A Renegade History of the United States

by Thaddeus Russell

  “True crime” pamphlets became enormously popular in the early nineteenth century, and among the common true crimes recounted in them were sexual crimes, including prostitution, sodomy, adultery, and fornication. Women who bore illegitimate children in true crime stories were depicted as immoral and their children as unhealthy. In the early national period, public relief (welfare) for unmarried mothers was discontinued and replaced by asylums for illegitimate children. Women who bore children out of wedlock were forced to turn them over to the state, which officially labeled them as “illegimate.” Children were not allowed to be taken out of the asylums until the cost of caring for them had been reimbursed by a parent. If a debt was not paid, the asylums would typically put the child “out to service” until he or she worked off what was owed. Many illegitimate “bastards” became permanent orphans.

  A NEW WAR

  John Adams rose to the heights of American politics, but his life ended in disappointment. After his term as vice president under Washington, he ran for president in 1796 on the Federalist Party ticket and narrowly defeated his rival, Thomas Jefferson of the Democratic-Republicans. Four years later, however, Jefferson reversed the results in another close vote. Following his 1800 defeat, Adams retired from politics and returned to farming at his home in Quincy, Massachusetts. He eventually reconciled with Jefferson and in 1812 began a lengthy epistolary friendship with the Virginian. By then many Americans had subscribed to the philosophies of the Founding Fathers and had devoted themselves to the rigors of democratic life. But despite the best efforts of the nation’s founders to train the people for self-governance, “decadence” and “vice” did not disappear in the early years of the republic. Drinking increased. The cities, with their saloons and prostitutes and illicit couplings, grew exponentially. New, mass-produced goods introduced luxuries to common people. Poor folk, even slaves, began to dress ostentatiously. And many of the newly rich resembled the aristocracies of Europe. Facilitating all of this vice was a new economic order that Adams, Jefferson, and most of the Founding Fathers feared.

  Today, many on the conservative side of the political spectrum like to make the founders into champions of a free-market economy, while many on the left claim that they were simply the tools of the rising merchant class. Neither of these sides understands that the market economy has always been a friend of renegades and an enemy of moral guardians. When Americans lived on farms in isolated towns where they grew, made, and bartered for everything they used, they could not purchase beer at a saloon, sex from a prostitute, contraceptives and pornography from a corner shop, or flashy clothes from British importers. They had nowhere to go to dance, gamble, or search for paramours in public. And they had to work, pulling their livelihoods from the soil, from before dawn until after dusk. This is why so many of the founders wished that Americans would stay on farms and away from cities and commerce. It is why Jefferson declared that “those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God if ever He had a chosen people” and that “the mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body.” It is why John Adams warned that “commerce, luxury, and avarice have destroyed every republican government.” It is why he denounced credit, which allowed ordinary people to purchase extraordinary things, as being responsible for “most of the Luxury & Folly which has yet infected our People.” And it is why most of the Founding Fathers insisted that the states allow only landowners to vote and hold public office, which insured that farmers, and not merchants, bankers, manufacturers, or consumers, would control the government. But what Adams called the “universal gangrene of avarice” continued to spread in the streets underneath the government.

  In the last years of his life, Adams wrote to his friend Jefferson a set of plaintive questions: “Will you tell me how to prevent riches from becoming the effects of temperance and industry? Will you tell me how to prevent riches from producing luxury? Will you tell me how to prevent luxury from producing effeminacy, intoxication, extravagance, vice, and folly?” Jefferson had no answer. And there would be no winner in the war between pleasure and discipline. During the Revolution, Americans began what would be a long resistance to the obligations and sacrifices required by the dark side of democracy. The fight was on between disciplinarians and renegades, but neither would win. The founding of the United States simply began the war that continues today.

  2

  THE FREEDOM OF SLAVERY

  When he rubbed burnt cork onto his white face, Dan Emmett knew the secret of slavery. When he let his body move on stage the way he never would off stage, he knew what the abolitionists would not say. When he sang songs of easy work and lazy days, told jokes about sex in black dialect, and heard his audience roar its approval, he knew what our history textbooks still keep secret. Emmett, one of the creators of the blackface minstrel show, knew that slaves enjoyed pleasures that were forbidden for white people. He knew that slaves were often the envy of America.

  Whites imitating blacks is America’s oldest pastime. It began on the decks of ships that brought the first slaves to the New World, where European crewmen gleefully joined the dances of their African hostages, and it continued on the plantations in the southern colonies, where masters and overseers were known to partake in the revelries in the slave quarters. But this curious phenomenon became a national obsession with the advent of steamboats and railroads in the early 1800s, when, for the first time, isolated white Americans from all over the country could easily travel south to see large numbers of black people in person.

  In the 1810s, soon after giant paddlewheel boats began carting passengers along the rivers that ran from Pittsburgh and Cincinnati to St. Louis, Memphis, through the Mississippi Delta, and all the way down to New Orleans, white entertainers imitating black songs and dances became a common sight on the streets of major cities. By the 1840s, when the curious could ride a train from New York City to Pittsburgh, then take steamboats to the cotton fields of Mississippi, whites all over America were acting black. The ethnomusicologist Dale Cockrell has estimated that by 1843, characters in blackface had appeared in more than twenty thousand American stage performances. “The facts are that blackface theater was extremely common, and Americans had ample opportunities to see it, often had to choose between competing performances on the same night, and attended blackface performances with enthusiasm.”

  On the night of February 6, 1843, at the shabby, raucous Amphitheatre of the Republic in the Bowery district of New York City, Emmett and three other white men, calling themselves the Virginia Minstrels, made it into a form of art. That night they put on the first theatrical performance devoted entirely to a blackface minstrel act. The quartet, dressed as slaves, sang songs and told jokes in black dialect and did their best to perform the dances that Emmett had seen on the streets of Cincinnati, on Kentucky plantations, and on the steamboats that plied the Ohio River. The performance was so popular that the theater in which it was staged soon began booking minstrel shows exclusively. By the middle of the decade, the Spirit of the Times, one of the leading theater journals in New York, reported that theaters staging minstrel shows “are among the best frequented and most profitable places of amusement in New York,” and that while an attempt to put on an Italian opera house “has resulted in bankruptcy, the Ethiopian Opera has flourished like a green bay tree.” Dozens of minstrel troupes performed on New York’s biggest stages and toured the country. Theaters devoted to the genre appeared in every major American city by the 1860s, and by the end of the century, blackface performance was a common, accepted, and respectable amusement. According to virtually all historians of American popular culture, it was the preeminent form of entertainment in the nineteenth century.

  Blackface minstrelsy is now often considered to be antiblack parody, and some of it certainly was, but scholars have recently begun to see the songs of Dan Emmett and many other performers in the genre as expressions of desire for the freedoms they saw in the culture of
the slaves. “Just as the minstrel stage held out the possibility that whites could be ‘black’ for a while but nonetheless white,” David Roediger, the leading historian of “whiteness,” has written, “it offered the possibilities that, via blackface, preindustrial joys could survive amidst industrial discipline.” One of Emmett’s first songs was “De Boatman’s Dance,” a tribute to the slaves and free blacks who worked on the steamboats of the Old South. Emmett admired what he saw as their embrace of pleasure, the freedom of their bodies, and their attitude that work was simply a means to fun:

  Hi ho, de boatmen row,

  Floatin’ down de river de Ohio.

  De boatmen dance, de boatmen sing,

  de boatmen up to ebry ting,

  An when de boatmen gets on shore,

  he spends his cash and works for more,

  Den dance de boatman dance,

  O dance de boatman dance,

  O dance all night till broad daylight,

  an go home wid de gals in de morning.

  The tragedy of Dan Emmett’s song about these black men—the tragedy of all minstrelsy and of being a free white man—was that this kind of freedom could only be visited:

  I wen on board de odder day

  To see what de boatman had to say;

  Dar I let my passions loose

  An dey cram me in de callaboose.

  I’ve come dis time, I’ll come no more,

  Let me loose I’ll go on shore.

  If we dismiss the men who painted their faces black as deluded racists, we miss what they were telling us, even if subconsciously, about what free Americans were missing from their lives. As we will see, much of what they missed could be found in the lives of real slaves. Yet those who wished to be considered good American citizens knew that distancing oneself from all that African American culture represented was a principal qualification. So they allowed themselves to enjoy the pleasures of blackness only vicariously.

  This is not an endorsement of slavery. But it is an argument that many freedoms we now cherish were available only to slaves in early America, and that citizenship in the young republic was a terribly constrained thing. It also reveals why slaves and their descendents were able to create a culture that has been so envied—and resented—not just by white Americans but also by the world.

  Emmett began writing songs of longing for plantation life soon after he saw slaves for the first time. In 1834, when he arrived in Cincinnati from his home in central Ohio, Emmett encountered a city that was uniquely situated at the crossroads of slavery and freedom. Set among hills that looked across the Ohio River and onto plantations in Kentucky, there was no better place in America from which to compare the two cultures. Because it was the only major northern city located on the border between the two societies, in Cincinnati one could see in a single day great numbers of fugitive slaves, free blacks, and whites of every class and immigrant group who worked, fought, danced, and slept together. It is certainly no accident that most of the creators of blackface minstrelsy spent time in the city known as “the Queen of the West.”

  Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice, the “father of American minstrelsy,” made his way from New York City down the Ohio River to Cincinnati, where he found inspiration for one of the classic characters of the American theater in a song about “Jim Crow,” sung by a black stage driver. Stephen Foster began writing songs soon after he moved to Cincinnati to work for his brother’s riverboat company. He produced a large portion of the minstrel genre, including “Camptown Races,” “Swanee River,” and “My Old Kentucky Home.” Dan Rice, perhaps the most famous blackface performer of the nineteenth century—and Abraham Lincoln’s favorite—imitated the slaves and ex-slaves he encountered as a horse jockey and riverboat gambler along the Ohio River. Other minstrel performers traveled deeper in the South and sought company with slaves. Billy Whitlock, who gained fame as the banjo player in Emmett’s troupe, toured plantations where he would “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.”

  Soon after arriving in Cincinnati, Emmett enlisted in the army and was stationed at a base just over the river in Newport, Kentucky. According to his diary, he joined the marching band and “practiced the drum incessantly.” A year later Emmett was transferred to a base in Missouri, a state where slaves made up more than 15 percent of the population. Discharged in the summer of 1835, the young musician returned to Cincinnati, but the songs he began writing showed that he’d left much of his heart with the slaves. When he looked across the Ohio River from the free North, he saw the promised land:

  I just arrived in town, for to pass de time away,

  And I settled all my bisness accordin’,

  But I found it so cold when up de street,

  Dat I wish’d I was on de oder side ob Jordan.

  So take off your coat, boys,

  And roll up your sleeves,

  For Jordan is a hard road to trabel.

  In the late 1830s, Emmett joined a traveling circus, where he began performing in blackface and imitating the slaves and ex-slaves he had encountered. Emmett performed with both the Virginia Minstrels and as a solo act. A common theme in his music was a lament for having been born free. One of his troupe’s most popular acts was a skit called “Hard Times,” a portrayal of life in freedom in which Emmett played a character named Showman, “a chap that won’t work.” During the Civil War, Emmett wrote “Road to Richmond,” in which he imagined the regret of a slave who joined the Union army:

  When I was young and in my prime,

  Labor nebber done.

  I used to work, but took my time.

  It was during the war that Emmett gained national prominence for his most famous song, which today is known as the anthem of Southern racism, but for Emmett was actually a wish to be a slave:

  I wish I was in Dixie,

  Hooray! Hooray!

  In Dixie Land, I’ll take my stand,

  To lib and die in Dixie,

  Away, away,

  Away down south in Dixie …

  Freedom to me will never pay!

  Writing from Pittsburgh in 1851, a few years after leaving Cincinnati, Stephen Foster expressed similar regrets in “Farewell, My Lilly Dear”:

  Old massa sends me roaming,

  So Lilly, fare-you-well!

  Oh! Fare-you-well, my true love,

  Farewell, old Tennessee.

  Dan Emmett was just one of many songwriters who saw black men as objects of desire, as in “Dandy Jim from Caroline”:

  For my ole massa tole me,

  I’m de best looking nigga in de county oh,

  I look in de glass, as I found it so,

  Just as massa tell me, oh …

  Oh, beauty is but skin deep,

  But wid Miss Dinah none compete;

  She changed her name from lubly Dine,

  To Mrs. Dandy Jim of Caroline.

  Much has been made of the occasional references to grotesque Negro facial features, but minstrel songs, particularly those written during slavery, more frequently referred to longings for beautiful slave women on the plantation. Benjamin Hanby’s “Darling Nelly Gray,” a popular song in the 1850s, told of love amid the pastoral splendor of Kentucky: “When the moon had climb’d the mountain, and the stars were shining too, / Then I’d take my darling Nelly Gray, / And we’d float down the river in my little red canoe, / While my banjo sweetly I would play.” The beauty of the land was often compared to the loveliness and grace of slave women, as in Stephen Foster’s “Melinda May”:

  Lubly Melinda is bright as de beam,

  No snow-drop was ebber more fair,

  She smiles like de roses dat bloom round de stream,

  And sings like de birds in de air.

  And John P. Ordway’s “Twinkling Stars Are Laughing, Love”:

  While your bright eyes look in mine,

  Peeping stars they seem to be.

  Golden beam
s are shining, love,

  Shining on you to bless;

  Like the queen of night you fill

  Darkest space with loveliness.

  To the twenty-first-century ear, these lyrics sound conventionally romantic. But to Victorian America, any such expression of physical desire—no matter how sweetly phrased—was disreputable, lowbrow, and black.