Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787-1861: Lifting the Veil of Black (review)

Heather Nathans' book tracks sentimental portrayals of African and slave characters on the American stage in 1787-61, which she argues challenged Thomas Jefferson's sense that a 'veil of black' precluded interracial sympathy. Jefferson's 'veil' differentiated black people from other Americans, and by implication prevented white people from empathising with them. Nathans finds a range of theatrical productions which showed black characters feeling, suffering, and arguing, plays which positively encouraged audiences to make a sympathetic identification with black speakers. This in an era in which recent scholarship has more often brought out ambivalent and disturbing aspects of racial representation on the stage, particularly in blackface minstrelsy. In another recent CUP book, Hazel Waters' Racism on the Victorian Stage (2007), the theatre is more damaging than progressive.

Nathans shows that from the late eighteenth century onwards, the American theatre generated a substantial range of black characterization. Although very little of it was explicitly related to the abolition or colonization movements, discussions of race and slavery in the wider culture very quickly found expression and contention in the theatre. Moreover, the stage helped provide some of the language for these discussions: the famous example is the derivation of 'Jim Crow' from a dance act, but in the 1780s Isaac Bickerstaffe's play The Padlock also engendered a slang term for a black person—Mungo.

The book traces important themes in these representations, particularly visions of African identity (including some of the earliest on-stage references to the Middle Passage) and violence. This includes both white fears of uprising—like the rest of American discussions of slavery after 1793, the drama seems to have been haunted by Haiti—and antislavery anxieties about the rape of enslaved women. Certain genres also emerge as significant: Nathans discusses a large number of plays in which the stage Yankee is paired with an African slave (from Jonathan Postfree in 1807 to Neighbor Jackwood in 1857). She shows that the development of the stage Yankee in this period, as he becomes an increasingly sympathetic, philanthropic figure, is intimately linked to the warmth of the character's stage relationship with the slave. Black parts, are, by contrast, rare in Temperance drama, but in Aunt Dinah's Pledge, the moral exemplar is a black mother, an intriguing development that Nathans links to a protest by Southern members of the Sons of Temperance against the inclusion of black marchers in a Boston parade. Some of the most fascinating discussion is of performance outside the theatre—abolitionist protests in churches, like Parker Pillsbury's baptising of dogs, and Henry Ward Beecher's 'slave auctions'; or William C. Nell's recreation of the Boston Massacre in a tableau at Faneuil Hall.

Nathans' analysis tends to prioritise text over performance or reception, and tends not to consider the demands of genre (farce, afterpiece, melodrama) on the possibilities of representation, but her book demonstrates the wealth of the theatrical and performative commentary on race and slavery in this period, and outlines some significant developments in the course of it.