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Race: Between Slavery and Emancipation Uncle Tom’S Cabin and American Blackface Minstrelsy in the Netherlands from the 1840S to the 1880S

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Race: Between Slavery and Emancipation Uncle Tom’S Cabin and American Blackface Minstrelsy in the Netherlands from the 1840S to the 1880S Race: Between Slavery and Emancipation Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American blackface minstrelsy in the Netherlands from the 1840s to the 1880s Elisabeth Koning MA History, American Studies 5951852 University of Amsterdam [email protected] Dr. George Blaustein June 10, 2013 Dr. Eduard van de Bilt For my mother Contents Introduction 1 1. The emergence of the tension 12 - The Ethiopian Serenaders in the Netherlands: an eccentric spectacle 12 - The British and American reception of blackface minstrelsy 17 - The broad appeal of The Ethiopian Serenaders 20 - “Americanness” 25 2. The numerous messages in Uncle Tom 28 - The nature and influence of the Dutch translation of Uncle Tom 28 - Inspired by Stowe: Dutch anti-slavery accounts 33 - Uncle Tom on stage: Dutch actors as American minstrels 35 - The “Dutch” Tom play: from sympathy to racial domination 39 - The American element in the Dutch play 45 - An African American performer in the Netherlands 50 - “Yankee’s Bluff:” American minstrelsy in the Dutch Colonies 56 3. Uncle Tom: from Surinamese to Javanese 65 - The Memory of Slavery 65 - What about the Javanese? 70 - Continuation of tension with an element of class 79 - The adaptability of Uncle Tom 86 Epilogue 93 Conclusion 96 Bibliography 101 Introduction Within a time period of six years, two seemingly opposite forms of American culture arrived in the Netherlands. American blackface minstrelsy, the most popular form of American entertainment in the nineteenth century, arrived in 1847. Six years later, arguably the most influential novel in the American history was published in Dutch: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly. Whereas the first mainly ridiculed African American slaves and freemen, the latter aimed to evoke sympathy for the African American slaves. When these two forms of popular American culture were merged together in the so-called Tom play, the intention and message behind the blackface performance began to become less clear. This unclear message was especially evident in the Netherlands and its colonies, since both forms of American culture arrived at a time when Dutch abolitionism had taken off. Moreover, this ambiguous message allowed Dutch citizens to switch between the anti-slavery and the racial mockery component of the message. I will argue that American blackface minstrelsy and Uncle Tom became part of the Dutch anti-slavery and colonial discourse, revealing a tension between race and emancipation from the 1840s to the 1880s. In other words, the message Dutch citizens got from the American forms of popular entertainment paralleled the contemporary discourse on race and emancipation. Before I can explain the meaning of the “tension between race and emancipation,” a short introduction about the nature of American blackface minstrelsy and the influence of Uncle Tom on the American society is necessary. In 1828, the white American actor Thomas D. Rice began to perform an act he accordingly learned by watching an old African American sing and dance. For his character, who became known as “Jim Crow,” Rice blackened his face and hands with burnt cork and dressed in rags, battered hat and torn shoes (figure 1). The blackening of one’s face in combination with exaggerated red lips is simply referred to as “blackface.” In the decade that followed, Rice and other blackface performers began to elaborate and consolidate acts similar to Rice’s. In doing this, blackface artist used, created, and disseminated African American caricatures. The popularity of the performances was unmatched, and a new stage genre was born: the minstrel show. In short, “minstrel show entertainment included imitating black 1 Figure 1 - "Mr. T. Rice as Jim Crow" Source: “Africans in America/Part 3/Jim Crow Close-up,” accessed May 28, 2013, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part3/3h489b.html. 2 music and dance and speaking in a ‘plantation’ dialect.”1 Moreover, “the shows featured a variety of jokes, songs, dances and skits that were based on the ugliest stereotypes of [free] African American[s, and] slaves.”2 The minstrel show became “one of the most popular genres, if not the most popular genre, of stage entertainment in the nineteenth century” in the United States.3 During the heyday of American blackface minstrelsy, Stowe wrote her famous sentimental anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). The popularity of the novel was unparalleled: already three hundred thousand copies had been sold in the United States in the same year of its publication. Since Uncle Tom existed of a portrayal of African Americans’ life under slavery, it did not take long for blackface minstrels to include Uncle Tom in their shows.4 Indeed, two popular stage versions of Uncle Tom, containing an opposing message, began to compete with each other. Whereas George L. Aiken’s version retained the antislavery content of Stowe’s story, Henry J. Conway wrote a more “pro-Southern version” of Uncle Tom.5 Not surprisingly, given their focus on African Americans, both blackface minstrelsy and Uncle Tom played an immense role in the American discourse on race and slavery. Similarly did both blackface minstrelsy and Uncle Tom fit into the Dutch discourse on race and emancipation. What do I mean with “a tension between race and emancipation?” When the anti-slavery, or emancipation debate became more vocal in the Netherlands during the 1840s, the Dutch Empire existed of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), the Cape Colony, Dutch West Africa, Dutch Brazil, Suriname, and Netherlands Antilles. Five of these six Dutch colonies can be described as slave societies and in three of them the overwhelming majority of slaves were of black descent.6 Not surprisingly, both in the United States and in the Netherlands, the debate about abolition brought along the question what one should do with the freed slaves. In answering this question, “race” became one of the largest arguments for white men’s control 1 “Blackface! - The History of Racist Blackface Stereotypes,” accessed May 26, 2013, http://black-face.com/. 2 Ibid. 3 Popular Culture in American History, Blackwell Readers in American Social and Cultural History 1 (Malden, Mass: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 57. 4 Robert C. Toll, Blacking up. The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 93. 5 Ibid., 90–91. 6 Allison Blakely, Blacks in the Dutch World. The Evolution of Racial Imagery in the Modern Society. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 8. 3 over freed slaves after slavery. In this research, race refers to “the idea that the human species is divided into distinct groups on the basis of inherited physical and behavioral differences.”7 One of the American founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, exemplified what happens if one includes race into the slavery discourse. According to Jefferson, “blacks and whites could never coexist in America because of the ‘real distinctions’ which ‘nature’ had made between the two races.”8 Therefore, although Jefferson argued that slavery should be abolished, the freed “blacks would have to be removed from American society.”9 A similar argument was made by F.W. Hostmann, who lived in the Dutch colony of Suriname. He argued that the Netherlands was not ready to free their slaves in Suriname, unless a clear emancipation process was agreed upon.10 In the context of this research, emancipation refers to the act of freeing someone from “restraint, control, or the power of another.”11 However, as we will see, emancipation would not become reality. Therefore, the tension between race and emancipation can be described as the realization that slavery should be abolished on the one hand, and the search for new forms of domination based on perceived racial differences on the other. After the abolition of slavery in the Netherlands and the United States, new forms of racial dominations were quickly implemented. In the United States, for example, the notorious Black Codes were adopted by President Andrew Johnson two years after the abolition of slavery.12 Some of these Black Codes established “systems of peonage or apprenticeship resembling slavery.”13 Indeed, between 1876 and 1965, the so-called “Jim Crow laws” that mandated racial segregation in most Southern States, followed the Black Codes. Not surprisingly, the name of the laws refers to the blackface “Jim Crow” character.14 In the Dutch 7 “Race (human) -- Encyclopedia Britannica,” accessed June 7, 2013, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/488030/race. 8 Ronald T Takaki, A Different Mirror: a History of Multicultural America (New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown, and Co., 2008), 64. 9 Ibid., 63. 10 F.W. Hostmann, “Royal Tropical Institute — Over de Beschaving van Negers in Amerika, Door Kolonisatie Met Europeanen, of Beschouwingen Omtrent de Maatschappelijke Vereeniging Der Negers in Afrika, Den Staat, Waarin Zij Door Den Zoogenaamden Slavenhandel Komen, En Later Door Abolitie En Emancipatie Overgaan 1850,” accessed June 7, 2013, http://62.41.28.253/cgi-bin/kit.exe?a=d&d=GBHFIF1850&cl=CL2.1850&e=-0-------2en---- 10--1----------IN-0. 11 “Emancipating - Definition and More from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary,” accessed June 7, 2013, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/emancipating?show=0&t=1370593551. 12 It should be noted that I refer to the “Emancipation Proclamation” signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863, although slavery was only officially abolished with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. 13 C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, Commemorative ed (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 23. 14 Ibid., 7. 4 colony of Suriname, a similar system of control was introduced. The so-called Emancipatiewet [Emancipation Law] of 1863 forced the freed slaves in Suriname to remain on the same plantation for ten years.15 While the better part of the emancipation discourse addressed slavery in Suriname, critics of the nature of the colonial rule in the Dutch East Indies began to raise their voices more frequently during the 1860s.
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