always portrayed by whites in blackface—white men who covered their faces with burnt cork and used what they considered black language, mannerisms, songs, etc. By about 1820, such characters were common, especially for songs or brief entr’acte (“between act”) performances. However, this cultural practice was placed on an entirely new basis sometime around 1828, when Thomas D. Rice, an actor who specialized in blackface performances, saw an old African-American man perform an unfamiliar dance while singing “Wheel about and turn about jus’ so/Every time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crow.” Rice learned the song and dance, added new verses, and began performing “Jump Jim Crow” on stage. It was a sensation across the country, and even in London when Rice took it on tour.
In the 1830s, blackface entertainment became increasingly popular but remained only one part of an evening’s stage entertainment. It was not until the early 1840s that groups of blackface actors began banding together to form troupes for what became known as minstrel shows. Many went on tour through the South and West, but the demand was so heavy that some cities were able to sustain troupes for a decade or more.
Between the mid-1840s and the onset of the Civil War, the minstrel show evolved into the three-part structure that would define its course for the rest of the century. In the first part, the entire company formed a semicircle, with the star performers, called “Tambo” and “Bones” for the instruments they played, at either end. Individual minstrels sang or danced, while the rest of the company sang the choruses. Such numbers were interspersed with jokes and comic songs, presided over by a white master of ceremonies known as the interlocutor. The first part ended with a group song-and-dance number.
The second part of the show, known as the “olio,” was a variety section that featured any number of novelty acts. One important element of the olio was a stump speech, usually given by an endman, who spoke in the garbled language of a pretentious black man “putting on airs.” “Transcendentalism is dat spiritual cognoscence ob psychological irrefragibility,” began one such speech, which simultaneously lampooned the “uppity” black man and the pieties of such intellectuals as Ralph Waldo Emerson. Indeed, class critiques were a very big part of minstrel social commentary, so much so that African Americans occasionally had a laugh at the expense of the white elite, as in this story about a black man who rides a ferry with a white one:
When I got out a little piece from the shore, de man axed me if I knowed anyting about frenologism [phrenology, the mid-nineteenth century pseudoscience that mapped the brain]. I told him no. Ah, says he, den one quarter of your life is gone. Finally he says, does you know anyting about grammar. I told him no. Ah, says he, den one half ob you life am gone … He axed me if I knowed anyting about dickshionary. I told him no and he say tree quarters of your life is gone. We hit a rock and den I axed him if he knowed how to swim. He said no. Den, says I, de whole four quarters of your life am gone—shure.38
In this story, blacks and whites share the kind of practical knowledge and wit so often celebrated on the U.S. stage, and the “other” is the formally educated white American who is both arrogant and ignorant.
Shakespeare, incidentally, was a favorite among minstrels, both in such speeches and as a source of simple jokes. “When was Desdemona like a ship?” a comic would ask. “When she was moored,” came the answer. “Get thee to a brewery!” Hamlet would tell Ophelia—a telling joke on middle-class temperance advocates who considered alcohol a major moral issue. Such comedy is an important reminder not only of Shakespeare’s popularity with the mechanics’ set, which formed the core of the minstrel audience, but also of the often risque and decisively male humor that characterized it.39
The final part of the minstrel show was a one-act skit. These generally had Southern plantation settings and featured slapstick comedy “nearly always ending in a flurry of inflated bladders, bombardments of cream pies, or fireworks explosions that literally closed the show with a bang,” according to one historian of minstrelsy. Such climaxes were typical of stage entertainment in the early nineteenth century, when even the most sober Shakespearian tragedy was followed by a farce to lighten the audience’s mood.40
Broad comedy was only one side of minstrelsy, however. The other was a kind of melancholy that took a variety of forms in the songs. Some were laments for lost family members; others expressed nostalgia for plantation life. The most famous composer of such music was Stephen Foster, who began his career as a blackface singer before selling a series of songs to minstrel troupes in the 1840s and 1850s. His “Old Folks at Home” and “Massa’s in the Cold Ground” were great favorites in his time, while others (“O! Susanna,” “Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair”) are still familiar today. Many described dying or dead lovers, which intensified their impact. Foster drank himself to death during the Civil War.
Both the comic and the sentimental sides of the minstrel tradition were racist. With certain partial exceptions, like the ferry story quoted above, most humor in minstrel shows was at the expense of African Americans and was emphatically hostile to any hint of equality with whites. The sentimental strain in minstrel entertainment, a form that generally celebrated plantation life, implicitly or explicitly sanctioned slavery as the natural and most comfortable place for African Americans (escaped slaves were usually depicted as unhappy). In the early days of minstrelsy, there were important exceptions to this rule, among them depictions of rape, alcoholism, and broken families, as well as humorous jibes at slaveholders. For instance, “Blue Tail Fly,” with its famous chorus “Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care/master’s gone away,” expresses pleasure at the death of a slaveowner. But such sentiments became progressively less common as sectional conflict intensified and slavery became an increasingly divisive political issue.
As the controversy over slavery intensified in the 1840s and 1850s, it strained the national political system to the breaking point and polarized the parties along racial lines. The Whig Party had collapsed completely by the early 1850s, giving way to the Free Soil and Republican parties, both of which were against slavery. During the same years, pro-slavery forces got the upper hand in the Democratic Party, driving many Barnburners into Free Soil and/or Republican ranks and recruiting Southern pro-slavery Whigs. The effect was to make the Democrats more racist, and this new hard line was reflected in minstrel shows, whose cultural politics were strongly consonant with those of the Democratic Party.41
There were two powerful ironies in all of this. First, while minstrelsy was considered a cultural form that displayed the variety and mirth of Southern plantation life, some of the most important figures in its development—E.P. Christy, Thomas Rice, and Foster, among others—were of Northern, urban origin. So was Dan Emmett, an Ohioan whose “Dixie’s Land,” a paean to the plantation sung from the point of view of a slave (“I wish I war in the land ob cotton/Old times dere am not forgotten”), eventually became a Confederate anthem. In fact, there is a logic to this apparent contradiction, in part because minstrelsy was largely an urban creation for urban audiences, and in part because it embodied the Southern planter-Northern workingman alliance that had been forged in the 1840s.
The larger, more powerful irony in minstrelsy was its dependence on the very African-American culture it satirized, belittled, and feared. In fact, many minstrels prided themselves on the degree of verisimilitude in their renditions of black culture. E.P. Christy and other influential troupe leaders boasted about their immersion in African-American life and fancied themselves amateur anthropologists. While these men undoubtedly overestimated their powers of observation and recall, there can be little question that minstrel shows did tap into the immense vitality of an Afro-American folklore that had accumulated over the course of two centuries of bondage. The ferry story quoted above suggests the humorous, pragmatic thrust of secular black storytelling, while melancholy minstrel songs evoked the otherworldly quest for reassurance found in black sacred music. For all their fear of and condescension toward black people, minstrels captured the genuine beauties of pastoral life for white rural refugees who were forced to leave the Irish, German, or American countrysides for subsistence wages in large cities. If minstrelsy was
