EDGAR FAWCETT.
If an American character was drawn at all, he was too apt to be a Solon Shingle or a Mose; if an American play was written at all, its scenes were laid on Sandy Bars, or in the false and unhealthful atmosphere of Saratoga or Long Branch. While London managers presented Orange Blossoms and Two Roses, the managers of New York and Boston set Diamonds and Pearls. The English flowers were fresh and fragrant; the American jewels, although they had a certain sparkle, were too often paste. The exotics flourished and bloomed on our soil for a time, it is true; but if they had been native buds they would have withered in a week, or else, like so many other indigenous plants, have been left to waste their sweetness in the pigeon-holes of managers’ desks. So strong was this unnatural prejudice against the production of an American picture of American home-life upon the American stage, that in one of the brightest American comedies ever taken from the French Mr. Hurlburt was forced to go abroad with his characters, and to place his Americans in Paris.
All this is not so true of the stage of to-day as it was at the beginning of the second century of our national drama. Scores of native writers, during the past decade or two, have presented American plays which have been clean and clever, even if they have not yet become classic. But it is a striking fact that the first three original “society plays” which were in any way successful upon the American stage were from the pens of women—Mrs. Mowatt’s Fashion, Mrs. Bateman’s Self, and Miss Heron’s The Belle of the Season—and that since their production the name of a woman has very rarely appeared upon the bills as the author of a play.
During the ten years which followed the first performance of Fashion it had a few rivals—comedies and dramas, satirical or otherwise—which treated, or pretended to treat, of that which asserts itself to be “the higher stratum of American society.” Among the longer lived of these were Extremes, a local New York play, which ran for three weeks at the Broadway Theatre in 1850; a dramatization of Mr. Curtis’s Potiphar Papers, brought out at Burton’s Theatre in 1854, in which Charles Fisher made a great hit as Creamcheese; and Mr. De Walden’s Upper Ten and Lower Twenty, also at Burton’s, in 1854, in which Mr. Burton himself, as Christopher Crookpath, a serious part, was a genuine surprise to his audience, and created a profound impression. Extremes, by a Baltimore gentleman, was never repeated here; the version of Mr. Curtis’s work—happily called Our Best Society—was merely an adaptation; Mr. De Walden was not a native writer; and only one of these productions, and that one the least successful, was an original American play.
BRANDER MATTHEWS.
“Self, an original New York comedy in three acts,” by Mrs. H. L. Bateman, was seen for the first time in New York at Mr. Burton’s Chambers Street house on the 27th of October, 1856. The plot was slight, and the play was long and a trifle dull. It was the story of a young girl (Mrs. E. L. Davenport) with a few thousands of dollars of her own, which both of her parents were determined to possess. She gave the money to her father (Charles Fisher); the mother (Mrs. Amelia Parker) instigated the son (A. Morton) to forge a check for the amount; the forgery was discovered; the girl, to save her mother and her brother, confessed the crime which she did not commit, and was turned out-of-doors in ignominy and disgrace, Mr. Burton, the traditional stage uncle, rescuing and righting her in the end. All of this was not new, was not cheerful, and, it is to be hoped, was not “society”; but it was received with great praise, and it took its place in popular favor by the side of Mrs. Mowatt’s comedy. Self was frequently repeated in New York, notably at Wallack’s Theatre, now the Star, in the Summer of 1869, when it introduced John E. Owens as Unit, and where it ran for three weeks, Miss Effie Germon playing the heroine, and playing it well. Mr. Owens made of Unit what is called a “star part.” It gave him an opportunity for the display of his peculiar comedy powers, and he presented it with a variety and force of expression which was not always to be seen in his acting. In it he appealed more to the hearts of his audiences than in Solon Shingle; and, next to his Caleb Plummer, his Unit is the pleasantest and most perfect picture he has left in the memory of his friends.
Mrs. Bateman was the daughter of Joseph Cowell, a well-known theatrical manager in the South and West, who came to this country from England in 1821, and whose Thirty Years Among the Players is known to all collectors of dramatic books. She went upon the stage at New Orleans in 1837 or 1838, but did not long remain an actress. She was successful as a manager; and she was the author of Geraldine, a tragedy, and of a dramatization of Longfellow’s Evangeline. For many years she was known only as the mother of the Bateman Children.
At Winter Garden, on the evening of March 12, 1862, Miss Matilda Heron produced for the first time The Belle of the Season, advertised as “a new and original home play,” and as written by Miss Heron herself. Its scenes were laid in the parks of Niagara and in Fifth Avenue drawing-rooms, but it suggested too many familiar plays of The Lady of Lyons school to be altogether free from the suspicion of imitation. That it came from Miss Heron’s own brain and pen, however, there could be little doubt; it had, as a literary effort, many of the faults and virtues and strong characteristics so curiously blended in the acting of its author. The production, as a whole, was what is termed “emotional,” the part of the heroine being peculiarly so. Unquestionably Miss Heron wrote it to fit herself, and unquestionably it did not fit her so well as did Camille, upon which so much of her fame as an actress now rests. She had all of an author’s fondness for the part and for the play. She considered both her greatest works. She produced the comedy many times in many cities of the Union, not always to the benefit of her purse or of her professional reputation, and when urged by her business manager to withdraw it altogether, she is said to have replied, with characteristic determination, that The Belle of the Season she wanted to play, The Belle of the Season she would play, and that when she died she wished nothing placed over her grave but the epitaph, “Here lies The Belle of the Season!”
BRONSON HOWARD.
Matilda Heron was one of the most remarkable actresses our stage has ever produced. With an intensity and passion in her performances which, at times, were magnificent and carried everything before them, she displayed professional shortcomings and infirmities which were often glaring and unpardonable; but she made and held, by the force of her own genius—and genius she certainly possessed—a position which few modern actresses have ever reached. Her personal faults were of the head rather than of the heart, and may they now rest lightly on her!
Miss Heron’s immediate successors as native playwrights of society dramas were Miss Olive Logan, with Surf; or, Summer Scenes at Long Branch, at Daly’s Theatre in 1870; Bronson Howard, with Saratoga in 1870-71, with Diamonds in 1873, and with Moorcroft in 1874; James Steele Mackaye, with Marriage in 1873; and Andrew C. Wheeler, with Twins, and Mr. Marsden, with Clouds, in 1876.
Anything like an enumeration of the original American society plays written and produced here during the last ten or fifteen years is not possible within the limits of a single chapter. They have been very many, and of all degrees of merit, the best and most creditable perhaps being Young Mrs. Winthrop, Old Love Letters, A Gold Mine, Esmeralda, Conscience, and The Charity Ball; but how long these are to live, and how they are to be regarded by the next generation—if the next generation has ever a chance to regard them at all—of course remains to be seen. Fashion, the first of the lot, survives only in its printed form, and the shell of the locust gives but a faint dry rattle, while the locust itself is as much alive as when The School for Scandal was first seen in America over a century ago. Have we a Sheridan among us? or is he still twenty years away?
THE AMERICAN STAGE NEGRO.
Bottom: “I have a reasonable good ear in music: let’s have the tongs and the bones.”—Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act iv. Sc. 1.
Shakspere’s Moor of Venice was one of the earliest of the stage negroes, as he is one of the best. If the Account of the Revels be not a forgery, he appeared before the court of the first English James in 1604, and he certainly was seen at the Globe Theatre, on the Bankside, on the 30th of April, 1610. Othello is hardly the typical African of the modern drama, although Roderigo speaks of him as having thick lips, and notwithstanding the fact that he himself is made to regret, in the third act of the tragedy, that he is “black, and has not those soft parts of conversation that chamberers have.” Shakspere unquestionably believed that the Moors were negroes; and as he made Verges and Dogberry cockney watchmen, and altered history, geography, and chronology to suit himself and the requirements of the stage, so he meant to invest his Moorish hero with all of the personal attributes, as well as with all of the moral characteristics, of the negroes as they were known to Englishmen in Shakspere’s day.
Othello was followed, in 1696, by Oroonoko, a tragedy in five acts, by Thomas Southerne. The real Oroonoko was an African prince stolen from his native kingdom of Angola during the reign of Charles the Second, and sold as a slave in an English settlement in the West Indies. Aphra Behn saw and became intimate with him at Surinam, when her father was Lieutenant-General of the islands, and made him the hero of the tale upon which the dramatist based his once famous play. With the more humble slaves by whom he was surrounded, the stage Oroonoko spoke in the stilted blank-verse of the dramatic literature of that period, and without any of the accent or phraseology of the original West Indian blacks. Mr. Pope was the creator of Oroonoko; and the part was a favorite one of the elder Kean in England and of the elder Booth in this country. It has not been seen upon either stage in many years. Oroonoko, of course, had a black skin and woolly hair. When Jack Bannister, who began his career as a tragic actor, said to Garrick that he proposed to attempt the hero of Southerne’s drama, he was told by the great little man that, in view of his extraordinarily thin person, he would “look as much like the character as a chimney-sweep in consumption!” It was to Bannister, on this same occasion, that Garrick uttered the well-known aphorism, “Comedy is a very serious thing!”
CHARLES DIBDIN AS MUNGO.
Mungo was a stage negro of a very different stamp, and the first of his race. He figured in The Padlock, a comic opera, words by Isaac Bickerstaffe, music by Charles Dibdin, first presented at Drury Lane in 1768. Mungo was the slave of Don Diego, a West Indian planter. It was written for and at the suggestion of John Moody, who had been in Barbadoes, where he had studied the dialect and the manners of the blacks. He never played the part, however, which was originally assumed by Dibdin himself. Mungo sang:
“Dear heart, what a terrible life I am led!
A dog has a better that’s sheltered and fed.
Night and day ’tis the same;
My pain is deir game;
Me wish to de Lord me was dead!
Whate’er’s to be done
Poor black must run.
Mungo here, Mungo dere,
Mungo everywhere;
Above and below,
Sirrah, come, sirrah, go;
Do so, and do so.
Oh! oh!
Me wish to de Lord me was dead!”
This is a style of ballad which has been very popular with Mungo’s descendants ever since. It may be added that Mungo got drunk in the second act, and was very profane throughout.
The great and original Mungo in America was Lewis Hallam, the younger, who first played the part in New York, and for his own benefit, on the 29th of May, 1769, at the theatre in John Street. Dunlap says, “In The Padlock Mr. Hallam was unrivalled to his death, giving Mungo with a truth derived from the study of the negro slave character which Dibdin, the writer, could not have conceived.” Mungo is never seen in the present time. Ira Aldridge, the negro tragedian, played Othello and Mungo occasionally on the same night in his natural skin; but Mungo may be said to have virtually died with Hallam, and to have gone to meet Oroonoko in that land of total oblivion to which Othello is destined to be a stranger for many years to come.
IRA ALDRIDGE AS OTHELLO.
In 1781 a pantomime entitled Robinson Crusoe was presented at Drury Lane. It was believed by the editor of the Biographia Dramatica to have been “contrived by Mr. Sheridan, whose powers, if it really be his performance, do not seem adapted to the production of such kind of entertainments. The scenery, by Loutherbourg, has a very pleasing effect, but, considered in every other light, it is a truly insipid exhibition.” Friday, in coffee-colored tights and blackened face, was naturally a prominent figure. The pantomime was produced at the Theatre Royal, Bath, during the next year, when Mr. Henry Siddons appeared as one of the savages. This gentleman, who played Othello on the same boards a few seasons later, is only remembered now as having given his name to the greatest actress who ever spoke the English tongue. This same Robinson Crusoe and Harlequin Friday was seen at the John Street Theatre, New York, on the 11th of January, 1786; while at the Park Theatre on the 11th of September, 1817, Mr. Bancker played Friday in The Bold Buccaneers; or, The Discovery of Robinson Crusoe, a melodrama which was very popular in its day.
Charles C. Moreau, of New York, possesses a very curious and almost unique bill of “The African Company,” at “The Theatre in Mercer Street, in the rear of the 1 Mile Stone, Broadway.” Tom and Jerry was presented by a number of gentlemen and ladies entirely unknown to dramatic fame, and the performance concluded with the pantomime of Obi: or, Three Finger’d Jack. Unfortunately the bill is not dated. Mr. Ireland believes this to have been a company of negro amateurs who played in New York about 1820 or 1821, but who have left no other mark upon the history of the stage; and the historians know nothing of the “theatre” they occupied. Broadway at Prince Street is one mile from the City Hall, although the stone recording this fact has long since disappeared.
A number of stage negroes will be remembered by habitual theatre-goers, and students of the drama—two very different things, by-the-way, for the man who sees plays rarely reads them, and vice versa: Zeke, in Mrs. Mowatt’s Fashion; Pete, in The Octoroon; Uncle Tom; Topsy, whom Charles Reade called “idiopathic”; a cleverly conceived character in Bronson Howard’s Moorcraft; and the delightful band of “Full Moons,” led for many seasons by “Johnny” Wild at Harrigan and Hart’s Theatre, who were so absolutely true to the life of Thompson Street and South Fifth Avenue.
In the absence of anything like a complete and satisfactory history of negro minstrelsy, it is not possible to discover its genesis, although it is the only branch of the dramatic art, if properly it can claim to be an art at all, which has had its origin in this country, while the melody it has inspired is certainly our only approach to a national music. Scattered throughout the theatrical literature of the early part of the century are to be found many different accounts of the rise and progress of the African on the stage, each author having his own particular “father of negro song.” Charles White, an old Ethiopian comedian and manager, gives the credit to Gottlieb Graupner, who appeared in Boston in 1799, basing his statement upon a copy of Russell’s Boston Gazette of the 30th of December of that year, which contains an advertisement of a performance to be given on the date of publication at the Federal Street Theatre. At the end of the second act of Oroonoko, according to Mr. White, Mr. Graupner, in character, sang “The Gay Negro Boy,” accompanying the air with the banjo; and although the house was draped in mourning for General Washington, such was the enthusiasm of the audience that the performer had to bring his little bench from the wings again and again to sing his song. W. W. Clapp, Jr., in his History of the Boston Stage, says that the news of the death of Washington was received in that city on the 24th of December, and that the theatre remained “closed for a week;” and was reopened with “A Monody,” in which “Mrs. Barrett, in the character of the Genius of America, appeared weeping over the Tomb of her Beloved Hero”; but there is no mention, then or later, of Mr. Graupner or of “The Gay Negro Boy.”
Mr. White says further that “the next popular negro song was ‘The Battle of Plattsburg,’ sung by an actor vulgarly known as ‘Pig-Pie Herbert,’ at a theatre in Albany, in 1815”; but H. D. Stone, in a volume called The Drama, published in Albany in 1873, credits “a member of the theatrical company of the name of Hop Robinson” as the singer of the song; while “Sol” Smith, an eye-witness of this performance, gives still another and very different account of it. According to Smith’s Autobiography published by Messrs. Harper and Brothers in 1868, Andrew Jackson Allen produced at the Green Street Theatre in Albany, in 1815, a drama called The Battle of Lake Champlain, the action taking place on real ships floating in real water. “In this piece,” says Smith, “Allen played the character of a negro, and sang a song of many verses (being the first negro song, I verily believe, ever heard on the American stage).” Two verses of this ballad, quoted by Smith “from memory,” will give a very fair idea of its claims to popularity:
“Backside Albany stan’ Lake Champlain—
Little pond half full of water;
Plat-te-burg dar too, close ’pon de main:
Town small; he grow big, dough, herea’ter.
“On Lake Champlain Uncle Sam set he boat,
An’ Massa Macdonough he sail ’em;
While General Macomb make Plat-te-burg he home,
Wid de army whose courage nebber fail ’em.”
Andrew Allen was a very quaint character, and he deserves a paragraph to himself. Born in the city of New York in 1776, he appeared, according to his own statement, as a page in Romeo and Juliet at the theatre in John Street in 1786, on the strength of which, as the oldest living actor, he assumed for years before his death the title of “Father of the American Stage.” He was more famous as a cook than as a player, however, and he is the subject of innumerable theatrical anecdotes, none of which are greatly to his credit. He was called “Dummy Allen” because he was very deaf and exceedingly loquacious; he adored the hero of New Orleans, whose name he appropriated when Jackson was elected President of the United States; and he was devoted to Edwin Forrest, whose costumer, dresser, and personal slave he was for many years. He invented and patented a silver leather much used in the decoration of stage dresses; and he kept a restaurant in Dean Street, Albany, and later a similar establishment near the Bowery Theatre, New York, being a very familiar figure in the streets of both cities. Mr. Phelps, in his Players of a Century (Albany, New York, 1880), describes him in his later years as tall and erect in person, with firmly compressed features, an eye like a hawk’s, nose slightly Romanesque, and hair mottled gray. He wore a fuzzy white hat, a coat of blue with bright brass buttons, and carried a knobby cane. He spoke in a sharp, decisive manner, often giving wrong answers, and invariably mistaking the drift of the person with whom he was conversing. He died in New York in 1853, and Mr. Phelps preserves the inscription upon his monument at Cypress Hills Cemetery, which was evidently his own composition: “From his cradle he was a scholar; exceedingly wise, fair-spoken, and persuading; lofty and sour to them that loved him not, but to those men that sought him sweet as summer.”
ANDREW JACKSON ALLEN.
Apropos of Allen’s association with Edwin Forrest, and of Smith’s assertion that Allen sang the first negro song ever sung on the American stage, it may not be out of place here to quote W. R. Alger’s Life of Forrest. Speaking of Forrest’s early and checkered experiences as a strolling player in the far West, Mr. Alger says that perhaps the most surprising fact connected with this portion of his career is “that he was the first actor who ever represented on the stage the Southern plantation negro with all his peculiarities of dress, gait, accent, dialect, and manner.” In 1823, at the Globe Theatre, Cincinnati, Ohio, under the management of “Sol” Smith, Forrest did play a negro in a farce by Smith, called The Tailor in Distress, singing and dancing, and winning the compliment from a veritable black in his audience that he was “nigger all ober!” Lawrence Barrett, in his Life of Forrest, quotes the bill of this evening, which shows Forrest as a modern dandy in the first play, as Cuffee, a Kentucky negro, in the second, and as Sancho Panza in the pantomime of Don Quixote, which closed the evening’s entertainment.
Forrest was by no means the only eminent American actor who hid his light behind a black mask. “Sol” Smith himself relates how he became a supernumerary at the Green Street Theatre, in Albany, in his fourteenth year, playing one of the blood-thirsty associates of Three-fingered Jack with a preternaturally smutty face, which he forgot to wash one eventful night, to the astonishment of his own family, who forced him to retire for a time to private life.
At Vauxhall Garden, in the Bowery, a little south of and nearly opposite the site of Cooper Institute, a young lad named Bernard Flaherty, born in Cork, Ireland, is said to have sung negro songs and to have danced negro dances in 1838 to help support a widowed mother, who lived to see him carried to an honored grave in 1876, mourned by the theatre-going population of the whole country. In 1840, as Barney Williams, he made a palpable hit in the character of Pat Rooney, in The Omnibus, at the Franklin Theatre, New York. He certainly played “darky parts,” such as they were, for a number of years before and after that date; and he is perhaps the one man upon the American stage with whom anything like negro minstrelsy will never be associated, not so much because of his high rank in his profession as on account of the Hibernian style of his later-day performances, and of the strong accent which always clung to him, and which suggested his native city rather than the cork he used to burn to color his face.
BARNEY WILLIAMS IN DANDY JIM.
In 1850, when Edwin Booth was seventeen, and a year after his début as Tressel at the Boston Museum, he gave an entertainment with John S. Clarke, a youth of the same age, at the court-house in Belair, Maryland. They read selections from Richelieu and The Stranger, as well as the quarrel scene from Julius Cæsar, singing during the evening (with blackened faces) a number of negro melodies, “using appropriate dialogue”—as Mrs. Asia Booth Clarke records in the memoir of her brother—“and accompanying their vocal attempts with the somewhat inharmonious banjo and bones.” Mrs. Clarke reprints the programme of this performance, and pictures the distress of the young tragedians when they discovered, on arriving in the town, that the simon-pure negro they had employed as an advance agent had in every instance posted their bills upsidedown.
Mr. Booth, during his first San Francisco engagement, appeared more than once in the character of what was then termed a “Dandy Nigger;” and he remembers that his father, “some time in the forties,” played Sam Johnson in Bone Squash at the Front Street Theatre, Baltimore, for the benefit of an old theatrical acquaintance, and played it with great applause. Lawrence Barrett’s negro parts, in the beginning of his career, were George Harris and Uncle Tom himself, in a dramatization of Mrs. Stowe’s famous tale.
RALPH KEELER.
Among the stage negroes of later years, whom the world is not accustomed to associate with that profession, Ralph Keeler is one of the most prominent. His “Three Years a Negro Minstrel,” first published in the Atlantic Monthly for July, 1869, and afterwards elaborated in his Vagabond Adventures, is very entertaining and instructive reading, and gives an excellent idea of the wandering minstrel life of that period. He began his career at Toledo, Ohio, when he was not more than eleven years of age; and under the management of the celebrated Mr. Booker, the subject of the once famous song, “Meet Johnny Booker on the Bowling-green,” he “danced ‘Juba’” in small canton-flannel knee-breeches (familiarly known as pants) cheap lace, tarnished gold tinsel, a corked face, and a woolly wig, to the great gratification of the Toledans, who for several months, with pardonable pride, hailed him as their own particular infant phenomenon. At the close of his first engagement he received what was termed a “rousing benefit,” the entire proceeds of which, as was the custom of the time, going into the pockets of his enterprising managers. During his short although distinguished professional life he was associated with such artists as “Frank” Lynch, “Mike” Mitchell, “Dave” Reed, and “Professor” Lowe, the balloonist, and he was even offered a position in E. P. Christy’s company in New York—the highest compliment which could then be paid to budding talent. Keeler, a brilliant but eccentric writer, whose Vagabond Adventures is too good, in its way, to be forgotten so soon, was a man of decided mark as a journalist. He went to Cuba in 1873 as special correspondent of the New York Tribune, and suddenly and absolutely disappeared. He is supposed to have been murdered and thrown into the sea.
P. T. BARNUM.
Lynch, when Keeler first knew him, had declined into the fat and slippered end man, too gross to dance, who ordinarily played the tambourine and the banjo, but who could, and not infrequently did, perform everything in the orchestra, from a solo on the penny trumpet to an obligato on the double-bass. He had been associated as a boy, in 1839 or 1840, under Barnum’s management, with “Jack” Diamond, who was “the best representative of Ethiopian break-downs” in his day, and, according to P. T. Barnum, the prototype of the many performers of that sort who have entertained the public ever since. Lynch asserted that he and Barnum had appeared together in black faces; and Mr. Barnum, in his Autobiography, called Mr. Lynch “an orphan vagabond” whom he had picked up on the road; neither statement seeming to be entirely true. Lynch was his own worst enemy, and, like so many of his kind, he died in poverty and obscurity, his most perfect “break-down” being his own!
It is a melancholy fact that George Holland joined Christy and Wood’s minstrels in 1857, playing female characters in a blackened face, and dividing with George Christy the honors of a short season. He returned to Wallack’s Theatre in 1858. This is a page in dramatic history which old play-goers do not like to read.
The name of John B. Gough, the temperance orator, occurs occasionally in the reminiscences of old minstrels. He certainly did appear upon the stage as a comic singer in New York and elsewhere during his early and dissipated youth, and even gave exhibitions of ventriloquism and the like in low bar-rooms for the sake of the few pennies he could gather to keep himself in liquor, as he himself describes; but there is no hint in his Autobiography of his ever having appeared in a blackened face, and his theatrical life, if it may be so called, was very short.
Joseph Jefferson, the third and present bearer of that honored name, was unquestionably the youngest actor who ever made his mark with a piece of burnt cork. The story of his first appearance is told by William Winter in his volume entitled The Jeffersons. Coming from a family of actors, the boy, as was natural, was reared amid theatrical surroundings, and when only four years of age—in 1833—he was brought upon the stage by Thomas D. Rice himself, on a benefit occasion at the Washington Theatre. Little Joe, blackened and arrayed precisely like his senior, was carried onto the stage in a bag upon the shoulders of the shambling Ethiopian, and emptied from it with the appropriate couplet,
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’d have you for to know
I’s got a little darky here to jump Jim Crow.”
Mrs. John Drew, who was present, says that the boy instantly assumed the exact attitude of Jim Crow Rice, and sang and danced in imitation of his sable companion, a perfect miniature likeness of that long, ungainly, grotesque, and exceedingly droll comedian.
JOHN B. GOUGH.
Thomas D. Rice is generally conceded to have been the founder of Ethiopian minstrelsy. Although, as has been seen, it did not originate with him, he made it popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and his image deserves an honored niche in its cathedral. The history of “Jim Crow” Rice, as he was affectionately called for many years, has been written by many scribes and in many different ways, the most complete and most truthful account, perhaps, being that of Edmon S. Conner, who described in the columns of the New York Times, June 5, 1881, what he saw and remembered of the birth of Jim Crow. Mr. Conner was a member of the company at the Columbia Street Theatre, Cincinnati, in 1828-29, when he first met Rice, “doing little negro bits” between the acts at that house, notably a sketch he had studied from life in Louisville the preceding summer. Back of the Louisville theatre was a livery-stable kept by a man named Crow. The actors could look into the stable-yard from the windows of their dressing-rooms, and were fond of watching the movements of an old and decrepit slave who was employed by the proprietor to do all sorts of odd jobs. As was the custom among the negroes, he had assumed his master’s name, and called himself Jim Crow. He was very much deformed—the right shoulder was drawn up high, and the left leg was stiff and crooked at the knee, which gave him a painful but at the same time ludicrous limp. He was in the habit of crooning a queer old tune, to which he had applied words of his own. At the end of each verse he gave a peculiar step, “rocking de heel” in the manner since so general among the many generations of his imitators; and these were the words of his refrain:
“Wheel about, turn about,
Do jis so,
An’ ebery time I wheel about
I jump Jim Crow.”
RICE AS JIM CROW.
Rice closely watched this unconscious performer, and recognized in him a character entirely new to the stage. He wrote a number of verses, quickened and slightly changed the air, made up exactly like the original, and appeared before a Louisville audience, which, as Mr. Conner says, “went mad with delight,” recalling him on the first night at least twenty times. And so Jim Crow jumped into fame and something that looks almost like immortality. “Sol” Smith says that the character was first seen in a piece by Solon Robinson, called The Rifle, and that he, Smith, “helped Rice a little in fixing the tune.”
Other cities besides Louisville claim Jim Crow. Francis Courtney Wemyss, in his Autobiography, says he was a native of Pittsburg, whose name was Jim Cuff; while Robert P. Nevin, in the Atlantic Monthly for November, 1867, declares that the original was a negro stage-driver of Cincinnati, and that Pittsburg was the scene of Rice’s first appearance in the part—a local negro there, whose professional career was confined to holding his mouth open for pennies thrown to him on the docks and the streets, furnishing the wardrobe for the initial performance.
THOMAS D. RICE.
Rice was born in the Seventh Ward of New York in 1808. He was a supernumerary at the Park Theatre, where “Sam” Cowell remembered him in Bombastes Furioso attracting so much attention by his eccentricities that Hilson and Barnes, the leading characters in the cast, made a formal complaint, and had him dismissed from the company Cowell; adding that this man, whose name did not even appear in the bills, was the only actor on the stage whom the audience seemed to notice. Cowell also describes him in Cincinnati, in 1829, as a very unassuming modest young man, who wore “a very queer hat, very much pointed down before and behind, and very much cocked on one side.” He went to England in 1836, where he met with great success, laid the foundation of a very comfortable fortune, and professionally he was the Buffalo Bill of the London of half a century ago. Mr. Ireland, speaking of his popularity in this country, says that he drew more money to the Bowery Theatre than any other performer in the same period of time.
Rice was the author of many of his own farces, notably Bone Squash and The Virginia Mummy, and he was the veritable originator of the genus known to the stage as the “dandy darky,” represented particularly in his creations of “Dandy Jim of Caroline” and “Spruce Pink.” He died in 1860, never having forfeited the respect of the public or the good-will of his fellow-men.
JAMES ROBERTS.
There were many lithographed and a few engraved portraits of Rice made during the years of his great popularity, a number of which are still preserved. In Mr. McKee’s collection he is to be seen dancing “Jim Crow” in English as well as in American prints—as “Gumbo Chaff,” on a flat-boat, and, in character, singing the songs “A Long Time Ago” and “Such a Gettin’ Up-stairs.” In the same collection, among prints of George Dimond and other half-remembered clog-dancers and singers, is a portrait of John N. Smith as “Jim Along Josey,” on a sheet of music published by Firth & Hall in 1840; and, more curious and rare than any of these, upon a musical composition, “on which copyright was secured according to law October 7, 1824,” is a picture of Mr. Roberts singing “Massa George Washington and Massa Lafayette” in a Continental uniform and with a blackened face. This would make James Roberts, a Scottish vocalist, who died in 1833, the senior of Jim Crow by a number of years.
GEORGE WASHINGTON DIXON.
George Washington Dixon, whose very name is now almost forgotten, also preceded Rice in this class of entertainment, but without Rice’s talent, and with nothing like Rice’s success. He sang “Coal Black Rose” and “The Long-tailed Blue” at the old amphitheatre in North Pearl Street, Albany, as early as 1827, and he claimed to have been the author of “Old Zip Coon,” which he sang for Allen’s benefit in Philadelphia in 1834. He became notorious as a “filibuster” at the time of the troubles in Yucatan, and he made himself particularly offensive to a large portion of the community as the editor of a scurrilous paper called the Polyanthus, published in New York. He was caned, shot at, imprisoned for libel, and finally forced to leave the city. He died in the Charity Hospital, New Orleans, in 1861.
Mr. White says that in early days negro songs were sung from the backs of horses in the sawdust ring; that Robert Farrell, “a circus actor,” was the original “Zip Coon,” and that the first colored gentleman to wear “The Long-tailed Blue” was Barney Burns, who broke his neck on a vaulting board in Cincinnati in 1838. When the historians disagree in this confusing way, who can possibly decide?
MR. DIXON AS ZIP COON.
Rice very naturally had many imitators, and Jim Crow wheeled about the country with considerable success, particularly when the original was in other lands. In the collection of Mr. Moreau is a bill of “The Theatre” (the Park), dated May 4, 1833, in which Mr. Blakeley was announced to sing the “Comic Extravaganza of Jim Crow” between the comedy of Laugh When You Can, in which he played Costly, and the melodrama of The Floating Beacon, and preceded by “Signora Adelaide Ferrero in a new ballet dance entitled ‘The Festival of Bacchus’;” the entertainments in those days being varied and long. Thomas H. Blakeley was a popular representative of what are called “second old men,” Mr. Ireland pronouncing him the best Sulky, Rowley, and Humphrey Dobbin ever seen on the New York stage: and the fact that such a man should have appeared at a leading theatre, between the acts, in plantation dress and with blackened face, shows better than anything else, perhaps, the respectable position held by the negro minstrel half a century ago.
Mr. White, so frequently quoted here, is an old minstrel who was part and parcel of what he has more than once described in the public press, and upon his authority the following account of the first band of negro minstrels is given. It was organized in the boarding-house of a Mrs. Brooks, in Catherine Street, New York, late in the winter of 1842, and it consisted of “Dan” Emmett, “Frank” Brower, “Billy” Whitlock, and “Dick” Pelham—the name of the really great negro minstrel being always shortened in this familiar way. According to Mr. White, they made their first appearance in public, for Pelham’s benefit, at the Chatham Theatre, New York, on the 17th of February, 1843; later they went to other cities, and even to Europe. This statement was verified by a fragment of autobiography of William Whitlock, given to the New York Clipper by his daughter, Mrs. Edwin Adams, at the time of Whitlock’s death. It is worth quoting here in full, although it contains no dates: “The organization of the minstrels I claim to be my own idea, and it cannot be blotted out. One day I asked Dan Emmett, who was in New York at the time, to practise the fiddle and the banjo with me at his boarding-house in Catherine Street. We went down there, and when we had practised Frank Brower called in by accident. He listened to our music, charmed to his soul[!]. I told him to join with the bones, which he did. Presently Dick Pelham came in, also by accident, and looked amazed. I asked him to procure a tambourine, and make one of the party, and he went out and got one. After practising for a while we went to the old resort of the circus crowd—the ‘Branch,’ in the Bowery—with our instruments, and in Bartlett’s billiard-room performed for the first time as the Virginia Minstrels. A programme was made out, and the first time we appeared upon the stage before an audience was for the benefit of Pelham at the Chatham Theatre. The house was crammed and jammed with our friends; and Dick, of course, put ducats in his purse.”