The Making of American Audiences

The 1850s witnessed a remarkable growth in three new urban stage entertainments that competed with traditional theater: museum theater, minstrelsy, and variety. By far the most influential on nineteeth-century American culture was minstrelsy. Northern white Americans at midcentury were fascinated with stage portrayals of blacks, as slavery grew to be the issue that overshadowed all else in the nation. Minstrelsy blended politics and popular culture and its music permeated daily life. One could go nowhere outside the South without hearing “Negro melodies.” Putnam's Monthly described Jim Crow's immediate and widespread popularity, “The school-boy whistled the melody … The ploughman checked his oxen in mid furrow, as he reached its chorus… Merchants and staid professional men … unbend their dignity to that weird and wonderful posture … it is sung in the parlor, hummed in the kitchen, and whistled in the stable.”

Whiteness and Blacks

The incredible popularity of whites performing as stereotyped black characters on stage confirmed the overwhelming whiteness of American theater before the Civil War. Blacks were barely a presence on-stage or in the audience. There was only a handful of black entertainers who played to white audiences, almost always as between-act diversions. Aside from the African Grove, a summer garden theater in New York City in the early 1820s, there is no record of any black theaters in the antebellum period.