A New Angle on the Chapmans Wayne H

HISTORICAL SOCIETY NOTES AND DOCUMENTS PITTSBURGH AND THE FIRST SHOWBOAT: A New Angle on the Chapmans Wayne H. Claeren on the Chapman family, creators of America's first success- Factsful showboat, are difficult to obtain. One source, for example, lists William Chapman, Sr., as making his American acting debut as King Henry inRichard IIIin1827. l Another contemporary says Chapman's first appearance in the United States was as Iago in an 1828 produc- tion of Othello. 2 Still another finds him debuting in America as Billy Lackaday in Sweethearts and Wives.* There is similar disagreement about the time and place of William Chapman's death. Other members of the family have equally confusing histories, and there is even a question as tohow many Chapmans actually existed. Itis reasonable, however, to include in the original showboat family the following members :William, Sr., and his wife Sarah ;their three sons, William B., George, and Samuel (who died before the so-called Floating Theater began) ;two daughters, Caroline and Theresa; and various grandchildren, most notably Harry and another Caroline. 4 Because the Chapmans spent much of their time touring the western rivers, more information about them is based on frontier anecdotes than on the newspapers and playbills which normally trace the careers of actors. Atleast one author, George D. Ford, has collect- ed some of these legends and elaborated on them to such an extent that they contradict the few verifiable facts available. Ford gives as history, for instance, an incredible story of William B. Chapman, Jr., escaping a shotgun wedding. Young William,says Ford, once evaded a venge- ful father and several armed assassins by falling through the vampire trap at Covent Garden, fighting a series of duels, and finally being Wayne Claeren received a Ph.D. in Theater Arts from the University of Pittsburgh. He now teaches drama at Jacksonville State University in Alabama. i —Editor 1 Francis Courtney Wemyss, Wemyss' Chronology of the American Stage from 1752 to 1852 (1852; reprint ed., New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968), 40. 2 Noah M.Ludlow, Dramatic Life as IFound It(1880; reprint ed., New York: Benjamin Blom, 1966), 569. 3 T. Allston Brown, History of the American Stage (New York, 1870), 69. 4 William A. Chapman, the famous lowcomedian who first appeared inthe United States in 1839, was no relation. j APRIL 232 HISTORICAL SOCIETY NOTES AND DOCUMENTS shanghaied onto a ship bound for America by his own brothers. 5 The Chapmans had many interesting adventures but this was not one of them. Most sources of showboat history seem to agree on only four things about the Chapmans :They began the first successful American showboat in 1831 and continued in the business until 1847; they had little or no desire for money or for fame; they were clannish to an extreme (It has even been suggested that they had a secret family language which they used to the consternation of other actors in the greenroom) ;6 they loved fishing with a family-wide passion and which was a primary factor in their life style. A closer look at the Chapmans and their times, however, indi- cates that at least two, and possibly three, of these commonly held beliefs are incorrect assumptions. The picture of a jolly family lazily floating down the Mississippi, doing an occasional show, and spend- ing more time fishing than working, is picturesque but untrue. Why, then, did the Chapmans begin the first showboat ? In 1827 the Chapmans left England, where disastrous conditions had descended upon members of the acting profession. A few months earlier, J. B. Booth had described the situation in England in a letter to his father : The distress is so excessive ... that men look upon each other doubtful if they shall defend their own, or steal their neighbor's property. Famine stares all England in the face. As for the theatres, they are not thought of, much less patronized. The emigration to America willbe very numerous, as it is hardly possible for the middling classes to keep body and soul together. 7 Joining the exodus to America, William Chapman, Sr., William B., Samuel, and George worked for two seasons at the Bowery and Park Theaters in New York. William B. quickly became the favorite comedian at the Bowery, but he and Samuel soon left New York for Philadelphia, where they became joint managers of the Walnut Street Theater. In 1829 Samuel married Elizabeth Jefferson, sister of Joseph Jefferson II,but died a few months later when a suit of armor he wore in a show infected a wound he had sustained in a fall from his horse. The Chapmans acted in various theaters around the country, but 5 George D. Ford, These Were Actors (New York, 1955), 85-91. Sol Smith, in Theatrical Apprenticeship and Anecdotical Recollections (Philadelphia, 1846), 62, tells of a similar but less exciting escape from some constables in Pittsburgh and may have stirred Ford's imagination. 6 Constance Rourke, The Roots of American Culture (1942; reprint ed., Port Washington, N.Y. :Kennikat Press, Inc., 1965), 139. 7 Quoted in Philip Graham, Showboats (Austin, Texas, 1951), 10. 1976 HISTORICAL SOCIETY NOTES AND DOCUMENTS 233 in the early summer of 1831 they gathered together at the Red Lion Hotel on St. Clair Street in Pittsburgh. Itis easy to gain the im- pression that the Chapmans just happened to arrive in Pittsburgh and that the idea of a family showboat came up quite casually. The smoky city, however, was not known for its theatrical enthusiasm. Both Noah Ludlow and Sol Smith, on separate occasions, had discovered this only a few years earlier. 8 "Relatively handsome theaters were already fairly common in the middle states shortly after the Revolution." 9 But Pittsburgh, in1831, stillhad only one "unimposing" frame playhouse, and by the time the Chapmans arrived it had been converted into a machine shop. 10 Two years later Francis Wemyss opened —"what may justly be termed the model theatre of the United States elegance and comfort being combined, both for the auditor and actor." n Wemyss, ever the optimist, looked forward to a long and successful career inPittsburgh, but he soon discovered that his audi- ences were extremely difficult to please and that business was seldom up to expectations. 12 The Chapmans, however, were in Pittsburgh for a different rea- son. They were no doubt aware of several factors which, at first glance, seem unconnected withthe stage. First of all, in the years just before the Chapmans' arrival Pittsburgh's population nearly doubled from 7,500 in 1820 to 13,000 in 1830. 13 This was due to the city's position at the headwaters of the Ohio which made it the "Gateway to the West" and the leading riverboat construction center in the country.14 Second, after many years of Indian wars and other frontier strug- gles, the west (the midwest of today) was at last becoming—civilized. Between 1816 and 1821 six new states entered the Union five of them from the west. Andrew Jackson's election to the presidency em- phasized the growing importance of this new section of the country and the common, democratic men who lived there. Third, American culture, after years of dependence on Europe, was at last bearing fruit of its own. The newly developed and pacified west was anxious to share in the American artistic flowering. 8 Ludlow, Dramatic Life, 51-76; Smith, Apprenticeship, 62-64. 9 Brooks McNamara, The American Playhouse in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), 72. 10 Walter Havighurst, River to the West (New York, 1970), 264. 11 Francis Courtney Wemyss, Twenty-Six Years of the Life of an Actor and Manager, 2 vols. (New York, 1847), 2: 216. 12 Ibid., 224-25. 13 James T. Lloyd,Lloyd's Steamboat Directory (Cincinnati, 1856), 53. 14 Ethel C. Leahy, Who's Who on the Ohio River (Cincinnati, 1931), 381. 234 HISTORICAL SOCIETY NOTES AND DOCUMENTS APRIL Fourth, the 1820s had ushered in a new age of transportation. Turnpikes, canals, steamboats, and flatboats allowed goods, information, and people to travel from one part of the country to another faster than ever before. — Finally, at the end of the long river highway more than two thousand miles from Pittsburgh — was New Orleans, the fastest growing city in the country. The British Quarterly Review predicted that New Orleans would become, because of the Mississippi, "the most important commercial city in America, if not the world." 15 Deboit/s Review, an eminent statistical and economic periodical, said that "no city of the world has ever advanced as a mart of commerce with such gigantic and rapid strides as New Orleans." 16 It was soon to become the fourth largest city in the United States and the third commercial port in the world,behind only London and Liverpool. In short, the entire Ohio-Mississippi valley was a young, eager, and energetic giant, and its residents were increasingly aware of culture and hungry for entertainment after years of lonely pioneering. William Chapman, Sr., was known to be a man who was alert and widely read. 17 Itseems logical that he would have been aware of these social and economic conditions, and that they (more than an interest in angling) led him and his family to launch the Floating Theater in the summer of 1831. It seems possible, too, that Chapman might have learned that in 1827 a massive government program had commenced removing thousands of snags from the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Losses on the two rivers, from snags alone, between 1822 and 1827 had amounted to $1,362,500.

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