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Overview
If one went looking for the tipping point in the prelude to the American Revolution, it would not be the destruction of the tea in Boston Harbor, or the blockade of Boston by British warships, or even the gathering of the first Continental Congress; rather, it was the Congress’s decision in late October of 1774 to close the theatres. In this remarkable feat of historical research, Odai Johnson pieces together the surviving fragments of the story of the first professional theatre troupe based in the British North American colonies. In doing so, he tells the story of how colonial elites came to decide they would no longer style themselves British gentlemen, but instead American citizens.
London in a Box chronicles the enterprise of David Douglass, founder and manager of the American Theatre, from the 1750s to the climactic 1770s. The ambitious Scotsman’s business was teaching provincial colonials to dress and behave as genteel British subjects. Through the plays he staged, the scenery and costumes, and the bearing of his actors, he displayed London fashion and London manners. He counted among his patrons the most influential men in America, from British generals and governors to local leaders, including the avid theatre-goers George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. By 1774, Douglass operated a monopoly of theatres in six colonies and the Anglophone Caribbean, from Jamaica to Charleston and northward to New York City. (Boston remained an impregnable redoubt against theatre.)
How he built this network of patrons and theatres and how it all went up in flames as the revolution began is the subject of this witty history. A treat for anyone interested in the world of the American Revolution and an important study for historians of the period.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609384951 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2017 |
| Series: | Studies Theatre Hist & Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 294 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
[LONDON] in a box
Englishness and Theatre Inrevolutionary America
By Odai Johnson
University of Iowa Press
Copyright © 2017 University of Iowa PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-495-1
CHAPTER 1
A Season of Great Uncertainty
New York, October 1774
There never was a period in our history more critical than the present.
WILLIAM EDDIS, October 26, 1774
A small tax in a series of small taxes had been lately imposed on East India tea, and when a cargo of it sailed into Boston, a fiery group of radicals costumed as Mohawks, who styled themselves the Sons of Liberty, marched to the harbor and pitched the tea overboard. Even the subterfuge was marked with the same transatlantic hybridity that would characterize this generation: "Mohawks" in the cultural imagination were both the untamed tribe of native Americans they impersonated, and a gang of desperados who haunted Covent Garden in the early 1770s. William Hickey, who moved among this gang in 1771, offered a vivid portrait of their "outrageous conduct" in the theatres, taverns, and coffeehouses, and their escapades were much talked of in the newspapers. If one considered their conduct in familiar London terms, the Boston Tea Party hooligans seemed exactly that kind of Mohawk, petty vandals and thugs. Indeed, even those on the American side of the question were alarmed at the "dominion of the mob." First it was stamps, now it was tea.
Whitehall was infuriated by the destruction of goods and the boycott of the tax, but mostly by the notion of American resistance to British policy, and it retaliated against the unruly colonists by closing the Boston harbor. The action catalyzed the colonies, and their delegates gathered in Philadelphia. What steps they would ultimately agree to take and upon what authority was still far from clear to those outside Carpenter's Hall, Philadelphia, in late October. The men who gathered there to debate, petition, resist, and organize were not yet the great men of history (Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense, had just stepped off the boat in Philadelphia, nearly broke and with few prospects); they were burgesses and planters, large-acre landholders, merchants and lawyers. They also belonged to a dense network of educated, propertied gentlemen in the sparsely populated colonies and constituted a network of incalculable worth. The crucible to come would make them into generals, presidents, patriots, martyrs, and a few fence-sitters. At present, they were incensed British subjects becoming Americans, with only a vague sense of how to proceed with their grievances; they were possibly on the verge of something cataclysmic, something extraordinary and unprecedented, or else something utterly disastrous. They might very well be playing out the all-too-familiar narrative of rebellion, with its inevitable doomed conclusion.
At the close of October 1774, still months from the first shots exchanged between British regulars and colonial Minutemen that would irrevocably decide the fate of so many thousands of the uncertain, most colonists watched events and waited with great expectation. William Eddis of Annapolis was one; on the 26th of that month he wrote, "[A]ll descriptions of people are waiting for the result of their deliberations with the utmost impatience." Nicholas Cresswell commented, "A General Congress of the different Colonies met at Philadelphia on the 5th of last month [October] are still sitting, but their business is a profound secret." Like so many others, David Douglass waited, and like so many, not fully prepared to comprehend the enormity of the times around him. He was one of thousands of small and ordinary players caught in the uncertainty of the times. A month earlier, when Douglass was still fitting up the John Street Theatre in preparation of opening the winter season, John Adams had walked right past him, up Broadway, with Alexander McDougall ("the Wilkes of America"). It was McDougall who summarized for Adams the state of New York at the time:
[T]here is a powerful party here who are intimidated by fears of a civil war. ... [A]nother party are intimidated lest the leveling spirit of the New England colonies should propagate itself into New York. Another party are prompted by Episcopalian Prejudices against New England. Another party are Merchants largely concerned in Navigation, and therefore afraid of Non Importation, Non Consumption and Non Exportation Agreements. Another party are those who are looking up to Government for favours.
Douglass knew firsthand that civil wars were bad for business. The last one in England closed the theatres for eighteen years. He would likely have agreed with another artist, the painter John Singleton Copley: "Political contests ... [are] neither pleasing to an artist nor advantageous to art itself." Douglass was a businessman, a merchant of high culture, and now the unemployed manager of nineteen unemployed actors and seven closed theatres. He had long-term leases and money invested in the years to come with his "theatrical force hitherto unknown" in America. And somewhere at the end of October 1774, he must have sat on the steps on his unopened theatre and wondered how it all came to this.
Merchants were maneuvering to supply the military in Boston; the Committee of 51 were marshaling to intimidate them; merchants demanded to know upon what authority they derived their force? And that was the heart of the issue: who had the authority in the city? The lieutenant governor reported to the Earl of Dartmouth "the most trifling unforeseen incident may produce the greatest events. I have already said, my lord, that I am well assured almost the whole inhabitants in the counties wish for moderate measures. They think the dispute with Great Britain is carried far enough and abhor the thoughts of pushing it to desperate lengths. ... I have some hopes that our merchants will avoid a non-importation agreement even if proposed by the Congress."
In hindsight one could say there were signs. Others would observe at the time how the king was openly cursed, how sympathetic the colonists were to the plight of Boston, that things were, as Nicholas Cresswell wrote, "ripe for rebellion." Cresswell had just landed in Virginia in mid-October, and among his first assessments of America: "Nothing but war is talked of." Charles Carroll, Jr., writing to his father, observed: "I still think this controversy will at last be decided by arms: that is, I am apprehensive the oppressions of the Bostonians, & Gage's endeavours to enforce the new plan of govern[me]nt, will hurry that distressed & provoked People into some violence, which may end in blood: if that should be the case a civil war is inevitable." Even the hard-nosed tidewater tobacco-broker, James Robinson, was fretful all through the summer of 1774 that "the worst is to be dreaded, as moderate men are not listened to in the present ferment."
But there were those too who still spoke of the conflict as resolvable in any number of ways. For the merchants, to sever ties with Great Britain by force of arms was commercially untenable; moralists thought revolt unnatural; and the more politically far-sighted conceded that even if it succeeded, it would only leave America vulnerable to Spanish or French subjugation, or worse, throw the colonies into an intra-colonial war. General Gage, meanwhile, was collecting troops, troops marching through New Jersey, sailing up the Hudson, en route to Boston. Equally visible were the broadsides at New York's Merchant's Coffeehouse urging merchants to refuse the use of their ships to transport soldiers, and pilots not to assist ships involved in the blockade of Boston. More committed merchants, like Walter Franklin, were openly ordering munitions. The contest over the tea was equally heated in New York as it was in Boston, exacerbated by the observation that the same captain who carried the stamps to New York back in 1765 now carried the tea. When they learned he had purchased the tea for private sale, an unadorned mob boarded the London and eighteen chests of tea were dumped in New York harbor. That had been in the spring, and the Sons of Liberty had organized and grown more dangerous since then. A heated press war was also underway: pamphlets were in high circulation, including John Dickinson's formidable Tory platform, Essay on the Constitutional Power of Great Britain over the Colonies in America, published and widely circulated in the late summer of 1774. Closer to home was Dr. Myles Cooper's Friendly Address to All Reasonable Americans, which articulated a policy of the natural maternity of Great Britain to her colonies, and pointedly noted its military superiority. Cooper too was a great patron of the theatre, who had, the previous summer, sponsored plays in New York as a civic benefit for the hospital attached to Kings College (now Columbia University), and wrote the prologue for Douglass. John Adams, however, thought Cooper's maternal argument closer to the maternity of Lady Macbeth. Looking back, there were plenty of signs of a mighty showdown in the making.
But at the time the idea of successful armed resistance to or independence from Great Britain was utterly without precedent. In the fall of 1774 most colonists knew that every attempt against the monarchy of Great Britain since the English civil war had failed. A century of Irish uprisings, most recently the Heart of Oak uprising (1762), Scottish highland revolts, the "Forty Five" (the Jacobite rebellion), had all been quashed mercilessly. On the American continent the same was true for a century of Indian uprisings, including, Pontiac's Rebellion, the Cherokee wars in South Carolina, and the French-Indian War of 1756–1763. Servant and slave revolts in the colonies and on the islands of the Anglophone West Indies had also failed. There had been many attempts to rise against Great Britain, but there was no precedent to suggest that a new armed rebellion would end differently. One hears the voice of Cato, a role Douglass himself played for fifteen years, coolly reasoning: "Let not a torrent of impetuous zeal / Transport thee thus beyond the bounds of reason."
A general boycott of all British goods seemed equally improbable, despite John Adams's injunction: "Frugality, my Dear, Frugality, parsimony must be our refuge. ... [L]et us eat potatoes and drink water, let us wear canvas." Douglass had just spent eight months in Charleston, one of the busiest trading ports on the coast. Charlestonians were certainly not wearing canvas, not the beaus onstage, where they sat because the theatre was so crowded, night after night, and the ladies there described as "dazzling" and "superfine," where one could lose a jeweled bracelet there "set with Brilliants, Rubies and twelve strings of Oriental Pearls" and advertise for its recovery. At the close of that season, some of the actors in his company had sailed to Philadelphia with one of South Carolina's most radical delegates, Christopher Gadsden, who had just completed the longest wharf in America, capable of unloading any number of ships at the same time. Surely merchants (and representatives) such as Gadsden and Henry Laurens were not about to forfeit their business.
More likely, cooler heads would pull back from this brinkmanship and restore civil order, reestablish commerce, and allow level-headed men of business on both sides of the pond to return to making money. Douglass, who had kept his theatre open right through the Stamp Act crisis, had weathered these tempests before. "Bad this year, the better the next," as Douglass himself would speak from the stage; "[w]e must take things rough and smooth as they run." Many merchants endured periods of suspended business. John Jay's former legal employer, the New York firm of Benjamin Kissam, had to recess during the Stamp Act crisis, and Kissam wrote to Jay on its repeal: "As upon the Repeal of the Stamp Act, we shall doubtless have a Luxuriant Harvest of Law, I would not willingly, after the long Famine we have had, miss reaping my part of the crop." Even this selected boycott of goods would be a matter of negotiation (in South Carolina rice was exempted, but not wheat or hemp; in Virginia spars and saltpetre were exempted). These patriots were very boisterous at the moment, but at its core, America remained a land of merchants, bound up with the merchants of England. Commerce impassioned the trans-Atlantic world, not rights, and men of sense would soon restore — if not harmony, at least the climate for trade. So reasoned many, and so may have Douglass reasoned, because he remained in New York for the next three months.
The Association of Mechanics in New York fretted out the same anxiety. In early November of 1774 they wrote to the New York Committee with "anxious solicitude for the restoration of that harmony and mutual confidence between the parent state and America." The lieutenant governor, Cadwallader Colden, concurred: "I am well assured almost the whole inhabitants in the counties wish for moderate measures. They think the dispute with Great Britain is carried far enough and abhor the thoughts of pushing it to desperate lengths. In the city a large majority of the people wish that a non-importation agreement may not be proposed by the Congress." William Cunninghame, a Virginia tobacco-broker, assumed the parties would compromise: "Meanwhile, our violent patriots, of which there are a number, will cool and they will consult reason and their own interests."
Even this great display of arms, militiamen carrying off gunpowder, drilling on the parade, seemed all show. One Scots merchant asserted: "It was the general opinion among civil and military men that our provincials would not fire a single gun in the contest, and all their preparations were meant only to intimidate and to exhort terms." "Notwithstanding the noise of arming and mustering," wrote another, "the colonists will not attempt fighting." Over and over one finds level-headed voices convinced that armed resistance would be too devastating to be seriously entertained. So the actors did not leave New York, and New Yorkers noticed. And then more actors arrived. New recruits from London appeared, anticipating work. Peyton Randolph's letter to Douglass was followed by a visit from Philip Levingston and John Jay of the New York Committee of Safety, another by-product of the first Congress, citizens delegated to patrol the new resolutions. Levingston, whom Douglass knew from the St. Andrew's Society, reconfirmed personally the will of the Congress. Cadwallader Colden would also have noticed that though Douglass did not leave, neither did he open the theatre, though he had secured the requisite permission. Colden and his family were all long-time acquaintances and patrons of Douglass. Douglass had relied on character letters and support from the lieutenant governor for years, and was familiar enough with the Colden family to carry letters for them in his own travels, such as the letter from David Colden to Alexander Garden that Douglass carried to Charleston, which spoke with great detail, great interest, and at some length about Douglass and his success in the business of theatre. Suddenly, to open or not to open became a question of political identity in which neutrality was an increasingly difficult position to occupy.
The Sons of Liberty reminded Mr. Douglass that the last company that played New York in 1766 during the Stamp Act crisis had faced a mob that whipped the actors and demolished the playhouse, and "carried the pieces to the common, where they consumed them in a bonfire." One unfortunate young man had his skull fractured, "his recovery doubtful."
For three months at the close of 1774 and the opening of 1775, Douglass watched and waited, while local militias formed, munitions unloaded on the wharfs, British warships arrived, and dispatches flew back and forth across the sea. He waited, like so many others, during these most critical months in American history, with nineteen unemployed actors, and watched from the wings of an empty theatre the preparations of what John Adams called "the Theatre of Action."
It is difficult to look beyond the charisma of 1776 and everything that followed, but to those caught up in the confusion of the times that preceded the Declaration of Independence and the war, to those who could see beyond the rhetoric of slavery and liberty, it must have seemed incredible to think of severing ties with Great Britain, the largest power in Europe. As Douglass waited in New York for a civil outcome of the current uncertainty, the only comfort was — if there was any comfort — that he had been here before. He had been shut down before in New York, sixteen years earlier during his first assault on the city in 1758.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from [LONDON] in a box by Odai Johnson. Copyright © 2017 University of Iowa Press. Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents Acknowledgments Preface. “The Velim Lyth Bare”: A Note on Absence and Other Sources Prologue. The Most Well-Connected Man in America Receives a Letter from Congress, and Is Put Out of Business Chapter 1. A Season of Great Uncertainty: New York, October 1774 Chapter 2. A Disastrous Arrival: New York, October 1758 Chapter 3. Building a Network: 1759–1760 Chapter 4. London in a Box Chapter 5. This Wandering Theatre: Newport, New York, Charleston, 1761–1763 Chapter 6. Heart of Oak, and Other Transatlantic Transformations: April 1764–October 1766 Chapter 7. Murder in the Greenroom, and Other London Interludes: 1764–1765 Chapter 8. Sailing on an Unwelcomed Ship: 1765–1766 Chapter 9. The Politics of Frugality: 1767–1769 Chapter 10. Associations and Binges: 1770 Chapter 11. Lords of the Turf: Maryland, 1770–1771 Chapter 12. Great Reckonings in Small Rooms: 1773–1774 Chapter 13. Christopher Gadsden’s Wharf: Charleston, Summer 1774 Chapter 14. The Second America: New York, Winter 1774 Epilogue. Final Reckonings: New York, January 1775 Notes Works Cited IndexWhat People are Saying About This
“By making the wheelings and dealings of David Douglass the center of his study, Johnson creates a history that encompasses not only the theatre and the politics of it in the colonial era, but also a history of sociability and the interactions among public men during the era. Johnson writes with wit and grace; his narrative voice is reminiscent itself at times of an eighteenth-century novelist.”
“London in a Box offers extraordinarily well-written, engaging prose that tells compelling stories about early American and Atlantic theatre and the social worlds in which it traveled. This book recovers and fleshes out important stories of early American theatre’s origins, adding significantly to social histories of the revolutionary era. More broadly, it enhances our sense of the Atlantic world’s transnational networks and furthers the theoretical and methodological conversation around cultural history’s evidence and interpretation.”