Everybody’s Doin’ It

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LIBERTINES, BLACKFACE MINSTRELS, AND THE SMALL-POTATOE HUMBUG

JOHN R. MCDOWALL was a thoroughly righteous, somewhat naive, twenty-nine-year-old student at the Princeton Theological Seminary when he moved to New York City in 1830. He planned to be a missionary among the city’s downtrodden. Inevitably he was drawn to the Sixth Ward, with its infamous Five Points and warren of dens, joints, saloons, dance halls, assignation houses, and brothels. McDowall was repulsed by the open prostitution he saw there and branded it an endemic and “gangrenous canker” that was infesting the body and soul of the city. Springing into action, he worked with other like-minded people to forward the mission of the newly established New York Magdalen Society and institute a halfway house (the “Asylum”) for the magdalens who wanted to leave their old lives behind. A crusader who was also a writer, within a year of arriving in the city McDowall had edited the Magdalen Report, which the Magdalen Society published. There New Yorkers learned that young women were being led to the life through vicious indulgence in drink and capricious frolicking in dance halls or by loss of virtue resulting from malicious seduction. Furthermore, he claimed that “not less than TEN THOUSAND!!” prostitutes plied their profession in New York, with leading city fathers among their best clients.¹

The city establishment was not amused. Newspaper editorials, public letters, and meetings at Tammany Hall decried the Report as obscene and filled with distortions. Its editor and authors were branded as traitors. Society members received threats, and a majority of them quickly caved. As a result, the New York Magdalen Society folded in late 1831, barely a year after its founding.²

McDowall grabbed the gauntlet before it hit the ground, however, revamped the thrust of the Report, and quickly published Magdalen Facts, a tightly packed booklet of more than one hundred pages that ends with a hymn to “The Magdalen.” His life’s work back on track, he began editing McDowall’s Journal in 1833. Emblazoned on its masthead was “Purity and Truth,” with the image of a printing press spreading cleansing rays across the globe, while the lead editorial in the first issue laid bare the mission: expose immorality, build public support against it, and destroy it at its root. The Journal subsequently published details on techniques employed by seducers, traced the prevalence of prostitution, cited the addresses of brothels, and fingered some of prostitution’s patrons by name.³

To garner support for the fight against moral contagion, McDowall convened a conference of three hundred clergymen in early 1834. There he shared documents and artifacts gathered during his work: obscene books, sexually graphic prints, lewdly decorated music boxes (some featuring animated nude couples), and more—probably the era’s largest collection of what would now be called pornographic materials. The response was not what McDowall expected. The men of the cloth, although initially quite interested, turned against him for polluting their purity of mind. Then, with the patience of the powerful stretched to the breaking point, a grand jury in late 1834 indicted McDowall for presenting “such odious and revolting details as are offensive to taste, injurious to morals, and degrading to the character of our city.” Papers filed with the court claimed that McDowall’s work produced a result opposite to his stated intentions, for the details he published actually “inflame the passions of the young” instead of quelling them. The indictment was sustained and McDowall’s Journal was banned for being obscene.⁴

To complete McDowall’s fall from grace, the Presbyterian Church defrocked him in April 1836. Psychologically broken and always lacking a strong physical constitution, he died seven months later on December 14, 1836. McDowall was for years afterward celebrated by his supporters as the “Martyr of the Seventh Commandment.”

Although viewed by many as something of a fanatic, McDowall did leave a legacy. Organizations that both advocated for moral reform and were aggressively prescriptive on the maintenance of female virtue became a feature of New York life for much of the next century. The most immediately successful of these was the New-York Female Moral Reform Society, which followed directly on the heels of the Magdalen Society. The Society organ—The Advocate of Moral Reform, which at its peak claimed to have twenty thousand subscribers—was intended to be read by upstanding, middle-class churchgoers. Articles and columns shared lessons learned from the fallen and advice on how not to become one of them. Attending the theater received constant cautionary attention, for there would be found scantily clad actresses and women of the night in the infamous third tier. Readers were alerted to the dangers of novel reading, since it filled the young (female) mind with useless romantic fantasies. And dancing was certainly bad for the morals, especially waltzing.

It consists of a whirling movement, in which the hand of the lady is on the gentleman’s shoulder, while his arm encircles her waist. . . . We have heard young ladies confess that they thought this kind of dance extremely indelicate, but “it is so delightful and we love it so, that we cannot give it up.”

Soon, the report warned, the lilting triple meter enchants and “the heart becomes prostituted by unholy sensations.” Even music itself could lead to moral perdition. According to the author of “The Use and Abuse of Music,” piano music distorted mindful and moral values, for quicksteps and waltzes on the piano both associate the “pleasures of the dance with the witchery of music.”⁵

McDowall’s crusade, in league with that of the New-York Female Moral Reform Society, forced the consideration of prostitution, promiscuity, and sexuality’s effect on an often-resistant public. In this way, his short life’s work was not in vain.

Into the breach left by McDowall’s death came a quite different crew, often motley, sometimes brilliant, and always ready and armed (frequently with hypocrisy) to defend the sanctity of womankind. The pen was their sword, and at the head of the brigade was editor and publisher George Washington Dixon, surely one of the most complex, enigmatic, and colorful figures in American history.

Born around 1801, probably in Richmond, Virginia, Dixon entered what he called his “momentous vocation” when he assumed editorship of a Lowell, Massachusetts, newspaper in 1835. From the first he proclaimed that paramount among his duties was to be an “advocate of sound morals.” Within a year, Dixon moved to Boston, started the Bostonian; or, Dixon’s Saturday Night Express, and chased after the moral failings of Bostonians in high places. Already at this early stage in Dixon’s journalistic career, a discernible pattern of good intentions followed by overreach to the point of libel was evident. The Boston Post in an 1837 editorial noted that Dixon had the tendency to grab hold of the hot end of the poker, and characterized him as somewhat like a cow that gave a pail of good milk and then kicked it over.

Dixon became a New Yorker in 1838 and published the first number of his weekly Polyanthos (“many flowers”). In an early issue, he revealed that Thomas Hamblin, a popular actor and manager of the Bowery Theatre, was having an illicit affair with a teen-aged actress in his troupe. Within ten days of the exposé, the actress was dead. A coroner’s jury found that she had died as the result of “brain fever” induced in large part by the Polyanthos article. Later that year a merchant, Rowland R. Minturn, was censored by the Polyanthos for his ongoing liaison with a married woman. Twelve days after that article’s publication, Minturn leaped to his death. Nothing if not indefatigable, Dixon then turned his pen on the Reverend Francis L. Hawks, the rector of St. Thomas Episcopal Church in New York since 1831, and charged him with sexual dalliance, graphic details provided.

The Hamblin exposé resulted in Dixon being publicly flogged by the actor. The Minturn scoop did not lead to bodily harm for Dixon, but the family brought him into court on a libel charge. Jailed, Dixon was released when the astronomical bail of nine thousand dollars was provided (in only one of a long string of Dixon paradoxes) by Adeline Miller, a well-known brothel madam. The trial in April 1839 turned into a three-day circus. The press and the masses packed the courtroom in part for the titillation provided by illicit details introduced as evidence and in part simply because the notorious Dixon was in the dock. A hung jury resulted, and the prosecution chose not to retry the slippery defendant.

But only a month later Dixon was back in court, this time to face a libel charge from Rev. Hawks. Astonishingly, Dixon changed his plea to “Guilty” and received a sentence of six months at hard labor in the New York State Penitentiary. There is no convincing evidence why the editor agreed to the libel charge. Dixon did claim two years later that Hawks paid him one thousand dollars to take the fall, thus allowing the reverend to avoid damage to his reputation in a public trial. There might well have been some fire beneath Dixon’s smoke, for Hawks was soon removed from the rectorship of one of the largest, wealthiest, and most influential Episcopal churches in the country’s largest and most dynamic city and shipped out to a new position in Holly Springs, Mississippi (population about four thousand).

After serving his time, Dixon returned to the publishing fray, seeking to reveal ever yet more egregious immoral behavior among the rich and famous. Fanny Elssler, an Austrian ballerina then the toast of New York’s stage, was accused in the pages of the Polyanthos of immoral sexual behavior. Words were seldom quite enough for Dixon, so he incited and led a mob against her in August 1840 and subsequently published the incendiary speech he delivered before his enflamed followers. He then turned his attention to the business of Ann Lohman, who worked under the name of Madame Restell performing illegal, backroom abortions for desperate women, many of them married. In Dixon’s expressed view, the fundamental function of marriage was the birthing of children, which compounded abortion’s sin; and with abortion available, why should women practice abstinence before marriage or remain faithful to their vows afterward? ⁶

Madame Restell was indicted and jailed shortly after Dixon’s barrage. The editor followed with more articles on Restell, one illustrated with a woodcut of a woman overlaid with the head of death, a skeleton leering in the background. When Restell was convicted in July 1841, Dixon rejoiced in print and then, typically, published a self-congratulatory pamphlet detailing the trial.⁷

William J. Snelling (born in 1804) was initially a publishing partner with Dixon at the Polyanthos and contributed columns to the paper for several years. With seeming paradoxical intent, they together broadened the scope of the paper to champion the virtues of New York’s prostitution culture. Julia Brown, for instance, ran New York’s premier brothel and was royally treated to a “Full Description of Princess Julia’s Palace of Love” in an 1841 issue. The “Princess” herself was described—“the rarest specimen of art and nature combined”—along with her brothel, its fine furnishings, and the fetching occupants of the rooms, all of whom were passionate and graced with “downy bosom.” The Palace of Love, according to the distorted logic of the Polyanthos, was a place where “the evil that flesh is held to” came to know virtue.⁸

Dixon and Snelling spawned a cohort of journalists who followed their line: reveal the titillating lives of New York’s prostitutes, endorse generous expressions of male sexuality, and dig for dirt in the lives of New York’s hypocrites, especially those of high standing. Cohort members George Wilkes, Thaddeus W. Meighan, and George B. Wooldridge sometimes worked with Dixon and/or Snelling and sometimes against them. Between them they were responsible for a flurry of generally short-lived “sporting” weeklies with names such as the Flash, the True Flash, the Whip, the Sporting Whip, the Rake, and the Libertine. These papers were among the very first to develop a strategy later perfected by tabloids: launch inflaming and moralistic-sounding exposés into the social fray, graced with a brazen, salacious, conspiratorial smirk, adorned by a sly wink, and ornamented on the front page by an image of female dishabille.

The pages of the sporting press paid special attention to prostitution. Brothels, with addresses included, were ranked by the cleanliness and beauty of their women, along with admonishing advice (of course) to avoid them all. The Flash advocated in 1841 for making adultery and fornication outside of marriage illegal, and the True Flash argued against “self-pollution” (masturbation). All the while they were glorifying New York’s male, sporting culture. Satire—often intended to puncture the pretensions of the powerful—was the name of their game.⁹

While hardly serious journalism, the work of Dixon and cohort opened to view important windows on the underworld culture of the times. Perhaps most obviously, if one could cut through the cant, hypocrisy, irony, and personal imbroglios, they established in the public mind a de facto right by print media to investigate and publish findings on the lives of private citizens. Moreover, whereas McDowall seemed most concerned about the philandering of the educated class, Dixon and colleagues eventually widened the lens to include all levels of New York society, high and low. This meant, among much else, that prying eyes now peeked into the basement dance halls of the Five Points as well as offices on Wall Street and the rector’s study in St. Thomas Episcopal Church.

Then there is the surprising place of music and dance in the (often sordid) story. And, again, Dixon is the key figure.

He pursued a career in music from early in his life, with records capturing him singing in touring variety shows by 1824. In 1827 Dixon made his New York debut performing some of the day’s popular comic songs in a Lower East Side theater. But his claim to fame was made in July 1829 when he first sang “Coal Black Rose.” This song features a simple melody, really more of a ditty, that quickly gets out of the way to allow for the theatricality of the lyrics. The story is of Sambo, a slave, who is in love with Rose; everything is fine at first, but in verse eight Sambo spies his rival, Cuffee, in Rose’s room, which leads to a tussle and a chase. By the end of the song, Sambo curses “blackka snake Rose.”

To perform this song, Dixon applied burnt-cork-and-grease “blackface” makeup to mimic the complexion of the uneducated, comically smitten Sambo. Although white actors at that time commonly applied blackface to play black characters (viz., Othello), this ludicrous, comic song sung to (probably) a folk melody was different. There was no effort here at an accurate representation of black Americans or of their music; the intent was comic ridicule, and audiences in the lower-class theaters of New York’s Bowery district loved it. With this stroke, Dixon became, in an honorific coined later by one of his editor colleagues, the “Columbus” of blackface minstrelsy in America.

Thomas Dartmouth Rice jumped on the blackface bandwagon a year later in September 1830 when he first performed “Jim Crow” in Louisville, Kentucky. Rice brought acting and dance experience to the blackface stage with his famous song, opening the fledgling genre to a vivid and dynamic theatricality. Although Dixon also performed “Jim Crow,” his lasting mark was made with the blackface song “Zip Coon,” which he first sang in 1834. A counterpoise to “Jim Crow,” which is a depiction of a southern slave dressed in rags, “Zip Coon” is about a northern, freedman dandy, a self-proclaimed “larned skoler.” Together “Jim Crow” and “Zip Coon” represented (and defined) the stereotypes between which most black Americans at that time lived their lives.¹⁰

Unlike “Jim Crow,” “Zip Coon” was graced with an infectious melody, known widely today as “Turkey in the Straw.” It is a “fiddle tune” in type or, as it would have been called then, a “jig.” Dancing is implied by this tune, which has plenty of rhythmic accents where feet can slap the floor. The tune structure—an A section repeated, followed by a related B section repeated—allows, even mandates, enough repetitions to sustain the energies of the dancers. Like many fiddle tunes of the time, the melody to “Zip Coon” was likely born in a disreputable dance hall or in a lower-class brothel. In fact, the tune has also been known as “Natchez Under the Hill,” a reference to the infamous district on the muddy banks of the Mississippi River at Natchez, literally and figuratively “under” the high society “on” the top of the bluff.

In their lyrics, “Jim Crow” and “Zip Coon” both touch on matters of political and social moment that concerned the urban, white working class. Race was one of these issues, and it is clearly the case that white performers in blackface expressed deeply felt fears about black people in a manner that later generations would consider abhorrent. But singers brought up other audience concerns that did not touch directly on race. Verses to both songs were frequently improvised and rendered topically to their place, time, and audience. Some countered elite disdain for President Jackson, who was a hero to many in early minstrelsy’s audience; others addressed the oppression of the working class; even specific matters, such as the chartering of the Second Bank of the United States (which was perceived by Jackson and his supporters to favor the rich), were treated.

The constant in both songs is that the music and the texts are expressions of working-class culture and life. An engraving of a performance of “Jim Crow” at the Bowery Theatre on November 25, 1833, is captioned: “View of the Stage on the fifty seventh night of Mr. T.D. RICE, of Kentucky in his original and celebrated extravaganza of JIM CROW on which occasion every department of the house was thronged to an excess unprecedented in the records of theatrical attraction.” It shows Jim Crow dancing his jig at center stage while surrounded by the hoi polloi, some listening and watching intently, some pushing and shoving; a few appear to be enjoying a good fight. Jim Crow was clearly a man of the people.

In July of the next year, the masses were back at the Bowery Theatre, but this time in an angry mood. A famous English actor who was performing that evening had allegedly said disrespectful things about the general character of Americans. In retribution, rioters rushed into the theater during his performance, threatened mayhem and revenge, and refused all entreaties for order. But then, according to a reporter from the New York Sun, a newspaper favored by the lower classes:

Mr. Dixon, the singer (an American), now made his appearance. “Let us have ‘Zip Coon,’” exclaimed a thousand voices. The singer gave them their favorite song amidst peals of laughter. . . . Dixon, who had produced such amazing good nature with his “Zip Coon,” next addressed them—and they soon quietly dispersed.

Zip Coon was clearly a man of the people.

The word “minstrel” would not be applied to those who performed in comic blackface until 1843. But “blackface minstrelsy” was already in place by 1834. There is no question that the skeleton around which this popular entertainment was built was the denigration of black people. There is also no doubt that its muscle consisted of stereotypes of black Americans, many of which tragically prevail to the present. And—too often forgotten—there is no question that its enormous, century-long appeal was because of the music and dance that gave it flesh.

That music and dance, like “Jim Crow” and “Zip Coon,” came out of and was an expression of urban, lower-class, dance-hall and brothel culture. To the throngs on the stage of the Bowery Theatre, “Jim Crow” belonged to them. Who would have thought that lower-class music and dance deserved a place on the legitimate stage? And once it was there, the Jacksonian hordes joined Jim Crow in rollicking and roiling solidarity. And to the throngs in the Bowery Theatre in 1834, “Zip Coon” belonged to them as well. The song was of them, and once Dixon sang their song—surely some among the mob danced a jig to it—their point was made: our music; we made it; we belong here.¹¹

Over the course of the next decade, American theaters were flooded with songs and dances performed by white musicians in blackface. More than a thousand such performances have been documented, along with many dozens of newly published songs. The songs had titles such as “De Boatman’s Dance,” “Clare de Kitchen,” “Dandy Jim, from Caroline,” “Dan Tucker,” “Gumbo Chaff,” “Jim Along Josey,” “Jumbo Jum,” “Lucy Long,” “My Long-Tail Blue,” “Possum Up a Gum Tree,” “Settin’ on a Rail,” “Sich a Gettin’ Upstairs,” “Walk Jaw Bone,” and “Whar Did You Come From.” Most of the tunes to these songs appear less “composed” by a single songwriter and more “made” by an involved community, as is the case with much folk music. Almost none of them had an obvious stylistic connection with African or black American music. Most are jigs or other danceable tunes. Most could have been enjoyed and probably were enjoyed in working-class dens, dance halls, and brothels in New York.

Another man of the people, Davy Crockett, described the scene in which this music was rooted in 1835, the year before he died at the Alamo. On his first trip to New York, he headed to the Five Points. Crockett noticed that many of the houses there had cellars and each one was crowded. Underground, “such fiddling and dancing nobody ever saw before in this world. I thought they were the true ‘heaven-borns.’ Black and white, white and black all hug-em-snug together, happy as lords and ladies.” And with a dram handy to all.¹²

Crockett’s general rendering is confirmed by newspaper accounts from that time. The Evening Tattler, for example, published a report of a police raid on Michael Hardy’s property at 18 Anthony Street. The watch was looking for signs of organized gambling and to squelch the disorderly behavior that belched out of Hardy’s joint. A reporter had apparently been tipped off and was along for the raid. He wrote that the police noticed riotous laughter from the back of the house that was “sufficient to awaken the seven sleepers, or burst a thunder cloud.” Proceeding toward that noise, they discovered a saloon occupied by about twenty persons “of all sizes and colors” who were drinking beer, smoking cigars, and playing cards. In one corner, a “little black rascal of twelve years, assisted by two little white ones of eleven or under,” was roaring away at a love song, while in another corner a knot of “amalgamationists were applauding the exertions of a bit of a niggar, who was jumping ‘Jim Crow.’” The police made their move and instantly the lights were snuffed. Some of the participants jumped through the window, some ran under the officers’ legs and out the door, and others shimmied up the chimney. Chaos reigned, and to “crown the whole, two feminine blocks of ebony and a little Irish woman set up a pullaloo that was equal to the keen of a Munster funeral.”¹³

Few other papers of the time matched the Evening Tattler for its graphic depiction of what the underworld scene looked, sounded, and felt like. But among the select exceptions was the Libertine, a sporting paper published during the summer of 1842 by George B. Wooldridge, a protégé of Dixon. The prospectus for the Libertine promised editorial content that could be read by the “most fastidious without causing a blush (if not too sensitive).” It stated an intention to publish articles on “celebrated females, illustrated” and exposés of “roués and libertines.” In closing: “all the failings of the fair sex will be set forth in glowing colors.”¹⁴

Toward such an end, the first issue contained an account and illustration of a “Dance on Long Wharf.” This was a match dance between two Boston prostitutes—“the elegant and bladder-like” Nance Holmes and the sylph-like Susan Bryant. Fiddle music was provided by a mulatto barber. Bryant led off, dancing to “Fisher’s Hornpipe,” and the way she danced the “big licks was a ‘sin to Moses.’” Then Holmes took to the wharf and promised to “make the grease come.” She struck up and moved in a way that was “a caution to French bedsteads.” If she could keep it up, bystanders thought that the contest between the two prostitutes would be “hip and thigh between them.” After a short break, a “Virginia breakdown” was announced. The fiddler lit into “Camptown Hornpipe,” then moved on to other well-known minstrel tunes and jigs. “They danced—the sweat poured,” but in the end Bryant prevailed, and “Nance was carried home on a cart, procured for the purpose, while Suse footed it, amid shouts of joy from her friends.”¹⁵

There is no knowing if the dance-off actually happened this way, or if there was a contest at all. Susan Bryant was a real person, however, a madam who ran a brothel in Boston, and it is likely there was also a Nance Holmes; Long Wharf existed and the tunes were well-known. But in the world of the Libertine the line between fact and fiction was gray; it does not much matter if the scene happened or was only imagined, for even if fictional the piece was intended to distill and express a reality.¹⁶

Wooldridge was the perfect person to publish “Dance on Long Wharf,” for he had deep experience in the worlds of sex, music, dance, and sporting papers. At various times he edited the Whip and its successor, the Whip and Satirist of New-York and Brooklyn. Furthermore, he was a co-publisher of the Flash early in 1841 with Snelling and Wilkes until a libel charge was filed and Wooldridge turned people’s evidence. That partnership sundered, he and Dixon banded together to publish the True Flash.

As a result of their collaboration, both were skewered by the Flash later in 1841. One such roasting involved a satirical account of a fancy ball thrown by Julia Brown, who was reported by the Flash to be paying special attention to Dixon, for she claimed to have “bought and paid for the melodist, body and soul.” Phoebe Doty, who ran a high-profile brothel a few doors down from Brown’s brothel at 55 Leonard Street—which was next door to where Wooldridge would come to live—counterclaimed that Dixon was her fiancé and “exhibited a written promise of marriage.” Suck Jo and French Celeste, prostitutes, took sides and a tussle ensued during which Brown lost her tiara and Doty was “divested of her bustle.” To calm matters, someone requested a song, whereupon Dixon offered up “Settin’ on a Rail” and “Jim Crow,” the final verse of which went:

I’ve swindled all creation,

And now I’d have you know,

Lies are nothing but vexation

And my Flash turns out “No Go.”

Peace restored, all present then tucked into the comestibles catered by Wooldridge. The article was signed: “Yours with real respect, Moral Reformer McDowall.”¹⁷

That McDowall had been dead for five years is some clue to the veracity of the report. Still, the other named characters were real, alive, and presumably well. And Dixon singing blackface minstrel songs to calm the unruly has been documented.

Wooldridge suffered through a rough 1842. In early January, after testifying against Snelling and Wilkes, he received special attention from the Flash, whose readers learned that he had run the Bank House, the Canvass Back Lunch, and the Elssler Saloon, all drinking and eating establishments that were alleged also to have been disorderly houses. Further, the Flash claimed that Wooldridge had been implicated in a burglary, revealed that he had married a prostitute, and that, without divorcing that lady, had since married another. In April he was charged once more with libel against a young woman. July brought an indictment against him for publishing an obscene newspaper—the Libertine—after only its second issue. The trial on this charge in September resulted in the jury deliberating for five minutes before returning a guilty verdict. Wooldridge then pleaded guilty to a similar charge against another publication of his (the Whip) and was sentenced to sixty days in the penitentiary. To cap his run of trouble, he was indicted again in March 1843, this time for libel against Eliza Trust, yet another target of his self-justified moralizing.¹⁸

Things did not go well for Dixon that year either. In January 1842, he too was indicted for publishing an obscene newspaper, the True Flash. After that, he appeared to turn away from the newspaper business (perhaps because it resulted in too much time on the court docket) and in February embarked on a new career as a “pedestrian” by entering prize-money competitions that involved speed-walking the farthest or longest (up to forty-eight hours, nonstop). But by the end of 1842, again intoxicated by printer’s ink, he advertised that his Polyanthos would resume publication.

When I stopped my nice moral paper and took to stumping it about the Union, a host of small-fry was spawned upon the public, in the shapes of Whips, Flashes, Libertines and Rakes, and now I mean to crush them all.

But apparently “Dixon, [the] small-potatoe humbug, and literary charlatan,” never managed the restart. In March 1843, the Sporting Whip published some kindly intended words on Dixon: “George is a queer—noble—erratic—talented—well-meaning, but sometimes mistaken fellow—and when he leaves this nasty little football of clay for a better world, millions will mourn, and the Devil will triumph.”

Dixon had other notable misadventures over the next two decades, including commissioning himself a major general, mustering an army of volunteers, and planning an invasion of Mexico (which he never pulled off). When the Columbus of blackface minstrelsy died in the New Orleans Charity Hospital in 1861, “Editor” was listed as his occupation on the death certificate.¹⁹

After Dixon’s failed effort to revive the Polyanthos, other papers arose, including the Sporting Whip, whose motto was “Place in Every Honest Hand a WHIP—To Lash the Rascals Naked through the World.” The editor, twenty-year-old Thaddeus W. Meighan, was claimed by his (many) enemies to be a male prostitute and to live with a (female?) prostitute who was “fat, fair, and forty.” He, like Dixon, also had a strong interest in the popular entertainments of the day, particularly blackface minstrelsy. For instance, his sporting paper followed closely the professional career of John Diamond, a white blackface dancer, and looked forward with great anticipation to a match dance between Diamond and “a little negro called ‘Juba.’” The article assured readers that the dancer who could “cut, shuffle, and attitudanize with the greatest facility” would be the winner.²⁰

Meighan may even have been the first to write a critical history of blackface minstrelsy. In a Sporting Whip article dated January 28, 1843, he cited the pivotal importance both of Dixon’s performance of “Coal Black Rose” and of Rice’s “Jim Crow.” From them, so Meighan claimed, the numerous blackface singers, dancers, and actors that afterward graced the stage were directly descended. Meighan went on in that column to become the first to identify important new developments in blackface entertainment. Until 1843, theatrical blackface entertainers worked by themselves in single acts on programs that might also feature (non-blackface) acrobats, monologues, and comic skits. Instead, at the Chatham Theatre near the Five Points, three blackface entertainers (Frank Kent, Dick Pelham, and Billy Whitlock) were reported by the Sporting Whip to have been appearing nightly in enthusiastically received full shows. The next issue of the Sporting Whip made it clear that what was afoot was the formation of the first blackface musical ensemble, a turning point in the history of blackface minstrelsy. The band, which had clearly been performing together for some time, was identified by name two days later in the pages of the New York Herald.

First Night of the novel, grotesque, original and surpassingly melodious ethiopian band, entitled the VIRGINIA MINSTRELS. Being an exclusively musical entertainment, combining the banjo, violin, bone castanetts, and tambourine. . . .

With these strokes, there on the Bowery the blackface minstrel show was born. The world’s popular music and culture would never be remotely the same.²¹

Meighan knew the members of the Virginia Minstrels and followed them closely in his columns. He wrote that each played “a negro-like instrument” and called their performances entertaining, essentially musical, and highly original. Meighan also broke the news that the Virginia Minstrels were soon to depart for a tour of England. He was also critical of new minstrel bands that sprang up soon after the original’s success, scattered saplings that would soon grow into a forest.²²

Meighan continued to report on the Virginia Minstrels until mid-March 1843 when he pleaded guilty in the Court of General Sessions to editing the Sporting Whip, which had been determined by the court to be an obscene paper. With that, the Sporting Whip ceased publication and another window into the life and music of New York’s underworld was shut. Meighan’s interest in music and the popular theater was long-lasting, however. Later in life, he even tried his hand at songwriting and playwriting, and for a while in the 1850s he managed the Bowery Theatre.²³

The Virginia Minstrels did indeed travel to England with their blackface extravaganza, as Thomas D. Rice had done with his blackface “Jim Crow” in 1836. When they departed for their six-month tour on April 21, 1843, they took with them an agent to manage contacts, contracts, and arrangements. That person, surely a friend of theirs, had been an editorial colleague of Meighan, Wilkes, and Snelling. He had operated saloons and hotels that were thought to be assignation houses; he had been rumored to consort with prostitutes; he had an extensive court record and a modest jail record; and he had been indicted for libel less than a month earlier (thus giving him yet more reason to skip the country). The fifth member of the époque-making Virginia Minstrels was their appointed agent, George B. Wooldridge, Dixon’s old pal.²⁴