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chapter one Celebrating Columbia, Mother of the White Republic On December 26, 1807, just as Congress passed legislation to ban the foreign slave trade, Philadelphia’s New Theatre on Chestnut Street performed The Spirit of Independence, which featured “a grand emblematical transparency of the genius of america” and a “characteristical dance” set in the “temple of liberty , according to the playbill.”1 During and immediately following the American Revolution, Philadelphia artists, balladeers, thespians, and participants in festive civic parades created performances of Columbia, the “Genius of America ,” as an anthropomorphic symbol of the aspiring nation and a guardian of the natural right to political and personal liberty. Stirred by the revolution’s democratic precepts, Philadelphians began depicting Columbia bequeathing personal liberty to supplicant slaves from her throne in the temple, seen as a metaphor for the body politic. The thespians at the New Theatre, however, stripped Columbia of her emancipatory powers in The Spirit of Independence. Their Genius of America dispensed no liberty: representations of supplicant slaves were nowhere to be seen. This enactment of Columbia glorified national unity but evaded the strife-ridden question of slavery by removing the slaves from the Temple of Liberty . Columbia’s guarantee of political liberty was divorced from her previously inclusive mandate of personal liberty for all. The theater’s depiction of Columbia was both a gauge and propellant of the nation’s political pulse; the removal of slaves from the temple mimicked postabolition shifts in the larger body politic, including a lull in antislavery activities and newly violent attempts to restrict the political participation of free blacks. This backlash was sparked by slave-trade abolition, which had been passed just as a visible growth of the free black communities in the northern cities was drawing negative attention, and amid whites’ fears that the spirit of rebellion would spread from Saint Domingue to free blacks and slaves in the United States. In this context, some white Philadelphians perceived slave-trade abolition as raising the threatening possibility of eventual emancipation and, therefore, of large numbers of free blacks flooding into the city and demanding their civic rights in the body politic. 18 Slave-Trade Abolition Columbia’s post-abolition Temple of Liberty—performed in theater, print, fine art, polemical pamphlets, comical broadsides, and street parades—promoted a vision of citizenship as a white and male prerogative. By excluding slaves from the temple, the New Theatre thespians expunged the slaves’ claim to the “inalienable right” to liberty, as well as to civic participation in the republic they had helped found. Moreover, although at the birth of the nation cultural producers had often depicted Columbia as Native American, by the time of slave-trade abolition , they were consistently fashioning her as a Greco-Roman Goddess. This whitened Columbia better represented new ideas about white women’s special role as republican mothers and also symbolized white Americans’ claim to the Indian maiden’s ancestral lands. The newly whitened Columbia appeared not only in The Spirit of Independence but also in related artwork, parades, and prose. But when artists, thespians, abolitionists, and others sought to create an emergent American idiom that celebrated the revolutionary heritage and republican nation, they reached to their British heritage to do so; the Greco-Roman goddess was closely related to Britannia, whose use as an anthropomorphic symbol of liberty originated in the Glorious Revolution, a political legacy shared by Britons and Americans alike.2 Side by side with the whitening of Columbia and the figurative removal of the slaves from her temple, white Philadelphians unleashed a newly virulent form of racial burlesque that disparaged free Northern blacks’ civic participation in the polity and their celebration of slave-trade abolition. This racial burlesque, too, borrowed from British cultural traditions, as it featured blackface theatrical characters from British stage plays to satirize American blacks. When blacks paraded in celebration of the abolition legislation, white Northerners lampooned them in broadsides depicting malapropism-prone blackface characters celebrating the abolition bill with civic activities modeled on supposedly Native American rituals. Whites’ mockery of black civic participation simultaneously derided both Native and African Americans and combined with the erasure of blacks in performances of Columbia to promote constructions of citizenship defined by whiteness, masculinity, and newly rigidified edifices of racial codification. Natural Rights, Antislavery, and Revolutionary Columbia Modern Columbia began emerging as a potent symbol of the colonists’ right to political liberty during the imperial crisis that precipitated the American Revolution . Starting from the Stamp Tax protests of 1765...

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