The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North

by Douglas A. Jones

Overview

In The Captive Stage, Douglas A. Jones, Jr. argues that proslavery ideology remained the dominant mode of racial thought in the antebellum north, even though chattel slavery had virtually disappeared from the region by the turn of the nineteenth century—and that northerners cultivated their proslavery imagination most forcefully in their performance practices. Jones explores how multiple constituencies, ranging from early national artisans and Jacksonian wage laborers to patrician elites and bourgeois social reformers, used the stage to appropriate and refashion defenses of black bondage as means to affirm their varying and often conflicting economic, political, and social objectives. Joining performance studies with literary criticism and cultural theory, he uncovers the proslavery conceptions animating a wide array of performance texts and practices, such as the “Bobalition” series of broadsides, blackface minstrelsy, stagings of the American Revolution, reform melodrama, and abolitionist discourse. Taken together, he suggests, these works did not amount to a call for the re-enslavement of African Americans but, rather, justifications for everyday and state-sanctioned racial inequities in their post-slavery society. Throughout, The Captive Stage elucidates how the proslavery imagination of the free north emerged in direct opposition to the inclusionary claims black publics enacted in their own performance cultures. In doing so, the book offers fresh contexts and readings of several forms of black cultural production, including early black nationalist parades, slave dance, the historiography of the revolutionary era, the oratory of radical abolitionists and the black convention movement, and the autobiographical and dramatic work of ex-slave William Wells Brown.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472120437
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	07/09/2014
Series:	Theater: Theory/Text/Performance
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	218
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Douglas A. Jones, Jr. is Assistant Professor of English, Rutgers University.

Read an Excerpt

The Captive Stage

Performance and The Proslavery Imagination of The Antebellum North

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By Douglas A. Jones Jr.

The University of Michigan Press

Copyright © 2014 University of Michigan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-12043-7

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CHAPTER 1

Setting the Stage of Black Freedom

Parades and "Presence" in the New Nation

In the aftermath of the armed conflicts of the American War of Independence, a series of "quiet" structural revolutions commenced. The United States had to instate an untested system of democratic governance called republicanism; implement new economies of capital, exchange, and labor predicated on the individual's absolute right to property; and readjust to the large-scale demographic shifts the war produced. The role of slaves and free people of color in the emergent polity surfaced as a markedly fraught question. On the one hand, dominant civic discourses rendered whiteness the precondition of citizenship. On the other, the prevalence of the rhetoric of egalitarianism threatened the permanence of such race-based civil circumscriptions. That many slaves and free people of color had distinguished themselves in the Revolutionary cause and demanded full citizenship in return made questions of civil inclusion all the more pressing.

These demands helped quicken antislavery sentiment in the period, when many already doubted the viability of slavery in a new nation founded on principles of democratic freedom. Indeed, northern state legislatures enacted gradual emancipation statutes, and slaveholders in all regions (most notably the Upper South) manumitted slaves in vast numbers. The increasing masses of free black people did not attempt to isolate themselves from their former masters; rather, they sought to expand the polity in such a way that included them as equal participants. In this effort they crafted a protest culture that merged (inherited) African notions of community, institution-building, and personal obligation to Enlightenment discourses and political practices. These doings, along with the patterns of black migration throughout the North American continent that emancipation instigated, laid the groundwork for what would become African America.

Throughout the early national period, African Americans continued to stress that their efforts toward the formation of the U.S. were at the core of their identity. As literary historian John Ernest writes, "In the pages of the early [black] historical texts, one encounters frequently both the history and prehistory of African American contributions to American military and political history." The most venerated and recurring historical figure in this literature is runaway slave Crispus Attucks. Attucks was one of the first men British soldiers killed in the Boston Massacre, an initiating event of the American Revolution, and he quickly became the iconic signifier of selfless black patriotism. His story appealed to early black writers and other "integrationist historians" because his martyrdom, as they would have classified it, and other contemporaneous acts of black sacrifice evidenced the ways African Americans had always been at the nation's center.

Yet in official and normative accounts of the American Revolution from the period, Attucks' death is little more than a footnote, if that. For example, the most famous rendering of the Boston Massacre, Paul Revere's 1770 engraving The Bloody Massacre Perpetuated in King Street Boston on March 5th, does not graphically depict Attucks. Historian Marcus Rediker argues that Revere's engraving, which he contends "may be the most important political work of art in American history," excludes Attucks because he was "the wrong color, the wrong ethnicity, and the wrong occupation to be included in the national story." But all stories — national or otherwise — invite us to read them against the grain, and the narrative Revere sought to tell with his engraving is a case in point. For instance, Attucks' name does appear in the subtitle of Revere's print as one of the Massacre's victims. Moreover, as cultural historian Tavia Nyong'o notes, "no one else is depicted either individually or realistically in the print." Nyong'o suggests that "rather than see Attucks either included or excluded by Revere's print," we should "understand [Attucks'] status as an exception" because "it is impossible to say finally whether or not he is included or excluded, because he is clearly both." Thus, Revere's listing of Attucks as one of the slain patriots destabilizes the narrative limits that the amorphous, yet racially all-white rendering presents visually. Even if Attucks is not discernibly "in" The Bloody Massacre, he is certainly there — throughout it, above it, under it.

Nyong'o's reading of Attucks as a figure of exception haunting Revere's engraving suggests an instructive way to frame free black life in the post-Revolutionary period. For African Americans living in the wake of the nation's founding, they lacked the security of being an American and the surety of being a non-American; instead, they were at once both, existing in what I would call the state of black exception. This racial state has generated dialectics of desire and disgust, resistance and repression, and value and valuelessness that have beset black freedom since the nation's beginning and, for many, continue to trouble the viability of black freedom itself. As theorist Lindon Barrett asks, "What are the particulars of negotiating social and civic relations in a society in which one remains part of a constantly expended present absence?" In one form or another, this question has animated the ways African Americans have imagined the nation, their place within it, and the practical resources with which to overturn their condition as the excluded members who are also the included non-members of the American polity.

This chapter looks at some of the ways these imaginings crystallized into a culture of black parade performance that spurned the state of black exception and aimed to position African Americans as self-determined citizens and bearers of American possibility. More specifically, I explore how early national black publics across cities and towns in the north used commemorative parades to press for universal emancipation, black citizenship, and social equality. While African Americans grounded the parades' rhetorical, performance, and textual practices in the immediate concerns of black life, they were equally interested in the direction of the entire nation and of American democracy. Indeed, these civic performances mark the beginnings of a collectively honed political consciousness that draws from black struggle a set of imaginative and pragmatic resources with which to expand democratic possibilities for all Americans.

Hostile onlookers did not construe black parades as a kind of pedagogy that elucidated what the American polity could and should be; they viewed such acts as absurd at best and menacing at worst. That threat stemmed in large part from the fact that the parade, which was "the characteristic genre of nineteenth-century civic life," rendered ex-slaves and their descendants' demands highly legible and therefore potent. Hundreds, sometimes thousands of African Americans participated, and their use of the nation's most cherished form of civic display signified to antagonistic white audiences an attempt to seize the nation. The parades, of course, were not projections of a black-controlled nation-state with a subordinate white population; rather, they were (re)presentations of African Americans as a free people deserving of the promises of American democracy.

The culture of parading that early national African Americans crafted also vexed certain antislavery northerners because its affirmations of American subjectivity pointed to an increase in the black presence. Many in the north, particularly in New England, supported emancipation because they hoped it would lead to the end of black people in their midst. But, as the parades suggested in the grandest of scales, African Americans had no intention of disappearing. This reality became even more daunting for many in the region when they grappled with the fact that they no longer had the racial and social protections slavery once offered. The question of what to do with a mass of free black people rarely arose before the 1780s because legislating bodies, slaveholders, and other invested white publics could not foresee large numbers of ex-slaves laying claim to the nation and demanding full inclusion therein. It took the realities of emancipation, notably including black activism, for them to begin to take seriously the overriding question of black freedom, which Thomas Jefferson succinctly articulated in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1781–82, 1787): "Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state, and thus save the expence of supplying, by importation of white settlers, the vacancies they will leave?" With this query, Jefferson pinpointed the fundamental quandary of abolishing slavery. While northerners refused to incorporate the ex-slave into the state as an equal member, they did imagine new forms of black captivity with which to retain him. Some of the most representative of these efforts took shape in the plays of John Murdock, and, as I explore in what follows, they provided a model for future cultural producers to meld the assumptions of proslavery ideology with the realities of black freedom.

"CITIZEN SAMBO": A PROBLEM FOR THOUGHT

John Murdock was a white hairdresser in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia. As a member of the artisan class, he was afforded time to contribute to the city's budding theatre culture. Theatre historian Heather S. Nathans argues that a "rise of class awareness" significantly informs Murdock's plays because of the "diminution in both [artisans' and mechanics'] political and economic influence." His dramas "presented the Philadelphia Murdock knew, a hodgepodge of recent German and Irish immigrants, slave and free blacks, Quakers, artisans, and wealthy elites." Murdock's The Triumphs of Love; or, Happy Reconciliation (1794), for example, considers how these various groups attended to some of the period's most pressing concerns, including the slave uprisings in Santo Domingo and the parameters of political representation in the newly formed U.S. More relevant to the concerns of this chapter, Triumphs explores the conditions that led to and followed the onset of black freedom in Philadelphia, and it does so through a narrative of post-war intergenerational conflict. The older generation of characters, especially Jacob Friendly Senior, objects to the profligacy and sybaritism of the younger generation, particularly that of George Friendly Junior. Among George Junior and his peers' most troubling habits and practices, slaveholding is perhaps the most acute for Jacob Senior because, as a Quaker, it conflicts with his religious and moral convictions. Quaker antislavery activism dates back to the late seventeenth century and, institutionally, culminated in the creation of the world's first abolition organization, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS), which formed in 1775. In Jacob Senior's view, which is to say the view of Quakerism, slavery is an institution that not only contradicts divine law but also nourishes the "rank weeds of vice [to] overgrow the seeds of virtue" in both man and society.

Ultimately, George Junior accepts the way of his Quaker forebears, and manumits his slave, Sambo, after watching "the honest creature" perform an "untutored, pathetic soliloquy" on the physical and psychological wounds of the "barbarous, iniquitous slave-trade." Before George Junior does, however, he recalls the so-called merits of being a slave; as he sees it, the life of the slave is hardly the worst lot one can endure: "And yet how many thousands of the poorer class of whites are there, whose actual situation are [sic] vastly inferior to his [i.e., the black slave's]." Over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century, and especially in response to the rise in wealth inequality that early wage-labor capitalism produced, this claim became an ever-common refrain of proslavery ideologues. George Junior's use of it does not prevent him from freeing Sambo, but his comment does signal the ways white northerners believed slavery was something of a saving grace for the mass of black people; it also points to the qualms that accompanied statutory emancipations and personal manumission, the "moral" qualifications that prevented former masters and even non-slaveholding white people from treating their newly freed black counterparts as equals.

What is even more noteworthy about the use of this proslavery claim in Triumphs is that Sambo himself repeats a version of it in the very soliloquy that leads to his manumission.

Sambo what a gal call a pretty fellow. ... Can tink so, so, pretty well. He tink; he berry often tink why he slave to white man? why black foke sold like cow or horse. He tink de great somebody above, no order tings so. — Sometime he tink dis way — he got bess massa in e world. He gib him fine clothes for dress — he gib him plenty money for pend; and for a little while, he tink himself berry happy. Afterwards he tink anoder way. He pose massa George die; den he sold to some oder massa. May be he no use him well. When Sambo tink so, it most broke he heart.

Sambo is trapped, here, within a muddied logic. No sooner than he questions the bestial ways whites imagine and subsequently treat black people, he expresses his gratitude that he has the "bess massa in [the] world." Then, later in the scene, he takes another turn and makes clear that his assessment of George as a "good" master does not in any way dampen his desire to be free. Sambo's equivocality, along with George's later reserve regarding slave manumission, lays the conceptual and narrative groundwork for the play's ensuing speculation on what many saw as the wrongheadedness of grounding abstract notions of liberty in the form of black emancipation. In this effort, Murdock pursued a question that, in my view, has shaped the course of American social history: "Sambo, suppose you had your liberty, how would you conduct yourself?"

After George asks this of Sambo and subsequently frees him, Sambo declares, "O massa George, I feel how I neber feel before. God bress you. (Cries.) I muss go, or my heart burst," then exits. He quickly returns, now alone on stage, and tells the audience, "When massa George ax me how I like go free, I tink he joke: but when he tell me so for true, it make much water come in my eye for joy. (Sings.) Den Sambo dance and sing./ He more happy dan a king./ He no fear he lose he head. He now citizen Sambo." Sambo's effusion in this solo act, it bears noting, is as much a celebration of white freedom as it is his own. By means of the figure of manumitted black slave, one happier "dan a king" (George III) in this case, the scene evoked Americans' recent triumph over monarchial authority and commemorated their (white) freedom from "political slavery." But immediately after hailing himself "citizen," Sambo exits, and only appears in Triumphs once more. In that scene he is drunk and belligerent, and George remarks that Sambo is in a "situation I never saw him in before." Sambo's drunkenness is not an instance of racial stereotyping, however, because in the previous scene George and his white friend, Careless, are belligerently inebriated. Thus, drunkenness and, by extension, other forms of intemperance emerge in the play as problems of freedom rather than those of an essential racial (i.e., black) disposition. The behavioral symmetry between Sambo and his erstwhile masters, coupled with the paean to republican ideals he sings following his manumission, suggests that he has begun to wear the mantle of American citizenship. In fact, Sambo's final line in Triumphs is "Liberty and [e]quality ... for eber."

Triumphs offers no further clarification of the fate of "citizen Sambo"; but Murdock's 1798 follow-up, The Politicians; or, A State of Things, returns him to the stage. In this play, Murdock explores the lingering partisan hostilities that stemmed from the ratification of the highly controversial Jay Treaty of 1794, which helped the U.S. deter another war with Great Britain by strengthening economic ties between the two nations, and from American investment in the French Revolutionary Wars. According to The Politicians, these tensions consumed all order of persons, from the wealthy merchant to the enslaved. Murdock's representation of slave investment in these affairs is hardly complex, as slaves simply ape their respective masters' views: Caesar "don't like" the French because his "massa no like 'em" and Pompey "dam[s]" the English because his "massa no like English." But what about Sambo? How does he, as a "citizen," contribute to the discourses of American partisanship and international relations?

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Contents Introduction: The “Common Sense” of Slavery in the Free Antebellum North One: Setting the Stage of Black Freedom: Parades and “Presence” in the New Nation Two: Black Politics but Not Black People: Early Minstrelsy, “White Slavery,” and the Wedge of “Blackness” Three: Washington and the Slave: Black Deformations, Proslavery Domesticity, and Re-Staging the Birth of the Nation Four: The Theatocracy of Antebellum Social Reform: “Monkeyism” and the Mode of Romantic Racialism Five: Melodrama and the Performance of Slave Testimony; or, William Wells Brown’s Inability to Escape Epilogue: No Exit, but a New Stage Notes Index