by John Beckman
66. White acknowledges that these fancy-dress balls: The following quotations are from Shane White, Stories of Freedom in Black New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 49, 191–98.
67. “at a signal”: Asbury, The French Quarter, 243.
68. “abhor & detest the Sabbath-day”: Mark Twain, Mark Twain–Howells Letters: The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William D. Howells, 1872–1910 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 520.
69. “frightful triumph of body over mind”: George Washington Cable, “The Dance in Place Congo,” The Century 31, no. 51 (February 1886): 525.
70. “what havoc”: Ibid., 522.
71. “Now for the frantic leaps!”: Ibid., 525.
72. “social death”: For a brilliant response to recent historical trends that argue for “social death” in slavery, see Vince Brown, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” American Historical Review 114, no. 5 (December 2009): 1231–49. See also Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
73. “all this Congo Square business”: Cable, “Dance in Place Congo,” 527.
74. “No wonder the police stopped it”: Ibid., 525.
4 A CALIFORNIA EDUCATION
1. “quite dejected and sulky”: J. D. Borthwick, Three Years in California (London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1857), 10.
2. “grumbled at everything”: Ibid., 150.
3. were often ungoverned, ungodly fun: Susan Lee Johnson, whose study of gold rush “leisure” includes church attendance, saloons, gambling, dancing, and popular blood sports like bull and bear baiting, makes the strong claim that “like domestic and personal service work, leisure was one of the key locations in which gendered and racialized meanings got made, unmade, and remade … When immigrant men laid down their picks and shovels, they found that the oppositions which created both social order and social relations—that is, society—back home were all out of kilter in California.” Anglo-American men, in particular, used to enjoying positions of social domination, experienced what Johnson calls a “crisis of representation.” Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 144.
4. “The streets were full of people”: Bayard Taylor, El Dorado, or Adventures in the Path of Empire (1850; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 43.
5. “Northern barbarians”: Ibid., 30.
6. “for action”: This and subsequent quotations come from ibid., 44–46.
7. “beggarly sum”: Ibid., 62.
8. “disposition to maintain,” “In the absence of all law,” “thousands of ignorant adventurers”: Ibid., 77. Taylor also exposes self-government’s dark side. He watches in Stockton as two defenseless blacks were apprehended, tried, accused, and sentenced for allegedly assaulting a Chilean woman in her tent—all in the course of one day. Their respective sentences of fifty and twenty lashes were administered on the spot: “There was little of that order and respect shown which should accompany even the administration of impromptu law; the bystanders jeered, laughed, and accompanied every blow with coarse and unfeeling remarks” (ibid.).
9. “They struggled to gain freedom”: Sucheng Chan, “A People of Exceptional Character: Ethnic Diversity, Nativism, and Racism in the California Gold Rush,” in Rooted in Barbarous Soil: People, Culture, and Community in Gold Rush California, ed. Kevin Starr and Richard J. Orsi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 69. For a penetrating study of African-American life in the diggings, see Rudolph M. Lapp, Blacks in Gold Rush California (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977).
10. “ideological overtones”: W. J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 151. See pp. 149–83 for vivid examples of Americans’ fidelity to alcohol—as a test of character, mark of freedom, and lubricant to community—in the early years of the republic.
11. American Temperance Society (ATS): Thomas R. Pegram, Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998), 3–42.
12. Not content with just reforming hard drinkers: Ian R. Tyrrell, Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition, 1800–1860 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), 77, 87, 159–60.
13. “the natural bad passions of men”: Borthwick, Three Years in California, 67.
14. “sufficiency of schools and churches”: Quotations in this and the following paragraph are from ibid., 68–69.
15. the “disease” of “drunkenness”: This and other quotations in this paragraph are from ibid., 71.
16. “a farewell whiff of smoke”: This and other quotations in this paragraph and the two following paragraphs are from ibid., 318–22.
17. Such happenings were common: Gary F. Kurutz, “Popular Culture on the Golden Shore,” in Rooted in Barbarous Soil, 294–97.
18. “cotillions upon the green prairie”: Paula Mitchell Marks, Precious Dust: The Saga of the Western Gold Rushes (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 77.
19. “generous, hospitable, intelligent”: Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe, The Shirley Letters from California Mines, 1851–52 (San Francisco: Thomas C. Russell, 1922), 165.
20. “the ‘ladies,’ after their fatigues”: Borthwick, Three Years in California, 321.
21. “a very good move indeed”: Alfred Doten, The Journals of Alfred Doten, ed. Walter Van Tilburg Clark, vol. 1, 1849–1903 (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1973), 20.
22. “slaves of King Alcohol”: Ibid., 26.
23. “several of the Americans drunk”: Ibid., 37.
24. “the most civil country”: Ibid., 52.
25. serious gold rush fun: A small sample indicates Doten’s daily frolics: “Harry sang her some of his naughty songs—We had the tallest kind of dancing and when we started for home again about one o’clock we were all more or less thick tongued and top heavy” (ibid., 144). “Ranch routine during the days, partying at night—Many snakes killed in the hayfields” (15). “The house was crowded—dancing, singing, and kicking up was the order of the night … waltzes and polkas … a most glorious jollification and we kept it up till daylight” (153). “We danced and kicked up to hearts’ content till just before daybreak” (159). “We marched up and down the road and went through all the military maneuvers—We had a glorious time and kept it up till about two o’clock” (164). “Tom Locke, John Fernandez, Mike and a lot more of the boys came in and we had a most joyful jollification—We had plenty of the ‘oh be joyful’ and were very joyful and jolly—we had music and dancing and lots of songs” (165).
26. “drinking and gambling”: Ibid., 97.
27. “howling drunk”: Ibid., 98, 117.
28. “a hell of a spree”: Ibid., 125.
29. He “astonished” crowds: Ibid., 128–30.
30. “This is one of the best ‘benders’”: Ibid., 141.
31. “jollification”: Ibid., 137, 192, 779.
32. “plum cake”: Ibid., 198.
33. “Mexicans are robbing and killing the Chinese”: Ibid., 141.
34. “thieving Mexicans”: Ibid., 107.
35. “it perfectly thunder beneath”: Quotations in this and the next paragraph are from ibid., 168.
36. “little Spanish village”: Ibid., 177.
37. “As usual in California”: This and other quotations in this paragraph from ibid., 190.
38. “as fast as [they] could load”: Quotations in this and the next paragraph are from ibid., 227–32.
39. “far famed,” “No use for my pencil”: Ibid., 716.
40. “considerable drunks & some fights”: Ibid., 723.
41. “got on a big spree”: Ibid., 727.
42. “skylarking”: Ibid., 762.
43. “Evening stage brought a noted correspondent”: Ibid., 763.
44. “Every feature of the spectacle”: Mark Twain, Roughing It (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 156; see also 1–284. Further, s
ee Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life (New York: The Free Press, 2005), 110–30, and Paul Fatout, Mark Twain in Virginia City (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964), 3–33.
45. “Oh, don’t he buck”: Twain, Roughing It, 161.
46. “Here was romance”: Ibid., 67.
47. “It was dark as pitch”: Ibid., 145.
48. “Unassailable certainty”: Ibid., 274.
49. “could take [his] pen and murder”: Ibid., 277.
50. Clemens’s hoax of a “petrified man”: Mark Twain, “Petrified Man,” in Early Tales & Sketches, ed. Edgar Marquess Branch and Robert H. Hirst, vol. 1, 1851–1863 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 159.
51. But a medical journal: Kelly Driscoll, “The Fluid Identity of ‘Petrified Man,’ ” American Literary Realism 41, no. 3 (Spring 2009): 214–31.
52. “Unreliable”: Mark Twain, Mark Twain of the Enterprise: Newspaper Articles & Other Documents, 1862–1864, ed. Henry Nash Smith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 59.
53. “April Fool & Co.”: Doten, Journals, 146.
54. “that most incorrigible of jokers”: Dan De Quille [William Wright], The History of the Big Bonanza: An Authentic Account of the Discovery, History, and Working of the World Renowned Comstock Silver Lode of Nevada (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1877), 357.
55. “12 pound nugget”: William P. Bennett, The First Baby in Camp: A Full Account of the Scenes and Adventures During the Pioneer Days of ’49 (Salt Lake City: Rancher Publishing Company, 1893), 6–7.
56. One famous prank: Twain, Roughing It, 221–27, 631–32n. For an earlier account of the landslide case, see also Mark Twain, “A Rich Decision,” in Early Tales & Sketches, vol. 1, 280–81, 481–82n.
57. “to provoke cascades of inextinguishable merriment”: Lucius Beebe, Comstock Commotion: The Story of the Territorial Enterprise (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1954), 40, 60.
58. At a time when eastern culture: Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), especially 227–56.
59. a rash of murders: Mark Twain and Dan De Quille took a room in a house shared by the family of Tom Fitch, editor of their rival Union, and Twain managed to offend Fitch’s hospitable wife, Anna, with the rumor that De Quille had hanged her cat. (He hadn’t.) Making matters worse, Fitch had become the object of the Enterprise’s vicious ridicule for turning against the Union cause, a war of words that peaked, on September 27, in a Colt .44 duel between the two editors in chief. It was the season’s best-attended social outing—numbering “gamblers, pimps, touts, bartenders, teamsters, newspaper reporters, con men, shills, spielers, gold-brick artists, and snake-oil venders” among the witnesses—and though it spared Fitch’s life, it cost him a kneecap. Beebe, Comstock Commotion, 63–65.
60. “great pine forest”: Mark Twain, “A Bloody Massacre near Carson,” in Early Tales & Sketches, vol. 1, 324–26.
61. “Presently his eyes spread wide open”: Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Sketches New and Old (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1882), 296.
62. “as baseless as the fabric of a dream”: Richard G. Lillard, “Contemporary Reaction to ‘The Empire City Massacre,’ ” American Literature 16, no. 3 (November 1944): 198–203.
63. “fun,” “gold as large as peas”: These quotes and the story of Tom and Pike are in De Quille, History of the Big Bonanza, 542–53.
64. “Three Saints”: Nigey Lennon, The Sagebrush Bohemian: Mark Twain in California; Samuel Clemens’s Turbulent Years on the Barbary Coast (New York: Paragon House, 1993), 30.
65. “very wild”: Artemus Ward [Charles Farrar Browne], (His Travels) Among the Mormons, in The Complete Works of Charles Farrar Browne (London: Chatto and Windus, 1889), 204.
66. “ ‘opinions and reflections’ ”: Twain, Mark Twain of the Enterprise, 122–25.
67. “composed of two desperadoes”: Twain, Roughing It, 321.
68. “infinitely varied and copious”: Ibid., 309.
69. “the wildest mob”: The story is told ibid., 293–98. See Lennon, Sagebrush Bohemian, 31–35.
70. “All Politeness”: Anthony, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, vol. 1 (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2001), 42; emphasis added. Shaftesbury countered Hobbesian egotism with the idea that citizens don’t strive just for their personal happiness, but also for their neighbors’ happiness, and have what he called sensus communis. He argued that a sense for the “common good” is an instinct every bit as natural as hunger.
5 SELLING IT BACK TO THE PEOPLE
1. “Plenty, unless gorged to dyspepsia”: Samuel S. Cox, Why We Laugh (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1876), 38.
2. “go farther, wait longer”: P. T. Barnum, The Autobiography of P. T. Barnum, Clerk, Merchant, Editor, and Showman With His Rules for Business and Making a Fortune, 2nd ed. (London: Ward and Lock, 1855), 3.
3. “those dangerous things”: Ibid.
4. “there could be found”: Ibid., 11.
5. “organ of acquisitiveness”: Ibid., 5.
6. “cheerful Christianity”: Philip B. Kunhardt Jr. et al., P. T. Barnum: America’s Greatest Showman (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 16.
7. “eternal hostility”: P. T. Barnum and James W. Cook, The Colossal P. T. Barnum Reader: Nothing Else Like It in the Universe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 113.
8. “totally blind”: Barnum, Autobiography, 49.
9. “curiously constructed automaton”: Ibid., 54.
10. “began to take great delight”: Quoted in Kunhardt et al., P. T. Barnum, 22.
11. “so perfectly ludicrous”: Barnum, Autobiography, 253.
12. “as usual”: P. T. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, or Forty Years’ Recollections of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself (Hartford, CT: J. B. Burr & Company, 1869), 81–82.
13. “Jollity and gloom”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, “The May-Pole of Merry Mount,” in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales, ed. James McIntosh (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 89.
14. “to arrest public attention”: Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, 67.
15. “Mr. Griffin, the proprietor of this curious animal”: Notice in New York Herald, August 14, 1842, quoted in James W. Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 101.
16. “a new way of thinking”: Cook, Arts of Deception, 29.
17. “Barnumization”: Bluford Adams, E Pluribus Barnum: The Great Showman & the Meaning of U.S. Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 195.
18. Even Mark Twain: See, for example, Mark Twain, “Barnum’s First Speech in Congress,” in Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches, ed. Tom Quirk (New York: Penguin, 1994), 24–27. Also, his protagonist Hank Morgan, a monster of humbugs, is a glorious send-up of this original Connecticut Yankee. Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
19. “business” as a breeding ground: P. T. Barnum, The Humbugs of the World: An Account of Humbugs, Delusions, Impositions, Quackeries, Deceits and Deceivers Generally, in All Ages (New York: Carleton, 1866), 13.
20. “greatest trick of all”: Cook, Arts of Deception, 118.
21. “be systematic”: P. T. Barnum, Art of Money Getting, or, Golden Rules for Making Money (1880; Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, 1999), 63, 83.
22. “Weel about and turn about and do jis so”: T. D. Rice, “The Original Jim Crow,” in W. T. Lhamon Jr., Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 96.
23. “that fascinating imaginary space”: Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 51.
24. “Hottentot Venus”: For an exceptional account, see Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story an
d a Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
25. “improvised” “ecstatic,” “demanded planned variety,” “stress[ed] jolliness”: Hans Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 71.
26. “de holy state of hemlock”: Rice, “Original Jim Crow,” 250.
27. “he should like to play Otello”: Ibid., 293.
28. “Sambos”: Lhamon, Jump Jim Crow, 36.
29. “overlapping publics”: Ibid., 5.
30. “quick-quipping runaway,” “pestered those who would enter”: Ibid., 16.
31. “inspired the laughter of cruelty”: Gary D. Engle, This Grotesque Essence: Plays from the American Minstrel Stage (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), xxvii.
32. “genuine negro”: Thomas Low Nichols, quoted in Lott, Love and Theft, 112–13.
33. “Single shuffle, double shuffle”: Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1842), 107.
34. Lane is believed to have been: Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise, 71.
35. He had learned to dance: Eileen Southern, The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 121.
36. “to give correct Imitation Dances”: Quoted in Lott, Love and Theft, 115. See also James W. Cook, “Dancing Across the Color Line,” Common-Place 4, no. 1 (October 2003), section IV; http://www.common-place.org/vol-04/no-01/cook/cook-4.shtml.
37. “rare boys”: Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise, 129.
38. “the fun of these three nigger minstrels”: English actor H. P. Grattan quoted ibid., 145.
39. This frantic endeavor to “reproduce” fun: Ibid., 120.
40. starting a trend that in decades to come: Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 31.
41. “I have always strictly confined myself”: Emmett’s introduction quoted in Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise, 232.
42. urban riots: At least fifty-three riots erupted in 1835 alone; Daniel Walker Howe notes that there probably were three times that many. What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 430–39. See also Feldberg, The Turbulent Era, 84–119.