of slavery.”48
The antebellum years were also the age of the “confidence man,” a mysterious figure who took advantage of the naive and managed to hoodwink even the suspicious. Herman Melville’s 1857 novel of the same name presented a character who might or might not have been what he appeared to be, which offered the novelist a way to explore his fascination with the larger ambiguities surrounding the hectic commercial life of the 1840s and 1850s. To a great extent, there was a class dimension in attitudes toward the confidence man. For the emerging middle class, he was widely seen as a deplorable figure and caused a great deal of social anxiety, perhaps because he belied the powerful myths of self-reliance, upward mobility, and moral certitude central to the legitimacy of the political system. For white workers losing hope of ever moving beyond wage-earning status, there was a kind of pleasure in figures who exposed the contradictions of U.S. life, and an interest in trying to discover the underlying logic of trickery.49
Although they still largely lacked a voice within popular culture, African Americans had their own folklore version of the confidence man: Brer Rabbit. A trickster who routinely exploited larger and more dangerous animals in the jungle and then escaped their subsequent rage, this allegorical character figured in countless slave tales as an example of how the weak could survive—and even defeat—the strong. The most famous tale was the story of the briar patch, where the captured rabbit used reverse psychology by begging the wolf to do anything but throw him into the briar patch, which, of course, was exactly where he wanted to be—and ended up. While Brer Rabbit was not an object of universal veneration (especially after emancipation, when there appeared at least some hope that freedpeople could gain access to, and mobility within, white society), he was nevertheless a clear-eyed realist who recognized relations of power and adopted effective, if not always moral, strategies for realizing his goals.50
Folk tales like those of Brer Rabbit existed in profusion in both black and white society in the early nineteenth century. As the outlines of a modern industrial society emerged, many of these tales were revised, adapted, or simply reproduced in mass-produced cultural forms, especially plays and minstrel shows. But they received their fullest elaboration in the many kinds of storytelling that came of age in the Jacksonian era.
TRANSGRESSING LINES: ANTEBELLUM POPULAR NARRATIVE
There were three major influences on popular writing between 1820 and 1860. The first was regional folklore, an often humorous form that reached large national audiences through a rapidly expanding media infrastructure. The second was cheap, often sensational, fiction emanating from Eastern cities, much of which exhibited a radical edge infused by the content and style of the reform movements that were unfolding across the antebellum United States. The third was the conventional novel, a form in which women writers played an especially large role. These elements intersected at various points in time and in the work of a number of writers, creating a dynamic literary culture.
In the 1820s, as Brother Jonathan moved from a secondary to a major figure on the stage, his comic analogue appeared in print. He went under a variety of guises, the most famous of which was Jack Downing. Downing was the creation of Portland, Maine journalist Seba Smith. Starting in 1830, Smith’s fictional character wrote a series of letters on local politics for the Portland Daily Courier, the paper Smith edited. Jack Downing drew on what folklorists would call Down East humor: a clipped, understated sensibility that relied heavily on irony. (His spirit survives in contemporary folklore as the kind of person who, after prolonged reflection, advises lost tourists looking for help that “you can’t get there from here.”) Downing played the role of the country bumpkin who would visit cities like Portland or Boston and puncture urban pretensions. As his popularity grew—the Downing letters were published all over the country by the 1850s—Downing became an advisor to President Andrew Jackson and commented on the national scene.51
As with Brother Jonathan, Jack Downing (and Sam Slick, a similar Down East character) was a regional figure who simultaneously represented a more broadly national Yankee spirit. By the 1840s, however, it was the characters and humor of the Old Southwest, which stretched from Kentucky to Texas, that were capturing national attention. This regional sensibility, which revealed a good deal about the quest for national identity (and territory), also generated a pool of images and concepts that would later be refashioned by Northern intellectuals and urban purveyors of popular culture.
As mentioned earlier, the quintessential Southwesterner was Davy Crockett. What makes Crockett unusual is that, unlike fictional characters such as Downing or more generalized stereotypes like Sambo, he was a real person. A-veteran of the War of 1812, he acquired conquered Indian lands in Tennessee and became an ardent supporter of settlers’ rights against those of the Indians who were forcibly moved West and the land speculators back East. His image as a rugged frontiersman (he killed over one-hundred bears in one season alone) and his common-man demeanor (that famous coonskin cap, which later became part of his legend) made him a popular figure in state politics. Elected to Congress in 1827, the slaveholding Crockett began as a rank-and-file Jackson supporter, but a dispute over land policy led to a break with the Democrats. The party failed in its first attempt to unseat him with a rival candidate in 1829, but succeeded in 1831. Crockett then cast his lot with the Whigs, who gave him political and financial support and gained a frontiersman icon to compete against the appeal of Jackson. An avid expansionist, Crockett was executed by Mexican soldiers for his role as an insurrectionary at the Alamo in 1836.
But it was the mythic Crockett, not the real one, who won enduring fame. In 1832, just after he lost his Congressional seat, a Cincinnati newspaper published an account of Crockett’s adventures. Two years later, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee, Written by Himself (actually written by a ghostwriter) became an immediate success, going through seven printings in the first year alone. Three more Crockett books had been published by 1836, the last of which claimed to be based on a diary found on his body at the Alamo. Written in homespun Southwestern dialect, these books described a series of adventures, rendered in a tone of masculine bravado that pleased male readers in city and countryside alike. “On the subject of my style, it is bad enough, in all conscience, to please critics, if that is what they are after,” Crockett explained in the first book. “They are a sort of vermin, though, that I shan’t even so much as stop to brush off.” His widely quoted maxim, which appeared on the title page and in the books’ advertising, was “I leave this rule for others, when I’m dead: Be always sure you’re right—THEN GO AHEAD.”52
In terms of the direction of popular culture, perhaps even more important than the “official” Crockett books were the approximately fifty “Crockett almanacs” published between 1835 and 1856. These capture the essence of Southwestern literary vision in two important ways. First, the humorous anecdotes show the same exaggerated, legendary quality that marked the plethora of tall tales from the region. In one such almanac, Crockett is asked by Andrew Jackson to wrestle a comet. “I was appointed by the President to stand on the Alleghany [sic] Mountains and wring the comet’s tail off,” he relates with deadpan surrealism. “I did so, but got my hands most shockingly burnt, and the hair singed off my head, so that I was as bald as a trencher. I div right into the Waybosh river, and thus saved my best stone blue coat and grass green small clothes.”53 In such tales of superhuman exploits, Crockett joined a pantheon of heroes that emerged in the nineteenth century, including riverboatman Mike Fink, his sidekick Sal Fink, and the black railroad worker John Henry, mightier than the machine.54
A second important dimension of the Southwestern narrative style was its reliance on vivid and violent imagery. When Crockett’s uncle gets married, he presents his beloved with two eyes he has gouged. She dries them out, makes earrings out of them, and wears them to church. Sal Fink escapes from the stake to which she was bound by fifty Indians and then ties her captors together by their heels. Crockett, for his part, deals with a swindling squatter by forcing him to eat pig dung. Such violence and exaggeration, which crossed gender
