Staging America

LECTURE LEARNING OBJECTIVES

1. Describe the working-class leisure culture of the Bowery, the volunteer fire companies, and Five Points, and explain how it differed from the middle-class leisure of Lecture 3.
2. Analyze the antebellum city as a stage on which identity was performed, and evaluate the claim that the public sphere became performative.
3. Describe the origins, format, and stock characters of blackface minstrelsy, and explain how it worked as racist ideology.
4. Interpret blood sports and prizefighting as expressions of a working-class male counterpublic.
5. Assess P. T. Barnum’s museum and humbug as both a democratization and an exploitation of popular curiosity.

Introductory Framing

Lecture 1 traced a reading public; Lecture 2 traced a worshiping public; Lecture 3 traced a Northern middle class that turned its homes and its leisure into proof of respectability. Lecture 4 turns to a watching public. Between 1815 and 1850 Americans, especially in the growing cities of the Northeast, paid in unprecedented numbers to see plays, minstrel shows, prizefights, animal fights, and the curiosities of P. T. Barnum’s American Museum. Entertainment became an industry. It was also an argument. Where you went, what you watched, and how you behaved there announced your class, your morals, and your race.

The stages of antebellum America were not neutral. The middle class built “respectable” amusements to display its refinement. Working-class New Yorkers built a loud, physical, proud culture of their own on the Bowery. Blackface minstrelsy, the era’s most popular entertainment, united white audiences across class lines by mocking Black Americans. The prize ring offered working men a vision of democracy based on courage rather than property. Barnum mixed education, fraud, and exploitation into a product almost everyone could afford. This essay follows those stages in the order of the lecture and keeps returning to a single question: when entertainment became democratic, whose democracy was it?

I. Rough Leisure: The Working-Class City

Lecture 3 showed how industrial time-discipline, the subject of E. P. Thompson’s classic 1967 essay, split work time from free time, and how the new middle class spent its leisure on “improving” amusements at prices that sorted audiences. At New York’s Park Theatre box seats cost about a dollar, the pit fifty cents, and the gallery twenty-five cents; Barnum’s museum charged a quarter; the Bowery Theatre’s pit cost twelve and a half cents. Working people had fewer free hours and far less money, and they built a leisure culture of their own.

Crowded Streets and the Bowery

New York grew from about 60,000 people in 1800 to more than 500,000 by 1850, and in the decade after 1845 roughly three million immigrants entered the United States, many of them Irish famine refugees and Germans. Workers crowded into subdivided houses and early tenements with little water or sanitation. Cholera struck in 1832 and 1849. Twelve- to fourteen-hour days, dangerous machinery, and irregular work were common, and children worked to help their families.

Out of these conditions came a vibrant working-class leisure world centered on the Bowery, the street and neighborhood running north from Chatham Square. The Bowery Theatre, opened in 1826 and run from 1830 by Thomas Hamblin, staged melodramas, spectacles, and patriotic plays for a noisy, participatory crowd. Its signature figure was the “Bowery b’hoy,” a young working man in a red flannel shirt, black trousers, and a tall hat, his hair greased forward in “soap locks,” whose swagger rejected middle-class restraint. In February 1848 Benjamin Baker’s A Glance at New York opened at Mitchell’s Olympic Theatre with Frank Chanfrau as Mose the fireboy, and the b’hoy became a national stage type. Real b’hoys copied their stage image, and the stage copied them.

Volunteer fire companies were the b’hoys’ clubs. Until New York created a paid Metropolitan Fire Department in 1865, companies of volunteers raced hand-pumped engines to fires, competed fiercely, sometimes brawled over who would fight a blaze, and paraded in uniform. Each company, such as Lady Washington Engine Company No. 40, cultivated fierce loyalty, rituals, and a hierarchy of foremen. They were also bases of Democratic ward politics; William M. Tweed rose through the Americus Engine Company, “Big Six,” around 1850. Amy Greenberg’s Cause for Alarm (1998) shows how the volunteer fireman embodied a model of manhood based on courage and public display, and how reformers who professionalized fire service were also trying to curb that model. Paul Gilje’s The Road to Mobocracy (1987) traces how crowd action, including fire-company brawls, became a normal form of urban politics.

Five Points

Nearby lay Five Points, where Anthony, Orange, and Cross streets met on the filled-in Collect Pond. Charles Dickens toured it in 1842 and helped make it the most famous slum in America. Middle-class writers described it as a den of vice. Tyler Anbinder’s Five Points (2001) argues that its reputation outran its reality: it was desperately poor and crowded, but it was also a community of Irish immigrants and Black New Yorkers with churches, saloons, small businesses, and mutual aid. Leslie M. Harris’s In the Shadow of Slavery (2003) shows that Black New Yorkers there experienced both cooperation and hostility from white neighbors. Later reformers kept the stereotype alive; Charles Loring Brace’s The Dangerous Classes of New York (1872) is a classic example of the genre, and should be read as evidence of reformers’ fears rather than as a neutral description. Five Points’ dance halls also helped give birth to new American performance styles, a point that matters for the minstrelsy section below.

II. The City as Theater and the Performative Public

In the crowded, anonymous city, people judged strangers by appearance. Karen Halttunen’s Confidence Men and Painted Women (1982) shows middle-class Americans anxious about deception, the con man who performed a false identity, and seeking sincerity in dress and manners. Broadway was a promenade for display; the Bowery had its own codes. Posters and playbills covered walls, and penny papers reported performances, scandals, and feuds as ongoing stories. The city itself became a stage on which everyone was both performer and audience.

The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962; English translation 1989), described an eighteenth-century ideal of rational debate among private citizens in coffeehouses and newspapers, and he argued that mass commercial culture later degraded that ideal into passive consumption. The lecture proposes a different reading of antebellum America: public life did not simply decline into spectacle; it became performative. Citizens took part by attending, watching, and judging. Theater audiences behaved like a sovereign people, demanding encores, hissing actors, and throwing objects at performers who displeased them. Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow (1988) shows that Shakespeare was popular entertainment for every class in this era, performed alongside farces and acrobats before audiences who talked back.

The Astor Place Riot of May 1849 showed how dangerous these performances could become. A long feud between the American actor Edwin Forrest, a hero to working-class audiences, and the English tragedian William Charles Macready, favored by elite Anglophiles, became a proxy for class and national resentment. On May 7 a crowd drove Macready from the stage of the Astor Place Opera House. When he returned on May 10, thousands gathered outside. The militia fired into the crowd, and at least 22 people were killed. Levine reads Astor Place as a turning point in the separation of “high” from “low” culture and in elite efforts to tame audiences. Peter Buckley’s study of the riot and Bowery theater culture likewise treats the theater as an arena where competing claims to represent “the people” collided.

Political theorist Nancy Fraser, in “Rethinking the Public Sphere” (1990), argued that excluded groups form counterpublics, parallel arenas with their own values. The Bowery, the fire company, and the prize ring fit her model. Michael Denning’s Mechanic Accents (1987), on dime novels and working-class readers later in the century, makes a related point about popular fiction: working people did not simply absorb commercial culture; they read it through their own experience.

III. Blackface Minstrelsy

Origins and Format

Blackface minstrelsy, in which white performers darkened their faces with burnt cork and caricatured Black speech, music, and dance, was the most popular form of American entertainment in the nineteenth century. Its first star was Thomas Dartmouth Rice, whose song-and-dance routine “Jump Jim Crow” became a sensation between about 1828 and 1832 and made Rice famous in New York and London. Rice and his promoters claimed he had copied an elderly Black man he observed; historians treat the story as legend, but it reveals the genre’s central claim to authenticity.

In February 1843 four white performers led by Dan Emmett, calling themselves the Virginia Minstrels, staged a full evening of blackface entertainment in New York. Within a few years E. P. Christy’s troupe and others standardized the three-part show. In the first part, performers sat in a semicircle, with a pompous interlocutor in the center trading jokes with two endmen, “Tambo” and “Bones,” named for their tambourine and bone castanets, between songs. The second part, the olio, was a variety section of specialty acts, including the stump speech, a parody of learned oratory. The third part was a one-act skit, often a sentimental or farcical plantation scene or a burlesque of a popular play. (The deck’s second minstrelsy slide originally placed plantation scenes in the first part; it has been corrected to match this standard structure.) Stephen Foster wrote some of the era’s best-known songs for the minstrel stage, including “Oh! Susanna” (1848) and “Old Folks at Home” (1851).

Minstrelsy’s stock characters carried its politics. “Jim Crow” was a ragged, foolish, contented rural slave; “Zip Coon” a free Black urban dandy mocked for fancy clothes and malapropisms; the “Mammy” a devoted enslaved caregiver. Together they said that slavery was natural and benign and that freedom made Black people ridiculous. The name Jim Crow later became shorthand for the system of legal segregation.

How Historians Read Minstrelsy

Early histories such as Robert Toll’s Blacking Up (1974) traced minstrelsy’s growth into a national industry and its increasingly proslavery tone as sectional conflict sharpened. Alexander Saxton’s The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (1990) connected it to Jacksonian Democratic politics and the idea of a republic for white men. David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness (1991) argued that white workers, especially Irish immigrants who were themselves often caricatured, embraced a “wage” of racial superiority; minstrelsy told them that however poor they were, they were not Black and not slaves.

Eric Lott’s Love and Theft (1993) is the most cited interpretation. Lott argues that minstrelsy expressed a contradictory white working-class desire for Black culture, the “love,” combined with appropriation and ridicule, the “theft.” Blackface allowed white men to “play Black” for an evening and then wash off the cork and return to whiteness. W. T. Lhamon Jr.’s Raising Cain (1998) and Dale Cockrell’s Demons of Disorder (1997) locate early blackface in the mixed, rowdy street culture of places like the Bowery and the Catharine Market, where Black and white New Yorkers traded dances for coins. Michael Rogin’s Blackface, White Noise (1996), focused on later film, insists that whatever its complexity, blackface let white performers claim American identity at Black Americans’ expense. Critics of the “love and theft” approach warn that dwelling on white desire can understate the cruelty of the form and the harm it did.

Black Responses and Black Performers

Black Americans named minstrelsy for what it was. Writing in his newspaper in 1848, Frederick Douglass condemned blackface performers in terms that leave no room for nostalgia:

Black performers also worked inside and around the form. William Henry Lane, known as “Master Juba,” danced in Five Points dance halls; Dickens’s American Notes (1842) describes a brilliant young Black dancer there who is usually identified with him. Lane competed against and outdanced white blackface dancers, toured England with a white minstrel troupe in 1848, and helped create the hybrid of Irish and African American steps that became tap dance. After the Civil War, Black minstrel troupes performed for paying audiences, often bound by the same stereotypes. The posters on the deck’s second minstrelsy slide come from that later era of big commercial minstrelsy; the “Zip Coon” sheet music dates from the 1830s.

IV. Blood Sports and the Prize Ring

Rough Amusements

In taverns, cellars, and back rooms, working-class men gathered to bet on cockfights, dogfights, rat-baiting (a terrier killing rats in a pit against the clock), and bare-knuckle bouts. These amusements were often illegal, weakly policed, and profitable for saloonkeepers. To reformers they epitomized cruelty and disorder. The organized anti-cruelty movement came later, when Henry Bergh founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in New York in 1866, but the conflict over rough sports was already a conflict over sympathy, self-control, and the proper uses of leisure.

Elliott Gorn’s The Manly Art (1986) argues that these sports expressed a working-class code of honor that valued courage, loyalty, and the willingness to take risks, values under pressure in an economy of wage dependence. Critics warn that such readings can romanticize real violence. Both points belong in a classroom discussion.

The Fancy and the Ring

Prizefighting was illegal almost everywhere, so promoters staged bouts in secret, on barges, riverbanks, and across state lines. Fights followed the London Prize Ring Rules of 1838: a round ended when a man went down, and a fight could last dozens of rounds until one man could not come back to the mark. Followers called themselves “the fancy” or “sporting men”: butchers, mechanics, firemen, tavern keepers, gamblers, and politicians from Irish, native-born, and other backgrounds. William T. Porter’s Spirit of the Times, founded in 1831, covered horse racing and the ring, and the National Police Gazette (founded 1845) later made crime and sport a staple of popular reading. In February 1849 Tom Hyer, a native-born New Yorker, defeated the Irish-born James “Yankee” Sullivan at Still Pond Heights, Maryland, in a bout followed by newspapers across the country and charged with nativist rivalry.

The lecture’s appendix argues that the ring offered an alternative vision of democracy: in theory, two men stripped to the waist faced each other as equals, and only strength, skill, and courage mattered. Michael Kimmel’s Manhood in America (1996) describes the competition between this “heroic artisan” model of manhood and the middle-class “self-made man.” The ring’s equality was partly myth, since backers, training, and money mattered, and it was an equality for men only.

V. Barnum and the Art of Humbug

Joice Heth

Phineas Taylor Barnum (1810–1891) launched his career in 1835 with an act of human exploitation. Joice Heth was an elderly, blind, nearly paralyzed enslaved Black woman whom another showman was exhibiting as the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington. Barnum paid $1,000 for the right to exhibit her, in effect purchasing her, and toured her through Northeastern cities. When audiences dwindled, he planted a newspaper rumor that she was not a woman at all but an automaton, which brought customers back to judge for themselves. After she died in February 1836, Barnum sold tickets to a public autopsy, where the surgeon David L. Rogers concluded she had been no more than about eighty years old. Benjamin Reiss’s The Showman and the Slave (2001) argues that the Heth exhibition fed on Northern debates about slavery, race, and memory, and that Barnum’s fame began with the commodification of a Black woman’s body.

The American Museum

In late 1841 Barnum bought John Scudder’s American Museum at Broadway and Ann Street and reopened it in 1842 as Barnum’s American Museum. By the time it burned in July 1865 it had drawn an estimated 38 million admissions, a total that includes repeat visits. (The deck had said “over 15 million visitors”; it now gives the commonly cited admissions figure.) For twenty-five cents, visitors saw natural-history specimens, live animals, dioramas, “human curiosities,” jugglers, and plays in a theater Barnum called the “Lecture Room” to reassure churchgoers. The Lecture Room staged moral dramas such as the temperance play The Drunkard in 1850. Barnum banned alcohol, advertised the museum as suitable for women and children, and wrapped everything in the language of education.

His most famous attractions show the mix. Charles Stratton, a four-year-old from Bridgeport, Connecticut, was billed from 1842 as “General Tom Thumb,” an eleven-year-old “dwarf,” and became an international celebrity who met Queen Victoria and grew wealthy. The “Feejee Mermaid,” exhibited in 1842, was a monkey’s upper body sewn to a fish’s tail; Barnum’s associate Levi Lyman posed as a British naturalist, “Dr. J. Griffin,” to lend it scientific credibility. In 1850 Barnum brought the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind to America for a concert tour that cemented his claim to respectability.

Humbug and Its Critics

Barnum called his method humbug, and he wrote about it openly in his autobiography (1855) and in The Humbugs of the World (1865). (The line “There’s a sucker born every minute” is commonly attributed to him, but there is no good evidence he said it.) Neil Harris’s Humbug (1973) argued that Barnum’s audiences enjoyed an “operational aesthetic,” the pleasure of investigating how something worked and whether it was genuine. James W. Cook’s The Arts of Deception (2001) explains this taste in an age when traditional authorities were weakening: judging a clever fraud let ordinary people act as critics. T. J. Jackson Lears’s Fables of Abundance (1994) places Barnum in the history of advertising.

Other scholars emphasize the costs. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s Extraordinary Bodies (1997) argues that freak shows taught audiences to define themselves as “normal” by staring at people with disabilities or from other cultures who were presented as abnormal. Reiss insists that racial exploitation cannot be separated from Barnum’s achievements. The fair conclusion, which the deck draws as well, is that Barnum democratized access to culture while exploiting vulnerable people, empowered audiences while manipulating them, and challenged elite authority while creating new hierarchies between the savvy viewer and the “sucker.”

Closing Synthesis

Between 1815 and 1850 the market revolution created leisure time, and the growing cities created mass audiences to fill it. The middle class used respectable amusements to perform refinement. Working-class New Yorkers built a counterculture of theaters, fire companies, taverns, and rings that celebrated courage and loyalty. Blackface minstrelsy, the most popular entertainment of all, forged a cross-class white public by ridiculing Black Americans, even as Black critics like Frederick Douglass condemned it and Black performers like William Henry Lane outshone its stars. Barnum blended all of these currents into a single, profitable institution.

Chapter 10 as a whole describes the emergence of an American culture that was commercial, participatory, emotional, and national. Print made a reading public, revival made a worshiping public, the middle class made its homes and its “respectable” amusements into proofs of character, and the stage made a watching public. Each was more open than the elite culture it replaced, and each drew boundaries of its own: by class, by gender, and above all by race. The rest of the course will show how those boundaries shaped the sectional crisis to come.

Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation

Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1993; 20th anniversary ed. 2013). The central interpretation of minstrelsy; demanding but essential.

Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (1974). The accessible starting point on minstrelsy’s history and format.

David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (1991); Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (1990). Race, class, and politics in white working-class identity.

W. T. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain (1998); Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder (1997). Early blackface in the mixed street culture of New York.

Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (1984). Artisans, wage labor, and the Bowery’s political culture.

Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (1988). Shakespeare as popular culture and the Astor Place Riot as a cultural turning point.

Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (1986). The prize ring and working-class manhood.

Amy S. Greenberg, Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City (1998). Fire companies, manhood, and urban politics.

Tyler Anbinder, Five Points (2001); Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery (2003). Five Points and Black New York beyond the slum stereotype.

Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (1973); James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception (2001). Barnum’s methods and the cultural appeal of being fooled.

Benjamin Reiss, The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America (2001). The Joice Heth exhibition and the racial foundations of Barnum’s career.

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies (1997). Disability, the freak show, and the making of the “normal.”

Primary sources: Charles Dickens, American Notes (1842), chapter 6 on Five Points; P. T. Barnum, The Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself (1855); Frederick Douglass in The North Star (1848); minstrel songbooks and playbills in the Library of Congress and the Harry Ransom Center digital collections.