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 a cultural form that often projected fierce hatred, it also, often despite itself, betrayed a deep admiration and affinity for the world the slaves had made under conditions of severe adversity.42
In terms of the future course of popular culture, what was most significant about minstrelsy was its heterogeneous character. Not only did whites alter black culture in the course of its translation and migration into the cities—many minstrel songs have a strongly Celtic flavor that draws on shared traditions of oppression—but minstrelsy also found its way back into black communities, where it underwent further refinement. For the most part, minstrel songs that became part of the slave cultural tradition were those, like “Blue Tail Fly,” that retained their critical character.43 They eventually formed part of the bedrock for blues, gospel, and other forms of African-American music. Meanwhile, minstrelsy’s ideas and forms—comic skits, monologues, and a variety format—laid the foundations for burlesque, vaudeville, and eventually television. For better and worse, here was a true wellspring of U.S. culture.
DECEPTIVE SIMPLICITY: SHOW BUSINESS IN THE AGE OF BARNUM
The stage represented only one facet of the entertainment world in the decades before the Civil War. A series of separate but interrelated developments evolved in tandem with it: new forms of popular culture, new attitudes toward it, and the economic elaboration of what became known as show business. No one better understood these developments, or better integrated them, than P.T. Barnum, and no history of U.S. culture would be complete without him.
There was little in Phineas Taylor Barnum’s early life that would indicate the breadth of his later success. He was born in rural Connecticut in 1810, the son of a man who struggled financially, as tailor, farmer, tavern-keeper, livery-stable operator, and country-store merchant. Working in the store, young Barnum learned about the false pieties of Yankee business practices. In his famous memoir Struggles and Triumphs, he used the example of a New England deacon and grocer who asked his clerk: “‘John, have you watered the rum?’ ‘Yes, Sir.’ ‘And sanded the sugar?’ ‘Yes, Sir.’ ‘And dusted the pepper?’ ‘Yes, Sir.’ ‘Then come up to prayers.’”44
Barnum’s father died when the boy was fifteen, leaving behind heavy debts and five children. Over the course of the next decade, Barnum worked as a grocery clerk in New York, tried unsuccessfully to sell used books in Connecticut, and founded a weekly newspaper (he was a fervent Jacksonian Democrat in a highly federalist state). He also established a store of his own, where he made a fair amount of money managing a local lottery until new regulations forced him to curtail that activity. After his marriage in 1834, he returned to New York to try the grocery business again. His prospects seemed to be narrowing.
In 1835, however, Barnum heard about a slave named Joice Heth who was reputed to be George Washington’s 161-year-old wet nurse. The woman’s owner claimed to have a 1727 bill of sale proving her authenticity, and her appearance—she was blind and toothless, but very spirited and convincing in her talk of “dear little George”—was dramatic. Sensing an opportunity, Barnum bought her, sold his interest in his store, and launched his career as a stage manager by advertising Heth as a traveling entertainment exhibition.
In so doing, he was participating in a long-standing traveling-show tradition that predated the American Revolution. Exhibitors would present miscellaneous, crude, and often deceiving “entertainments”: animals, mechanical oddities, wax figures, peep shows, and so on. The practice continued through the nineteenth century and eventually became the featured element in the medicine show—the highly theatrical (and often tawdry) entertainment event that was used to create a crowd that could then be sold tonics, elixirs, and other products of dubious value.45
As Barnum himself must have realized—but never admitted—Joice Heth’s claim of being Washington’s nurse was highly dubious.46 The fledgling showman recognized her potential at a time when Washington was almost universally revered and anything about him was sure to attract an audience. Moreover, in a pattern that would mark many other such enterprises in his career, he was able to base Heth’s appeal less on his ability to prove her claims than on her and her former owner’s having made them in the first place, allowing others to judge for themselves. He also developed a number of the techniques that he would continue to use repeatedly: careful packaging through press releases, relentless exploitation of the local press, and indignant denials of lies he himself had planted. It would not be too much to say that Barnum was the inventor of the modern publicity business.
Barnum went on to manage a number of other acts, among them a blackface dancer and a professional Italian juggler. When another juggler boasted he could do everything Barnum’s performer did, Barnum publicly offered him $1,000 to try. When the juggler refused, Barnum secretly struck a deal with him to stage a rivalry, which Barnum portrayed as a test of national character, between foreign skill and native genius (foreign skill would win).
Over the course of the next few years, Barnum travelled widely, invested his earnings in a more respectable company—-and lost them. He mounted a few more shows, sold pictorial bibles, and even wrote advertisement copy for the Bowery Theatre. By 1841, his fortunes were at low ebb.
That year, Scudder’s American Museum, a once impressive but now run-down collection of exhibits, went up for sale in New York. Since the late eighteenth century, museums had been halls of learning for the elite, the most famous of which was Peale’s Museum of Philadelphia, founded in 1784. A bastion of the U.S. Enlightenment (Benjamin Franklin and Thomas