (the ironic “overdo the ebony”) in order precisely to suspend disbelief in his own earlier such performance. Th e man of spleen who disbelieves the con man’s fakery succeeds in proving the minstrel show’s possibility; the man of irony who argues its impossibility succeeds in proving minstrelsy’s power.

Th is scene is, one might say, an allegory of audience response: mordant irony and suspension of disbelief were simply inextricable moments of white participation in the minstrel show. Th e racial predispositions loosely attached to those moments, I would suggest, were disavowal or ridicule of the Other and interracial identifi cation with it, though belief in the authenticity of black- face called forth ridicule easily enough; indeed, the valuations and subject po- sitions tend to multiply when one attempts to sketch them out. I am interested precisely in this “play of pronoun function,” which fi lm theorists insist charac- terizes our experience of the cinema, as we successively identify, across gender lines, with logical screen representatives of ourselves (heroes, victims), then with seeming adversaries (villains, killers), and so on: a destabilized structure of fascination, a continual confusion of subject and object. 15 Th e blackface phe- nomenon was virtually constituted by such slippages, positives turning to neg- atives, selves into others, and back again. Th ere was in minstrelsy an unsteady but structured fl uctuation between fascination with (or dread of ) “blackness” and fearful ridicule of it, underscored but not necessarily determined by a fl uc- tuation between sympathetic belief in the authenticity of blackface and ironic distance from its counterfeit representations—within a single audience, and even within individual audience members.

“Th e Seeming Counterfeit” 129

An illustration has come down to us that suggests this pattern in more con- crete and historically specifi c fashion. It is an engraving of T. D. Rice “jumping Jim Crow” at the Bowery Th eatre in 1833, very early in the minstrel show’s his- tory (see Fig. 7 ). Th e illustration is evidence of a most telling kind—audience response about audience response—and indicates the complex, interrelated interests called forth by such performances. Indeed, to call it a drawing of Rice already understates the case. With only a fi ddler by his side, Rice performs center stage. He is the only “black” person in the theater. A crowd has thronged to the foot of the stage and overfl owed onto the boards. It is a crowd of some variety, except for the almost total absence of women: workers in smocks and straw hats rub elbows with militiamen; clerks ape the betters they hope one day to become; a few respectable men intervene in scuffl es that have broken out in two places on the stage. Th e picture frame is tightly packed with spectators; the frame extends beyond the boxes on the left to include four more tiers of people. Th e crowd has become both background and foreground—it is not too much to say that it has become the spectacle itself, so much is Rice dwarfed by the crowd’s interest in its own activities. For the singular thing about this audience is that many members of it do not seem to be looking at Rice at all.

Th ere is a circle of attention directly surrounding Rice, and down in front there are scattered faces turned in his direction. Beyond them, however, all is up for grabs. Much of the crowd is interested in the brawl at stage left , or in conversation among themselves; some of those conversations seem concerned

Figure 7 T. D. Rice as “Jim Crow,” 1833 Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society, New York City

Love and Th eft 130

with the brawl, not Rice. Th e worker behind Rice’s fi ddler being held back from the fi ght suggests either an artistic confusion about the real matter of interest or a trick of the pen meant to unsettle us about it: his legs point directly, four- square, toward Rice, while his torso is turned full toward the fi ght. It is an im- possible contortion even were verisimilitude a secondary goal here. Th e fi ght indeed attracts as much if not more attention than Rice’s act, as does the con- fusion stage right, a grand collective lunge toward the performer which has itself taken on theatrical interest. In the lunge, a stout gentleman has been put in the dark by the descent of his top hat over his eyes; the lunge’s theatricality has allowed a dandy to appropriate the stage for himself.

One of the earliest pictorial appraisals of this startling new theatrical phenomenon—the caption says this was Rice’s fi ft y-seventh night in his “orig- inal and celebrated extravaganza of jim crow” —is thus extremely interested in its audience’s contradictory responses. In this rendition at least, blackface min- strelsy hosts a variety of attentions. While some frankly indulge in Rice’s “blackness,” others involve themselves in the class values articulated through what dime novels sometimes called a “fi stic duel.” 16 Most striking is the illustra- tion’s assertion, literalized in the contorted worker, that this audience is seeing the performance and performing onstage at the same time, indulging both in “blackness” and in a kind of ironic self-presentation or self-promotion. It is as if the two indulgences were quite compatible—as if the minstrel show encour- aged white audiences to fi nd themselves represented in it. 17 As I have already hinted, two moments of white participation are apparent here: both have to do with minstrelsy’s status as a predominantly male arena, preoccupied with mat- ters of the body; and both have roots in working-class culture and ideology.

Take the “fi stic duel,” for example. What is the signifi cance of working-class brawling onstage at a blackface performance? Why should it be this that sums up Rice’s fifty-seventh night? One might say, with Tocqueville, that “[i]n written productions the literary canons of aristocracy will be gently, gradually, and, so to speak, legally modifi ed; at the theater they will be riotously over- thrown” (85). Yet there is more going on here than mere riotousness. Several social historians of the nineteenth century have determined the importance of physical “manliness” and bravery to working-class life, viewing it as an ambig- uous force of “lived” class resistance. 18 Women no doubt bore the brunt of this kind of physical pride; the construction of masculinity in a capitalist dynamic where power in the body substituted for power in the workplace was obviously only partly transgressive. 19 Th e same can be said for its racial import. Philip Cohen has suggested that working-class men live their class subjection by dis- sociating themselves from the structural position of their labor and assuming “imaginary positions of mastery linked to masculine ‘prides of place’” (27). Th is assumption is clearly one moment of the drawing: the fi ghting workingmen assert their mastery and defi ne their superiority in relation to, and over the body of, a “black” man.

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Black men, however, lived their subjection in quite similar ways, which white men recognized and wildly exaggerated in their fantasies of black male aggression. Th e quarrel between two black men, for instance, was a staple of many early minstrel songs and playlets; oft en the quarrel was over a woman, as in “Coal Black Rose” (1827) or Rice’s burlesque playlets O Hush! or, Th e Virginny Cupids (1833) and Bone Squash (1835) (see Fig. 8 ). Mark Twain’s chief pleasure in minstrel productions as he remembered them was indeed the

Figure 8 Courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia

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“happy and accurate imitation of the usual and familiar negro quarrel” ( Auto- biography 60). Th e important point is that if white and black men assumed mastery and superiority through similar mechanisms of male rivalry, such similarity, in Cohen’s words, implied “some recognition that black and white [were] peers of the same proletarian public realm” (27). Th e very activities white male workers used to assert that they were not at the bottom, that they were somebody, could produce instances of solidarity with black men. Th at is the second moment of the drawing—the fascination with Rice—and it is the second moment of early minstrel productions generally. White workers evinced split perceptions in regard to race, identifying, for example, with indi- vidual black men and tolerating various kinds of interracial practice, but dis- avowing ideally, and ideologically, all modes of intercourse with black people, from “amalgamation” to abolitionism, although this is not the only split one might construct on the basis of the evidence. 20 Th e minstrel show was a form that at some “imaginary” level negotiated and attempted to resolve such con- tradictions in antebellum American culture, contradictions that stalled orga- nized interracial labor radicalism in the 1830s and early 1840s. Not only were both moments of the contradiction present in minstrelsy, as we have seen in the equivocal character of its representations; but they were also responsible for and infused the ambiguous form of the show itself. 21

Th is view might help reaccent recent debates around white working-class racial tendencies in the years of these fi rst minstrel productions. I have already pointed up a seemingly direct correspondence between public masking rituals, minstrelsy, and the widespread racial hostility among working- class white men. It has been a commonplace of antebellum labor history that such hostility was generated in part out of the extreme competition for work in the earliest stage of “initial proletarianization” in America, though it is now clear that the myth of black competition was a cover story for white workers’ precipitous descent in the class structure. 22 Cover story or not, white workers labored to preserve the dignity of work by keeping out the “degrading” pres- ence of blacks. Th is is one context for the beating of the soon-to-be fugitive slave Frederick Douglass in a Baltimore shipyard by a group of white workers fearful that blacks “would soon take the trade into their own hands” ( Narrative 100). It is also one context for antebellum violence such as the 1834 New York antiabolitionist rioting, much of which involved young male workers. 23 And it is of course one context for the minstrel show. Several historians, however, have complicated such notions of working-class racism with subtler inquiries into the contradictions of labor’s racial attitudes and ideologies.

A new phrase crept into political discourse in the 1830s to describe the con- dition of at least the artisan portion of the working class: “wage slavery.” Eric Foner observes that this succinct overlapping of racial and class codes embod- ied fears about a diminished respect for labor, a loss of economic indepen- dence, and the emergence of “European” social conditions, all of which tore at

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the central ideas and values of artisan radicalism—liberty, democracy, equality. Moreover, Foner says, this term’s metaphorical equation of northern workers with southern slaves carried within it a “critique of the peculiar institution as an extreme form of oppression,” only one indication that the “entire ideology of the labor movement was implicitly hostile to slavery” (“Abolitionism” 61). While such rhetoric was to be put to less emancipatory uses in the hard times of the 1840s, a decade which also witnessed an alliance between Mike Walsh’s “shirtless democracy” and proslavery Democrats, evidence for this earlier pe- riod suggests it was a useful strategy. 24 Th e only public New York defense of the Nat Turner insurrection, for example, was published by George Henry Evans’s Daily Sentinel , an organ of the Workingmen’s party: “Th ey were deluded, but their cause was just.” In words that evoke the concept of wage slavery, Evans goes so far as to argue that

we have been negligent in relation to [the slaves’] cause, and our only excuse is, that the class to which we belong, and whose rights we endeavor to advocate, are threatened with evils only inferior to those of slavery . . . . [W]e are now convinced that our interest demands that we should do more, for equal rights can never be enjoyed, even by those who are free, in a nation which contains slaveites enough to hold in bondage two millions of human beings. 25

Working-class newspapers (and certain minstrel songs) may have been merci- less in their ridicule of wealthy evangelical abolitionists such as the Tappan brothers, but, when not distracted by the class makeup of some abolitionist organizations, they were quite ready to hear the merits of antislavery.

Indeed, the largest single group advocating immediate abolition in the 1830s was that of artisans, not professional reformers; artisans were far more widely represented in abolitionist organizations than in antiabolitionist riot- ing. 26 Key fi gures of “artisan republican” ideology such as Robert Dale Owen and Frances Wright were, aft er all, well-known antislavery advocates. Jacobin radicalism predisposed labor toward abolitionism, as did evangelical religion, though the latter was a limited source of antislavery support and in some cases worked against it. 27 Generally speaking, the hostility to the equation of workers and slaves came as oft en from the abolitionists, who saw no oppression in northern labor conditions, as from workingmen. Th e very fi rst issue of the Liberator attacked the New England Association of Farmers, Mechanics, and other Workingmen for unnecessarily exciting the working classes against the “more opulent,” whereas William West, president of the New England Associ- ation, wrote in 1831: “I think there is a very intimate connection between the interests of the workingman’s party and [the abolitionists’] own.” 28 If minstrelsy had another, more positive moment besides or in addition to racial ridicule, this sympathetic identifi cation between black and white, represented by an inchoate artisan abolitionism, was its political correlative. Th e minstrel show

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no doubt supported and was supported by working-class racism; and even an advocacy of abolitionism did not preclude individual racist responses. But op- position to abolitionism did not necessarily mean an acceptance of slavery, either, and minstrelsy also rested on certain kinds of lived interracial identifi - cation. Th ese two tendencies within working-class culture were both to be found in blackface, and they shaped the double political valence of the form. 29

It is plausible but mistaken to suspect that this duality was a mark of the class unevenness of the minstrel show’s audience, of racial feeling unequally distributed by class fraction, rather than of generalized racial ambivalence. It could also be objected that contradictions in working-class racial feeling owed simply to Alan Dawley and Paul Faler’s cultural and ideological antinomy of “rebels” sympathetic to radical organizing and “traditionalists” indiff erent or opposed to it; minstrelsy might then be seen as a form catering not to the rest- less rebel minority, who rarely went to the theater anyway, but to the tradition- alist racist majority—perhaps, in this view, the same men who perpetrated New York’s antiabolitionist riots. Actually, however, there was more contradic- tory race and class feeling here, which it was minstrelsy’s task to mediate; at least one of those arrested at the scene of the 1834 riots, for example, was a trade union member, and union men were not unfamiliar with the Bowery milieu (Wilentz 264, 270).

Th e dichotomy of pro-and antiabolitionist workers was itself shot through with ambivalence. Th e fi rst working-class penny daily newspapers, as I have remarked, voiced highly contradictory attitudes in regard to slavery. Despite their typical advocacy of Democratic party policy, which championed na- tional expansion in alliance with southern slaveholders, papers such as the New York Transcript and the New York Sun , not unlike the Democrats nation- ally, were split in their views on racial issues—the same kind of split visible in white workers who attended minstrel performances. 30 Th e Transcript , for ex- ample, hurled angry denunciations at antislavery agitators while also defend- ing their freedom of speech. Th e Sun , as abolitionism gathered force, on the one hand printed various kinds of antislavery material and on the other printed anecdotes about racial brawls in which white men were scornfully victorious. What interests me about such ambivalences is that they disallow simplistic ascriptions of racism to the working class and discourage easy di- chotomies of working-class culture. Th ey also capture the structure of feeling that made an interracial labor movement falter. Certainly it is this kind of complexity that gives historical concreteness to the equivocations and ambi- guities we have seen in the minstrel show.

It bears reiterating that abolitionism’s Whiggish association with wealthy merchants (such as Arthur Tappan), precisely those who were held responsible for the erosion of working conditions, was a major reason for working-class ambivalence toward the movement. 31 Also, the association of abolitionism with the evangelical impulse (most frequently in the person of Arthur Tappan’s

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Sabbatarian brother, Lewis) was read as the “Church and State Party’s” cabal to reform Tom Paine’s republic out of all recognition. 32 Neither Tappan hesitated to use his socioeconomic power for purposes of coercion. On one occasion, when a tailor would not sign Lewis Tappan’s petition against Sunday mail de- livery, Tappan threatened the artisan that he would get no more business from his brother Arthur’s mercantile fi rm. 33 Th e Tappans had also founded the New York-based Journal of Commerce , a staunch foe of the trade unions. Artisan ambivalence toward abolitionism was in part a case of class resistance overde- termining and blocking what appears, from the evidence of the minstrel show at least, to have been a real, if tenuous, interest in black people; it was also, of course, merely racist, an expression of white cultural fears. But the sources of identifi cation remained, and were implicit even in minstrelsy’s critiques of antislavery reform. True to the popular anticlericalism of which they formed a part, minstrel songs made frequent reference to the supposed amalgamative tendencies of a “Tappan”—it mattered not which—and rumors fl ew for a decade that one of the Tappans was about to marry, had married, or was en- couraging others to marry, a black. 34 Even so, early minstrelsy left occasional interracial recognitions intact by grasping this class resistance to reform even as it took racial parody for granted. Th is is, as a matter of fact, a succinct way of stating the social complications that wrecked the potential for a labor abolitionism in these years.

Th e Black Dandy

Perhaps the severest test of my argument about such contradictions was the seemingly unalloyed racism of the infamous 1834 antiabolitionist riots. If min- strelsy could negotiate the contradictions I have outlined, the riots made for far rougher going; yet the same ideological complexities were at work in both social texts. Indeed, blackface minstrelsy illuminatingly glosses this other bit of riotousness from the Bowery crowd.

Occurring in the midst of a long year of violent public disturbances throughout the Northeast, the New York riots witnessed four nights of exten- sive violence in a variety of locations. 35 More than seven churches—those as- sociated with “amalgamationist,” that is to say abolitionist, ministers—and a dozen houses, many of them belonging to blacks, sustained damage. Skilled “native” workers, rather than the more prominent mercantile and professional men recent historians have fi ngered as perpetrators of much antebellum riot- ing, seem to have been largely responsible for the violence. 36 On one night of the riots (July 9) there were three separate disturbances that contemporary observers (among them a former mayor, Philip Hone) believed to have been not only linked but attributable to the same mob. 37 Th at perception demands our attention; it amounts to a kind of narrative. Early in the evening a crowd of

Love and Th eft 136

two to three thousand gathered at the Chatham Street Chapel (an old theater that Arthur Tappan had converted into a church for Charles Grandison Finney) to break up an integrated antislavery meeting; when the meeting did not materialize (the group had been forewarned), certain of the crowd broke into the chapel and passed resolutions in favor of Negro deportation (one young man, wrote Th e Man , preached “in mock negro style” while his fellows “struck up a Jim Crow chorus”). 38 Th en a number of them left for the Bowery Th eatre, intending to ruin a benefi t for its English stage manager, George Farren, whose allegedly anti-American remarks had become associated with Britain’s attacks on American slavery and with British aid to the Tappans’ American Anti-Slavery Society. Meanwhile, a separate mob of about one hun- dred had converged upon the home of Lewis Tappan himself, smashing win- dows and doors and burning artwork and fi ne furniture in the street. One rioter discovered a portrait of Washington, and when a friend insisted, “For God’s sake, don’t burn Washington,” the portrait was gently put aside (Harlow 292). Th is crowd met the overfl ow of the Chatham Street crowd at the Bowery. Four thousand people fi nally stormed the theater, and fi ve hundred to a thou- sand of them broke in and drove Edwin Forrest and the cast of Metamora from the stage. Th e rioters were calmed only when the theater manager, Th omas Hamblin, ran in from the wings apologizing for the Farren benefi t, waving two American fl ags, and summoning a performer to sing “Yankee Doodle” and “Zip Coon” (Wilentz 265).

It does not trivialize the violence and destructiveness of the riots to see them as complex events, essentially like all cultural forms: intentional, over- lapping weaves of social codes and signifying systems whose larger, “narrative” designs transcended the goals of single individuals. Th e New York riots were indeed purposive, their targets carefully chosen; they were planned and un- dertaken with consequence, though abolitionist artisans, together with editors such as George Henry Evans, claimed they merely united the “head” and “tail” of society, revealing the “aristocracy of the North” (merchants and politicians) to be in league with the “penniless profl igates.” Some have taken this very per- ception by “rebel” mechanics to signify their break not only with the elite but also with “traditionalist” workers suddenly using age-old mobbing practices against their own rightful allies. 39 Yet there did emerge from the rioters’ actions a complicated tale of republicanism, blending “traditionalist” racism and “re- bellious” class resistance in distorted and allegorized ways—a tale related to the ones that occurred in minstrelsy.

Th e principal part of the night of rioting I have recounted involved three main sites: Lewis Tappan’s house, the Chatham Street Chapel, and the Bowery Th eatre. Th e class logic behind the juxtaposition of these sites ought to be clear from the foregoing pages. And the “recapture” of the Bowery Th eatre not only mimics the rowdiness one had come to expect from the shows that played there but also yokes minstrelsy to the ugly purposes of the mob in the form of

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“Zip Coon.” One should note, too, the variousness of the signs conjoined in the rioters’ expressions of white supremacy, class resistance, and plebeian patri- otism: colonizationist speeches (performed in near-blackface in “amalga- mationist” churches), Washington’s portrait, “Yankee Doodle,” “Zip Coon.” Washington in this context seems a familiar artisan-republican standard, as does “Yankee Doodle,” talismans meant to keep the British and reformist, that is to say class as well as abolitionist, threats to the republic at bay. Coloniza- tionist speechifying, “in character,” directly controverts abolitionist ideology. But the logic of these anti-amalgamationist rioters’ being calmed by one of the several minstrel songs about the miscegenating proclivities of black “dandies” is somewhat unfathomable. What are we to make of the odd contiguity of cel- ebrated black dandies (“Zip Coon”) and hated “amalgamationist” reformers (the Tappans)? What was the regulative social type of the dandy, who was widely rumored to have been on the loose during the riots advancing racial intermarriage, a fi gure for—aside, indeed, from amalgamation? What was amalgamation itself a fi gure for? As with “Jim Crow,” there was certainly racist confi rmation here, as if the song sealed the fate of the rioters’ black targets. But we have seen that such racial feeling was part of a more complex dynamic, and I would argue that the early minstrel show provides the best clue to its inner workings. If the riots confi rm our suspicion that the amalgamationist prospect of blacks on top, so oft en played with in minstrelsy, was an intolerable threat in antebellum America, it is also true that minstrel productions such as burlesque playlets clarify the wayward impulses generating the riots.

In these short dramatic interludes, black mechanics combat self-satisfi ed black dandies who have begun to consider themselves better than the rest. In the most popular playlet, Rice’s O Hush! or, Th e Virginny Cupids (fi rst pre- sented at the Bowery Th eatre in 1833), 40 a bootblack named Sambo Johnson who has won the lottery becomes an object of scorn for the “‘spectable,” hard- working bootblacks who rally behind their boss, Cuff (played by Rice). Th ey ridicule Johnson for putting on airs and reading the newspaper (upside down); Johnson’s fi rst riposte to them is to read (that is, pretend to read) an ad for some bootblacks on Canal Street who are underselling them. In what becomes another male-rival plot, it turns out that both Cuff and Johnson are courting Rose (the plot derives directly from the song “Coal Black Rose”). Cuff hides in Rose’s cupboard when Johnson comes to call, and foils the visit by tumbling down from a high shelf—covered with fl our—when Johnson tries to kiss Rose. Rose protests to Johnson that Cuff (now unrecognizable) is “noffi n’s else but trash . . . a runaway from de nullifying States,” so Cuff shows his free papers, fi ghts with Johnson, and is hit on the head by Rose with a frying pan. When the men are pulled apart, everything seems settled and all begin to dance. As Rose and Johnson dance, however, Cuff breaks a fi ddle over Johnson’s head, Rose faints, and, as the fi nal stage direction has it, “ cuff stands with uplift ed hands.”

Love and Th eft 138

Th is is obviously in part a fantasy about social class, in which honest me- chanics are vindicated at the expense of those who taunt them with cheap threats and class insults. Th e dandy who hints that the bootblacks are being undersold is defeated in the end, as is the woman who dismisses Cuff as a slave. It is not too diffi cult to recognize here the kind of cross-racial identifi cation we have seen before; though the respectable mechanics are black, the plot invokes certain aspects of the “republicanism” so central to white working- class culture—independence, virtue, equality, and so on. There is even an oblique play on “wage slavery,” a charge against which Cuff vigorously defends himself; his “free” papers are more a certifi cation of “manly” integrity than a document of status. Th e plot in fact underscores the identifi cation of black stage mechanic with white audience mechanic in certain of its devices: Cuff ’s momentary whiteness by way of the fl our; the pugilistic male rivalry; and the wish fulfi llment of sudden riches through the lottery (variants of which, in inheritance plots and millionaires incognito, would become central to the dime novel). Yet this curious fi guration of white class confl ict through black characters, a formal recognition that white and black cohabited the “same pro- letarian public realm” (Cohen 27), is even more complex than it may appear, and takes us straight to the riots.

Th e class object of this narrative of hostility has a racial component that is far from self-evident. Th e class animus is directed not, as we might expect, at Cuff the boss but at someone outside the master-journeyman nexus, Johnson the black dandy. Th is racial object certainly illustrates the class limit to inter- racial identifi cation—and insofar as it echoes the rioters’ call for “Zip Coon” it is an excuse for racist fun. But I believe this character’s condensation of race and class to be a fi guration of the antislavery reformer; if the class counterpart of Cuff is the white mechanic, the class counterpart of Johnson is a “Tappan,” the only current social type combining a superior class position with racial overtones. Johnson the dandy indeed occupies the structural position given to the Tappans in many minstrel songs; “amalgamationist” threat, he interposes himself between Rose and the rightful suitor, Cuff . And the association in the rioting of abolitionism with black dandies, not to mention amalgamation, was so strong as to mark a confusion of one hated object with another. For weeks preceding the New York riots there circulated rumors of two basic kinds: one that charged abolitionists with promoting amalgamation, and one that charged black dandies with the wooing of white women. 41 Even if the black dandy fi g- ure referenced an increasing population of middle-class blacks in the urban Northeast, the animus toward it was not only racial but also class-fueled—a substitute, as one black newspaper put it, for less permissible outlets of class hatred. 42 Th e black dandy literally embodied the amalgamationist threat of abolitionism, and allegorically represented the class threat of those who were advocating it; amalgamation itself, we might even say, was a partial fi guration of class aspiration. 43 Hence the dandy’s downfall in the playlets and in the

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rhetoric of the riots, and hence his song at one of the riots’ conclusion. Ironi- cally, the rioters’ targeting of the dandy seems to have achieved one desired outcome: merchants and professionals withdrew from abolitionism in droves, leaving the movement for the most part to artisans and shopkeepers. 44

Apparent here, as in the other texts, are the ways in which white men lived an antebellum structure of racial feeling: interracial solidarity was briefl y and intermittently achieved through male rituals of rivalry; such solidarity was hampered by the cultural presence of class superiors removed from these rit- uals, whether in the guise of a wealthy reformer or a black “dandy”; and such solidarity, in any case, was always tenuous and fl eeting. We do well to remem- ber, in addition, that even the emancipatory moment of the blackface act was conducted in the realm of male mastery—courtship plots at best, misogynist joking at worst—in other words, over the bodies of women. Th e plots, types, and disguises to which this structure gave rise might properly be termed min- strelsy’s “dream-work of the social,” in Michael Denning’s phrase, its fantastic fi gurations of the racial tendencies in antebellum culture ( Mechanic 81). In condensed and somewhat displaced form, minstrel productions suggested the class obstacle to a labor abolitionism while they relied, in making that sugges- tion, on an interracial identifi cation it was the purpose of the riots to negate. Riot and blackface both scapegoated the fi gure of the black dandy because the latter, I would submit, glossed not only the racism that was one response to the political tensions of antebellum New York, but also the working-class hatred of reformers seen as responsible for the republic’s impending ruin. Here anti- capitalist frustrations stalled potentially positive racial feelings and signifi ca- tions, revealing in the end the viciously racist underside of those frustrations. Yet minstrel productions symbolically and momentarily resolved these contradictions of antebellum white racial feeling.

Readers of Edmund Morgan will have noted a fi nal turn of the screw: the black dandy, in another sense a representative of black maleness as such, was scapegoated to foster the bond between journeyman and master, essentially the argument of Morgan’s American Slavery—American Freedom . Th is aspect of minstrel productions, of course, was never absent. It returned as if to refute the burgeoning cross-racial interest so manifest in blackface performance in the 1830s. And it leaves us with a question that would be answered in the next decade: to what extent would white workingmen identify with their masters, and to what extent was it possible to do so with their potential black allies?

{ 6 }

“Genuine Negro Fun” Racial Pleasure and Cl ass Formation in the 1840s

Th e discovery that one has it in one’s power to make someone else comic opens the way to an undreamt-of yield of comic pleasure and is

the origin of a highly developed technique. —Sigmund Freud

Sometime in the winter of 1842–43 four irregularly employed circus and min- strel men, in one of the numberless small hotels that lined the Bowery, hit upon the idea of a blackface minstrel band. Th e band would soon be called the Virginia Minstrels, and it was the fi rst troupe of its kind to form in New York City. Although the story is variously told, all accounts agree that this happy occurrence came about quite by accident. Sitting in the North American Hotel, Dan Emmett, Billy Whitlock, Dick Pelham, and Frank Brower one day de- cided to descend upon the Bowery Circus with fi ddle, banjo, tambourine, and bones and treat one of its proprietors to what Emmett termed a “charivari.” “Without any rehearsal,” according to Emmett, “with hardly the ghost of an idea as to what was to follow,” they crossed the street and “‘browbeat’ Uncle Nate Howes into giving them an engagement, the calculation being that he would succumb in preference to standing the horrible noise” the men made. Intrigued, Howes challenged them to sing a song, whereupon they lit into “Old Dan Tucker,” Emmett singing and the others joining in the chorus. “Th e four minstrels were as much surprised at the result as was Uncle Nate,” Emmett later told the New York Clipper . “Aft er singing some more songs for him, they returned to the North American, where they resumed their ‘horrible noise’ in the reading-room, which was quickly fi lled with spectators.” 1

Suspect as such accounts typically seem, Emmett’s tale immediately roots us in the culture of early 1840s New York—not least in its crowding of the reading room with the culture of amusements. Above all it situates the activities of the minstrel show in a tradition of “rough music” and charivari that we associate with a moral economy of “natural rights,” the right to bread and work, and a

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time-honored misogyny dedicated to regulating women’s courtship and sexual practices. 2 Regarding the fi rst of these, the minstrel show appears to have taken form most immediately as a response to unemployment, as a means of impor- tuning a prospective employer for a job. Although the response of Emmett and his fellows was undoubtedly infl uenced by a recent trend toward larger min- strel groups, not to mention “singing families” such as the Hutchinsons, its accidental nature suggests that they simply cast about for the best possible so- lution to a pressing need. Th e depression following the 1837 panic had indeed devastated theatrical employments as well as most of the trades. One of the Virginia Minstrels, Billy Whitlock, had once been a printer’s compositor; now the second of his chosen employments was in jeopardy (Rice 12).

It is fi tting that the minstrel “show” began in this way, for its institutional popularity may be said to have sprung up as part of the crisis of hegemony brought about by the forward march of capital in the early republic. If early minstrelsy’s contradictory appeal had been subtended by the class warfare that marked most of the 1830s, its plots and types already hinted at the uses of min- strel acts for whites insecure about their whiteness. Working people hit hard by economic disaster in the 1840s were to turn even more urgently to the new minstrel shows. Because the economic slump came amid the enormous shocks that northeastern capitalist consolidation was dealing to the apprentice system of labor, it fostered a profound sense of unease among the popular classes. Th eir response was a much muted sense of class resistance, an attempt to shore up “white” class identities by targeting new enemies such as immigrants, blacks, and tipplers. Th is decade’s chiliastic sects, its working-class subcultural styles, its nativist and temperance movements are cited by historians as products of a turn to what David Montgomery calls “cultural politics” in the 1840s. Th e min- strel show was a key player in the turn, and served a crucial new social purpose.

I focus here on the role of blackface in what one might call, aft er Gramsci, the production of racist consent. I am aft er the ways in which a new formal achievement in New York entertainment answered and helped promote an 1840s shift in the structure of racial feeling which had emerged with the onset of metropolitan industrialization. Blackface acts did not merely confi rm an already existent racism—an idealist assumption that ignores the ways in which culture is reproduced. Social feelings and relationships are constantly gener- ated and maintained, regulated and fought over, in the sphere of culture and elsewhere, and giving due attention to the minstrel show reveals the straitened contours of racial feeling it helped produce in the hard years of the early 1840s. For even as the new shows continued to sponsor a variety of social contradic- tions, they began to ease the friction among various segments of the working class, and between workers and class superiors, by seizing on Jim Crow as a common enemy. Th e alliance at which Rice’s burlesque playlets had hinted in their effi gies of the black dandy soon became commonplace in policing the capitalist crisis of the post-panic years. 3

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Not only had early blackface acts confronted less extreme ideological demands, but they had taken much of their inspiration from class struggle, implicitly coupling the interests of plebeian black and white while mirroring the ways in which class fi ssures helped destroy interracial coexistence. Th e minstrel show, as it developed into a night-long entertainment in its own right, met the crisis of the early 1840s with an intensifi ed white egalitarianism that, for all its real instability, buried class tensions and permitted class alliances along rigidifying racial lines, a vital need in this period of seeming disintegra- tion. In what follows I specify the formal and social mechanisms in blackface performance that were congenial to this complex development. If the minstrel show was invented at the very moment when workingmen’s nativist, prosouth- ern, and temperance groups began to form, we shall see that it fostered this chilly climate with an unusual set of racial and sexual fantasies and represen- tations. To address the other aspect of Emmett’s charivari, we must indeed at- tend to the intersecting lines of class and race as they were worked out across the body, oft en in transvestism. And while we shall also see that the new acts, many of them, were not as racially clear-cut as the white egalitarian alliance might have wished, they ultimately turned matters of the body to racist account.

Th e Spectacle of Vulgarity

From the start it appeared that a sort of general illicitness was one of the orga- nized minstrel show’s main objectives. So much is suggested, at least, by the lengths to which reviews and playbills typically went to downplay (even as they intimated) its licentious atmosphere:

First Night of the novel, grotesque, original, and surpassingly me- lodious ethiopian band, entitled the virginia minstrels. Being an exclusively musical entertainment, combining the banjo, violin, bone castanetts, and tambourine; and entirely exempt from the vulgarities and other objectionable features, which have hitherto characterized negro extravaganzas. 4

One wants to know more about those other objectionable features. Whatever they were, nobody took very seriously their alleged absence from the minstrel show, as an 1843 song sheet illustration of the Virginia Minstrels only begins to suggest (see Fig. 9 ). Brower the bone player with legs splayed wide; Pelham on the verge of forced entry of the tambourine; Whitlock in ecstasy behind a phallic banjo: unlike in the engraving of Rice, there is no attempt at realism here. Th e whole scene has rather the air of a collective masturbation fantasy— accurate enough, one might guess, in capturing the overall spirit of the show. Th at spirit depended at the very least on the suggestion of black male sexual

“Genuine Negro Fun” 143

misdemeanor. And the character of white men’s involvement in this institutional Other of genteel culture bears some scrutiny, for as oft en as not, audiences were themselves inscribed in advertisements of companies such as the Vir- ginia Minstrels, the “able delineators of the sports and pastimes of the Sable Race of the South .  .  . who have won for themselves a popularity unprece- dented and the patronage of the elite of Boston” (quoted in Nathan 121). What, in these years, did this spurious “elite” get out of blackface? And what should

Figure 9 Th e Virginia Minstrels, 1843 Courtesy of the Harvard Th eatre Collection

Love and Th eft 144

we make of the obfuscations here, the hints and denials of vulgarity, or the strained attempts to code the popular classes as elite?

Th e form of the early minstrel show gives us some necessary clues. What the early show was not is as important as what it was. Narrative, for instance, seems to have been only a secondary impulse, even though Rice’s burlesque aft erpieces had been tremendous successes in the 1830s. In their fi rst perfor- mances the Virginia Minstrels gave what they termed “Negro Concerts,” con- taining certain burlesque skits, to be sure, but emphasizing wit and melody; the skits themselves, like Emmett’s “Dan Tucker on Horseback,” seemed little more than overgrown circus acts. An 1844 playbill publicizing a “Vocal, Local, Joke-all, and Instrumental Concert” conveys both the tenor and the substance of early minstrel shows (quoted in Odell 5:33). In “sporting saloons” and indeed circuses, among other Bowery leisure sites, the Virginia Minstrels featured burlesque lectures, conundrums, equestrian scenes, and comic songs, fi nally settling into an early version of the show form that would become standard minstrel procedure. Th e evening was divided in two; both parts consisted mainly of ensemble songs interspersed with solo banjo songs, and were strung together with witticisms, ripostes, shouts, puns, and other attempts at black impersonation. Th ere was as yet no high-minded interlocutor at whom some of the jokes were later directed. Frequently at least one of the songs was sung by a female impersonator, a fi gure that would prove enormously popular in the 1840s. 5 Very soon the program’s fi rst part came to center on the now institu- tionalized northern dandy, while its second put the southern slave at center stage. In the late 1840s and early 1850s, as the fi rst part began to be devoted to more sentimental music (sometimes performed without blackface), Emmett’s and other companies added a stirring middle or “olio” section containing a variety of acts (among them a stump speech), the third part then oft en com- prising a skit situated in the South. Seated in a semicircle, the Emmett troupe placed the bones and tambourine players at either end of the band, and though originally all were comic performers, these two endmen began to assume chief importance in most minstrel companies, particularly aft er the addition of the interlocutor—genteel in comportment and, popular myth notwithstanding, also in blackface. 6

Th e early emphasis, then, was on what fi lm theorists have called spectacle rather than on narrative. Th e fi rst minstrel shows put narrative to a variety of uses, but relied fi rst and foremost on the objectifi cation of black characters in comic set pieces, repartee, and physical burlesque. If the primary purpose of early blackface performance had been to display the “black” male body as a place where racial boundaries might be both constructed and transgressed, the shows that developed in the mid-1840s were ingenious in coming up with ways to fetishize the body in a spectacle that worked against the forward mo- tion of the show, interrupting the fl ow of action with uproarious spectacles for erotic consumption, as Laura Mulvey has suggested of women in cinema (19).

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With all their riot and commotion, contortion and pungency, performers in these fi rst shows exhibited a functional unruliness that, in one commentator’s words, “seemed animated by a savage energy,” nearly wringing minstrel men off their seats—their “white eyes roll[ing] in a curious frenzy” and their “hic- cupping chuckles” punctuating the proceedings ( Ethiopian 22). Here was an art of performative irruption, of acrobatics and comedy, ostensibly dependable mechanisms of humorous pleasure. 7 “Black” fi gures were there to be looked at, shaped to the demands of desire; they were screens on which audience fantasy could rest, and while this purpose might have had a host of diff erent eff ects, its fundamental outcome was to secure the position of white spectators as supe- rior, controlling fi gures. “I am stating a simple fact,” wrote an early admirer of Christy’s Minstrels,

when I say that so droll was the action, so admirable the singing, so clever the instrumentation, and so genuine was the fun of these three nigger minstrels, that I not only laughed till my sides fairly ached, but that I never left an entertainment with a more keen desire to witness it again than I did the fi rst Christy Minstrel concert I had had the pleasure of assisting at . . . . Th e staple of E. P. Christy’s entertainment was fun— mind, genuine negro fun . . . the counterfeit presentment of the southern darkies they personally wished to illustrate, and whose dance and songs, as such darkies, they endeavored to reproduce. (quoted in Nathan 145)

Assertions of the genuine fun these vulgar counterfeits inspired turn up with some frequency in the commentary on blackface, and they off er compel- ling evidence of the kind of pleasure minstrelsy aff orded—so supremely infec- tious that it begged to be repeated. While we know a fair amount about the overt ideological meanings produced in blackface acts, their more immediate and embodied eff ects remain poorly understood, as does the relationship of these pleasurable eff ects to ideology itself. It is not always the case that plea- sure, what Roland Barthes once called the “formidable underside” of cultural products ( Pleasure 39), entirely coincides with ideological intention: it has an underestimated ability to take its captives in wayward political directions, as we have seen, and this held true throughout the antebellum years of the minstrel show. Behind all the circumlocution going on in descriptions of mid-1840s blackface performance, where the celebrations of “fun” and the as- persions against “vulgarity” intersect, we must begin to glimpse the white male traffi c in racial degradation whose cardinal principle was yet a supreme disor- derly conduct—a rather equivocal means of racial containment. In this aff air “blackness” provided the inspiration as well as the occasion for preposterously sexual, violent, or otherwise prohibited theatrical material—material that could result in a somewhat unsettling spectacle of black power, but which, in this social climate, went a great distance toward the subjection of “blackness.” Indeed, such material and the guilty pleasure it permitted helped clinch popular

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racist feeling in these years, if unevenly, and in no area was it so bold and un- guarded as in minstrelsy’s greatly elaborated staple element, humor.

Th e function of race in blackface comedy has tended to defeat critics of the minstrel show, particularly when it comes to the subject of racist pleasure. So offi cially repugnant now are the attitudes responsible for blackface joking that the tendency has been simply to condemn the attitudes themselves—a suspi- ciously respectable move, and an easy one at that—rather than to investigate the ways in which racist entertainment was once fun, and still is to much of the Caucasian population of the United States. It will hardly do to nod toward ideology as a suffi cient explanation for such pleasure, as though it were inher- ently enjoyable to have one’s prejudices confi rmed, or indeed as though cul- tural products were mere reiterations of ideology. Th e sources of minstrel acts were more complex than that; and the complexity of racist pleasure was pre- cisely that it was labile enough occasionally to outwit Jacksonian ideological prescription. Th is observation is, by the way, intended to make it perfectly clear that racial feeling was intrinsic to minstrel joking; more than one mis- guided critic has seen blackface as an only incidentally racialized example of the burlesque impulse. 8 While it is true that audiences in the mid-1840s appear to have been drawn principally to the scabrous fun, it is also true that a special kind of racial pleasure proved so irresistible to minstrel-show audiences. Th at racist pleasure has proven so resistant to analysis is perhaps only symptomatic of the scandal of pleasure itself, which is notoriously diffi cult to domesticate and very oft en goes against the grain of responsible social practice. In pursuing the neglected roots of minstrelsy’s off ensive humor, therefore, we should also be prepared to fi nd in and alongside them certain dangerous moments of plea- surable disorder that sometimes off ended the racial regime of antebellum America. It might even be said that such titillating ambiguity as to the place and proper function of minstrel comedy was one source of its extreme popu- larity in the mid-1840s, though this ambiguity was, as I say, increasingly cir- cumscribed. And the promise of racially suspect pleasure for whites in the ostensibly right-minded black comedy of our own time is perhaps blackface humor’s legacy and equally scandalous analogue, an area of complicitous fun whose formation and sedimentation is mightily clarifi ed by investigating the minstrel show. 9

Let me emphasize fi rst that the implicitly triangulated, derisive structure of minstrel comedy, in which blackface comic and white spectator shared jokes about an absent third party, usually resolved to a confi guration of two people, the joker personifying the person being joked about. Th e central component of mimicry in minstrel acts was just this aggressive triangulation (the basic situation in Freud’s account of the joking process) masked as an intimate but no less objectifying aff air of two. “Entering the theatre,” wrote the Knicker- bocker of a T. D. Rice performance, “we found it crammed, from pit to dome, and the best representative of our American negro that we ever saw, was

“Genuine Negro Fun” 147

stretching every mouth in the house to its utmost tension. Such a natural gait!— such a laugh!—and such a twitching-up of the arm and shoulder! It was the negro, par excellence. Long live James Crow , Esquire!” 10 Distensions and all, this comic strategy was vital in generating salacious interest in “our” Negroes. Such responses, moreover, begin to point to the aff ective origins of racist pleasure—the degree to which the scarifying vision of human regression implicit, for whites, in “blackness” was somewhat uneasily converted through laughter and humor into a beloved and reassuring fetish. 11

Th e Knickerbocker is clearly delighted with “blackness” as spectacle, a delight that, in nineteenth-century terms, might border on benignity, but which here seems unpalatable even in those terms. Th e intermittent illusion of black performers’ presence was especially convenient because in this way white ridicule could be passed off as “naive” black comedy, the sort of comedy, according to Freud, in which spectators indulge in lost moments of childish pleasure evoked by the antics of children, or of “inferior” people who resemble them ( Jokes 182–89). Th e great infectiousness of minstrel per- formances, I maintain, owed much to these childish sources. For a good deal of the minstrel show’s “vulgarity” approximated life in the nursery, whether it was the nonsense in songs and puns or tirelessly absurd physical antics. Minstrelsy’s stump speeches reached back to long-prohibited pleasure in nonlogical modes of thinking and speaking, or simply to the child’s helpless- ness before its bodily demands: “Den I ’gin to sweat so .  .  . I sweat half de clothes off my back—tumbled ober a sweat-cloth—took a bite ob dar steaks in de bottom ob my pocket—and absquatulated, just for all de world like a California feverite when he’s bound for de gold region!” 12 Elsewhere Freud remarks that children tend to expect homonyms to have the same meaning ( Jokes 120)—not the worst defi nition of minstrel puns, which on the page are so weak (Mark Twain professed great exasperation with them) that only the most wizened professional could have brought them to life, let alone to a high pitch of naughtiness:

Why is a fi ddle like a handsome young lady? Because it ain’t no use without a bow—( beau .)

Why can a ship’s crew always have fresh eggs when they are out at sea? Because the captain can make the ship lay-to whenever he pleases. 13

Th e oversized clothes performers typically wore, their enormous shooting collars and shoes several sizes too big, had the infantilizing eff ect of arresting “black” people in the early stages of childhood development.

Th is is the sense in which “the African,” a “child in intellect” and a “child in faith,” in the words of one Journal of Music minstrel-show fan (“Songs” 51), might become an object of screaming fun and games, as in Emmett’s extraordinarily popular “Old Dan Tucker” (1843):

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I come to town de udder night, I hear de noise den saw de fi ght, De watchman was a runnin roun, Cryin Old Dan Tucker’s come to town,

So get out de way! Get out de way! Get out de way! Old Dan Tucker, Your too late to come to supper.

Tucker is a nice old man, He use’d to ride our darby ram, He sent him whizzin down de hill, If he had’nt got up he’d laid dar still.

Tucker on de wood pile—can’t count ’lebben, Put in a fedder bed—him gwine to hebben, His nose so fl at, his face so full, De top ob his head like a bag ob wool 14

Th ose who have heard this plantation trickster’s song know that it conveys the inspired abandon of childhood. What it wished most to provide for its fi rst audiences was the giddiness reliably generated by “Negro” high jinks. Its con- tribution to racist ideology, like the jokes just cited, is therefore obvious; yet since, as Freud says, naive comedy requires taking the “producing person’s psychical state into consideration, put[ting] ourselves into it and try[ing] to understand it by comparing it with our own” ( Jokes 186), one attraction of such joking seems to have been its ability to reduce not only black people but white spectators themselves to children.

Th is eff ect perhaps explains the regularity with which observers resorted to the word “fun” to describe their enjoyment of blacks and of blackface acts, a repetition which, congruent with repeated returns to the minstrel show, may suggest (in Freud’s words) “the child’s peculiar pleasure in constant repetition” that is a primary wellspring of jokes ( Jokes 226). In fact the disorder conjured out of wayward portrayals of “black” regression also exuded a certain danger; the evidence indicates that spectators duly arrested in infancy experienced something of its terrors as well as its pleasures. Th is experience comes through, for instance, in Twain’s reminiscences of blackface. The way in which he chooses to celebrate the “genuine nigger show”—he devotes an entire chapter in his autobiography to it—is through a complicated narrative that involves escorting his mother to a Christy’s Minstrels performance in St. Louis. Th is doubled comic situation, in which Twain pays tribute to the fun of blackface acts with a dose of superadded humor at his mother’s expense, not only places Twain himself in the position of son but also evokes from him a certain amount of oedipal hostility. His mother is an adherent of the church, and while she delights in all sorts of novelties, she must also square these with her religious

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proclivities. She is, writes Twain, “always ready for Fourth of July processions, Sunday-school processions, lectures, conventions, camp meetings, revivals in the church—in fact, for any and every kind of dissipation that could not be proven to have anything irreligious about it” ( Autobiography 62). Twain means to immerse his mother in some real dissipation—a desacralizing impulse on the part of the son inspired by the unease minstrelsy has provoked in the writer.

Twain gets his mother and one Aunt Betsey Smith to go to the minstrel show by telling them it is an exhibition of African music by some lately returned missionaries:

When the grotesque negroes [Twain here gets carried away with his own conceit] came fi ling out on the stage in their extravagant costumes, the old ladies were almost speechless with astonishment. I explained to them that the missionaries always dressed like that in Africa.

But Aunt Betsey said, reproachfully, “But they’re niggers.” (62)

Of course the novices are soon merrily enjoying themselves, “their con- sciences . . . quiet now, quiet enough to be dead,” Twain writes. Th ey gaze on “that long curved line of artistic mountebanks with devouring eyes” (63), fi nally reinvigorating with their laughter the whole house’s response to a stale joke from the endmen. As is so oft en the case in accounts of the minstrel show, Twain’s actually reproduces standard elements of blackface joking, here at the expense of blacks and women both. Indeed, the linking of these humorous objects is registered in the syntactical ambiguity as to who pos- sesses the devouring eyes, and this double threat, along with the aggression Twain aims at his mother, points toward the sources of pleasure involved. Twain’s enjoyment of blackface fooling and funning arises from a source of humor Freud calls “degradation to being a child” ( Jokes 227). Th is, of course, was neither the fi rst nor the last time white male aff ection for blacks, (self-) degradation, and infantile pleasure were conjoined by way of an imaginary racial Other.

Th is ambivalent atmosphere quite evidently lent itself to a widespread pre- occupation in minstrel acts with oral and genital amusement. One might spec- ulate with Melanie Klein, for example, that Twain’s infant sadism owed to blackface’s engendering of a longing for oral bliss whose absence he felt was his mother’s fault and the “devouring” privilege of which was hers alone (267–77, 282–338). Twain stands out neither in his veiled rage nor in his distinct uneas- iness. Carl Wittke reports that there was among some blackface performers a superstition regarding the makeup of the mouth, whether painted red or left a sharp, unpainted circle of white around the lips; if this bit was badly managed it was bad luck to take the stage (141). Th is anxiety not only instances again the mystic or tabooed air that clung to blackface evocations of “blackness” but also attests to the importance the minstrel show accorded certain strategic bodily zones. Fat lips, gaping mouths, sucks on the sugarcane; big heels, huge noses,

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enormous bustles: here is a child’s-eye view of sexuality, a “pornotopia,” these fetish images recurring so dutifully that minstrelsy comes to seem nothing less than a carnival space devoted precisely to excesses outgrown in the service of workday rationality (see Figs. 5 and 9 ). 15 Twain has Jim sing the protuberant “Lubly Fan Will You Cum Out To Night?” in a book for boys, Tom Sawyer ( chap. 2 ), a scene which again conjoins the naked powers of blackness and femaleness: Jim sings the song as he discovers Tom painting his aunt’s fence in punishment for his truancy. Th e black and female goads to this childlike am- bivalence naturally came together in blackface representations of black women, who generally fared far worse than Twain’s mother. Th e reader will recognize “Lubly Fan” (1844) as “Buff alo Gals,” though not, perhaps, its original lyrics:

Den lubly Fan will you cum out to night, will you cum out to night, will you cum out to night,

Den lubly Fan will you cum out to night, An dance by de lite ob de moon.

I stopt her an I had some talk, Had some talk, Had some talk,

But her foot covered up de whole side-walk An left no room for me.

Her lips are like de oyster plant, De oyster plant, De oyster plant,

I try to kiss dem but I cant, Dey am so berry large. 16

Th e singer on the Musical Heritage Society’s collection of popular American music gets the ambiguous, almost uncontainable edge of that rising last phrase exactly right. 17 Dey am so berry large: allusive promise and exaggerated threat; desire so deep and consequential that it scarcely bears uttering, revulsion so necessary that utterance is ineludible.

What Mikhail Bakhtin called “grotesque realism,” which in Rabelais and His World provides the occasion for so much antibourgeois celebration, here off ers up its less than liberatory eff ects. Th is song is, to be sure, antibourgeois, but it is again black people, black women , who are the world’s body. While minstrel grotesquerie surely had some hand in constructing a raceless pop- ular community ideal of the “low” and vulgar, it was in this sense more histor- ically useful to some of the people than to all of them. Whether because images of black women abetted the return of rowdy audiences to the pleasures of childhood—to the totalizing, and thus terrorizing, connectedness of pre- oedipal bliss—or because their excess, troubling enough in itself, seemed

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additionally activated by black male potency, blackface performers tilted their staves at the black female power they simultaneously indulged. To appreciate the force of those charges of “vulgarity,” one must attend to the way certain material—and, we should recall, performers themselves—pressed home a sort of violent corporeal reality:

Th e other day while riding With two ladies by my side,

I hardly knew which one to chose To make my happy bride;

I took them into Taylor’s shop To get some ginger beer—

Th ey fl irted up and down the room— Th e white folks they looked queer.

One swallow’d six milk punches, Half a dozen eggs as well;

But fore de bill was brought to pay Th is darkey thought he’d shell.

Th e other ate six mince pies, Twelve juleps quickly sped;

And when dey axed me for de tin, Now what do you think I said? 18

Th e immediacy of the object supervising a loss of the spectatorial subject—the horror of engulfi ng female bodies, gorging women depleting the bankbook— seems immanent in the most extreme minstrel representations. Here, it seems, the extraordinary energy of antebellum misogyny, perhaps even that contempt for white women intermittently repressed through men’s “protection” of them from savage black manhood, was displaced or surcharged onto the “grotesque” black woman. Th ese images indeed make Klein’s point that the child’s longing for union with the absent mother—a longing both precipitated and symbol- ized, it seems to me, by certain blackface images—is inextricable from its primitive desire for vengeance against her, in this case the black woman as the world’s mother . 19 Yet even within its oppressive outlines, minstrelsy clearly marketed certain “objectionable features” (to recall the fi rst shows of the Vir- ginia Minstrels) which, for all their aggression, were conducive to frightful disorder if not to racial or gender harmony. Why might this experience have been pleasurable at all?

Fredric Jameson has noted that “the aesthetic reception of fear .  .  . the enjoyment of the shock and commotion fear brings to the human or- ganism” (“Pleasure” 72), is well-nigh central to the experience of pleasure. From eighteenth-century notions of the sublime to Barthes’s jouissance , Jameson argues, the dissolution of the subject in a paroxysm of threatened

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menace constitutes one way of transforming “sheer horror” into “libidinal gratifi cation.” How much more must this have been the case when, as in min- strelsy, the horror itself was based on a libidinal economy; when the threat of blackface acts was precisely their hint of pre-oedipal suff ocation, or their promised undoing of white male sexual sanctity. If all the hilarity here seems suspicious, it is perhaps because it was both a denial and a pleasurable conver- sion of a hysterical set of racial fears. Images of the body may be of particular help in this project, off ering a symbolic map of psychic, spatial, and social re- lationships, or a site for the concerns of these realms to be secured or dis- solved. 20 By way of the “grotesque” (black) body, which, in the words of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, denied “with a laugh the ludicrous pose of au- tonomy adopted by the subject” and reopened the normally repressive bound- aries of bodily orifi ces (183–84), the white subject could transform fantasies of racial assault and subversion into riotous pleasure, turn insurrection and intermixture into harmless fun—even though the outlines of the fun disclose its troubled sources. Minstrelsy’s focus on disruptions and infractions of the fl esh, its theatrical dream work, condensed and displaced those fears, imaged in the “black” body, that could be neither forgotten nor fully acknowledged.

Yet we ought not overlook an equally present historical referent of the “ecstatic surrender,” in Jameson’s phrase, of blackface minstrelsy’s fearsome pleasure in the early and middle 1840s. Th e overt rudenesses of minstrel per- formance seem to me calculated recollections of the pleasures workingmen were at least putatively required to abandon in a society experiencing over- whelming industrial change and an emphasis on workplace discipline and ab- stemiousness. Whether through coercion or suasion, employers increasingly insisted on the “morality” of their workers. 21 Th e blackface body fi gured the traditional, “preindustrial” joys that social and economic pressures had begun to marginalize. 22 Minstrelsy’s subversively joking focus on bodily degradation, which tainted white spectators themselves, rubbed their noses in foul fl uids and anointed them with mud and manure, were splendid transformations of a constricted world into images of imaginary communion and raging excess. Th e tortured and racist form of this pleasure indicates the ambivalent attitude toward enjoyment itself that industrial morality encouraged.

In rationalized societies such as the one coming into being in the ante- bellum years, the Other is of prime importance in the organization of desire. Whites’ own “innermost relationship with enjoyment,” writes Slavoj Žižek, is expressed in their fascination with the Other; it is through this very displace- ment that desire is constituted. Because one is so ambivalent about and re- presses one’s own pleasure, one imagines the Other to have stolen it or taken it away, and “fantasies about the Other’s special, excessive enjoyment” allow that pleasure to return. Whites get satisfaction in supposing the “racial” Other enjoys in ways unavailable to them—through exotic food, strange and noisy music, outlandish bodily exhibitions, or unremitting sexual appetite. And yet

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at the same time, because the Other personifi es their inner divisions, hatred of their own excess of enjoyment necessitates hatred of the Other. 23 Ascribing this excess to the “degraded” blackface Other, and indulging it—by imagining, incorporating, or impersonating the Other—workingmen confronting the demand to be “respectable” might at once take their enjoyment and disavow it. Hence indeed the air of sheepish degradation that hangs over so much of this “fun.” All the standard elements in the repertoire of inversion—fi lth, scatology, racial marking itself—returned here to assault the white subject whose self-possession had been constituted by their disavowal. Th e material capacity of burnt cork or greasepaint, mixed with sweat and smearing under the fl ick- ering gaslights, to invoke coal, dirt, or their excremental analogues was oft en acknowledged, as in Tom’s humiliating escape, for instance, in the “Whelp- hunting” chapter of Dickens’s Hard Times (1854), a blacking-up that is a not- quite tarring and feathering. Likewise, it was said of Rice that his reputation depended “upon his blackface; and how he contrives to keep it white, might be matter of grave debate, begrimed as it has been for the last ten years, at least three hours in each of the twenty-four.” 24 Th e pleasurable force of min- strelsy’s suff ocating degradation was an ambivalent protest against the new moral order.

Chief among the dissenters were the immigrant Irish, with whom such “black” behavior was already widely associated; removed from the land and from less rigidifi ed rural work rhythms, and cramped in the most crowded sections of northern cities, the Irish clung to old habits and customs by way of entertainments such as brawling, drinking, and minstrelsy. Newly arrived, un- certainly “industrialized” Irish workers appear to have relished and identifi ed with the stage peccadillos they necessarily projected onto blacks. 25 Moreover, if, as Paul Gilje suggests, antebellum working-class racism was sometimes only a more focused instance of disgust with unskilled workers and their work habits, then traditionalist practices paraded as “black” in the minstrel show helped displace tensions within the working class even as they made certain objectionable pleasures available to its least reformed members (165–66). In any case, white pleasure in minstrelsy was a kind of social responsiveness; dif- fi cult as it may be to acknowledge, this cheap racist libidinal charge was also a willed attempt to rise above the stultifying eff ects of capitalist boredom and rationalization, especially when the latter meant not increasingly meaningless work but no work at all. It was a rediscovery, against the odds, of repressed pleasure in the body—vulgar enough in taste, and worse in politics, but nonetheless a measure of what Jameson calls the “deeper subject,” the “libid- inal body . . . and its peculiar politics, which may well move in a realm largely beyond the pleasurable in that narrow, culinary, bourgeois sense” (“Pleasure” 69). Codes of industrial morality, or indeed any kind of morality, were utterly ne- gated. I would, however, certainly pause before identifying the pleasure of racist impersonation as some utopian prefi guration; the important point about

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minstrel-show vulgarity, rather, is that it inevitably connected a local struggle for working-class freedom with the politics of American pleasure. Minstrel comedy forces us to recognize the extent to which comic fun in America is bound up with intimate crises of racial demarcation.

Th ese minstrel types, that is to say, were also black, and much of the disor- der was peculiarly orderly aft er all. If the minstrel show’s “black” body off ered a terrible return to the gorging and mucus-mongering of early life (witness, indeed, the lingering resonance of the black mammy fi gure), it did so in the form of “Othered” images of exhibition. As much as blackface types were sometimes menacing vehicles of fantasy, they were made, even in the terms of menace itself, into levers of mere vulgarity and fun. Th is may recall the common charge, leveled most compellingly by Nathan Huggins in Harlem Renaissance , that minstrel characters were simply trash-bin projections of white fantasy, vague fl eshly signifi ers that allowed whites to indulge at a distance all that they found repulsive and fearsome. I would take this line of thinking much further; for, as Stallybrass and White argue, “disgust bears the impress of desire” (77), and, I might add, desire that of disgust. In other words, the repellent elements repressed from white consciousness and projected onto black people were far from securely alienated; they are always already “inside,” part of “us.” Hence the threat of this projected material, and the occasional pleasure of its threat. (I do not assume that black people escape such splits, only that these occur by diff erent means.) It is important to grasp that for white Americans the racial repressed is by defi nition retained as a (usually eroticized) component of fantasy. Since the racial partitioning so necessary to white self-presence opens up the white Imaginary in the fi rst place, the latter’s store of images and fantasies is virtually constituted by the elements it has attempted to throw off . Which is to say that white subjectivity, founded on this splitting, was and is (in the words of Stallybrass and White) a “mobile, confl ic- tual fusion of power, fear and desire” (5) absolutely dependent on the Other- ness it seeks to exclude and constantly open to transgression, although, in wonderfully adaptive fashion, even the transgression may be pleasurable. And if only to guarantee the harmlessness of such transgression, racist “Othering” and similar defenses must be under continual manufacture. 26 Th is is the color line Du Bois was to speak of a half century later, more porous and intimate than his graphic metaphor allowed, and it is the roiling jumble of need, guilt, and disgust that powered blackface acts. It should therefore come as no sur- prise that minstrel comedy took great strides to tame the “black” threat through laughter or ridicule, or that, on the contrary, the threat itself could sometimes escape complete neutralization. Blackface representations were something like compromise formations of white self-policing, opening the color line to ef- facement in the very moment of its construction. Th ree further examples, two based on songbook images and one on the dynamics of theater spectatorship, will make my meaning plain.

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Th e real urgency of white self-policing is evident in the outright aggression of many blackface jokes. Even the ugly vein of hostile wish fulfi llment in dime minstrel songbooks reads as a sort of racial panic rather than confi dent racial power (though, to be sure, the result was hegemonic enough). We are still in the world of the child, the fantasies of omnipotence barely concealing the vul- nerability they mask. One notes in particular the relentless transformation of black people into things, as though to clinch the property relations these songs fear are too fl uid. Th e sheer overkill of songs in which black men are roasted, fi shed for, smoked like tobacco, peeled like potatoes, planted in the soil, or dried and hung up as advertisements is surely suspicious; these murderous fantasies are refi ned down to perfect examples of protesting far too much. Here is “Gib Us Chaw Tobacco”:

Natur planted a black baby, To grow dis weed divine, Dat’s de reason why de niggers Am made a ’baccy sign.

( Negro 90)

Although this verse comes on in the mimed accents of a cut-rate Aesop, self- buttressing fairy tales such as this one are so baroque that one imagines their concoction requiring a considerable amount of anxious attention. Th ey are not unlike the “atrocious misrepresentations” (as John Quincy Adams called them) in the infamously rigged 1840 U.S. Census, its imagined North popu- lated with frightful hordes of black lunatics and idiots (quoted in Litwack 45). Indeed, in “My Ole Dad,” another oedipal scenario, the ridiculous titular fi gure mistakenly throws his washing in the river and hangs himself on the line; he goes in aft er his clothes but drowns. His son subsequently uses fi shing line to catch him, a bloated ghost who returns at song’s end, interestingly enough, to haunt his mistress ( Negro 30). In the realm of blackface impersonation, one might say, the house was always haunted; the disavowals were never enough to halt the (parental) Other’s encroachment on white self-identity. Th e continual turn to the mask itself, its obvious usefulness, suggests as much.

Some songs came even closer to the heart of the matter. More successfully prophylactic than “My Ole Dad” is “Ole Tater Peelin”:

Oh, yaller Sam, turn’d a nigger hater, Ah, oo! ah, oo! An’ his skin peeled off like boiled potatoe, Ah, oo! ah, oo!

( Negro 102)

Th e protagonist of this little rhyme is called “Tater Peelin”; blacks snub him because he becomes colorless, neither “yellow, blue, nor black.” Finally hogs eat him, and plant his bones. (Th e end result of this particular planting is not

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specifi ed.) It is diffi cult to say whether one’s speechlessness before this sort of thing owes more to its merciless brutality or its perverse inventiveness—both signifi cant elements, in my recollection, of schoolyard culture. Again, that is to say, there is the imprint of the panicky child. Th e concern with fl uid, not to say skinless, ego boundaries, together with the imagined introjection of objecti- fi ed black people, acknowledges precisely the fragility of the racial boundaries the song attempts to police. Obviously the dilemma of “race” is a matter of the marking not of white people themselves but only, in particular, of the liminal “yaller” man produced by intermixture, signifi er of the crossed line, of racial trespass. In such songs it is as though whites were at a loss for a language to embody the anxiety that in eff ect constituted the color line, and indicates how extreme the consequent defensiveness must have been.

Racial defensiveness was imaged in this period in more disguised ways as well. Minstrelsy’s obsession with the penis and with the world’s mother seems to have given rise to an inordinate amount of anxiety and fantasy regarding the threat of castration. Blackface fetish images indeed substituted in complex ways for the threat of the (b)lack. 27 Especially instructive examples in this regard are the many songs in which black women get their eyes put out, as in “Old Blind Josey,” whose violent protagonist is already (perhaps revealingly) blind:

But den one night he [Josey] danced so high, He run his heel in a black gal’s eye— Oh! Golly me, but didn’t she cry! Unlucky Old Blind Josey. 28

Repeated ad infi nitum, such representations signify, if we are to take seriously Freud’s connection of Oedipus’ blinding and castration. It is perfectly clear, moreover, that this fantasy resonated against the erotic white male looking inherent in “black” theatrical display. So variable are the possibilities of spec- tator identifi cation in the theater, however, that we might inquire as to just whose castration was being constantly bandied about. On the most immediate level, collective white male violence toward black women in minstrelsy not only tamed an evidently too powerful object of interest, but also contributed (in nineteenth-century white men’s terms) to a masculinist enforcement of white male power over the black men to whom the women were supposed to have “belonged.” Indeed, the recurrence of this primal scene, in which beheeled black men blind black women, certainly attests to the power of the black penis in American psychic life, perhaps pointing up the primary reason for the rep- resented violence in the fi rst place. Yet it is still puzzling that black women were so oft en “castrated,” even if, to follow the metaphor, they were allegorical stand-ins for white men whose erotic looking was undone by the black men they portrayed as objects of their gaze. (No doubt this racial undoing, phallic competition and imagined homosexual threat both, was the fear that underlay

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the minstrel show tout court .) Or perhaps, if one may extrapolate from Lacan, to castrate the already “castrated” woman was to master the horrifying lack for which she stood.

Th e elastic nature of spectator identifi cation suggests another possibility, one which does not contradict the general air of male vulnerability being man- aged or handled here. Th e blackface image, I have suggested, constituted black people as the focus of the white political Imaginary, placing them in a dialectic of misrecognition and identifi cation. And this dialectic was achieved by a dou- bled structure of looking; black figures (male and female) became erotic objects both for other characters onstage and for spectators in the theater, with a constant slippage between these two looks. It follows that white men found themselves personifi ed by “black” agents of desire onstage, as in Rice’s O Hush!; and this was of course an equivocal ideological eff ect because, in allowing white men to assume imaginary positions of black male mastery, it threatened an identifi cation between black men and white men that the blackface act was supposed to have rendered null. “Old Blind Josey,” conversely, uses white men’s imaginary “blackness” to defend them against black male power. Th e song calls on tricks of (cross-racial) disguise that Michael Denning has shown to be en- demic to working-class cultural production in order to make the black male fi gure of “Old Blind Josey” a representative of white men—already unfortu- nately castrated, as I have noted—striking out at a black woman who seems not only female but also a cover for black maleness. 29 Her typically jutting pro- tuberances and general phallic suggestiveness bear all the marks of the white- fantasized black men who loomed so large in racialized phallic scenarios. It makes perfect sense that castration anxieties in blackface would conjoin the black penis and the woman, as not only in “Old Blind Josey” but “Gal from the South” and other songs. Another referent for whites of Lacan’s threatening (m)Other, Frantz Fanon argued, is precisely the black male—an overlap too pressing to ignore in songs such as these (161).

Th us the “castration” scene played out so oft en in minstrel songs of the 1840s was an iterative, revealingly compulsive rebuttal of black men by mo- mentarily empowered white men. Such dream-work disguises are telling proof of minstrelsy’s need to fi gure black sexual power and white male supremacy at one and the same time. In fact, their imaginary resolutions speak perfectly to the structure of feeling behind them: the violence against black women vicar- iously experienced but also summarily performed; the spectacle of black male power hugely portrayed but also ridiculed and fi nally appropriated. Just as at- tacker and victim are expressions of the same psyche in nightmares, so were they expressions of the same spectator in minstrelsy. Th is dynamic of mastery was both the genesis and the very name of pleasure in the minstrel show. 30

One might, aft er Laura Mulvey, call this dynamic the “pale gaze”—a fero- cious investment in demystifying and domesticating black power in white fantasy by projecting vulgar black types as spectacular objects of white men’s

Love and Th eft 158

looking. Th is looking always took place in relation to an objectifi ed and sexu- alized black body, and it was oft en conjoined to a sense of terror. But the polit- ical character of the mid-1840s seems to have held the terror in check. Th e pale gaze reigned supreme: by 1847 the Spirit of the Times rated the increasingly popular Ethiopian Serenaders, recently returned from serenading English royalty, far below the Christy troupe, who were fi rmly entrenched down at Mechanics’ Hall:

Th e performance of the Ethiopians as a delineation of Negro eccentric- ities is a failure. It is entirely too elegant. Th e singing is very fi ne and very agreeable for a time, but its very excellence is an objection to it . . . . [W]e listen and are pleased, but leave with little desire to return. At the Mechanic’s Hall [ sic ], we listen and laugh, and have a desire to go again, and again. (October 9, 1847)

Policing the Crisis

Th e theater historian George Odell expressed legitimate surprise that per- formers of modest talent, best suited for the circus, could within a few years’ time occupy center stage in blackface minstrel acts (4:478). Odell’s perplexity is a useful reminder that the localizing of “vulgarity” in minstrel shows and other popular forms coincided with their gain in visibility and importance toward the mid-1840s. It should also remind us that nothing intrinsic to min- strelsy accounted for its popularity; it was less the performers than working- class demands and preoccupations that brought blackface into the limelight. Th e chief reference point for such matters was the depression and its eff ect on the popular classes.

Historians have long held that the depression, unlike its twentieth-century counterpart, temporarily quieted the claims of class struggle. In contrast to the class vehemence of the 1830s, which resulted, for example, in General Trades’ Union strikes in several cities in 1835–36 and furnished a broad lexicon of class disgust at evangelical reformers and other usurpers of the republic, the post- panic 1840s produced diff erent antagonisms, other investments. David Mont- gomery has argued that the Philadelphia working class in the mid-1840s divided along ethnic and religious rather than class lines; a “counterpoint of class and ethnic confl ict” found disaff ected nativist workingmen more oft en than not siding with their masters against Irish workers, and Irish workers with their masters against nativists rather than “the Catholic weaver, the Meth- odist shoemaker and the Presbyterian ship carpenter [uniting] as members of a common working class” (“Shuttle” 45, 52, 68). Others have similarly noted the coincidence in this decade of working-class proletarianization—new dep- redations of “outwork” (piecework done in the home, oft en for middlemen)

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and divisions of labor—and the disruption by ethnic segmentation of class militancy. 31

Yet, as historians have also acknowledged, class resistance hardly went away. It was injected into popular movements such as land reform, temperance, public education, and “self-improving” mutual aid societies which usually brought together participants from a diversity of class positions. Sean Wilentz has deft ly shown how class energies both fueled and bifurcated these move- ments, a phenomenon that ought to make us attentive to the way racial, ethnic, and other preindustrial confl icts actually masked and provided displaced ter- rain for the ever-volatile politics of class. To be sure, reform movements such as nativism and temperance did, in Wilentz’s words, defi ne “a new mood in the [New York] trades, an apparent quieting of the class turbulence of the 1830s and a more conservative approach to social and personal problems” arising from workers’ “fears of dependence, from the search for an adjustment to what looked like permanent hard times.” But the decline of mass trade unionism amid reformist impulses indicated only “a change in emphasis and a loss of apparent unity—a return, in most instances, to the broader terms of social confl ict, of ‘producer’ versus ‘nonproducer’ rather than of workers versus em- ployers, compounded by a defl ection of purpose and new ethnic stratifi cation and tensions” (324, 357). Th e appearance of lowered class consciousness aft er the panic was in large part just that, an appearance marred by Mose at the Olympic Th eatre, seriously threatened by the b’hoys at Astor Place, and abolished altogether by striking New York tailors in 1850.

In these years of evangelical crusades and ethnic hatred, however, most working-class people were not disposed to look toward an exclusively workers’ millennium, or were but in the name of other enthusiasms. It is thus possible to speculate on the sources and cultural usefulness of the minstrel show’s plea- sures. Th e social contradictions of the 1830s, in which class confl ict both per- mitted and overruled certain radical racial impulses, here became an even more complex bog of social needs, tensions, and feelings. Minstrelsy’s mark- edly elaborated form in the 1840s amounted to racial rather than more multi- ply determined aggression; it is interesting, for example, that the interlocutor, that “codfi sh aristocrat,” was not yet a permanent fi xture. 32 Th e minstrel show, as with other kinds of cultural politics in this period, brought various classes and class fractions together, here through a common racial hostility. Min- strelsy was still propelled by, and in many ways hosted, the angry energies of class disaff ection; indeed there was always the chance that class disdain might become a liberatory alliance across racial lines against capitalist elites. But there is also a good deal of evidence that in these years, unlike in the 1830s, even the class anger capable of disrupting the white egalitarian alliance was directed at racial targets. 33

Certainly the tensions between labor and abolitionism had never been so great; the early and mid-1840s off er a depressing narrative of failed schemes

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and scuttled allegiances. Th e entrepreneurial outlook of most antislavery ac- tivists made for distinctly uneasy relations between opponents of slavery and opponents of capital. 34 Th e notion of slavery as a metaphor for both black and white oppression, which in the form of “wage slavery” had seemingly harbored much antiracist potential in the 1830s, increasingly led to the ranking of op- pressions, distancing rather than relating the conditions of slaves and workers. Wendell Phillips, for instance, would have no part of the idea of wage slavery, perhaps understandably, because for him the condition of slaves was not anal- ogous to that of the masses of workingmen; freedom meant precisely self- ownership. When in 1843–44 the abolitionist John A. Collins, a socialist, began to insist that slavery was only symptomatic of a deeper ill—private property— Garrison and Douglass both heaped scorn on what Douglass later termed his “communistic ideas” ( Life 228). Abolitionists were hardly the sole culprits. Working-class politics had so little room to maneuver in hard times that racial sympathy was shoved aside. In a famous 1844 public correspondence with the abolitionist Gerrit Smith, labor reformer George Henry Evans spoke for many labor leaders when he declared himself “formerly” an advocate of abolition: “Th is was before I saw that there was white slavery.” Figures such as Robert Owen and Horace Greeley were saying much the same thing. Indeed, in the mid-1840s, as David Roediger has shown, “white slavery” came to displace “wage slavery” in labor rhetoric, a fi gure concerned less with twinning the plight of white worker and slave than with privileging the former over the latter. 35 Th e tenor of the times was evident in one thoroughgoing attempt at a labor abolitionism, Nathaniel P. Rogers’s proposed alliance of northern and southern workers against all the exploiters of labor, which unfortunately gave more attention to the northern capitalist than to the slave owner, perhaps con- fi rming the suspicions of the abolitionists. Workers were rarely proslavery, but, for a variety of reasons, abolitionism was less and less their chosen reform. 36

Th ese incidents highlight the familiar ways in which class oppression ham- pered working-class abolitionism. Yet in these years such class-resistant impulses were very oft en expressed or lived as racial distaste and white self- validation, a convenient displacement of class anger not at all unlike the na- tivist or temperance versions of class collaboration. In contrast to the previous decade, there was now little worker abolitionism to off set such a result, and it had to compete in any case with alliances such as that between the working- class rebels behind Mike Walsh and proslavery Calhoun Democrats (no matter that low-tariffi sm and anti–Van Burenism helped this alliance along [Wilentz 333]). What class rhetoric remained, moreover, was vented as much at aboli- tionists as at other class enemies. Th e general result was to substitute racial hostility for class struggle, which at least temporarily, and in at least this sense, settled accounts between artisans and laborers, ethnics and natives, workingmen as a class and their employers: a crucial development amid the disarticulation of capital in antebellum America. 37

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In the racial chill, then, two main working-class impulses were nourished. On the one hand there was an assumption of broad cross-class agreement on racial tenets, on the other a sense of class disaff ection that in the present climate had lost its capacity to extend across racial lines. Th ese impulses marked the relations not only between workers and those above them but also between various fractions of the working class. Th e minstrel show appealed to workingmen because it relied on a shared (though largely empty) “whiteness” even as its rowdiness diff erentiated worker from bourgeois. Workers on the very bottom may have negotiated the cementing of their class position beneath the artisan class by denying that position through celebrations of their free- white status as well as embracing it through unseemly—and unrepublican— activities such as racist mobbing and other forms of public racial antagonism. 38 Th us did popular racism aid the formation of the white working class: “white- ness” was capacious enough to allow entry to almost any nonblack worker, and resilient enough to mask the class tensions that were worked out in the mo- dality of race. Racial hostility in itself was no badge of class diff erence; quite the contrary. But the way in which racism was manifested may have helped mark such diff erences as were coming to characterize the white-egalitarian world of American workingmen no less than the American republic.

It was just here that the fi rst minstrel shows were situated. Insisting on the whiteness of all upstanding workers, blackface minstrelsy still occupied a very uneasy class space—as we saw in chapter 3 , the “dark” side of working-class culture. For while minstrelsy began to issue a sort of racial rallying cry across the classes, it stressed its “vulgarity” in ways that made class diff erence, and therefore the whole business of class formation, uncomfortably apparent. Th e grasping aft er the label “elite” in minstrel playbills and newspaper ads suggests that working-class identities in these years of muted class expression were established not only in the realm of race and other non–class-based associa- tions but by way of variable relations to entertainment forms that bore the marks of class. Minstrel-show partisanship, in other words, had class-related implications, however monochromatic its racial design. One might claim one’s rowdy allegiance, or fi nesse it through the language of respectability, but one’s ultimate class relationship to such forms could not be ignored. A signifi cant amount of jostling among the classes occurred in the offi cially homogeneous medium of minstrelsy’s racial representations.

In light of these developments, one begins to remark another sort of spec- tacle going on in minstrelsy, one that showcased the vulgar themselves. Spec- tatorship, we might even say, was bound up in the early minstrel show with surveillance. Blackface’s sponsoring of what we have seen to be white as well as black infantilization had its analogue in the way it displayed not only “black” fi gures but white working-class spectators as well. Th is exhibition, surely, was the point of the whole genre of journalistic theater-crowd observa- tion which proved so valuable in fi xing the class allegiances of the minstrel

Love and Th eft 162

show. Its oft en ironic discourse was dedicated precisely to locating working- class “pathologies” of theater behavior. Recall the Spirit of the Times ’s portrait of the Bowery pit as

a vast sea of upturned faces and red fl annel shirts, extending its roaring and turbid waves close up to the foot-lights on either side, clipping in the orchestra and dashing furiously against the boxes—while a row of luck- ier and stronger-shouldered amateurs have pushed, pulled and trampled their way far in advance of the rest, and actually stand with their chins resting on the lamp board, chanking peanuts and squirting tobacco juice upon the stage. (February 6, 1847)

Th e body on display here is white; and class is on display in the form of bodies and bodily behaviors. Such writing serves not only to localize class values in theatrical spectacles of the body such as the minstrel show, but to scrutinize the way working-classness itself was lived in the body—scandalous enough in an age bent on devising bourgeois codes of self-abnegation. 39 Th e minstrel show’s display of spectators’ bodily activity had the eff ect of securing rowdy class meanings and signifi cations in a context which pressed for their absence, for if the body is notoriously an object of regulation and control, the form and place- ment of activities such as spitting, eating, or yawning may become areas of re- fusal to conform to the dictates of propriety. Norbert Elias observes that such “personal” habits and behaviors, while seeming the most natural and automatic things we do, are in fact the most “cultural” (150). Which is to say, of course, that there are class modes of these behaviors, shaped by their relation—their opposition—to other class modes. Given that most minstrel playbills warned audience members against spitting, chewing loudly, or “beat[ing] time with their feet, as it is unpleasant to the audience and interrupts the Performers,” one must guess that the prevalence of these displays attested to the persistence of working-class self-defi nition by means other than labor activism. 40

Th e reported outrageousness of working-class spectators in accounts such as the one from the Spirit of the Times is attributable to the roving eye of the distanced bystander who speaks either for the shocked bourgeoisie (the high-minded quarterly, the cultural reformer) or the respectable por- tion of the working class (the penny press). If such accounts involve a good deal of class projection in their details, they also capture a signifi cant and self-conscious set of audience rituals. In fact they describe a certain fraction of theatergoers who know their behavior is under scrutiny, and who agree that the spectacle of minstrel comedy includes their own performance. We must, then, read this critical genre itself as a class break—a break disguised in the context of early 1840s reformist politics. Pierre Bourdieu has drawn our attention to diff erent class-infl ected modes of spectatorship; where bourgeois (or bourgeois-aspirant) involvement is oft en pure disembodied gaze, working-class involvement often takes the form of demonstrative

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engagement ( Distinction 4). One sees precisely this break in journalistic accounts of minstrel-show audiences. It is a break that minstrelsy both en- couraged and bridged. For not only did blackface performance give class meanings a local habitation at a time when ideologies of reform denied them a name; but for the length of a night, at least, it resolved the contradiction between the working-class push against the master and the post-panic impulse toward an alliance with him. Purveying racial ideologies over which the classes could bond, the minstrel show off ered them in a guise and in a place that all but the most abject of respectable men might fi nd troubling.

As for these men in contradictory class locations—artisans on the rise into the master class, clerks with working-class cultural links—not all of them, of course, were put off by new developments such as blackface minstrelsy. Working- class culture and minstrelsy both were more complex and multilay- ered than that. Th e diversity of the minstrel show’s audience depended in part on the fact that upwardly mobile men retained some “low” cultural associations even as they kept a necessary distance from the rites of workingmen. T. J. Clark has detected a kind of knowing connoisseurship in nineteenth-century French petit-bourgeois café-concert spectators, an attitude that helped establish a useful irony toward working-class cultural forms while clearly depending on a oneness with and delight in the forms themselves ( Painting 237). Embourgeoisement is in fact undertaken in relation to cultural choices, through, among other things, a “superior” appreciation of popular forms such as blackface—a perspective that in antebellum America was constructed by the “elite” view in the ironic press account. To read the protestations of respectability in minstrel ads is indeed to witness the process of class formation. Having a place in which to be “elite” was a petit-bourgeois necessity; as if in response to this need, popular theatrical forms hosted rituals of class diff erentiation as well as class solidarity. When the b’hoys screamed that they were “sons of freedom,” the shopkeeper raised a shout he may have retracted with a raised eyebrow. Amusement at the antics of the vulgar distanced them; petit-bourgeois mastery of minstrel-show spectatorship, which included taking in the spectators as part of the show, was precisely the power of one class over another. Th is dynamic was a theatrical correlative of the contradictory class politics of the 1840s. Indulging the racial vulgarity, small masters and other respectables masked their own social mobility by playacting working-classness among their former associates. Enjoying the show at one remove, they just as surely reveled in the injuries of class. 41

Acting the Wench

We must now turn to blackface transvestism, the supreme form of “vulgarity” in the popular theater and the most diffi cult to assess. Th e immense popularity of cross-dressing in the blackface theater suggests that this was one “objectionable

Love and Th eft 164

feature” no self-respecting troupe of vulgarians could do without. We have already seen many instances of minstrel-show misogyny, and in part the black- face “wench” character was just a more extravagant form in which to achieve the same result. According to one commentator, the female impersonator had “a hair-trigger sort of voice” and an “unholy laugh” capable of hurrying “little innocent children .  .  . into premature graves” and convincing wicked unbe- lievers that “there must, at least, be a hell.” Th is observer further comments that such performances featured fi endish dances, much show of leg, and silly confi dences uttered in parody of womanhood, extending to imitations of pop- ping corks, descriptions of the size of “her” last meal, and tales involving hap- less boyfriends who must pawn their clothes. In fi ne, the female impersonator, this expert notes, “makes you wish the journey of life were ended and you were laid away in a nice, cozy little tomb somewhere under the weeping willows.” 42

As this rather extreme account indicates, however, burlesque was wrested from a good deal of anxiety. Th is is the language of defensiveness, and the fi rst of its referents is the apparently profane and murderous power of women. One outcome of the class formation we have been witnessing was indeed a reorga- nization of gender roles in and out of the home. “In a period when the pro- ductive household economy [men and women working side by side in the patriarchal home] was disappearing and the family wage economy [the pooled earnings of men, women, and children from their separate spheres] had yet fully to take shape,” writes Christine Stansell, many forms of gender strife con- stituted “a great renegotiation of what, exactly, men and women owed each other” (81). Because the “shocks of the wage system” were so oft en registered in the form of familial adjustments, she argues, some of the most painful ef- fects of the emerging order were lived as rearrangements in the expectations for men and women (77). Ill-paid, irregular, or nonexistent work made hus- bands ineff ectual breadwinners, weakening cherished patterns of patriarchal control, while wage work off ered women some new means of self-support; such developments helped set in motion an epochal battle for rule of the home. Workingmen many times sought to redress the erosion of their authority with abusiveness and violence. Quarrels over household arrangements, domestic service, family loyalty, even female drunkenness pitted self-styled male disci- plinarians against “their” women. Tenement women were partially fortifi ed against male hegemony by their extensive involvement in one another’s lives— from neighborly rounds of drinks and shared domestic tasks to emergency eavesdropping on battered wives. As it turned out, says Stansell, certain mas- culinist traditions were loosening: young women on the Bowery, for example, fl aunted a newfound sense of power by way of stylistic excesses that paralleled the cult of the b’hoy. Counterparts of Mose’s Lize, indiff erent to bourgeois decorum, they not only dressed in “fancy” clothes—“a light pink contrasting with a deep blue, a bright yellow with a brighter red, and a green with a dashing purple or maroon,” wrote a bemused George Foster—but pursued the city’s

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parks, promenades, and amusements (including the theater), using commer- cial leisure to redraw the boundaries of male privilege and ultimately forcing some enlargement of the proletarian public sphere. 43

Men threatened by these developments at least had the solace of the min- strel show’s popular misogyny. Th e “wench” role was made famous in the 1840s by performers such as Barney Williams and George Christy, who vied for the title of originator; many performers (such as a “Master Marks” of Charley White’s Minstrels) probably engaged in similar displays. Th e most renowned of “wench” performances centered on the song “Miss Lucy Long” (1842), of which there were numerous variations, the most prominent being that of Wil- liams. As best one can tell, the “wench” (despite a “hair-trigger” voice) usually did not sing the songs she starred in; the songbook headnote to Charley White’s version, “Th e Dancing Lucy Long,” for instance, says that the piece was danced by Master Marks and sung by the band, and Ralph Keeler remembered dancing rather than singing “Lucy Long.” 44 Th e “wench” became the lyric and theatrical object of the song, exhibiting himself in time with the grotesque descriptions. Th e earliest version of “Lucy Long” includes these verses:

I’ve come again to see you, I’ll sing another song,

Jist listen to my story, It isn’t very long.

Oh take your time Miss Lucy, Take your time Miss Lucy Long.

Oh! Miss Lucy’s teeth is grinning, Just like an ear ob corn,

And her eyes dey look so winning Oh! would I’d ne’er been born.

If she makes a scolding wife, As sure as she was born,

I’ll tote her down to Georgia, And trade her off for corn.

An 1848 version interpolates this verse:

Miss Lucy, when she trabels, she always leaves de mark

Ob her footsteps in de gravel, you can see dem in de dark. 45

In such performances coquette was reduced to coon and scolding wife “mas- tered,” though just what it meant to have footprints that were visible in the dark is anyone’s guess.

Love and Th eft 166

It is interesting to note that psychoanalysts consider one form of cross- dressing in men to be a way of warding off castration anxiety, of recovering the phallus for heterosexuality. Having experienced a “feminizing” distur- bance in early life, some men allay fears of castration by paradoxically enact- ing a fantasy in which they become a woman who is genitally male. Th is identifi cation with the “phallic” woman (the mother) who once threatened them is an attempt at mastery; there is no desire to be a woman, only to “prove” that feminization will not take away their maleness, that there can be such a thing as a woman with a penis. Unlike gay cross-dressers, they wear women’s clothes as a fetish substitute for the (hetero)sexual object, never losing sight of the fact that they are male: on the contrary, they do it to pre- serve male potency. As Robert Stoller writes, “If females are evidence [to the transvestite] of a state of penislessness, the cause is not hopeless if there are women with penises. What better proof can there be of this than if one is such a creature oneself?” 46

Even if it were plausible, as it probably is not, to suggest that blackface “wenches” were so motivated, we must ask whether this logic appealed to their fans. Evidence that it might have is to be found in the kind of pornography that caters to transvestites. It comprises primarily representations of the “phallic” woman—physically large and strong, with gigantic appendages and oversized shoes or boots, the insignia of maleness peeping through the womanly pre- tense. It is not too far from this preoccupation to spectatorial interest in the theatrical female impersonator, the “funny ole gal” of the minstrel show. “Clad in some tawdry old gown of loud, crude colors,” writes Olive Logan, “whose shortness and scantness display long frilled ‘panties’ and No. 13 valise shoes . . . the funny old gal is very oft en a gymnast of no mean amount of muscle, as her saltatory exercises in the break-down prove.” 47 Th is description practically insists on the “phallic” womanhood of the blackface cross-dresser, who, as in the pornographic fantasy and the transvestite’s private behavior, converted men’s gender anxiety into a source of pleasure, in this case comic pleasure. Th e attraction of all such representations appears to consist in portraying “mascu- linized,” powerful women, not in order to submit but, through the pleasurable response, to take the power back. Th e “wench” fi gure, beyond its rather ob- vious gender insults, salvaged “potency, power, and masculinity from an orig- inally castrating event” (Stoller 206, 214): off ering up a “woman with a penis,” the “wench,” as in other areas of blackface minstrelsy, defl ated the threatening, “castrating” power of women.

Th e theatrical eff ects the “wench” reached aft er, however, were sexually var- iable. Th e retreat from women into drag tended, of course, to compromise the masculinity that was so hard-won. Indeed, even without female dress the economy of white male looking in blackface spectatorship was apt to convert sexual defensiveness into same-sex desire. Th is important fact, as I have sug- gested, asserts itself long before one encounters such desire in cross-dressing.

“Genuine Negro Fun” 167

Freud’s suggestive notion that jokes allow access to culturally prohibited sources of pleasure may mean that another of the minstrel show’s purposes was to allow something besides racism onto the American stage ( Jokes 101). Ante- bellum whites scarcely needed a separate institution to indulge their racism; and that racism appears oft en to have provided the occasion for a wider preoc- cupation with sexuality, not least homosexuality. Black male genitalia were invoked readily, if coyly:

I don’t like a nigger, I’ll be dogged if I do, Kase him feet am so big Dat he can’t war a shoe.

Oh, I does hate a nigger, Th o’ its colour ob my skin, But de blood ob dis nigger Am all white to de chin.

I war coloured by de smoke, In de boat war I war borned, And de gals say my gizzard, Am as white as de corn.

( Negro 70–71)

Th ese were not the most common lyrics of “Boatmen Dance”—along with “Lubly Fan” and “Old Dan Tucker” one of the most frequently performed songs of the mid-1840s. But in throwing Victorian caution to the wind, they may have gestured toward minstrelsy’s true purposes, in “Boatmen Dance” and elsewhere.

Nowhere was this clearer than when minstrel writers verged on porno- graphic representations of black men, as in “Astonishing Nose,” which depicts “an ole nig wid a bery long nose”:

Like an elephant’s trunk it reached to his toes, An wid it he would gib some most astonishing blows

No one dare come near, so great was his might

He used to lie in his bed, wid his nose on de fl oor, An when he slept sound his nose it would snore, Lik a dog in a fi ght—’twas a wonderful nose, An it follows him about wherever he goes.

De police arrested him one morning in May, For obstructing de sidewalk, having his nose in de way. Dey took him to de court house, dis member to fi ne; When dey got dere de nose hung on a tavern sign.

(Fox 74–75)

Love and Th eft 168

Th is song is a very nice example of what Freud calls “smut.” Freud attributes the genesis of such sexual joking to the social taboo on seductive language directed by men to women. In Freud’s frankly speculative originary scenario, a man wishes to seduce his object of desire through sexual language but is prohibited by the woman—who, Freud avers, objects to such language—as well as the presence of a male third party. Owing to the prohibition of this situation, there arises sexual joking among men in which this “original” sit- uation is called up to those who partake of it; signifi cantly, however, the jokes are told by the former seducer to the formerly inhibiting man, who now becomes his partner in ridicule of the former love object. As Freud says, “[T]he desire to see what is sexual exposed is the original motive of smut” ( Jokes 98). Not only has derision replaced desire, but so has looking replaced the desire to touch. And this activity is restructured as an aff air between men. In songs such as “Astonishing Nose,” one has, it seems to me, a situation in which white male desire for a prohibited object has been con- verted to ridicule, which reveals all too clearly the desire it seeks to mask. Furthermore, behind the display of black men for white male consumption, a joking relation in which looking and exposure stand in for desire, one begins to make out the presence of a diff erent speculative (though histori- cally specifi c) transaction. Th e joking triangle, in which white men share a dominative relationship to a black man which is based above all on looking, seems to me the northern analogue of black men on the auction block. Mel- ville had something similar in mind when he wrote the various exchanges between Stubb and Pip, and Stubb and Fleece, in Moby-Dick (1851). Th ese dialogues, of course, are essentially and intentionally minstrel-show feints and jabs: Melville has Pip close the “Doubloon” chapter with a snippet of “Old King Crow” (1843), one of the most popular minstrel songs in the 1840s, and Fleece comes forth with a sermon straight out of the minstrel show. Th eir ironic import lies in the special, if mundane, power Stubb has over Pip, spelled out before Pip tumbles from the whaleboat a second time: “We can’t aff ord to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in mind, and don’t jump any more” (524).

In other words, regardless of the attempts to demystify black men’s sexu- ality, if not indeed amidst them, white male desire for black men was every- where to be found in minstrel acts. Of course there was very little attempt generally to disguise the fact that uncontrollable black desire was one of the minstrel show’s chief attractions, whether in lubricious dances, jokes, gestures, or lyrics. Th e hunch that white men might momentarily have taken black men themselves for imaginary sexual objects is borne out in the homosexual moments that begin to mark blackface songs in the 1840s, as in “Sally Is De Gal for Me” (1850):

“Genuine Negro Fun” 169

Oh, Sally is de gal for me, I would’nt hab no udder, If Sal dies to-morrow night, I’ll marry Sally’s brudder.

( De Susannah 67)

It is true enough, as the reader will no doubt object, that this lyric attributes homosexuality to black men, comfortably “emasculating” them; but there is nothing here that suggests a conformity on the part of the audience to conven- tional codes of masculinity. Th ese songs allowed white men to imagine same- sex desire even more freely than when virile black men were represented. Consider “Nigga, Put Down Dat Jug” (early 1850s), in which a considerable amount of sucking goes on:

My mouth around him cling, Close as de rum ole friend.

Niggar put down dat jug, Touch not a single drop, I hab gin him many a hug, So dar you luff him stop.

( Negro 41)

It was perhaps the good and proper “vulgarity” of veiled homoerotic desire that was the jewel in minstrelsy’s crown, ensuring crowded houses night aft er night; there is reason enough to think so, given the drawing power of blackface “wenches.”

“Acting the wench” was wildly popular not only, I would guess, because of the riotous misogyny in which it indulged. While I have found no evidence of the sort of loving milieu that formed around stars such as Francis Leon later in the century (taking drag that seriously seems to have been a postwar black- face development), the association of a Barney Williams or George Christy with this particular talent may indicate a covert agreement between actor and audience that camping it up would be part of the play. One might posit here an unsteady oscillation in “wench” acts between a recoil from women into cross-dressing misogyny and a doubling-back from the homoeroticism that this inevitably also suggested, with the misogyny serving as a convenient cover story for or defense against the homoerotic desires aired in the process of achieving it. In any case, there is no question that the “wench” brought homo- sexual desire to the stage, as in “My Love He Is A Sailleur Boy” (sung by a cross-dressed Dan Bryant in blackface):

My love, he is a sailleur boy, so galliant and bold,

He’s as tall as a fl ag-staff , scarcely nineteen years old

Love and Th eft 170

For to cruise around this wide world, he has left his own dear,

And my heart it is a busting, because he is not here.

For his spirit was tre-men-duous, And fi erce to behold,

In a young man bred a carpentier Only nineteen years old

His parents they bounded him for to be a carpentier,

But a sea-faring life he did very much prefer—

My bussom it is a tossing, just like the rolling sea,

For fear that his aff ections don’t still point to me

And it’s oh for my lover I grieve and repine,

For fear that this young man can never be mine . . . .

(Moreau vol. 1)

Th e whiff one gets here of absurdly debased John Donne nevertheless conveys the jokey homoeroticism on which the song trades. Th ere is the frank evoca- tion of the lover who has set out for sailors; and there is the beloved’s fairly obvious genital obsession. Th ere is even a veiled reference to the public impos- sibility of this sort of love. Such relatively unadorned moments recall recent speculations about the Elizabethan theater—that women’s roles were played by boys on the English Renaissance stage (unlike anywhere else in Europe at the time) because Shakespeare’s audiences wanted to see same-sex desire por- trayed there. 48 Since women were a major presence in the “legitimate” midcen- tury American theater, one must surmise that cross-dressing in the minstrel show intended to clear a space in which homoeroticism could fi nd halting, humiliated, but nonetheless public expression.

Th is expression oft en achieved its desired eff ect. Th e New York Clipper , for example, circulated one story of an elderly gentleman who became “desper- ately enamored of inimitable [Francis] Leon,” whom he supposed to be a “dashing brunette of the gentler sex”:

Th e symmetry of form, the dash and easy, graceful manners of the actor in his guise of a young lady, were irresistible to the old gentleman, and his aff ections went out in one spontaneous gush. A gentleman who was sitting beside him was the recipient of sundry nudges and whispered

“Genuine Negro Fun” 171

words of admiration for the fair one, but with heroic fortitude he main- tained his equanimity till aft er the performance. (May 16, 1874)

Whatever the provenance of this tale, it seems attentive to the male “actor’s” centrality to womanly masquerade, and to the transferability of the aff ections he inspires to a neighbor male—recipient of nudges and whispered words if not of the old gentleman’s helpless gush. As Lillian Schlissel has remarked, female “disguise did not diff use sexuality,” as Robert Toll and others have argued. Rather, the “game of sexual identity took on new intensity when the players were ‘masked.’” “Wench” performances were rituals of what Schlissel calls “genital guessing,” which, as we know one observer noted, might “make a fool of a man if he wasn’t sure.” 49

Again recourse to Mark Twain is suggestive. In the 1901 Underwood edition of Huckleberry Finn , Huck’s brief foray into cross-dressing earns an E. W. Kemble illustration in which Huck fl ounces around expertly in the foreground (see Fig. 10 ); the vertical plane of his body intersects that of a horizontal, grinning Jim in the background, Huck’s head overlapping and partially obscuring Jim’s crotch. Th e picture brings into contiguity the pre- cise terms of homosexual desire in blackface “wench” acts—white male cross-dressing on the one hand, black male sexuality on the other. It also reiterates the spectatorial terms in which blackface transvestism mapped this desire, with “black” men watching and singing the “praises” of the cavorting “woman” at center stage. Two consequences in particular of this doubled structure of looking (the black male characters’ look and the audi- ence’s look) interest me here. First, this confi guration allowed a displace- ment of interest from the ambiguously gendered “wench” to her male admirers. Figuring black male heterosexual desire alongside the “wench” of- fered alternative, and safer, bearers of the audience’s look such that more “compromising” desires—for the man under the skirt—might be defl ected or remain unacknowledged. Th is was of course only one moment or possi- bility in a mass of dangerous options, for who was to say that the “black” male singers were not themselves pursuing gay desire, and who was to guarantee that identifying with them didn’t fl ip over into homoeroticism? At the very least, the recurrence of this specifi c theatrical structure sur- rounding the “wench” suggests that she inspired thoughts and feelings that needed containing.

Th is confi guration off ered up a second possibility. In acts such as “Lucy Long,” the misogyny occurs through the degradation of the male singer who expresses his love for such a distasteful object of desire; he praises Lucy’s huge feet and corncob teeth. In the broadest sense, the blackface male’s desire for his “wench” acknowledges or represents the relation of the white audience to blacks generally. Th e blackface male is aft er all a fi gure for the audience’s looking, however ridiculous he is made to appear; the “wench” encompasses in her person male and female both; and the relationship between the two

Figure 10 Jim and Huck, by E. W. Kemble Courtesy of the Alderman Library, University of Virginia

172

“Genuine Negro Fun” 173

fi gures is foregrounded. Th e singer’s most ridiculous impulse is indeed to pro- claim his love for such an unworthy object as “blackness.” Th e familiar (and familial) irony is that the act derided white America for its fascination with blacks while at the same time it marketed that fascination. Surely this structure of feeling evidences again the precariousness or dissonance or confl ictedness that marked white people’s sense of their own whiteness.

It was, of course, the internal “racial” ghosts that minstrel-show “vulgarity” was meant to exorcise. Exorcism is a drastic resort, and minstrelsy’s growing popularity in these years suggests it was an only partly successful one. No doubt its pleasures were peculiarly conducive to a political climate that demanded racial complacency as well as class-coded public arts. Yet we shall see that as time went on, minstrel performers found themselves backed steadily into a corner. Th at predicament is now known as the slavery crisis, and it was about to erupt.

{ 7 }

California Gold and European Revolution Stephen Foster and the American 1848

We follow the descending sun, to that land where the light reigns, while Europe is covered with darkness—to the new Eldorado, which was so

recently the golden prize of American prowess, and has already become the apple of discord to the victorious States. — Southern Quarterly Review (1850)

An extraordinary confl uence of forces destroyed the minstrel show’s hermetic self-satisfaction. Th e hedging politics of reform were overshadowed in the late 1840s by the slavery issue, and class-consciousness played an unpredicted role in its return. Th e manner in which social change was registered and produced in public discourse was itself changing, saturated by a consolidating “sentimen- tal” ethos not unrelated to women’s rights agitation for female control of the public sphere. Th e inescapable synecdoches of plantation, factory, and home signifi ed not only a slowly clarifying historical predicament of outrageous pro- portion but also, perhaps not paradoxically, a highly confused and contested one; each of these images, for instance, oft en contained signifi cant admixtures of the others. Indeed, so visible were the social contradictions in American life from the start of the Mexican War in 1846 to the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1851 that earnest analogies and casual representations, generic conventions and allegorical fl ights of fancy—social fi gurations of almost every kind—threatened a formidable visitation of unwelcome meanings and reso- nances. Markers of historical change too convoluted to comprehend fully, such fi gurations frequently overwhelmed the intentions of their putative users.

Th is was the burden of an 1850 article in the Southern Quarterly Review titled “California Gold and European Revolution.” 1 Attempting by analogy to distin- guish American prospects from those of a class-riven Europe, it evinced obliquely and against its will the internal shocks and divisions over slavery that had ac- crued to the wresting of California, the new Eldorado, from Mexico. In crowded Europe, wrote the anonymous author in reference to 1848, “the spell of modern

California Gold and European Revolution 175

civilization has evoked a devil, which it is powerless to lay, and which yields not to its exorcisms” (297). Th e “passion for gold” has reduced the citizen of yore to a “slave of the Dollar,” pitting greedy capitalist against starving worker (282–83). By contrast, following the descending sun to the ample American West, one fi nds a “new land of promise .  .  . the Canaan of mammon,” where the “light reigns” (304). “While the scale of Europe descends, that of America must ascend”; the “golden city” of San Francisco “has arisen as rapidly as rose by enchantment the single palace of Aladdin,” but as for the Old World, “only a paroxysm of [its] disease” can follow upon the discovery of gold in California (303–5). Working toward a conclusion, the writer remembers a story from childhood:

. . . the story of that enchanted rock, in the Indian Seas, which attracted to itself the bars and bolts, the rivets and the nails, of the vessels that sailed over the surrounding waters. Th e luckless mariners were drowned—the dissevered spars, deprived of all bonds of cohesion, fl oated at the mercy of the waves. Such a rock may California prove to Europe in her advancing dissolution. (312)

As Michael Rogin has observed, this remarkable piece points to California as in every way an enchanted rock for America, not Europe ( Subversive 105). It is America’s “passion for gold” and America’s “slaves” that are being worried in the guise of European dissolution. Th e article’s critique of Europe so resembles the South’s critique of northern wage slavery, in fact, that it invokes the sec- tional confl ict western emigration not only failed to dispel but—in reopening the question of whether the occupied land would be slave or free—actually revivifi ed. Th e author’s metaphors generally get the better of him. Light does not reign where the sun descends, and “the Canaan of mammon” is a suitably contradictory fi gure for the United States’s imperial subsumption of California gold and the ensuing events, since it implicitly yokes promise with depravity, continental expansion with political convulsions over slavery, unfettered white social desire with the threat of sectional division.

Th ese events, and the article’s unwitting attempt to manage them, are em- blematic of the American 1848. While blackface minstrelsy was the privileged signifi er of the complex, Union-threatening ensemble of confl icts and dis- courses temporarily halted by the 1850 Compromise, it could not escape get- ting caught up in similar ineff ectual displacements and prophetic ironies. Essentially using the plantation to gloss northern home and workplace rela- tions, the minstrel show witlessly though constantly and uniquely focused at- tention on the great confl icts of national life at midcentury. If by the late 1840s minstrelsy had assumed a cultural centrality one would scarcely have pre- dicted for it, its popularity seems in retrospect a token of its curious, polyse- mous insistence on matters that much contemporaneous discourse evaded. And if history gave it moment, Stephen Foster’s emergence as a composer of popular “Plantation Melodies” gave blackface performance an aesthetic charge

Love and Th eft 176

potent in its historical consequences. Th e national self-fashioning that took place with the aid of songs such as “Oh! Susanna” revealed not only the signif- icance of racial and sectional questions for the nation’s future but also the fact that precisely that future was at stake.

Two-Tone

Th e rapid increase in the popularity of blackface minstrelsy aft er around 1846 suggests that whatever else it may have been, it was a remarkably good busi- ness. Th ere is every indication that the minstrel show, like other elements of New York’s downtown amusement scene, was beginning to make a lot of people a lot of money, and in a variety of ways, according to its various modes of dissemination. A quick scan of George Odell’s Annals of the New York Stage for the postdepression years discloses a whole battery of newly professional blackface performers, now with this company and now with that, assembling and reassembling with a fl uidity for which only volumes of ready cash can be assumed to account. The minstrel show’s stars, such as T. D. Rice, Charles White, E. P. Christy, and George Harrington (pseudonymously George Christy), were apparently able to take home astronomical weekly paychecks, as the many contemporary references to their salaries indicate (never mind that many of these men died destitute). 2 Christy’s Minstrels’ seven-year run at New York’s Mechanics’ Hall (from March 1847 to July 1854) was only the most notable example of the many kinds of steady work to be had selling “blackness” as a commodity. “Mass” entertainment publishers (Dick and Fitzgerald in New York, T. B. Peterson and Turner and Fisher in Philadel- phia) yearly cranked out dozens of dime songbooks in the names of famous minstrel stars or companies (see Fig. 11 ); these books, usually only printed lyrics without music—little lyric volumes of mass-produced racist carica- ture—evidently allowed fans of blackface to sing the words at home to tunes they knew by heart from the theater, and were therefore advertisement, a symbol of product loyalty, as much as entertainment. 3 Nor did the sheet- music business lag behind. Firth and Pond, Stephen Foster’s New York pub- lisher, employed twenty men to engrave and print its annual output of over two hundred pieces of music (a good deal of it culled from “low” realms such as the minstrel show), the selling of which occupied another ten men and brought in a revenue of $70,000. 4 In this form blackface minstrelsy entered the middle-class parlor, a development that soon led the Journal of Music to despair of all the

“native compositions” and “composers” . . . who can put together notes and make up little pieces, that will sell. Inquire at the mills where all this grist is ground, inquire of the publishers who snow “sheet music” over

California Gold and European Revolution 177

all the land, as fast as it melts away, and they will tell you that the native crop is quite a vast aff air, and pays the better as it is the more ephemeral. (“Native” 61)

Th e Adornian disgust responsible for this mix of metaphors completes the picture of an industry in ascendance.

At the center of this industry was the minstrel show’s music, whose writers gave back in ritualized emotionalism what they received in capital investment. It is, then, to the music that I now turn, and to its sentimentalized images of plantation life, which were enlarged in this period into a mythology so en- during it barely seems to have had a distinct beginning. 5 Surprisingly harsh and mournful when it was not cheerful and spry, this mythology was marketed in hundreds of cloying songs full of nostalgia, heartbreak, and death as much as winsome contentment, and its usefulness to a North marked by fracture and dissent will be of interest in this discussion. Yet the very coincidence of the music’s popularity with what one might call its “industrial” character (some have suspected Stephen Foster of composing to formula, as lesser writers un- questionably did), together with its looming social and political importance, suggests that we fi rst ought to fi nd some mediating device that will account for the specifi c relations between minstrel music and its various socioeconomic determinations and consequences. Th e most likely formal bridge between such disparate realms is that of repetition. At once a principle of popular music and—as Th eodor Adorno wrote—of the music industry, repetition is central to the human reception of music in its broadest social character. As Richard Mid- dleton has written in a brilliant theoretical discussion from which the present analysis takes its lead, “Th e extent and nature of repetition in a given music [is] produced by and located at the point where several sets of determinations intersect,” among them the political economy of production, the psychic and social economy of reception, technologies of musical creation and dissemina- tion, and inheritances from musical traditions. 6 If the abuses of repetition as a mediating category in the hands of, say, Adorno are by now notorious, there nevertheless remain unexploited uses for its undeniable mediatory power. 7

It is fi tting that when Adorno set out to critique what he believed to be the regressive tendency of American jazz, its “crude unity”—that is, repetition— he seized upon an important antecedent: “[Jazz’s] method, all declarations of propagandistic historians notwithstanding, has remained essentially unchanged; its prehistory dates back to certain songs from the fi rst half of the nineteenth century, such as ‘Turkey in the Straw’ and ‘Old Zip Coon’” (“Peren- nial” 121). From Adorno’s perspective, the fact that the two named songs were actually one and the same might merely confi rm his sense of popular music’s standardization: who could tell them apart anyway? And if he knew that the song had come from the blackface theater, his charge had even more weight, for at least actual black music, while to Adorno “primitive,” had some claim to

FigURE 11 Minstrel Songbook, 1848 Courtesy of the Butler Library, Columbia University

178

FigURE 11 (continued)

179

Love and Th eft 180

a noncommodifi ed authenticity. Authentic or not, however, the rhythmic rep- etition so crucial to commercial products derived from African-American music generally seemed to Adorno the internally rationalized result of a ratio- nalized industry committed to the endless, cretinizing reproduction of the same under the ever-changing cover of fashion. 8 Certainly, as I have sug- gested, the blackface industry was taking off . One might assume that its racial repertoire was thus narrowed into easily replicable units of racist “common sense.” But we ought neither to ascribe minstrelsy’s rising pop- ularity to culture-industry cunning nor read off its political results from industrial practice; recent studies have shown these assumptions to be rather too underdetermined. 9 We must somehow acknowledge the part played by commercial predictability in the writing, marketing, and consumption of minstrel music without disqualifying the place of audience responsiveness, disparate racial determinations, and historical consequence in our account. What political sense can we make of musical repetition in blackface min- strelsy? What racial antecedents did it organize and put on off er? Why did audience pleasure oft en take the form, as we saw in the last chapter, of re- peated returns to the minstrel show, the desire, as the Spirit of the Times mimetically put it, “to go again, and again” (October 9, 1847)? How are we to understand audience demands in minstrel theaters for reprises of favorite songs, prompting exasperated theater managers to state in playbills that au- diences “are particularly requested not to demand a repetition”? 10 Let me begin to look for some answers in the formal properties of the songs themselves.

Richard Middleton distinguishes between two sorts of repetition in pop- ular music: musematic and discursive repetition. Musematic repetition is based on the repetition of short units (musemes), such as the riff s or “shouts” in African-American music; a “purer” kind of repetition, it is likely to be unvar- ied and prolonged, and tends toward the “circularity” one associates with col- lective oral invention. Discursive repetition is based on the repetition of longer units, usually musical phrases, which are mixed in with contrasting units in a hierarchical framework; harmonic progressions give such repetition the more “narrative” character of written music of the Tin Pan Alley stripe. Yet, as Mid- dleton cautions in “In the Groove,” these are historical categories rather than crudely technological ones; they are “actively summoned into development and strongly mediated by the needs of distinct socio-economic confi gura- tions” (164). Th e link between individualist, literate musical composition and the development of bourgeois social formations, for example, has long been axiomatic. 11 By the same token, the two types are rarely mutually exclusive, particularly in the United States, and oft en coexist in a given popular form. Th e diversion of some of the impulses of written music into orally transmitted, black-infl uenced songs in nineteenth-century popular theater was itself sum- moned into being by the mix of classes in minstrel-show spectatorship, and by the mix of races in the antebellum North, quite apart from their paving the

California Gold and European Revolution 181

way for the earthshaking public emergence of African-American musical forms.

In terms of this basic distinction, nineteenth-century black secular song forms were usually (but not always) musematic, relying on short, repeated tags and refrains directly opposed to melodic narrativity—an eruption, as Max Roach has termed hip hop music, of “rhythm for rhythm’s sake” (quoted in Owen 61). In Rec- ollections of a Southern Matron (1838), for example, Caroline Gilman recounts a boat trip in South Carolina during which the slave oarsmen, led by one Juba, sing about the boat Neely, named for the young mistress on board with her suitor, Lewis:

Hi de good boat Neely? She row bery fast, Miss Neely! An’t no boat like a’ Miss Neely,

Ho yoi’!

Who gawing to row wid Miss Neely? Can’t catch a’ dis boat Neely— Nobody show he face wid Neely,

Ho yoi’!

Maybe Maus Lewis take de oar for Neely, Bery handsome boat Miss Neely! Maus Lewis nice captain for Neely,

Ho yoi’! 12

Th e repetitions of “Neely” create a leveling, hypnotic eff ect, systematically broken up by “breaks” or “cuts” (“Ho yoi’!”) that only intensify the repetitive fl ow once it is resumed. 13 Th is structure was highly elastic, shaped to the rhythm of work, and, as in this example, off ered a perfect form for submerged, wry, or overtly bitter commentary about white people or their systematic abuses—among a great many other things. “I’m Gwine to Alabamy,” notated by William Francis Allen and Lucy McKim Garrison for their edition of Slave Songs of the United States (1867), treats the forced separation of families under slavery (see Fig. 12 ):

I’m gwine to Alabamy,—Oh, For to see my mammy,—Ah.

She went from Ole Virginny,—Oh, And I’m her pickaninny,—Ah.

She lives on the Tombigbee,—Oh, I wish I had her wid me,—Ah.

Now I’m a good big nigger,—Oh, I reckon I won’t git bigger,—Ah.

But I’d like to see my mammy,—Oh, Who lives in Alabamy,—Ah.

(89)

FigURE 12 From Slave Songs of the United States, 1867, ed. William Francis Allen, Lucy McKim Garrison, and Charles Pickard Ware Courtesy of the Alderman Library, University of Virginia

182

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Th e similarities between this song and Foster’s “Oh! Susanna” are, paradoxi- cally, striking evidence of the cultural changes that were rung on inherited forms, whether it was Foster who transformed the repeated cries into a con- ventional chorus or the slaves who broke down Foster’s (already somewhat creolized) discursive structure into a sort of incantatory insistence. 14

By contrast, the repetition in Anglo-American popular or music hall song was discursive, working at the largely melodic level of the phrase, and the repeats were either immediate, delayed, or some combination of the two. Mid- dleton suggests that this kind of repetition was typifi ed by the technique of sequence, the nearly identical repetitions of a musical phrase to fi t changing harmonies, or that of phrase-structure repetition, in which the details change but leave intact a parallelism or set of melodic analogies at the level of har- mony and rhythm (see also Maróthy 11–127). Th e following example, Henry Bishop’s famous “Home! Sweet Home!” (1823), represents the kind of song that was in the air when Stephen Foster began to compose:

’Mid pleasures and Palaces though we may roam, Be it ever so humble there’s no place like home! A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there, Which seek through the world, is ne’er met with elsewhere!

Home! Home! sweet, sweet, Home! Th ere’s no place like home! Th ere’s no place like home!

(Marrocco and Gleason 310–11)

Th is is perhaps the simplest type of discursive repetition, involving neither me- lodic analogies nor sequence. Th e fi rst phrase is simply repeated immediately, then a second occurs and is likewise repeated, before the chorus comes to cap it all off . Th is type of repetition is clearly both repetitive and nonrepetitive, as the repeated phrases are marshaled into the service of a broader narrative order. Discursive repetition, Middleton argues, is thus in essence a way of deploying the power of repetition while taming it, of domesticating it by incorporation into other structural processes. Rather than marking time or even obliterating it, as musematic repetition oft en seems to do, 15 this type of repetition, as Mid- dleton puts it, “makes us aware of rise and fall, a discursive hierarchy, and thus refers us to irreversible experiences” (165). Th is is an idea to which I will return.

It seems fairly clear that antebellum minstrel-show songs were situated at the intersection of these types of repetition. Historically there was a move away from the more “folk”-derived music (black, British, and Irish) imitated in early minstrelsy toward a more discursive, “bourgeois” (actually petit-bourgeois) song in the commercial era of the midcentury minstrel show, and from comic or novelty tunes to earnestly sentimental ones. 16 Yet well into the 1850s much of the blackface repertory was of a mixed character, in keeping with its general cultural mix as I have outlined it. Hans Nathan charts the convergence of

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cultural infl uences in the music along lines familiar from Middleton’s discus- sion: “Excessive repetition of single tones and of phrases of narrow compass derives from the Negro; on the other hand, the symmetry of phrase structure is a white concept” (187). Th is blend is already present in “Old Zip Coon” (1834) (see Fig. 13 ), which, while it is related to two Irish hornpipes (Nathan 166–68), flattens out their complex figures in the repeated tones (and words) of its

FigURE 13 “Zip Coon,” 1834 Courtesy of the Harvard Th eatre Collection

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second and fourth bars; its chorus is then constructed out of a sequence, but feels more repetitive than it is because of its syncopated rhythm. A particularly good example of the cross between musematic and discursive modes of repe- tition from the most popular decade of blackface music is “De Blue Tail Fly” (1844) (see Fig. 14 ), which uses phrase-structure repetitions, but of phrases so brief and of such small interval that the eff ect is very fl at indeed, with its refrain

FigURE 13 (continued)

Love and Th eft 186

dunning aft er every verse. Nathan notes that minstrel songs came into their own in the 1840s by drawing less on European “folk” antecedents and more on just such multiple repetitions of brief phrases—the “chief structural principle” of the style of this period—now enhanced by a certain amount of rhythmic syncopation. 17

FigURE 14 “De Blue Tail Fly,” 1844 Courtesy of the Alderman Library, University of Virginia

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Th is “racial” ambiguity in the makeup of minstrel songs was intensifi ed by the range of song types most minstrel companies purveyed in the years I examine in this study, a range visible even in the course of a night’s perfor- mance. On one side were the almost wholly musematic repetitions of Dan Emmett’s 1843 “Old Dan Tucker”:

I come to town de udder night, I hear de noise den saw de fi ght, De watchman was a runnin roun, Cryin Old Dan Tucker’s come to town,

So get out de way! Get out de way! Get out de way! Old Dan Tucker, Your too late to come to supper. 18

Th ere is scarcely any “discursivity” at all here; the attempt is to level out the song as much as possible through repeated tones and repeated shouts, in verse and chorus both. Of course, the impulse toward discursive repetition in most blackface songs was usually modifi ed by at least some simulated presence of African-American elements. Yet on the other side were the many sentimental songs of the late 1840s lamenting the death of some “lady” or longing for the plantation past—or both at once. Th ese nostalgic “carry-me-back” songs, as Sam Dennison calls them, were discursive structures out of a long tradition of “home songs” such as “Home! Sweet Home!” however plaintively “black” they seemed (Austin 123–62). Most typical of the songs that fell between these two kinds were some of Foster’s melodies, which oft en unfold by “discursively” repeating (or virtually repeating) a single striking phrase, but betray little “narrative” musical development—as in “Oh! Susanna” (1848):

I came from Alabama wid my banjo on my knee, I’m g’wan to Lousiana, My true love for to see, It rain’d all night the day I left , Th e weather it was dry, Th e sun so hot I frose to death; Susanna, dont you cry.

Oh! Susanna, Oh! dont you cry for me, I’ve come from Alabama, wid my banjo on my knee.

(Jackson 89–91)

Cutting across all this variety was the tendency for minstrel troupes to identify themselves with a particular style. Hence the associations of vulgarity that

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dogged the Virginia Minstrels or Campbell’s Minstrels, the somewhat more sentimental, “refi ned” aff ect of Buckley’s Serenaders or the Ethiopian Sere- naders, and the broadly middle-of-the-road appeal of Christy’s Minstrels— though within such bounds, stylistic heteroglossia, as well as intimations of vulgarity, were the order of the day.

Generally, then, the overlapping types of repetition in “two tone” minstrel music (as in “Oh! Susanna”) arose from a willed attempt to approximate as much as incorporate the eff ects one fi nds in slave songs such as “I’m Gwine to Ala- bamy.” Adorno once scoff ed at such “handicraft ” devices for disguising the debased, mechanical character of the popular music that deployed them (“Pop- ular” 308); and indeed, Foster’s work is still oft en perceived, in a rather desperate racial euphemism, as genuine “folk” music. But a more Gramscian approach alerts us to the immediate social valences of the music’s commercial miscegena- tion, the fairly direct kinds of cultural work, of both class and race, performed by its jumbling of racial signifi ers. Th e disparate elements in blackface music were implicitly tied to diff erent parts of its audience, and to multiple, overlapping meanings—not in any given or essential way, but in a process of articulation to groups and signifi cances in the Jacksonian theater. 19 Counterfeited black “folk” elements no doubt undergirded sentimental or reactionary ideologies of planta- tion slavery (about which more shortly), but they also “represented” plebeian theatergoers, as I have suggested, and marked the literal encroachment of such people on the sanctums of respectable song. In this as in other ways, minstrelsy’s racial meanings proved a cover story for class struggles, allowing working-class self-diff erentiation from petit-bourgeois respectability within minstrelsy itself, and perhaps urging intermittent interracial identifi cations through the (simu- lated) collectivist ethos slave music shared with working-class culture. Blackface performance thus wrested space for plebeian representation from the patterns and traditions of mainstream American music, but only in partial and contested ways; I would again remark the hegemonic cast of this insurgency (working- men’s “freedom” dependent on performative “blackness”) as well as the class unevennesses of minstrel audiences. Indeed, the minstrel show’s course in the 1850s revealed its possible counteruses as a mode of cultural embourgeoisement, its redirection of antithetical class impulses into a kind of imperiously bland, albeit racialized, gentility. 20 In any case, these racial cross-codings and internal contradictions in blackface music begin to clarify the ways repetition both dove- tailed with and outstripped its frankly commercial uses. Likewise with the net “racial” eff ect of musical repetition in minstrelsy: a plundering of black music whose outcome was a hesitation between types, a tension between circularity and teleology, a wink at the counterfeit alongside a nod toward “blackness”—a struggle within minstrel music of the kind that would characterize appropria- tions of black culture to the present day.

Yet despite these social contradictions, there would still appear to be a close fi t, as Fredric Jameson suggests, between the whole enterprise of musical

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repetition and reifi ed modes of musical apprehension under capitalism. 21 Not- withstanding a certain atavistic, communal joie d’esprit in the minstrel show, the iterative practices in blackface music—rhythmic repetition, repeated tags and phrases, the recycling of lines in diff erent songs, the recycling of songs themselves—can hardly have induced the same eff ects in newly commodifi ed situations of music making or listening as in the precapitalist oral cultures (black or white) from which they provided a transition. Th e popular associa- tion of repetition with what Adorno terms “distraction,” mere sensation, the trance, all the mindless investments allegedly called forth by the numbing calculations of pop music, argues poorly for any but the most degraded and “obedient” responses to this cultural mode, if not to the popular generally (“Popular” 310, 312). As I mentioned in chapter 6 , however, such a loss of the subject has recently become a privileged category of pleasure in the writings of many postmodern theorists. Although, as Tania Modleski has pointed out, these writers are no more friendly to the popular than was the Frankfurt School, they may nonetheless help us view more complexly the collective “absence” induced by pop-musical repetition in the minstrel show—as more than merely the tyranny of capitalist, white-supremacist banality. 22

Roland Barthes, for instance, posed the idea of jouissance against the infe- rior (and “mass” cultural) enjoyments he together denoted plaisir, an attempt to fi nd a language for the bliss “in the course of which the ‘subject’ of the text, escaping the logic of the ego-cogito and engaging in other logics (of the signi- fi er, of contradiction), struggles with meaning and is deconstructed (‘lost’)” (Heath 10). Plaisir is a shoring up, a “comfortable” reading practice that affi rms the consistency of one’s selfh ood, making available, in Stephen Heath’s words, “the cultural enjoyment of identity . . . a homogenizing movement of the ego” (9); conversely, jouissance, on the model of the orgasm, “seeks [the ego’s] loss” through disruptions and crises in one’s relation to signifying practice itself (Barthes, Pleasure 14).

Yet the vulgar, ego-mastering plaisir of a musical compulsion to repeat is, critically speaking, at odds with the unselving distraction supposedly attendant on popular pleasure. Indeed, from another angle, Middleton suggests, the latter looks a lot like jouissance, perhaps brought on by even “industrial” music— which, as with all music, in Henri Lefebvre’s words, “communicates corpore- ality” and “renders the body into social practice” (“Musique”). Th at is all it does, say its harshest critics. But in doing so it delivers up Barthes’s “grain of the voice,” the materiality of the musical signifi er. Blackface patrons, rendered unto the body, spoke of “plaintive” and “aff ectionate” minstrel songs that went “directly to the heart,” while J. S. Dwight spoke mordantly of them as the “melodic itch of the times.” 23 And such music delivers up the signifi er’s fl eshly coordinates—we have seen minstrel-show patrons requested in playbills “not to beat time” (re- petitively) “with their feet”—where one had expected only the rule of the same, the mechanical pleasure of the next. One musicologist has argued that because

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the psychogenetic origins of music lie in the relationship of baby to mother, in, for instance, the aural and tactile repetitions of heartbeat and breathing—a rela- tionship that preexists the emergence of a subject—the experience of even rig- idly structured music may well call up pre-oedipal moments whose disruptions are the hallmark of jouissance. 24 Th e popular vocabulary of “rapture” and its re- lated terms in nineteenth-century musical parlance surely indicates something of this blissful emptying out of the self. We are, then, left with an apparent am- biguity. Did blackface musical repetition produce a merely pleasurable girding of the (racial) ego, as in Freud’s notion of the repetition compulsion; or did it open up a space in the listener for ego loss, rupture, jouissance?

It is an ambiguity that resides in Freud’s own account of repetition. On the one hand, the fort/da game of Beyond the Pleasure Principle appears as a way of mastering reality; the child delights in the disappearance and repeated return of small objects in order to overcome the pain of separation from the mother. Th is is a game of self-preservation, and the repetitions based on it in cultural products might be seen as an attempt to buff er the ego against reality’s shocks and jolts (8–11). On the other hand, such repeated stagings of obviously unpleasurable experiences led Freud to the much more far-reaching theory of the death instinct, in which an inherent urge toward inertia in all organic life, overriding or preceding the pleasure principle, becomes the ultimate object of repetition (30). From this perspective, repetition would appear to tend toward a fi nal loss of the subject, originating on some presubjective level and result- ing, perhaps, in moments of jouissance. But it is soon clear that the death instinct’s purpose is itself to fulfi ll the ego’s instinctual wishes (to die), a pur- pose at variance with a relaxation or disruption of ego functions. Over against the death instinct, however, Freud constructs sexuality, eros; disrupter and disturber of all inertia, it accounts for sources of pleasure not tied even to repetition’s cessation of tension, and may be seen, Middleton points out, as the root of Barthes’s jouissance.

But we have not simply returned here to the initial ambiguity of ego preser- vation, death, repetition, plaisir over against ego loss, sexuality, rupture, jouis- sance. For sexuality and the death instinct, Freud avers in Th e Ego and the Id, are not mutually exclusive; they are articulated together as what Paul Ricoeur calls “coextensive domains” (292). They are undifferentiated forces each of which may serve either the libido or the ego. Th e wires are oft en crossed. Th ink, for instance, of narcissistic forms of sexuality; or consider the paradox Freud observes, that sex (dependent in its very essence on repetitive motion) results in miniature forms of the self ’s extinction ( Ego 37), a process evoked musically, of course, by heavily incantatory patterns of repetition. What all this suggests is that the seemingly opposed interpretations of repetition are in fact bound up with one another—that the eff ects of musical repetition are very precisely ambiguous and range over a spectrum of meanings depending on given mixes of musical elements.

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By this I mean that the ambiguity regarding the outcome of musical repetition per se was overdetermined by the minstrel show’s use of two diff erent kinds of repetition, musematic and discursive, each of which, Mid- dleton argues, produces or makes available a diff erent psychological “set.” Middleton writes that the eff ects of repetition may vary widely according to its specifi c form; “its precise eff ects [owe] to the nature of what is repeated [rhythms and short refrains or more extended musical phrases] and the extent to which it is mixed up with other elements (channelling repetition in particular directions)” (173). Breaking down the twin tendencies in minstrel music toward ego dispersal and self-identity, one might say that its use of musematic repetition, seemingly closer to primary psychic processes, was most congenial to momentary losses of ego boundaries, while its use of dis- cursive repetition, as in János Maróthy’s account of bourgeois song, per- mitted egoistic self-affi rmation. Th ese tendencies were stitched up together in a host of musical combinations, so that, far from being only an epiphe- nomenon of the commercial bottom line—the racist, ego-stroking cycle of novelty-boredom-novelty—blackface music constituted a variable fi eld in which diff ering, even overlapping results might accrue to various stylistic mixes. Th e overdetermination of the psychological eff ects of repetition by confl uences of repetitive musical type may indeed have garnered complex and equivocal calibrations of response. Above all, the “racial” mixtures in minstrel music may mean that the confl icted energies making blackface minstrelsy an institution to contend with in these years were determined in part at the formal level of its song craft .

For it follows that libidinal and ego functions as they were manifested in blackface musical repetition had specifi c racial eff ects. Without attempting very closely to examine instances of blackface music for the sorts of response their complexities may have brought forth, I submit that musematic repetition in the minstrel show was linked in purely formal terms to blissful, “unraced” moments of ego loss, and discursive repetition to ego-preserving feelings of racial mas- tery and self-assurance. Th e surface details of minstrel song types bear out this speculation, the “blacker” structures immersing whites in boundary-crossing aff airs of racial Otherness and the “whiter” folk or ballad structures making opportunistic use of the black mask. Of course these types were crossed not only with each other but also with other racial and cultural determinations; the perceived “blackness” of miscegenated blackface performance still warred with (at best) a widespread condescension toward black arts, just as sentimental “slave” laments that were patently derived from European music sometimes performed liberatory racial work. Th ese contradictions, indeed, are my point: they took shape in accordance with the structure of racial feeling impressed by a moment of evidently widening cracks in the social bloc. Not that there was any immediate link between racial feeling and national confl ict, nor that the resurgence of the slavery controversy in late-1840s America represented any

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new consensus (on either side) about racial matters. Th is period’s uncontain- able “social motion,” however, did not fail to pervade either the subjectivities of those who lived it or the cultural products it sponsored. Th e same pressing confl icts underlay both the minstrel show’s popularity and the American 1848; minstrelsy responded at the (emotional and representational) level of com- mercial racial ritual to political and economic confl icts that were fought out in legislatures, boardrooms, and streets. 25 In Noise: Th e Political Economy of Music Jacques Attali argues for the predictive value of music, its capacity to register at very deep levels the goings-on of the social surround. Something similar was beginning to occur in the way blackface minstrelsy, through mu- sical repetition and other devices, mediated between social confl ict and national racial ambivalence.

In other words, I credit the minstrel show with a sudden new capacity to turn vast knots of social turbulence into confl icted stagings of racial subjec- tivity, and vice versa, to shuttle between racial drama and social trauma. Th e fact that the depression had passed and theatrical venues were in the black again did not in itself account for the new range of song styles in minstrelsy, nor for the frisson of trouble that clung to the minstrel show. No doubt its makers’ purposes, though various, amounted to a hegemonizing eff ort, coin- cident with Democratic party policy, on behalf of things as they were: racist self-assurance, then sectional compromise, then white-supremacist Unionism. But once the act was off and running, it was diffi cult to rein in resonances and images that grew up seemingly out of nowhere to map, as political allegory and as racial feeling, the course of events. Th e minstrel show was now a na- tional presence; and its evocation of garden-variety racial disdain as well as paranoid racial fantasizing, complacent white-Negroism as well as humani- tarian interest, indicates its eff ortless ability to operate in the realms of racial subjectivity and national self-refl ection at one and the same time.

It is indeed in the context of the slavery controversy that the racist and pop- ulist positions on minstrelsy fully emerged. Th us an antislavery New York Tri- bune writer spoke of blackface music’s “truth to the humanity of which it assumes to be the exponent” and linked it to “the true originators of this music—the negroes themselves”: “Plaintive and slow, the sad soul of the slave throws into his music all that gushing anguish of spirit which he dare not oth- erwise express” (“Black” 107). Conversely, J. K. Kennard imagined the minstrel show to be a springboard for cultural insurrection: “At no time does the atmo- sphere of our planet cease to vibrate harmoniously to the immortal songs of the negroes of America. At this present moment, a certain ubiquitous person”— “Dan Tucker”—“seems to be in the way of the whole people of these United States simultaneously” (335). Meanwhile, sometime b’hoy Walt Whitman’s skittery involvement in antislavery politics coincided with a nervous seesaw- ing between infatuation and disgust in his view of the minstrel show. As always, and owing partially to institutions such as the minstrel show, variousness in

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facts of racial feeling bore an uncertain and indirect but unmistakable relation to political turmoil. 26

Th e minstrel show’s constituency was itself beginning to demonstrate its racial ambivalences in the political arena. Most historians have observed a new antislavery interest among workingmen in the late 1840s, though insis- tently deteriorating working conditions closer to home certainly paced the turn toward a new politics. As the issue of territorial expansion moved to the foreground, an undertone of impatience with slavery emerged in many labor newspapers and platforms; in 1846, for instance, the New England As- sociation of Mechanics, Farmers, and other Workingmen resolved “to secure to all others those rights and privileges for which we are contending our- selves.” Th e Wilmot Proviso’s injunction that slavery be excluded from newly acquired territory was in many ways more attractive to workers than aboli- tionism; the Proviso’s concern with free white labor emphasized how they might theoretically benefi t in the form of public lands. Wilmot or no, the New England Industrial League in 1850 condemned the Fugitive Slave Law outright, and northern workingmen’s general disdain for slavery in this pe- riod outweighed their distaste for the abolitionists themselves. By the same token, however, it was no less possible for a leading federation of workers, the Industrial Congress, to bypass slavery in its political eff orts although it was antislavery in its platform. 27 Labor’s increasing antislavery gestures, in other words, were shot through with racial hostility, political cross-purposes, and sheer indiff erence, and can be read as an index of racial feeling only with the greatest caution.

Yet I hope to show that these political and aff ective confusions were pre- cisely what the formal ambiguities of blackface music and performance sym- bolically harmonized. As both cultural register and cultural agent, performance genres have as one of their chief tasks the translation of social cleavages into cultural form. Formal specifi cities indicate the shape of a culture’s under- standing of such confl icts, if not that of the confl icts themselves. 28 Th is is why the minstrel show’s most elaborate invention, the plantation mythology that came to fruition in the late 1840s, was also the most revealing picture of a social order coming apart at the seams.

Homesickness

To move from blackface minstrelsy’s dance, humor, and music to its social imagery of plantation slavery is to be struck immediately by an unremitting and largely unremarked emphasis on death, nostalgia, and doom. Relief was ready to hand, of course, in the (by then) conventional mode of plantation gaiety—darkies perennially ready to sing, Massa to be pleased, heels to be kicked up, lovers to be pursued. Th e reigning tonality of the minstrel show in

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its most popular years was of course upbeat. But there was a gaping sore at the heart of all this cheer. Th e early work of Stephen Foster (a sort of one-man research and development team) alone contained the main elements of senti- mentalized plantation distress on which most minstrel companies capitalized forthwith. Some of these songs, to be sure, mourned good times on the plan- tation now gone, most explicitly Foster’s “Massa’s In de Cold Ground” (1852). But it seems to me revealing that even tributes to the plantation took the form of keening its loss, and very oft en this tonality brushed against the grain of proslavery ideology. In his exhaustive content analyses of blackface songbooks, Robert Toll found the minstrel show in this period as contradictory an aff air as its musical devices have led us to believe, criticisms of slavery running roughly equal to sympathetic representations of it (66).

Foster’s “Plantation Melodies,” for instance, feature sweethearts or whole families who are separated by the slave trade and long to reunite, yearning for the glad days past and never to return, as in “Old Folks at Home” (1851) or “Farewell My Lilly Dear” (1851). Young men lament the death of their chosen ones in youth’s full bloom, as in “Nelly Was a Lady” (1849). Slaves do back- breaking work and wait for death to carry them home, as in “My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night!” (1853), or breathe their last aft er years of toil, as in “Old Uncle Ned” (1848). I mimic the cloying unrestraint of these songs only to con- vey how heavy their eff ects were—heavy but eff ective, for they touched com- mentators of every kind—W. M. Th ackeray, for example:

I heard a humorous balladist not long ago, a minstrel with wool on his head and an ultra-Ethiopian complexion, who performed a negro ballad that I confess moistened these spectacles in a most unexpected manner. I have gazed at thousands of tragedy queens dying on the stage, and ex- piring in appropriate blank verse, and I never wanted to wipe them. Th ey have looked up, be it said, at many scores of clergymen without being dimmed, and behold! a vagabond with a corked face and a banjo sings a little song, strikes a wild note, which sets the heart thrilling with happy pity. (quoted in Wittke 53)

Sentimental plantation songs moistened their share of spectacles, and for good reason. Th eir generic projection of death and sorrow onto female or “feminized” male black victims, which coincided with the encroachment in the late 1840s of a larger female spectatorship on the minstrel show’s gener- alized masculinism, pushed all the right buttons for the midcentury culture of feeling, preternaturally alive to tales of virtuous suffering and familial disintegration:

Nelly was a lady Last night she died, Toll de bell for lubly Nell My dark Virginny bride. 29

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I would incidentally emphasize the vanguardism of this strategy. It is true that milking sentiment by way of black characters was a practice of long standing, reaching back to at least the “noble Negro” types of the late eighteenth-century stage (from which sentimental blackface songs indeed partly descended). But historical and theatrical contexts had changed enough for “blackness” to be unorthodox territory for the evocation of strong feeling, and only the minstrel show’s innovations in this area helped establish “blackness” as one fundamen- tal source of the sentimental. Stephen Foster’s family was probably embar- rassed by rather than proud of his plantation songs, and Charles Hamm goes so far as to argue that mainstream sentimental music was itself the product, not the motive, of minstrelsy’s maudlin strain (Austin 95; Hamm 136–39). As I suggested in chapter 1 , the consequences of this feminization of “blackness” for black representation and domestic ideology both can scarcely be overstated; the two would soon come crashing together, as though for the fi rst time, in Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 30

More specifi cally, these songs cemented the popular preoccupation with death which Ann Douglas has argued was one cornerstone of sentimentalism. A controlled luxuriance in grief amounting to what Douglas calls “therapeutic self-indulgence” (245), this emphasis on the departing and the departed none- theless had the useful outcome of endowing black people with human emo- tion, indeed the perpetual sorrow of life under slavery. Th at it is also one of minstrelsy’s most insidious legacies—issuing today in, say, pious tributes to Martin Luther King, Jr., the hushed tears and whispers of greatness masking a lot of business as usual—should not allow us to overlook its Christian exalta- tion of the powerless in the nineteenth century. 31 Indeed, one outcome of this attempt to keep up with white concerns was that it produced a new and very diff erent kind of black fi gure along with the better-known goofs and simps. Yet the morbid opportunism inherent in the vogue of the dear departed does lead one to suspect that these undeniably racially positive songs were also doing other, less charitable kinds of work, and this in turn reminds us of their “white,” ego-shoring, discursive form. Th e death instinct so central to musical repeti- tion now manifested itself at the mournful level of content, as though this whole genre longed thematically for the pleasurable cessation of tension that is the death instinct’s hallmark; and in this sense the “narrative” cast of discur- sive, sentimental minstrel songs does indeed “refer us to irreversible experi- ences” (165), as Richard Middleton has it.

We are in the province of Poe’s “most poetical topic in the world” (486)— the dead woman—and surcease was visited not upon an audience willing to forego its racial ranking but upon the hapless female or feminized blacks who populated the plantation melodies. For this reason it is diffi cult to shake the feeling that what was being repeated in these songs amid a sympathetic emotional agenda was, simply, racial and sexual aggression, that is, meta- phorical murder. Into the pantheon of blackface social fi gurations (the black

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dandy, the childlike trickster) must be admitted the elegized dead black woman (or feminized man). Th e elegy, according to Jahan Ramazani, so depends for its existence on the death of the person being memorialized that elegists can in some sense be said to will the death they lament (17–26). Th ere is a self-evident ambiguity in this situation. Narrating desire by absenting the loved one—desire being structured around a lack, in Lacan’s account—such cultural products, in Ramazani’s words, “enact a symbolic rite of presence and absence” (18); seeking to master grief, not unlike in Freud’s fort/da game, they seem to relish the loved one’s removal as much as mourn it. And where poets are occasionally self-conscious about this dynamic, meditating on it over the course of a poem, minstrel writers exploited it with a vengeance.

In short, laments for the dead in minstrel songs were very oft en occasions for symbolic violence and hostility. Here, for instance, is the Charles White song “Emma Snow” (1848), in which an idyllic Alabama love story turns harsh:

Now that happy time hath sorrow, Th e day is turned to night;

I lost my dearest Emma By the poison adder’s bite.

We miss’d her in de evening, And we hunted far and wide,

And we found her in the meadows, Whar she sicken’d and she died. 32

Not only is Emma Snow’s death portrayed and lingered over (the adder’s bite a rococo if not naughty embellishment), but there is a kind of jokey strait- jacketing of the lines that actually serves to distance rather than entrance the listener. But it is with more than representations of racial cruelty that we are dealing here; the unease relaxed by this generic death drive was ultimately social, and it was rooted in the most pressing racial questions of the day. One might say that while such songs needed the recurring deaths of black people in order to exist, they also repeatedly wished away the existence of blacks al- together. Mournful enough on the face of things, the general run of such songs supervised the elimination of black characters rather than marked their passing away. And it seems to me that what was being symbolically eliminated and put to rest was the whole lamented business of slavery in the United States, by means of the elimination of black people themselves. Con- sider the sold-down-the-river sadness of Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night!”:

Th ey hunt no more for the possum and the coon On the meadow, the hill and the shore, Th ey sing no more by the glimmer of the moon, On the bench by the old cabin door.

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Th e day goes by like a shadow o’er the heart, With sorrow where all was delight: Th e time has come when the darkies have to part, Th en my old Kentucky Home good-night!

(Jackson 71)

It would be perverse to deny empathic glimmers, moonlit or otherwise, in such a hegemonic form; and these lines glare rather than glimmer. But there is no greater qualifi cation of the seemingly positive nature of romantic racial- ism’s sentimental ethos than that so much of it centers on black misery, death, indeed disappearance. Stowe, like Lincoln himself in the 1850s, would send George Harris to Africa to realize his fortunes, and good riddance.

Th us, as this example begins to show, minstrelsy’s plantation mythology in eff ect mediated between diff erent social agendas and social feelings. Simulta- neously lamenting and killing off the black victim, it condensed ambivalences of racial feeling into a single complex fi gure, implicitly connecting such ambiv- alences to the antislavery impulse—which, indeed, was increasingly of a racially unsympathetic character. At the same time, and for all its ambivalence, this my- thology backed the minstrel show into putting broken-family sentimentalism at the service of antislavery, as the abolitionists themselves did. (And did, oft en enough, with blackface songs: the abolitionist Hutchinson Family Singers per- formed Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” with Foster’s own words [Austin 35].) It was much the same with the nostalgic longing at the heart of these songs, which focused the sentimental appeal and in sublimated ways took up social confl icts underlying or adjacent to the slavery crisis. Minstrel-show nostalgia, usually for home and family life on the plantation, strikes me (again) as a condensed, fortuitous mapping of white desire in dark skin.

Way down upon de Swanee ribber, Far, far away, Dere’s wha my heart is turning ebber, Dere’s wha de old folks stay.

All up and down de whole creation, Sadly I roam, Still longing for de old plantation, And for de old folks at home. 33

Alexander Saxton argues that nostalgic blackface songs spoke at once to restless migrants moving west, recently transplanted rural folk in cities, and rootless urban dwellers beginning to experience the anomie of modern metro- politan life; turning the South into a kind of timeless lost home, a safe, imagi- nary childhood, these songs proved supremely satisfying to a wide variety of white audiences. 34 Certainly this view complements my argument in chapter 6 about blackface’s world of the child; and nostalgia was so rife in late 1840s

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blackface songs as to indicate a rather widespread preoccupation with trau- matic parting, distance, temporal and geographic breaks. Th is is also, perhaps, minstrelsy’s strongest connection with Irish-American audiences and per- formers, whose displaced self-masking in minstrelsy (as I have interpreted it) involved, further, a lament for home and circumstance that deepened and ex- tended the minstrel show’s sentimentalism. Whatever the case, audiences everywhere fell hugely for this aspect of minstrelsy. One fan wrote to the Jour- nal of Music that the Swedish singing sensation Jenny Lind’s performance of “Home! Sweet Home!” had caused “such an emotion as I never before experi- enced; it might be exquisite home-sickness,” an eff ect this fan also said was strikingly achieved by Foster’s “Old Folks at Home.” 35

What interests me here is the allusive elasticity of nostalgia as a mode, its ability to join, through what Saxton calls “psychological identity,” the facts of metropolitanization, the frontier, immigration, and urban weightlessness—to bring these together and to suggest by way of the black mask their relationship to racial matters. It is not merely that, at one time or another, blackface songs took up these facts as explicit themes. Minstrel nostalgia intimated by emo- tional antidote all the forces in American life that seemed to be pulling the country apart. As an aff ective category it was occasionally of racially positive value, a rather dangerous formal move; as social allegory it was a superbly concise mediator, pinpointing if not insisting on the home sicknesses just then contributing to the slavery controversy, or at least making it harder to bear. We will see later how western migration was tied up with slavery, and how the minstrel show handled it; here I would pause over the way blackface nostalgia began through its peculiar racial logic to yoke slavery to the various divisions in the metropolis.

One might do worse than to start with the emotional profi le of Stephen Foster himself. Born near Pittsburgh, Foster at the age of four moved with his family amid regrets and fears from the house in which he was born; at thirteen he left home to go to school under the protection of his brother William. He left again in his late teens, this time to work in Cincinnati with his brother Dunning, and soon aft er, at twenty-four, now with a young wife, Jane, he parted from his parents to go to New York and write songs. He separated tem- porarily from Jane three years later, and within a few more years his parents were dead. Foster was still only thirty-one. “From 1851,” writes William Austin, “when he wrote ‘Farewell! Old Cottage,’ till he died, he continued to dream of the ‘faithful shelter,’ the ‘guiding star,’ the ‘hospitable hearth,’” as his songs termed the various longings he felt. And Foster’s case was hardly anomalous, at least with regard to geographic mobility; for working class as for middle class, Stuart Blumin shows, turnover rates in nineteenth-century cities were so high that the city was less a place than a process. 36

Th e deracinating experience of modern life in the city underlay min- strelsy’s brand of nostalgia, with tunes such as Christy and Wood’s Minstrels’

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“Miller’s Song” (1854) a dead giveaway: “Th e mill is torn away,/And a factory dark and drear /Rears its smoke o’er the clear blue sky.” 37 And the fact that writers such as Foster cast this nostalgia in blackface form, that “blackness” was its best expression, indicated (among other things) the hidden but necessary social link between southern black life and the northern city dwell- er’s own. Th e link is made with great clarity in the work of Richard Slotkin. In his magisterial study Th e Fatal Environment, Slotkin revises the traditional notion of a frontier safety valve continually reorienting prospects and possi- bilities in the congested metropolis, noting on the contrary a wholly reversed set of determinations, or at the very least the dialectical interdependence of city and frontier:

Whereas the Frontier Th esis asserts that Metropolitan political eco- nomics are transformed by the intervention of an outside force or phenomenon—the discovery of a distant Frontier of superabundant natural wealth—it seems more plausible (and more consonant with economic and social facts) to consider an alternative hypothesis: that the particular forms taken by the developing political economy of the Metropolis—its modes of production, its system for valuing social and economic goods, its peculiar culture and history of social relations, its characteristic political institutions—inform the decision to seek Fron- tier wealth, and determine the kind of people that will go (or be sent) to the colonies, the kinds of resources they will be interested in, the ways in which they will organize their exploitation and governance of the territory, and so on. (42–43)

If the city determined the frontier equally if not more than the other way around, then it was the city’s confl icts, perspectives, and politics—not to men- tion its psychic predispositions—that had prompted the continental expan- sion urging slavery back into the national debate. With an irony amounting to historical aptness, blackface songwriters hit upon a fi guration—blackface nostalgia—that acknowledged this social relationship. Th e blooming, buzzing growth of the city, owing much to rural migration and, aft er the mid-1840s, to Irish and German immigration, allowed or encouraged “natives” to light out (or make the case for lighting out) for territories whose mode of labor became a dangerously open question. It is also true that “western” confl icts erupted in the city before manifesting themselves on the frontier. Industrialization North and South created political divisions in the metropolis over the extension of slavery and the protective tariff that in a very real sense determined the fate of the territories. Since slavery and the tariff , Slotkin writes, “were vital to the prosperity of businessmen in the two sections, and hence to politicians, the matter of territorial expansion in the West was increasingly held hostage to resolution of these Metropolitan issues” (113). Th e problems of the frontier, and therefore slavery, were bound up with the problems of the city; and

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blackface representations of slave nostalgia, for the indulgence of nostalgic city whites, recognized their inextricability.

Of course, this was only a specifi c instance of minstrelsy’s general move from city to country within each night’s show. Minstrel companies perfected the three-part structure of blackface performance in these years: fi rst a group of songs, sometimes performed in whiteface, and oft en featuring the northern black dandy; an olio section comprising stump speeches and other novelties; and a full-blown burlesque skit set in the South. I believe this structure must be read as in every sense an attempt to compass city and frontier, or more precisely free metropolis and outland slavery. Most obviously a way of burlesquing as many black types as possible, the “narrative” performance practice of moving from the fi rst part’s North to the third part’s South, from urban dandies to rural slaves, not only implied the necessary relationship of these realms but in a feat of cognitive mapping pursued their unity—their union—as a positive goal. One brisk blackface song by the name of “Th e Jolly Raft sman” (1849) literalized the connections. Imagining the road from bondage to freedom as a simple transplantation of slave customs to a northern urban setting, it metaphorically joined the fate of slavery to that of the city by asserting their identity:

Oh, leabe your mammy, my deary lub; In New York we’ll fry dem steaks;

We’ll feed de folks “up to de hub,” An’ you shall “hurry up dem cakes!”

So good bye we bid to ole Virginny! Niggers, we bid you all farewell!

Our massas dey may go to Guinea! In Free States we will dwell! 38

Th e nostalgia I have been discussing exemplifi es in miniature the inability of minstrelsy’s plantation mythology to avoid glossing social confl icts abutting the slavery crisis—a reckless referentiality aided by the tendency of minstrel products to air from behind the mask, as though live and direct from the white unconscious, just about anything that chanced to surface. Not only the city’s relation to the West, as we shall see, but its inner life—the lives of workingmen and women, their lives together, their labor—made its way into representa- tions of the plantation. And how could this not have been the case, if aft er all the minstrel show featured displaced and condensed portrayals of the white audience’s concerns and desires? Alongside the arguments for and against slavery, alongside the (not simple) indulgences in the reputed ways of black folks, blackface inevitably off ered a view of life in these United States among northern white folks, principally those aspects of it that weighed most on the public mind. Yet no one realized, when it came to more intimate confl icts, that the domestic ideologies of American institutional life—including those of slavery—would come under joking fi re.

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Domestic ideology was so ubiquitous an organizing metaphor in nineteenth-century America that its imagery allowed dangerously easy refer- ence from sector to sector of the social formation. Th e familial underpinnings of late 1840s plantation songs were more than a necessary thematic device to hook increasingly “feminized” audiences, although they were that. Their sources were much deeper—deep enough, as I have noted, to run the risk of putting blackface’s sentimental songs in a curiously supplementary relation- ship to the abolitionist appeal. Even when politics posed no danger, minstrel songs celebrated that emblematic familial grouping, the master and his slaves. Nor is it enough to say that this strategy was the obvious one in arguing on slavery’s behalf. Taking its energy from the realities and ideologies of domestic life, the mythology of plantation paternalism became a fi gure for the family in America. Central to this fi gure was the master’s strict but gentle management of the antic blacks who surrounded him. “Angelina likes de boys/As far as she can see dem,/She used to run old Massa round/To ax him for to free dem,” goes a stanza from Foster’s “Angelina Baker” (1850). Such pestering had little result, admitted Christy and Wood’s Minstrels’ “We’ll All Make a Laugh” (1854): “Some massas love dar darkies well, and gib ’em what dey want—/ Except it is dar freedom—and dat I know, dey won’t:/Howeber, we am happy, and contented whar we am,/As a serenading party, and a scientifi c band.” 39 From one angle, the slavemaster was proof of the benignity of the Law, of a patriarchy that ruled with a feather touch. Goaded and run around he might be, but lovingly serenaded he always was, fi rm father to the last.

Indeed, needling asides like this one, minstrel songs hinted, were a sort of family joke, a touch of plantation jocularity meant to lighten the load of a just and necessary hierarchy. Rather than posing threats to the regime, they evinced the security of the system that indulged them. Yet throughout the plantation songs the various pesterings continue, suggesting that something less assured was also going on here. Foster’s “Ring, Ring de Banjo!” (1851) confi rms this hunch:

Once I was so lucky, My massa set me free,

I went to old Kentucky To see what I could see:

I could not go no farder, I turn to massa’s door,

I lub him all de harder, I’ll go away no more.

Early in de morning Ob a lubly summer day,

My massa send me warning He’d like to hear me play.

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On de banjo tapping, I come wid dulcem strain;

Massa fall a napping— He’ll nebber wake again.

My lub, I’ll hab to leabe you While de ribber’s running high

I’s guine to make some money; But I’ll come anodder day—

I’ll come again my honey, If I hab to work my way.

(Jackson 113)

Th is was of course the standard blackface argument against freeing the slaves, that they could not stand on their own two feet; and it comports comfortably enough with the aggression perhaps attributed here to slave music—the death that may be a murder but is just as surely an unfortunate orphaning. Yet how- ever one adjudicates the mixed impulses in some of these songs, which do briefl y or obliquely kick against plantation authority, their contradictions unex- pectedly serve to foreground the whole issue of the master class’s power. Rather than taking this power for granted, blackface songs selling the notion of the happy plantation off ered an extended focus on the purview, limits, and opera- tions of paternal authority. Attempting to narrate a supposedly untroubled instance of racial ideology, they revealed its gaps, or “unspokens” in Pierre Macherey’s term, let loose signifi ers of unsaid, unconscious misgivings (85–89). Weirdly apposite to songs of plantation misery, these cheerful tunes registered disturbances or instabilities in the plantation mythology such that the master’s control was made as much a question as an answer.

Putting aside for the moment the question of what eff ects these representa- tions had on the antebellum racial status quo, their obsession with the father at a time of extreme tension within the working-class family urges us to see them as social fi gurations of white northern life. And there is another reason as well. As the early republican agrarian ethos sank into industrialized obsolescence, the universal valorization of the mythic deferential yeoman, as we have seen, gave way to an ideal of the manly mechanic, from whom all dependence, do- cility, and domesticity were now projected onto women and blacks—the pre- dominant part of the proletariat, which workingmen were (oft en unsuccessfully) bent on remaining above (Slotkin 139). I have noted continuities in the repre- sentation of blacks and women, chiefl y in the sentimental writing that used the equation for liberatory purposes; and the oft en feminized character of slaves on the minstrel-show plantation doubly suggests we read the latter as in part a fi ctive mediation of women in the northern home. What, we might ask, was the attraction of the plantation’s “natural” hierarchy of master and happy slaves

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to a northern male working population not always, perhaps, unduly agitated about the state of aff airs under slavery? And how do we account for the teasing threats to that hierarchy within minstrel songs themselves? One answer may be found in the development of the working-class family in these years, which, under pressure from the emergent sexual division of labor, betrayed growing instabilities in the traditional sex/gender system.

Amid new patterns of wage earning, men and women began to renegotiate the whole question of gender and its particular capacities and responsibilities within the family. Men with sharply reduced opportunity in the postdepres- sion years had perforce to relinquish some patriarchal control over the home, while work options for women gave them some measure of autonomy. Ancient varieties of exploitation lived on, of course, whether in the sexualized in- equality of encounters on the street or the reconstructed household depen- dencies of women’s (chorelike) “outwork.” But male workers appear to have felt quite unmanned by the trajectory of family life. Finding it diffi cult to shore up their power in the straitened and unreliable circumstances of wage earning, men clung to at least the ideology of female dependency. In their labor orga- nizations they spoke on behalf of a rejuvenated patriarchal family, with men in the workplace and women in their rightful and natural place—the home. 40 Th is vision only partly mimicked the middle-class domestic ideology of wom- en’s “infl uence.” It was a proud code of the provider, according to which women would perform the duties of the household in a fi rmly protected atmosphere of working-class dignity, not one of (powerfully feminized) bourgeois respectability. Radical workingmen’s masculinist opposition to women’s labor outside the home resisted rather than capitulated to bourgeois norms, since workers thought the very necessity of female wage work was evidence of the class oppression they protested. As was oft en the case in ple- beian culture, patriarchal assertion provided the primary avenue of working- men’s self-respect. In the end these men were far more concerned about female competition within the trades than they were about women’s well-being, and the working-class version of separate spheres obviously perpetuated real con- strictions for women, though it also had the refreshing eff ect, as Christine Stansell argues, of acknowledging them as indispensable if frankly subordinate members of the working community (141).

Th is ideology plainly salved men’s anxieties rather than addressed women’s needs. So did ideological tropes such as the much-excoriated, sexually im- moral (read: self-suffi cient) “factory girl” of male labor rhetoric, reform tracts, and urban journalism, a transparent attempt to halt the drift in the domestic balance of power (Stansell 125–28, 139). Blackface gags brayed their support: “Why is a man that’s taking a popular medicine like a man that’s whipping his wife? Because he takes an’ he licks her, (elixer).” 41 Th e well-ordered minstrel plantation seems a choice picture of the family for men who felt less and less fi rmly at the helm, so precisely are its scope, energy, and primary concerns

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reminiscent of workingmen’s fantasied “family of labor,” as the labor leader John Commerford called it (quoted in Wilentz 253)—quite as much as the disturbances attending this imaginary minstrel-show hierarchy mirrored workingmen’s own experience of family life. Th e class specifi city of the wish- fulfi lling plantation mythology is clear in its benevolent male-centeredness, its loving obeisance to the gentle planter’s power—something of a departure from middle-class domestic ideology, whose ideal man was ambitious in the world but retiring at home; and a new turn on middle-class fi ctional represen- tations of the plantation, whose masters were largely declining or ineff ectual. 42 In so imaging the family, however—more accurately, in celebrating the pater- nalist imagery that structured so much American life, including both the family and slavery—blackface minstrelsy could not elude an emphasis on its troubling “unspokens.” By unconsciously taking up and representing the Real of the family in plantation form, the minstrel show allowed instabilities in domestic life to become contradictions in the much-heralded familial basis of slavery—the anguish of its forced separation of families, the dubious legiti- macy of the master. Of course it goes without saying that other factors also shaped and pressured the unsettled outlines of the blackface plantation. Yet minstrel songs, in forming what look like unintended dream-work resolu- tions to familial confl icts, registered the turbulence of the home and revealed men’s version of domestic ideology for what it was, in any sphere: a utopian fantasy of household control trying desperately to ignore its own encroaching obsolescence.

Here again, then, one confronts in blackface a certain narrative compro- mise formation of confl icts in the North that were, in this case ideologically, tied to slavery. But how does this argument square with what I have said about the tendency of spectators to identify with black characters onstage, with the slaves themselves? What inducements would there have been for men to pro- ject themselves into the role of master, a fi gure only obliquely represented in these songs and, even in the racial worst of times, anathema to northern wor- kingmen? In Th e Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology Göran Th erborn argues that ideologies always have a dual character, insofar as they represent both one’s own (imaginary) position as well as this position over against an Other. Th erborn therefore splits ideologies into ego-ideologies and alter- ideologies: whereas ego-ideologies outline the role one imagines oneself inhabiting, alter-ideologies determine the place of the Other in that ideology, most oft en the position of the dominated (27–28). In the minstrel show, I have argued, workers’ ego-ideology was confused and distorted; white workingmen indulged in displaced blackface versions of themselves, “went black,” even as they were engaged in racist ridicule. In terms of ego-ideology, the male spec- tator was alternately his “black” self and black people’s “manly” white superior, when, of course, “blackness” did not simply underscore a resistant sense of white “manliness,” as in the rhetoric of “wage slavery.” It was in terms of his

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alter-ideology that he became a planter. Th e spectator may intermittently have identifi ed with black characters—he had to if the minstrel show was to have its impact—but he always knew what he was not: a slave, whether of wages or of the plantation; he was no feminized (proletarian) subaltern. Here was a conve- nient fi ction born in part of male panic, a gendered fantasy of renewed mas- tery over inferiors whose blandishments the mechanic enjoyed and whose pleasures he commanded.

It must be said that there was another available view, even within the minstrel-show audience. At least one writer made it clear that women might experience this mythology, and these same associations, in precisely opposite ways. If for workingmen the plantation was implicitly an ideal image of the family, for women the family felt, well, like a plantation. M. W. Tyler’s remark- able novel of 1855, A Book Without a Title, draws the parallel from a woman’s perspective—and it is not a pretty sight. 43 Mira Dana, the novel’s protagonist, goes to work in the famous Lowell factories in order to help fi nance her broth- er’s education. She fi ercely resists the harshness of factory life (not to mention the social logic that makes her work for her brother’s benefi t), and eventually leads a “Lowell girls” strike. Sometime aft er, she marries a southern planter and moves to the South, where family life brings to her mind the equation not only of wife and slave but of wife and wage slave as well. Tyler implies that women’s experience of the family was their version of (wage) slavery—that plantation, factory, and home were interchangeable metaphors for one another—and her novel indicates the possibility of women’s less confl icted identifi cation with the slaves than that which workingmen felt. Proslavery pro- pagandists may have used the family as a rationalizing image for the planta- tion, just as factory representatives used it for the workplace, but the suggestion here is that, far from a neutral or “natural” grid useful in mapping the social world, the family was continuous with—even determined by—extrafamilial forms of exploitation. From the evidence of Tyler’s novel it appears that some women, in discerning the real continuities between these spheres, understood the ways in which paternalist familial ideologies (such as those of slavery) infected freedom in the home. Th e vogue of the mournful plantation song seems in more than its sentimental appeal a subtle product of women’s identi- fi cation with (blackface) slaves. Not for nothing did Stowe and other feminists rename the peculiar institution the “patriarchal institution.” Th e famous wom- en’s rights meeting at Seneca Falls looms here as part of the unfi nished busi- ness of the American 1848, conspicuous by the minstrel show’s fear—or, what is the same thing, its burlesques—of it. 44

As for the equation of family and factory, more women than Tyler, it is safe to say, made the connection. Th is is clear from the English hatter James Daw- son Burn’s observations of working women in New York. During his three years of living there, Burn noted sourly that female workers had neither due deference toward their husbands nor a proper mastery of the rudiments of

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housekeeping: “Th ey will not be instructed by their husbands; and as proof of their obstinacy, one of their common remarks to each other when speaking of their husbands is that they would like to see a man who would boss them” (85). Such, one realizes, was oft en the true nature of the laboring family— patriarch-bosses and unwilling minions. Th rowing that relationship into relief against a plantation background, moreover, Tyler’s novel insists on the famil- iar notion of wage slavery that workingmen themselves, those righteous mas- ters, occasionally pondered in blackface portraits of slave life. Such an appreciation on the part of men was not at all inconsistent with the minstrel plantation’s happier fi guration of the family, given the metaphorical capa- ciousness of ideological narratives, the subjective workings of ideology itself, or the gendered likenesses of men’s self-images: “planter” heads of the family on one hand, manly mechanics resisting their descent into wage slavery on the other.

So, fi nally, the nature of northern work for both men and women was at issue in minstrelsy’s pricking of the southern boss. From another angle—the angle of white ego-ideology—the plantation mythology, for all its content- ment, was the most elaborated version of the industrial imagery housed in the phrase “wage slavery,” and took its (unconscious) lead from struggles at work. Once again, that is to say, the minstrel show in these its most popular years fi gured as a racialized mediator of northern confl icts in southern guise, willy-nilly joining national dissatisfactions about northern and southern work. Indeed, as a kind of upbeat American feudalism the minstrel-show South appreciably enlarged the metaphorical “blackness” that, I have argued, became a fi gure for the “Europeanizing” of working conditions, the bluntly medieval nature of lower-class work under capitalism. In such terms it was far from accidental that some “Plantation Melodies” unceremoniously, even jubilantly, killed off the beloved master—an occurrence less exceptional than one has any right to expect in songs devoted to, as people in the nineteenth century would have said, “nonagitation” in regard to slavery. We have seen an instance already in Foster’s “Ring, Ring de Banjo!” but the baldest, most loving account of the master’s demise is the popular “De Blue Tail Fly” (1844):

O when you come in summertime, To South Carlinar’s sultry clime; If in de shade you chance to lie, You’ll soon fi nd out de blue tail fl y,

An scratch ’im wid a brier too.

When I was young, I used to wait On Massa’s table an hand de plate; I’de pass de bottle when he dry, An brush away de blue tail fl y,

An scratch ’im wid a brier too.

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Den arter dinner massa sleep, He bid me vigilance to keep; An when he gwine to shut he eye, He tell me watch de blue tail fl y,

An scratch ’im wid a brier too.

When he ride in de arternoon, I foller wid a hickory broom; De poney being berry shy, When bitten by de blue tail fl y,

An scratch ’im wid a brier too.

One day he rode aroun de farm, De fl ies so numerous did swarm; One chance to bite ’im on de thigh, De debble take dat blue tail fl y,

An scratch ’im wid a brier too.

De poney run, he jump, an pitch, An tumble massa in de ditch; He died, an de Jury wonder why, De verdict was de “blue tail fl y,”

An scratch ’im wid a brier too.

Ole Massa’s gone, now let him rest, Dey say all tings am for de best; I neber shall forget till de day I die, Ole Massa an de blue tail fl y,

An scratch ’im wid a brier too. (quoted in Nathan 429–31)

What, in fact, but the slave’s own “negligence” kills his master? Th e sped-up jubilance of the penultimate line conveys the song’s sense of its own mischie- vousness. In moments such as this, blackface performance, energized by a felt cynicism toward the boss in popular life, stumbled into hyena laughs at the muted victory of slaves, a brief subversion whose reach may have extended toward both white women and white men in the workplace and the family.

As we have seen, however, the earlier trains of thought and metaphor within working-class culture which had allowed certain direct links to be made between shop fl oor and cotton fi eld had broken down as northern working conditions declined—to say nothing of the fact that white men were always of at least two minds about the equation of workers with slaves. Th e ideological climate changed with the onset of depression; and by the late 1840s the eman- cipatory uses of “wage slavery” as a rhetorical device, if not wholly superseded, were at least outrun by other investments—the interest in western homestead- ing, for example, or the heating up of the slavery issue. As I have noted, the

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move toward antislavery did not depend on any developed sense of the shared fate of black and white labor (such as had sometimes been implied in the rhetoric of wage slavery) or on labor abolitionism; as we shall see, it was other social questions, chiefl y the issue of “free soil,” that sparked a concomitant and intense degree of antislavery. Mostly concern about the status of work at home took precedence. Said the labor reformer William West of workingmen in 1846: “Th ey do not hate chattel slavery less, but they hate wages slavery more.” 45

Th e minstrel show’s idioms of defi ance were furnished not by a close con- nection between worker resistance and blackface (wage) slaves but by a gener- alized sense of cultural opposition that in certain instances made creative links to “blackness” available. Certainly the boss/planter was villainized in working- class culture; a typical image, for instance, was the likening of Whiggish east- ern capitalists to the feudal overlords of the Spanish conquest in Mexico. During the Mexican War of 1846–48, the Democratic Review deployed this analogy in order to rebuke capitalist speculation on the labors of the American “pioneer army,” though it also connected the religious opposition to slavery in America with the fanaticism of Spanish Catholic priests. 46 And yet a George Lippard could draw the parallel between lords of the loom and lords of the lash—and thus slaves and workingmen—in Th e Quaker City (1844): “Th en came the slaves of the city, white and black, marching along one mass of rags and sores and misery huddled together . . . . Chains upon each wrist and want upon each brow. Here they were, the slaves of the cotton Lord and the factory Prince; above their heads a loom of iron, rising like a gibbet in the air, and by their sides the grim overseer” (389). Th e blackface plantation mythology re- sided somewhere in this broad set of resistant images and impulses. It was here that extraordinary apparitions such as heroic plantation fi remen would appear in 1848, songs of blackface “sons of freedom” and a blackface Mose which clearly spoke in the accents of the white popular classes. 47 Th e “freedom” was of course conveyed through racial caricature, and much of the time white self-as- sertion depended on the representation of black subjugation. But it is diffi cult to deny the brief, subterranean identifi cations across the boundaries of race or the broadly antithetical stances that could occur on the minstrel-show planta- tion, such was the tendency for lower-class cultural pride, forced into the pecu- liar dramatic shape of blackface, to result in unruly racial meanings. Here was labor abolitionism as an unbidden social fantasy, an imaginary and largely unconscious alliance of white and black against all the lords of labor.

Th is series of confl icts, duplicities, and false moves in the mythology of the plantation confi rms Richard Slotkin’s argument that paternalist ideology attempted “to mask the changes that were in fact transforming relations between proprietors and dependents both inside and outside the family” (140). As the minstrel show made use of it, the plantation mythology also tried to manage the changing relations between the nation’s two principal sections, and the social and aff ective ambiguities that resulted, fi nally persist- ing in the illusion that for half the country American feudalism could go on

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indefi nitely. One notes, however, that the mask was cracking. In working so hard to eff ace the confl icts from which it took its energy, the plantation mythology bared them.

Facing West

If we can now see blackface minstrelsy to have thrived on a remarkably complex and extensive involvement—an allusive ease, a sense almost of “collaboration,” in T. S. Eliot’s term—with its audiences’ lives and desires, we must yet account for perhaps the strangest fact of all. I mean that these years of its peak popularity coincided with the greatest surge of antislavery feeling the United States had yet experienced. The easy explanation is that the minstrel show meant to stanch national racial divisions with calculated racist counterpressure; indeed, we know that printed proslavery propa- ganda began to accumulate only when antislavery ideology became more insistent. Another possibility, that the minstrel show existed quite happily in its time alongside antislavery politics, given the latter’s own often prob- lematic racial attitudes, seems more correct historically if less satisfying analytically. It could also and more interestingly be argued that, with the increase in antislavery feeling, minstrel performers, like their legislative counterparts, incorporated certain antislavery images and arguments into their generally complacent acts in order to achieve a sense of national bal- ance on dangerous racial divisions in the republic; on this view, minstrelsy becomes the Compromise of 1850 plus banjo. No doubt all of these expla- nations have their partial truth. But I would suggest another view of the broad fit between blackface minstrelsy and the events leading up to the Compromise.

Inevitably taking up notable issues and confl icts in white popular life, the minstrel show, I have argued, made correlate glosses on the slavery issue, sometimes backing itself into dangerous racial ideologies. Perhaps the central, most defi ning instance was the way it became a major national signifi er of western migration. To understand this process requires us to know about pop- ular investments in the land issue—the issue, in a word, of California gold. We have seen that the collapse of autonomous working-class politics in the aft er- math of the 1837 panic defl ected attention from class enemies, uniting white working class and emergent petite bourgeoisie around campaigns of racial, religious, and ethnic opposition: antiabolitionism, temperance, nativism. Cu- riously, the South itself was about to become the prime “preindustrial” enemy, as one of the popular reform schemes that had hampered labor abolitionism earlier in the decade began to push the popular classes into resisting the en- largement of the area of slavery. Owing in part to the huge gain of southwest- ern land that seemed the likely outcome of the confl icts with Mexico, and perhaps owing even more to the activities of free-land groups such as George

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Henry Evans’s National Reform Association (NRA), the spread of slavery was now increasingly a concern of the laboring population. Where Evans had in 1844 invoked the notion of wage slavery to rebut the abolitionist defense of southern slaves and to argue on behalf of northern “white slaves” (a retreat from his own earlier position), it was soon evident that the interest in free- white homesteading would bring the issue of slavery into the center of public controversy. 48

In 1845, for instance, the NRA and the New England Workingmen’s Associ- ation issued the call for a New York convention to galvanize a new general movement of labor. Although the workingmen explicitly stated their desire to “abolish slavery” along with other social ills, this desire seems in retrospect almost the result rather than the cause of their proposed remedy for “the slaves of wages and all other slaves forever”: free public lands, not abolitionism (quoted in Loft on 279). Many workers saw in the land issue—whether as ex- plicit reform program or as generalized ideological tendency—a more sensible response to northern and southern working conditions than abolitionism, which they oft en felt was a single-issue campaign. Yet, however uninterested in antiracist politics the free-land positions may have been, the notion of free land for free (white) labor vivifi ed popular disdain for slavery. 49 Again, this eff ect came as much from distaste for the presence of black slaves in the terri- tories as it did from hatred of the institution itself. 50 In any case, the politically undetermined character of western land was what made it possible for many workingmen’s organizations to stake their claim with the banner of antislavery. Indeed some, following the Van Burenite wing of the Democratic party, criti- cized the Mexican War as an attempt to get more land for southern slave- holders, and in May 1848 a mass meeting in Boston’s Faneuil Hall celebrated the recent revolutionary success of the French, crying down southern despo- tism and northern oligarchy and urging “the destruction of white and black slavery” (quoted in Loft on 282). By the circuitous route of land reform, wor- kingmen were ever more publicly invested in halting slavery. Facing west, they brought the slavery crisis back over the eastern horizon.

And the slavery crisis, of course, cast long shadows over the nation; the gaze west was portentous, as the writer for the Southern Quarterly Review sensed but did not fully understand. It threatened to spark the sort of “European” con- fl ict on American soil that the western surge was supposed to have rendered impossible. By the late 1840s agitation around the issue of western lands was such that every invocation of westward movement brought with it the bitter question of whether newly acquired territory would be slave or free, a rather ominous fact given the importance of “Manifest Destiny” (as Democratic Review editor John O’Sullivan called it in 1845) to northern social aspiration. It is in every respect striking, therefore, that blackface minstrelsy should have moved to the cultural center at precisely this moment, and, as we shall see, by means of the matter of the West. Th e emphasis and outline of blackface acts revealed

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the political unconscious of Manifest Destiny. However ironically, the minstrel show became the badge of northern sectional formation and its developing struggles over slavery. One might even say that the backhanded antislavery politics of these years, which avoided civil rights in favor of land and other matters only to see issues of race return to startling centrality, were best repre- sented in minstrelsy’s mapping of white men’s move west. Blackface tunes, es- pecially those of Stephen Foster, became the very theme songs of the popular republic and California gold. Th e story of “Oh! Susanna’s” recruitment into the politics of America’s 1848 is very simple, but the song’s repercussions were as large as the crisis that a legislative compromise could only temporarily stall.

In many ways “Oh! Susanna” is the summation of blackface song craft . For one thing, it contains most of the elements I have identifi ed as central to the plantation mythology—lost love, separated families, death, home, nostalgia— themselves, of course, signifying a wide variety of contemporary social facts and facts of feeling:

I came from Alabama wid my banjo on my knee, I’m g’wan to Lousiana My true love for to see, It rain’d all night the day I left , Th e weather it was dry, Th e sun so hot I frose to death; Susanna, dont you cry.

Oh! Susanna, Oh! dont you cry for me, I’ve come from Alabama, wid my banjo on my knee.

I jumped aboard de telegraph, And trabbelled down de riber, De Lectrie fl uid magnifi ed, And killed fi ve hundred Nigger De bullgine bust, de horse run off , I realy thought I’d die; I shut my eyes to hold my breath, Susanna, dont you cry.

I had a dream de odder night When ebery ting was still; I thought I saw Susanna, A coming down de hill. Th e buckwheat cake war in her mouth, Th e tear was in her eye,

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Says I’m coming from de South, Susanna, dont you cry.

I soon will be in New Orleans, And den I’ll look all round, And when I fi nd Susanna, I’ll fall upon the ground. But if I do not fi nd her, Dis darkie ’[ll] surely die, And when I’m dead and buried, Susanna, dont you cry.

(Jackson 89–91)

Perhaps it was this compression of so many of the minstrel show’s favorite themes into an unarguably infectious tune that made “Oh! Susanna” a hit. Th e song that a twenty-one-year-old Foster fi rst saw performed at a Pittsburgh ice cream saloon in 1847 was immediately pirated by Nelson Kneass, a local, even- tually quite well known blackface performer, and Christy’s Minstrels were soon singing it at Mechanics’ Hall in New York City (several of the fi rst sheet versions of the song claimed Christy’s authorship). 51

It was, of all things, a polka—the rhythm of a rising generation marking itself off from the discarded elegances of the formerly audacious waltz. For our purposes it is important to note the nationalist accents of the polka. “For the fi ghters of 1848,” William Austin observes, the polka “fi tted exuberant hopes for national freedom—no matter whether the nation was Polish, Bo- hemian, German, French, Irish, or American.” If Foster’s song found itself caught up in an ambiguous tussle of American nationalisms—to which “na- tion” did it refer, the northern, the southern, or the black?—the urgent conno- tations of its rhythm no less than its context strike me as responsible. All the more so in light of the fact that, as Austin further writes, the attempt to cross this rhythm with sources closer to home was quite unforced, the “polka pigeon-wing” or “Jim Crow Polka” a seemingly natural (though terribly am- biguous) expression of youthful American hope and desire (9). All of this— the West, northern social desire, musical nationalism—was about to cohere around a most singular event.

On November 26, 1848, amid a complex series of political developments crucial to the slavery controversy—among them the Free-Soil insurgency within the Democratic party and that year’s presidential campaign—the Bal- timore Sun broke the story that gold had been discovered in California. Th rough December and January newspapers headed “Ho! for California!” began to hit the stands; the New York Herald ’s special California edition of December 26 sold out in one hour. Th e promise of land thus entangled with the prospect of fortune, thousands of the inspired credulous began the rush west for gold. Th ree gold rushers, preparing in late December to sail from

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Salem, Massachusetts, on board the bark Eliza, set their own words to a brand-new blackface tune:

I come from Salem City, With my washbowl on my knee; I’m going to California, Th e gold dust for to see.

I jumped aboard the Liza ship, And traveled on the sea, And every time I thought of home I wished it wasn’t me! Th e vessel reared like any horse Th at had of oats a wealth, It found it couldn’t throw me, So I thought I’d throw myself.

I’ll scrape the mountains clean, my boys, I’ll drain the rivers dry, A pocket full of rocks bring home, So brothers, don’t you cry!

Oh, California! Th at’s the land for me, I’m going to Sacramento, With my washbowl on my knee.

(Minnigerode 323–24)

Th is version of “Susanna,” like those that followed it, plainly salvages the gid- diness of the original lyrics and exists on that slim margin alone. Yet Foster’s song, with many variations on the migration theme, was embraced in ways its young author could hardly have predicted. No fewer than eight diff erent copy- right claims for “Susanna” were registered within fourteen months of its fi rst hearing. Very soon a sentimental ditty about two black lovers probably sepa- rated by slavery and trying to fi nd their way back to each other became the national anthem of westward expansion. In Eldorado, his 1850 account of a trip to California, Bayard Taylor remembered watching Sacramento blackface bands nightly play “Susanna,” and noted “the curious expressions of satisfac- tion and delight in the faces of the overland emigrants, who always attended in a body.” To this day the song’s original content is obscured by its association with westward pioneering. 52

As though in direct response to the nationalist tones of “Susanna,” and as though in acknowledgment of the social logic behind their choice, westward migrants had seized upon the song as their own. From behind the mask of a slave determined to overcome the peculiar institution’s breakup of families, they celebrated America’s move west. 53 No matter that political containment

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had been the intended result of blackface shows: such white self-masking, in this context, implicitly connected the North’s westering impulse and its growing distaste for southern slavery, in the process turning “Susanna” into a rather mordant comment on the desperate problem of American nationalism at mid- century. Small wonder its original lyrics were so oft en suppressed! Blackface writers, no mean examples of market cunning, proceeded to contribute many diff erent versions of “Susanna,” but the adoption of these “black” songs by Free- Soil northerners only reiterated the racial subtext of their pursuit of the new Eldorado. Although the songs recounted a variety of tales, chief among them were oblique references to westward migration and national expansion, such as “Lilla dear, Good Bye”—

Th o’ I am going far away, Beyond the dark blue sea,

I leave my heart with Lilla dear In good old Tennessee.

or explicit musical boosterism, as in “California Song”:

Th is country’s all excited, ’Bout the Californy gold,

And every one’s delighted With the stories that are told;

Th en, the steamers bring such glorious lines, And such monstrous junks, to boot—

Oh! for happy California mines, We, one and all, will scoot! 54

Once in motion the drift was hard to stop, and minstrel tunes became an out- right venue for northern nationalism. “De Mexicans dey fl ed before us,/And Taylor he took Matamoras,” goes “General Taylor,” a song whose infatuation with Zachary Taylor (the slaveholding Whig general turned more or less antislavery president) marks both the antislavery promise and the political ambiguity of liberal nationalism in blackface. 55

Nor should it come as any particular surprise that “Susanna” was stridently appropriated by the b’hoys, especially in the melodramas featuring Mose. Mose in California, an 1849 play capitalizing on recent events, features a set piece in which the most widely known “California” version of “Susanna” is hooted to all assembled:

Oh! California! Th at’s the land for me! I’m going to Sacramento, With my wash-bowl on my knee!

(quoted in Dorson 291)

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It is scarcely an overstatement to say that “Susanna,” and by extension black- face minstrelsy, had become a sectional signifi er, a potent popular fi gure for the North and “all its emigrations, colonizations and conquests,” as Bayard Taylor put it (275). Th e shape and function of commercial blackface acts, that is to say, had been transformed by historical developments they had had some hand in bringing about. Less and less a vehicle of racist alignment between the sections, the minstrel show, now in its guise as a mask for the North, actually began to mark their diff erence—a much larger and more dangerous division than those for which it had previously provided a stage. Th e aforementioned “narrative” character of a typical night’s show, joining city to country, North to South, seemed an ever more futile attempt to disguise the sectional break that Zip Coon the northern dandy and Jim Crow the southern slave now inevitably suggested. Th ings were falling apart, for reasons of race, and the foremost ra- cialist entertainment of its time was taking—if not serving—notice.

One must therefore argue that it is almost beside the point whether or not the b’hoys directly expressed antislavery (let alone antiracist) views. Th eir use of minstrelsy to further northern ends, to fi gure northern society generally, made the case for them, and with the sort of ambiguity that—as we have seen in its doubled, two-tone songs and in its contradictory plantation mythology— forcefully mirrored the northern antislavery thrust. When, in other words, this case involved a certain sympathy for the slaves, as in “Oh! Susanna” or other, even more sentimental songs, the minstrel show may be said to have intensi- fi ed the North’s racially equivocal agenda, pressing an implicitly antislavery point even as it lampooned and wished away the blacks who would be its prime benefi ciaries. In the very broadest sense, nationalism in blackface was an ironic, shadow black nationalism, particularly when northern white men expressed their nationalist pride—a pride that would result a dozen years later in the extinction of slavery—through the black mask: “Oh, we are de Cowbel- logers,/An de General Taylor sojers,/ . . . We’ll ring dese bells all ober de land,/ From Newtown creek to de Rio Grande.” 56 Th is despite the racism that marked the general run of blackface productions, for, as I note in conclusion, these dubious attitudes infected institutionalized antislavery as well.

Th is condensation of working-class and racial impulses, as for instance in the marriage of blackface and Mose, gestured toward the largest meanings of the American 1848. Th e congested intersection of these twin social desires has, of course, informed much of my historical narrative. Th eir convergence here is of immense signifi cance. On the one hand, blackface was clearly useful in fi g- uring class struggle. Offi cially buried for several years by the late 1840s, class demands reemerged as one motive for the popular surge west. Making “black- ness” their mask, men of the popular classes called on current (racial) lan- guages of social division to manifest their distaste for the class-riven realities that going west was meant to redress. Th us was class desire expressed in the racial modality of blackface, whose usefulness as a “vulgar” class signifi er and

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as an ugly vision of white working-class supremacy—as well as a sublimated antislavery herald—has been starkly clear. True enough, this whole set of fi gu- rations met up with the post-panic graphing of class in ethnic or other terms, the overall eff ect of which was to submerge class dissent. Here, however, the expression of interclass northern pride in a vision of nationalist western pio- neering not only did not tame class desires but turned the struggle against “preindustrial” formations (the Irish, blacks, drinkers) into a drama of sec- tional division. In short, the working-class white man in blackface fi gured both the division between classes and that between class systems as a whole, as though to gloss the one would naturally gloss the other. 57 While there is some truth in the argument that the united northern fi ght against the South eff ec- tively destroyed class dissent, in one respect this fi ght brought class and racial agendas, which had always been tense partners, suddenly and strikingly to- gether. 58 It did so most clearly in the Free-Soil movement, the closest the United States ever got to a labor abolitionism.

Eric Foner has argued that the Free-Soil movement was founded on precisely the resolution of the antinomy of labor and abolitionism. Bringing together radical Democrats, antislavery Whigs, and much of the antislavery Liberty party, it settled (temporarily and in compromised form) the old arguments between workers and abolitionists, the competing claims of class and race. Th e Free-Soilers made antislavery “a respectable element in politics,” in the words of William Seward, by disseminating the moral equivalent of abolitionism— anti-slavery—yet abandoning the agitation for black civil rights; they criticized northern capitalist relations (in the form of free-land arguments) yet asserted that the real threat to northern labor lay in the South’s desire to extend slavery. 59 Th is critique would not soon go away, though the Free-Soilers lost their bid for the presidency in 1848; half a decade later it formed the ideology of the early Republican party.

Th e question was whether, in achieving this unprecedented alliance between antislavery and labor, the Free-Soil party was in any way emancipatory for black people. Th e degree of prejudice within its ranks was extreme: Joshua Giddings, a major antislavery advocate and Free-Soil leader who had on sev- eral occasions defended black suff rage in the House, still refused to state un- ambiguously his belief in the equality of white and black people, and similar contradictions characterized other antislavery stalwarts such as Salmon P. Chase, Charles Sumner, and Horace Mann. Th e National Era, the Liberty and then Free-Soil party organ (in which, a few years later, Uncle Tom’s Cabin would be serialized), termed the presence of the Negro race an “inconve- nience,” supported voluntary black emigration to Africa or to public land in the United States, and complained that “the real evil of the Negro race” was that they were “so fi t for slavery”—though the paper was equally capable of criticizing the prejudice of some former New York Democrats within the Free- Soil party. For these reasons and others, some abolitionists refused to support

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the Free-Soilers, among them Gerrit Smith and Samuel R. Ward. Yet Frederick Douglass, urging the vote in 1848 for Free-Soil presidential candidate Martin Van Buren, believed that, however ambiguous their antislavery positions, the Free-Soilers were the only if not the best game in mainstream political life, and most free blacks in the North appear to have agreed. Th at black civil rights had been struck off the roll as an issue—that racism generally was much more visible within the party than its positions would lead us to believe—even as it injected racial-sectional questions into politics, was not the least of Free-Soil’s parallels with blackface minstrelsy. As Foner has concluded, the party’s plat- form was so broad that it received support from those who abhorred the presence of fugitive blacks in the North and slaves in the territories, as well as veteran antislavery spokesmen and those more abstractly concerned with the South’s infl uence on the national government. 60 Th is list is probably not a bad taxonomy of the minstrel show’s own audience.

But it will not do to leave the matter there, with blackface minstrelsy as the cultural equivalent of Free-Soil. For it was equally a harbinger of the Compro- mise of 1850: it derided the slave more than it advanced the North’s pallid ver- sion of antislavery, and its plantation mythology indicated that it was dedicated to keeping the Union together with slavery or without it. Stasis was its social ideal. In 1851 Stephen Foster wrote a campaign song in support of the Demo- cratic Bigler brothers, to the tune of his own “Camptown Races”: “Th e Consti- tution is our theme, Hurrah! Hurrah! /And Union is our cherished dream,/ Hurrah for the Bigler boys!” 61 If in the late 1840s minstrelsy provided a space where, in disguised ways, the confl icts between white workers and black might be resolved, its very existence kept those confl icts alive. Indeed, the latter con- stituted minstrelsy’s “live social intelligibility,” to use V. N. Volosinov’s phrase, its hosting of sharply contradictory social aims and desires (23).

As the national art of its moment, the minstrel show harmonized a variety of impulses. It represented a return of the racial repressed that did indeed follow the American empire in all its migrations and colonizations. It fi gured a nationalist urge to nation building whose inevitable result was sectional confl ict. And, by way of the consolatory mask, white folks’ other, “black” self, it lamented and denied the strife of its time. At one stroke it revealed the sectional divide that lay behind the “national” veil and tried to close it up. In doing so, the minstrel show provided the soundtrack for the American 1848.

{ 8 }

Uncle Tomitudes Racial Melodrama and Modes of Production

It is a sad blunder; for when our stage shall become the deliberate agent in the cause of abolitionism, with the sanction of the public, and their approbation, the peace and harmony of this Union will soon be ended.

— New York Herald (1852)

In January 1854 T. D. Rice took the Bowery Th eatre stage as Tom in one of the numberless dramatic productions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Rice’s path from celebrated Jim Crow in the early 1830s to sympathetic Uncle Tom twenty years later highlights the improbable political geometry of black- face minstrelsy. Surely Rice’s Bowery appearance in a more or less antislavery play registered a series of changes: changes in the theater’s social position, now as close to lower million as to upper ten; changes in theatrical production, as melodrama was now spliced to blackface performance; and changes, evidently, in racial representation itself. Even half a dozen years earlier it would have seemed preposterous thus to cast Rice, an originator of blacking up. We ought not, however, let these changes obscure the extent to which the great midcen- tury vogue of “Tom shows” owed precisely to the blackface tradition. Th e stage conventions of such productions, which included minstrel tunes and blackface makeup, were clearly those of minstrelsy; dramatizations of Uncle Tom fore- grounded not only sectional confl ict but also the blackface forms that had shad- owed it. “He is decidedly the best personator of negro character who has appeared in any drama,” wrote the Spirit of the Times of Rice as Uncle Tom, obliterating the distinction between the play and the minstrel show (January 21, 1854). Uncle Tom’s Cabin onstage was in one sense minstrelsy’s logical ante- bellum conclusion, and by the 1850s casting Rice as Uncle Tom followed a train of thought. It confi rms the equivocal character of racial representation—of blackface minstrelsy and Uncle Tom’s Cabin both—just prior to the Civil War.

One might say this state of aff airs issued from the Compromise of 1850. With party politics nearly swallowed up by sectional feeling, Congress attempted

Uncle Tomitudes 219

through legislation to forestall an ultimate crisis of sectional division. Com- promise designer Henry Clay’s chief provisions for “the peace, concord, and harmony of the Union” amounted to a sort of sectional balancing act: the ad- mission of California as a free state but no restrictions regarding slavery in other territories gained from Mexico; the prohibition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia but no abolition of slavery there. Th e gravest item, which threw off the balance, was a call for the more eff ectual capture and remittance of fugitive slaves, eventuating in the Fugitive Slave Law in 1851. Compromise fever extended from Clay of Kentucky to Daniel Webster of (it seemed) all New England; Webster’s famous Seventh of March speech clinched the deal. 1 For his acceptance of slavery in the name of Compromise and Union, Webster was excoriated far and wide (from Emerson’s disdain to Whittier’s “Ichabod”), and Stowe composed first “The Freeman’s Dream” (1850) and then Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–52) in outrage over his eff orts. 2 America’s most popular nineteenth- century novel made sectional confl ict an inescapable cultural matter. Turning this confl ict into aff ecting tableaux, Uncle Tom ’s dramatists deepened sectional discord; for every one of the three hundred thousand who bought the novel in its fi rst year, many more eventually saw the play. 3 Yet to varying degrees the stage versions followed from the Compromise in another sense: they attempted to match its sectional tact. Th is was particularly so in the fence-sitting drama- tizations that tried to make antislavery a stroke for Union; but even in the ver- sion most faithful to Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was itself a compromise between antislavery politics and established entertainment conventions.

Th e reader will have noticed the equivocation in my account: Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a break from but also a continuation of blackface minstrelsy; min- strelsy and Uncle Tom as of equally uncertain provenance. I have found this ambiguity an unavoidable product of the revolutionary 1850s. Th e fact is that the Tom plays fully revealed this decade’s social and racial contradictions, and thus fi nished off what the minstrel show had unintentionally begun. Not only were there versions of the play written from antislavery, moderate, and proslavery positions—the lot of them informed by the devices of the minstrel show—but they all took up in their very formal structures the sectional divi- sion, based on competing economic systems, that would soon culminate in civil war. Indeed, “modes of production” is a doubly resonant phrase, aptly invoking both theatrical forms and economic formations. Onstage each sec- tional mode had its characteristic tone, politics, and regime of racial repre- sentation, and these were visible in the competing productions of Uncle Tom, if not indeed in a single production. To produce the play was by defi nition to engage in a divisive cultural struggle. While the plays tried to tame down their material with melodrama, their political consequence was heated jour- nalistic and street debate, sometimes conducted right outside the theater. Th e cultural manifestations of America’s competing modes of production warred within the shared language of Uncle Tom’s Cabin —the precise condition,

Love and Th eft 220

writes Fredric Jameson, of cultural revolution ( Political 89–100). Putnam’s Monthly in 1853 termed this situation “Uncle Tomitudes,” which it could not have known would result in a prelude to civil war on the stage.

“A Wonderful ‘Leaping’ Fish”

Aft er a forty-week run in the Free-Soil National Era, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in book form on March 20, 1852. Something of the immediacy of its impact may be gauged from the fact that its fi rst stage production occurred during its serialization, before the book appeared. Since no law existed copy- righting fi ctional material for stage use, adapters were free to appropriate at will. In January 1852 a short-lived anti-Tom play, Uncle Tom’s Cabin as It Is; Th e Southern Uncle Tom, was produced at the Baltimore Museum. Th e telling echo of Bowery melodrama (most evidently the 1848 Mose vehicle New York As It Is ) fi xes the social cast of this adaptation no less than the more successful ones that followed it. Pursuing emotionally wrought narrative with a racial theme, stage adapters of Uncle Tom’s Cabin simply conjoined the forms they found appropriate to the attempt at hand, melodrama and blackface, for audiences already more than familiar with them. 4

When the novel was published, Asa Hutchinson of the reform-oriented Hutchinson Family Singers approached Stowe about a possible stage adaptation, which the author, Puritan antitheatrical prejudices intact, declined. 5 Particularly with no approval from Stowe forthcoming to even the most congenial of adapters, the way was opened for the canny professional. Th e fi rst serious at- tempt at a stage version was that of C. W. Taylor, which ran at New York’s Purdy’s National Th eatre for about ten performances in late August and early September 1852. Reaching haphazardly for the novel’s coattails, this hour-long Uncle Tom’s Cabin shared the bill with a T. D. Rice burlesque of Shakespeare called Otello and other minor acts. Th e rather bald attempt to mute sectional controversy with blackface parody, and Taylor’s reckless editorial hand (St. Clare, Eva, and Topsy were absent), did not prevent the New York Herald among others from fi nding in this Uncle Tom a disturbing abolitionist portent. 6 But it was two com- peting dramatizations, those of George Aiken and H. J. Conway, that would rule the market in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Even as Taylor’s production gave halting visibility to the Tom show, the Aiken and Conway versions were gestating in Troy, New York, and Boston, respectively. Like Taylor, Aiken appears to have been overcome by the weight of Stowe’s material, and omitted Tom’s story in his Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which premiered in Troy on September 27, 1852. Having given all his attention to Little Eva (partly in deference to the child star of the George C. Howard acting family, Cordelia Howard), Aiken was soon forced by his play’s popularity and its sins of omission to write a sequel, Th e Death of Uncle Tom, or Th e Religion

Uncle Tomitudes 221

of the Lowly. Th e sequel’s odd detachment from the rest of the story is probably what persuaded Aiken and his company to make the daring move of com- bining the two parts into a single play, a whole night’s show of six acts, eight tableaux, and thirty scenes—the fi rst full-length, night-long dramatic produc- tion to date (Ames 1045–52). Aiken’s adaptation is the one that has come down to us as the defi nitive dramatic treatment of Stowe’s work, in part because it is the only one for which we have an authoritative script, and in part because it is so attentive to Stowe’s intentions and even her words, though there are cer- tainly lapses in dramatic effi cacy. Aiken does conjure much theatrical excite- ment out of scenes such as the battle between the George Harris escape party and the slave traders, but he deemphasizes or omits some characters and scenes crucial to Stowe’s message and invents others with unclear motivation. Aiken does not dramatize the self-conscious trickery of Sam and Andy, for instance, erasing some of the novel’s more telling instances of black agency under slavery. 7 Miss Ophelia, however, is supplied with a love interest in the person of one Deacon Perry, and much of this subplot devolves into trivial farce. Aiken also leans heavily on two low-comedy types, a Quaker fron- tiersman lift ed from Stowe and a callow Yankee called Gumption Cute. In other major respects, however, Aiken follows Stowe’s story and vents her chief arguments against slavery. 8 Th is Uncle Tom played a record-breaking one hun- dred nights in Troy before opening at Purdy’s National Th eatre in New York on July 18, 1853.

Meanwhile, Conway’s adaptation was taking shape at Kimball’s Museum in Boston, opening there as the full-length Aiken opened in Troy on November 15, 1852. 9 Th is dramatization departs from Aiken’s on a number of counts, most notably in its relatively complacent politics. Its criticism of slavery is voiced largely by another invented Yankee fi gure, Penetrate Partyside, a sort of roving reporter in the South à la Dickens or Frederick Law Olmsted; Conway’s ambiv- alence about such observers is manifested in the curious doubleness of Party- side, who may one moment harshly criticize slavery and the next question Eva’s “taste” in wanting her father to buy Uncle Tom (2.2). Conway depicts at great length a slave auction in which Legree rigs the bidding so that he can capture Tom, but this only weakens Stowe’s case against slavery’s contractual ordinariness. In any event a variety of minstrel gags and cracks soft ens Con- way’s mild antislavery perspective. Conway, unlike Aiken, avoids any too in- fl ammatory feeling by setting Tom free in the play’s happy ending (George Shelby has meanwhile freed Chloe and the children), and a confounding fi nal address to the audience sends best wishes to “our” Uncle Tom, hoping “his life may be happy, though it be life among the lowly” (6.3). P. T. Barnum got wind of the Conway version’s impressive run and Compromise politics and booked it for the American Museum beginning November 7, 1853.

Th ese two major adaptations aired in the giddy atmosphere of other, almost incidental versions of Uncle Tom; a rewritten version by Taylor at the National

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and a Bowery Th eatre version by H. E. Stevens starring T. D. Rice, for instance, premiered in January 1854. 10 Th e theatrical world was soon crowded with off - shoots, parodies, theft s, and rebuttals of every imaginable kind—a “magic lan- tern” version (tableaux from the play) at the Franklin Museum, innumerable blackface lampoons such as Charles White’s Uncle Dad’s Cabin (1855), Christy and Wood’s Minstrels’ full-scale Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Hearts and Homes (1854), the former Virginia Minstrel Frank Brower’s Happy Uncle Tom (1854), George Christy’s Lights and Shadows of Southern Life or, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1858), Irish parodies such as Uncle Pat’s Cabin (by H. J. Conway) and Uncle Mike’s Cabin (1853), and so on ad nauseam. 11

As even this casual and incomplete list suggests, Uncle Tom’s Cabin very quickly dominated northern popular culture, and did so for several years. 12 How much so may be gleaned from one of the play’s early patrons, Henry James. James’s remarks in A Small Boy and Others concerning his youthful trips to both the Conway version of Uncle Tom at Barnum’s Museum and the Aiken version at the National have been taken for the swipes at Stowe they are, but the swipes also serve James’s half-articulated notion that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a new kind of cultural artifact, a sign of change in the character of American culture. “We lived and moved at that time, with great intensity, in Mrs. Stowe’s novel . . . my fi rst experiment in grown-up fi ction.” In this and other observa- tions, James’s memory of Stowe’s book is saturated with a sense of its nontex- tual nature, its pithy and immediate provision of fl esh-and-blood life—“less a book than a state of vision, of feeling and of consciousness, in which [readers] didn’t sit and read and appraise and pass the time, but walked and talked and laughed and cried and, in a manner of which Mrs. Stowe was the irresistible cause, generally conducted themselves” (167). Th e gush of this sentence so exceeds the studied gentle irony of A Small Boy that we may be sure of Stowe’s early eff ect on James. And its brief antiliterary enthusiasm is the context for what follows:

Appreciation and judgment, the whole impression, were thus an eff ect for which there had been no process—any process so related having in other cases had to be at some point or other critical; nothing in the guise of a written book, therefore, a book printed, published, sold, bought and “noticed,” probably ever reached its mark, the mark of exciting interest, without having at least groped for that goal as a book or by the expo- sure of some literary side. Letters, here, languished unconscious, and Uncle Tom, instead of making even one of the cheap short-cuts through the medium in which books breathe, even as fi shes in water, went gaily round about it altogether, as if a fi sh, a wonderful “leaping” fi sh, had sim- ply fl own through the air. Th is feat accomplished, the surprising creature could naturally fl y anywhere, and one of the fi rst things it did was thus to fl utter down on every stage, literally without exception, in America and

Uncle Tomitudes 223

Europe. If the amount of life represented in such a work is measurable by the ease with which representation is taken up and carried further, car- ried even violently furthest, the fate of Mrs. Stowe’s picture was conclu- sive: it simply sat down wherever it lighted and made itself, so to speak, at home; thither multitudes fl ocked afresh and there, in each case, it rose to its height again and went, with all its vivacity and good faith, through all its motions. (168)

James’s metaphor of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as one of Barnum’s oddities—a performing fi sh—communicates in form and in content that he is speaking in these lines of the culture industry itself. Stowe surely suff ers a good deal of condescension here, but from another angle she seems the co-inventor with Barnum of a new ubiquity of popular culture. Uncle Tom leaps from the page, evading his textual confi nement and springing into national conscious- ness as an aerial fact with no apparent links to the mechanics of production (“printed, published, sold, bought and ‘noticed’”) or of form (“simply [fl ying] through the air”). Indeed, James’s hesitancy in the fi nal sentence between Uncle Tom as a work of fi ction, a “measurable” “representation,” and Uncle Tom as a living being, “ma[king] itself, so to speak, at home” and going “through all its motions,” indicates an eye-rubbing uncertainty about the precise status of this new cultural force. More than in its taking a full eve- ning’s performance time, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was revolutionary in its eff ortless and near-immediate replication everywhere; rousing for its politics but apprehended as pop-culture iconography, the story so transcended the usual media of culture that it put an uncanny new spin on one’s relation to the cul- ture. Uncle Tom was at once all places and specifi ably nowhere. It was this quality as much as anything else to which Lincoln referred when he famously attributed the Civil War to Stowe.

A résumé of the scene-ending tableaux in the Bowery Th eatre production of the play (starring Rice) gives the rhythm and fl avor of Uncle Tom ’s melodra- matic reproducibility: Eliza’s escape; Eliza’s peril on the ice; Eliza’s preservation; the freeman’s defense; the death of Eva; the death of St. Clare; the murder of Tom; the death of Chloe; and the “realms of bliss” (Moreau vol. 1). Th is is very nearly Uncle Tom as silent fi lm—which it would indeed become quite early in cinematic history. 13 Dramatists craft ed Uncle Tom’s Cabin into an allegorical series, a set of holy pictures. To this extent the story carried the religious aura with which Stowe had invested it but lost the precise political import Stowe’s intrusive and pointedly abrasive narrative voice had been able to enforce. Where in the novel there was melodrama pinned to a politics of antislavery domestic feminism, onstage there were free-fl oating trademark pictographs with greater or lesser political bite, according to the production. Th row in a little blackface activity, the “cultural dominant” in antebellum racial portrayal, and one has the recipe for an extremely uncertain political play.

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Blackface Uncle Tom

Th e proximity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin shows to blackface performance is sug- gested in a New York Daily Times account of the Aiken adaptation, “‘Uncle Tom’ Among the Bowery Boys.” When a blackfaced G. C. Germon made his entrance in the role of Uncle Tom, the Times reported, the audience geared up for a laugh, for he had “that accent which, in the theatre, is associated always with the comic.” He might easily have been taken, said the reviewer, for

a camp-meeting preacher [who would] overdo the matter, or he would be so ignorant as to make his religious sentiments ridiculous. His very fi rst words, however, showed that a good hand had his part. Th e accent, a broad and guttural negro accent, but the voice deep and earnest—so earnest, that the fi rst laugh at his nigger words, from the pit, died away into deep stillness. “No,” said he, “I can’t run away. Let her [Eliza] go—it’s her right! If I must be sold, le’b me [be] sold—Mass’r allers found me on the spot. I nebber hab broke my trust, and nebber will.” (July 27, 1853)

One historian alleges that Germon had feared tainting his career by playing a “Jim Crow darkey,” and while this is probably only speculation, it does specify the theatrical convention that any Uncle Tom inherited (Birdoff 42). Indeed, the lines quoted in the Times at fi rst glance only reinforce the association of Uncle Tom’s Cabin dramas with minstrel-show sentimentalism. Strikingly, while Uncle Tom in Stowe’s novel had been a strong and reasonably young man, Uncle Tom in successive productions of the play grew older and older, no doubt owing to the infl uence of minstrelsy’s pathetic elderly men such as Ste- phen Foster’s “Old Uncle Ned.” 14

Th e changes Stowe’s tale underwent in making the transition from page to stage underscore its indebtedness to the minstrel tradition. Both Aiken and Conway, as Bruce McConachie observes, generally gutted the novel’s gender politics, cutting such major female moral exemplars as Rachel Halliday and Mrs. Bird, and reducing the roles of Eliza and Aunt Ophelia to passive victim and comic old maid, respectively (“Out” 10–11). By and large, the plays turn the fi ght for black freedom into male combat; Conway substitutes George Harris’s gunfi ght with Haley, Loker, and Marks for Eliza’s crossing of the Ohio, and in both it is the return of young George Shelby and various others to the Legree plantation, not Stowe’s matrifocal polis, that really tips the scales. 15 Without the female axis on which Tom and other blacks in the novel are aligned, and are thereby (at least in intention) enhanced—Stowe’s “romantic racialism”—the black types in the Uncle Tom dramas drift free, veering between the devoted and the daft , one hardly better than the other. Nor is this eff ect countered by any truly sustained critique of slavery, as in the novel. 16

What remains in both adaptations are moments straight from Christy. In Aiken, Legree enjoins Sambo and Quimbo to “sing and dance one of their

Uncle Tomitudes 225

dances” (6.3); Topsy and little Harry do so at the playwright’s behest. Whereas Stowe wryly references “Jim Crow” in regard to these characters (44, 352), in Aiken, St. Clare’s description of Topsy as “rather a funny spec- imen in the Jim Crow line” is not only much less ironized but right on target (2.2). Mrs. G. C. Howard’s Topsy—“I ’spects I’s de wickedest critter in de world” (2.4)—was a departure from the minstrel show’s typical female types, whose ridicule depended on their overripe aptitude or special inaptness for courtship and love; Topsy, by contrast, was Miss Ophelia’s mischievous, unruly sidekick, a sort of female match for the rustic Jim Crow. 17 “Destined to become for Anglo-Saxon millions the type of the absolute in the artless,” as James wrote, Howard’s Topsy set the standard for future stage Topsys as well as for the character’s pictorial representation in nineteenth-century en- gravings and illustrations (172). Conway’s Uncle Tom actually begins with a minstrel show. In a remarkable diversion from both Stowe’s novel and Aik- en’s version of it, in which Eliza and George Harris’s bitter and terrifi ed con- versation about the imminent separation of their family sets the plot in motion, Conway foregrounds slaves singing blackface choruses: “Sam Solo: Come lay it out you niggers, /Come hoe it down with me, /Th e way we’ll heel and toe it out/Will be a sight to see” (1.1). In this version Sam and Andy are highlighted but function as virtual endmen of the group, straightaway be- ginning a minstrel dialogue about some horses which is sustained when Mrs. Shelby enters the conversation in the interlocutor’s role.

Yet the fact that minstrelsy itself in the early 1850s was no unitary political phenomenon makes the stage Uncle Tom a startlingly ambiguous text. Th e knotted inextricability of minstrel-show trappings from the Uncle Tom tradi- tion begs the question of the work’s infl uence on the minstrel tradition. Ste- phen Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night!” (1853), with its Kentucky cabin and separating family, was directly inspired by Stowe (its working title was “Poor Uncle Tom, Good Night”); Foster’s song became a staple of the plays, as did his “Old Folks at Home” (1851). Th e emergent sentimental strain of blackface minstrelsy took heart from Uncle Tom’s Cabin and infused it in turn. William Austin writes that Foster’s sense of his work was “thrown into some confusion” when Uncle Tom ’s stage adaptations began to give his blackface songs a more respectable gloss than they or even his genteel compositions had previously received; certainly his reputation was enhanced by his association with Uncle Tom (236). In this respect, Austin argues, the blackface plantation- song tradition and the Uncle Tom tradition “overlapped and nearly coalesced” (235), and Harry Birdoff goes so far as to lament that no production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin scored by Foster ever occurred (138).

Tempting though the prospect may be, Uncle Tom’s Cabin cannot be written off as just another minstrel show. Th e Uncle Tom stage plays were surely ver- sions of minstrelsy, but to that extent they were infected by the minstrel show’s own ambiguities. Lampooning Topsy one minute and lamenting Tom’s fate the

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next, Uncle Tom was nearly as duplicitous as blackface performance—which is to say that it raised hackles on both sides of the slavery question. No doubt the play, like the book, compromised the abolitionist agenda. As Wendell Phillips had said of the novel’s sentimentalism, “Th ere is many a man who weeps over Uncle Tom and swears by the [proslavery] Herald.” 18 Th e Liberator in turn de- rided Conway’s dramatic version: “Barnum has off ered the slave-drivers the incense of an expurgated form of Uncle Tom. He has been playing a version of that great story at his Museum, which omits all that strikes at the slave system, and has so shaped his drama as to make it quite an agreeable thing to be a slave” (December 16, 1853). And yet the Herald itself found the fi rst, catch- penny production of C. W. Taylor’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the National Th eatre a dangerous premonition. Th is version was replete with minstrel-show impor- tations; much like the Conway version, the show began with a minstrel tune, “Nigga in de Cornfi eld,” and a “Kentucky Breakdown Dance.” But its sugges- tion of what Herald editor James Gordon Bennett termed “the imaginary hor- rors of Southern slavery” was enough to convince him that Uncle Tom marked “a new epoch and a new fi eld of abolition authorship—a new fi eld of fi ction, humbug and deception, for a more extended agitation of the slavery question— than any that has heretofore imperiled the peace and safety of the Union.” For Bennett, compromise was the order of the day:

Th e institution of Southern slavery is recognized and protected by the federal constitution, upon which this Union was established, and which holds it together. But for the compromises on the slavery question, we should have no constitution and no Union—and would, perhaps, have been at this day, in the condition of the South American republics, divided into several military despotisms, constantly warring with each other, and each within itself. Th e Fugitive Slave law only carries out one of the plain provisions of the constitution. When a Southern slave escapes to us, we are in honor bound to return him to his master. And yet, here in this city— which owes its wealth, population, power, and prosperity, to the Union and the constitution, and this same institution of slavery, to a greater de- gree than any other city in the Union—here we have nightly represented, at a popular theatre, the most exaggerated enormities of Southern slavery, playing directly into the hands of the abolitionists and abolition kidnap- pers of slaves, and doing their work for them. (September 3, 1852)

Bennett had reason for his rage. Th e Uncle Tom shows’ great achievement was to put even the worst elements of blackface minstrelsy into a narrative—no longer merely an implied context—of sectional debate. Wherever in its politics a particular production might fall, sectional division made up Uncle Tom ’s sto- ryline. Uncle Tom oft en slouched back into the ambit of minstrel-show japery, but it also, as the Times intimated, turned minstrelsy toward the prospect of black redemption.

Uncle Tomitudes 227

Th e chief Uncle Tom’s Cabin dramas, then, both were and were not minstrel shows. Th e plays could not in any case have avoided making use of blackface devices: minstrelsy was the current material condition of theatrical produc- tion in the representation of racial matters. But in doing so they made the minstrel show’s duplicities outright contradictions, to some extent redeploy- ing blackface acts for explicit antislavery purposes. Th e results were never less than equivocal, as we have seen; but we must begin to see this quality as a mark of the period in question. As social contradiction was the historical theme of the 1850s, so the Uncle Tom’s Cabin plays made the theme their own. Th ey did so, as I have said, by making this contradiction visible specifi cally at the level of popular stage representation. I now want to go further and argue that the play’s way of introducing sectional controversy into the theater was by fore- grounding and even thematizing the vagaries of racial representation. Here it makes sense to isolate for discussion the two competing versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Aiken and Conway each took up one of the minstrel show’s con- tradictory representational strategies in regard to blacks—Conway its hard- edged ridicule, Aiken its sentimentalism. It could scarcely have been the stated politics of either version that won over the New York Daily Times or off ended the Liberator, for the explicit antislavery content in both was roughly the same. Rather, it was the reigning racial tonality of each play that put the message across, the way its particular iconography did or did not suggest an irreverence for the plight of the slaves. Conway earned low marks from the Liberator because his version took over wholesale the minstrel show’s racial meanness; Aiken’s Tom succeeded, the Times was careful to point out, because he escaped the comic, falling instead into a Fosteresque pathos. Th is is not at all to say that Conway exploited only the comic and Aiken only the sentimental; true to the plays’ ambiguous minstrel legacy, they were crossed-hatched by a variety of devices. But, by and large, Conway left the minstrel show’s worst contributions intact, while Aiken brought out the radical uses lurking in it. Th is in fact was the ground of theatrical controversy: Uncle Tom’s Cabin onstage was the site of competing attempts to capture the authority of blackface.

Modes of Production

Althusserian social theorists have suggested that every social formation resides not in a single mode of economic production but in a complex overlay of sev- eral modes at once, with residual modes now subordinated to the dominant one and emergent modes potentially disruptive of it. 19 Fredric Jameson argues that every ensemble of such overlapping modes has its own “cultural domi- nant,” or specifi c, defi ning cultural sensibility. To the extent that competing economic modes (and their networks of ideological self-representation) co- exist at any given moment, so will clash and confl ict occur in the realm of

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culture, dominant or not, and even in the space of a single text. Jameson writes that moments when the “coexistence of various modes of production becomes visibly antagonistic, their contradictions moving to the very center of political, social, and historical life,” constitute situations of cultural revolution ( Political 95–96). Th e advent or consolidation of any mode of production is accompa- nied by a cultural revolution specifi c to it, and the emergence of the bourgeois state in America was no exception. Without entering into the long-standing debate on the antebellum South’s precise mode of production, we can see clearly that the sections at midcentury—northern industrialists and western farmers on the one hand, southern slaveholders and their unlanded allies on the other—were engaged in a major eff ort of economic struggle and eventual national consolidation, as observers from Karl Marx to David Potter have stressed. 20 In the stage versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin one sees aspects of a cul- tural revolution fully equal to this revolutionary political moment. Not only did their thematic content make visible the antagonism between America’s two modes of production or regimes of economic organization, but in formal terms they staged sectional diff erence as a contest between the comic and the sentimental aspects of the minstrel show. Although these racial discourses did not arise in any essential or unitary way from economic modes of production, competing versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin turned them into sectional cultural dominants.

Th e lines the Times quoted from the Aiken version illustrate how much Tom sets the tone for that play’s politics. “I ain’t going,” says Tom when he hears of Eliza’s escape plan. “If I must be sold, or all the people on the place, and everything go to rack, why, let me be sold .  .  . . [T]he Lord’s given me a work among these yer poor souls, and I’ll stay with ’em and bear my cross with ’em till the end” (1.3). As in Stowe’s novel, Tom is a sacrifi cial fi gure, a black Christ. He has much to bear, for Aiken emphasizes the Harris family’s breakup and Eliza’s trials, while Eva is shown fading fast in Tom’s spiritual glow. To Aiken’s credit, much of Topsy’s role is taken up with Eva’s eff ect on her, not her antics only; her conversion and her regret at Eva’s passing pile on more senti- mentalism. In this sense the strategic sounding of “Old Folks at Home” when Tom has been sold down the river hardly comes as a shock to the attentive reader (5.3). Legree in this version, moreover, fi gures the bad conscience of the slaveholder, not the pure malignancy he becomes in the Conway adaptation; whereas Conway’s Cassy must taunt Legree with his sins, Aiken’s Legree knows that his alienation from maternal aff ection is his problem but cannot quite fi nd his way back. “Curse me if I think there’s any such thing as forgetting anything, any how,” he says, meaning his dead mother, but just as well speaking of the acts of barbarity he has committed since his antisentimental rejection of her (6.3). Th e Tribune wrote of Aiken’s version, “Th e play is a veritable pièce de mouchoir, a comédie larmoyante —for tears were freely shed by the audience” (August 8, 1853). “Of the lightness and gayety of the book there was no sign,”

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confi rmed Francis Underwood, who accompanied Stowe on a visit to this dra- matization. Topsy must have been the exception, for Mrs. Howard was in that role, and Stowe was apparently delighted by her. Stowe’s engagement with this stage Topsy suggests that the Aiken adaptation was in other respects able to hold a tone of sentimental gravity, on which Underwood himself plays when he writes that Howard and Stowe appeared to exchange glances during the performance: “Mrs. Stowe’s face showed all her vivid and changing emotions, and the actress must surely have divined them. Th e glances when they met and crossed reminded me of the supreme look of Rachel when she repeated that indescribable Hélas!” Th roughout the play Underwood saw Stowe display “smiles and tears succeeding each other.” 21

By contrast, Conway’s version opens, according to a Barnum advertise- ment, with an “amusing and appropriate Ethiopian Medley Overture,” and makes enthusiastic use of the minstrel show’s comic mode. 22 I have already said that Sam and Andy become major characters in this version, and not as the sometimes self-conscious ironists they are in Stowe but as jokey buff oons. For his part, the Yankee Penetrate Partyside occasions as much mirth as indig- nation at the spectacle of slavery. Walking along the plank to board the boat going south, Partyside feels his feet slipping and sliding and wonders whether he is stepping on eels; these turn out to be slaves in chains, whom the compar- ison, so close to many we have seen in minstrel songs, does its best to make light of (2.1). If this moment of complacency does not belong to Partyside, many others do, such as when Partyside jokes about the “niggers” on whose behalf he is evidently writing, or when he ridicules Adolph, St. Clare’s valet (3.1). Indeed, it is a mark of this play that its antislavery mouthpiece makes most of its comic minstrel japes, as though in the single fi gure of Partyside the desperate social symptom and its theatrical antidote were joined. Revealingly, whenever Conway stoops to sentimentalism, he deploys its safer side—not “Old Folks at Home” when Tom is sold but “Massa’s in de Cold Ground” when St. Clare dies (5.1). Th us did Barnum falsely advertise when he said of the Con- way play that “it does ‘nothing extenuate nor set down aught in malice’”— quoting, pointedly and obnoxiously, Othello’s fi nal address—and speak more accurately when he said that “it does not foolishly and unjustly elevate the negro above the white man in intellect or morals” (quoted in Birdoff 89).

Th ese dominant representational approaches fi t precisely the diff ering po- litical intentions of Aiken and Conway. Th e sectional division their separate strategies arose from and acknowledged was thematized in other ways as well, again through fi gures derived from the minstrel stage: the southern rustic and the “northern” dandy. Even in Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom and Topsy on the one hand and St. Clare’s Adolph on the other are surely inheritances from the minstrel show; in the Tom shows they become displaced markers of sectional dispute. Aiken gives Topsy an entrance during which she excoriates the dandified blacks who evidently call her “nigger”: “[ Without. ] You go ’long.

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No more nigger dan you be! [ Enters—shouts and laughter without—looks off . ] You seem to think yourself white folks. You ain’t nerry one—black nor white. I’d like to be one or turrer” (2.4). (Th ese events result in one of the more pathos-driven moments Topsy is allowed, a tearful pledge to Eva that she will try to be, as Eva puts it, “one of those spirits bright Uncle Tom sings about!”) Given the way Zip Coon and Jim Crow had come to seem sectional signifi ers, condensing northern urbanity and southern rusticity into black fi gures that referenced the source of the struggle, such moments are diffi cult to detach from a context of national controversy. Despite the fact that condescension toward Topsy and disdain for black dandies are both projected onto black characters—as though this were not generated elsewhere—these minstrel- show attitudes are aligned, by way of minstrel types, with sectional matters. Th e tug-of-war between Topsy and the dandifi ed blacks which Topsy describes indeed seems just that, complete with rhetorical combat (“Miss Rosa—she gives me lots of ’pertinent remarks”), symbolic violence (Topsy destroys Jane’s earrings and dumps dirty water on all the dandies), and actual violence (Topsy lays a trap of scalding water for Miss Rosa) (2.4).

Conway is even more invested in such displaced struggles. Th rough Party- side, Conway dwells on the diff erences between Adolph and Tom; Partyside is stunned to learn that Adolph, with his light skin and adorned in St. Clare’s vest, is not part of the family, while Tom’s status is never questioned. Partyside makes the dichotomy particularly clear in his references to Adolph and Topsy, whose respective jobs (valet for Adolph, “danc[ing] breakdowns” for Topsy) record similar proclivities to those we have seen in the two chief minstrel types (3.1). Later Conway secures this theme by depicting a pointless fi ght between Adolph the dandy and Sam the plantation hand (5.1)—pointless, that is, unless we recognize the social energies making such a fi ght necessary. Not for nothing does St. Clare die in both versions of the play from knife wounds Legree infl icts while lunging at a Yankee disputant; Legree’s Vermont origins notwithstanding, he represents the South, making St. Clare a passive victim of sectional animus.

Th e fact is that in using these dramatic strategies, the Uncle Tom’s Cabin plays institutionalized the social divisions they narrated. Sectional debate henceforth became theatrical ritual, part of the experience of Uncle Tom. To examine the partisan discourse around the two major versions of the play is to witness a situation in which stage devices have sparked a dramatic rivalry which in turn eff ortlessly invokes political upheaval. Accordingly, the phrase “modes of production” in this context takes on a highly condensed and over- determined set of meanings. Barnum may be said to have raised the stakes on opening Conway’s version of the play in obviously direct competition with the Aiken—National Th eatre version, which was then in its fourth month of performances. Barnum’s ad for the American Museum Uncle Tom, in addi- tion to the aforementioned crowing about his refusal to “unjustly elevate the negro,” promised that his was the “only just and sensible dramatic version of

Uncle Tomitudes 231

Mrs. Stowe’s book that has ever been put upon the stage.” As if this claim were not pointed enough, Barnum dismissed his rival, though not by name: “And instead of turning away the audience in tears, the [American Museum] author has wisely consulted dramatic taste by having Virtue triumphant at last, and aft er all its unjust suff erings, miseries and deprivations, conducted to happi- ness by the hand of Him who watches over all.” He thus notably denounces the Aiken version’s very mode—sentimentalism’s tears—while piously (and falsely) claiming the same sentimental values for his own “happy” produc- tion. Th e National shot back in its ad: “Which is the humbug version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Not that played at the National Th eatre!” Th e gauntlet had been thrown down. 23

Th ere are grounds for thinking the small war that followed surprising and signifi cant. It is true that, coming a few short years aft er the Astor Place riot and nowhere approaching the intensity of that confl agration, the Uncle Tom feud seems like petty cash. Yet in this case, as in the case of a whole tradition of theater disturbances, ideologies of the state and of the stage intertwined, charging the theatrical realm’s every gesture. Signifi cantly, too, the ideologies in question had to do not with competing class productions of the play—one typical cause of theatrical riots—but with national and racial questions. Both productions inhabited a broadly popular arena of reference, discourse, and audience; it was the sectional perspective of the plays that fi lled the air and made dramatic theory fair game for political discussion. Taking its lead from Barnum’s ad, the Morning Express rationalized Conway’s ending by appealing to the play’s popular public:

Th ere is no good reason why Uncle Tom should be whipped to death by a brute in a moral drama, because from the popular character of the drama itself, such a closing triumph for vice and defeat of virtue would leave a most pernicious impression upon the general mind. Hence the astonishing success of the sumptuous version of Uncle Tom at Barnum’s Museum, where the hero, aft er all his tribulations, is restored to his free- dom and his family. (quoted in Birdoff 89–90)

Th rough this critic’s convenient resort to the melodramatic categories of good and evil, one again glimpses the competing aesthetics of the sentimental and the comic. Presumably the “pernicious impression” the Morning Express feared was the rousing, lachrymose eff ect of Tom’s fatal whipping on Conway’s “sumptuous” work of what one can only call Compromise formation. 24

Th e New York Atlas indeed thought Conway’s version violated the spirit of Stowe’s text, and, pointing to the dramatist’s English birth, spoke in a lexicon of national service:

It may be well enough, perhaps, for the mendicants of the state, if they belong to the “home squadron,” to vitiate the works of authors of their

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own country; but, is it to be endured that an imported scion of Crip- plegate should be allowed to falsify and misrepresent such an author as Mrs. Stowe, to pander to the appetites of a few mercenary toadies, who would misrepresent a moral and enlightened community? Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as played at the American Museum, has few charms for us; and yet, it is the popular drama of that establishment. It calls in immense audiences; and, of course, is most vociferously applauded.

Readers interested in an authentic version were directed to the National Th e- atre, for there the play did not “pander to the fears of the timid, nor gratify a perverted taste” (November 20, 1853). Th e rhetoric of territorial rights and community representation alerts us to the fact that in the case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, theatrical taste and political devotion had once again become one and the same. To misrepresent Stowe as Conway does, the argument goes, is to allow a “few mercenary toadies” to misrepresent the nation. Observers of Uncle Tom’s Cabin understood perfectly clearly that struggles over the text mediated struggles over sectional allegiance.

Th at is why it repays our attention to note the public relations gambits launched all around this curious rivalry between theaters. One feels the gravity of what under normal circumstances would be culture-industry business as usual. Barnum hung a fi ft y-foot sign along the cornice of the American Mu- seum bearing the play’s title, some fi ve hundred yards of cotton muslin; in ac- cord with Conway’s hedging politics, one end showed a black dancer and the other a fi ght between fugitive slaves and their now legal hunters. Th ree days aft er Barnum opened the Conway version, A. H. Purdy celebrated the one- hundredth performance of the Aiken version at his National Th eatre with a “Grand Jubilee Festival,” complete with brass band on the balcony (inciden- tally a Barnum innovation), fi reworks, and Drummond light on the roof (Odell 6:309). When Barnum had some success with a play called Little Katy, or the Hot Corn Girl, Purdy in December 1853 mounted his own production at the National starring Aiken’s Little Eva, Cordelia Howard. Despite its attempt to represent New York street life aft er the fashion of the Mose plays, the drama so resembled Uncle Tom’s Cabin (it was indeed dramatized by one of Uncle Tom ’s fi rst adapters, C. W. Taylor) that it too took on some of the energies of the rivalry. Purdy claimed that Cordelia Howard had read the story of Little Katy—which would soon appear in novel form as Solon Robinson’s Hot Corn (1854)—in the (antislavery) Tribune, and had pledged to save a dollar per night from her Uncle Tom’s Cabin performances to give to some real Katy. A proslav- ery newspaper attacked this ploy and the theater that sponsored it: “Th ere is not a greater rendezvous for prostitution and iniquity of every sort than this same National Th eatre,” wrote the New York Observer:

Undoubtedly the moral character of the play which has for the last few months been nightly exhibited on its stage [ Uncle Tom’s Cabin ], and with

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so much success, has been the means of enticing hundreds of innocent souls within its halls and on the road to ruin. But Satan has indeed put on the double garb of an angel of light when, as a means of alluring a still larger number of them into his snares, he clothes himself thru the column of that same N.Y. Tribune with the eminently righteous work of devoting a dollar a night for the support of a charity to which the Na- tional Th eatre with the above zealous aid is nightly adding its victims. (quoted in Birdoff 94–95)

Braving this challenge, the editor of the New York Atlas on the contrary found the National iniquity-free—or, as one patron put it, demystifying the editors’ code, “this ’ere theatre is one that goes in for religion, virtue, morality—and liberty!” (Birdoff 96).

So intense did the late 1853 rivalry become that it eventually found its way back into the play. At one point in the Aiken version the Yankee Gumption Cute engages Topsy in a (minstrel) dialogue:

Cute : Don’t you be too severe, now, Charcoal; I’m a man of genius. Did you ever hear of Barnum?

Topsy : Barnum! Barnum! Does he live out South? Cute : No, he lives in New York. Do you know how he made his fortin? Topsy : What is him fortin, hey? Is it something he wears? Cute : Chowder, how green you are! Topsy : [ Indignantly. ] Sar, I hab you to know I’s not green; I’s brack . . . . Cute : . . . Well, as I was saying, Barnum made his money by exhibiting a

woolly horse; now wouldn’t it be an all-fi red speculation to show you as the woolly gal? (5.2)

Topsy refuses, but one feels the damage has been done. In any case, the Yankee Barnum is here pegged as the “southerner” his version of the play revealed him to be. In this and other ways the play thrived on the political stir it had generated and kept it going beyond the proscenium. Legend has it that the controversy was carried forth into the street, where fevered debate took place under the gaslights and where, on Chatham Street, near the National, two clothing stores allied themselves with the warring productions of Uncle Tom, one store calling itself Horton and Barnum’s, the other Brown and Purdy’s, and each respectively hawking the latest fashions of the South and the North (Birdoff 96–97).

By way of the play, sectional feeling had seeped into the half-conscious ges- tures of everyday life; and the new political space Uncle Tom opened up did not close again when these particular versions ended their runs. Further Tom shows, C. W. Taylor’s (and others’) dramatization of Stowe’s Dred, J. T. Trow- bridge’s abolitionist Neighbor Jackwood, Dion Boucicault’s melodrama Th e Octoroon, the John Brown-inspired Th e Insurrection, and other plays in the

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1850s attested to the cultural revolution of which the minstrel show had been one portent. Bruce McConachie is thus only partly correct in charging the stage adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin with “normalizing” Stowe’s novel, “smoothing away the radical challenges to the dominant culture implicit in its mystical and matrifocal values” (“Out” 7). Th e plays emptied Uncle Tom of Stowe’s feminism and her partial critique of capitalism, but they translated her antislavery ( not antisouthern) convictions into sectional barbs. Th e increas- ingly uneasy coexistence of economic systems worked its way into a tussle of sign systems that productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin only dimly realized they were developing. Based on a narrative of sectional ideologies in confl ict, the plays exuded sectionally loaded incidents and devices, and rather than sym- bolically resolving these, the Tom plays blew apart the happy ambiguities of the minstrel shows from which they had come. It was at this level of interven- tion that Uncle Tom did its work; the comic and the sentimental, the corner- stones of minstrelsy, no longer seemed entirely compatible. Th e divergent productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin had given them a sectional gloss, and as long as there was friction in the street, there would be disruption on the stage.

Wage Slavery Once More

For many observers the play held an importance beyond its explicit political message. Th is lay in its specifi cally popular audience, whom abolitionists had oft en perceived to be hostile to their cause. “Oh! Susanna” may have intimated a working class ready to hear a diff erent tune regarding the extension of slav- ery; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it was widely noted, actively recruited the b’hoys. Wil- liam Lloyd Garrison liked Aiken’s version better than he had liked the novel, not least because Uncle Tom was beginning to secure the Free-Soil alliance of workers and slaves that had hitherto been only inchoate:

If the shrewdest abolitionist amongst us had prepared the drama with a view to make the strongest anti-slavery impression, he could scarcely have done the work better. O, it was a sight worth seeing, those ragged, coatless men and boys in the pit (the very material of which mobs are made) cheering the strongest and the sublimest anti-slavery sentiments! Th e whole audience was at times melted to tears, and I own that I was no exception. (September 9, 1853)

To which the skeptic will reply: and then they went out and bought the Herald. Th ere is wish fulfi llment here, but it is buttressed by a great variety of opinion noting the new class of spectators Aiken’s dramatization roped into this ideo- logical arena. Th e New York Atlas called on a now familiar code to make its case: “Th e gallery was fi lled with a heroic class of people, many of them in red woollen shirts, with countenances as hardy and rugged as the implements of

Uncle Tomitudes 235

industry employed by them in the pursuit of their vocations” (October 16, 1853). Th eir silence at the moment Eliza crosses the Ohio causes the writer to look around, only to fi nd the whole audience, b’hoys included, in tears. No doubt the foreign visitor Adolphus Hart was partly correct when he noticed in the balconies and pit a “class intent on every scene in the drama that could gratify their morbid love of cruelty, and make them gloat over pictures of human wretchedness and misery.” Yet this ruder interest in mere sensation resulted perforce, Hart wrote, in much “shouting and holloing as Eliza was crossing the Ohio, or George Harris was shooting his pursuers” (5–6). Th e New York Tribune, remembering the 1834 antiabolitionist rioting, made essentially the same point about this new venue for rowdiness:

No mob would have dared to disturb the Abolition part[y] at the Na- tional Th eatre. It was composed largely of the stuff which demagogues acting under oligarchs have used for the purpose of burning down halls, destroying printing presses, assaulting public speakers, intimidating, striking [interesting ambiguity], killing. Now that is changed, at least in Chatham-st.

Its conclusion was that “[t]he ‘b’hoys’ were [now] on the side of the fugitives. Th e pro-slavery feeling had departed from among them. Th ey did not wish to save the Union. Th ey believed in the higher law” (August 8, 1853). One notes indeed that one month into the run of Aiken’s adaptation, the National began accommodating black spectators, though in a separate part of the theater (Odell 6:238).

Adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were perfectly situated to infiltrate this cultural sphere in a way Stowe’s novel had been unable to do. Th eir chief theaters, such as the National, the Bowery, the American Museum, and the Franklin Museum, were well known for their ability to cater to the million. Henry James remembered the National as a “playhouse till then ignored by fashion and culture . . . deep down on the East side, whence echoes had come faintest to ears polite” (169). Th e same, of course, might have been said of the other theaters as well. 25 If, as James suggests, Uncle Tom’s Cabin marked a time when more than one class would again enter a single theater, it also made pos- sible a decisive shift in concern among the popular classes in particular. Little Katy ’s continuities with Aiken’s Uncle Tom already indicated the popular cul- tural sphere into which this antislavery material had been inserted. Aiken himself had been a “sensation” dramatist before embarking on the Howards’ version of Stowe’s tale, having done up stories from the New York Ledger for the Albany stage ( Th e Gun-Maker of Moscow and others); in the early 1860s he became the American Museum’s house dramatist, and he later wrote dime novels for the George Munro publishing house (including A New York Boy Among the Indians [1872]). 26 Selected cast members of Conway’s version at Barnum’s Museum were none other than veterans of the Mose vehicles and

Love and Th eft 236

other such melodramas; Emily Mestayer, James’s favorite in the part of Eliza, had on more than one occasion played Mose’s Lize. Sure enough, there is a bit part in Conway’s Uncle Tom for a slave called Little Mose. Th ese overlaps had the eff ect of reaching the popular classes where they lived. Rather than talking down to them from the abolitionist’s loft y perch, Uncle Tom dramas spoke in the idiom of popular melodrama, wedding new political concerns to familiar forms.

New political concerns did not always amount to new politics, of course; the ideological slant of Conway’s version alone saw to that. Any too optimistic view of this new popular interest in antislavery melodrama is tempered by other sorts of common responses to Uncle Tom —by which I mean, in part, the parodies of blackface minstrelsy. Christy’s Minstrels, for instance, soon turned the burlesque third part of their show into “Life Among the Happy,” and Christy and Wood’s Minstrels in 1854 devised an operatic burlesque of Uncle Tom in which Tom was not sold, Legree was not present, and a general plan- tation frolic substituted for the pathos of melodrama. 27 Frank Brower’s “Happy Uncle Tom” (rehearsed for at least a decade) was a huge hit; based for the most part on extremely tired hard-of-hearing jokes (Tom is deaf ), the piece appar- ently also featured a jig and banjo dance (Brower 5–8). Sam Sanford also performed a “Happy Uncle Tom” act, which he claimed brought in $11,000 in nine weeks:

Oh, white folks, we’ll have you to know Dis am not de version of Mrs. Stowe; Wid her de Darks am all unlucky But we am de boys from Old Kentucky.

(quoted in Toll 94–95)

Th e most telling ripostes, however, pitted the condition of the slave against that of the white worker in the North, as in “Take Care of Number One”:

But don’t come back, Aunt Harriet; in England make a fuss, Go talk against your country, put money in your puss; And when us happy darkies you pity in your prayer, Oh, don’t forget de white slaves dat’s starvin’ ober dar!

(Dixey 64–65; see also Pop 211)

Th is was obviously a charge that had not gone away; as the Irish parodies (one by Conway himself ) make particularly clear, the competing constituencies for liberation were still in competition. Th e Irish American printed a scathing piece (interestingly titled “Mrs. Stowe in Cork”) that argued the case of “Father Pat” against that of Uncle Tom, and held up the suff erings of the white peasant to the hypocritical antislavery Stowe, “the female Barnum” (Birdoff 183–84). Th is critique arose in part from the ways the dramas themselves handled the tension between antislavery and working-class concerns. In St. Clare’s

Uncle Tomitudes 237

comparisons of slaves and workers as well as in other moments of the play, confl ict over the notion of “wage slavery” emerged again, not to be resolved so easily by a single “abolitionist” drama.

Th ere is, of course, a great deal of room in the story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for mechanic accents, to borrow Michael Denning’s phrase. Right off the bat George Harris loses his job in the factory to which his master has hired him out; the master has decided that George’s lease on independence is getting too dear, and wants him to come back to the plantation and, despite his mar- riage to Eliza, an arranged marriage. Th is demotion is transparently a shift from artisan (George is an inventor) to slave, and in conjoining the two, the action everywhere invokes George’s status as put-upon “wage slave.” In the dramas George’s speeches about his lack of freedom thus take on a specifi - cally artisanal cast, making the freedom in question a matter of both black and working-class relevance. George’s mixed racial heritage reinforces this equation in a literal way and allows him to mediate between the worlds of white audience and black slave. Signifi cantly, Aiken makes much more of George’s plight than does Conway. Aiken’s George and Eliza begin the play, agonizing at length over their fate. “I’m a poor, miserable, forlorn drudge,” says George, wishing he were dead; Eliza counters, “I know how you feel about losing your place in the factory, and you have a hard master; but pray be patient” (1.1). Th e multiaccentuality of these lines, pointing at once to southern slave and northern artisan, is self-evident, as is the familiar appeal of George’s righteous “manliness.” His declaration of independence is a workingman’s “republican” manifesto: “I’ll fi ght for my liberty, to the last breath I breathe! You say your fathers did it; if it was right for them, it is right for me!” (2.3). (Th e Times reported that such speeches got “great cheers” [July 27, 1853].) In the Conway version, by contrast, the fi rst scene between Eliza and George is bur- ied in the middle of act one, just aft er the minstrel-show opening, and George’s plan to escape has apparently already been discussed between them, for George assumes rather than announces it, decisively diminishing the impact (1.2). George does get to make his stirring declaration (1.5) and shoot at Loker, Haley, and Marks when they pursue him, but Conway’s confl ation of the escapes of Eliza and George, both of them complete by the end of act one, gives George much less stage time. Already in the George Harris subplot Aiken proved him- self much more attentive to the potential links between slave and worker; he accordingly earned the approval of antislavery portions of the working class and their journalistic friends, and perhaps, as the Spirit of the Times wrote, “made converts to the abolition doctrine many persons, we have no doubt, who have never examined the subject” (March 11, 1854). Conway’s version, shrinking the role of George and downplaying the power of sympathy, left sig- nifi cantly more space for derision and dismissal than for alliance politics.

Th is was no less the case with St. Clare’s disquisitions on the relative condi- tions of southern slaves and “British” workers. In the novel St. Clare assesses

Love and Th eft 238

the slaves to be “better off than a large class of the population of England” (341). St. Clare’s conservative labor critique is soft ened by Stowe’s portrayal of him as fatally fl awed rather than mean; he has no illusions regarding the slaves’ contentment with their enslavement and even has a certain sympathy for both wage slave and black slave (339). But he makes essentially John C. Calhoun’s argument about the greater oppressions of the North: “[Th e English laborer] is as much at the will of his employer as if he were sold to him.” 28 Considering the Tom shows’ rather diff erent audience from that of the novel, this was a posi- tion requiring sensitive handling by the dramatist: pushed too hard, it would compromise the story’s antislavery politics; pushed too little, it might alienate the working class. 29 Aiken interestingly chooses to bypass this thorny issue, giving St. Clare no chance to air his opinions on the subject of workers and slaves. St. Clare makes his sectional case by mocking Ophelia’s personal dis- dain for Topsy in light of her missionary zeal, and otherwise ridicules the “lovely rule of woman”; but the rest is silence (2.2; 3.1). Conway, however, exploits St. Clare’s brief on behalf of the white worker. Penetrate Partyside, taking on the function of Miss Ophelia in the novel, criticizes St. Clare for traffi cking in slaves, and St. Clare gets to make his labor critique in full: “Th e English aristocracy, and capitalists . . . are only doing in another form what the American planter does” (2.2). Th is apology for slavery is lift ed nearly verbatim from the novel, as is St. Clare’s assertion that while the slave can be whipped to death, the worker can be starved to death. Labor oppression under slavery is the same as labor oppression the world over, says St. Clare. To this small extent Conway equates the condition of worker and slave; but, the argument goes, at least the South is forthright about its economic regime. Partyside himself defends the white worker when he comes across a law requiring manumitted elderly slaves to be provided with food, clothing, and shelter by their deceased masters’ estates: “Pity it weren’t more general. Guess it wouldn’t do much harm to some of the rich folks in the North if they was obliged to provide for all those who have gotten grey and superannuated in their service” (6.1). Th us, despite the vacillation between prolabor and generally antiaristocratic views, Conway endorses Calhoun—or, closer to home, Mike Walsh—and the white- egalitarian reading of “wage slavery.” 30

Together with Aiken’s foregrounding of George Harris, his refusal to enter the swampy terrain of labor’s racial politics has the eff ect of a hopeful gesture in the direction of a labor abolitionism. Restricting St. Clare’s diatribes, Aiken avoids even an echo of the nettled cry of “white slavery.” Conway, in allowing St. Clare free reign, off ers a sharp response from within a putatively antislavery play to the long-standing abolitionist denial of the pinched circumstances of northern workers. Th ere are in Conway no characters and little rhetoric with labor-abolitionist potential; since George Harris is a marginal fi gure at best and Penetrate Partyside a deeply suspect antislavery spokesman, the play effi - ciently blocks most liberatory political entries. Th e diff ering positions in the

Uncle Tomitudes 239

Tom shows and in related dramatic productions therefore suggest that the Uncle Tom’s Cabin plays did not at all mark something so unequivocal as a turn in working-class racial perspective. Rather, they intensifi ed the racial terms of working-class debate. Th ere were now “northern” and “southern” portions of the northern popular classes; the perennial confl icts over labor’s racial politics intersected with struggles over sectional policy, each giving spark to the other. Put another way, national controversy over slavery disrupted alliances between workers even as confl icts over labor’s proper racial alignments furthered sec- tional dislocation. Not the least of Uncle Tom’s Cabin ’s stage achievements was to force together these diff erent realms of feeling—one local, diurnal, a matter of daily bread and racial responsiveness; one national, broadly political, a situation of major historical signifi cance.

Th is was, of course, also the purpose of mid-nineteenth-century political parties, and the competing versions of Uncle Tom soon had their party equiv- alents. 31 Two months into the Uncle Tom’s Cabin stage feud, in January 1854, Stephen A. Douglas introduced his Kansas-Nebraska bill into congressional debate. Th e purpose of the bill was to grant to local governments the right to declare slavery legal in territory formerly established as free by the 1820 Mis- souri Compromise. Th e bitter fi ght over Kansas-Nebraska was the revolu- tionary centerpiece of the 1850s, dramatically confi rming sectional divisions, destroying the major political parties, and—in the actual combat in “Bleeding Kansas” between those favoring and those opposing Douglas’s “popular sovereignty”—foreshadowing the war to come. Douglas’s bill was widely per- ceived as a test of party loyalty for those Democrats who persisted in their Free-Soil sympathies. Th e 1848 Free-Soil presidential run of erstwhile Demo- crat Martin Van Buren, in opposition to what the radical Barnburners per- ceived to be Polk’s pandering to the South and proslavery expansionism, had already weakened national party ties; despite the Compromise and the over- whelming Democratic victory of Franklin Pierce in 1852, Van Buren’s attempt made the Democratic defections in the wake of Douglas’s bill that much easier. 32 Where before there had been an uneasy cross-sectional Democratic coalition enlisting a majority of workers under a banner of southern appease- ment, there was now no party consensus at all on the issue of slavery. Together with factional confl ict over other issues (temperance, nativism, internal im- provements, patronage), the slavery controversy dealt a hard blow to the Democrats, producing an electoral debacle in 1854. Th e two-party system was breaking down, evidenced most succinctly by Whig editor Horace Greeley’s proposal that Democratic editor William Cullen Bryant, no friend of Gree- ley’s, head the 1856 New York State ticket of the newly formed Republican party. 33 Th e Uncle Tom controversy was both product and portrait of the social energies that gave rise to this political upheaval, as the Spirit of the Times, among others, perceived. “Th e slavery agitation has been augmented by the passage of the Nebraska-Kansas bill, and a little zest is given to the votaries of

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negro freedom by an attendance at the Bowery or National .  .  . . We have nothing to do here with the matter, politically, but we can perceive what the drama may do to foster or eradicate passions and prejudices of high or low degree” (March 11, 1854).

Sectional thinking had come alive in the North. Party politics had been for decades a way of keeping sectional tension out of the public sphere; the coming of the Civil War witnessed the displacement of national politics by sectional insurgency. Th e Democratic defectors’ contribution to the Republicans, for ex- ample, was stunning; one Democrat wrote to the New York Tribune that he had voted for Pierce, Cass, and Polk in the previous three elections but was calling in 1854 for a fusion of elements to oppose the Nebraska bill. Th e House vote on the bill made clear the northern Democratic split: forty-four Democrats voted for, forty-three against. 34 (Th is fact alone calls into question some writers’ easy equation of northern workingmen with the Democratic party and therefore the prosouthern stance in these years.) 35 Specifi cally sectional perspectives produced the Republican party in 1854–56 out of a coalition of Liberty party members, liberal Whigs, and anti-Nebraska bill Democrats. Th e Republicans came together around a belief in the northern way of life: “free labor,” antiex- pansionism, and rather ambivalent racial feeling. Th e achievement of the Republicans was to turn adherence to a renovative ideal of capitalist labor into a sectional critique of the South and the extension of slavery, bringing together the interests of workers and abolitionists (and, to be sure, racists) in a way that seemed synonymous with northern well-being. Aiken’s version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin clearly resembled this fusion of ideas, beliefs, and feelings, and it struck a chord among the northern popular classes. Of course, it is impossible to know the infl uence of Aiken’s play on Republican party formation, parallel development though it may have been; but in the increasingly visible and so- phisticated sphere of popular culture it gave great emotional weight to the di- visions that had begun to occur. In an era in which, as Eric Foner has observed, politics was itself becoming part of the culture industry, the ubiquity of Uncle Tom and its unavoidable sectional emphasis surely played its part ( Politics 30–31). Not least among Aiken’s adherents, perhaps, were those who rejected the “white slavery” call of southern-sympathizing New York Democrats—the specter of free blacks clamoring for white men’s rightful jobs. In the 1856 elec- tion the Republicans indeed appealed to workers by publicizing southern pro- slavery fi gures’ derogatory remarks about northern wage earners, nicely joining sectional and labor critiques. 36 At the very least, Uncle Tom’s Cabin registered these changes in sectional alignment and the vicissitudes in labor’s racial politics; as the foremost racial melodrama of the day, it brought political and social change into the realm of feeling and crystallized it into memorable and irrecusable images.

But of course there was no end to class struggle, as the continued superses- sion of racial concerns by class anxiety suggests. Class energies had themselves

Uncle Tomitudes 241

reemerged aft er a decade of slumber; the New York tailors’ strike of 1850 led to the fi rst state-sponsored violence in history against urban American workers (Wilentz 380). I have noted that the Industrial Congress, aft er 1850 a leading coalition of the trades, was antislavery in its platform but in the ensuing decade remained indifferent to its agitation, preferring “to abolish Wages Slavery before we meddle with Chattel Slavery” (quoted in Wilentz 382). Th ese no doubt were Conway’s partisans, as were all those workers Iver Bernstein has described as disgusted with centralized Republican party politics in New York City and determined to fl out them (96–97). Conway’s play mediated upheaval in the nation’s party organizations, but it fl owed even more directly from the class resentments responsible for the rhetoric of “white slavery.” Union at all costs, indiff erence to slavery, the immediacy of northern working-class op- pression: these were the pressing concerns hardly veiled in the background and foreground of Conway’s play, and they resonated with portions of the working class ready to refuse the rule of reforming Republican politicians. 37 Whether craft smen desiring wage earners to mount a distinctively working- class infl uence outside the major parties or proletarianized artisans less put off by middle-class reformers’ interventions in Congress, many workers still demurred from slavery agitation. Th eir party was the Democracy, and wage labor their reality. 38

Th e terrifi c confl icts among and within the Uncle Tom’s Cabin plays root us in the national-popular struggles of the 1850s. A peculiarly fi ssured text in all of its dramatic versions, Uncle Tom relied on strategies of blackface represen- tation that unsettled the plays even as the diff ering dramas put such stage con- ventions to largely confl icting uses. Th e sectional divide to which the competing versions of the play bore witness abutted questions of popular racial alliance and testifi ed to cracks in the national bloc that only a state apparatus imposed during a great civil war would at last address. 39 Th ere was ultimately to be just one reigning mode of production, but it would have to be won in a long and bitter confl agration. Th e fi nal stage directions of Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin provide grim commentary on that battle: “Impressive music.—Slow curtain.”

{ Afterword to the Original Edition }

I have located contradictions in blackface performance and in nineteenth- century racial ideologies that combined to produce a variety of unsuspected political eff ects. What I have called the social unconscious of blackface sug- gests that the whites involved in minstrelsy were far from unenthusiastic about black cultural practices or, conversely, untroubled by them, continuous though the economic logic of blackface was with slavery. As oft en as not, this involve- ment depended on an intersection of racial and class languages that occasionally became confused with one another, reinforcing the general air of political jeop- ardy in minstrel acts. Th e vernacular rowdiness of such acts helped turn them into acknowledged, if unlikely, representatives of a peculiarly American culture. At every turn blackface minstrelsy has seemed a form in which transgression and containment coexisted, in which improbably threatening or startlingly sym- pathetic racial meanings were simultaneously produced and dissolved. Neither the social relations on which blackface delineations depended, the delineations themselves, their commercial setting, nor their ideological eff ects were mono- lithic or simply hegemonic. Th e question then arises: what were the immediate cultural and historical results of this “seeming counterfeit”?

As the nation edged toward civil war, Herman Melville issued a meditation on this subject in the June 1855 Putnam’s Monthly, a journal founded two years earlier out of the collapse of Young America’s literary nationalism. Where Young America had paid remarkably superfi cial attention to race—the Neddy Mellish–Pompey Smith subplot in Cornelius Mathews’s Big Abel and the Little Manhattan (1845) is a perfect example—Melville had from his earliest work highlighted the victims of slavery and Manifest Destiny, and in “Benito Cereno” foregrounded the problem of racial representation itself. 1 We might indeed see the story as Melville’s version of the minstrel show, in which he ingeniously brings together the narrative paradigm of slave insurrection with the ironies and conundrums of minstrel acts. Th e slaves-turned-mutineers disguised as slaves aboard the San Dominick are in virtual blackface, per- forming for the liberal northern visitor too blinkered to know better. Th e implication is that Captain Delano’s inadequate responses to the slaves in secret revolt have been so conditioned by forms such as minstrelsy that the blacks are reduced to instances of white fantasy about them, a fact the insur- rectionaries use to their advantage. Yet Melville’s pessimism about the eff ects of white racial discourse is revealed in the way the rebelling slaves are, for

Aft erword to the Original Edition 243

most of the story, stuck in mid-drama, frozen in the midst of revolutionary activity. In Melville’s view there is apparently no possible emergence from behind the minstrel mask even in the act of revolt, which is to say that the mask itself interrupts the attempt to throw it off . “Benito Cereno” implicates the minstrel show in what it sees as the grim course of racial politics and indeed of American history in the 1850s.

Melville’s peers among the northern liberal bourgeoisie were more sanguine if less thoughtful about the representation of black people and black culture. Following upon the romantic-racialist vogue of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ste- phen Foster’s songs, and celebrated by Harriet Beecher Stowe herself, a black singer named Elizabeth Greenfi eld enjoyed a brief renown in the 1850s. Green- fi eld, known as the “Black Swan” (no doubt in mimicry of Jenny Lind, the “Swedish Nightingale”), seemed to Stowe and others to capture the promise of blackface minstrelsy’s cultural “blackening.” Th ough noted particularly for her classical repertoire (Handel, Bellini, Donizetti), Greenfi eld was known to sing not only “Home! Sweet Home!” but also Foster’s “Old Folks at Home.” Stowe’s memory of one Greenfi eld concert indicates the uncertainties surrounding this attempt to turn Stephen Foster to the account of a black people’s tradition. For the “choicest of the elite ” of London, surrounded by other singers bent on national illustration, Greenfi eld sings as a representative of her race:

Miss Greenfi eld’s turn for singing now came, and there was profound attention. Her voice, with its keen, searching fi re, its penetrating vibrant quality, its “timbre,” as the French have it, cut its way like a Damascus blade to the heart. It was the more touching from occasional rusticities and ar- tistic defects, which showed that she had received no culture from art.

She sang the ballad, “Old folks at home,” giving one verse in the so- prano, and another in the tenor voice.

One enraptured English lord, according to Stowe, declared the “use of these halls for the encouragement of an outcast race, a consecration. ” Th e reverent response to Greenfi eld pressed upon Stowe the realization that “there really is no natural prejudice against colour in the human mind.” 2

But the fascination with the “Black Swan’s” artless and pitiable persona, not to mention her proximity to blackface, sounded a distinct note of condescen- sion, and easily fl ipped over into contempt. One spectator at a New York per- formance, Alfred Bunn, heaped derision on Greenfi eld, and, turning to a discussion of a women’s rights advocate, he ventured to describe “Miss Lucy Neale (Stone, we beg the lady’s pardon),” invoking the minstrel “wench” char- acter (Lucy Neale) the “Black Swan” had suggested to him (61). Indeed, the immediately ensuing history of black stage representation indicates the highly problematic status of such performances. Black organizations such as the Fisk Jubilee Singers took the stage in the 1870s to perform black “sorrow songs,” or spirituals, to astonished ears; but, like Elizabeth Greenfi eld, they included

Aft erword to the Original Edition244

Foster songs in their repertoire, confounding the notion of a distinctive Afri- can-American people’s tradition. In fact the group had already been mistaken for minstrel performers and had taken the name Jubilee Singers to diff eren- tiate themselves from such acts. Soon aft er, both black and white blackface minstrel troupes began assuming the rubric of “jubilee” singing groups, mix- ing minstrel songs with spirituals and eff ectively muddying the traditions. Th e people’s-culture gambit, once infected by the minstrel tradition, would remain a highly ambiguous one into the twentieth century (Toll 236–37).

Perhaps sensing this impure confl uence of traditions, Martin Delany’s black-nationalist novel Blake; or, Th e Huts of America (1859–61) devises a complex reinvention of the minstrel tradition. Delany refuses to settle for Mel- ville’s liberal despair. Similar to “Benito Cereno,” Blake narrates a planned slave uprising, and here, too, insurrectionary energies intersect with minstrel forms. But Delany makes guerilla appropriations of Stephen Foster plantation mel- odies, gives them new and oft en parodic lyrics, and in this way furnishes his rebels with songs of revolution. Foster’s pathetic “Old Uncle Ned” (1848), for example, which mourns the passing of the slave Old Ned, arms Delany with a song that wishes good riddance upon the master:

Hang up the shovel and the hoe-o-o-o! I don’t care whether I work or no! Old master’s gone to the slaveholders rest— He’s gone where they all ought to go!

(105–6)

Blake writes black agency back into history through blackface songs taken “back” from those who had plundered black cultural practices. Rather than reject the cultural territory whites had occupied by way of minstrelsy, Delany recognizes that occupation as fact and occupies it in turn. In Delany’s novel, black claims on the national culture, given distorted but infl uential shape in the minstrel show, come home to roost. Th rough a vivifying irony, Blake transforms the impact of black cultural practices on American culture into the political movement they had augured—anticipating with relish the imminent confl ict so many northern white intellectuals would mourn. 3

Th ese three moments from the tail end of my history capture the range of minstrelsy’s cultural results. Th e confl icts they signify, like most cultural con- fl icts, held a tenuous relation to concrete social turbulence, but they were ulti- mately those of a social order in the midst of a great renegotiation of the character and color of labor. Th e overwhelming working-class white (and, when legalized, black) enlistment in the Union cause was one worldly out- come of these cultural ideas, feelings, and acts, which blackface tunes some- times acknowledged by putting the Union in blackface: “For soon we’ll stop each rebel raid/When I march along wid de Black Brigade” (Brower 9). But there were other, bleaker responses, as is suggested by the northern popularity

Aft erword to the Original Edition 245

of Dan Emmett’s famous “Dixie” (1859), a blackface plantation melody in the traditional mold adopted by the Confederacy as its theme song. 4 As the Civil War entered its third year, New York was beset by racial rioting on a scale hitherto unequaled in American history. In response to an 1863 federal con- scription act intended to bolster fl agging volunteer Union armies, unskilled Irish workers revolted, dealing death and destruction to blacks and black property throughout the city. Draft ees included all men aged twenty to thirty- fi ve (if unmarried twenty to forty-fi ve). Th ose able to hire a substitute or pay a $300 fee could be legally exempted from service; poorer men perceiving themselves to be fi ghting someone else’s war rebelled against the Republican law with arson, looting, machine-breaking, sabotage of railroad and telegraph lines, and murder and public sexual mutilation of blacks. Th e cost was at least one hundred and fi ve lives and over $1 million in property. 5

Th is violence, too, was part of the cultural milieu that nurtured blackface performance. One blackface song, “Th e Bonny Green Flag,” expressed the ri- oters’ sentiments outright: “Th ey say that the Irish need not apply/But when soldiers they want, in the front Pat is seen.” 6 At the same time, I have hoped to emphasize the terrifi c variability in class and racial feeling surrounding such events. As W. E. B. Du Bois perceived, the racial violence of the draft riots was inseparable from a class context that was manipulated to serve the ruling elites, and in which pinched class circumstances forestalled interracial recog- nitions and solidarity. 7 Capitalism was ultimately the enemy, but racial feeling the immediate obstacle; energies directed against the state apparatus might too easily join those focused on black people. Th is dialectic has provided the principal themes of my study. Class straits may energize interracial coopera- tion, but they are also oft en likely to close down the possibility of interracial embrace. In the 1830s upper-class reformers alien to the proletarian public sphere were apt to interrupt the incipient solidarity marked by the radical slo- gan “wage slavery.” When the existence of any wages at all became an open question in the depression years, a racial scapegoat was quite convenient to a white-egalitarian alliance of workers and employers. Th e variability of white racial feeling reemerged in the years of America’s 1848, though the North largely backed by way of class-based struggles into the confl icts over slavery that were to produce the Civil War. Th e social contradictions issuing from a national entity based on competing modes of economic production, together with labor’s confl icts over whether to oppose wage slavery or chattel slavery, confi rm that the question of American labor in the broadest sense could be addressed only aft er the demise of slavery.

Th e charge has been leveled by some historians that the antislavery movement defl ected attention from northern working conditions and forestalled a rigorous critique of capitalist wage relations—precisely the charge of some workers in the antebellum North. 8 But, as David Roediger has observed, it is more accurate to say that slavery, not antislavery, prevented the full-circle critique of capitalism on

Aft erword to the Original Edition246

behalf of all workers which could emerge (if in intermittent fashion) only aft er the war. Neither the abolitionists, the labor movement, nor even the Republicans fully developed the interracial prolabor argument that the Civil War for the fi rst time made available, if not exactly inevitable ( Wages 87, 174). Shortly aft er the war, in 1867, Karl Marx wrote that in the “United States of North America, every inde- pendent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfi gured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” 9 How could any but these words from Capital form the appropriate ending to my story? Marx’s image of labor as a great Blakean body, with certain of its parts immobilized owing to the shackling of others, gestures to the immensity of the “emancipation” these words invoke: not mere trade union unity—even less bourgeois “tolerance”—but a visionary conception of human collectivity.

{ AFTERWORD TO THE 20TH-ANNIVERSARY EDITION }

For some reason I have always liked the O. Henry story “Aft er Twenty Years,” in which two pals agree to meet at the same spot twenty years later, no matter the circumstances, to compare their fates; in the meantime Jimmy becomes a beat cop and Bob a wanted crook, whom the former is, when they meet again, obliged to apprehend. Seeing this new edition of Love and Th eft is not unlike meeting yourself at the same corner twenty years on, nightstick in hand, seeing what became of your erstwhile self, learning so much more aft er the book’s publication what it is about.

I had some intentions going in. Late 1980s, long hot New York summers, the crack panic and Paul Simon’s Graceland , the vogue of Public Enemy and Spike Lee alongside racist attacks in Howard Beach and Bensonhurst, New York City’s fi rst black mayor David Dinkins up against revanchist Ronald Reagan successor George H. W. Bush. Me, post-suburban jazz refugee immersed in the dark arts, by which I pretty much mean bebop, fascinated by the role of culture in such racial contradictions, my own included. As an aspiring scholar and writer, I thought it a little overhasty if not dishonest to presume expertise in African- American life and began to wonder about the prehistory of cross- racial interest like mine, its capacity to intervene in, to move or to stall, weirdly uncertain political climates like the one around me.

Tambo and Bones, bingo: greasepaint and sweat under guttering gaslights in sweltering city theaters, young white Negroes doing what Joni Mitchell calls the “boho dance,” getting under someone else’s skin and getting paid for it. What was the story there? Th e idea was to try for scholarly writing that would bring together something of the wit and learning of my teacher Steven Mar- cus’s work on the quintessentially indefensible form of Victorian pornography, the revolutionary insouciance and class rage of T. J. Clark on nineteenth-cen- tury French art, the deep racial ironies articulated in Ralph Ellison’s essays (more profoundly subtle, it still seems to me, than his Invisible Man ), the dramas of cultural insurgency in Amiri Baraka’s prose and plays, the dialec- tical design of Fredric Jameson’s Th e Political Unconscious , the commitment to the popular as a crucial domain of socialist struggle as Stuart Hall wrote of it, the cunning analysis of working-class culture that another teacher, Michael Denning, brought to the dime novel, and above all the framework of the American 1848 that Michael Rogin had established to study what Karl Marx himself called the U.S.’s mid-century “revolutionary turn.” All of it, not too

Aft erword to the 20th-Anniversary Edition248

distantly one hoped, summoning the punch of Robert Christgau, Ellen Willis, Greil Marcus, and Greg Tate on politics and pop music. I found myself well situated during graduate school, keeping myself alive by teaching literacy workshops at Borough of Manhattan Community College, just down the street from the former site of P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, and working crew at the Public Th eater—Astor Place, an earlier time’s ground zero—including the Delacorte stage in Central Park and a mobile Shakespeare unit that went to all the boroughs. Shades of trodding the boards in the period that drew me.

I was surprised and schooled by the tangle of convergences and connec- tions that emerged during the writing and aft er the appearance of Love and Th eft . Rogin had himself begun to write about blackface, it turned out, and he became a pre-publication supporter and friend. David Roediger was com- radely enough to show me galleys of his fi ne chapters on minstrelsy from his soon to be celebrated Wages of Whiteness . I had sought to bring together crit- ical race and cultural studies with the (then still mostly race-blind) new social and labor history, and these august fellows were helping lead the way. Love and Th eft was in turn part of a long (Clintonian but ongoing) moment defi ned by scholarly fascination with performative race and gender crossing both in min- strel shows and out, producing such works as Marjorie Garber’s Vested Inter- ests , Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise , Susan Gubar’s Racechanges , Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection , Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good , W. T. Lhamon’s Raising Cain , Nick Tosches’s Where Dead Voices Gather , Daphne Brooks’s Bodies in Dissent , Camille Forbes’s Introducing Bert Williams , and many, many others. Th e week my book came out, Ted Danson told racist jokes in blackface at a Friar’s Club roast of his then-girlfriend Whoopi Goldberg, prompting my colleague Paul Cantor to suspect my publisher had arranged for the promotion. Fairly soon, “love and theft ” became a kind of shorthand for the dialectic of white racial attraction and repulsion, cultural expropriation born of cross-racial desire, that fi rst arose in public commercial terms in the antebellum minstrel show but is plain today wherever you look.

In 2001 Bob Dylan released an album called “Love and Th eft ” —the only one of his dozens of titles to appear in quotation marks. My title riff ed on Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel ; why couldn’t Dylan lift mine? It was, aft er all, in the tradition. I suspect Dylan liked my title for its general resonance, in which stolen hearts and emotional misdemeanors stalk the sweetness of love, as they usually do in Dylan’s songs. Plus he knows full well the cross-cultural indebtedness of music in the Americas, his included, and he alludes to that in the songs as well as the title, itself stolen, of “Love and Th eft .” Novelist and cultural critic Jonathan Lethem later wrote an essay celebrating this sort of thing as “Th e Ecstasy of Infl uence.” Love and Th eft became a pop- country band’s name. “Some of these bootleggers/Th ey make pretty good stuff ,” Dylan sang on the “Love and Th eft ” song “Sugar Baby.” It is quickly be- coming a truism of popular music studies that crossover bo otlegging, as rich

Aft erword to the 20th-Anniversary Edition 249

in result as it is unfair in credit, has always been American music’s hallmark— less roots and remixes than masking and mimicry all the way down.

Of course I have been gratifi ed as well as edifi ed by these developments. Th ey do sometimes make me wish I had punched up the writing a little (where’s that nightstick?). But it’s also true that responses to Love and Th eft generally hew to the phrase and its local implications, for worse as well as better. I still think it serves as an apt conceptual handle for cultural relations in North America; but it can seem overly equivocating, even apologist, regarding the meaner aspects of those relations. Th is is because the larger framework of Love and Th eft is oft en overlooked. Th e book is embedded rather strenuously in a Marxist architecture. It is not simply the irony of American history I am aft er, although there is that, with the blackface mask of political containment backing its partisans into unbidden subversions at a particular historical juncture. More than this, the blackface mask is understood here, I think for the fi rst time, not as a dead sign of social stasis transparent to nostalgic racists and anti-racist scourges alike but as a nearly isotopic sizzle of historical confl ict, a meeting- place (per V. N. Volosinov’s idea of class struggle at the level of the sign) for the clash of forces that defi ned its revolutionary moment. Not that minstrelsy is an agent of revolution ( pace Lhamon): it is, though, a place of reversals and unin- tended consequences that grew out of the moment’s explosive capitalist en- ergies and class struggles lived in the modality of race. Something of much greater weight than blackface bad taste was at stake—a labor abolitionism, the possibility of a revolutionary interracial working-class alliance, whose here rising and there declining fate blackface seemed to me to augur. Th e architec- ture of the book’s second half was tacitly drawn, in fact, from Jameson’s Political Unconscious , with its three outlined horizons of analysis: a textual horizon in which, here, blackface performance is an internally contradictory symbolic act, an imaginary resolution of real social contradiction ( Ch. 5 ); an ideological horizon in which texts or performances become the occasional utterances of larger groups or social classes, oft en wielding the most extreme accents of class and racial antagonism ( Chs. 6 and 7 ); and a fi nal horizon that sees the transfor- mation of both of these into symbolic forms or sign systems that are traces or anticipations of (competing, overlapping) modes of production themselves— capitalism and slavery, North and South, in my terms Chapter 8 ’s competing pro- and anti-slavery versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the antebellum stage. Social contradiction and dialectical reversal foretelling the revolution of 1865 and the ensuing drama of Reconstruction are at the heart of my analysis, in other words, leaving minstrelsy not in some moralistic purgatory ( now is it ok? isn’t it gone yet?) but as fundamental—then and now—to the fate of racial rep- resentation, and therefore racial liberation, in these United States.

I am not sure why this didn’t wholly take, but the entire trajectory of my argu- ment depends on it. Th at is why it still kills me that T. D. Rice begins his career as little Jim Crow in early-1830s minstrel acts and ends it as noble Uncle Tom in

Aft erword to the 20th-Anniversary Edition250

1850s Tom shows. What happened aft er that is another two or three stories, as the scholars mentioned above have variously demonstrated. Of blackface’s con- tinuing relevance there is no doubt: ask your local wigger. Or Barack Obama. Th e election of the fi rst African-American president of the Un ited States occasioned the legitimate return of blackface comedy. All across Obama’s fi rst term the burnt cork snuck back, most notably in comedian Fred Armisen’s many Obama im- pressions on Saturday Night Live ; the kitchen heating up, SNL replaced Armisen’s Obama during election season with that of African-American Jay Pharoah, whose artifi cially lightened skin on top of the inevitable comparisons to his comedic predecessor only redoubled the minstrel quotient. A national fantasy of the new men of power played out on American screens. Earlier in the decade, Dennis Haysbert had laid important representational track for Obama’s advance- ment in his portrayal of black president David Palmer on Fox’s 24 , solemnizing somewhat comedian Chris Rock’s conceit in the 2003 fi lm Head of State . With Obama’s actual triumph came the conscious restoration of minstrelsy.

Should the specter of a blackface Obama surprise us? Aft er all, as Constance Rourke observed long ago, commercial blackface stage performance fi rst appeared at the turn of the 1830s in tandem with William Lloyd Garrison’s abo- litionist movement (and its paper Th e Liberator ); isn’t this always the dialectic of racial representation in America? It’s never clear in any case what the relation is between off -color comedy and advances of color. Counterweights or comple- mentarities? Could Obama in cork be a backward testament to Americans’ in- vestment in a black president? Obama’s Dreams from My Father , as Donald Pease has argued, suggests the president’s dialectical cast of mind when it comes to such questions. At one moment while a Columbia undergraduate, he and his sister go at his mother’s behest to see the 1950s Brazilian fi lm Black Orpheus ; the author is dismayed by the romantic racialism of the “childlike blacks” onscreen and embarrassed at his mother’s rapt involvement in them. Th e eternal racial gulf, he despairs, even amongst loved ones. “Whether we sought out our demons or salvation,” Obama writes, “the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.” Later, though, hearing his mother talk about his father, a deeper feeling settles over him. She’s still “that girl with the movie of beautiful black people in her head,” but he realizes that her love for his father was guileless and unself-conscious like any other love, transformed if we’re lucky into something fi rmer. “What I heard from my mother that day, speaking about my father, was something that I suspect most Americans will never hear from the lips of those of another race, and so cannot be expected to believe might exist between black and white: the love of someone who knows your life in the round, a love that will survive disappointment.” Ardor and disappoint- ment, theft and love, twenty years later I’m beginning to see the light.

Major thanks to Benjamin Fagan for assistance in preparing this new edition.

{ Notes }

Introduction

1 . Alexander Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology” 27. 2 . Since this work is still in the process of formation, any listing of it must be eclectic

and inexhaustive: John Szwed, “Race and the Embodiment of Culture”; Barbara Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History” and “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America”; Homi Bhabha, “Th e Other Question” and “Of Mimicry and Man”; Bar- bara Johnson, “Metaphor, Metonymy, and Voice in Th eir Eyes Were Watching God” and “Mirror Stages”; the essays in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., “Race,” Writing, and Diff erence; Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity”; Hazel Carby, Recon- structing Womanhood; Paul Gilroy, “Th ere Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”; Philip Cohen, “Tarzan and the Jungle Bunnies”; the essays in Kobena Mercer, ed., Black Film/British Ci- nema; Richard Dyer, “White”; the essays in Cheryl Wall, ed., Changing Our Own Words; Andrew Ross, “Ballots, Bullets, or Batmen”; David Roediger, Th e Wages of Whiteness; Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women 115–34; Lauren Berlant, “National Brands/National Body”; Kobena Mercer, “Skin Head Sex Th ing” and “‘1968’”; bell hooks, “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination”; Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale; Michael Rogin, “Black- face, White Noise”; Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark; and Christopher Looby, “‘As Th or- oughly Black as the Most Faithful Philanthropist Could Desire.’”

3 . I am thinking here of Stuart Hall, “Th e Meaning of New Times” and “New Ethnic- ities”; Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light; Andrew Ross, No Respect; Mary Childers and bell hooks, “A Conversation about Race and Class”; and others.

4 . Th is point is made forcefully in David Roediger, “‘Labor in White Skin,’” and Stanley Aronowitz, “Writing Labor’s History.”

5 . For some acute remarks on this missed chance, see Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream 18–29.

6 . On Lincoln’s enjoyment of minstrelsy in Chicago, see Jesse Weik, Th e Real Lincoln 75, 85–86, and Albert Beveridge, Abraham Lincoln 1:536, 597–98.

7 . For a reading of Black Like Me, see Eric Lott, “White Like Me.” 8 . Michael Rogin, “Blackface, White Noise” 417–19. 9 . Robert Cantwell, Bluegrass Breakdown 249–74; Robert Dawidoff , “Some of Th ose

Days”; Armond White, “Th e White Albums” 21. 10 . Robert Winans, “Th e Folk, the Stage, and the Five-String Banjo in the Nineteenth

Century” and “Th e Black Banjo-Playing Tradition in Virginia and West Virginia.” Th ose interested in hearing historical recreations of antebellum minstrelsy are directed to the re- cordings Popular Music in Jacksonian America and Th e Early Minstrel Show.

11 . Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature 133–34, emphasis in original. I use Wil- liams’s phrase “structures of feeling” to refer, as he does, to a “structured formation which, because it is at the very edge of semantic availability, has many of the characteristics of a

252 Notes to Pages 6–11

pre-formation, until specifi c articulations—new semantic fi gures—are discovered in mate- rial practice” (134). Williams’s concept is far more useful, it seems to me, than conventional, functionalist ideas of racial “relations” or “pathologies” because it inquires into the social and historical “lived” quality of meanings and values, and into the complex and historically variable relation between these and more formally held beliefs or ideologies.

12 . In this I follow Stuart Hall’s argument against the misleading view that “because racism is everywhere a deeply anti-human and anti-social practice . . . therefore it is every- where the same —either in its forms, its relations to other structures and processes, or its eff ects.” See “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity” 23.

13 . It may be that by the 1920s an imaginary proximity to “blackness” was so requisite to white identity and to the culture industry which helped produce that identity—witness the sudden vogue of the suntan—that the signifi er of blackface had become redundant; the apposite development of forceful public black cultural production in the Harlem Renais- sance also made itself felt. Th e death of minstrelsy as a (professional, not college fraternity) stage activity, however, does not speak to blackface’s lingering presence on the motion pic- ture screen—minstrelsy’s somewhat baffl ing aft erlife. I am grateful to Harry Stecopoulos for confi rming my hunch about racial subjectivity in the 1920s; on blackface in the movies, see Joseph Boskin, Sambo 148–63, and Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women 115–34.

14 . Th e locus classicus for this view is Carl Wittke, Tambo and Bones, with its elision (but for assurances about the character of the “darky”) of racial politics altogether. More recent examples of such nostalgia have been furnished by the United States Congress, with the disclosures that Representative Robert Michel (R-Illinois) and Senator Alan Simpson (R-Wyoming) respectively enjoyed and performed in minstrel shows.

15 . For excellent exceptions, see Berndt Ostendorf, Black Literature in White America 65–94, and Robert Cantwell, Bluegrass Breakdown 249–74.

16 . See, for example, Eve Sedgwick on the relation of representations of sexuality to social power in Between Men 7.

17 . For examples of the fi rst tendency, see Hans Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (on minstrel music and dance), or William Mahar, “Black English in Early Blackface Minstrelsy” (on dialect), both excellent pieces of research; for examples of the second tendency, see Carl Wittke, Tambo and Bones, Constance Rourke, American Humor 77–104, and Robert Toll, Blacking Up.

18 . For a view of American Studies as a “cautionary example” to cultural studies (one the writer himself might have heeded), see Patrick Brantlinger, Crusoe’s Footprints 26–33; on American Studies scholarship as radical cultural criticism, see Alan Trachtenberg, “Myth and Symbol”; on its relationship to British cultural studies and Marxism, see, for instance, Leo Marx, “Th e Long Revolution”; Gary Hentzi and Jon Anderson, “An Interview with Jonathan Arac” 7; Michael Denning, “‘Th e Special American Conditions’”; Joel Pfi ster, “Th e Americanization of Cultural Studies”; and Cary Nelson, “Always Already Cultural Studies.”

19 . Raymond Williams, Culture 92–93. 20 . For an extended discussion, see Michael Denning, “‘Th e Special American

Conditions.’” 21 . For examples of this tendency (notably the work of Lawrence Grossberg and John Fiske)

and a partial exoneration, see Joel Pfi ster, “Th e Americanization of Cultural Studies” 205. 22 . Th is possibility was suggested to me by a reading of Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto

for Cyborgs”; see esp. 91.

253Notes to Pages 12–20

23 . For an analysis of Reagan-Th atcher “authoritarian populism,” see Stuart Hall, Th e Hard Road to Renewal; on the social context of recent cultural theory, see Michael Denning, “Th e End of Mass Culture.”

24 . For examples in which disgruntled blacks obstruct the development of a recon- structed welfare state, see J. Anthony Lukas, Common Ground; William Julius Wilson, Th e Truly Disadvantaged; Shelby Steele, Th e Content of Our Character; Jim Sleeper, Th e Closest of Strangers; Th omas Byrne Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction.

25 . Stanley Aronowitz, “Writing Labor’s History” 172–73.

Chapter 1

1 . Each of these positions is of course underwritten by an intellectual tradition as old as “mass” culture itself. Th e view of capitalist popular culture as a “culture industry” that sys- tematically cretinizes and depoliticizes an ever more passive populace is best articulated in the writings of the Frankfurt School; its classic expression is Th eodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “Th e Culture Industry.” Th e populist view of mass culture as a less mediated phenomenon of “the people” is perhaps most forcefully argued by Leslie Fiedler in What Was Literature?

2 . My theoretical framework is indebted to Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular’”; Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents; and T. J. Clark, Th e Painting of Modern Life 205–39. More generally these formulations, and many that follow, are drawn from work on culture industry phenomena by scholars associated with the Birmingham Centre for Contem- porary Cultural Studies, including Richard Hoggart, Th e Uses of Literacy; Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis; Richard Johnson, “What is Cultural Studies Anyway?”; Paul Gilroy, “Th ere Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”; and Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light. Like-minded work in the United States includes Fredric Jameson, “Reifi cation and Utopia in Mass Cul- ture”; Jean Franco, “What’s in a Name?”; Tania Modleski, Feminism Without Women; and Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood. Th e pervasive infl uence of the work of Steven Marcus should also be acknowledged here, especially his pioneering eff ort in Th e Other Victorians to make cultural sense of dubious text.

3 . As does this minstrel conundrum: “Why are minstrel companies like midnight rob- bers? Because they live by their deeds of darkness” ( White’s New Book 31).

4 . “Cuff ”—a kind of common-denominator fi gure of nineteenth-century white fantasy about black people—shows up again in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Parson’s Horse Race” (1878), in which cultural appropriation is revealed to be a one-way street: “Cuff was the doc- tor’s nigger man, and he was nat’lly a dreff ul proud critter! Th e way he would swell and strut and brag about the doctor and his folks and his things! Th e doctor used to give Cuff his cast-off clothes, and Cuff would prance round in ’em and seem to think he was a doctor of divinity himself, and had the charge of all natur” (472). Obviously this scene is insuffi ciently ironized—precisely because cultural appropriation is a one-way street; black borrowings from the dominant culture, according to whites, result by defi nition in absurdity. Th e scene aff ords a rather bleak, though probably unconscious, commentary on Reconstruction from the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

5 . Mrs. Anne Mathews, A Continuation of the Memoirs of Charles Mathews, Comedian 1:239.

6 . Carl Wittke, Tambo and Bones 75; New York Herald January 1, 1848.

254 Notes to Pages 20–23

7 . Among these are Al Field, Watch Yourself Go By 113, and “Reminiscences” (I am in- debted to Robert Toll, Blacking Up 38, for these references). See also P. T. Barnum’s Struggles and Triumphs (1869), in which a backstage altercation arises because the young Barnum in blackface is mistaken for an impudent black man (90).

8 . Mark Twain, Autobiography 62, 60. 9 . On the purposes and value of the genealogy, see Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Gene-

alogy, History.” Concerted attempts to narrate a minstrel-show “ancestry” include Olive Logan, “Th e Ancestry of Brudder Bones”; Brander Matthews, “Rise and Fall of Negro Min- strelsy”; and George Rehin, “Harlequin Jim Crow.” Th ese attempts are mistaken because, while illuminating—I have called on them to produce my genealogy—they fi nally make no room for historical discontinuity in the wearing of blackface, positing a kind of linear de- velopment; and they tend to underplay the central racial dimension—even, in the case of Rehin, to argue its only secondary importance.

10 . Th ere is a second, subsidiary purpose to this genealogy, which Cornel West has clar- ifi ed in a position paper regarding the study of race in Marxist cultural studies. Th at is briefl y to elucidate some specifi c American resonances of the various western white- supremacist discursive logics: Judeo-Christian (blackness as divine curse), scientifi c (black- ness as anthropological object), and psychosexual (blackness as vengeful father, carefree child, dirt, excrement). See West, “Marxist Th eory and the Specifi city of Afro-American Oppression” 22–24; see also, in this regard, Joel Kovel, White Racism.

In my genealogy I have purposely tried not to privilege literary representations of black people, to respect the relative autonomy of broadly “theatrical” ones. Literary representa- tions, in any case, largely reiterate the contradictions and problems I note in this discussion. For analyses of such literary representations, see Francis Gaines, Th e Southern Plantation; Sterling Brown, Th e Negro in American Fiction; Jean Fagan Yellin, Th e Intricate Knot; Wil- liam Van Deburg, Slavery and Race in American Popular Culture 31–39; and, more generally, William Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee. As for artistic representations, see Albert Boime, Th e Art of Exclusion, and Sue Bridwell Beckham, “By ‘N’ By Hard Times.”

11 . Harlequin, for instance, was a rustic with a strong dialect, whose role, according to Mar- montel, was “that of a patient servant, loyal, credulous, greedy, always amorous, always getting his master or himself into a scrape” (quoted in Nicoll 73–74): a description very close to those of some minstrel types. Indeed, in certain late eighteenth-century theatrical productions a slave is turned into a harlequin by a wizard, and aft er marrying his master’s daughter lives happily ever aft er (Gates, Figures 52). Both the outrage and the amusement of such activities were to be found in the minstrel show. (Pantomime and minstrelsy, Harlequin and Jim Crow, were literally con- joined at New York’s Kemp’s Lyceum in 1848. George Odell, Annals of the New York Stage 5:494).

For slave tricksters, see Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness 102–33. For earlier blackface fi gures on the stage, see Charles Baskervill, Th e Elizabethan Jig 286–88; Pierre Duchartre, Th e Italian Comedy 124, 135; David Mayer, Harlequin in His Element 44; Allardyce Nicoll, Th e World of Harlequin 73–74; Henry Louis Gates, Figures in Black 51–53; and George Rehin, “Harlequin Jim Crow.”

12 . George Rehin, “Harlequin Jim Crow” 687. In Figures in Black Henry Louis Gates argues that in minstrel representations the black and white mask of the Harlequin is split into the black “Tambo” and the white “Bones” (52). While some interesting observations follow from this idea, it strikes me as mostly fanciful. It is even unclear whether the inter- locutor of the early minstrel show appeared in whiteface; and I know of no accounts of the endmen which indicate that one was white and the other black.

255Notes to Pages 23–30

13 . S. Foster Damon, Series of Old American Songs no. 16. 14 . Huggins suggestively but rather too hastily assimilates all early minstrel fi gures to

those of Mike Fink, Davy Crockett, and (their northern counterpart) Yankee Doodle ( Har- lem Renaissance 249). Th at there was signifi cant overlap is uncontroversial, as John Blair makes clear in “Blackface Minstrels in Cross-Cultural Perspective” 55. But this overlap nei- ther accounts for the varied cultural eff ects such fi gures could produce nor for the songs that do not feature such types. Robert Cantwell somewhat overingeniously argues that minstrel performers who called on such types were involved in a multilayered act of self - parody—that minstrel types resembled Fink and Crockett because they parodied black styles that originated in parody of white men ( Bluegrass Breakdown 261).

15 . In Black Literature in White America Berndt Ostendorf talks about the minstrel show as a kind of compromise formation between the poles of “intermixture and insurrection” (69).

Nathan Huggins and Sylvia Wynter have produced psychosexual arguments that extend Ellison’s critique in interesting ways. Huggins reads minstrel fi gures as projections of all that the dominant culture deemed undesirable (albeit fascinating) (244–301); Wynter gives them a Lacanian gloss, seeing in the qualities attributed to the (b)lack the inverse of what the dominant culture considered human (“Sambos and Minstrels”). For this line of thinking in regard to the longue durée of western colonialism and slavery, see Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks 141–209, and George Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup 128–33.

16 . Damon, Series of Old American Songs no. 14. 17 . In “Mirror Stages” Barbara Johnson remarks that if the (Lacanian) phallus is almost

by defi nition white, the penis must be black—which accounts for its unruly and threatening potential. I am grateful to Michael Rogin for a similar point in regard to my project. In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon remarks that in the white imagination, “the Negro . . . is a penis” (170; emphasis in original).

18 . In Vested Interests Garber pursues this thesis rather singlemindedly; see also Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France 132. I return to blackface cross-dressing in chapters 2 and 6 .

19 . As Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has demonstrated in “Davy Crockett as Trickster,” an- other would surely be the various 1830s and 1840s Crockett almanacs, revealing compen- diums of misogynist and male homosexual fantasy. “Wench” characters were cut from the same cloth.

20 . Christy and Wood’s New Song Book 85–86. 21 . See Claudia Johnson, “Th at Guilty Th ird Tier” for a discussion of antebellum theater

prostitution; see also Patricia Cline Cohen, “Unregulated Youth.” 22 . Susan Davis, “‘Making Night Hideous’” 187–92 and Parades and Power 77–111, esp.

106. I have also learned much from Dale Cockrell, “Th e Early Blackface Minstrel and His World.”

23 . Davis, “‘Making Night Hideous’” 192; see also Paul Gilje, Th e Road to Mobocracy 258–60.

24 . Alexander Saxton introduces the useful phrase “white egalitarianism” to describe the adherence of the popular classes in this period to both white supremacy and democratic (class) ideals. See Th e Rise and Fall of the White Republic 221. Th is is Saxton’s version of what Pierre van der Berghe has termed “herrenvolk democracy.” On van der Berghe, see George Fredrickson, Th e Black Image in the White Mind 65, 84, 90–94.

25 . For an argument about race in which this is an ever-present possibility, see Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities” 28–29.

256 Notes to Pages 30–33

26 . Th is song on the Kensington nativist riot of 1844 might be considered a tenuous vindication of minstrelsy in regard to Jacksonian rioting:

Oh, in Philadelphia folks say how, Dat Darkies kick up all de rows, But de riot up in Skensin ’ ton Beats all de darkies twelve to one.

An’ I guess it wasn’t de niggas dis time. I guess it wasn’t de niggas dis time, I guess it wasn’t de niggas dis time, Mr. Mayor, I guess it wasn’t de niggas dis time.

(“Philadelphia Riots,” Dennison 134)

In any case, this song is ambiguous in precisely the ways I have been outlining. 27 . Th is tradition includes Margaret Fuller, “Entertainments of the Past Winter”; “Letter

from a Teacher at the South”; “Th e Black Opera”; “Negro Minstrelsy—Ancient and Mod- ern”; “Songs of the Blacks”; W. E. B. Du Bois, “Th e Negro in Literature and Art”; Francis Gaines, Th e Southern Plantation 95–111; James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan 87; Con- stance Rourke, American Humor 77–104; S. Foster Damon, “Th e Negro in Early American Songsters”; Stanley Edgar Hyman, “American Negro Literature and Folk Tradition”; Hans Nathan, Dan Emmett; George Rehin, “Th e Darker Image”; Orrin Clayton Suthern, “Min- strelsy and Popular Culture”; William Austin, “Susanna,” “Jeanie,” and “Th e Old Folks at Home”; David Grimsted and William Stowe, “White-Black Humor”; Robert Winans, “Th e Folk, the Stage, and the Five-String Banjo”; Berndt Ostendorf, Black Literature in White America 65–94; Robert Cantwell, Bluegrass Breakdown 249–74; William Mahar, “Black Eng- lish in Early Blackface Minstrelsy” and “‘Backside Albany’ and Early Blackface Minstrelsy”; W. T. Lhamon, “Constance Rourke’s Secret Reserve”; and Carl Bryan Holmberg and Gilbert Schneider, “Daniel Decatur Emmett’s Stump Sermons.”

28 . Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke” 50. In “Twain’s ‘Nigger’ Jim” Bernard Bell marshalls much evidence of Mark Twain’s “socialization in the ethics of Jim Crow”: his love of minstrelsy, his brief enlistment in a Confederate militia, the racism of some early (private and published) letters, his apprenticeship in the racism of southwestern humor, and internal evidence from Huck Finn itself, obviously the underside of Clemens’s complex investment in black culture.

29 . See also Fredrick Woodard and Donnarae MacCann’s “Huckleberry Finn and the Traditions of Blackface Minstrelsy.” As they point out, the unfi nished “Tom Sawyer’s Con- spiracy” includes a scene in which Tom goes to his aunt’s garret to fi nd “our old nigger-show things” and plan a “nigger” disguise (11–13, n.4). Mark Twain’s imaginative encounters with race seem to have been unavoidably bound up with blackface minstrelsy. Soon aft er leaving Hannibal for New York in 1853, Twain wrote his mother about free blacks in the North: “I reckon I had better black my face, for in these Eastern States niggers are considerably better than white people” (quoted in Bell 11).

30 . Guy Cardwell, Twins of Genius 105. I have benefi ted from Steven Mailloux’s discus- sion of this issue in Rhetorical Power 57–99 and from Forrest Robinson, In Bad Faith 111–211.

31 . Quoted in Fredrickson, Th e Black Image in the White Mind 102. Th is is the contradic- tory “other half ” of the image of the potent and frightening black male. Th ese two images, as John Blassingame observes, existed together in a kind of dialectical relationship, the one assuaging fears that the other raised. Both images certainly haunted the minstrel show. See Th e Slave Community 223–38, and, more generally, Fredrickson, Black Image 43–129.

257Notes to Pages 33–39

32 . Quoted in Fredrickson, Black Image 107. 33 . Delany quoted in Wilson Moses, Th e Golden Age of Black Nationalism 46; Douglass

quoted in Waldo Martin, Th e Mind of Frederick Douglass 235–36. 34 . Th is tradition includes R. P. Nevin, “Stephen C. Foster and Negro Minstrelsy”;

T. A. Brown, “Th e Origin of Negro Minstrelsy”; H. D. Stone, Personal Recollections of the Drama 240–41; Olive Logan, “Th e Ancestry of Brudder Bones”; N. M. Ludlow, Dramatic Life as I Found It 392–93; H. P. Phelps, Players of a Century 165–67; Brander Matthews, “Th e Rise and Fall of Negro Minstrelsy”; J. G. Burtnett, “National Elements in Stephen Foster’s Art”; Dailey Paskman and Sigmund Spaeth, “Gentlemen, Be Seated!”; and Carl Wittke, Tambo and Bones.

35 . Th is revived tradition includes M. H. Winter, “Juba and American Minstrelsy”; Ber- nard Wolfe, “Uncle Remus and the Malevolent Rabbit”; Frank Davidson, “Th e Rise, Devel- opment, Decline, and Infl uence of the American Minstrel Show”; Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke”; Kenneth Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor 100–111; Cecil Patterson, “A Diff erent Drum”; LeRoi Jones, Blues People 82–86; James Dorman, “Th e Strange Career of Jim Crow Rice” and “Shaping the Popular Image of Post-Reconstruction American Blacks”; Alan Green, “‘Jim Crow,’ ‘Zip Coon’”; Russell Nye, Th e Unembarrassed Muse 162–69, 308–15; Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance 244–301; Robert Toll, Blacking Up; Alexander Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology”; Charles Hamm, Yesterdays 109–40; Sylvia Wynter, “Sambos and Minstrels”; Sam Dennison, Scandalize My Name 27–186; Jean Baker, Aff airs of Party 213–43; William Van Deburg, Slavery and Race in American Popular Culture 17–24, 39–49; Joseph Boskin, Sambo 65–94; Robert Dawidoff , “Some of Th ose Days”; Houston Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance 17–24; David Roediger, Th e Wages of Whiteness 95–131; Jan Pieterse, White On Black 132–56; and Roger Abrahams, Singing the Master 131–53.

36 . Stuart Hall, “New Ethnicities” 28–29. 37 . Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn 26. Indeed, in Chants Democratic Sean Wilentz argues

that “the real object of scorn in these shows was less Jim Crow than the arriviste, would-be aristo—either the white interlocutor or the dandifi ed black, both parodies of unmerited self-satisfi ed condescension” (259). Wilentz names the right targets, but I would insist with David Roediger that class meanings were always imbricated with working-class racial feeling (“Labor” 294; Wages 123)—though not, to be sure, in simple or politically guaranteed ways, as I argue throughout.

38 . James Monroe Trotter, Music and Some Highly Musical People 271, 274. For more on the Georgia Minstrels, see Richard Waterhouse, From Minstrel Shows to Vaudeville 47–80.

39 . Douglass was acutely aware of this problem. On tour in England in 1846, he found himself relentlessly exoticized—minstrelized. As he wrote to an abolitionist friend: “It is quite an advantage to be a nigger here. I fi nd I am hardly black enough for British taste, but by keeping my hair as wooly as possible I make out to pass for at least half Negro at any rate” (quoted in Martin 116). Douglass’s wicked irony depends on the fact that he was, precisely, “half Negro”—born of a black mother and a white father.

40 . In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Harriet Jacobs’s escape to the shed where she would spend seven years is made in a blackface disguise; even “the father of [her] children” does not recognize her (437).

Chapter 2

1 . On minstrelsy’s northern aura and its threat to territory undergoing sectional tension (i.e., 1850s Kansas as well as the South), see Carl Wittke, Tambo and Bones 82–83.

258 Notes to Pages 40–43

2 . For a similar point regarding Hoagy Carmichael’s place in a twentieth-century com- mercial context, see Roger Hewitt, “Black Th rough White.” I have also found useful Cathe- rine Gallagher’s discussion of Marx’s analysis of the commodity in her review of Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking, and N. N. Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels, in addition to Bowlby and Feltes themselves.

3 . Berndt Ostendorf observes that “the lower class folk in Western society, and blacks among them, have served the dominant classes in two ways: fi rst in setting up the material basis of high civilization, second in healing the injuries of that civilization by maintaining alternative life styles and cultures” (77–78). Th e result, as John Szwed points out, is oft en that the dispossessed become bearers of the dominant classes’ “folk” culture (30).

4 . Th is is also the view of John Szwed, to whom I owe the coinage “minstrelization.” See “Race and the Embodiment of Culture.”

5 . Many scholars have made a strong case for the existence of an identifi able black cul- ture in the antebellum North, among them Leon Litwack, North of Slavery passim, esp. 187–213; Eileen Southern, Th e Music of Black Americans 53–59, 97–127; Th eodore Hersh- berg, “Free Blacks in Antebellum Philadelphia”; Dena Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals 127ff .; Ira Berlin, “Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society” 45–54 and “Th e Revolution in Black Life”; Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture 73–83, 141–46; and Shane White, Somewhat More Independent 92–106, 150–206.

6 . Th e fi rst verses of “Backside Albany,” also known as “Th e Siege of Plattsburg,” go as follows:

Back side Albany stan’ Lake Champlain, One little pond, half full a’ water Plattebug dare too, close pon de main, Town small—he grow bigger do hereater. On Lake Champlain Uncle Sam set he boat, An Massa M’Donough he sail ‘em; While Gen’ral M’Comb Make Plattebug he home, Wid de army, who courage nebber fail ’em.

On ’lebenth day of September In eighteen hund’ed an fourteen, Gubbener Probose, and he British soger, Come to Plattebug a tea party courtin; An he boat come too Arter Uncle Sam boat, Massa ’Donough do look sharp out de winder— Den Gen’ral M’Comb, (Ah! he always a home,) Catch fi re too, jis like a tinder.

Th e battle follows, in which General Sir George Prevost is very patriotically defeated, as indeed he was in the Battle of Plattsburg (1814). See William Mahar’s “‘Backside Albany’ and Early Blackface Minstrelsy” for this song and an analysis of it in regard to the battle it versifi es.

7 . Th ese words are Herbie Hancock’s, and he is talking about break dancing in the 1980s (36).

259Notes to Pages 46–51

8 . For accounts of the African Grove Th eatre see Simon Snipe, Sports of New York; George Odell, Annals of the New York Stage 3:34–37, 70–71; Roi Ottley and William Weath- erby, ed., Th e Negro in New York 72–73; Herbert Marshall and Mildred Stock, Ira Aldridge 28–47; Errol Hill, Shakespeare in Sable 11–16; and Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business 2:156–58.

9 . “Stump speeches” do appear to have grown out of white observation of black churches and black street oratory, other fairly common theaters of racial interaction. Whites were clearly nonplussed by black religious practices. In part because of its demon- strative character, black worship put whites in mind of secular culture. One observer noted that hymns “were lengthened out with long repetition choruses” and sung “in the merry chorus-manner of the southern fi eld harvest, or husking-frolic method of black slaves,” generally including the foot stomping and thigh slapping that invoked “negro dancing in Virginia”—the sort of Sunday morning vehemence, he wrote, that prematurely awakened neighboring white workingmen sleeping off a Saturday night binge (quoted in Nash, Forging 223).

10 . For a good sketch of Mathews in America, see Walter Blair, “Charles Mathews and His ‘A Trip to America’”; see also Sam Dennison, Scandalize My Name 505–14.

11 . For work on Pinkster, Election Day, and John Canoe festivities, see Edwin Olson, “Social Aspects of Slave Life in New York” 71–72; Eileen Southern, Th e Music of Black Americans 53–59; Lynne Emery, Black Dance 30–34, 140–45; Dena Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals 66–68; Ira Berlin, “Time, Space, and the Evolution of Afro-American Society” 53–54; Joseph Reidy, “‘Negro Election Day’”; James Eights, “Pinkster Festivities in Albany Sixty Years Ago”; Lorenzo Greene, Th e Negro in Colonial New England 245–48; Ira Reid, “Th e John Canoe Festival”; Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture 73–83, 142–44; Shane White, Somewhat More Independent 95–106; and Dale Cockrell, “Th e Early Blackface Minstrel and His World.”

12 . Not to mention of racial politics itself. Cincinnati, for example, home in the late 1830s and 1840s of Stephen Foster, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the humanitarian lecturer Alex- ander Kinmont, has the odd distinction of being simultaneously the promised land to which Eliza Harris escapes in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the composition site of Foster’s idyllic “Plantation Melodies.”

13 . See Mechal Sobel, Th e World Th ey Made Together, for evidence (in Virginia) of the kinds of interracial cultural practices that develop in conditions of extensive racial contact; see also Carter Woodson, “Th e Negroes of Cincinnati Prior to the Civil War” and Howard and Judith Sacks, “Way Up North in Dixie” 421–25.

14 . Th e crowning example is the work of Newman White. See “White Man in the Wood- pile” and American Negro Folk-Songs.

15 . Edward LeRoy Rice’s Monarchs of Minstrelsy, though oft en sketchy, is the most com- prehensive source for profi les of blackface performers.

16 . See Saxton’s “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology” 5–7, 15–16; see also Sax- ton’s “George Wilkes” for some of the other activities of the milieu that nourished blackface performers. Th ese articles have been incorporated into Saxton’s study Th e Rise and Fall of the White Republic.

17 . T. Allston Brown, History of the American Stage 202. 18 . Consider an 1844 song called “Polko Foco Poetics,” aimed at James K. Polk’s vice

president, G. M. Dallas, a longtime supporter of Nicholas Biddle’s Bank of the United States:

260 Notes to Pages 51–55

If dallas now turn anti Bank Or what the Loco Polkos axes, His next Jim Crowish, wheel about prank, May texas turn to doleful taxes! And dallas then by permutation, Will turn all-sad in this great nation.

( Kentucky 11)

For another reading of blackface as Democratic party ideology, see Jean Baker, Aff airs of Party 249–58.

19 . See the notable account of French bohemia by Arnold Hauser, Th e Social History of Art 4:189–93; see also Richard Miller, Bohemia 29–78.

20 . Morrison Foster, My Brother Stephen 83. In “Susanna,” “Jeanie,” and “Th e Old Folks at Home” William Austin disputes and complexifi es this claim (238–39).

21 . As J. S. Dwight’s Journal of Music put it: “In [the black’s] wild bursts of melody he seems to be giving utterance to that exultant liberty of soul which no chains can bind, and no oppression subdue . . . . Let us not be ashamed to learn the art of happiness from the poor bondman at the South” (“Songs” 51).

22 . Th at this feeling was a little more than business as usual is indicated by the following blackface verse, in which a black man seems to acknowledge the surplus value being gener- ated from expropriated black practices:

[Jim] gwan to de Bowery to see Rice a actin, He tink he act de brack man much better dan de white ’un . . . [Rice] cut de pigeon wing, an he do de handsome ting, Wheel about and turn about, an’ bring de money in.

(“De New York Nigger,” De Susannah 74)

Th is subtly acknowledged guilt suggests a certain amount of unexpected self-consciousness on the part of the expropriators.

23 . In Across the Atlantic (1851) John Delaware Lewis observes that young men wishing to be comical would greet others on the street with an imitation of “the peculiar chuckle of the sable race” they had learned from the minstrel show (22). I am grateful to Bluford Adams for bringing this to my attention. Elizabeth Blackmar has suggested to me that this appropriation of black masculinity may also have allowed imaginary access to black women apart from white men’s assumed prerogative of rape, providing an outlet for white male desire not fully accounted for by stereotypes of black female “looseness.” I thank her for this suggestive notion, to which I return intermittently in part II.

24 . Revising René Girard’s triangulated model of heterosexual desire in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel —in which men fi ghting over a woman engage in a more intense bond than either of the men share with the woman—and drawing on Gayle Rubin’s reaccentuation (in “Th e Traffi c in Women”) of an anthropological tradition that views women as objects of exchange in a male economy, Eve Sedgwick explores some of the ways men maintain patriarchal domination by bonding through mediating women. “Homosocial” bonds are those heterosexual, homophobic relations that consolidate men’s interests. But, as we shall see, homosocial and homosexual desire are, in Sedgwick’s words, “remarkably cognate” (“Beast” 246). See Between Men 1–27.

In the minstrel show, as will become clear, this dynamic extended in several directions. In addition to the traffi c in women eff ected by minstrelsy’s “wench” characters, white male

261Notes to Pages 55–58

bonding occurred over the bodies of black men as well. Th is homosocial bonding was, oddly, mediated by white men’s appropriations of “black” maleness—a peculiar kind of traffi c in black men.

25 . Quoted in Robert Toll, Blacking Up 142; see also the New York Clipper September 20, 1873, on the “songstress” Ernest Linden, as well as Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests 275–81.

26 . For the best account of Elvis’s racial contradictions, see Greil Marcus, Mystery Train 141–209; see also George Lipsitz, Class and Culture in Cold-War America 195–225. An acute reading of 1950s intellectual white-Negroism can be found in Andrew Ross, No Respect 65–101; see also Steve Shoemaker, “Norman Mailer’s ‘White Negro.’” White-Negroism ap- pears particularly to have affl icted the many Irish-American men who became minstrel performers; indeed, Mailer’s essay is a sort of extension of this ethnic subtext. Th ere is, as Werner Sollors has observed, a long tradition in America of ethnic artists fi guring them- selves or other “white” ethnicities as black (or Native American) (“Literature” 656). If in the twentieth century, as Mailer’s essay implicitly suggests, the men most identifi ed—and most in confl ict—with African-Americans have been American Jews, in antebellum America the Irish had a similar relationship to “blackness.” I outline this history in chapter 4 ; we need only note here the extensive Irish investment in early minstrelsy, including performers such as Dan Bryant, Dan Emmett, Joel Walker Sweeney, and E. P. Christy—a tradition inherited by Jewish men from Al Jolson and George Gershwin to bebopper Mezz Mezzrow, some of the Beat writers, and Lou Reed, whose “I Wanna Be Black” (1978) may be taken as a provi- sional, self-conscious end point (but not the end) of this tradition. For a brilliant analysis of the surplus symbolic value generated by Jews out of black culture, see Michael Rogin, “Blackface, White Noise.”

27 . In his attributing agency to the blackface artist and leaving “negro melody” disem- bodied and uncopyrighted, and in the language of cost accounting, one senses here as else- where that Hutton and other such writers would prefer that the question remain open. See also Charley White, “Origin of Negro Minstrelsy.”

28 . Th is discussion owes much to Edward Said, Beginnings chap. 2, and to J. F. Lyotard’s refl ections on the function of “legitimating narratives” ( Postmodern 18–20). Th e many ac- counts of the rise of minstrelsy, some briefer than others, include “Origins of Jim Crow”; James Kennard, “Who Are Our Negro Poets?” 332; F. C. Wemyss, Th eatrical Biography 178–79 and Th eatrical Biography of Eminent Actors 122; G. W. Curtis, “Editorial Notes” 572; “Letter from a Teacher at the South”; “E. P. Christy: Originator of Ethiopian Minstrelsy”; Sol Smith, Th e Th eatrical Journey 53; “Obituary, Not Eulogistic”; R. P. Nevin, “Stephen C. Foster” 608–9; T. A. Brown, History of the American Stage 310 and “Th e Origin of Negro Min- strelsy”; H. D. Stone, Personal Recollections 240–41; Olive Logan, “Ancestry of Brudder Bones”; H. P. Phelps, Players of a Century 166–67; Noah Ludlow, Dramatic Life as I Found It 392–93; E. S. Conner, “An Old Actor’s Memories”; J. J. Jennings, Th eatrical and Circus Life 368; Walter Leman, Memories of an Old Actor 92; Laurence Hutton, “Th e Negro on the Stage”; E. L. Rice, Monarchs of Minstrelsy 7–10; M. B. Leavitt, Fift y Years in Th eatrical Man- agement 23–24; Brander Matthews, “Th e Rise and Fall of Negro Minstrelsy” 755; Arthur Hornblow, A History of the Th eater in America 2:107ff .

29 . “Negro Minstrelsy—Ancient and Modern” 72. 30 . I have been inspired here by the art historian T. J. Clark, who has read mid–

nineteenth-century French painting through “symptomatic” analyses of its contempora- neous critics, and in this way—by a kind of historical ethnography—reconstructed the

262 Notes to Pages 58–63

concerns of an art form’s “public.” Clark makes an analogy with Freudian theory: if the unconscious is visible only in slips, silences, and (in)admissions in conscious life, so the political unconscious of the public, though usually hidden by offi cial representations that are made of it in the discourse of the critic, can erupt out of gaps in this discourse:

Like the analyst listening to his patient, what interests us, if we want to discover the [public], are the points at which the rational monotone of the critic breaks, fails, falters; we are interested in the phenomena of obsessive repetition, repeated irrele- vance, anger suddenly discharged—the points where the criticism is incomprehen- sible are the keys to its comprehension. Th e public, like the unconscious, is present only where it ceases; yet it determines the structure of private discourse; it is the key to what cannot be said, and no subject is more important. ( Image 12)

Clark’s remarks are evidently (though not explicitly) based on Pierre Macherey’s Th eory of Literary Production, to which I am also indebted. See Richard Dyer’s Heavenly Bodies for a similar practice of reconstructing the racial and sexual discourses in which, for example, movie stars become intelligible.

31 . I mean, of course, to imply again the threatening alternatives of intermixture and insurrection in my formulation of minstrel-show origin narrative paradigms. I am using a model of narrative analysis that has been developed out of a long tradition of Marxist the- ories of mediation by scholars associated with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, most notably Stuart Hall (see, for instance, Hall et al., ed., Resistance Th rough Rituals 9–74); see also Fredric Jameson, “Reifi cation and Utopia in Mass Culture” and Th e Political Unconscious 77–80. Drawing on the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss in Struc- tural Anthropology, these theorists suggest that the function of cultural forms is not only to mediate but symbolically or “magically” to resolve lived social contradictions.

32 . “Negro Minstrelsy—Ancient and Modern” 73–74; see also New York Herald January 6, 1848.

33 . Marx writes:

Could commodities themselves speak, they would say: “Our use-value may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of us as objects. What, however, does belong to us as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each other we are nothing but exchange-values.” ( Capital 83)

And Dreiser:

Fine clothes to her were a vast persuasion; they spoke tenderly and Jesuitically for themselves. When she came within earshot of their pleading, desire in her bent a willing ear. Th e voice of the so-called inanimate! Who shall translate for us the language of the stones?

“My dear,” said the lace collar she secured from Partridge’s, “I fi t you beautifully; don’t give me up.”

“Ah, such little feet,” said the leather of the soft new shoes; “how eff ectively I cover them. What a pity they should ever want my aid.” (75)

What allows commodities to talk is precisely their exchange value; it is this that masks their social character as labor and gives them a life of their own. Under slavery the opposite happens: self-owning human beings become voiceless things, pure socioeconomic values. “Lending oneself ” occupies a strange middle ground between the two, suggesting both self-ownership

263Notes to Pages 63–71

and an invitation to self-enslavement, particularly given the uses to which Cuff ’s loan is put. It is in any case Nevin’s ambivalence toward black labor that is represented here, for he is com- fortable with neither slavery nor free labor; this ambivalence accounts for the shift ing displace- ments going on in his narrative.

34 . Carolyn Karcher has argued forcefully that the confi dence man’s race is fi nally a riddle, that Melville’s manipulations leave us no way of knowing whether he is “really” white (here in blackface) or black. While her argument is generally persuasive, and I agree with Karcher that the issue of slavery is at the heart of Th e Confi dence-Man, the specifi c implica- tions of blackface are central to Black Guinea’s fi rst appearance; in the sixth chapter Melville himself invokes the minstrel show, and it is only later that race is successively destabilized. Th is fact hardly calls Karcher’s point into question; indeed, it is probably central to it. See Karcher, Shadow over the Promised Land 186–257.

35 . Eric Sundquist links Melville’s view of benevolence to abolitionism in “Benito Cereno and New World Slavery” 102.

Chapter 3

1 . Th e title of Lippard’s last novel was New York: Its Upper Ten and Lower Million (1853). Huyssen’s term comes from his study Aft er the Great Divide. For gendered accounts of the divide that have infl uenced the shape of my project, see Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman”; Tania Modleski, “Th e Terror of Pleasure”; and Ann Douglas, Th e Feminization of American Culture.

2 . George Rehin, “Th e Darker Image” 371. For a similar argument, see Albert McLean, American Vaudeville as Ritual.

3 . “Pompey’s Rambles,” White’s New Book of Plantation Melodies 15–16; see also “Broad- way Song,” Buckley’s Song Book for the Parlor 43, and “Coney Island,” Budsworth’s New Comic Ethiopian Songster 54.

4 . Quoted in David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled 52–53. 5 . See Bruce McConachie, “Th e Th eatre of Edwin Forrest.” Forrest, a great fan of min-

strelsy, was also certainly one of the fi rst to “black up”—as “Cuff , a Kentucky negro,” in Cincinnati in 1823 (Rice 23).

6 . For accounts of the Astor Place rioting, see the New York Herald May 11, 1849; “Opin- ions of the Press on the Late Occurrences in Astor Place,” New York Herald May 16, 1849; William Northall, Before and Behind the Curtain 123–51; Alvin Harlow, Old Bowery Days 323–332; Richard Moody, Th e Astor Place Riot; David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled 68–74; Peter Buckley, To the Opera House 3–83 (quotation at 20); and Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/ Lowbrow 63–68.

7 . For this diversity, see, among others, Richard Stott, Workers in the Metropolis 37–67, 214–16, and Buckley, To the Opera House 147, 294–409.

8 . See Buckley, To Th e Opera House 346–53, 370–76; Stott, Workers in the Metropolis 222–29, 247–76. Erik Olin Wright’s Classes is to date the best theoretical discussion of class. Wright makes a distinction between class structure and class formation. “Class structure refers to the structure of social relations into which individuals (or, in some cases, families) enter which determine their class interests” (9). “Class formation . . . refers to the formation of organized collectivities within that class structure on the basis of the interests shaped by that class structure” (10). Classes, then, “have a structural existence which is irreducible to the kinds of collective organizations which develop historically (class formations), the class

264 Notes to Pages 71–73

ideologies held by individuals and organizations (class consciousness) or the forms of con- fl ict engaged in by individuals as class members or by class organizations (class struggle), and . . . such class structures impose basic constraints on these other elements in the con- cept of class” (28).

My concern is minstrelsy’s role in antebellum class formation. I am assuming that struc- turally the minstrel show was at all times part of a class-infl ected culture which began to emerge aft er 1830 and which underwent an increasing separation from the dominant cul- ture; and that while the people who made up minstrelsy’s audiences oft en employed a pop- ulist language of the “industrious” or “producing” classes to describe themselves, they nevertheless had a sense of belonging to this class-infl ected culture. By class formation, then, I mean the ways minstrelsy participated in or redirected class confl ict or contributed shift ing languages of race for such confl ict.

9 . F. C. Wemyss, Th eatrical Biography; or, Th e Life of An Actor and Manager 178–79. 10 . Journal of Music September 17, 1853, 191. Wrote the New York Tribune: “We may be at

fault in comprehending the sinuosities of a score, and quite out in our majors and minors, but we would not exchange the profound reverence with which a Yorker receives ‘Lilly Dale,’ or ‘Woodman Spare that Tree,’ or ‘Th e Old Folks at Home,’ as, in some sort, a stammering utterance of his best hopes and sweetest reminiscences, for all the sensuous and deliques- cent raptures of southern shores” (“Popular” 99).

William Austin notes that these lines appear in Walt Whitman’s “Salut au Monde!” as it stood from 1856 to 1876: “[T]he Virginia plantation chorus of negroes of a harvest night . . . the strong baritone of the ‘long-shoremen of Manahatta .  .  . the stevedores unlading the cargoes, and singing” (63)—a series whose associations clearly depend on those of the min- strel show, particularly as it moves from slaves to white workingmen, with perhaps a hint of the interracial character of dockwork.

11 . For a similar point, see David Roediger, Th e Wages of Whiteness 110, 116. 12 . It is time, one would think, to put the somnolent idea of American exceptionalism to

bed. Recent labor historians have certainly demonstrated striking class parallels between the American and European contexts. Indeed, in Prisoners of the American Dream Mike Davis pointedly argues that, far from being a fundamental American essence, the lack of class consciousness relative to that of Europe has actually been temporarily created—and then, with a vengeance, undone again—at various historical junctures, most recently in the “failure of the labor movements of the 1930s and 1940s to unify the American working class on either the economic or the political planes” (8). Th is history might also account for the veneration of the idea of American exceptionalism by the cold war generation of U.S. intel- lectuals. For a fi rst-rate discussion of this matter, see Eric Foner, “Why Is Th ere No So- cialism in America?”

13 . Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium 42; see also the fascinating account of the origins of “boss” in Roediger, Th e Wages of Whiteness 50–54.

14 . Stuart Blumin, “Th e Hypothesis of Middle-Class Formation” 313–16. 15 . I have drawn most on the following sources for these historical developments: Herbert

Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America 3–78; David Montgomery, “Th e Shuttle and the Cross”; Paul Faler, “Cultural Aspects of the Industrial Revolution”; Alan Dawley, Class and Community; Dawley and Faler, “Working-Class Culture and Politics in the Industrial Revolution”; Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium; Susan Hirsch, Roots of the American Working Class; Bruce Laurie, “‘Nothing on Compulsion,’” Working People of Philadelphia, and Artisans into Workers 15–112; Edward Spann, Th e New Metropolis; David

265Notes to Pages 73–77

Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers 1–17, 48–99; Mary Blewett, “Work, Gender, and the Artisan Tradition in New England Shoemak- ing”; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic 23–142; Steven Ross, Workers on the Edge 3–192; Stu- art Blumin, “Th e Hypothesis of Middle-Class Formation”; Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles 263–79, 293–344; Amy Bridges, “Becoming American”; Christine Stansell, City of Women 43–62; Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent; Richard Stott, Workers in the Me- tropolis; and Patricia Cline Cohen, “Unregulated Youth.”

16 . In “Ideology and Race in American History” Barbara Fields concurs that a new dis- course of race was a result of “the unfolding of bourgeois social relations” generally (152). But for a “prehistory” of working-class whiteness, see Roediger, Th e Wages of Whiteness 31–36.

17 . See, among others, Bernard Mandel, Labor 65–70; Leon Litwack, North of Slavery 158–68; John Runcie, “‘Hunting the Nigs’” 197, 203; Leonard Richards, “Gentlemen of Prop- erty and Standing” 151–55; Emma Jones Lapsansky, “‘Since Th ey Got Th ose Separate Churches’” 61; Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia 63–66, 156–58; Paul Gilje, Th e Road to Mobocracy 165–66; and Iver Bernstein, Th e New York City Draft Riots 27–31.

18 . Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City 105–6; Litwack, North of Slavery 162–66; Richard Slotkin, Th e Fatal Environment 149; Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles 267; Dale Knobel, Paddy and the Republic 88–103; Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness 133–163. I pursue this equation in chapters 4 and 6 .

Minstrel skits portrayed the Irish in terms identical to those in which they portrayed blacks; see, for example, “Paddy Conner’s College,” Billy Birch’s Ethiopian Melodist 11.

19 . In Th e Politics and Poetics of Transgression Peter Stallybrass and Allon White insist that discourses and discursive hierarchies owe much to the specifi c social locations or ideo- logical topography in which they are produced (194–95).

20 . Th eodore Schank, “Th e Bowery Th eatre” 282; Elliott Gorn, Th e Manly Art 133–34; Neil Harris, Humbug 40–41; Stott, Workers in the Metropolis 212–35, 242–46.

21 . Recent labor historians have elaborated the ways in which the American working class reworked republican principles, descended from Enlightenment fi gures such as Tom Paine, into an “artisan republican” rhetoric designed to resist the emerging capitalist order. Broadly speaking, this scholarship includes Alfred Young, Th e Democratic Republicans of New York; Edward Pessen, Most Uncommon Jacksonians; Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revo- lutionary America; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic; and much of the work cited in note 15.

22 . I am, of course, invoking one of the central ideas of Edmund Morgan’s American Slavery—American Freedom, a profound work of paramount importance to my own. David Roediger, “‘Labor in White Skin,’” and Stanley Aronowitz, “Writing Labor’s History,” off er useful sustained critiques of the new labor history; both argue the inextricability of white workingmen’s freedom and American slavery and racism. Th is view has begun to be sub- stantiated by, among others, Richard Slotkin, Th e Fatal Environment; Alexander Saxton, Th e Rise and Fall of the White Republic; and Roediger, Th e Wages of Whiteness.

23 . Charles Haywood, “Negro Minstrelsy and Shakespearean Burlesque” 86 (quotes Hamlet parody); Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow 11–82; Ray B. Browne, “Shakespeare in Ameri- can Vaudeville and Negro Minstrelsy” 382 and “Shakespeare in the Nineteenth- Century Song- sters” 215–18; Tilden Edelstein, “Othello in America” 187–88; William Mahar, “Ethiopian Skits and Sketches” 248–54; Gary Engle, ed., Th is Grotesque Essence. In addition to Peter Buckley’s To the Opera House 3–409, Robert Allen, Horrible Prettiness 51–76 and Bruce McConachie, Melodramatic Formations 65–155 off er fi ne accounts of antebellum theatrical culture.

266 Notes to Pages 78–85

24 . Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia 55. 25 . For studies of the saloon in nineteenth-century working-class life, see Jill Seigel

Dodd, “Th e Working Classes and the Temperance Movement in Antebellum Boston”; Jon Kingsdale, “Th e ‘Poor Man’s Club’”; Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will 35–64; Gorn, Th e Manly Art 133–36; and Stott, Workers in the Metropolis 217–222.

26 . For accounts of Walsh’s career, see Robert Ernst, “Th e One and Only Mike Walsh”; Wilentz, Chants Democratic 326–35; Saxton, “George Wilkes”; and Roediger, Th e Wages of Whiteness 75–77. Th e Free-Soilers, said Walsh, were “traitors who, at a pepper-and-salt convention, held in Buff alo in 1848, fraternized, with pertinacious assumption of well- dissembled sincerity, with disappointed and disloyal Whigs, rampant Abolitionists, and long-heeled Negroes, pampered by the traitorous artifi ces of demagogues, whose hearts and purposes were blacker than the faces of the poor dupes they were deluding in doing so” (quoted in Ernst, “Walsh” 60–61).

27 . Th is decline is implied, for instance, in Constance Rourke’s essay on Barnum in Trumpets of Jubilee 276–319. For earlier incarnations of the museum in America, see Th omas Bender, New York Intellect 47, 83–87.

28 . In “P. T. Barnum’s Double Bind,” Richard Herskowitz argues that Barnum’s typically outrageous publicity foregrounded advertising itself as a kind of “metamessage,” recon- ciling spectators to the deceptions being worked upon them: “Barnum’s oeuvre operated to carry the spectator away from the frustration of events that were falsely advertised, towards an identifi cation with the process of advertising” (139)—and, by implication, with Barnum himself, who candidly shared the mechanisms of his “humbugs.” Spectators’ feelings of being “insiders,” undeceived yet intrigued by the enormity of false claims, were bought with capitulation to the advertising that nonetheless manipulated them.

29 . M. R. Werner, Barnum 204. Apparently it was not Barnum but black showmen who invented this trick. Ira Berlin observes that 1790s Baltimore was a hotbed of black entertain- ment enterprises: Robert Wilson, a free Negro, paid one dollar to hold a three-month ex- hibit; a license was granted to a “Negro Rope Dancer”; and permission was given to exhibit “a Negro turned White as a Show” ( Slaves 62).

30 . Lydia Maria Child’s “Mary French and Susan Easton” (1834) also instances the pecu- liar attraction antebellum whites had to fantasies of racial transmutation. Mary is kid- napped, stained black, and sold into slavery; the climactic moment comes when her weeping washes the black away, triumphantly revealing her unbesmirched identity. I am indebted to Karen Sanchez-Eppler’s fi ne analysis of this story in “Bodily Bonds” 36, 38–39.

31 . For the mulatto fi gure as a fi ctional device of racial mediation, see Werner Sollors, “Literature and Ethnicity” 656; Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood 88–91, 171–73; and Mary Dearborn, Pocahontas’s Daughters 131–58.

32 . Alexander Saxton, “Problems of Class and Race” 232–33. 33 . Walt Whitman, Uncollected Poetry and Prose 1:236. For the 1858 remark, and for more

on Whitman and race, see Daniel Aaron, Th e Unwritten War 59–62. 34 . William Austin, “Susanna,” “Jeanie,” and “Th e Old Folks at Home” 61; Walt Whitman,

Uncollected Poetry and Prose 1:236; Eric Foner, “Racial Attitudes of the New York Free Soil- ers” 92. See also Joseph Jay Rubin, Th e Historic Whitman 278–86 and passim; this chapter’s epigraph is quoted at 279.

35 . New York Mirror December 29, 1832. 36 . Here as elsewhere Peter Buckley’s To the Opera House has been indispensable (139–61).

267Notes to Pages 85–90

37 . T. Allston Brown, History of the New York Stage 1:284. 38 . Antebellum volunteer fi re companies approximated gangs or fraternal organizations

as much as fi re-fi ghting units. Sporting names such as Lady Washington and Old Maid, they not only involved themselves in party politics but also engaged in intense intercom- pany confl ict, oft en neglecting a raging fi re to combat or sabotage a rival company in the street. For work on the fi re companies, see Lowell Limpus, History of the New York Fire Department; Alvin Harlow, Old Bowery Days 201–15; Bruce Laurie, “Fire Companies and Gangs in Southwark”; and Richard Stott, Workers in the Metropolis 229–31.

39 . For accounts of Mose and the Bowery milieu generally, see George Foster, New York in Slices 43–47 and New York by Gas-Light 101–9; William Bobo, Glimpses of New York 162–67; Charles Haswell, Reminiscences of an Octogenarian 270–71; Harlow, Old Bowery Days 190–215; Richard Dorson, “Mose the Far-Famed and World-Renowned”; John Jentz, “Artisans, Evan- gelicals, and the City” 238–55; Buckley, To the Opera House 294–409; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic 257–71; Christine Stansell, City of Women 89–100; Elliott Gorn, Th e Manly Art 129–36; David Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance 463–66; Stott, Workers in the Metropolis 222–29; and Luc Sante, Low Life.

40 . Alexander Saxton also notes the overlapping of class and racial concerns in the blackface version of Mose. See “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology” 9–11. Jules Zanger, “Th e Minstrel Show as Th eater of Misrule,” makes a similar point but parcels out class and racial satire to diff erent characters—the haughty interlocutor and the black endmen—and thus to some extent simplifi es their meaning.

41 . “Wake Up, Mose!” M. Campbell, Wood’s Minstrels’ Songs 25; White’s New Illustrated Melodeon Songbook 72; White’s New Book of Plantation Melodies 24. See also “Th e Fireman’s Boy,” Beadles Dime Song Book No. 3 34. A daguerreotype of T. Prendergast and Dan Bryant (c. 1850–56) shows the two in full blackface “b’hoyisme”—cocked stogeys, canes, stovepipe hats (Harvard Th eatre Collection).

42 . Th is was not an unusual occurrence; there are other recorded instances of black in- volvement in minstrelsy this early in its history. Francis Johnson, a prominent black Phila- delphia composer and bandleader, made an arrangement of the minstrel tune “Dandy Jim,” and apparently performed it with a (probably white) Mr. Creely, “the celebrated Negro Mel- odist,” in 1844. Eileen Southern speculates further that Johnson may have had direct contact with Dan Emmett’s Virginia Minstrels, as the title page of Johnson’s arrangement suggests. See Southern, “Black Musicians and Early Ethiopian Minstrelsy” 80 and Th e Music of Black Americans 107–10.

43 . New York Herald May 12, 1849. 44 . Gorn, Th e Manly Art 140–44 and “‘Good-Bye Boys’” 403, 409; Stansell, City of

Women 89–101; and Stott, Workers in the Metropolis 253–56, 270–76. 45 . As I have noted, Eve Sedgwick defi nes homosocial bonds as heterosexual, homo-

phobic relations between men, mediated by women, which consolidate men’s interests. Because homosocial and homosexual desire are closely related, however, there is built in to homosocial bonds a constant sexual instability and consequent defensiveness with farreach- ing implications. See Sedgwick, “Th e Beast in the Closet,” for an analysis of this dynamic in Victorian fi ction. I am also relying here on Louis Althusser’s account of ideology. Th e func- tion of ideology, says Althusser, is to represent (actually to mis represent) the subject’s relation to his or her lived conditions of existence. It is thus an “imaginary” relation (in the Lacanian rather than the simply “false” sense), one that takes place in a realm of “misrecognition.”

268 Notes to Pages 90–96

Since the minstrel show was tantamount to an “ideological state apparatus,” an institution with specifi c material rituals that produced (oft en contradictory) ideologies of race, class, and gender, this account of ideology is helpful in thinking about the ways white men’s rela- tion to black men was structured by the minstrel show in this period. See Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy 127–86.

46 . Th e genesis of these concerns owed in part to the massive migrations of roving young workingmen to the city in the years of minstrelsy’s greatest popularity. Country boys (and immigrant men) fl ed the commercial and cultural constrictions they had inherited and landed in towns and cities, where they lodged in boardinghouses, drank in saloons, and generally constituted an alarming new presence beyond the pale of conventional morality— at least according to moral reformers. As he was constructed by the most popular reformers (Henry Ward Beecher, John Todd, Sylvester Graham, O. S. Fowler), this endangered and dangerous species of young man was defi ned by an illicit attention to his own body which threatened to rend the body politic. One need not submit to the reformers’ valuation of this phenomenon to allow the general validity of their perception. See Carroll Smith-R osenberg, Disorderly Conduct 79–108; Allan Horlick, Country Boys and Merchant Princes; Stuart Blumin, “Mobility and Change in Ante-Bellum Philadelphia” and “Residential Mobility Within the Nineteenth-Century City”; Richard Stott, “Th e Geography of Gender in Nineteenth-Century America”; and Sam Bass Warner, Th e Private City 49–78.

Chapter 4

1 . Th is story has been told best in Perry Miller’s wonderful study Th e Raven and the Whale.

2 . I am indebted to T. J. Clark’s suggestive use of this essay in his discussion of the French café concert in Th e Painting of Modern Life 216–17. Gramsci’s term “national-popular” is an analytical device of variable defi nition in the Prison Notebooks. Politically it was developed to conceptualize the ways in which the fascist ascendancy in Italy might be combated, not by directly seizing power (which was impossible) but by securing a cross-class alliance in a mass party that would contest its hegemony—a transitional stage ultimately leading to socialist de- mocracy. Culturally it sought to articulate elements of an indigenous culture to a national will or mass desire for historical change. My use of the term emphasizes this connection between indigenous cultural forms and political formations—between, in particular, vernacular ele- ments and the idea of the nation—though it will become clear how many contradictions ac- crue to such a notion in the American context. Th at, indeed, is one reason for my use of it. See Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings 196–286, and David Forgacs, “National-Popular.”

3 . Eliot, however, might have; in a deeply felt moment he said that his “nigger drawl” owed to his closeness to his native St. Louis. See Terence Hawkes, Th at Shakespeherian Rag 86.

4 . For a similar point, see Andrew Ross, “Ballots, Bullets, or Batmen” 41–44. 5 . See the essays in Tony Bennett et al., Popular Culture and Social Relations. I take this

particular emphasis from Bennett’s essay “Th e Politics of ‘the Popular’” 8, 19. 6 . For a theoretical inquiry into the problem of constructing “indigeneity,” see Bill

Ashcroft , Gareth Griffi ths, and Helen Tiffi n, Th e Empire Writes Back 133–45; see also Timo- thy Brennan, “Th e National Longing for Form,” and Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation.”

7 . Anderson links the rise of both the newspaper and the novel to the formation of na- tional self-consciousness (28–40). See also Alexander Saxton, “Problems of Class and Race in the Origins of the Mass Circulation Press.”

269Notes to Pages 97–100

8 . Charles Hamm, Yesterdays 115; Hans Nathan, Dan Emmett 159–88, 194–213, 70–97; Robert McDowell, “Bones and the Man”; Marshall Stearns and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance 49–54; M. H. Winter, “Juba and American Minstrelsy” 42. Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, of course, have insisted on the “mulatto” character of American culture for a generation or more. See partic- ularly Murray, Th e Omni-Americans, but also Ellison, Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory.

9 . It might be noted here that many scholars’ overattention to textual evidence— primarily songsters (without music), in eff ect written “scores” for interactive aff airs of performance—has skewed their view both of minstrelsy’s inauthenticity and of the varied eff ects minstrelsy might have produced in antebellum audiences. My attention to other media in addition to print is an attempt to redress this imbalance.

10 . Th ere was indeed a peculiar unevenness in whites’ appropriations of black material, resulting in an art in which black dances survived relatively intact even amid the burlesque of the lyrics. Th e question is why the racist fi lter did not produce a more uniform parody of all the “black” elements. My own feeling is that this is evidence, again, of the contradictory relationship whites had to black people and to black culture.

11 . For a survey of the debates on the origins of black secular (and religious) music, see Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness 19–30.

12 . Herbert Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society 59; Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom 76 and Life and Times 54.

13 . Th e former song can be found in Th e Negro Forget-Me-Not Songster 33, and the latter is mentioned in Carl Wittke, Tambo and Bones 224; Wittke lists Irish-nationalist titles at 200. On the Irish-black identifi cation in Harrigan and Hart, see Robert Toll, Blacking Up 247, 249. A song called “Th e Darkey’s Lament,” according to one 1847 playbill, was a parody of “Th e Irish Emigrant’s Lament” (Winans, “Minstrel-Show” 72).

14 . Michael Feldberg, Th e Turbulent Era 44–45, 50–51; John Runcie, “‘Hunting the Nigs’” 199–200; Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia 124–25; and David Roediger, Th e Wages of Whiteness 133–137.

15 . See Osofsky’s excellent “Abolitionists, Irish Immigrants, and the Dilemmas of Romantic Nationalism,” as well as Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City 153, and Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles 263. For the best exposition of the contradictions that faced the attempted abolitionist—working-class alliance in these years, see Eric Foner, “Ab- olitionism and the Labor Movement in Ante-Bellum America.” See also chapters 5 and 6 .

16 . As I noted earlier, a similar argument might be made for the twentieth-century Jew- ish involvement in black culture, from minstrelsy to jazz. See Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers 562–63; Michael Rogin, “Blackface, White Noise” and “Making America Home”; and Charles Musser, “Ethnicity, Role-Playing, and American Film Comedy.” In addition, see Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City 135–37, 181–84, and David Roediger’s splendid account of the making of working-class Irish “whiteness” in Th e Wages of White- ness 133–63. Th ere was, to be sure, plenty of anti-Irish nativism registered in the minstrel show (though even this could in certain cases be a strategy of Irish “Americanization”). Consider this verse from “Old Paddy Whack” (early 1850s):

Dan [O’Connell] scolds de Yankee’s wid a big fi gger, Kase dey take care ob us poor nigger, But slave holders am not worse by smash, Dan he dat fobs de repealer’s cash.

( Negro 91–92)

270 Notes to Pages 100–105

See Robert Toll, Blacking Up 175–80, for a review of minstrelsy’s shift ing portrayals of the Irish.

17 . “Dem Niggers am Dead an Gone,” White’s New Illustrated Melodeon Songbook 59. 18 . William Austin, “Susanna,” “Jeanie,” and “Th e Old Folks at Home” 44; see also the

Journal of Music ’s equation of minstrelsy with national music (“National” 140). As one blackface songster put it, the cry of America’s lack of a native music was “tauntingly reiter- ated, until our countrymen found a triumphant, vindicating apollo in the genius of E. P. Christy.” Christy’s Plantation Melodies No. 4 v.

19 . New York Herald November 1, 1842. 20 . As I observed in chapter 1 , Stowe’s Uncle Tom and Stephen Foster’s sentimental

slaves, the former arguably “radical” and the latter oft en reactionary, are as types nearly in- distinguishable. Th e point is that the type had publicly emerged for the fi rst time; what remained to be fought out were its political meanings. See William Stanton, Th e Leopard’s Spots; William Gossett, Race 54–83; George Fredrickson, Th e Black Image in the White Mind 51–164; and Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny 116–57.

21 . See also Broadway Journal July 12, 1845, 13–14. Imagine patrician diarist George Temple- ton Strong’s dismay when at Castle Garden, “instead of the accustomed orchestra, out came fi ve hideous savages with black faces, who called themselves Nigger Serenaders, and began singing something about Miss Juliana Johnson” (Lawrence 372). Mid-twentieth- century British observers called on the very same equations to criticize the deluge of American mass- cultural products—equations by then about a century old. See Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light 45–76.

22 . I am indebted to Bruce Franklin’s provocative discussion of this article, and of the relation of black arts to America’s national culture, in Th e Victim as Criminal and Artist 73–123. Franklin’s book had a formative infl uence on my project.

23 . I have lift ed this apt phrase from Berndt Ostendorf, Black Literature in White America 67. 24 . “Negro Minstrelsy in London” 67. 25 . Robert Faner, Walt Whitman and Opera 40; Walt Whitman, An American Primer 24. 26 . Bayard Taylor, Eldorado 275. Th e famed American pianist and composer Louis

Moreau Gottschalk wrote in 1853 a Grand National Symphony, which, performed solo as American Reminiscence or National Glory, included quotations of “Oh! Susanna” and “Old Folks at Home,” perhaps the beginning of those tunes’ lengthy middle-class institutionali- zation as national exemplars—and, simultaneously, of “black” culture’s recruitment as an American “folk” culture. See William Austin, “Susanna,” “Jeanie,” and “Th e Old Folks at Home” 22. For interesting treatments of the minstrel show in diff erent national contexts, see Dale Cockrell, “Of Gospel Hymns, Minstrel Shows, and Jubilee Singers”; George Rehin, “Blackface Street Minstrels in Victorian London”; Simon Frith, “Playing with Real Feeling”; Michael Pickering, “White Skin, Black Masks”; J. S. Bratton, “English Ethiopians”; and Richard Waterhouse, From Minstrel Show to Vaudeville.

27 . Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings 349. Th e “historical origin” or “artistic aspect” of cultural material, Gramsci wrote of popular music, matters less than that a certain group of people has adopted it because it “conform[s] to their way of thinking and feeling” ( Cultural 195). In this sphere of popular counterfeits, as Tony Bennett argues in “Marxism and Popular Fiction,” nothing matters but the way certain artifacts momentarily secure their adherents and inspire various popular formations.

28 . By contrast, very little cultural appropriation took place in the written form of the slave narrative. Mattie Griffi th’s fraudulent 1857 slave narrative, Autobiography of a Female

271Notes to Pages 105–118

Slave (by a planter’s daughter), is a rare exception. Even if we include Harriet Beecher Stowe’s work as an example of such appropriation—her use, for example, of the slave narra- tives of Henry Bibb and Josiah Henson in writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin —suffi ce it to say that this was a second-order attempt at cultural incorporation, a kind that was far less pervasive than the formal consequences of minstrelsy, which, as we shall see, infl uenced the stage productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin itself.

29 . Smith-Rosenberg has demonstrated that the Crockett almanacs, which began to ap- pear aft er 1835, can be read as a kind of fi ctional management, through the medium of the body, of antebellum American social dislocation. An out-of-hand adolescent in rebellion against paternal authority, Crockett as he is portrayed in the almanacs is a paragon of orality, scatology, and violent sexuality. Posed in all respects against the formation of an emergent bourgeois respectability, the almanacs nevertheless, according to Smith- Rosenberg, ultimately formed a “paean to the free individual” at a time when America was witnessing the most thoroughgoing institutionalization in its history (107–8); rebellious- ness, in short, embodied (provided a Barthesian mythology for) the bourgeoisie’s belief in uncontained, unfettered selves even as they resisted the material historical developments underwriting this ideology.

30 . In addition to Stuart Hall, I am indebted here to T. J. Clark’s study Th e Painting of Modern Life 205–39.

31 . “Negro Minstrelsy—Ancient and Modern” 73; “Who Writes Our Songs?” 52; William Austin, “Susanna,” “Jeanie,” and “Th e Old Folks at Home” 79; T. W. Higginson, “Negro Spirituals” 685.

32 . Stanley Aronowitz, “Defi ning the Popular”; see also Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism 45–69, for some cautions in regard to Ginzburg’s project, particularly its implicit formulation of peasant culture as a fully reconstructed, static whole. For discussions of the appropriation of English and Native American oral traditions, see Gene Bluestein, Voice of the Folk 1–15, and Arnold Krupat, “Native American Literature and the Canon.”

33 . See Iain Chambers, Popular Culture 140–44, for the ways the color bar was broken in radio; see, among others, Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment, or C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary, for the world-historical struggles that may obtain in the world of sport.

34 . Quoted in David Roediger, “‘Labor in White Skin’” 293. 35 . Karl Marx, “A Criticism of American Aff airs” 211; Marx is referring specifi cally to the

progress of the Civil War. Th e fi rst sections of Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces (1–152), consti- tute an extended meditation on punk music’s relation to its late-1970s social history.

36 . In Subversive Genealogy Rogin brilliantly reads Melville’s career through political developments that roughly parallel the European context; but for brief explicit statements on that context, see 15–23, 102–6. See also Larry Reynolds, European Revolutions and the American Literary Renaissance.

37 . Rogin, Subversive Genealogy 148, 130; Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History 180–201.

Chapter 5

1 . For Rice’s career, see Molly Ramshaw, “Jump Jim Crow!” 2 . See, for example, Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance 270, 273, and Jules Zanger,

“Th e Minstrel Show as Th eater of Misrule.” 3 . Uncatalogued playbills in the Harvard Th eatre Collection.

272 Notes to Pages 118–130

4 . Another writer, the theater historian Laurence Hutton, noted in 1889 that many blackface performers had made names for themselves, “to say nothing of the bands of veri- table negroes who have endeavored to imitate themselves in imitation of their white breth- ren in all parts of the land” (144). As if in response to this cultural eff ect, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin Stowe has Mr. Shelby hail George and Eliza Harris’s little boy as “Jim Crow” (44).

5 . S. Foster Damon, Series of Old American Songs no. 13. 6 . “Negro Minstrelsy—Ancient and Modern” 73. 7 . Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies 138–39; emphasis in original. 8 . S. Foster Damon, Series of Old American Songs no. 17. 9 . Insurrection was no small concern in the 1830s and early 1840s, as an editorial in the

New York Sun makes clear. When Joshua Giddings introduced a resolution in Congress that commended the slaves who revolted aboard the Creole and steered it to Britain, the Sun (March 25, 1842) compared him to “Robespierre, Brissot and Marat,” who “set themselves up as champions of the freedom of speech and of the negroes, and led the way to deeds of blood, the history of which will appall the world throughout all time to come” (quoted in Saxton, “Problems” 233). For an excellent treatment of the ironies attending the issues of slavery and revolution in these years, see Eric Sundquist, “Slavery, Revolution, and the American Renaissance”; for a brilliant analysis of the overdetermined proximity in T. W. Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (1867) of black male bodies, weapons, and the sort of homoerotic interest I review in this discussion, see Christopher Looby, “‘As Th or- oughly Black As the Most Faithful Philanthropist Could Desire.’”

10 . S. Foster Damon, Series of Old American Songs no. 14. 11 . White’s New Illustrated Melodeon Songbook 82. 12 . For this depressing but infi nitely suggestive excerpt from the history of sexual

re lations, see Leonore Davidoff , “Class and Gender in Victorian England”; a provocative analysis is also to be found in Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, Th e Politics and Poetics of Transgression 154–56. More generally, see Steven Marcus, Th e Other Victorians chap. 3, as well as Christine Stansell, City of Women 125–27, 139, 161–65, 175.

13 . Philip Cohen, “Tarzan and the Jungle Bunnies” 27. Tania Modleski has argued that the extreme ambivalence toward women in Hitchcock’s fi lms arises from a similar dialectic of misogyny and identifi cation—the identifi cation so threatening that it requires misogyny ( Women 5, 13). Aptly in the present context, psychoanalytic theorists and their fi lm-theory epigones have speculated that perceptual contradictions, the play of belief and nonbelief, the disavowal of things one knows on other levels to be true, originate in castration anxiety. Th e (male) shock at seeing the “castrated” mother gives rise to two thoughts: all human beings are endowed with a penis (primal belief ), and some human beings do not have a penis (evidence of the senses). Th is “lasting matrix,” as Christian Metz calls it, is the “aff ec- tive prototype of all the splittings of belief which man will henceforth be capable of ” (70). Th e minstrel show’s blackface counterfeits capitalized on the proximity of these two structures—the origins of belief and disavowal in castration anxieties about black men. See Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism”; in Black Skin, White Masks Frantz Fanon also notes this inter- play of identifi cation and disavowal (141–209).

14 . Michael Rogin argues this point at length in Subversive Genealogy 236–56. 15 . Th e phrase “play of pronoun function” comes from Mark Nash, “Vampyr and the

Fantastic” 37. Th e notion is brilliantly elaborated in Carol Clover, “Her Body, Himself.” 16 . Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents 176.

273Notes to Pages 130–132

17 . An early version of “Jim Crow” (published the same year as the illustration, 1833) suggests (derisively) that envy of black people is responsible for this identifi cation:

I’m so glad dat I’m a niggar, An don’t you wish you was too For den you’d gain popularity, By jumping Jim Crow.

Now my brudder niggars, I do not think it right, Dat you should laugh at dem Who happen to be white.

Kase it dar misfortune, An dey’d spend ebery dollar, If dey only could be Gentlemen ob colour.

(Dennison 54)

Th is charge is closer to the mark than the song would allow. 18 . See, for example, Andrew Tolson, Th e Limits of Masculinity 63–64; Peter Stearns, Be a

Man! 59–78; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic passim; Stansell, City of Women 77–78, 81, 95–96, 137–41; Denning, Mechanic Accents chap. 9; and David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America 13–14. Walt Whitman’s bohemian bravado in the late 1840s and early 1850s—the “manly” bearing of a journeyman carpenter’s son—derives at least in part from this dynamic.

19 . For an excellent discussion of this imbalance, see Nancy Chodorow, “Mothering, Male Dominance, and Capitalism” 96–97. For an acute contemporary account and analysis of the construction of shop-fl oor masculinity, see Paul Willis, “Shop Floor Culture, Mascu- linity, and the Wage Form.”

20 . Freud’s description of the deeply troubled moment of identifi cation bears signifi - cantly on this discussion: “Identifi cation, in fact, is ambivalent from the very fi rst; it can turn into an expression of tenderness as easily as into a wish for someone’s removal” ( Group Psy- chology 37). I use “identifi cation” loosely here to refer to both primary and secondary pro- cesses. (See also Mary Ann Doane, “Misrecognition and Identity.”) Laura Mulvey has taken this dynamic several steps further. In a justly famous article on narrative fi lm, Mulvey uses Freud to distinguish between a scopophilic, or objectifying, structure of looking (here, per- haps, a dominative fetishizing of the “black” performer) and a voyeuristic, or identifi catory, one (here, interracial identifi cation). My point is that there was in minstrelsy a more or less constant play between these two structures. See Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Ci- nema” 18. For some forceful observations on racial contradictions in white working-class subjectivity, see C. L. R. James et al., Facing Reality 124 and Martin Glaberman, Wartime Strikes 121–34. A powerful instance of antebellum white identifi cation with blacks is a studio daguerreotype of blackface performer Charles White (c. 1850, Harvard Th eatre Collection) in which all traces of irony have been expunged from White’s rigidly forthright pose.

21 . As I have mentioned, this model of cultural analysis, derived from the Claude Lévi-Strauss of Structural Anthropology, has been developed by theorists associated with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, most notably Stuart Hall, as well as Fredric Jameson in “Reifi cation and Utopia in Mass Culture” and Th e Political Unconscious 77–80 and passim.

274 Notes to Pages 132–134

22 . For an analysis of America’s “initial proletarianization,” see David Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers 1–17, 48–99. David Roedi- ger is right to suspect the economic determinism of the job-competition argument ( Wages 106, 147–50); as I try to show, this matter was heavily laden with race-specifi c associations and ideologies. But see also chapter 3 .

23 . See, for example, Linda Kerber, “Abolitionists and Amalgamators” 34, and John Run- cie, “‘Hunting the Nigs’” 196–202.

24 . David Roediger dissents from this view of “wage slavery” rhetoric in “‘Labor in White Skin’” 300–301 and in Wages of Whiteness 65–92, and Th omas Haskell has asked whether such rhetoric was not simply opportunist in “Capitalism and the Origins of Hu- manitarian Sensibility, Part I” 350. Skepticism about the radical usefulness of the idea of wage slavery stems, I think, from a failure to historicize it; conjunctural analysis reveals its potential use value in the 1830s and occasionally later, as is indicated in Williston Loft on, “Abolition and Labor” 277–83, and Eric Foner, “Abolitionism and the Labor Movement in Ante-Bellum America” 59–62 and “Workers and Slavery.” I would argue, moreover, as the American Whig Review did in 1849, that labor’s alliance with Calhoun was always “forced and unnatural,” growing as much out of common enmities as proslavery principles. Much of the labor movement shared Calhoun’s hatred of Martin Van Buren, and looked to the “Marx of the master class” (in Richard Hofstadter’s phrase) for theoretical support of anti- monopolistic “free trade.” It certainly would not be long before radical democracy posed itself against the extension of slavery in the form of the Free-Soil movement. See Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Th e Age of Jackson 406–8, 470; Hofstadter, Th e American Political Tradition chap. 4; and Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic 327, 333.

25 . Quoted in John Jentz, “Artisans, Evangelicals, and the City” 213. 26 . Bernard Mandel, Labor 61–62, 74–75; Jentz, “Artisans, Evangelicals, and the City” 193,

202–3, 234–76; Leonard Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing” 140–41. Alan Daw- ley notes that while “white workers feared the competition of nonwhite laborers and shared the racism of a white-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant culture, they hated the institution of slavery, identifi ed with the slave, and grouped overbearing Lynn manufacturers together with slave- masters as ‘a set of lordly tyrants’” (65). I fi nd rather overreaching the argument of David Roediger that working-class support for abolitionism arose from a wish to “follow middle class leaders who emphasized the diff erences” between white mechanic and black slave and thus distanced their relative conditions from each other ( Wages 86).

27 . In fact the two traditions oft en contradicted each other, the presence of Paineite arti- sans frightening evangelical antislavery supporters away. Jentz, “Artisans, Evangelicals, and the City” 208–15.

28 . Jentz, “Artisans, Evangelicals, and the City” 215; Joseph Rayback, “Th e American Workingman and the Antislavery Crusade” 153.

29 . Jentz, “Artisans, Evangelicals, and the City” 213–14; Bernard Mandel, Labor 82. Th is is to argue strongly against Lorman Ratner, Powder Keg, which assumes labor’s hostility toward both organized abolitionism and antislavery views generally; labor was oft en hostile to the former but usually in agreement with the latter. For a nice riposte to Ratner, see Jentz, “Artisans” 232. For a succinct summary of the contradictions in the relationship of aboli- tionism and labor, see W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 17–26; see also Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia 66; Herbert Shapiro, “Labor and Antislavery”; and Bruce Levine, Half Slave and Half Free 156–59. In “Ideology and Race in American History,” Barbara Fields insists on the contradictory nature of popular racial feeling:

275Notes to Pages 134–137

“[Racial] attitudes . . . are promiscuous critters and do not mind cohabiting with their op- posites. Indeed, they sometimes seem to be happier that way” (155).

30 . Alexander Saxton, “Problems of Class and Race” 232. See Arthur Schlesinger, Th e Age of Jackson 424–27, for a quick summary of the Democratic splits over slavery.

31 . A labor pamphlet from 1850, for instance, indicts the abolitionists for being, simply, the “Hollow-Hearted Swindlers of Labor”: “Th ese men know by experience the preference of cheap hired labor over Chattel” (quoted in Rayback, “American” 154). See also Ber- nard Mandel, Labor 62.

32 . John Jentz, “Th e Anti-Slavery Constituency in Jacksonian New York City” 108; Ray- back, “Th e American Workingman and the Antislavery Crusade” 153. For the class conno- tations of the mutually reinforcing movements of abolitionism and evangelicalism see Schlesinger, Th e Age of Jackson 136–40, 350–60; Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery; Lawrence Friedman, “Confi dence and Pertinacity in Evangelical Abolitionism”; Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium; Eric Foner, “Aboli- tionism and the Labor Movement”; and Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic 145–49, 305. Had workers in New York City and other northeastern centers converted like their counterparts in the Burned Over District of upstate New York, one might suppose the lessened opposi- tion to evangelicalism to have contributed to the antislavery vanguard. At least in New York City, writes Sean Wilentz, workers did not in any great number sign on to the evangelical cause (279–80). Yet this produced no fi rm ideological result; secular traditions of antislav- ery persisted as much as did the reaction to “Tappanism”—itself perhaps the result of evan- gelicalism’s organizational headquarters’ being housed in New York City.

33 . Foner, “Abolitionism and the Labor Movement” 66. 34 . De Susannah, and Th ick Lip, Melodist 73; Bruce McConachie, “‘Th e Th eatre of the

Mob’” 35. See Wilentz, Chants Democratic 180–81, for a sense of the routineness of anti- Tappanism.

35 . Th e impetus for this brief investigation is, of course, the extraordinary work on pop- ular rioting and mobbing produced by George Rudé ( Th e Crowd in History ), E. P. Th omp- son (“Th e Moral Economy of the English Crowd”), and others. I have drawn my narrative from these accounts: Gustave de Beaumont, Marie, “Appendix”; Alvin Harlow, Old Bowery Days 289–93; Linda Kerber, “Abolitionists and Amalgamators”; Leonard Richards, “Gen- tlemen of Property and Standing” 113–22; Jentz, “Artisans, Evangelicals, and the City” 245–55; Paul Weinbaum, Mobs and Demagogues 23–27; Wilentz, Chants Democratic 264–65; Peter Buckley, To the Opera House 184–90; and Paul Gilje, Th e Road to Mobocracy 162–70.

36 . Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing” 151–55; Jentz, “Artisans, Evangelicals, and the City” 247–48.

37 . Peter Buckley carefully notes that these separate actions “became part of a seamless organism” in the minds of contemporary observers (190), given the “mobocratic” spirit (as a young Abraham Lincoln was to call it) of those days. See Lincoln’s 1838 “Address to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfi eld.”

38 . Quoted in Jentz, “Artisans, Evangelicals, and the City” 249. 39 . Jentz, “Artisans, Evangelicals, and the City” 251–55 (the quote is from Jentz, “Th e Anti-

Slavery Constituency in New York City” 117); David Roediger, Th e Wages of Whiteness 110. 40 . Th e text here is reprinted in Gary Engle, ed., Th is Grotesque Essence 1–12. It dates

from 1856, but Hans Nathan observes that it derives from the original. Although no plot summary survives from the early performances, the playbill synopsis of a companion piece, Bone Squash, is in almost complete agreement with its 1856 printing, and the names

276 Notes to Pages 137–144

of the characters in O Hush! are virtually identical with the earlier play’s. See Nathan, Dan Emmett 67.

41 . Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing” 114–15. In Gustave de Beaumont’s Marie (1835), whose pivotal episode is based on the July riots, the antiabolitionist violence interrupts the wedding ceremony of a Frenchman and a mulatto, rather nicely underscoring the link between the rioters’ motives and fears of amalgamation.

42 . Emma Jones Lapsansky’s “‘Since Th ey Got Th ose Separate Churches’” is very good on the emergence of the black dandy as an ideological fi ction—its class sources and its reg- ulation of black behavior. Black responses to the fi ction included an 1838 Philadelphia Col- ored American article that asserted, “Th e same class of vagabonds who mob abolitionists, would as readily mob .  .  . the aristocracy could they do it with the same impunity” (72), casually making clear the class resonance of abolitionism. See also Gary Nash, Forging Free- dom 254–59.

43 . Indeed, Lapsansky observes that in Philadelphia it was not amalgamation per se but amalgamation for the purposes of upward mobility to which rioters objected (62).

44 . Jentz, “Artisans, Evangelicals, and the City” 192 and “Th e Anti-Slavery Constituency in Jacksonian New York City” 110.

Chapter 6

1 . Emmett’s account, a more elaborated and convincing narrative than those of Billy Whitlock and G. B. Wooldridge, appeared in the New York Clipper May 19, 1877; the other accounts were published there a year later (April 13, 1878). Despite Hans Nathan’s assess- ment, the evidence may support E. P. Christy’s claim of having organized (in Buff alo, New York) the fi rst minstrel band, though Emmett’s was no doubt the fi rst in New York City. See Dan Emmett 116–18, 143–46; more generally, see C. B. Galbreath, Daniel Decatur Emmett.

2 . On charivari, and for further references, see E. P. Th ompson, “‘Rough Music’”; Nata- lie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France 97–123; and Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, Th e Politics and Poetics of Transgression 24.

3 . Th e argument of this chapter has been infl uenced by the brilliant analysis by Stuart Hall et al. in Policing the Crisis of the British “mugging” scare of the early 1970s—an attempt on the part of “law and order” to regain lost ground in the wake of the “crisis” of the 1960s.

4 . New York Herald February 6, 1843. 5 . Hans Nathan is very precise about the makeup of the fi rst minstrel shows. See Dan

Emmett 118–34, 143–53. 6 . Th is assertion is still perhaps a controversial one, based as much on guesswork as on

insurmountable evidence. About all that can be adduced on the matter is the recollection of the late nineteenth-century performer Lew Dockstader that the early interlocutor’s lack of “darky dialect” contrasted with his black makeup; on the basis of this statement, Robert Toll concludes in Blacking Up (63, n.63) that interlocutors generally appeared in blackface. Cer- tainly there is a considerable lack of evidence of a whiteface interlocutor in this period, much less songbook illustrations featuring blackface companies with a sole whiteface per- former. Reminiscences such as that of Mark Twain, which does support the claim of a white interlocutor, seem infl uenced both by regional particularity (Twain saw shows in Hannibal) and by minstrelsy’s later incarnations—more accurate in spirit than in all their facts. Th e ease with which the mask accommodated a variety of dialects—Irish brogues, the b’hoy’s slang, even parodic, German-infl ected English—perhaps indicates less of a contradiction

277Notes to Pages 144–152

between the blackface mask and genteel dialect than one might have expected. Th e white interlocutor, at least in urban centers, appears to have been a later development.

7 . In this respect the minstrel show is not unrelated to television situation comedy; see Patricia Mellencamp, “Situation Comedy, Feminism, and Freud.” For some interesting remarks on the minstrel show’s structure, see W. T. Lhamon, “Constance Rourke’s Secret Reserve” xxxiv.

8 . See, for instance, George Rehin, “Harlequin Jim Crow”; Robert Winans, “Early Minstrel-Show Music”; Gary Engle, “Introduction,” Th is Grotesque Essence; and William Mahar, “Ethiopian Skits and Sketches.”

9 . By “right-minded black comedy” I mean anything from Spike Lee’s fi lms to Bill Cosby to the unfortunate “In Living Color.”

I have been oriented in this project by several excellent discussions of pleasure: Roland Barthes, Th e Pleasure of the Text; Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”; Fredric Jameson, “Pleasure”; and Colin Mercer, “Complicit Pleasures” and “A Poverty of Desire.” Also helpful are John Lowe, “Th eories of Ethnic Humor”; John Morreall, Taking Laughter Seriously 27–37; and Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity 131–41.

10 . Knickerbocker 16, 1 (July 1840), 84. 11 . If the symbolic depends on refl ection and lack, writes Christian Metz, “the cinema is

a body . . . a fetish that can be loved” (57). Barbara Freedman’s Staging the Gaze argues that the same might be said of the actor’s presence in the theater (47–77).

12 . “Peabody’s Lecture, On the Great Soger Camp-Meeting,” White’s New Book of Planta- tion Melodies 79.

13 . White’s New Book of Plantation Melodies 13; White’s New Illustrated Melodeon Song- book 31.

14 . S. Foster Damon, Series of Old American Songs no. 37. 15 . Steven Marcus, Th e Other Victorians 266–86. Edward James’s Amateur Negro Min-

strel’s Guide advises that three quarters of an inch of lipstick will “make the face look all mouth when opened to its full extent” (8).

16 . S. Foster Damon, Series of Old American Songs no. 39. 17 . Popular Music in Jacksonian America, side 2. 18 . “Now Hold your Horses, will You!” Christy and Wood’s New Song Book 9; see also

George Christy, Essence of Old Kentucky 46–47. 19 . A third possibility is that some audience members experienced a marginally more

positive nostalgia for nurture rather than infant rage; this was true, we shall see, for the wave of sentimental black images that would soon begin to fl ood the minstrel stage. I have been infl uenced here by Michael Rogin’s psychohistorical interpretation of white attitudes toward Native Americans in the antebellum period. See Fathers and Children 3–15, 114–25; see also Sander Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies” 256.

20 . Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, Th e Politics and Poetics of Transgression 192. Th is argument refi nes ideas drawn from symbolic anthropologists such as Mary Douglas, who have written of the body as a symbolic representation of the social forces that produced it—bodily functions and boundaries, points of entry and of exit signifying societal relations and values. See, for example, Douglas, Natural Symbols esp. 65–81.

21 . Paul Faler, “Cultural Aspects of the Industrial Revolution” and Mechanics and Man- ufacturers 100–138; Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium 55–61, 79–83; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic 271, 277–84, 305.

22 . For a similar argument, see David Roediger, Th e Wages of Whiteness 97, 100, 110, 118, and, regarding theatrical portrayals of the Irish, Bruce McConachie, “Th e Cultural Politics of ‘Paddy.’”

278 Notes to Pages 153–161

23 . Slavoj Žižek, “Eastern Europe’s Republics of Gilead” 57; see also Sylvia Wynter, “Sam- bos and Minstrels” 152–54.

24 . F. C. Wemyss, Th eatrical Biography; or, Th e Life of An Actor and Manager 179. 25 . Roediger, Th e Wages of Whiteness 133–34, 150–54; Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles

267. 26 . Peter Stallybrass and Allon White make an excellent statement on how this formation

comes about in Th e Politics and Poetics of Transgression 193–94. Julia Kristeva terms this predicament “abjection.” Kristeva writes of the abject that “‘unconscious’ contents remain . . . excluded but in strange fashion,” clearly enough “for a defensive position to be established” yet “not radically enough to allow for a secure diff erentiation between subject and object.” Th us blackface’s white spectator, in Kristeva’s terms, “never stops demarcating his universe whose fl uid confi nes . . . constantly question his solidity and impel him to start afresh” (7–8).

27 . See Christian Metz, Th e Imaginary Signifi er, for an account of how the castration threat is managed by replacing it with a fetish substitute: “Th e fi xation on [the fetish’s] ‘just before’ [castration] is thus another form of disavowal . . . . Th e fetish signifi es the penis as absent, it is its negative signifi er; supplementing it, it puts a ‘fullness’ in place of a lack, but in doing so it also affi rms that lack” (70–71). Th e minstrel show exemplifi ed and worked several permutations on this theme, as will become clear.

28 . Christy and Wood’s New Song Book 30; for further examples, see “Gal wid de Blue Dress on,” White’s New Illustrated Melodeon Songbook 65, and “White Cat and Black Cat,” White’s New Ethiopian Song Book 49.

29 . Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents 146–48. 30 . In thinking about racial and gender disguise, and about theater spectators’ varying

identifi cations with blackface characters, I am indebted once again to Carol Clover’s “Her Body, Himself.”

31 . See, for instance, Amy Bridges, “Becoming American” 170–73, 176. On various aspects of the depression, see Samuel Rezneck, “Th e Social History of an American Depres- sion”; Robert Ernst, “Economic Nativism in New York City”; Ira Leonard, “Th e Rise and Fall of the American Republican Party”; and Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic 299–359.

32 . For this fi gure of “aristocratic” self-satisfaction, see Peter Buckley, To the Opera House 197–205.

33 . In Strangers in the Land, John Higham conncects nativism with racism (4). Whereas single-minded class radicalism had had variable racial results in the 1830s, the complexities and constrictions of class feeling in the 1840s tended to produce a corollary sense of racial impatience and disdain.

34 . See Bernard Mandel, Labor 79–80, 89–95; Eric Foner, “Abolitionism and the Labor Movement” 67–71; Williston Loft on, “Abolition and Labor” 254; and Joseph Rayback, “Th e American Workingman and the Antislavery Crusade” 152–53.

35 . W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 21; Mandel, Labor 76–84; Rayback, “Th e American Workingman and the Antislavery Crusade” 155–56; Loft on, “Abolition and Labor” 269; Marcus Cunliff e, Chattel Slavery and Wage Slavery 19–31; David Roediger, Th e Wages of Whiteness 72–80.

36 . Foner, “Abolitionism and the Labor Movement” 67–71; Loft on, “Abolition and Labor” 272.

37 . Roediger, Th e Wages of Whiteness 97, 110, 116, 127. 38 . In “Writing Labor’s History,” Stanley Aronowitz off ers some excellent insights re-

garding what he sees as the internally split formation of the American working class, which

279Notes to Pages 161–176

encompassed not only an artisan republicanism developed in opposition to a consolidating bourgeoisie but also proletarian substrata resisting artisan culture itself (180–85). See also Roediger, Th e Wages of Whiteness 110.

39 . See, for instance, Karen Halttunen, Confi dence Men and Painted Women. 40 . From an 1857 poster for a Boston performance of Christy’s Minstrels (New York

Public Library Th eatre Collection). 41 . On the internally contradictory (but fi nally conservative) character of the petite

bourgeoisie, see Arno Mayer, “Th e Lower Middle Class as Historical Problem.” 42 . I rely here on “Heroes of the Burnt Cork,” which includes one of the most detailed

descriptions of antebellum cross-dressing. 43 . See Christine Stansell, City of Women 78–80, 55–62, 89–100; Foster’s remark is

quoted at 94. Elsewhere, Foster makes the connection (without, I think, understanding it) between these women’s work and their (resistant) sense of style: “Th e pretty book-folder and the pale seamstress, the buxom housemaid and the ambitious laundress, slave cheer- fully all the week in the dreariest and most monotonous occupations, that they may obtain the means of making a handsome appearance at the Saturday night dance.” See New York in Slices 111.

44 . New York Clipper November 1, 1873; Olive Logan, “Th e Ancestry of Brudder Bones” 698; George Odell, Annals of the New York Stage 5:396; Robert Toll, Blacking Up 140; “Th e Dancing Lucy Long,” White’s New Illustrated Melodeon Songbook 46; Ralph Keeler, “Th ree Years as a Negro Minstrel” 77.

45 . S. Foster Damon, Series of Old American Songs no. 31; White’s New Illustrated Melo- deon Songbook 47.

46 . Robert Stoller, Sex and Gender 185, 176–86, 214–15; conversely, in “Transvestism” Ethel Person and Lionel Ovesey argue that transvestism seeks to allay separation anxiety, not castration anxiety, by using women’s clothes as a substitute for the mother (308). See also Marjorie Garber’s remarks on Stoller in Vested Interests 94–98.

47 . Olive Logan, “Th e Ancestry of Brudder Bones” 698. Th e New York Herald wrote of one “wench” performance: “Such a strapping pair of colored ladies have not been seen for many a day. Fine fun may be expected” (November 7, 1842).

48 . Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters 9–36; Katharine Eisaman Maus, “‘Playhouse Flesh and Blood’”; Stephen Orgel, “Nobody’s Perfect.”

49 . Lillian Schlissel, “Sexual Disguise”; Robert Toll, Blacking Up 144, 142. For searching discussions of the relationship of transvestism to homoerotic desire, see Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests 28–65, and Carole-Anne Tyler, “Boys Will Be Girls.”

Chapter 7

1 . I am indebted to Michael Rogin’s excellent discussion of this article in Subversive Genealogy 104–5.

2 . Th e Journal of Music noted that Christy’s Minstrels performed 312 times in 1853 and netted $47,972 (“Black” 108); one songster boasted that Christy’s Minstrels had given 69 concerts as early as 1842, yielding $1,847.52 ( Christy’s No. 4 v); Robert Nevin wrote that Ste- phen Foster’s commissions for “Old Folks at Home” alone totaled $15,000 (614); and in the New York Herald, a “card” published by Christy’s Minstrels asserted that George Christy (who had ungratefully broken from the troupe) earned $19,680 in his two and a half years with them (November 7, 1853).

280 Notes to Pages 176–180

3 . Not all of these lyrics, however, arose from minstrel performance; my guess (based partly on existing playbills) is that only a portion of the printed songs were ever performed onstage, though the ones that were probably supported songbook sales, and performed or not, songbook lyrics plugged the performers in whose names the books were published. In other words, to some extent the songbooks constituted an independent realm of literary production. While I have found little information concerning the circumstances of this production, minstrel songbooks did issue—voluminously—from urban dime novel or “fi c- tion factory” publishing houses which depended on a highly organized system of speedy prose manufacture, and it is likely that much minstrel-show verse originated in the same way. It is even possible, given that many songs have a headnote marking their recent perfor- mance at such and such a music hall, that blackface artists used the verses fi ction factories turned out rather than the other way around, perhaps setting them to tunes already in their repertoire—hence “De New Ole Dan Tucker” or “Old Tucker’s Wedding” or even “Mrs. Tucker.” (Th e fans at home, of course, could follow the same path.) Another inter- esting example of this culture industry collaboration is Tony Pastor, George Christy: A Story of Minstrel Life (1877), a dime novel extremely loosely based on the life of the famous black- face performer. Th e songs just mentioned are from the Negro Forget-Me-Not Songster 59, 110, and White’s New Illustrated Melodeon Songbook 67. On the fi ction factories, see Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents, chap. 2; Frank Schick, Th e Paperbound Book in America; and Madeleine Stern, ed., Publishers for Mass Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century America 35–50, 93–96, 101–14, 229–35.

4 . William Austin, “Susanna,” “Jeanie,” and “Th e Old Folks at Home” 25. Th e Journal of Music eventually reprinted an 1854 article, “Obituary, Not Eulogistic: Negro Minstrelsy Is Dead,” which sneered: “Fashion sent her cohorts to mingle with the unwashed million at the shrine of Gumbo, and negro sheet-music had immense sales, being found upon almost every piano in the land . . . ” (118).

5 . My use of “mythology” here is loosely derived from Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, in which myth is defi ned as an instance of “depoliticized speech” (143), what Fredric Jameson would in certain cases call an “ideologeme”—in short ideology narrated, that is, narrations of ideology presented as history or historical fact but from which history has been ab- stracted, evaporated, overthrown ( Political 87–88).

6 . Richard Middleton, “In the Groove, or Blowing Your Mind?” 160. Middleton’s work has been indispensable to my thinking about repetition as a tool in the analysis of music and its relationship to society. An earlier version of his article, “Play It Again, Sam: Some Notes on the Productivity of Repetition in Popular Music,” contains a few further examples and minor elaborations. All citations of Middleton are from “In the Groove.”

In his introduction to Jacques Attali’s Noise, Fredric Jameson incidentally suggests the importance of locating the kind of mediations I pursue here between music and socio-economic life: “Music . . . would seem to have the strongest affi nities with that most abstract of all social realities, economics, with which it shares a peculiar ultimate object which is number” (vii).

7 . In arguing that Adorno’s pinched analysis still has merit, Bernard Gendron broaches the issue of repetition without, fi nally, saying much about its usefulness in social analyses of music. See “Th eodor Adorno Meets the Cadillacs” 29–30. James Snead’s acute “Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture,” by far the best analysis I have seen of its subject, contributed much to the genesis of this discussion.

8 . See Th eodor Adorno, “On Popular Music” 306, 308–11, and “Perennial Fashion— Jazz” 121–27.

281Notes to Pages 180–189

9 . In this respect Richard Johnson’s “What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?” has some helpful remarks on the necessity of taking the full cycle of production, artifact, and con- sumption into critical account, as does Dick Hebdige, Hiding in the Light 80–83; Janice Radway, “Reception Study,” and Tania Modleski, “Some Functions of Feminist Criticism,” are interesting discussions of ethnographic problems and possibilities.

10 . Playbills in the Harvard Th eatre Collection indicate that the demand for repeats became standard in the late 1840s, resulting in evenings so extended that managers began to institute a policy of no repetitions.

11 . See, for instance, János Maróthy, Music and the Bourgeois, Music and the Proletarian 11–127.

12 . Quoted in Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness 11–12. 13 . For a compelling discussion of the “cut,” see Snead’s “Repetition as a Figure of Black

Culture” 67–70. 14 . In “Susanna,” “Jeanie,” and “Th e Old Folks at Home” William Austin notes some other

possible antecedents of Foster’s song: on the one hand a slave ballad printed in the Journal of Edward Abdy, an English abolitionist who visited the United States in 1833–34; and on the other a Lowell Mason hymn (6, 10).

15 . Stanley Crouch, in a paper called “Jazz and the Conquest of Time,” has some apposite things to say about what Middleton calls musematic repetition.

16 . Robert Winans charts this shift fairly conclusively in “Early Minstrel-Show Music.” 17 . Hans Nathan, Dan Emmett 180; chaps. 12 and 13, on early minstrel songs and banjo

tunes, are unsurpassed. 18 . S. Foster Damon, Series of Old American Songs no. 37. 19 . “Articulation” has been used by Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouff e, and others in rela-

tion to the antiessentialist, not inherently class-specifi c character of cultural elements to emphasize their ties to particular social groups and social meanings as the result of ex- tended processes of cultural work and struggle such as I described in chapter 3 . See Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Th eory; Mouff e, Gramsci and Marxist Th eory; and Stuart Hall, “Some Paradigms in Cultural Studies” 38–48. In “Articulating Musical Meaning/Re- Constructing Musical History/Locating the ‘Popular,’” Richard Middleton uses this notion very eff ectively to discuss some formations of popular music.

20 . Stephen Foster’s last letter to E. P. Christy (1852) is perhaps the classic text here:

As I once intimated to you, I had the intention of omitting my name on my Ethiopian songs, owing to the prejudice against them by some, which might injure my reputa- tion as a writer of another style of music, but I fi nd that by my eff orts I have done a great deal to build up a taste for the Ethiopian songs among refi ned people by mak- ing the words suitable to their taste, instead of the trashy and really off ensive words which belong to some songs of that order. Th erefore I have concluded to reinstate my name on my songs and to pursue the Ethiopian business without fear or shame and lend all my energies to making the business live, at the same time that I will wish to establish my name as the best Ethiopian song-writer. But I am not encouraged in undertaking this so long as “Th e Old Folks at Home” stares me in the face with another’s name on it . . . . (quoted in Austin 203)

21 . Fredric Jameson, “Reifi cation and Utopia in Mass Culture” 136–38. Th is is not the full extent of Jameson’s position, which allows for complex impulses to be raised and symboli- cally resolved within the products of popular culture (138–48).

282 Notes to Pages 189–194

22 . Tania Modleski, “Th e Terror of Pleasure” 156–60. In what follows I rely closely on Middleton’s account of some of the eff ects of repetition in “In the Groove” 168–75.

23 . J. S. Dwight, “Negro Minstrelsy” 124; William Austin, “Susanna,” “Jeanie,” and “Th e Old Folks at Home” 58.

24 . For this idea, see Middleton’s citation of and elaboration upon D. Avron’s “Vers une metapsychologie de la musique” in “In the Groove” 170.

25 . Th e phrase “social motion” comes from Jonathan Arac, Commissioned Spirits. For a sim- ilar argument in regard to bebop in 1940s New York, see Eric Lott, “Double V, Double-Time.”

26 . In 1846 there was broad agreement among British journalists that the Ethiopian Ser- enaders purveyed “the most beautiful combination of humour and pathos,” but what they made of this now familiar mix is apparent in their range of response. On the one hand, there was the usual complacency and worse: “Five minstrels—niggers bred, we might almost swear, from the closeness of their copy of ‘God’s image carved in ivory,’ though not niggers born,” said the Daily News; “inexplicable and inhuman noises . . . strange up-heavings of the voice . . . snores, chokings, and whistles,” cackled the Herald. Yet on the other hand, some extraordinary advocacy was thrown into the ring as well, such as this from the Daily News — which incidentally casts light on the ways antislavery cohabited with what we would regard as rather dubious racial feeling:

Such was the eff ect produced, not alone upon ourselves, but manifestly upon a vast majority of the listeners by the songs we have instanced, as to banish any other than a feeling of deep commiseration for the unhappy misused beings who, under all the wrongs which they endure, can yet laugh and sing and dance gaily aft er their labours for the day are over. And, so far from feeling angry or indignant [at the Ethiopian Serenaders] . . . we feel extremely glad in being able to say that their exhibition is not only innocuous, as regards the poor helpless beings they represent, but calculated from its force, truthfulness, and mixture of the ludicrous with sentiment, to raise feelings which may at no distant period produce results that every friend of negro emancipation would hail with satisfaction. (March 18, 1846)

Th e press notices that the Ethiopian Serenaders received on their tour of England were collected in an 1846 pamphlet, Ethiopian Serenaders; the quotations are from 30–32.

27 . Norman Ware, Th e Industrial Worker 225; Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mis- sion in American History 172–79; Bernard Mandel, Labor 115; Bruce Levine, Half Slave and Half Free 177–78; Williston Loft on, “Abolition and Labor” 278–79; Joseph Rayback, “Th e American Workingman and the Antislavery Crusade” 158, 160–62; Eric Foner, “Th e Wilmot Proviso Reconsidered”; Rayback, Free Soil 23–33; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic 382.

28 . Th is is the great insight of Fredric Jameson’s genre theory, and I have obviously recast it into broader form in this study. See Jameson, Th e Political Unconscious 103–50, and Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents 77.

29 . Stephen Foster, “Nelly Was a Lady,” in Richard Jackson, ed., Stephen Foster Song Book 82. Perhaps the most explicit of such songs was “Female Slave’s Lament” (1851), White’s Ser- enaders’ Song Book 20. For Putnam’s Monthly editor George William Curtis, minstrelsy and sentimentalism were virtually synonymous: “Th ere is no people in the world so sentimental as we. Our only really popular songs are such negro melodies as those of Mr. Foster, (‘Old folks at home,’ ‘Massa’s in de cold ground,’ &c.,) which are simply pathetic refrains adapted to what, in another sphere of literature, would be only extremely Laura Matilda-ish poetry, mainly dirges and desperate love songs” (572).

283Notes to Pages 195–204

30 . I have observed some of the implications of the feminization of blackness in chapter 1 , but see also, for example, Karen Sánchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds,” on sentimentalist ideolo- gy’s encounter with race, and George Fredrickson, Th e Black Image in the White Mind 97–129, on the vogue of sentimentalized “romantic racialism.”

31 . By extension the powerless included middle-class women and white working people; blackface sentimentalism might be seen as in part a “people’s” version of the genteel senti- mentalist discourse designed to equip or at least represent women disenfranchised by their distance from the centers of cultural power. I would stress, however, that this development was an uneven one, less a unitary phenomenon than a space within which class fractions grasped for the power to wield the cultural sign of feminized black victim. Sentimental minstrel songs were surely as indebted to, say, Godey’s Lady’s Book as they were to working- class melodrama’s moments of female helplessness (Mose rescuing victims from burning tenements), and they represented working-class whites only to the extent that they did not parrot the accents of genteel culture; they were hegemonic, an upwardly mobile gambit of show-biz respectability, to the extent that they did. Put another way, this trend was an attempted sentimentalist resolution of the growing class contradictions in minstrelsy’s au- dience that would contribute to its substantial recomposition by the turn of the 1860s.

32 . White’s New Illustrated Melodeon Songbook 6. 33 . Stephen Foster, “Old Folks at Home,” in Richard Jackson, ed., Stephen Foster Song

Book 101–2. For an account of this song’s burial at the hands of Louis Armstrong, see Gary Giddins, “Th e Signifying Satchmo.”

34 . Alexander Saxton, “Blackface Minstrelsy and Jacksonian Ideology” 14–15; see also David Roediger, Th e Wages of Whiteness 119. Th e New York Tribune wrote in 1855: “Who has not oft en observed the tear of sensibility moistening the cheek of youth, while listening to the primitive strains of ‘Uncle Ned’? . . . Ah, those tears constituted one of the blessings of that youth, which has now departed” (“Black” 107).

35 . “Letter from a Teacher at the South” 164. For Irish homesickness, see Kerby Miller, Emigrants and Exiles 277; for an argument about the radical protest at the heart of popular nostalgia, see Alun Howkins and C. Ian Dyck, “‘Th e Time’s Alteration.’”

36 . William Austin, “Susanna,” “Jeanie,” and “Th e Old Folks at Home” 119; John Tasker Howard, Stephen Foster; Gilbert Chase, America’s Music 248–65; Stuart Blumin, “Residen- tial Mobility Within the Nineteenth-Century City” and “Mobility and Change in Ante- Bellum Philadelphia”; Stephan Th ernstrom and Peter Knights, “Men in Motion”; more generally, see, for example, Sam Bass Warner, Th e Private City 49–78, and Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium 37–55.

37 . Christy and Wood’s New Song Book 19. 38 . White’s New Book of Plantation Melodies 49. 39 . Stephen Foster, Minstrel-Show Songs no. 1; Christy and Wood’s New Song Book 43. 40 . Christine Stansell, City of Women 137–41; Mary Blewett, “Work, Gender, and the

Artisan Tradition in New England Shoemaking” 230–32. 41 . Christy and Wood’s New Song Book 29. 42 . Th e image of middle-class domestic ideology that comes quickest to mind is Stowe’s

utopian Quaker family in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Wife and mother Rachel Halliday is the very model of domestic productivity and female infl uence, while husband Simeon is literally mar- ginalized in the corner, “engaged in the anti-patriarchal operation of shaving” (222–25). One notes that in this scene even the surname is given to Rachel rather than to Simeon. For ex- cellent discussions of this passage, and for auxiliary evidence of its antipatriarchal argument,

284 Notes to Pages 204–213

see Leslie Fiedler, What Was Literature? 157–58, and Jane Tompkins, “Sentimental Power” 141–46.

On the fi ctional plantation, writes William Taylor, the southern gentleman “is not the master of his own house, to say nothing of his environment, and he is frequently patronized by the novelist himself. Oft en he has died before the story opens and exists only as a memory” (153). On the equivocal role of the planter in plantation fi ction, see Taylor, Cava- lier and Yankee 146–201.

43 . I am indebted to Richard Slotkin’s discussion of this text in Th e Fatal Environment 149.

44 . Strikingly, Lydia Maria Child culled quotation upon quotation from the southern press illustrating the barbarism of slavery in Th e Patriarchal Institution as Described by Members of Its Own Family (1860). In Life and Liberty in America: Sketches of a Tour in the United States and Canada in 1857–8, Charles Mackay employed the more familiar locution— albeit with some qualifi cation—writing that on a plantation he visited “the slaves are kindly treated, and . . . the patriarchal relation in all its best aspects exists between the master and his poor dependents” (207–8).

Particularly aft er Seneca Falls in 1848, burlesque stump speeches on women’s rights were common in minstrel performances and songbooks.

45 . Joseph Rayback, “Th e American Workingman and the Antislavery Crusade”; Wil- liston Loft on, “Abolition and Labor” (William West’s remark is quoted on 272); Eric Foner, “Abolitionism and the Labor Movement in Ante-Bellum America,” “Racial Attitudes of the New York Free Soilers,” and “Politics and Prejudice”; and Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic 299–359.

46 . Richard Slotkin, Th e Fatal Environment 178; see also Alan Dawley, Class and Com- munity chaps. 2, 8.

47 . See chapter 3 . 48 . Rayback, “Th e American Workingman and the Antislavery Crusade” 155–56; Loft on,

“Abolition and Labor” 269; Eric Foner, “Workers and Slavery” 24–25; Bernard Mandel, Labor 84–86. Ronald Walters has demonstrated how the “erotic” South might have been particularly congruent with other preindustrial objects of republican distaste in Th e Anti- slavery Appeal 70–87.

49 . In Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men Eric Foner traces this logic through to its institu- tional conclusion in the founding of the Republican party in the mid-1850s. Th is impulse is perhaps the best riposte to David Roediger’s dour view of the racial politics of “free labor” rhetoric, a view he takes despite considerable evidence of ambiguity regarding working- class racial feeling, and despite the rhetoric’s result in antislavery party politics, not to men- tion civil war. See Wages of Whiteness 80–81, 87.

50 . Eugene Berwanger, Th e Frontier Against Slavery. 51 . In “Susanna,” “Jeanie,” and “Th e Old Folks at Home” William Austin provides an au-

thoritative account of the song’s sources and its entry into the public domain (3–12); see also John Tasker Howard, Stephen Foster 134–56.

52 . Meade Minnigerode, Th e Fabulous Forties 321, 323–24 (for the gold rush version of “Oh! Susanna”); Richard Jackson, ed., Stephen Foster Song Book 177; Bayard Taylor, Eldorado 275; Constance Rourke, Troupers of the Gold Coast 7–58.

53 . It is no coincidence that William Wells Brown set radical lyrics to “Susanna,” renamed “Th e Northern Star,” in the Anti-Slavery Harp (1849). Th e chorus goes: “Oh! Star of Free- dom, ’Tis the star for me;/’Twill lead me off to Canada, Th ere I will be free” (quoted in

285Notes to Pages 213–220

Austin 36). It is in this form that “Susanna” appears to have entered black oral culture; both Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth sang it.

54 . Christy and Wood’s New Song Book 23, 68. 55 . White’s New Book of Plantation Melodies 30; see also Robert Johannsen, To the Halls

of the Montezumas 230–40, 270–301. 56 . “Bell Ringer’s Medley,” White’s New Illustrated Melodeon Songbook 61–62. Bernard

DeVoto stresses the emotional nation-building performed by minstrel melodies, specifi - cally those of Stephen Foster, in “Stephen Foster’s Songs.” Th e most compelling accounts of the origins of the Civil War that emphasize the North’s specifi cally nationalist impulses are Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy 111–55, and Eric Foner, “Politics, Ideology, and the Origins of the American Civil War.”

57 . I have been aided here once again by Alan Dawley and Paul Faler, “Working-Class Culture and Politics in the Industrial Revolution” 474–78.

58 . Th e argument that northern class reform was thoroughly laid waste by the necessity of an interclass struggle against the South has been made by David Brion Davis, Th e Prob- lem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 251, and Alan Dawley, Class and Community 196, 238–39, though Eric Foner contests Dawley’s implicit ascription of antislavery sentiment to northern capitalists in “Abolitionism and the Labor Movement” 74–76.

59 . Eric Foner, “Racial Attitudes of the New York Free Soilers” 93 and “Abolitionism and the Labor Movement” 73–74; see also Joseph Rayback, Free Soil esp. 201–30.

60 . Eric Foner, “Politics and Prejudice” 242, 247, 249–50 and “Racial Attitudes of the New York Free Soilers” 87–89, 91–92.

61 . William Austin, “Susanna,” “Jeanie,” and “Th e Old Folks at Home” 33.

Chapter 8

1 . Good accounts of Webster’s (as well as Clay’s) investment in the Compromise may be found in James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 50–66; see also Irving Bartlett, Daniel Webster 240–53.

2 . Christy’s Minstrels managed both to support the Compromise and to lampoon Web- ster in a stump-speech parody of the Seventh of March speech:

Do dese people want to tear up dat magnifi cent and magniglorious American fl ag what’s ravelin’ out in de breezes ob de atmosphere on de top ob de St. Nicholas Hotel? Eh? umph? Do dey want to strip it up and gib de stars to de Souf, and de stripes to de Norf? I answer you in clarion tones dat I hope may be heard from de risin’ place ob de sun to de cheer in which he sets down. Dey can’t do it, nor—nor any other man. (“Any Other Man,” Christy, New 9–11)

See also “Or Any Other Man,” Frank Converse’s “Old Cremona” Songster 32. 3 . Th omas Gossett, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture 164, 260. 4 . T. Allston Brown, History of the New York Stage 1:314; Harry Birdoff , Th e World’s

Greatest Hit 20–23. Th e primary, if somewhat dubious, sources for the history of the stage productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin are Harry Birdoff , Th e World’s Greatest Hit, and Th omas Gossett, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture 260–83. Birdoff is rather liberal with cre- ative reconstructions of the past, and Gossett is wrong on several details (e.g., H. J. Conway, one of Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s chief adapters, is rechristened “Conroy”). I have also relied on newspaper accounts; George Odell, Annals of the New York Stage; J. N. Ireland, Records of

286 Notes to Pages 220–224

the New York Stage; and T. Allston Brown, History of the American Stage and History of the New York Stage. See, in addition, Frank Rahill, Th e World of Melodrama 247–53; Vera Jiji, ed., Showcasing American Drama; and Robert Shipp, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Ethos of Melodrama.”

5 . “Th e world is not good enough yet for it to succeed,” wrote Stowe to Hutchinson, evincing her commercial sense along with her piety. See Montrose Moses, “George L. Aik- en’s Dramatization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin” 605–6, and Th omas Gossett, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture 261.

6 . James Gordon Bennett’s Herald editorial (September 3, 1852) does reveal that the Taylor version, curiously enough, changed the names of George and Eliza Harris to Edward and Morna Wilmot—acknowledging, consciously or not, the part of the Wilmot Proviso and Free-Soil politics in giving rise to the story.

7 . Readers still in doubt on this point should consult Christina Zwarg, “Fathering and Blackface in Uncle Tom’s Cabin” 284–87.

8 . David Grimsted’s “Uncle Tom from Page to Stage” is an excellent account of the changes Aiken wrought on Stowe’s novel; see also Barnard Hewitt, “Uncle Tom and Uncle Sam.”

9 . For a brief discussion of Conway’s relationship with Kimball, see Bruce McConachie, “H. J. Conway’s Dramatization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

10 . A New Orleans production called Southern “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was performed by the virulently antiabolitionist circus comedian Dan Rice, not, as is oft en stated, the minstrel performer T. D. Rice. Performed at Dan Rice’s Amphitheatre in February 1854, the play was advertised as “a satirical quizzical burlesque by Mrs. Harriet Screecher Blow.” See Joseph Roppolo, “Uncle Tom in New Orleans” 222, and Richard Moody, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Intro- duction” 357.

11 . For a fuller listing of these and related dramas, see Gary Engle, “Th e Atkinson Collec- tion of Ethiopian Drama,” and William Mahar, “Ethiopian Skits and Sketches.”

12 . Add to the theatrical list innumerable Uncle Tom songs (M. A. Collier’s “Eva’s Parting,” John S. Adams’s “I Am Going Th ere, or, the Death of Little Eva,” and so on); touring panoramic views and dioramas of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; commemorative plates with scenes from the novel and bisque china busts of Tom and Eva; specially bound editions of the novel itself; St. Clare hats and Uncle Tom tippets; card games, picture books, and en- gravings. According to the Liberator: “It should be noted, among the favorable signs of the times, that artists, of all grades, now fi nd it not only congenial, but a remunerative work, to represent the creations of Mrs. Stowe’s genius in pictures and statues.” See Th omas Riis, “Th e Music and Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and Stephen Hirsch, “Uncle Tomitudes” 311–20 ( Liberator quoted at 316).

13 . Th e fi rst of many fi lm versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared in 1903; for this history, see Harry Birdoff , Th e World’s Greatest Hit 392–410. For some very acute remarks on the development of fi lm out of the surplus symbolic value of black representation, see Michael Rogin, “Blackface, White Noise.”

14 . Th omas Gossett, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture 278–80. 15 . Th e Aiken version has seen many reprintings; I have used the edition in Montrose

Moses, ed., Representative Plays by American Dramatists. Th e Conway version has not been reprinted, was indeed considered lost until recently; a promptbook manuscript from an 1876 Boston Museum production is now held at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas. Th ere are some problems with this text: act four is largely

287Notes to Pages 224–238

reprinted from Aiken, and several of Conway’s scenes in act three are missing. As Bruce McConachie has pointed out, these scenes can be supplemented by a Boston Museum pro- gram from December 7, 1852 (Boston Public Library), reference to which indicates that the 1876 production was in other respects virtually identical to the 1852 performances. See McConachie, “Out of the Kitchen and into the Marketplace” 25 n.2.

Stowe’s construction of a female polis in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, her “domestic feminism,” has been illuminated by Ellen Moers, Harriet Beecher Stowe and American Literature 20–26; Leslie Fiedler, What Was Literature? 145–78; Jane Tompkins, “Sentimental Power”; Gillian Brown, “Getting in the Kitchen with Dinah”; Elizabeth Ammons, “Stowe’s Dream of the Mother-Savior”; and Stephen Railton, Authorship and Audience 74–89. Such defenses of Stowe, however, usually entail the elision of racial matters, as Hortense Spillers argues in “Changing the Letter”; see also the critique of the feminist literature on Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Rachel Bowlby, “Breakfast in America.” For an argument that Stowe’s novel was even more radical in its questioning of patriarchal structures than her partisans have recognized, see Christina Zwarg, “Fathering and Blackface in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

16 . In the novel itself, as even some of its contemporaries remarked, Stowe’s representa- tions of blacks resemble those of minstrelsy. See Literary World December 4, 1852, 357.

17 . Cf. H. J. Conway’s remark in a letter to Moses Kimball: “We must [partially] depend for our comic parts on Topsy (hard thing to do as a female negro)” [ sic ]. Quoted in Bruce McConachie, “H. J. Conway’s Dramatization of Uncle Tom’s Cabin” 150.

18 . New York Herald May 14, 1853. 19 . Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination” and Reading Capital; Nicos

Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes. 20 . See Karl Marx, “Th e North American Civil War,” “Th e Civil War in the United

States,” and “A Criticism of American Aff airs”; Charles and Mary Beard, Th e Rise of Ameri- can Civilization 2:3–7, 36–41; William Appleman Williams, Th e Contours of American History 284–319; Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy 111–55; David Potter, Th e Impending Crisis 32–35, 41–43.

21 . Quoted in Montrose Moses, “George L. Aiken’s Dramatization” 610–11. 22 . Joseph Ireland, extra-illustrated edition of Records of the New York Stage 2:xvi. 23 . In this and the next several paragraphs I am much indebted to Harry Birdoff , Th e

World’s Greatest Hit, for the detective work crucial to reconstructing the Uncle Tom feud (87–99, 107–26).

24 . See Barnum’s advertising copy alleging that, “while thoroughly anti-slavery in its sentiment, [Conway’s play] contains not a single word calculated to off end those whose opinions on this topic favor its non-agitation.” J. N. Ireland, extra-illustrated edition of Records of the New York Stage 2:xvi.

25 . Th e Knickerbocker indulged its contempt for houses such as the National: “We went to the National Th eatre the other evening, to behold the ‘Rural Habitation of Uncle Th omas,’ vulgarly known as ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin;’ and we would n’t go to see it again for a ‘large sum of gold’” (“First” 210).

26 . T. Allston Brown, History of the American Stage 6; Montrose Moses, “George L. Aik- en’s Dramatization” 608.

27 . Playbill, June 2, 1854, Harvard Th eatre Collection. 28 . Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin 340. Th is confl ict is submitted to lengthy

and intelligent discussion in Charles Foster, Th e Rungless Ladder 49–57. Foster speculates that Stowe’s portrait of St. Clare was inspired by Orestes Brownson’s 1840 “Th e Laboring

288 Notes to Pages 238–242

Classes,” which equated the exploitative systems of capitalism and slavery and predicted class war eight years in advance of Th e Communist Manifesto. I believe Foster underempha- sizes St. Clare’s ultimate siding with the northern worker against the southern slave; and it is interesting to note that in Brownson’s own development the positions of “Th e Laboring Classes” were soon elaborated into apologies for slavery. See, for example, Arthur Sch- lesinger, Th e Age of Jackson 299–304, 407–8, 425.

29 . Of course the displacement of labor struggles onto Britain, in accordance with the abolitionist belief in American “free labor,” might also have given working-class audiences trouble; but in most cases, as far as I can judge, the rhetoric of “European” working condi- tions seems to have functioned both as a fi gure for the northern states of America and as a useful fi ction, in which workers still believed, that lifelong wage work was not yet an Amer- ican affl iction.

30 . Th e Tribune did note that Barnum later altered this “deformity” of Conway’s play, no longer defending so vehemently the white worker. Somewhat ambiguously, it added: “Now let him [Barnum] kill Uncle Tom and all will be right” (December 2, 1853).

31 . Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men (on the Republican party) and Jean Baker, Aff airs of Party (on the Democratic party), both enlarge on this purpose.

32 . Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men 156, 158, 154; Joseph Rayback, Free Soil. See the excellent review of northern intellectual response to the growth of sectional thinking in the North in George Fredrickson, Th e Inner Civil War 36–50.

33 . Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men 155, 237, 239, 165. 34 . Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men 157–58. 35 . See, for example, Alexander Saxton, Th e Rise and Fall of the White Republic 127–82. 36 . Helene Zahler, Eastern Workingmen and National Land Policy 102; see also Bernard

Mandel, Labor 120–24. Th e title of one pamphlet said it all: Slavery . . . To Be Made the Uni- versal Condition of the Laboring Classes of Society. Th e Supporters of Th is Doctrine Vote for Buchanan (Rayback, “American” 161).

37 . See Iver Bernstein, Th e New York City Draft Riots 75–77, 85–86, 91–93, 99–100, 123–24. 38 . See, for example, the white working-class anger expressed in the 1850s in John Hop-

kins, Th e American Citizen 132, and H. B. Mullins, A Voice from the Workshop 10–11; see also W. J. Rorabaugh, “Rising Democratic Spirits” 157.

39 . For a reading of Lincoln’s political rhetoric in the heat of this process, see Eric Lott, “Th e Eighteenth Brumaire of Abraham Lincoln.”

Aft erword

1 . In an early letter to his brother, Michael Rogin notes, Melville signed himself “Taw- ney,” and his fi rst books mixed travel writing with anti-imperialist critique ( Subversive 43). Moby-Dick (1851), written during the Compromise of 1850 debates, seems (as many have pointed out) an allegory of the Compromise itself. See Willie Weathers, “Moby-Dick and the Nineteenth-Century Scene”; Charles Foster, “Something in Emblems”; and Alan Heimert, “Moby-Dick and American Political Symbolism.” For all three writers, the Union in Mel- ville’s allegory is destroyed by monomania: for Weathers, Ahab is William Lloyd Garrison, whose slogan was “No Compromise with Slaveholders”; for Foster, Ahab is Daniel Webster, advocate of the Compromise and thus the betrayer of New England’s moral hopes; and for Heimert, Ahab is John C. Calhoun, who would have preserved slavery not through com- promise but at the expense of the Union.

289Notes to Pages 243–246

2 . Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands 1:284, 43; for a similar view, see Journal of Music 5, 17 (1854), 134. For a brief account of Greenfi eld’s career, see Eileen Southern, Th e Music of Black Americans 103–4.

3 . Unfortunately this mournful, even nostalgic tone persists; one popular example is Ken Burns’s television documentary “Th e Civil War” (1990).

4 . For more on this ambivalence, see Caroline Moseley, “‘When Will Dis Cruel War Be Ober?’”

5 . Albon Man, “Labor Competition and the New York Draft Riots of 1863”; Robert Ernst, Immigrant Life in New York City 172–74; Bernard Mandel, Labor 189–94; Iver Bernstein, Th e New York City Draft Riots 3–42.

6 . Christy’s Bones and Banjo Melodist 57. 7 . Du Bois wrote, “It was easy to transfer class hatred so that it fell upon the black worker”

( Reconstruction 103–4). 8 . David Brion Davis, Th e Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 251; Alan Dawley,

Class and Community 196, 238–39. 9 . Karl Marx, Capital 301; see also the clarity of Bernard Mandel, Labor 204. For an ex-

cellent gloss on Marx’s words, see David Roediger, “‘Labor in White Skin’” 290–91.

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{ Index }

A Abjection , 278 n 26 Abolitionism , 12 , 29 , 30 , 99 , 115 , 116 , 133–139 , 160 ,

193 , 210 , 218–220 , 226 , 234 , 235 , 263 n 35 ; and labor , 78 , 91 , 110 , 133 , 139 , 159 , 160 , 193 , 208 , 216 , 238 , 240 , 246 , 274 nn 26 , 29

Adorno, Th eodor , 177 , 180 , 188 , 189 , 253 n 1 , 280 n 7 African Grove Th eatre , 45 , 46 African-Americans , 15–17 , 32 , 41 , 46 , 68 , 69 , 180 ,

181 , 187 , 243 , 246 , 266 n 29 , 267 n 42 , 276 n 42 ; culture of , 39–65 , 97 , 99 , 100–103 , 188 , 189 , 254 n 9 , 284 n 53 ; in minstrel shows , 26 , 27 , 37 , 43 , 52–55 , 90 , 100 , 105 , 116 , 120 , 123 , 124 , 126 , 129 , 131 , 132 , 144 , 150 , 151 , 155 , 157 , 164–166 , 168 , 171 , 194 , 256 n 31 , 260 n 23 , 261 n 24 , 267 n 42 , 273 n 19 ; in North , 15 , 41 , 258 n 5 , 259 n 9 . See also Race ; Racism

“Aft er Twenty Years,” 247 Agee, James , 7 Aldrich, Th omas Bailey , 32 Aldridge, Ira , 45–47 , 51 Allen, William Francis , 182 Althusser, Louis , 15 , 227 , 267 n 45 Amalgamation . See Miscegenation American exceptionalism , 72 , 73 , 264 n 12 American Museum, Barnum’s , 75 , 79 , 80 , 221 ,

230–232 , 235 , 248 American Studies , 10 , 11 , 252 n 18 . See also

Cultural Studies Angelina Baker , 201 Antiabolitionism , 9 , 29 , 30 , 99 , 116 , 132–135 , 209 ,

235 , 276 n 41 , 286 n 10 Apollo Minstrels , 20 Aronowitz, Stanley , 106 , 278 n 38 Articulation , 188 , 281 n 19 Astaire, Fred , 5 “Astonishing Nose,” 167 , 168 Astor Place Opera House , 9 , 68–70 , 88 , 159 , 248 Astor Place riot , 9 , 68–70 , 85 , 88 , 89 , 91 , 110 ,

263 n 6 Attali, Jacques , 192 Audiences: minstrel show , 19–21 , 32 , 35 , 85 , 151 ,

177 , 264 n 10 , 270 n 21 ; music hall , 94 ; theater , 45 , 46 , 85 , 89

Austin, William , 198 , 212 , 225 , 281 n 14 Authoritarian populism , 12 , 253 n 23

B Babcock-Abrahams, Barbara , 25 , 27 “Backside Albany,” 42 , 48 , 258 n 6 Baker, Benjamin: A Glance at New York in 1848 ,

77 , 85 , 86 ; New York As It Is , 77 , 220 Bakhtin, Mikhail , 150 Baraka, Amiri . See Jones, LeRoi Barnum, P. T. , 79–81 , 117 , 223 , 226 , 229–232 ,

266 n 28 , 287 n 24 . See also American Museum, Barnum’s

Barthes, Roland , 145 , 151 , 189 , 190 , 280 n 5 Bell, Bernard , 256 n 28 Benedict, Ruth , 7 Bennett, James Gordon , 226 Bennett, Tony , 270 n 27 Bensonhurst racist attacks , 247 Bercovitch, Sacvan , 73 Berlin, Ira , 41 , 48 Bernstein, Iver , 241 Berret, Anthony , 32 , 34 Berryman, John , 5 Bhabha, Homi , 6 , 96 B’hoy , 70 , 72 , 85 , 87–90 , 159 , 163 , 164 , 192 , 214 ,

215 , 234 , 235 , 276 n 6 . See also Bowery Birdoff , Harry , 225 Birth of a Nation (Griffi th) , 5 Bishop, Henry , 183 Black Orpheus , 250 Black pageantry , 29 , 47 “Black Swan,” 243 Black theater , 45 , 46 Blackface: in art , 254 n 10 ; black penis , 9 , 26 , 29 ,

59 , 126 , 156 , 157 ; burnt cork , 6 , 26 , 37 , 51 , 117 , 153 , 164 , 250 ; in clowning , 25 ; and dream- work , 139 , 157 , 204 ; genealogy of , 38–49 , 136–37 , 276 n 1 ; greasepaint , 26 , 153 , 247 ; in literature , 5 ; and ritual inversion , 28 ; and slave trickster , 22–26 , 148 , 196 ; social consciousness of , 243 ; and southwestern humor , 23 , 256 n 28 . See also Minstrel show

Blackmar, Elizabeth , 260 n 23 “Blackness,” 5–9 , 15–41 , 53 , 54 , 57 , 62 , 64 , 65 , 67 ,

69 , 71 , 72 , 80 , 83 , 87 , 91 , 97 , 99–101 , 103 , 116 , 117 , 120 , 121 , 127 , 128 , 130 , 145 , 147 , 149 , 157 , 173 , 176 , 188 , 191 , 195 , 199 , 204 , 206 , 208 , 215 , 252 n 13 , 261 n 26

Index320

Blair, John , 255 n 14 Blake; or, Th e Huts of America , 244 Blassingame, John , 256 n 31 Bledstein, Burton , 72 “Blue Tail Fly, De,” 185 , 186 , 206 , 207 Blumin, Stuart , 73 , 198 “Boatmen Dance,” 167 Boaz, Franz , 7 Bohemia , 52–55 , 212 , 260 n 19 , 273 n 18 “Boho Dance,” 247 “Bojangles,” 5 Bonaparte, Louis , 109 , 110 Bond, Julian , 12 “Bonny Green Flag, Th e,” 245 Booker, Johnny , 53 Boucicault, Dion , 233 Bourdieu, Pierre , 50 , 162 Bowery , 68–70 , 77 , 80 , 82 , 85 , 87 , 90 , 92 , 129 ,

134–137 , 140 , 144 , 162 , 164 , 220 . See also B’hoy Bowery Circus , 140 Bowery Th eatre , 75 , 84 , 89 , 129 , 136 , 137 , 218 , 222 ,

223 , 235 Boyer, Paul , 72 Broderick, David , 78 Brooklyn Daily Eagle , 81 , 82 , 101 Brower, Frank , 53 , 140 , 142 , 222 , 236 Brown, T. Allston , 63 , 121 Brown, William Henry , 45 Brown, William Wells , 60 , 83 , 284 n 53 Bryant, Dan , 98 , 169 Bryant, William Cullen , 82 , 239 Buckley, Peter , 69 , 75 , 77 , 79 , 275 n 37 Buckley’s Serenaders , 188 Bull, Ole , 93 , 100 Bunn, Alfred , 243 Buntline, Ned . See Judson, E. Z. C . Burn, James Dawson , 205 Busch, Moritz , 100 Bush, George H. W. , 247 Byron, Lord George Gordon , 78

C Cable, George Washington , 32 Calhoun, John C. , 24 , 78 , 160 , 238 “California Song,” 214 Campbell’s Minstrels , 188 “Camptown Races,” 217 Cantwell, Robert , 50 , 98 , 99 , 248 , 255 n 14 Castle Garden , 72 Castration , 9 , 156 , 157 , 166 , 272 n 13 , 278 n 27 ,

279 n 46 Catholic church , 94 , 99 Channing, William Ellery , 33 Charivari , 140 , 142 Chase, Salmon P. , 216 Chatham Street Chapel , 136

Chatham Th eatre , 72 , 75 , 77 Child, Lydia Maria , 33 , 266 n 30 , 284 n 44 “Ching a Ring Chaw,” 123 Christgau, Robert , 247 Christy, E. P. , 51–53 , 145 , 176 , 276 n 1 , 281 n 20 Christy, George (George Harrington) , 15 , 55 , 87 ,

98 , 165 , 169 , 176 , 222 Christy and Wood’s Minstrels , 51 , 198 , 201 , 222 , 236 Christy’s Minstrels , 20 , 71 , 87 , 145 , 148 , 176 , 188 ,

212 , 236 , 279 n 2 , 285 n 2 Circus , 25 , 32 , 53 , 80 , 90 , 116 , 140 , 144 , 158 Civil War , 9 , 107 , 109 , 218–220 , 223 , 240 , 241 , 245 ,

246 , 271 n 35 , 284 n 49 “Clar de Kitchen,” 23 Clark, T. J. , 53 , 107 , 163 , 247 , 261 n 30 Clay, Henry , 51 , 219 Clemens, Samuel Langhorne . See Twain, Mark Clover, Carol , 278 n 30 “Coal Black Rose,” 121 , 131 , 137 Cohen, Philip , 127 , 130 Collins, John A. , 160 Colonization, black , 137 , 215 , 217 Commerford, John , 204 Compromise of 1850 , 9 , 37 , 109 , 110 , 175 , 209 ,

217–219 , 221 , 231 , 239 , 285 n 1 Connelly, Marc , 7 Conner, Edmon S. , 63 “Cooney in de Holler,” 88 Cooper, James Fenimore , 47 , 57 Cotton, Ben , 52 , 54 , 55 Crime , 74 “Cuff ,” 18–20 , 58 , 61–64 , 137 , 138 , 253 n 4 Cullwick, Hannah , 126 Cultural revolution , 91 , 220 , 228 , 234 Cultural studies , 10 , 11 . See also American

Studies Culture industry , 8 , 12 , 17 , 50 , 75–79 , 90 , 223 , 232 ,

240 , 252 n 13 , 253 n 1 Curtis, George William , 282 n 29 Cushman, Charlotte , 92

D Daily Sentinel , 133 Dan Tucker , 59 , 192 Dandy, black , 15 , 25 , 116 , 125 , 135 , 138 , 139 , 141 , 195 ,

200 , 215 , 229 , 230 , 276 n 42 Dandy Jim , 102 , 103 Davidge, William , 91 Davis, David Brion , 72 Davis, Mike , 99 , 264 n 12 Davis, Natalie Zemon , 28 , 29 Davis, Susan , 29 Dawley, Alan , 90 , 110 , 134 De Voe, Th omas , 42 Death instinct , 59 , 190 , 192 , 195 , 196 . See also

Repetition

Index 321

Delany, Martin , 5 , 33 , 51 , 94 , 244 Democratic party , 51 , 78 , 79 , 99 , 109 , 110 , 133 , 134 ,

160 , 192 , 210 , 212 , 216 , 217 , 239 , 240 , 275 n 30 Democratic Review , 92 , 109 , 208 , 210 Denning Michael , 83 , 139 , 157 , 237 , 247 Dennison, Sam , 187 Depression (1837–43) , 110 , 115 , 141 , 158 , 192 , 207 .

See also Panic of 1837 Diamond, John , 116–118 Dickens, Charles , 88 , 117 , 118 , 120 , 153 Dime novel , 67 , 69 , 71 , 81 , 83 , 130 , 138 , 235 , 247 ,

280 n 3 Dinkins, David , 247 “Dixie,” 245 Dixon, George Washington , 115 Donne, John , 170 Dorman, James , 8 Dorson, Richard , 85 Douglas, Ann , 32 , 64 , 195 Douglas, Stephen A. , 239 Douglass, Frederick , 5 , 7 , 15 , 31 , 34–36 , 38 , 78 , 98 ,

107 , 132 , 217 , 257 n 39 Downing, Major Jack , 96 Draft riots (1863) , 12 , 98 Dreams from My Father , 250 Dred Scott , 110 Dreiser, Th eodore , 63 , 262 n 33 Du Bois, W. E. B. , 17 , 154 Dunbar, Paul Laurence , 35 Dwight, J. S. , 101–103 , 189 Dyer, Richard , 122 , 123

E 1848: American , 9 , 91 , 108–111 , 165 , 174–217 , 244 ,

245 , 247 ; European , 109 , 174 , 206 , 210 . See also Civil War

Election Day , 47 , 48 Elegy , 196 Elias, Norbert , 162 Eliot, T. S. , 94 , 209 Ellison, Ralph , 3 , 4 , 8 , 25 , 39 , 247 , 269 n 8 “Emma Snow,” 196 Emmett, Dan , 49 , 51–53 , 75 , 98 , 140 , 144 , 187 , 245 ,

267 n 42 , 276 n 1 Engels, Friedrich , 57 Ethiopian minstrelsy . See Minstrel show Ethiopian Serenaders , 158 , 188 , 282 n 26 Evangelicalism , 110 , 115 , 133 , 134 , 158 , 159 ,

274 nn 27 , 32 Evans, George Henry , 133 , 136 , 160 , 210 Evans, Walker , 7

F Factory girl , 203 Faler, Paul , 90 , 110 , 134 Family , 194–208

Fanon, Frantz , 157 , 255 nn 15 , 17 “Farewell My Lilly Dear,” 194 “Farewell! Old Cottage,” 198 Farren, George , 136 Faulkner, William , 127 Feejee Mermaid , 80 , 117 Fiedler, Leslie , 5 , 54 , 248 , 253 n 1 Fields, Barbara , 265 n 16 , 274 n 29 Finney, Charles Grandison , 136 “Fire, Fire, Fire,” 87 Firth and Pond, Publishers , 176 Fisk Jubilee Singers , 243 Five Points, N.Y. , 49 , 88 , 116 , 120 “Folk,” 7 , 17 , 96 , 104–106 , 183 , 186 , 188 , 258 n 3 ,

270 n 26 Foner, Eric , 49 , 82 , 132 , 216 , 240 , 284 n 49 Forrest, Edwin , 70 , 92 , 136 , 263 n 5 Foster, Charles , 287 n 28 Foster, George , 88 , 164 Foster, Stephen , 9 , 17 , 19 , 34 , 49 , 51–53 , 98 ,

174–177 , 183 , 194 , 195 , 198 , 211 , 217 , 224 , 225 , 243 , 279 n 43 , 281 n 20

Franklin Museum , 222 , 235 Fredrickson, George , 32 , 34 , 256 n 31 Free labor , 63 , 73 , 208 , 238 , 240 , 288 n 29 Free Soil movement , 82 , 109 , 110 , 208 , 212–217 ,

220 , 234 , 239 , 266 n 26 , 274 n 24 , 286 n 6 Free Soil party , 109 , 110 , 216 Freud, Sigmund , 140 , 146–149 , 156 , 167 , 168 , 190 ,

196 , 273 n 20 Frontier , 10 , 39 , 48 , 49 , 57 , 86 , 96 , 104 , 105 , 109 ,

121 , 198–200 Fugitive Slave Law , 9 , 110 , 174 , 193 , 219 , 226 Fuller, Margaret , 7 , 16 , 20 , 69 , 100

G “Gal from the South,” 26 , 157 Garber, Marjorie , 26 , 248 Garrison, William Lloyd , 78 , 88 , 115 , 160 ,

234 , 250 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. , 254 n 12 Gavitt’s Original Ethiopian Serenaders , 37 Geertz, Cliff ord , 6 , 41 “General Taylor,” 214 , 215 Georgia Minstrels , 36 Germon, G. C. , 224 “Gib Us Chaw Tobacco,” 155 Giddings, Joshua , 216 , 272 n 9 Gilje, Paul , 153 Gilman, Caroline , 181 Ginzburg, Carlo , 106 Girard, René , 260 n 24 Gliddon, George , 81 Gold rush , 109 , 147 , 174–217 Gramsci, Antonio , 11 , 94 , 104 , 106 , 141 , 188 ,

268 n 2 , 270 n 27

Index322

Greeley, Horace , 15 , 160 , 239 Greenfi eld, Elizabeth , 243 Griffi n, John Howard , 5 Grimsted, David , 17 , 92

H Haiti , 123 Hall, Stuart , 8 , 12 , 18 , 73 , 105 , 247 , 252 n 12 ,

276 n 3 Halttunen, Karen , 72 Hamblin, Th omas , 75 , 136 Hamlet , 47 , 76 Hamm, Charles , 195 Hancock, Herbie , 258 n 7 Harmoneons , 82 Harrington, George . See Christy, George Harris, Joel Chandler , 32 Harris, Neil , 79 Harrison, One-Legged , 53 Hart, Adolphus , 235 Hartz, Louis , 73 Haven, Gilbert , 33 Hawkins, Micah , 42 , 48 Haysbert, Dennis , 250 Head of State , 250 Hearn, Lafcadio , 49 Heath, Stephen , 189 “Hee Haw,” 5 Henry, O. , 247 Herskowitz, Richard , 266 n 28 Heth, Joice , 80 , 117 Hewlett, James , 45 Higginson, Th omas Wentworth , 124 , 272 n 9 Higham, John , 278 n 33 Hip hop music , 181 ; and break dancing , 258 n 7 .

See also Street dancing, black Hobsbawm, E. J. , 28 Home Journal , 89 “Home! Sweet Home!” 183 , 187 , 198 , 243 Homesickness , 193 Homosexuality , 27 , 55 , 56 , 90 , 126 , 156 , 167–171 ,

255 n 19 , 260 n 24 , 267 n 45 Hone, Philip , 115 , 135 Horkheimer, Max , 253 n 1 Howard, Caroline Fox (Mrs. G. C.) , 225 Howard, Cordelia , 220 , 232 Howard, George C. , 220 Howard Beach racist attacks , 247 Howells, William Dean , 32 Howes, Uncle Nate , 140 Huggins, Nathan , 8 , 23 , 154 , 255 n 14 , 255 n 15 Hurston, Zora Neale , 7 Hutchinson, Asa , 220 Hutchinson Family Singers , 197 , 220 Hutton, Laurence , 57 , 272 n 4 Huyssen, Andreas , 67

I “I’m Gwine to Alabamy,” 181 , 188 Imaginary , 5 , 154 , 157 , 267 n 45 Industrial morality , 73 , 90 , 152 , 153 Insurrection: class , 89–91 , 192 ; slave , 24 , 25 , 46 ,

102 , 123 , 124 , 127 , 133 , 152 , 234 , 272 n 9 “Ireland and Virginia,” 98 , 100 Irish , 36 , 49 , 71–74 , 78 , 85 , 94–100 , 153 , 183 , 198 ,

199 , 212 , 216 , 245 , 261 , 261 n 26 , 265 n 18 , 269 n 13 . See also Minstrel show: Irish

Irish American , 236 Irving, Washington , 70 , 84

J Jackson, Andrew , 24 , 51 James, C. L. R. , 3 , 12 James, Henry , 80 , 222 , 223 , 225 , 235 , 236 Jameson, Fredric , 67 , 151–153 , 188 , 220 , 227 , 228 ,

247 , 249 , 253 n 2 , 262 n 31 , 273 n 21 , 280 n 5 , 281 n 21 , 282 n 28

Jazz , 177 Jazz Singer, Th e , 5 Jeff erson, Th omas , 60 Jentz, John , 274 n 29 Jews , 261 n 26 Jim Crow , 8 , 21–30 , 53 , 58 , 71 , 90 , 92 , 99 , 111 , 115 ,

130 , 141 , 215 , 218 , 224 , 225 , 230 , 249 “Jim Crow,” 23 , 53 , 58 , 61 , 84 , 115 , 225 , 273 n 17 John Canoe , 47 Johnson, Barbara , 255 n 17 Johnson, James Weldon , 17 Johnson, Paul , 72 , 73 , 77 Johnson, Richard , 11 “Jolly Raft sman, Th e,” 200 Jones, Gareth Stedman , 17 , 66 , 72 Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka) , 8 , 247 Jordan, Winthrop , 28 Jouissance/plaisir , 151 , 189 , 190 . See also Pleasure Journal of Commerce , 135 Journal of Music , 72 , 87 , 101 , 147 , 176 , 198 , 260 n 21 ,

279 n 2 , 280 n 4 Juba (William Henry Lane) , 53 , 117–120 , 181 Judson, E. Z. C. (Ned Buntline) , 69 , 88 “Jumbo Jum,” 124–126

K Kansas-Nebraska controversy , 9 , 110 , 111 , 239 Karcher, Carolyn , 263 n 34 Keeler, Ralph , 53 , 165 Kelley, Mary , 32 Kemble, E. W. , 171 , 172 Kemble, Fanny , 98 , 99 , 121 Kennard, James K., Jr. , 59 , 62 , 102 , 103 , 192 Kerouac, Jack , 52 King, Martin Luther, Jr. , 195 Klein, Melanie , 149 , 151

Index 323

Kneass, Nelson , 212 Knickerbocker , 59 , 102 , 146 , 147 Knobel, Dale , 98 Kotzebue, August von , 92 Kristeva, Julia , 278 n 26

L Lacan, Jacques , 157 , 196 Land reform , 159 , 193 , 209 , 210 , 212 Lane, William Henry (Juba) , 53 , 117–120 , 181 Lapsansky, Emma Jones , 276 n 43 Lee, Spike , 247 Lefebvre, Henri , 189 Leon, Francis , 55 , 169 , 170 Levin, Harry , 128 Lewis, John Delaware , 260 n 23 Liberator , 21 , 45 , 115 , 133 , 226 , 227 , 250 , 286 ,

286 n 12 “Lilla Dear, Good Bye,” 214 Lincoln, Abraham , 5 , 197 , 223 Lind, Jenny , 93 , 198 Lippard, George , 67 , 83 , 208 , 263 Little Katy, or the Hot Corn Girl , 232 , 235 Litvak, Joseph , 59 Litwack, Leon , 39 Lize , 86 , 87 , 164 , 236 . See also Bowery Lloyd, Marie , 94 , 95 Logan, Olive , 55 , 166 “Long Tail Blue,” 25 , 121 , 125 Lower million . See Popular culture “Lubly Fan,” 150 , 167 “Lucy Long,” 50 , 165 , 171 Ludlow, Noah , 63

M MacCann, Donnarae , 256 n 29 Macherey, Pierre , 58 , 202 Mackay, Charles , 284 n 44 Macready, Charles , 70 , 89 Macready, William , 98 Mailer, Norman , 5 , 54–56 , 261 n 26 Manifest Destiny , 109 , 111 , 210 , 211 , 242 Mann, Horace , 216 Marcus, Greil , 247 Marcus, Steven , 247 , 253 n 2 Maróthy, János , 191 Marx, Karl , 8 , 57 , 109 , 228 , 246 , 247 , 249 , 262 n 33 Marx, Leo , 10 Masculinity , 9 , 27 , 36 , 51 , 54–56 , 75 , 90 , 108 , 130 ,

156 , 164 , 166 , 169 , 194 , 203 , 260 n 23 , 273 n 19 Mathews, Charles , 46 , 51 Mathews, Cornelius , 77 Matthews, Brander , 35 McAndrews, J. W. , 45 McConachie, Bruce , 224 , 234 McDowell, Andrew , 52

Mechanics’ Hall , 71 , 158 , 176 , 212 Melodrama , 10 , 67 , 69 , 75 , 76 , 85 , 214 , 218–251 ,

283 n 31 Melville, Herman , 15 , 37 , 63 , 64 , 70 , 93 , 127 , 128 ,

168 , 242–244 , 263 n 34 ; “Benito Cereno,” 37 , 64 , 242–244 ; Th e Confi dence-Man , 63 , 127 , 263 n 34 ; Moby-Dick , 168

Mestayer, Emily , 236 Metz, Christian , 272 n 13 , 277 n 11 , 278 n 27 Mexican War , 109 , 174 , 208–210 Middle class , 77 , 94 , 95 , 109 , 115 , 138 , 176 , 198 , 241 ,

274 n 26 ; “boss,” 73 ; formation of , 67 , 72 , 73 ; merchant capitalist , 73

Middleton, Richard , 177 , 180 , 183 , 184 , 189–191 , 195 , 280 n 6

“Miller’s Song,” 199 Minstrel show: and black men , 26 , 52–55 , 90 ,

100 , 120 , 123 , 124 , 126 , 131 , 132 , 155 , 157 , 168 , 171 , 256 n 31 , 260 n 23 , 261 n 24 ; and black women , 26 , 27 , 124 , 129 , 144 , 150 , 151 , 157 , 164–166 , 194 , 260 n 23 , 273 n 19 ; blacks in , 37 , 43 , 105 , 116 , 267 n 42 ; and burlesque , 42 , 43 , 76 , 164 , 200 , 236 ; and class , 69–91 , 126–135 , 153–160 , 198 , 202–209 , 234 , 245 , 247 , 249 , 257 n 37 , 267 n 40 ; commercial organization , 76 ; as counterfeit , 62 , 88 , 104–108 , 115 , 117 , 118 , 127 , 145 , 188 ; as cultural domination , 8 , 17 , 18 , 30–38 , 52 , 105 , 126 , 222 ; as cultural theft , 8 , 10 , 11 , 19 , 41 , 54 , 253 n 3 , 260 n 22 , 269 n 10 ; dance , 97 , 116–118 , 164 ; decline of , 7 , 35 ; defi nition of , 3 , 5–6 , 219 ; dialect , 24 , 121 , 123 , 276 n 6 ; elements of , 97 , 187 ; endmen , 144 , 149 ; as ethnic mediator , 97–100 ; and evocation of childhood in audience , 54 , 147 , 148–150 , 197 ; folklore , 23 , 39 , 96 ; genesis/ history , 38–49 , 136–37 , 276 n 1 ; and homosexuality , 27 , 55 , 56 , 90 , 126 , 156 , 167–171 , 255 n 19 , 260 n 24 , 267 n 45 ; humor , 94 , 140–53 , 217 ; illustrations , 22 , 44 , 119 , 122 , 125 , 129 , 131 , 143 , 178 ; instrumentation , 41 , 94 , 138 ; interlocutor in , 144 , 159 , 276 n 6 ; and Irish , 36 , 94–100 , 153 , 183 , 198 , 212 , 216 , 245 , 265 n 18 , 269 n 13 ; lyrics , 22 , 25 , 39 , 49 , 97 , 100 , 123 , 124 , 126 , 148 , 150 , 151 , 155 , 156 , 165 , 167 , 169 , 179 , 181–183 , 187 , 196 , 197 , 200–202 , 206 , 211 , 213 , 214 , 236 , 258 n 6 , 260 n 18 , 273 n 17 ; melodrama , 75 , 76 , 218–251 ; and misogyny , 27 , 90 , 139 , 141 , 151 , 164 , 165 , 169 , 171 , 255 n 19 ; music , 97 , 100 , 176–181 , 212 , 214 , 280 n 4 ; as national art , 8 , 26 , 82 , 92 , 96 , 102 , 217 , 270 n 18 ; as northern art , 41 , 42 , 53 , 237 ; origin-narratives of , 57–65 , 97 , 136–37 ; as people’s culture , 7 , 15–17 , 20 , 30–34 , 97–100 , 113 , 124 ; performers , 50–56 , 259 nn 15 , 16 ; playlets , 131 , 137 , 138 , 141 ; puns , 144 , 147 ; as racial mediation , 38 , 40 , 97 , 100 , 255 n 15 , 262 n 31 ; and racial transgression , 9 , 66 , 123 , 154 ; reception , 19–21 , 32 , 35 , 85 , 151 , 177 ,

Index324

264 n 10 , 270 n 21 ; sentimentalism , 29 , 32 , 42 , 174 , 177 , 183 , 187 , 188 , 191 , 194–198 , 201–204 , 283 n 31 ( see also Romantic racialism ) ; and sexuality , 26 , 27 , 52–55 , 90 , 100 , 120 , 123 , 124 , 126 , 129 , 131 , 132 , 144 , 150 , 151 , 155 , 157 , 164–166 , 168 , 171 , 194 , 256 n 31 , 260 n 23 , 261 n 24 , 273 n 19 ; skits , 144 , 200 , 265 n 18 ; songs , 20 , 23–27 , 49 , 51 , 68 , 87 , 98 , 100–102 , 106 , 121–126 , 144–148 , 154–157 , 160 , 165–170 , 178 , 183–187 , 199 , 203–208 , 211–215 , 229 , 256 n 26 , 281 n 14 , 282 n 29 ; and southwestern humor , 23 , 97 , 256 n 28 ; stump speeches , 6 , 47 , 81 , 126 , 144 , 147 , 200 , 259 n 9 , 284 n 44 , 285 n 2 ; ubiquity of , 5 , 59 ; and Uncle Tom’s Cabin , 34 , 216 , 228–234 , 287 n 16 ; “wench” acts , 6 , 26 , 27 , 55 , 90 , 124 , 163–173 , 243 , 255 n 19 , 260 n 24 , 279 n 47

Minstrelization , 41–50 , 80 , 258 n 4 Miscegenation , 25 , 59 , 60 , 97 , 118 , 125–127 , 137 ,

188 , 191 , 276 nn 41 , 43 Missouri Compromise , 239 Mitchell, Joni , 247 Mitchell, William , 76 Mode of production , 30 , 199 , 227–234 , 241 Modleski, Tania , 168 n 13 , 189 , 252 n 13 Monroe, Bill , 5 Montgomery, David , 71 , 141 , 158 Moore, Scotty , 56 Moore, Th omas , 98 Morgan, Edmund , 139 Morning Express , 231 Morris, Willie , 54 Mose , 85–89 , 92 , 159 , 208 , 214 , 215 , 220 , 232 , 235 ,

236 . See also B’hoy ; Bowery Moses, Wilson , 34 Mulvey, Laura , 144 , 157 , 273 n 20 Munby, Arthur J. , 126 Murger, Henri , 52 Museum , 75 , 76 , 79 , 80 Music hall, English , 72 , 94 Musical Heritage Society , 150 “My Love He Is a Sailleur Boy,” 169 “My Old Kentucky Home, Good Night!” 194 ,

196 , 225 “My Ole Dad,” 155

N Nathan, Hans , 40 , 97 , 183 National Advocate , 45 National Era , 216 , 220 National popular , 94–104 , 241 , 268 n 2 National Reform Association , 210 National Th eatre , 220 , 221 , 226 , 230–233 , 235 Nationalism , 62 , 92–100 , 212m214, 215 , 268 n 7 ,

285 n 56 ; black , 94 , 215 ; Irish , 78 , 99 ; and postcoloniality , 92 , 94 , 96

Nativism , 69 , 85 , 91 , 94 , 110 , 141 , 142 , 158–160 , 209 , 239 , 256 n 26 , 269 n 16 , 278 n 33

Negro minstrelsy . See Minstrel show “Nelly Was a Lady,” 194 Nevin, Robert P. , 19 , 58 , 61 , 62–64 New England Association of Farmers,

Mechanics, and other Workingmen , 133 , 193 New Orleans Picayune , 45 New York Atlas , 231 , 233 , 234 New York Aurora , 81 , 116 New York Clipper , 52 , 140 , 170 New York Daily Times , 224 , 226–228 New York Evening Post , 82 New York Herald , 20 , 91 , 212 , 218 , 220 , 253 n 6 ,

262 n 32 , 263 n 6 , 279 n 2 , 279 n 47 New York Ledger , 235 New York Morning Express , 231 New York Observer , 232 New York Sun , 81 , 134 New York tailors’ strike (1850) , 110 , 159 , 241 New York Transcript , 81 , 134 New York Tribune , 15 , 192 , 235 , 240 , 264 n 10 ,

283 n 34 Newspaper , 96 Nichols, Th omas Low , 116 Nietzsche, Friedrich , 57 “Nigga, Put Down Dat Jug,” 169 “Nigga in de Cornfi eld,” 226 North Star , 15 Northall, William K. , 75 Nostalgia , 7 , 35 , 177 , 193 , 197–200 , 211 , 277 n 19 ,

283 n 35

O O. Henry , 247 O Hush! or, Th e Virginny Cupids , 131 , 137 Obama, Barack , 250 O’Connell, Daniel , 78 , 99 , 269 n 16 Odell, George , 158 , 176 “Oh! Susanna,” 5 , 34 , 81 , 176 , 183 , 187 , 188 , 211–215 ,

234 “Old Black Joe,” 17 , 34 “Old Blind Josey,” 156 , 157 Old Corn Meal , 45 “Old Dan Tucker,” 16 , 88 , 100 , 144 , 187 , 192 , 280 n 3 “Old Folks at Home,” 17 , 34 , 72 , 98 , 194 , 197 , 198 ,

225 , 228 , 229 , 256 n 27 , 279 n 2 , 281 n 20 “Old King Crow,” 168 “Old Uncle Ned,” 34 , 88 , 194 , 224 , 244 , 283 n 34 “Ole Tater Peelin,” 155 Olympic Th eatre , 75 , 76 , 159 One-Legged Harrison , 53 Opera , 67 , 82 , 92 , 93 , 103 ; burlesques of , 76 “Opossum Up a Gum Tree,” 47 , 49 Osofsky, Gilbert , 99 Ostendorf, Berndt , 40 , 107 , 255 n 15 , 258 n 3

Minstrel show: and black men (continued)

Index 325

O’Sullivan, John , 210 Othello , 45 , 229 Other , 4 , 25 , 100 , 127 , 128 , 143 , 149 , 152–155 , 191 ,

204 Ovesey, Lionel , 279 n 46 Owen, Robert Dale , 133 , 160

P “Pale gaze,” 157 , 158 Panic of 1837 , 62 , 69 , 70 , 110 , 141 , 209 . See also

Depression Park Th eatre , 45 Parry, Albert , 52 Pease, Donald , 250 Pelham, Dick , 140 , 142 Penny press , 67 , 76 , 81 , 96 , 162 People’s culture , 7 , 17 , 30–32 , 35 , 38 , 82 , 100 . See

also “Folk” ; Popular culture Percy, Th omas , 106 Person, Ethel , 279 n 46 Petite bourgeoisie , 209 , 279 n 41 Phelps, H. P. , 61 Philadelphia Public Ledger , 69 Phillips, Wendell , 99 , 160 , 226 Phrenology , 81 , 126 Pierce, Franklin , 239 , 240 Pinkster , 43 , 47 , 48 Pise, Olivia , 53 “Plantation Melodies” (Foster) , 9 , 34 , 175 , 194 ,

195 , 206 . See also Minstrel show: songs Plantation mythology , 193 , 197 , 200 , 202 , 204 ,

206 , 208 , 209 , 211 , 215 , 217 , 280 n 5 , 284 n 42 Pleasure , 145–154 , 157 , 159 , 166–167 , 173 , 180 , 183 ,

189 , 190 Poe, Edgar Allan , 195 Political Unconscious , 249 Polk, James K. , 109 , 239 , 240 , 259 n 18 Polka , 212 “Polko Foco Poetics,” 259 n 18 Popular culture , 8 , 17 , 76 , 83 , 92–95 , 104 , 105 , 107 ,

222 , 223 , 240 , 253 n 1 , 256 n 27 , 281 n 21 Potter, David , 228 Presley, Elvis , 5 , 56 , 107 Public Enemy , 247 Purdy, A. H. , 232 Purdy’s National Th eatre . See National Th eatre Putnam’s Monthly , 93 , 220 , 282 n 29

R Race: and desire , 6 , 24 , 26 , 30 , 56 , 57 , 60 , 151 , 152 ,

154 , 157 , 248 , 260 n 23 ; and fantasy , 56 , 63 , 101 , 145 , 154 , 156 ; and feeling , 4–6 , 9 , 11 , 12 , 18 , 21 , 40 , 66 , 74 , 83 , 108 , 110 , 115 , 120 , 127 , 134 , 137 , 139 , 141 , 146 , 191–193 , 197 , 245 , 257 n 37 , 274 n 29 ; languages of , 66–91 , 264 n 8 ; nineteenth- century theories of , 33 , 57 , 101 ; and politics , 8 ,

9 , 15 , 17 , 29–31 , 57 , 66 , 238 , 243 , 244 , 249 , 252 n 14 , 259 n 12 ; and representation , 8 , 29 , 58 , 61 , 76 , 82 , 91 , 154 , 161 , 217–219 , 227 , 242 , 243 , 249 , 250 ; and stereotypes , 8 , 33 , 34 , 36 , 117 , 260 n 23 , 270 n 20

Racism , 4 , 6 , 17 , 18 , 30–35 , 75 , 82 , 83 , 132–139 , 161 , 167 , 215 , 217 , 252 n 12 , 256 n 28 , 265 n 22 , 274 n 26 , 278 n 33 . See also Race

Ramazani, Jahan , 196 Ratner, Lorman , 274 n 29 Rawick, George , 255 n 15 Reconstruction , 249 , 253 n 4 Reed, Adolph , 12 Rehin, George , 67 , 254 n 9 Repetition , 148 , 156 , 177–192 , 280 n 6 , 281 nn 10 , 15 ,

282 n 22 ; fort/da , 190 , 196 Republican party , 82 , 216 , 239–241 , 284 n 49 Rice, Dan , 286 n 10 Rice, T. D. , 3 , 18–20 , 23 , 34 , 49 , 51 , 53 , 54 , 58 , 59 ,

61–63 , 71 , 78 , 84 , 97 , 115 , 118 , 129 , 130–132 , 137 , 141 , 142 , 144 , 146 , 153 , 157 , 176 , 218 , 220 , 222 , 223 , 249 ; O Hush! or, Th e Virginny Cupids , 131 , 137

Richard III , 45 Ricoeur, Paul , 190 “Ring, Ring de Banjo,” 201 , 206 Rioting , 29 , 30 , 68–70 , 85 , 88 , 89 , 91 , 98 , 99 , 110 ,

116 , 130 , 132–139 , 231 , 235 , 256 n 26 , 276 n 41 Roach, Max , 181 Robinson, Bill “Bojangles,” 5 Robinson, Jackie , 107 Robinson, Solon , 232 Rock, Chris , 250 Rock ’n’ roll , 5 , 95 , 121 , 271 n 35 Rodgers, Jimmie , 5 Roediger, David , 26 , 29 , 71 , 160 , 245 , 248 , 274 n 24 ,

277 n 22 , 284 n 49 Rogers, Nathaniel P. , 160 Rogin, Michael , 9 , 108 , 109 , 175 , 255 n 17 , 271 n 36 ,

277 n 19 Romantic racialism , 32 , 34 , 197 , 224 , 243 , 250 . See

also Sentimentalism Ross, Andrew , 93 Rourke, Constance , 7 , 11 , 17 , 21 , 250 Rubin, Gayle , 260 n 24 Ryan, Mary , 72

S Said, Edward , 57 “Sally Is de Gal for Me,” 168 , 169 Saloon , 67 , 75–79 Sambo , 7 “Sambo’s ’Dress to He’ Bred’rin,” 123 Sanchez-Eppler, Karen , 33 Sanford, Sam , 236 Saturday Night Live , 250

Index326

Saxton, Alexander , 51 , 197 , 255 n 24 , 259 n 16 , 267 n 40

Schiller, Dan , 74 Schlissel, Lillian , 171 Schoolcraft , Henry Rowe , 106 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky , 55 , 260 n 24 , 267 n 45 Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention (1848) ,

9 , 205 , 284 n 44 Sentimentalism , 29 , 32 , 42 , 174 , 177 , 183 , 187 , 188 ,

191 , 194–198 , 201–204 , 283 n 31 ; domestic ideology , 72 , 195 , 201–204 , 283 n 42 , 287 n 15 . See also Romantic racialism

Seton-Watson, Hugh , 96 Seward, William , 216 Sex/gender system , 9 , 36 , 108 , 165 , 166 , 203 Shakespeare, William , 45 , 46 , 76 , 170 , 220 ;

burlesques of , 76 , 220 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley , 126 “Sich a Getting Upstairs,” 121 Slavery , 42–46 , 59–64 , 72 , 75 , 78–83 , 91 , 99 , 109 ,

110 , 123 , 124 , 133–135 , 160 , 173–175 , 181 , 188 , 191–204 , 209–217 , 242–246 , 249 , 250 , 284 n 44

Slotkin, Richard , 74 , 199 , 208 Smith, Gerrit , 160 , 217 Smith, Henry Nash , 11 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll , 105 , 255 n 19 , 271 n 29 Sobel, Mechal , 259 n 13 Socialism , 12 , 160 , 247 Sollors, Werner , 261 n 26 Soul Man , 5 Southern, Eileen , 42 , 118 Southern Quarterly Review , 174 , 210 Spirit of the Times , 72 , 89 , 158 , 162 , 180 , 218 , 237 ,

239 Stallybrass, Peter , 25 , 152 , 265 n 19 Stansell, Christine , 90 , 164 , 203 Steinbeck, John , 7 Stoller, Robert , 166 Stowe, Harriet Beecher , 34 , 121 , 197 , 205 , 219–225 ,

229 , 243 , 259 n 12 , 271 n 28 , 272 n 4 , 283 n 42 , 286 nn 5 , 12 , 287 n 15 ; Dred , 80 , 233 ; “Th e Freeman’s Dream,” 219 . See also Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Street dancing, black , 42 , 43 , 77 Strong, George Templeton , 270 n 21 Sullivan, Yankee , 78 Sumner, Charles , 216 Susman, Warren , 7 Sweeney, Joel Walker , 98 Swing Time , 5 Szwed, John , 7 , 258 nn 3 , 4

T Tappan, Arthur , 133–137 Tappan, Henry , 79 Tappan, Lewis , 133–137

Tate, Greg , 247 Taylor, Bayard , 5 , 103 , 213 , 215 , 270 ,

284 n 52 Taylor, C. W. , 220 , 226 , 232 , 233 Taylor, William , 34 , 254 , 284 n 42 Taylor, Zachary , 214 Temperance , 73 , 77 , 91 , 99 , 110 , 141 , 142 , 159 , 160 ,

209 , 239 Th ackeray, W. M. , 194 Th atcher, George , 55 Th eater , 66–71 , 91 , 92 , 218 , 277 n 11 ; and

prostitution , 27 , 255 n 21 ; Renaissance , 170 Th erborn, Göran , 204 Th ompson, E. P. , 10 , 78 Th urman, Wallace , 35 “Tis Sad to Leabe Our Tater Land,” 98 Tocqueville, Alexis de , 130 Toll, Robert , 7 , 40 , 97 , 107 , 171 , 194 , 276 n 6 Tompkins, Jane , 32 Transvestism , 25–29 , 55 , 142 , 163 , 171 , 279 n 46 . See

also Minstrel show: “wench” acts Trotter, James Monroe , 36 Trowbridge, J. T. , 233 Tucker, Sophie , 5 “Turkey in the Straw,” 177 Turner, Frederick Jackson , 57 Turner, Nat , 24 , 60 , 124 , 133 Turner, Victor , 26 , 27 , 50 Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens) , 5 , 20 , 31–36 , 38 ,

131 , 147–149 , 256 nn 28 , 29 , 276 n 6 ; Th e Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , 5 , 31 , 33–35 , 89 , 166 , 167 , 5 , 32 , 34–36 , 92 , 171 ; Following the Equator , 31 ; Tom Sawyer , 145 , 150 ; “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy,” 256 n 29

Tyler, M. W. , 205

U “Uncle Tomitudes,” 218–241 Uncle Tom’s Cabin , 5 , 9 , 17 , 33 , 34 , 76 , 80 , 93 ,

121 , 195 , 216 , 243 , 249 , 253 n 4 , 259 n 12 , 270 n 20 , 271 n 28 , 272 n 4 , 283 n 42 , 285 n 4 , 286 n 8 , 287 n 15

Underwood, Francis , 229

V Van Buren, Martin , 109 , 217 , 239 , 274 n 24 Van Peebles, Melvin , 5 Van Vechten, Carl , 52 Vernacular , 96 , 97 , 100 , 105 , 106 , 268 Virginia Minstrels , 52 , 75 , 78 , 140–144 , 151 , 188 ,

267 n 42 Virginia Serenaders , 22 Th e Virginny Cupids , 131 , 137 Volosinov, V. N. , 108 , 217 Vulgarity , 82 , 85 , 120 , 142 , 144 , 145 , 147 , 151 , 154 ,

158 , 161 , 163 , 169 , 173 , 187 , 188

Index 327

W “Wage slavery,” 72 , 132 , 133 , 138 , 160 , 175 ,

204–208 , 210 , 234 , 237 , 238 , 245 , 274 n 24 . See also Working class

Walsh, Mike , 78 , 81 , 133 , 160 , 238 , 266 n 26 Waltz , 212 Ward, Samuel R. , 217 Washington, Booker T. , 34 “Watermelon Man,” 45 Webster, Daniel , 110 , 219 “We’ll All Make a Laugh,” 201 Wemyss, F. C. , 54 “Wench” acts , 6 , 26 , 27 , 55 , 90 , 124 , 163–173 , 243 West, Cornel , 254 n 10 West, William , 133 , 208 White, Allon , 25 , 152 , 154 , 265 n 19 White, Armond , 5 White, Charley , 165 , 176 , 196 , 222 White, Shane , 41 White Negro , 50–56 , 80 , 192 , 247 , 261 n 26 “White slavery,” 160 , 210 , 236 , 238 , 240 , 241 Whiteness , 4 , 36 , 51 , 71 , 74 , 138 , 141 , 161 , 252 n 13 ,

265 n 16 ; white egalitarianism , 30 , 111 , 142 , 245 , 255 n 24 ; white subjectivity , 154 . See also Race ; Racism

Whitlock, Billy , 52 , 140–142 Whitman, Walt , 5 , 7 , 20 , 52 , 81–83 , 89 , 90 , 92–94 ,

101 , 103 , 110 , 116 , 192 , 264 n 10 , 273 n 18 Wilentz, Sean , 75 , 90 , 159 , 257 n 37 Williams, Barney , 55 , 165 , 169 Williams, Raymond , 6 , 10 , 69 , 251 n 11 Willis, Ellen , 247 Willis, Nathaniel P. , 92 Willis, Susan , 50 Wilmot, David , 109

Wilmot Proviso , 9 , 109 , 193 , 286 n 6 Wittke, Carl , 149 , 252 n 14 Women , 26–29 , 32 , 33 , 45 , 55 , 90 , 126 , 129 , 130 ,

138 , 139 , 141 , 149–151 , 164 , 166 , 168 , 170 , 174 , 202 , 203 , 205 , 272 n 13 , 279 n 43 , 283 n 31

Wood, Fernando , 51 Wood, Henry , 51 Woodard, Frederick , 256 n 29 Working class: apprentices , 48 , 71 ; artisans , 70 ,

73 , 132 , 133 , 139 , 160 , 161 ; blacks , 42 , 48 , 50 , 72–74 , 97 ; butchers , 42 , 43 , 72 ; culture , 4 , 11 , 66–91 ; fi remen , 72 , 85 , 88 , 208 ; German , 73 , 96 , 199 ; interracial practices of , 30 , 40 , 42 , 49 , 50 , 79 , 245 , 246 , 249 , 259 n 13 , 264 n 10 ; Irish , 36 , 49 , 71–74 , 78 , 85 , 94–100 , 153 , 183 , 198 , 199 , 212 , 216 , 245 ; journeymen , 49 , 70 , 73 , 90 ; laborers , 49 , 78 , 160 , 274 n 26 ; “natives,” 71 , 135 , 199 ; proletarianization , 73 , 132 , 158 ; and racial feeling , 4 , 12 , 134 , 245 , 257 n 37 , 284 n 49 ; “rebels,” 134 , 136 ; republicanism , 79 , 90 , 136 , 279 n 38 ; strikes , 108 , 110 , 158 , 205 , 241 ; “traditionalists” 86–87 , 149 , 90 , 134 , 136 , 153

Workingmen’s party , 133 Wright, Erik Olin , 70 , 263 n 8 Wynter, Sylvia , 255 n 15

Y “Yankee Doodle,” 16 , 84 , 136 , 137 Young America , 62 , 77 , 93 , 102 , 109

Z Zanger, Jules , 267 n 40 Zip Coon , 23 , 92 , 102 , 111 , 215 , 230 “Zip Coon,” 16 , 125 , 136–138 , 177 , 184 Zizek, Slavoj , 100 , 152