The antebellum period of American history is one that encompassed many great changes in a nation that was still in the early stages of its existence. Economics, religion, women’s liberation, and slavery, were but of a few hotly debated topics of America’s infantile beginnings. However, in the history of any culture, especially American culture, the role of popular entertainment in the lives of the people who lived in them, played a crucial role in the shaping of the antebellum era. The entertainment industry that we see broadcast live each day on our televisions finds its most influential beginnings in the pre-Civil War time period of American history. The antebellum industry of entertainment found itself in the middle of many issues that were strewn across the young nation: gender roles, slavery, and the emergence of the celebrity, were all issues that should be observed when considering antebellum entertainment.
The work to follow will show how the entertainment industry of antebellum America played a key role in the development of a national identity. Freak shows, traveling opera troupes, stage shows, and agricultural fairs will be discussed as they apply to the issues of gender, emerging celebrity, and slavery.
P.T. Barnum was one of the very first men to display certain cases of human oddities in venues that catered to the macabre and unusual, and by the 1830’s the display of lusus naturae, or freaks of nature, was growing more and more into a popular form of entertainment.1 His most famous feature was the display of Charles Sherwood Stratton, or General Tom Thumb. Stratton came from a family of men who served in the militia for four generations and his father, Sherwood Edwards Stratton, would never recover from knowing his son would never be any larger than a doll..2 Barnum saw something to be gained economically from the absurdly small young man. Barnum was a man of unsurpassed drive to entertain, at any cost, the people of antebellum America. General Tom Thumb was not the only man displayed for his uncanny lack of height. On Tuesday, April 14, 1847, the real American thumb, Col. J. H. Chaffin, touted as being the world’s smallest man, arrived at the town hall of Athens, GA in order to be exhibited from ten in the morning until nine at night.3 The display of people with what most would consider an odd appearance, was a form of entertainment that Barnum would also use to deceive many people into believing they were viewing the body of a woman named Joice Heth.
Joice Heth was a woman that P.T. Barnum proudly displayed to people across the nation as the 161-year-old former nurse of George Washington.4 The fact that this woman was black and said by Barnum to be the nurse of one of the nation’s founding fathers, sparked a very keen interest in the woman. One of the related contexts of Barnum’s exhibit of Heth was the fact that the meanings of “race” in antebellum America were changing.5 The exhibit of Heth was an “improvised racialist display” that shows how race was an undertone to Barnum’s exhibit.6 Barnum displayed Heth for seven months after he purchased the exhibit from R.W. Lindsay, a showman like Barnum who came from Kentucky.7 The fact that Heth’s exhibit was sold, only accentuates the fact that the antebellum entertainment industry was one with no regard for the racial implications that would turn these men a profit. In later years the entire exhibit of Heth would be revealed as an elaborate hoax by Barnum in order to make a profit. This shows even more that the fact that antebellum entertainment, especially the freak show that Barnum made so popular, was unwavering it its every attempt to expose for profit, those people whose unfortunate lives, whether by birth or by race, were used to gain fortune for others. The antebellum entertainment industry was keeping time with the stereotypical norms of America’s early history. The question of where these wonderful oddities of the freak show came from was often answered by applying blame upon the "marked child."..8
Women of the antebellum period were vying for certain rights that were only allowed to men. Women’s bodies, their right to vote, and their general role in society, was generally shunned or put down by the dominant male population. One the contributing factors of the antebellum freak shows like that of Chaffin, was in fact, the women who gave birth to them. Society today generally believes that the characteristics we live our lives with come from a random reallocation of hereditary traits.9 However, in antebellum America this was once attributed to maternal impressions, or, a pregnant woman who has allowed some sort of psychological fear to deform her unborn fetus.10 Therefore, in the most archaic sense, the members of traveling freak shows like P.T. Barnum’s, can be traced back to the very mothers who bore the oddities seen from 1841-1868 in Barnum’s American Museum in New York.11 This unfortunate lineage of mother to freak show star only supplemented Barnum’s displays. Adding to the tale of the freak on display that his or hers abnormality came from a defect in their mother’s maternal preparation, only helped in the entertainment industry of young America, while alienating women at the same time. Women were also placed under the critical microscope of antebellum entertainment in the roles they played on the stage.
The role that women were expected to play during the antebellum era of American history was one which men felt the need to govern, criticize, and in all tense and purposes, control. The woman was expected to be mother, nurse, homemaker, and whatever else the men of the society wished them to be. The same was true when it came to women in the entertainment industry.
During the antebellum period, the majority of all drama critics were, not surprisingly, men.12 Those men were influential in more than one way. As the watchdogs of society and the protectors of society’s morals, the antebellum critic was quick to become a pillar of the soap- box, which is what dramatic criticism had become at that time.13 One of the more popular roles that women played was that of a breeches dancer. Breeches are knee high socks that were popular among men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The breeches were for men what the petticoat was to women, a way for each of them to express their masculinity and femininity respectfully.14 It is important to remember that the women who wore the breeches on stage were being watched by a crowd consisting mostly of men. While for men the breeches were emblematic of masculine privilege, for women it was a way of acting out in a society where the strict gender biases were the norm.15
The ways in which the women acted in their breeches was another important point observed by the antebellum theatre critic. A woman would be considered a “natural” performer if she were to take on the role of a melodramatic character.16b But of course they were at the mercy of a dramatic critic circle that would either praise them, or deny them social acceptance depending on what they perceived the actress to be: a natural artist or a perpetrator of immoral drama. However, the critics were themselves a part of an immoral culture that would not change until the mid-nineteenth century when professional critics came to document performances.17
Just as the entertainment industry of today has its sources in the media to boost popular interest, so too did the proprietors of antebellum theaters pay their critics to give better than deserved reviews.
In Athens, GA it seems that the people of the town were able to provide sound entertainment advise before a show even got to town, perhaps by way of the show’s manager. On the eighth of August, 1832 in the Southern Banner newspaper, there is a beckoning for the “good citizens to improve their present opportunity” and come to see a Mr. Sol. Smith’s “bill of fare.”18 Athens, a growing town with a strong foothold in the history of Georgia, was still a town that was working at making itself noticed. Any opportunity that would come to town that might include some sort of outside cultural enlightenment, would be regarded as a good way to improve the town’s character and culture. However, there is good and there is bad in the world of entertainment, and in the slave-ridden states of a young America, the entertainer was a slave to the audiences he entertained.19
The celebrities of antebellum America and the slaves of antebellum America shared the trait of laborers whose bodies rather than their work were available for consumer consumption; the slave master controlled his slaves, and the media and audience controlled the celebrity.20 Be certain that it is clearly not my intention to compare the hardships of the slave to the hardships of the celebrity. However, the analogy works because much like the slave, the celebrity had to perform to the expectations of the audience, much like the slave had to for his master. And even in the abolitionist rhetoric against slavery in books like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, do we see the slave turned into a champion of his own dreams of freedom.21 1 Just as slaves were beginning to find outsider voices from the North to call for an abolitionist legislature, the entertainment of certain Northern societies was still limited to those whose skin was white.
The agricultural fairs of the antebellum North, or cattle shows, were constructed out of an agrarian tradition that was exclusively white, and male gender driven.22 Agricultural fairs and the men who ran them year after year, were ways to congratulate each other on their “noble” cattle and other outstanding farm animals.23 In the emerging industry of the antebellum era it was the goal of entertaining venues like cattle shows to present to the farmers a way to improve their conditions and become apart of an ever growing profit margins.24 It was the position of the men who ran these agricultural fairs that gave them the opportunity to perform entertaining events that embodied the farming economy and the ideals of the agrarian life.25 However, those ideals and entertaining venues rarely included women and when they did, women were once again exposed to the ridicule of the formidable male population.
When women were finally allowed to slowly move their way into ceremonies of the antebellum men, their status can only be classified as much less than equal.26 Even in the South the newspaper advertisements for agricultural fairs and societies only asked for men. In the Athens, GA newspaper the Southern Banner, a meeting was called to elect the officials of a new agricultural society and in the announcement of the newly elected officials, not one was female.27 Women would eventually break down the barriers that agricultural fairs and societies put on them and they too would be allowed to take part in the festivities. They would sell their sewn goods even though for the men of the antebellum North, this represented proof that women were not tending to their household duties and hindering the independent yeomanry.28 The good that must be taken from this is that the women of antebellum America, beginning their fight for equality, finally took a piece of that lacking equality when they moved their way into the entertaining societies of agricultural fairs.
The antebellum society of America was one that would be by far one of the most influential time periods to come from the newly founded nation. The ideals, goals, and dreams were beginning to lie upon the shoulders of an ever- growing population that was struggling with the roles of gender, race, and entertainment values. In a society where the people were at times unwilling to conform to any new traditions or ideas, it was in the job of the performer to keep the ball rolling toward a more eclectic and artistic country. A good example would be in the traveling opera troupes that although resided mainly in the North, would at times venture to the south.
Jane Shirreff and John Wilson were apart of a traveling opera troupe that made a stop in Savannah, GA in the winter of 1840 in order to perform a series of six concerts.29 Having played a show that neither drew a very large crowd or very good reviews, Shirreff and Wilson decided that they would perform the “popular street ballads” that the Savannah crowds had come to expect.30 It was in this act of conforming to what the audience wanted that Shirreff and Wilson not only gave their audience what they came to expect, but so too did they show how their celebrity had made them slaves to the audience.
The entertainment industry of today differs very slightly in the role that it plays now as compared to the role it played in the antebellum era. Men that embody the trickery and deceit of P.T. Barnum and his freak shows still loom large in the entertainment industry, and even today shows like Ripley’s Believe It or Not cater to that dark and gloomy world of Barnum’s oddities on display. Women have come to a point in the entertainment industry that must always praise the courage of those women who fought for their liberation in the antebellum age and one thing continues to remain a constant: the entertainment industry of the modern United States is one that has been evolving ever faster since the years before our own “theatre” of self-destruction would play out in the Civil War. It continues on today though the balance of equality still remains slightly heavier to one side.
1Reiss, Benjamin. “P.T. Barnum, Joice Heth and Antebellum Spectacles of Race.” American Quarterly Vol.51, #1, March 1999, p.82.
2Desmond, Alice Curtis. Barnum Presents General Tom Thumb. New York: Macmillan, 1954, p.5.
3“The Real American Thumb.” Southern Banner, 14 April 1846, p.3, col.3.
4Reiss, p.78
5Reiss, p.79
6Reiss, p.79
7Reiss, p.80
8Wilson, Philip K. “Eighteenth-Century “Monsters” and Nineteenth-Century “Freaks”: Reading the Maternally Marked Child.” Literature and Medicine Vol.21, #1, 2002, p.1.
9Wilson, p.1
10Wilson, p.1
11Wilson, p.15
12Mullenix, Elizabeth Reitz. Wearing the Breeches: Gender on the Antebellum Stage. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000, p.22.
13Mullenix, p.22
14Mullenix, p.20
15Mullenix, p.20
16Mullenix, p.25
17Mullenix, p.26
18“The Theatre.” Southern Banner, 31 August 1832, p.3, col.1.
19Newbury, Michael. “Eaten Alive: Slavery and Celebrity in Antebellum America.” ELH Vol.21, #1, 1994, p.160.
20Newbury, p.161.
21Newbury, p.162.
22Kelly, Catherine E. “The Consummation of Rural Prosperity and Happiness”: New England Agricultural Fairs and the Construction of Class and Gender, 1810-1860.” American Quarterly Vol.49, #3, 1997, p.574.
23Kelly, p.574
24Kelly, p.577
25Kelly, p.579
26Kelly, p.581
27“Agricultural Meeting.” Southern Banner, 29 July 1842, p.2, col.4.
28Kelly, 590.
29Preston, Katherine K. Opera on the Road: Traveling Opera Troupes in the United States, 1825-1860. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993, p.85.
30Preston, p.85.