The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North by Douglas A. Jones Jr. (review)

In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois claimed that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line," yet this "problem" was a common concern if not obsession from the early years of the republic and gained momentum throughout the nineteenth century.¹ After the War of Independence, northern states began drafting constitutions that called for the abolition of slavery, yet these states also had to grapple with questions and concerns regarding the social, legal, and political status of free African Americans in the new nation. Pennsylvania delegate Benjamin Martin, as Douglas Jones Jr. notes in The Captive Stage: Performance and the Proslavery Imagination of the Antebellum North, voiced the common sentiment of northern whites when he opposed granting free blacks political or social rights based on "the law of nature" (qtd. 2). Martin's reference to natural law reflected white Americans' commonly held views regarding the African Americans' innate and natural inferiority, to which whites appealed in order to defend the institution of slavery in the South and to deny black Americans full citizenship status in the North. Thus, the so-called problem of free blacks in the North was addressed through various forms of, as Jones puts it, "black captivity." In his engaging study, Jones examines the culture of performance in the antebellum North and contends that "proslavery ideology was constitutive of these efforts, as those northerners who rejected black citizenship and racial equality in general molded and re-molded defenses of chattel slavery to fit their particular socio-historical contexts" (7). Performance practices such as the stage, dance, oratory, and parades provided an ideological playing field for warring perspectives regarding racial theories.

During the early national era, free black communities in the North created what Jones calls a "protest culture" in order to undermine white perceptions of black inferiority. An important strategy for protest drew on African Americans' contributions during the Revolutionary War in the form of commemorative parades to demonstrate black patriotism. For example, Crispus Attucks, one of the first men killed during the Boston Massacre, "became the iconic signifier of selfless black patriotism" (22). In chapter 1, Jones contends that black parades functioned as a way to "press for universal emancipation, black citizenship, and social equality" (23). But as Jones points out, "Hostile onlookers did not construe black parades as a kind of pedagogy that elucidated what the American polity could and should be; they viewed such acts as absurd at best and menacing at worst" (23). White northerners responded in several ways. One was by representing the role of blacks in Revolutionary events as limited to serving a white soldier or officer. Jones examines John Murdock's 1794 play The Triumphs of Love; or, Happy Reconciliation, specifically the character Sambo, who serves his master loyally and is then manumitted for his service and becomes "citizen Sambo." Murdock creates a figure who is legally free but who remains dependent on white patronage. Another response came in the form of broadsides that ridiculed black parades and black orators, most notably in the "Bobalition" (a distortion of abolition) series that "circulated throughout the north from the mid-1810s to the 1830s" (40). The series mocked black writing and speech as a way of suggesting that "defects in speech signify defects in reason" and that therefore "those who are the least articulate must remain the least free in that society because they retard its progress" (44–45).

One of the most pervasive and long-lasting forms of performance culture, which emerged in the late 1820s, is blackface minstrelsy, featuring a cast of exaggerated and often grotesque and foolish character types. In chapter 2, Jones disagrees with scholars who contend that minstrelsy functioned to unite poor whites and black workers in working-class solidarity. Jones asserts that "white working-class northerners expropriated black performance culture and developed a distinct strand of proslavery thought with...