What Hath God Wrought (94 page)

Early nineteenth-century American theatrical performances lasted a long time. Typically, the principal production was both preceded and followed by other presentations from singers, acrobats, dancers, and comedians. Sometimes these also appeared between acts of the main play. The appropriate analogy is to the typical motion picture theater during the golden age of Hollywood, where two feature films would be accompanied by short subjects like a travelogue, a newsreel, and cartoons. Acting companies, as in Shakespeare’s day, toured together, having a number of performances, major and minor, in their repertoire. By now the actors included women as well as men, and they often married each other; they were expected to sing or dance as well as act. Their productions frequently took liberties with the playwright’s text. The mixture of serious and light entertainment helped draw large numbers to performances. The rowdy audiences felt free to demand their favorite musical numbers from the theater orchestra (called the “band” although it included strings).
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The distinction between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” was not then characteristic of American culture, although people distinguished between that which was “improving” and that which was not. The future poet Walt Whitman contrived to straddle the two appeals in his 1842 novel,
Franklin Evans
. Selling for a “bit” (twelve and a half cents), Whitman’s story endorsed the temperance movement but included enough sensational details about urban life to attract some of the dime-novel audience.
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Like fiction, theatrical productions could be turned into vehicles for the promotion of reform causes. On the stage, the most famous reform advocates were the Hutchinson Family Singers, who began their celebrated tours in 1842. The Hutchinsons supported not only temperance but antislavery as well. Their well-publicized appearances at reform conventions helped boost attendance.
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After
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
appeared in print, it was quickly translated into innumerable traveling stage productions.

The struggle to legitimate the theater and redeem it from opprobrium provoked conflict between the upper and middle classes on the one hand, with their aspirations to polite culture, and the urban working class, which liked the traditional theater just as it was. Working-class patrons of the old-style, nonrespectable venues in New York, like the Park Theater, resented the elegant new Astor Place Opera House, with its rules against prostitutes and its dress code appealing to the affluent. When the Astor Place scheduled the touring British actor Charles Macready to play Macbeth in May 1849, the American actor Edwin Forrest performed the same role at the Broadway. Compared to the restrained performances of Macready, Forrest’s acting style was broader and his appeal more populist. The contrast between the two celebrities inflamed passions of national pride and class conflict. Forrest’s fans attacked the Astor Place, and somewhere between twenty-two and thirty-one people died in the riot that ensued. Surprisingly for us, one of the most horrific incidents of class conflict in antebellum America involved culture rather than material interest—specifically, rival visions of how to present Shakespeare.
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The most original, popular, and distinctively American form of stage entertainment in this period was the minstrel show. Originally the word “minstrel” meant simply a traveling musician, as it did in Thomas Moore’s Irish patriotic lyric “The Minstrel Boy,” a favorite with Irish Americans of this era. Beginning in the late 1820s, white men like T. D. “Daddy” Rice applied the term to their performance of songs, dances, and comic routines with faces blackened by burnt cork. Sometimes they imitated or adapted actual African American music; sometimes they used material by white composers. Their skits and songs caricatured black people, occasionally with sympathy (as in “Old Black Joe”), more often with contempt or gross hostility. (When African Americans themselves opened a theater in New York in 1821, playing Shakespeare and other works to integrated audiences, white harassment shut it down.)
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The first audience for the new minstrel shows consisted of northern urban white working-class men, and that social group always remained central to defining the humor of blackface minstrel shows, even though their appeal gradually broadened. The songs that have survived from minstrel show days mostly deal with the South and plantation slavery (such as “Dixie” or “Old Folks at Home”), but in the 1840s, when minstrel shows took off in popularity, they often ridiculed the free black people of the North. Other objects of their raillery reflected other working-class male resentments: the learned professions and learning in general, the newly rich, European high culture, abolitionism, evangelical reform, and women’s rights. Performance in blackface provided a convenient license for satire, since assaults on respectability could be attributed to ignorant blacks and still get laughs.
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In terms of party politics, minstrel shows usually sided with the Jacksonian Democracy; the most famous minstrel composer, Stephen Foster, also wrote Democratic campaign songs. Taken all in all, what minstrel show satire ultimately targeted was the ethic of self-improvement. Lampooning black people provided a vehicle for expressing contempt for self-improvement efforts, since blacks were deemed incapable of self-improvement and yet persisted in attempting it. The pretentious free Negro (“Zip Coon”), misusing big words, served as a stock comic figure in minstrel shows.
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Blackface comedy thus provided a Jacksonian rebuttal to the contemporaneous theater of moral uplift, exemplified by Whig performers like the Hutchinson Family (although the Hutchinsons were also sometimes termed “minstrels” in the general sense of touring musicians).

Blackface minstrel shows generated such large profits that they could employ many of the most talented American composers of their age, including not only whites like Foster (“O Susannah,” “The Camptown Races,” “My Old Kentucky Home”) but also African Americans like James A. Bland (“Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” and “Oh, Them Golden Slippers”). If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the minstrel shows paid African American culture the compliment of stealing ideas from it even when subjecting it to ridicule. Foster, who worked for the most successful minstrel troupe of all, Christy’s Minstrels, believed that his songs promoted respect for African American music by recasting it in a form accessible to white audiences.
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To twenty-first-century Americans, minstrel shows constitute an awkward aspect of our national inheritance; their tunes remain catchy, but performing them can give offense. Historically, the shows’ cultural importance is undeniable. They represent the American counterpart to the English music hall. They embodied not only racism but much else of the America of their time, with references to steamboats, new inventions like telegraphy, and the newly popular African American instrument, the banjo. Soldiers marched off to Mexico to the tune of “The Girl I Left Behind Me”; the forty-niners who went to California sang “O Susannah” around their camp fires. Minstrel shows remained popular for more than half a century and constituted the ancestor of the mass popular entertainment that followed.

Of course, the minstrel show would have been impossible without the authentic African American music that preceded it. Virtually everybody in America, including foreign visitors, joined in acknowledging that the most original musicians in the country were the slaves. Antislavery advocates used this as evidence of black talent; defenders of slavery pointed to it as evidence of black contentment. African American folk music took a multitude of forms both secular and sacred, to which may be traced varieties of modern music including the blues, gospel, and jazz. Its diversity bespoke its origins in diverse parts of Africa and the various New World influences to which black creativity responded, in the Caribbean and on the mainland. Music nurtured a sense of African American community. Singing could accompany work, holidays, or tragic moments like the march of newly sold slaves away from family and friends toward an unknown destination, usually westward. The most famous of African American folk songs were the spirituals, songs of Christian faith amid suffering (“Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen,” “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?”), often invoking the heroes of the Hebrew scriptures (“Joshua fit the battle of Jericho, / And the walls came tumbling down”), multilayered in meaning, like all great art (“My Lord, what a morning [mourning], / When the stars begin to fall”), sometimes expressing coded longings for freedom (“When Israel was in Egypt’s land, / O let my people go!”). Although contemporary descriptions of the music of American slaves exist, we are heavily indebted to postemancipation efforts to reconstitute and preserve it, such as those of the abolitionists Lucy and Wendell Garrison, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and the poet James Weldon Johnson.
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In antebellum America, white people as well as black encountered music most often not in observing performances by professionals but when they themselves sang, played, and danced. Free people too sang at social events and to soothe the children. Some of their folk music we still recognize: “The Arkansas Traveler,” “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain,” “O Shenandoah.” From the American folk music of this period, often Celtic in origin, evolved what came to be called country-western. Church worship provided one of the most common occasions for participation in music-making. By 1815, American Protestants had long since supplemented psalm-singing with hymns as well, though organs, being expensive, appeared only very gradually. Improvements in printing and transportation fostered the distribution of hymnals along with other books; thanks to increased literacy, congregations no longer had to learn their songs by rote. Like benevolent associations, hymns were interdenominational. Their lyrics dignified the trials of everyday life with metaphors of Christian pilgrimage and taking up the cross.
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On July 4, 1831, the Sunday school children of Park Street Church in Boston sang a new hymn with words by twenty-three-year-old Samuel Francis Smith: “My country, ’tis of thee,/ Sweet land of liberty,/ Of thee I sing.” The conjunction of patriotism and religion seemed natural. Entitled simply “America,” it was sung to the tune of “God Save the King”—originally written in reaction against the Stuart uprising of 1745 and once popular in the British colonies. “America” became the unofficial national anthem, and good citizens stood up upon hearing it. (During the First World War, Americans felt the need for a national anthem with a tune different from that of the British. “The Star-Spangled Banner” then replaced “America”; Congress made this official in 1931.) Lowell Mason, the choirmaster who conducted the first performance of “America” and a collaborator with Lyman Beecher, went on to become the most influential figure in the development of choirs and hymnody in antebellum U.S. Protestantism.
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The industrial and communications revolutions encouraged and transformed the performance of music at home. The former provided the piano, originally called the
pianoforte
(“soft-loud” in Italian) because unlike a harpsichord it could produce music of varied dynamic levels. Jonas Chickering, a Yankee artisan-turned-manufacturer, invented a cast-iron frame for the piano strings that withstood powerful tension. His firm pioneered the American piano industry and the mass marketing of its product. The printing press complemented the factory-made piano by providing published sheet music. Once reserved to the wealthy elite, access to keyboards now spread as part of that polite culture to which middle-class Americans aspired. In many middle-class households, the piano replaced the fireplace as the center of home life. Family and friends gathered around the piano to sing sentimental songs like Thomas Moore’s “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms” or perhaps a simple aria from a light opera like Michael Balfe’s “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls.” Learning to play the piano took hard work, which made it a prized accomplishment in a society that valued work highly. It was also a form of self-improvement considered especially suitable for women and girls.
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Classical music (“art music” as it is sometimes called) came slowly to the United States, since in the beginning the churches did not foster it, and no aristocracy existed to patronize it. Thomas Jefferson, who loved European classical music and played it on his violin, deplored its scarcity on the American scene. Its expansion in the nineteenth century responded to the humanistic aspirations of the middle class. The cultivated bourgeoisie of Boston enjoyed singing oratorios and accordingly founded the Handel and Haydn Society in 1815 as an amateur choral group. The spread of piano-playing as a form of self-improvement greatly broadened interest in classical music, and this in turn eventually stimulated a desire to hear the best music performed by the best artists. The oldest symphony orchestra in the United States still in continuous existence, the New York Philharmonic, was founded in 1842—the same year that P. T. Barnum took over Peale’s Museum in New York and began charging admission to it. The increasing ease and frequency of transatlantic crossings put Americans in touch with European music and the musical criticism of the Romantic movement. Tours by European virtuosi, like that of the Norwegian violinist Ole Bull in 1843, proved crucial to providing classical music a foothold in the United States. Barnum, who understood how to cash in on celebrity, sponsored the wildly successful tour of Jenny Lind, “the Swedish nightingale,” in 1850.

Early proponents of classical music in the United States included the Transcendentalists, especially John Sullivan Dwight and Margaret Fuller. Fuller felt a particularly powerful affinity with Beethoven’s genius. In her private journal of 1843, she addressed the composer (who had died in 1827) thus: “No heavenly sweetness of Jesus, no many-leaved Raphael, no golden Plato, is anything to me, compared with thee.” Her burst of Romantic feeling manifested the new attitude toward music among the nineteenth-century middle class: from music as recreation to music as spiritual uplift. For devotees like Margaret Fuller, high-quality secular music was sacred music.
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