A Renegade History of the United States

by Thaddeus Russell

  Blackface minstrelsy was widely popular but not “respectable.” It was criticized on moral grounds not because it was seen as racist but because it was seen as wild, erotic, and free. There was no greater evidence of the freedoms experienced in blackface than the attacks on it by the keepers of American morality. Newspapers catering to a genteel readership called minstrels “demons of disorder” who “made night hideous.” In one of its many outraged reviews, the Spirit of the Times declared,

  But we scarcely believe a respectable audience would not patronize or encourage Negro buffo songs here. We hope they would not. It is a duty society owes to itself to discountenance everything which tends to vitiate public taste.

  The New York Mirror called on audiences to give blackface performers “all the success they deserve—which is a sound and glorious pelting from the stage.” A group of moral reformers in New York City was so alarmed by the first performed impersonations of slaves that in 1832 it purchased the theater that staged them and converted it to an evangelical chapel. White America was at war with itself. “The two most popular characters in the world at the present time,” the Boston Post reported in 1838, “are Victoria,” the queen who symbolized bourgeois repression, “and Jim Crow.”

  But the creator of Jim Crow, T. D. Rice, claimed to know in his most famous song what was really in the hearts of the Victorians:

  I’m so glad dat I’m a niggar,

  An don’t you wish you was too

  For den you’d gain popularity

  By jumping Jim Crow.

  Now my brother niggars,

  I do not think it right,

  Dat you should laugh at dem

  Who happen to be white.

  Kase it dar misfortune,

  And dey’d spend ebery dollar,

  If dey only could be

  Gentlemen ob colour.

  It almost break my heart,

  To see dem envy me.

  The literary critic W. T. Lhamon Jr., who has authored several pathbreaking books on race in American culture, grants that depictions of blacks in minstrel songs were stereotypes but reminds us that there is no such thing as an “accurate” or “authentic” portrayal of black culture, either. More important, Lhamon argues that slave culture represented pleasure and freedom to blackface performers and fans, and danger to good citizens. In early minstrel shows, whites “were identifying with blacks as representations of all that the YMCAs [which taught industrial discipline to urban youth] and evangelical organizers were working to suppress.” The renegades who rubbed burnt cork onto their faces in the antebellum period “unmistakably expressed fondness for black wit and gestures.”

  Dan Emmett and the first generation of blackface minstrel performers were pioneers of what is now a global phenomenon. Blues, jazz, and rhythm and blues became more popular among whites than among African Americans, and there are now more fans of what is often called “the music of freedom” in Europe and Japan than in the United States. The same is true of hip-hop, whose white and non-American listeners outnumber the entire African American population. Radio stations from Orange County to Stockholm, Johannesburg, and Jakarta fill their playlists with sounds from the Bronx, Atlanta, and Compton. But to find the original source of this envy, we must return first to the lives of free white people in early America, and then to the plantation.

  INFINITE LABOR

  Dan Emmett knew well what it meant to be a free American. Born in 1815 in Ohio—a state where slavery was banned—he came of age during a time when the meaning of freedom was being hammered out. As Emmett learned, American freedom was curiously burdensome and restrictive. His father and mother knew this before he was born. Sometime in the early eighteen hundreds, they trekked to the flat plain between the Ohio River and Lake Erie and settled in Mount Vernon, which was then a few small buildings in a forest of tall trees. Like other Americans who headed west in search of the physical foundation of American freedom—land—Abraham and Sarah Emmett found that to be free was to work hard and constantly. Abraham felled trees and then shaped them into logs, from which he built their home by hand. To make a living, he pounded hot metal into tools and weapons as the town’s only blacksmith, while Sarah undoubtedly worked even harder as the housekeeper and mother of four children.

  Life in frontier towns like Mount Vernon was nearly constant toil. From colonial times through the nineteenth century, observers frequently reported on the enormity of the workload for American settlers. A Virginia official in the 1620s reported back to England that for settlers in the colony, “[t]he labor is infynite.” John Winthrop Jr., the son of the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, detailed the tasks necessary to make a civilization in the wilderness. “Plantations in their beginnings have [more than] worke [e]nough, and find difficulties sufficient to settle a comfortable way of subsistence, thee beinge buildings, fencings, clearinge, and breakinge up of ground, lands to be attended, orchards to be planted, highways and bridges and fortifications to be made, and all thinges to doe, as in the beginning of the world.” The prospect of owning land whipped many American colonists to outwork everyone else on the planet.

  Governor William Bradford of the Plymouth Colony recalled that once private land ownership was made available to his settlers, “The women now went willingly into the field and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.” Partly out of necessity, partly for independence, and partly from their devotion to the Protestant work ethic, the first American colonists eliminated many forms of leisure enjoyed by those who remained in England, including various folk dances, singing festivals, communal feasts and games, and scores of holidays. Work only grew more intense in the eighteenth century, when patterns of labor moved from seasonal to continuous schedules in every part of the colonial economy. By the start of the nineteenth century, most households had added manufacturing to their grueling agricultural production.

  The English writer Frances Trollope, who lived for several years on the Ohio frontier in the 1820s and 1830s, wrote with astonishment about the life of women who held Sarah Emmett’s position. In addition to cooking and cleaning and minding the children, they spun and wove all the clothes for the family, manufactured all the soap and candles, and made butter to use and to sell for sundries in town. “The life she leads,” Trollope wrote, “is one of hardship, privation, and labour.” Whether a farm produced only enough for subsistence, produced a surplus for sale, or both, those who lived on it typically spent nearly every waking hour at work. Unlike slaves, these “freeholders” were entirely responsible for their livelihood, and so, even when all the work was done, their thoughts remained occupied by it. Diaries of farmers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are filled with detailed records of labor done and labor in need of doing, as well as motivational sayings on the virtues of diligence, frugality, and discipline.

  Of course, hard work was necessary for a decent life in a preindustrial land, but in American culture it was celebrated as a good thing in itself. No people worked harder, scorned leisure more fervently, or expressed more pride in these traits than did the free Americans of the new republic. “There is, probably, no people on earth with whom business constitutes pleasure, and industry amusement, in an equal degree with the inhabitants of the United States of America,” said the Viennese immigrant and author Francis Grund, who, like many European visitors to the early-nineteenth-century United States, commented with pity on what was often called the American “disease of work.” Grund noted that, for Americans, work was “the principal source of their happiness” and they were “absolutely wretched without it.”

  From the time of the Puritan settlers through Dan Emmett’s lifetime, children’s books, school primers, newspaper editorials, poems, pamphlets, sermons, and political speeches told Americans that to work was to be godly and to be idle was to be wretched. Cotton Mather instructed parents to keep their children in �
�continual Employment” so as to “deliver them from the Temptations of Idleness,” and Thomas Shepard spoke for all Puritans when he told his son to “abhor … one hour of idleness as you would be ashamed of one hour of drunkenness.” In the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin adapted the Puritan work ethic to the age of capitalism with his enormously popular aphorisms that counseled Americans to work all hours of the day in order to achieve dignity and respect. “It is the working man who is the happy man,” he wrote in Poor Richard’s Almanack. “It is the idle man who is the miserable man.” With the beginning of mass industrial production in the nineteenth century, pride in work and shame in leisure became the defining characteristics of good citizens of the young nation.

  A textbook in Dan Emmett’s school might have been A New Picture-Book, a standard primer in the 1830s, whose first words are this poem:

  How doth the little busy bee

  Improve each shining hour;

  And gather honey all the day,

  From every opening flower;

  In works of labor or of skill,

  I would be busy too;

  For Satan finds some mischief still,

  For idle hands to do.

  His Sunday school book might have been Little Verses for Good Children, which includes a similar injunction:

  Work with your might,

  ’Tis God’s command:

  Let work and prayer

  Go hand in hand.

  All honest labor

  God will bless;

  Let me not live

  In idleness.

  American schools in the early nineteenth century taught children to avoid the “frivolities” of play and to make themselves “useful” through the exercise of self-denial. “Love not the world, nor the things that are in the world,” was one lesson in The United States Spelling Book, a commonly used textbook in early-nineteenth-century schools. “For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eye; is not of him that made us; but is of the world.” And Dan Emmett almost certainly read Noah Webster’s American Spelling Book, the best-selling primer of the nineteenth century, which instructed its young readers that “[a] wise child loves to learn his books, but the fool would choose to play with toys.”

  THE SECRET

  White minstrels were not the only people who knew the secret of slavery. Junius Quattlebaum knew it, too. In 1937 a young white man named Henry Grant brought a tape recorder to Quattlebaum’s little wooden shack on a dirt patch near a brick factory on the outskirts of Columbia, South Carolina. Grant was one of hundreds of writers hired by the Federal Writers’ Project, an agency of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal government, to record the memories of former slaves. “Well, sir, you want to talk to me ’bout them good old days back yonder in slavery time, does you?” Quattlebaum asked. “I call them good old days, ’cause I has never had as much since.” Quattlebaum was typical of the 2,300 ex-slaves who were interviewed. Many did tell of whippings, sadistic overseers, loved ones being sold away, and of wishing to be free. But we must come to terms with the fact that a majority of ex-slaves who offered an evaluation of slavery—field hands and house slaves, men and women—had a positive view of the institution, and many unabashedly wished to return to their slave days.

  Racists point to such statements as evidence of black inferiority. Our textbooks ignore them. But we can look squarely at the longing for slavery and turn racism on its head.

  Junius Quattlebaum expressed the experience of many when he recalled, “I has worked harder since de war betwixt de North and de South than I ever worked under my marster and missus.” The plantation was certainly no paradise, but to many people who had experienced both slavery and freedom, the former was clearly preferable. “All de slaves worked pretty hard sometimes but never too hard,” said Quattlebaum. “They worked wid light and happy heart ’cause they knowed dat marster would take good care of them; give them a plenty of good vittles, warm clothes, and warm houses to sleep in, when de cold weather come.” Quattlebaum concluded his comparison of slavery with freedom in virtually the same language used by the minstrels. “Easy livin’ is ’bout half of life to white folks but it is all of life to most niggers,” he said. “It sho’ is.”

  Mary Frances Brown, who was born a slave in Marlboro County, South Carolina, insisted, “Dey were happy time back dere.” As for the food on the plantation, “I ain’t nebber see de lak no time” in freedom. “Dem were de times to lib.” Brown sang a song for her interviewer that she said was popular among ex-slaves. It is remarkably similar to dozens of minstrel songs:

  We got a home ober dere,

  Come an’ let us go,

  Come an’ let us go,

  Where pleasure neber die

  Oh! Let us go where pleasure neber die,

  Neber die,

  Come and let us go,

  Where pleasure neber die, neber die.

  Again and again, the ex-slaves told of regret when freedom came. “Course, after the war, nothing was right no more,” remembered William Curtis, who had been a slave in what is now Oklahoma. “Yes, we was free, but we didn’t know what to do. We didn’t want to leave our old Master and our old home.” Most of the interviewees feared and hated the Union troops who freed them, and many, like Gabe Emanuel of Mississippi, sabotaged their liberators. “Dey’d eat up all de marster’s vit’als an’ drink up all his good likker,” Emanuel remembered. “One time us sot fire to a bridge de Yankees had to cross to git to de plantation. Dey had to camp on de other side, ’cause dey was too lazy to put out de fire. Dat’s ju’ lak I figgered it … Lawdy! I sho’ was happy when I was a slave.”

  Henri Necaise, who was a slave in Pass Christian, Mississippi, until his early thirties, expressed the preference of most of the interviewees. “I was better off when I was a slave dan I is now, ’cause I had ever’thing furnished me den,” he said. “Now I got to do it all myse’f.” Many of the ex-slaves who remembered being sold or whipped still wished to return to the “good old days.” As Dave Harper of Danville, Missouri, bluntly put it, “I was sold for $715. When de freedom come, I said, ‘Give me $715 and I’ll go back.’” Likewise, Clara Young of Alabama, who was in her twenties when she was emancipated, remembered being sold and whipped but when asked what she thought about slavery declared, “Well, leetle Miss, I tell you, I wish it was back. Us was a lot better off in dem days dan we is now. If dem Yankees had lef’ us ’lone we’d been a lot happier.” Many of the interviewees were aware that their feelings and recollections contradicted the dominant view of slavery in the twentieth century. James Lucas, who was owned by Jefferson Davis, remarked, “I guess slav’ry was wrong, but I ’members us had some mighty good times … One thing I does know is dat a heap of slaves was worse off after de War … Now dey is got to work or die. In dem days you worked an’ rested an’ knowed you’d be fed. In de middle of de day us rested an’ waited for de horn to blow to go back to de fiel’.”

  Many of the interviewees remembered the following as the most popular song among slaves during the Civil War:

  Jeff Davis is President

  Abe Lincoln is a fool

  Come here, see Jeff ride the gray horse

  And Abe Lincoln the mule.

  Contrary to what popular images of emancipation tell us, when given the opportunity to leave the plantation, most slaves stayed. Lina Hunter’s memory of the moment of freedom was similar to that of most of the interviewees. After the Yankees came, “Freedom didn’t make so many changes on our place right at fust, ’cause most of de slaves stayed right on dar, and things went on jus’ lak dey had ’fore dere was any war,” she recalled. “Marse Jack had done told ’em dey was free, but dat dem what wanted to stay would be tuk keer of same as ’fore de war. Dere warn’t many what left neither, ’cause Marse Jack had been so good to evvy one of ’em dey didn’t want to go ’way.” The quantitative historian Paul D. Escott tabulated all of the ex-slave interviews and found that 9.6 percent stayed with their master after freedom but w
ere uncertain as to how long, 18.8 percent stayed for one to twelve months, 14.9 percent stayed for one to five years, and 22.1 percent stayed for more than five years. By contrast, only 9 percent left immediately after emancipation.

  What these statistics and the wistful recollections of hundreds of ex-slaves point to is that slaves were able to create the culture so envied by whites not despite slavery, but because of it. In fact, slaves held enormous advantages over those considered free—especially over those who wished to be good American citizens—and they participated in a broader range of activities and self-expression than any other group in early America.

  LIFE OVER WORK

  When Dan Emmett moved to Cincinnati, he might have crossed paths with a young seminary student and abolitionist named Theodore Dwight Weld. Like most abolitionists, Weld believed, contrary to what we now assume, that one of slavery’s evils was its promotion of sloth. He argued that because slavery denied the incentive to work, it produced not only “ignorance and stupidity” but also “the petty thefts of the slaves, the necessity of constant watching,” and, rather than the willful exertion of free labor, “reluctant service.”

  Opponents of slavery disagreed over many issues—whether it should be abolished immediately or gradually, whether slavery was a moral or political problem, whether blacks were naturally inferior—but all agreed that “the peculiar institution” made people less industrious. The Republican Party members who drove the North to war believed that the laziness of slaves and masters threatened the hard-working culture of the free states. “Free labor languishes and becomes degrading when put in competition with slave labor,” said a leading member of the party in 1860, “and idleness, poverty, and vice, among large classes of non-slaveholders take the place of industry and thrift and virtue.” Party leaders produced reams of statistics to support their view that slave labor was less productive than free labor and publicized observations on the work habits of the slaves made by northern visitors to the South.