comedies. By twentieth-century standards, nineteenth-century dramas and tragedies often had a melodramatic quality—although, as has already been suggested, the romanticism and moral didacticism of the early nineteenth century can be seen as a reaction to Enlightenment drama, as well as a justification for what was still a suspect form of entertainment. In comedy, however, lower artistic and moral expectations permitted a kind of social commentary that was bracing in its frankness. This was especially true with regard to representations of women. Certainly, the stage was a patriarchal institution that treated women’s claims for autonomy as humorous. But such jokes could be revealing and even subversive. One can see this dynamic at work in William Dunlap’s 1796 play The Archers, in which a young woman tells her sweetheart not to go to war:
Cecily: I shall like you the better for it as long as I live—if you’re not killed.
Conrad: Why, you should like me better for dying for my country.
Cecily: Should I? Well maybe I should; but somehow I shall never like a dead man as well as a live one.
Conrad: Well I don’t know but that your taste is as well founded as your politics.32
The Archers, however, is still an eighteenth-century comedy of manners. A broader humor was evident in “The Magna Charter of Heaven,” a song from the 1822 play Deed of Gift:
While each freeman’s son
boasts of rights a plenty
Daughters have but one
E’en at one and twenty.
’Tis the right to choose
Tom or Dick or
Harry Whom we will refuse
Which we wish to marry
Chorus: ’Tis our chartered right Nature’s hand has penn’d it Let us then unite Bravely to defend it While our fathers fought For our Independence Patriot mothers taught This to their descendants: Daughters guard and save Rights too dear to barter Spurn the name of slave Freedom is our charter33
Such a song would only be permissible in the context of comedy—and if the charter was portrayed as of Heaven, not Earth. Nevertheless, it would not have had such vitality if it had not expressed a feeling that resonated with at least some of its audience, and a hope for this world, not the next one.
The mock-utopian injunction to “spurn the name of slave” in the “Magna Charter of Heaven” serves as an important reminder that freedom and equality in the pre-Civil War United States were predicated on whiteness. As everywhere else in the society, race was a major issue on the stage. After Europeans, the two most commonly represented racial groups were Native Americans and African Americans. Depictions of the former tended to occur in the realm of drama; the latter in comedy. The difference reveals a great deal about the relative place of each group in relation to white society.
From the very first settlement, European Americans tended to dichotomize red-white relations between nature and civilization. The rapid development of technology, coupled with progressive Indian removal westward (two processes that were, of course, intimately related), intensified this attitude, turning the Native American into something of a romantic figure—a tragic, dignified embodiment of a vanishing way of life. This portrayal usefully limited white guilt, for if the natives were doomed anyway, white incursions did not need to be seen as brutal. While in many cases portrayals of the destruction of Native Americans centered on evil white men, more often it was internecine conflict or bad Indians who were responsible.
If Indians were allowed a measure of respect, they were still not considered the white man’s equal. One important index of this was the treatment of women. Unlike with African Americans, with Native Americans there was at least some toleration of interracial sex, although for the most part playwrights implicitly or explicitly upheld racial separation. Indian women who did marry white men usually converted to Christianity or took up white folkways. And while white women were only sexually propositioned by the most vile villains, red women tended to have to contend with garden-variety boors (“Bad Man! Indian girl’s cheek grows redder with shame!” says one such victim).34
Perhaps the most well-known play about Native Americans was John Augustus Stone’s Metamora (1828), commissioned by Edwin Forrest, the most famous actor of his day. The story of an Indian chief who perished fighting New Englanders in King Philip’s War of 1675-1676, Metamora features the usual depiction of the noble savage who patiently endures his mistreatment by the white man. What makes this play unusual, though, is that Metamora finally strikes out against his oppressors. “Our Lands! Our nation’s freedom! Or the Grave!” he cries. Finally surrounded, he kills his wife rather than have her raped by whites, then dies with her name on his lips. In his passion for freedom—which evokes Patrick Henry’s famous slogan “Give me liberty or give me death!”—and in his possessive sexual anxiety about women, Metamora seems more white than red. Of course, he represents a white man’s idea of what a great Indian should be, and his dramatic actions at the end of the play were probably as much calculated to show off Forrest’s physique and generate standing ovations as to make a political statement. But the play was nonetheless a genuine critique of white policy toward Indians. “Let us hope, for the honor of humanity, that this applause is bestowed on Mr. Forrest, rather than the ferocious savage he impersonates,” said a reviewer in the American Quarterly Review in 1830. In all likelihood the writer need not have worried, for the pace of aggression toward Indians did not slow in any perceptible way. Moreover, Robert Bird, who helped revise the play to suit Forrest’s purposes, later became the author of Nick of the Woods (1837), a novel that essentially justified a policy of extermination.35
By the mid-nineteenth century, Native Americans were a dwindling group living outside white society. African Americans, by contrast, were part of a racially hierarchial system within white society, and their numbers were increasing. These facts help account for the different treatment of the two groups on the stage. A disappearing danger, Indians were often romanticized, the subject of nostalgia for a vanishing world. Black-white relations, on the other hand, were a subject of increasing conflict and uncertainty.
It must be noted that while an assumption of black inferiority has been a staple of white thinking since the first slave arrived on these shores, this attitude toward blacks has not been monolithic. “In certain places and at certain times between 1607 and 1800, the ‘lower sorts’ of whites appear to have been pleasantly lacking in racial consciousness,” writes David R. Roediger in his study of nineteenth-century racism. Thus, he notes, white indentured servants and black (and Indian) slaves sometimes fled oppressive masters together in the colonial era, and blacks and whites socialized—and engaged in petty crime—together. Some slave revolts, notably in New York City in 1741 and Richmond in 1800, included white participants.36
When present at all, African Americans were generally relegated to small roles on the early American stage. Free men of color did occasionally appear, and were treated with relative respect. And there were a few plays about the plight of slaves, usually centering on the tragedy of broken families. Most of the time, however, blacks were the butt of jokes, often stemming from their unusual dialects. In this regard, they were not unlike such ethnic types as the (drunk) Irishman, also a source of humor. More specific to blacks was comedy based on a purported love of finery, which reflected a racist contempt for any effort to enjoy white economic privilege. By the time Brother Jonathan was a clearly elaborated archetype, so was his black counterpart, Sambo, “lthough this “happy darky” was generally not allowed to express the confidence and pride of white characters like Jonathan, he was sometimes portrayed as a person of simple integrity, although this changed as the Civil War approached.37
