Challenge Dancing in Antebellum America: Sporting Men, Vulgar Women, and Blacked-Up Boys

APRIL F. MASTEN

Challenge Dancing in Antebellum America: SportingMen, Vulgar Women, and Blacked-Up Boys

Abstract

Between the 1840s and 1860s, jig-dancing contests were held in dockside taverns,markets, and streets across America between blacks and whites of both sexes. Suchcompetitions also captivated audiences in circuses and theaters as part of white andblackface productions. Jig dances, no less than boxing matches, could be scoredand promoted to attract huge crowds. This article traces the processes by whichmarket forces, reform movements, and sectionalism turned this dynamic and inclu-sive social practice into a racially segregated all-male sport and business. Whilescholars generally regard challenge dancing as a form of blackface minstrelsy andan early example of the appropriation of African-American culture by whites, thisview skews our understanding of the variety of personal interchanges that shapednineteenth-century culture. Challenge dancing is one realm in which the mixing ofworking-class blacks and whites was well documented. But as theater managersand minstrel troupes turned challenge dancing into fashionable entertainment, amoral backlash swept female competitors off the floor, isolated black contenders,and equated male dancers with gamblers. This social transformation and thechanging relationships of performers, audiences, and entrepreneurs are obscuredwhen challenge dancing is overlooked or viewed solely as a form of minstrelsy. As ahistorical subject, challenge dancing highlights the way popular cultural forms flour-ish and fade in the face of changing social, economic, and political relations.

In January 1843, the New York Sporting Whip announced a jig-dancing challengebetween the reigning champion, 19-year-old Irish American John Diamond, anda young African American contender called “Juba.” “The stake is large and an un-paralleled display will be the result,” said the newspaper, which predicted thatDiamond would “conquer” his opponent. It is not clear when the match tookplace, but a saloonkeeper later said it was danced on the floor of Pete Williams’tavern in New York City’s Sixth Ward before a mixed-race crowd of friends, gam-blers, and pugilists. No judge presided, as the spectators would determine thewinner according to who danced the longest with the greatest variety of steps.

Juba danced first. He “shuffled, and twisted, and walked around” brilliantlyfor over an hour, recalled the barman. But when Diamond’s turn came, he “out-stepped him.” He “kept on puttin’ in all the fancy touches and the funny

Journal of Social History (2015), pp. 1–30doi:10.1093/jsh/shu079© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected].

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business” until he had surpassed Juba’s time. Diamond won the purse that night,but the competition continued. Encouraged by the excitement generated by thematch, Masters Diamond and Juba carried their rivalry into theaters, facing off in“Great Public Contests” at least four times over the next three years, with Jubausually prevailing. Together they became the most renowned jig dancers of theirgeneration.1

Challenge dancing was a popular pastime in mid-nineteenth-centuryAmerica. Ordinary men and women—black and white, young and old, immigrantand native-born—met in homes and public places to drink, dance, and watcheach other compete. Spread by word of mouth and announced in print, jig-dancing matches enlivened the streets, taverns, circuses, and theaters of portcities and river towns throughout North America. Emerging as a spectator sportalongside boxing, challenge dancing drew large, raucous crowds who viewed,judged, and bet on favorites as they would on prizefighters. Competitors honedtheir skills, built their reputations, and battled it out for fun, money, belts, andbragging rights. Repeat winners claimed the title “Champion Dancer of theWorld.”2

Diamond and Juba are familiar figures to historians of blackface minstrelsyand tap-dancing. Showman P. T. Barnum discovered Diamond dancing onNew York’s East River wharves in 1839, hired him on a handshake with hisfather, and put him to work dancing in circuses and theaters. Charles Dickens sawJuba (born William Henry Lane) dance at Williams’ tavern in 1842 and immor-talized him in his travelogue American Notes.3 After 1843 both dancers performedwith blackface minstrel troupes known for comic portrayals of African Americansas dandies, buffoons, and lascivious housemaids. Scholars usually examineDiamond and Juba in this context.4 But minstrelsy was not the original, nor thefinest form of the sport they demonstrated in their matches.5 For all its fancy stuffand funny business, challenge dancing was not fundamentally parodic or racist.Rather, it was a serious, virtuosic, distinctly American form of expressive cultureproduced by the blending of Black and Irish working-class customs, conditions,and markets.

Antebellum challenge dancing is usually equated with blackface or presentedas simply a variation of minstrel dancing.6 But while emerging from the same cul-tural milieu, it bears a distinct history. Scholars such as David Roediger andAlexander Saxton maintain that early minstrelsy, although drawn fromAfrican-American vernacular culture, reflected and reinforced an incipientworking-class racism. Showy, false, insulting, and often violent, blackface was amanifestation of a white audience’s desire for cultural or racial superiority.7

William Mahar, in contrast, argues that early blackface, while harmful to race re-lations, was not intrinsically demeaning, for it relied on “common humanground” for its humor. Similarly, W. T. Lhamon finds early blackface displaying akind of lumpen politics that was lost as minstrelsy commercialized. He identifiesdancers and audiences as young white workers who defied the proscriptions of anincreasingly merchant-defined society by enacting miscegenation and identifyingwith blacks.8 Dance historians complement these accounts by tracing blackfacedancing to an amalgamation of Irish, English, and African elements, but mistak-enly designate challenge dancing an African-American practice observed andcopied by white men.9

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Blackface minstrelsy certainly intersected with challenge dancing, but it wasonly one context for this varied and popular sport. Between the financial panicsof 1837 and 1857, jig-dancing competitions proliferated in diverse settings, eachwith its own prospects and prohibitions. Challenge dancing arose from thepartner dancing and racial mixing of working women and men. Both the Africanand Irish diasporas carried away emigrants who had danced competitively in theirhome countries, and by 1800 their mixing had made “Negro jigs”—a term thatsignified a style of dancing rather than the dancer’s race—widespread amongNorth American slaves, free blacks, and whites.10 The extensive population ofdancers who delighted in this sport inspired entertainment entrepreneurs tofeature jigging matches alongside choreographed songs, skits, and set pieces inshows for working-class audiences. Their success led to the marketing of chal-lenge dancing to middle-class consumers as blackface theater. At the same time, amoral backlash against drinking, gambling, and dancing itself isolated femalecompetitors and forged a community of male dancers and sportsmen. Thesecomplex beginnings are hidden when challenge dancing is viewed solely throughthe prism of minstrelsy.

Challenge dancing is much more than an obscure cultural practice in need ofrecovery; it is a window into the evolution of working-class life at mid-century. Itshistory reveals the processes by which market forces, social reform, and sectionalstrife turned a dynamic, inclusive social pastime and employment into a crude,segregated commercial enterprise and profession. When we bring together itsorigins and performers, venues and audiences, promoters and detractors, andworkings as a professional sport, we perceive forgotten social and economic rela-tions, alliances concealed behind the era’s racist and sexist language. Challengedancing was not an exclusively male domain created solely by blackface minstrels,African Americans, Diamond and Juba, or any other participant. Nor was it en-tirely produced in New York’s polyglot Sixth Ward or any one place. It was fash-ioned by a whole society that was changing rapidly in the 1840s and 1850s andwould be altered forever by the Civil War.

Taking the Tavern Floor: The Mixed Origins of Challenge Dancing

Antebellum challenge dancing originated in neighborhoods, worksites, andrecreational venues where black and white men, women, and children mingled.Characterized by individual and communal rivalries and collaborations, suchplaces could be found in every North American city from Toronto to NewOrleans, Baltimore to Saint Louis. Searching through Philadelphia’s Southwarkdistrict for a runaway servant boy in 1806, Charles Biddle disturbed numerous“parties of whites, blacks, and mulattoes all dancing together.” In this world, jigdancing was a valued skill and lucrative trade that, like other lower-class occupa-tions, provided the basis for mutual respect between blacks and whites and attimes alleviated racial tension.11 The challenge dancers’ social standing and pro-fessional assets grew from this fraught, multicultural environment.

Challenge dancing emerged from the mixing of black with white culture, ofmostly Irish descent. “Jig dancing” and “Negro dancing” were synonymous termsin early America, used interchangeably to describe a particular dance step orstyle, a dance format also known as the “set dance,” and competitive dancing ingeneral. Black people who made jig dancing their own through style and white

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dancers who adopted African-style moves (or danced their jigs in blackface) werecalled “negro” or “nigger” dancers. In a “set dance,” four couples faced off and per-formed the same steps for three changes of music or figures. At the end of a set ornight of dancing, couples, solo dancers, or dancers and musicians moved to thecenter of the room to compete with their peer group. Partners separated, eachdancing with more rhythmic and physical freedom, while the other dancerswatched and shouted encouragement. The winner was the couple that dancedthe longest or “the best dancer, or sometimes the archest wag.” American dancerscalled these competitive exhibitions jigs, hornpipes, walk-arounds, or break-downs, a term that referred to the “riotous dance” at the end of an Irish ball and“a dance in the peculiar style of the negroes.”12

Most challenge dancing took place in taverns as part of a set or partnerdance. During his 1842 visit, Dickens was taken to a cellar dance-house inNew York to watch an African-American “break-down.” The format of the dancewas familiar to the English author, but the style of the challengers’ steps was new.“Five or six couples come upon the floor,” he noted, “marshaled by a lively youngnegro, who is the wit of the assembly. . . . Every gentleman sets as long as he likesto the opposite lady, and the opposite lady to him, and all are so long about itthat the sport begins to languish, when suddenly the lively hero dashes in to therescue. Single shuffle, double shuffle, cut and cross-cut: snapping his fingers,rolling his eyes, turning in his knees, . . . spinning about on his toes and heels . . .when, having danced his partner off her feet, and himself too, he finishes byleaping gloriously on the bar-counter, and calling for something to drink”(Figure 1). The “hero,” whom scholars identify as Master Juba, was not perform-ing solo. He and his partner were in competition. He won the match with his ex-pertise at combining Irish steps and African moves, and by exceeding her time.13

Dickens made Pete Williams’ dance-house famous, but it was only one ofhundreds of licensed and unlicensed drinking establishments, scattered through-out the poorer sections of every city, where workingmen and women met tosocialize and dance. Situated in cellars and ground floor rooms of their proprie-tors’ homes, neighborhood taverns, shebeens, and groggeries often provided aplace for working-class families to engage in communal forms of entertainment,from eating, singing and storytelling to card playing, music making and dancing.These venues supported diversions and customs increasingly opposed by themarket mentality of more commercialized saloons and dance halls. Some tavernkeepers kept open floor space or provided platforms where anyone could share atalent in exchange for a drink, a plate of food, or “for free gratis for nothin’, justfor fun of the thing,” recalled one bartender. Admission was free on nights whenthe customers provided the entertainment, but tavern dance-houses that hiredmusicians to play the tunes and call the sets charged ten cents entry, plus threecents for a glass of whiskey.14

Publicans who entertained old and young of either sex and both races weresaid to keep “disorderly houses.” Yet it was in such places that ordinary peopleturned “Negro jigs” from pastime to profession. All lower-class taverns counte-nanced some degree of rowdiness and sexual license, but when communal ties re-mained strong they were often the safest place for young workingwomen to meetand dance with men. Local folks, often a married couple or the widow of abarman, ran most of the public houses in lower-class neighborhoods. After beingshown a squalid integrated tenement in Five Points, Dickens was pleasantly




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surprised to be greeted by the “landlady” of Williams’ nearby tavern, “a buxom fatmulatto woman with sparkling eyes.” Equally impressed by the demeanor of thefemale dancers, he facetiously dubbed the place “Almack’s” after England’s fash-ionable assembly rooms. Newspaperman Nathaniel Willis likewise found the“subterranean” dance-house “very clean and cheerful” in 1846. While never freeof male predators, neighborhood taverns were places where women and childrenof both races were expected to join in.15

And join they did. Contrary to historical supposition, competitive dancingwas not a male prerogative. At informal gatherings, all the company enjoyeddancing matches as participants and spectators. Journalist George Foster capturedthis sexual equality in a description of the “unimaginable” dancing he witnessedat Williams’ place in 1850. Toward the end of the set, he wrote, “the dancersbegin contorting their bodies and accelerating their movements, accompaniedwith shouts of laughter and yells of encouragement and applause, until all obser-vance of the figure is forgotten and every one leaps, stamps, screams and hurras onhis or her own hook.”16 This improvisational finale led to matches betweencouples and solo dancers that determined champions. Men danced competitivelyto best other dancers, bolster reputations, win money, demonstrate manly

Figure 1. Artist A. B. Frost’s impression of the African-American “set dance” or“break-down” Dickens saw in New York City at Pete Williams’ tavern dance-house.Engraved illustration from The Works of Charles Dickens Household Edition (London, 1871).“Among the dancers are two young mulatto girls, with large, black, drooping eyes, andhead-gear after the fashion of their hostess, who are as shy or feign to be, as though theynever danced before, and so look down before the visitors, that their partners can seenothing but the long fringed lashes.” Charles Dickens, American Notes for GeneralCirculation (New York, 1842), 36.




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prowess, and attract partners. Women liked to dance as much as the men, repre-sented half the team of competitive couples, and sometimes matched upone-on-one themselves (Figure 2). When these female participants are erased, sotoo are the origins of popular culture.

The mixed race and gender gatherings where challenge dancers perfectedtheir art “fascinated” and “repulsed” middle-class journalists writing for middle-class readers. These enthralled observers described poor whites and blacks inequally disparaging terms. Foster simply reprinted the same paragraph (word forword) for white dancers in Philadelphia and black dancers in New York.However, when he encountered a racially-mixed gathering, Foster singled out thewomen for censure. He lavished praise on the white b’hoys—“members of rowdy

Figure 2. “GRAND TRIAL DANCE between NANCE HOLMES AND SUSEBRYANT, ON LONG WHARF, BOSTON.” What made this competition newsworthywas the public display of two well-known prostitutes. The picture shows that women’schallenge dancing was not a strictly New York phenomenon, nor were mulatto musiciansor mixed-race audiences. Holmes and Bryant showed off equally well a variety of Irish,English, and Negro steps, carefully described in the accompanying article. Bryant (right)won by superior stamina. The Whip, June 25, 1842, p. 1. Courtesy of AmericanAntiquarian Society. Respectable women, including the principal ballerinas of operatroupes, also competed against each other. See “Tremont Theatre,” Boston EveningTranscript, May 9, 1842, p. 2.




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clubs and those who ‘run’ with the engines,” but found the white women presenteven more “horribly disgusting” than the “negresses, of various shades andcolors.” The dancers themselves did not share these feelings. White and blackmen and women went to tavern dance-houses and sailors’ boarding-houses tofind other dancers who knew the steps—the only feature that mattered(Figure 3). When notorious nativist Bill Lord entered Williams’s dance-house, inan 1847 Ned Buntline story, and demanded the prettiest “yaller gals” match hisboys in a set, an ugly, ragged “mud-colored” girl countered: “Purty is as purty does,sah! Dem’s my senterments.” “So they’re mine, too,” he had to concede.17

Lower-class masculinity was never a singular quality. Ethnic allegiances couldspark conflicts between supposedly compatible groups. Several young nativeNew Yorkers came to the ground floor window of a small two-story boarding-house where a group of Irish tenants was dancing, reported the Flash in 1842, andbegan amusing themselves by “making ribald remarks” about the women. Acouple of “the Irish came out and ordered them away, and an affray took place inwhich an American lost his life.”18 By defending their female partners from lewdinsults, these Irish dancers separated themselves from other American men.

Figure 3. Promiscuous intermixing at dances in seamen’s boarding houses, which wererarely segregated by race, attracted the attention of professional slummers, who depictedthe women present in harsh terms. “The male dancers are all sailors, their partners beingcoarse, fat, vulgar-looking young women, whose bloated features indicate confirmed habitsof drunkenness.” The point-of-view of the dancers is better expressed by this woman’sdancing shoes, which indicated that she took her jigging seriously. Thomas B. Gunn, ThePhysiology of New York Boardinghouses (New York, 1857), 280. Illustrated by AlfredR. Waud. Engraved by John Andrew. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.




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Nor was race always the obvious divide that it seemed. Jig dancing realignedthe community in neighborhoods where black and Irish shared the same poorconditions. It served as a medium for confrontation without conflict. AtDiamond and Juba’s tavern match, both black and white spectators bet “theircoppers” on “the colored boy,” noted an eyewitness account, “but they changedtheir tune when they looked at Jack a while. . . . Even the negroes gave Juba thego-bye soon, and threw up the sponge, and wished they had their money back.One of the colored boys yelled out ‘He’s a white man, sure,’ lookin’ at Diamond,‘but he’s got a nigger in his heel.’”19

Betting on the Boys: The Dancing Business from Street to Stage

Tavern dancing gratified this mixed social community and offered economicopportunities to those good enough to win their matches. Anyone could make achallenge at the end of a set, but well-known dancers waited for a purse to beraised before dancing theirs. Contests of skill, strength, speed, and endurance, ac-companied by friendly wagers, were common forms of sociability and recreationamong the working classes. Betting on a match added to the excitement of thedancing. It also figured into the culture of reciprocity that sustained working-classcommunities. Traditionally, people interlaced workday and leisure activities,drinking, talking, and playing on the job. They socialized and earned money atthe same time. But the emerging wage-labor system gradually separated work andleisure pursuits, while task- and piecework progressively lowered the wages of menand women. For these workers, gambling on a match at a local tavern—wheredancers, spectators, and proprietors were all intimately tied to the community—functioned as a kind of mutual support, since money moved around the roomwhen poor people gambled among themselves in honest games.20

On the night of Diamond and Juba’s first match, Diamond and his gang“came down to Pete Williams’ and took dinner all round,” recalled the barmanspectator. “The boy, Juba, had his friends too, who jested him about the match,and told him to go in and do his best.”21 Both factions supported the tavern withpurchases of food and drink before, during, and after the contest. In return,Williams held the stakes and provided an honest, comfortable space for theircompetition. But the separation of work and play also stimulated the growth ofcommercialized leisure, which replaced this give-and-take ethic with the profitmotive. At newer saloons and gambling houses, where individuals bet against thehouse, the winnings did not circulate as freely.

The streets offered another democratic space for betting and dancing.Northern slaves, free blacks, and immigrant children turned jig dancing into avirtual street trade in the 1830s. At Philadelphia’s Callohill Street market andNew York’s Catherine, Bear, and Fly markets, African-American men, women,and children competed with each other for the shoppers’ attention. Two mendanced for eels in one corner of Catherine market, noted The Flash, while “twowenches” competed nearby. “The next trial of moment” was between two youths,“the old niggers singing and beating time for them.” On Buffalo’s steamboatwharves, travel writer Barton Atkins saw two white boys—Dick Sliter, “preco-cious as a jig dancer,” and George Harrington, who “beat time with his hands ex-pertly”—exhibiting “their peculiar talent to admiring crowds, who would strewsmall coin around the feet of the dancer.” These exhibitions “produced some




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excellent ‘dancers,’” remarked market chronicler Thomas DeVoe, “in fact, itraised a sort of strife for the highest honors, i.e., the most cheering and the mostcollected in the ‘hat.’”22

Vagabond performers swarmed waterfront cities like Baltimore, Philadelphia,New York, Buffalo, Troy, and Boston, where by 1840 migrations of rural workers,free blacks, and immigrants had created populations dominated by youths undertwenty. Produce vendors and tavern keepers sometimes hired these young huck-stering jig dancers to lure in crowds of potential customers. According to policereports, Luke Cavanagh, “a very pretty little boy about seven years of age,”worked in several of the “low public houses” in New York’s Centre Street, “figur-ing in negro dances.” Eleven-year-old Bob Sheppard debuted his jig-dancingshow in his father’s Philadelphia slaughterhouse: “admission 6 ¼ cents, with theprivilege of looking at the cattle.” Pete Williams engaged Lane to entice inpatrons with his marvelous competitive jigs. And Harrington and Sliter dancedin front of the public house kept by Harrington’s widowed mother, until her newhusband turned an upstairs room into a makeshift theater for their show.23 Theseyouths were ripe for professional markets.

Like Masters Diamond and Juba, and future Masters Sliter and Harrington,most challenge dancers were in their teens or younger when they first entered thelimelight. R. M. (Dick) Carroll began his career jig dancing at local balls andparties at age 5 and in theaters at age 13 as Master Marks (Figure 4). The title“Master” referred to the boys’ youth as well as to their expertise. It denoted their“dependency” on parents or guardians. Traditional apprenticeships were indecline at this time; however, white and black parents still bound their childrento master craftsmen for years of service. The entertainment trade was no excep-tion. Diamond’s father granted Barnum “power of attorney” over his 16-year-oldson’s engagements in 1839. Barnum also assumed control of the “orphan vaga-bond” Frank Lynch, a 14-year-old jig-dancer who, contrary to his designation,had a living father. Public officials and guardians of the poor routinely signed run-aways and half-orphans into contracts. In 1840, Diamond was bound again toBarnum by Joseph W. Harrison, a Catherine-street publisher appointed thedancer’s guardian by a New York surrogate court.24

The management of child performers resembled “halfway” apprenticeships inother industries. Employers provided young dancers with work in return for a pit-tance to live on, and lawfully commanded their profits until they reached maturi-ty. This arrangement benefited most street dancers, whose income wasintermittent at best, but it caused resentment in performers who made large sumsfor their employers. Bareback rider John Glenroy, whose father apprenticed himto circus equestrian George Cadwalader at “seven years four months old,” latercomplained: “I never received the sum of Fifty Dollars from the whole of my earn-ings, [Cadwalader] appropriating all to himself.” Circus and stage entertainersgenerally earned from $3 and $12 per week, wages comparable to those of manyskilled manual laborers. Popular “Negro dancers” earned from $10 to $25 perweek. However, it is doubtful Barnum’s apprentices earned that much. Not untilDiamond ran away and negotiated his own salary did he join blackface thespianThomas Dartmouth Rice (the original “Jim Crow”) as the two “exceptions, whoreceived $50 each per week,” while Lynch, who had absconded earlier, upped hissalary by rejoining Barnum as “an opposition ‘Diamond’.”25




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Almost every boy dancer moved up the professional ranks working for circus-es. During the first half of the nineteenth century, dozens of troupes—rangingfrom single exhibits to large equestrian companies—provided cheap entertain-ment in public gardens, militia grounds, theaters, museums, saloons, and canvas-covered stands erected in vacant lots. Landing in frontier towns and southerncities, these itinerant performers circulated tunes and steps developed in north-eastern regions and carried away local styles formed wherever whites and blacksworked or lived in close proximity. At Welsh’s Broadway Circus in 1839, MasterDiamond performed alongside acrobats, clowns, contortionists, vaulters, mimes,and eight other “Negro dancers and musicians.” Billed as “The very beau ideal ofa little Long Island darkie,” he leaped from the sawdust onto a springboard afterthe horses and riders galloped from the ring and astonished audiences with his“UNHEARD-OF, OUTLANDISH and INIMITABLE LICKS.” Circus dancersworked solo and in combination, performed sketches with actors and musicianscalled “Extravaganzas,” and held matches and “trials of skill.” Like other “Negroplayers,” jig dancers excelled in amusing antics, but their steps were taken more

Figure 4. “MAS.T MARKS, THE CELEBRATED DANCER.” Detail from the cover ofEthiopian Melodies of White’s Serenaders (New York, 1849), Sheet Music–Negro Minstrels.Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.




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seriously. An 1843 reviewer of the Park Olympic Circus recommended “to Mr.Hoyt the propriety of remaining in the back ground and silent while John[Diamond] is dancing. His buffoonery is not needed at those times, though it iswell enough at others.”26

Circus audiences understood that competitive “Negro dancing” was an art ofmixed heritage. “About 1842 John Diamond came with a circus” to Nashville, re-called James Thomas, an ex-slave barber turned Tennessee businessman. “Towardthe close of the performance a platform was brought out and Diamond, [who]came in black, asked the Master in the band to play ‘Camptown Hornpipe’ orsome other dance. He would walk around the board, then jump on it, and dancein a manner as though he would pick it up with his feet, jump-off, again walkaround, and say something nigger like and dance again. The people thought thatthe best part of the show.” Sitting in the stands with Thomas were Irish immi-grants and East Coast slaves (carried inland by the canal and cotton booms) whorecognized the dancer’s moves. In Ireland, “sometimes a door was taken off itshinges and laid down on the middle of the floor, and there the performer exhibit-ed his strength and agility,” noted a folklorist writing in 1867. “First, however, he‘circumnavigated’ the floor twice, in opposite directions” to signal a challenge.Replicating these moves, African-American dancers brought shingles to marketsquares and Juba walked around before starting his exhibitions, thereby turningtheir steps into what Diamond called “purely American” jigs, the product of Irishand African-American mixing.27

Managers of legitimate theaters presented popular circus and dance-houseacts between the plays to encourage audiences to identify their skills and interestswith those of the theater. The “Sailor’s hornpipe” was a mainstay of earlynineteenth-century circuses and playhouses, as were seamen on leave who flockedto dockside shows. Performed on stage by men and women in hard shoes, sailor’shornpipes were distinguished by costumes and gestures found in the racially andethnically mixed maritime world. But they were soon surpassed by the “CampTown hornpipe” and other competitive “Negro jigs.”28

“Negro jigs” gave Antebellum audiences a sense of importance, as theywatched and judged experts performing dances they felt were their own. Before1849, when class resentment and anti-British sentiment sparked a riot at theAstor Place Opera House, most theaters seated all sorts. Fashionable patronslounged in box seats, upper working- and middle-class men dominated the pit,and poor white and black folk filled the third tier. James Caldwell sat “Freecolored People” and “Colored Servants” with “a pass from their owners” on theright hand third tier of his theaters in New Orleans and Mobile; John Tyron setapart “Places . . . for colored persons” at his New York and Boston amphitheatres;and several Philadelphia managers turned the third tier of their playhouses into a“colored gallery.” Gallery tickets cost from 6 ¼ to 50 cents, with 12 ½ cents (oneshilling) most common. Theaters catering specifically to the “middling and lowerclasses,” mingled together white, black, and mulatto sailors, newsboys, shopkeep-ers, laundresses, mechanics, “and other people of that kidney.”29

For these raucous men and women, the primary function of “Negro jigs” wasnot to demonstrate African-American inferiority. Challenge dancers blacked upto mock the tastes of highborn viewers and elevate those of the low. In his 1841show at New Theatre in Mobile, Alabama, Master Diamond parodied genteelculture in a blackface burlesque of contemporary operatic ballet, then challenged




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“any person” present to compete with him on stage in a trial of skill at Negrodancing (Figure 5). Jig dancers also turned regional steps into professional dancesthat could be gauged and appreciated by local audiences (and admired by others).To “give a more perfect delineation of the negro character” at theaters in NewOrleans, Diamond paid black levee workers to teach him their moves, reportedthe New York Sporting Whip in 1843. Master Juba blacked-up too, before whirlingthrough his “wonderful complications” of the “Virginny Breakdown,” “AlabamaKick-up,” “Tennessee Double-shuffle,” and “Louisiana Toe-and-Heel.” That washow “Negro dancers” filled the gallery seats from Saint Louis to Toronto. Theyput vernacular culture on top.30

Challenge dancing was ideal entr’acte variety, a real crowd pleaser. Its appealstemmed in part from what Pierre Bourdieu calls “imaginary participation basedon past experience of real practice.” In other words, challenge dancing’s first

Figure 5. “Dis is de step what troubles Fanny Elssler,” says Master (John) Diamond,mocking renowned Viennese danseuse Fanny Ellsler, who toured the United States in1840–41. Diamond burlesqued Ellsler’s “Grand Trial Dance” from the operatic ballet LaBayadere in a sketch he called “The Black Bayadere.” He also casts himself as the best“white person” at Negro dancing. Detail from New Theatre playbill, Mobile, February 22,1841, Folder-New Theatre, Box-OS Posters, Harvard Theatre Collection, HoughtonLibrary, Harvard University.




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audiences were made up primarily of people who danced “Negro jigs” themselves.The excitement was “great and glorious” at an 1843 match dance between “Milesand Daniels for $50 a side,” confirmed a Franklin Theatre review: “women as well[as] male bipeds enjoyed the sport with a relish keen and delightful.” Some the-aters increased attendance by offering female patrons special seating on challengedancing nights. Others announced high stakes challenges between well-known“Negro dancers.” When Diamond and R. W. Pelham faced off for $500 atChatham Theatre on February 13, 1840, “the house was so crowded that a friendof ours could not obtain sight of the stage,” reported an enthusiastic Spirit of theTimes correspondent. Most venues staged their matches at the end of the night toattract patrons leaving other theaters and dance-houses. They also pitted localheroes against professionals. After the play on March 9, 1840, Philadelphia’sAmerican Theatre matched “Mr. Hoffman, A Native Fireman” in a “Grand trialof skill at NEGRO DANCING” with Master Diamond and Jim Sanford.31

Some patrons criticized legitimate theaters that “sullied” their boards with“the rude and uncouth dancing of a Diamond or a Pierce.” But they agreed it wasgood for business. “This boy’s abilities are certainly of a very remarkable andamusing character, although we should like them better anywhere else but on theregular stage,” noted the New Orleans Times Picayune. “Still, Diamond has sus-tained himself as a card, and will no doubt secure a bumper.” During hard times,theaters often depended on patrons who came specifically to see the entr’actedancers. The play produced at Philadelphia’s American Theatre in the winter of1839–40, “with all its beautiful scenery and dresses, failed,” recalled managerFrancis Wemyss, “. . . although to see Master Diamond and Sanford, [“my pit cus-tomers”] did once honour me with their presence, to the amount of sevenhundred and four tickets.”32

Theater managers quickly realized that an extraordinary challenge dancerwould attract more than working-class audiences. In September 1840, Barnumtook Master Diamond on a tour of the West and South, arriving in New Orleansearly January 1841 without an engagement but expecting to secure one at thecity’s “‘temple’ of the legitimate,” St. Charles Theatre. In the meantime, he ar-ranged performances for Diamond at a rival theater. “Mr. Barnum waited on uswith his boy,” recalled Noah Ludlow, manager of the New American, “and pro-posed that we should engage him to dance for a few nights between the plays andfarces, saying, as an inducement, that he would draw a gallery audience for us, andwould not be displeasing to other portions of the house. . . . and the result waswhat Mr. Barnum said it would be.”33 Diamond filled the New American’s seatsand within a fortnight was dancing challenges on the St. Charles stage.

Fashionable Footwork: Catering to the Middle Class

The introduction of challenge dancers to legitimate theaters was indicativeof the increased marketing of working-class culture to middle-class audiences.Leaving Philadelphia in early January 1843, Welsh & Mann’s circus joined forceswith Rockwell & Stone’s troupe at New York’s Park Theatre, another strongholdof legitimacy. They billed their formidable company as the first ever “refinedand genteel circus,” which “fashionable families” could “attend with propriety,and without loss of caste.” Top attraction, according to the Herald, was “thenegro dancing, in which the original, veritable, simon-pure, and inimitable John




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Diamond took a part.”34 Watching jig-dancing in particular commercial venuescould be a class-defining activity.

As circuses claimed gentility, dance-houses blossomed into “garden saloons.”Owned and managed by small-business men (and patrolled by “an efficientPolice”), these more lavish drinking places offered people with middle-class aspi-rations a cool and spacious alternative to local taverns during the summermonths. For “One Shilling” admission, saloons at New York’s Vauxhall Garden,Philadelphia’s McArran’s Garden, Brooklyn’s Military Garden, and Boston’sBoylston Garden presented “a variety of performances, including singing,dancing, Yankee stories, etc.” Dance matches at garden saloons were prearrangedand well advertised, with performers and patrons separated by the stage. For hisown “benefit night” in July 1845, Mr. De Lare, manager of Vauxhall saloon, chal-lenged “Master Thomas Tenser, from Troy” to “dance a Grand Match Dancewith Jerry Bryant for $1000, the Audience to be the Judges.”35 By limiting specta-tors to judging the competition, saloon managers replaced spontaneous dancingand betting with activities that directed funds to the house.

Genteel circuses and garden saloons presented a pleasing option to peoplewho enjoyed competitive jig dancing but no longer felt comfortable mixing withAfrican-Americans or poor whites. They simultaneously drained working-classcommunities of important financial resources by relocating popular leisure con-sumption outside local neighborhoods. As theater historian T. Allston Brown putit in 1912: “Every night was Vauxhall Garden crowded to witness Diamond’santics by anxious spectators . . . inveigled into an excitement which formerlycould have been conjured up at the old Haymarket by the production of half ascore of thoroughbred darkies, eager to dance . . . [for] the paltry trophy of a stringof eels.”36

Blackface musicians looking to market their talents attached themselves tojig dancers who moved easily between high- and lowbrow venues and paydays.Among “the tribe of Negro singers, dancers, and players,” the dancers are “the fa-vorites,” announced the Whip in 1843. “[H]e who can cut, shuffle, and attitudan-ize with the greatest facility is reckoned the best fellow and pockets the mostmoney.” That same year, the “Virginia Minstrels” (self-designated originators ofblackface minstrelsy) played together for the first time at a saloon adjacent thePark Theatre “in conjunction with the jig-dancer John Diamond.” This combina-tion diverted from the theater “a certain class of its patrons” and forced RufusWelsh, whose circus was playing there, “to engage them on their own terms.”According to legend, Diamond did not join the troupe, “as both Pelham andBrower were dancers, and would brook no opposition.” Actually, Diamond wasalready dancing for Welsh. African-American businessman John Thomas placedjig dancers at the center of the evolution of minstrelsy. When Diamond first cameto Nashville in about 1842, recalled Thomas, he danced to the circus band.“When he came again, he had a fiddler in back to sit on the ring along the side[of] the board. They soon added a banjo player, then tamborine, in a few yearsthey had formed troupes.”37

Blackface minstrel companies multiplied rapidly between 1843 and 1860,transforming their profession from circus and dance-house acts to full-lengthshows in their own theaters. Exhibitions of challenge dancers’ prizewinning stepswere a regular part of minstrelsy programs.38 “Without the champion jig dancerthe minstrel show was a ship without a rudder,” insisted performer-manager Frank




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Dumont. Minstrelsy likewise provided local performers with an entrée into com-mercial markets. Around 1838, ballad-singer E. P. Christy married GeorgeHarrington’s mother and organized a troupe to perform in her Buffalo saloon withyoung Harrington and Sliter as the nucleus. A few years later, he organized“Christy’s Minstrels” with Harrington (George N. Christy) as his championdancer.39

Challenge dancers took advantage of the situation, moving from one troupeto another, traveling west and abroad with touring companies, and dancingmatches and tournaments on the side. Some competitive dancers worked as“all-round” or “general” dancers, others performed chiefly as “jig, reel, and trialdancers.” A few tried organizing their own companies. Two of three Irish brotherswho formed the successful “Bryant’s Minstrels” (Jerry, Dan and Neil O’Brien fromTroy, New York) began as challenge dancers. Others moved between managerialand performance positions. Sliter worked as champion dancer for about ten com-panies, co-managed minstrel troupes with colleagues, and took “Dick Sliter’sEmpire Minstrels” on the road.40

By the late 1850s, blackface minstrelsy was a growth industry. To court thebroadest possible audience, some minstrel troupes replaced real competition withscripted parody. A set piece entitled “CHALLENGE DANCE” was performednightly by Jerry and Dan Bryant in 1857 and by several companies thereafter. Thecharacters, played by “two speaking Dancers,” embodied challenge dancing’sBlack-Irish origins: “Ill-Count McGinnis (a Hibernian Darkie)” is headed to aball in a local hall, where a silver cup will be awarded to the best dancer, when hemeets “Farmyard Sam (an Ethiopian Exquisite),” who challenges him to a matchfor ten dollars a side. The humorous bits of dancing are blocked out in the stagedirections, but it is up to the dancers to create the drama by making the jiggingconvincing. At the climax of the sketch, the script simply says: “new steps intro-duced.”41 Those new steps placated working-class spectators who knew good chal-lenge dancing when they saw it, while the contest’s counterfeit nature madewatching it acceptable entertainment for middle-class audiences.

Dancing With Disapproval: Reforming the Sport

As challenge dancing evolved into theater entertainment, its amateur practi-tioners came under attack. Women were the first casualties. Following the 1820stemperance movement, licensing laws began diminishing the number of tavernsand groggeries that provided a place for families and neighbors to socialize. Thecreation of business districts further eroded the social life of lower-class neighbor-hoods, as did ordinances prohibiting dancing in public. These laws pusheddancing into more commercialized saloons that catered to male customers andindividual drinkers.42 Women were not formally barred from these places, butfemale proprietors became less common and female patrons more vulnerable.What developed was a male-oriented drinking culture that spawned male-onlycompetitive dancing.

Women’s challenge dancing was also curtailed by white and blackProtestants who condemned dancing in the 1830s when waltzing, which requiredcouples to embrace, rose to popularity. While recognizing its healthful nature,Christian moralists equated the physical pleasure derived from dancing withsexual temptation. Middle-class African Americans who lived or worshipped in




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lower-class neighborhoods disagreed over the American Tract Society’s denuncia-tion of dancing. Some people declared it a non-issue compared to slavery; othersclaimed it reinforced degrading racial stereotypes. Looking back in 1869, HarrietBeecher Stowe could not recall when “the idea of the sinfulness of dancing arose”and appealed to her readers to remember a time, not long ago, when every townin New England held “dancing assemblies” to which “all the decorous, respectableold church members,” including the minister and local black Christians “broughttheir children.” She pictured her grandmother “red and resplendent” at the end ofa lively set asking, “Why shouldn’t I dance?”43 The question would have beenrhetorical at the time, but in 1869 it was daring. Middle-class consensus was thatwomen (white and black) were to wear the skirts of pious respectability. If theyimbibed, danced, competed with the men, or fraternized with the other race, theydisplayed “lower-class” morality.

The popular press reinforced these bourgeois convictions even as it gavevoice to urban working-class interests. Penny papers inevitably tied interracialdancing to illegal acts. To stir up fears of “amalgamation” in 1840, the EveningTattler reported on a police raid at a scandalous “gambling house” where men,women, and children “of all sizes and colors” were entertaining themselves eating,drinking, singing, and jig dancing. “Flash” papers targeting “sporting men” fea-tured stories about famous trollops who danced jigging matches on the streetsamong mixed-race crowds, or performed “a sort of Johnny Diamond and Jubastyle of dancing” at fancy balls.44 Men of all ages and classes invaded neighbor-hood dance-houses and newly commercialized saloons, deeming any women re-maining in them sexually available. Coupled with Christian respectability, thissporting community represented the other leg in the pants of middle-classmanhood. It distinguished itself by making immoral the working-class entertain-ments it embraced. It also finished the conversion of challenge dancing from amixed gender to a masculine sport, little different than boxing or horse racing.

“Man and Money Ready”: Competition and Social Class

Making challenges and winning matches turned social dancers into profes-sionals and professionals into champions. “There were a lot of jig-dancers in thosedays,” an enthusiast recollected about the 1840s, “Inyard, Wooly Moon, JackDiamond and others.” Henry Manning advertised his skills in New York’sMorning Herald in July 1840: “Whereas some interlopers and boasters have, inorder to get an engagement, bragged that they could beat any man in America ina Sailor’s Hornpipe, I now challenge one or all of them to meet me in public, anddance a hornpipe for a sum of $100 to $300.” The Bowery’s Ruthven Jones chal-lenged Diamond to a match at Knickerbocker Theatre for $10 a side in June1844. That same year newcomer Joe Brown challenged circus dancer Master(Earl) Pierce to a match in Albany.45 Pierce won, but afterwards Brown joinedthe circle of competitors. Juba entered the ranks by challenging Diamond.

While not yet covered by the national press, William Henry Lane wasalready a talented dancer with a growing reputation when Dickens gave him inter-national exposure in 1842. After American Notes came out, curious “youngbloods,” missionaries, and journalists sought out “Almacks” to get a peek at “Boz’sJuba.” A correspondent for the Whip who arrived early on December 31 passedthe time by maligning the character of a light-skinned mulatto woman he saw




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dancing there, until Juba entered. “[A] purse was soon raised, when he took hisstation upon the floor, and we never saw such dancing before. . . . Talk aboutyour Diamonds,” he crowed, “why they are no comparison to the dancing we wit-nessed there.” Within a month a match was made between Juba and Diamond.Juba lost, but afterwards he joined Diamond as the boast and pride of the circle.46

To instigate a match, a dancer or his friends made a challenge and specifiedthe terms, which another dancer either accepted or countered. On July 8, 1844the New York Herald announced a “GREAT PUBLIC CONTEST” between “theOriginal JOHN DIAMOND” and “the Colored Boy JUBA” for a $200 wager atthe Bowery Amphitheatre. According to the article, “the friends of Juba” chal-lenged “the world” to produce his superior in the art of breakdown dancing for$100. That challenge was “accepted by the friends of Diamond” (who alsowagered $100) and the match set for Monday evening when they will “meet andDance three Jigs, Two Reels, and the Camptown Hornpipe. Five judges havebeen selected for their ability and knowledge of the Art, so that a fair decisionwill be made. Each dancer will select his own Violin and the victory will bedecided by the best time and the greatest number of steps.”47

These terms would have been familiar to anyone who danced. Jigs, reels, andhornpipes were the tune changes in a set dance. Each dancer brought his ownfiddler because, as everyone knew, a dancer’s speed and accuracy depended on themusician’s skill at anticipating his moves. The “ability and knowledge” of thejudges meant that they were dancers themselves. The Bowery Amphitheatre,which offered everyone a fair view of the stage, was “expressly hired” for thatnight because the audience took part in the match by closely watching thedancers’ steps, cheering and applauding their favorite, and assessing the judges’pick. There was no post-dance coverage of the 1844 match, but according to sub-sequent playbills Juba won. After that he performed at Charlie White’s Melodeon(a minstrel theater that frequently held dancing tournaments), traveled withvarious blackface troupes, and assumed the title “King of All Dancers.”48

Dancers were recognized athletes; champion dancers claimed royalty byvirtue of their physical prowess. “For a long time,” claimed Dumont, “the jigdancer was monarch of all he surveyed. He posed about attired in a velvet coat,flashy, flowing necktie, glazed cap, tight pants, patent leather shoes with oldcopper pennies fastened to the heels.” Champion dancers “thought a heap” ofthemselves. Pride in physicality was an identity-defining trait among working-class artisans, and that pride was exaggerated as the division of labor degradedmanual work. Even as they entertained and made money for the middle class,challenge dancers remained working-class. After all, they supported themselveswith their bodies and sweat. Joe Miles was “one of the roughest chaps, but with asoft heart under his hard hide,” recalled one aficionado. “He was quite a jig-dancer, and very proud of his legs; as well he might be, for those legs of his madehim his livin’.”49

To emphasize the athletic component of their art, challenge dancersadopted pugilistic lingo and the trappings of prizefighting into their matches.Contestants “toed the mark,” demonstrated their “science,” and engaged in“bouts” of dancing. They also wore outfits associated with boxing, gave them-selves stage names and regional affiliations (“the Albany Fat Boy”), held trialsand exhibition tours ( just as boxers traveled around reenacting their prize bouts),competed in tournaments, and won belts (Figure 6). As in boxing, it was skill,




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body type, and style that made two dancers a good match-up. Some dancersinvited any “man or boy” to batter the boards; others specified age and size.Buffalo’s Johnny West, a featherweight who called himself “Young America,”challenged “any boy of 90 lbs in New York, to dance me a 40 stepped Jig, ontime, for any amount they wish to stake.”50

But the connection between dancing and boxing went deeper than appear-ances. On the night Diamond and Juba faced off at Pete Williams’ tavern, the cel-ebrated bare-knuckle boxer Bill “Liverhead” Harrington came in to look at thematch and “was warmly greeted by the boys.” Dancers performed for fighters’ ben-efits and boxers danced at sparring exhibitions. Black pugilist and “gymnast,”Aaron Molineaux danced his “great Decanter Dance” for J. E. Taylor’s benefit inBoston in 1854. Johnny Golden clog danced with Trotter Ned of Bradford aftersparring at his own benefit in New York in 1858 and Cade and Ike Laws held atrial dance at the Philadelphia Sparring Association’s benefit. These connectionsconferred honor and manliness on the sport of challenge dancing.51

Figure 6. American-born prizefighter Tom Molineaux (1784–1818) wearing the boxingattire copied by challenge dancers: knee breeches, white stockings, and black pumps. Adancer’s blackened face might also have been construed as a boxing reference, sinceAmerica’s first two champion prizefighters, Molineaux and his trainer Bill Richmond (b1765), were African Americans. See Kevin R. Smith, Black Genesis: The History of theBlack Prizefighter 1760–1870 (iUniverse, 2003), 17–30.




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A cohort of dancers, newspaper editors, and theater managers promotedchallenge dancing as both an amateur and professional sport in the 1850s.52 TheNew York Clipper, an entertainment weekly founded in 1853 by editor FrankQueen, regularly covered games and sports along with theatrical news. Dancematches were not as numerous as pedestrian races or prizefights in The Clipper, butQueen treated them exactly like other sports. He published challenges made byindividual dancers and their sponsors in the “Challenges” section (or, if interna-tional, in “Sports Abroad”), publicized and covered important matches, andrecorded results. Queen also “held the stakes” for competitors, answered readers’queries regarding dancers, printed letters disputing results, and denounced“humbug” or fixed dance matches.

Juba was the only black jig-dancer to receive public acclaim in the 1840s, butchallenges made in The Clipper in the 1850s (and the numbers of blackpercussive-dancers who emerged after the Civil War) suggest that AfricanAmericans were active participants in amateur circles. In answer to a challengemade by Dick Sliter in August 1856, Mickey Warren announced that he would“dance a match with Sliter for from $100 to $500: the dances to be a jig, straightreel, Irish reel and Irish jig. What says Sliter?” Sliter replied with a counter chal-lenge: “he would dance [Warren] or any other man a straight jig for from $500 to$1000, or will dance any white man (not excepting Mickey Warren) four danceshe (Dick Sliter) can name.” A “straight jig” referred to a sequence of eight-barsteps danced in 6/8 time with each foot.53 Ireland’s famine emigrants would havebeen familiar with that dance, and all the dances Warren named. They mighteven have danced them in rural competitions back home. So Sliter raised thestakes substantially, to keep poor immigrants off the floor, then announced thathe would dance any other man, i.e. white or black, a straight (Irish) jig. But hewould only dance any white man the dances “he can name.” Those dances wouldhave been “Negro jigs” particular to Sliter, probably his “original rattlesnake jig”or “Tar River dance.” This stipulation tells us that black jig dancers still competedwith whites (albeit covertly due to the dangers posed by the 1850 Fugitive SlaveAct), and there were champions among them who could have raised the moneyand beat him.

Amateur practice assured that champion dancers still made their names inthe heat and sweat immediacy of local matches. Its spontaneity can be detected inwritten challenges made in response to oral boasting: “As Mr. James Gibney hasbeen talking about his dancing, and seems unable to get a match, I, RichardCallaghan, am prepared to dance him for $25, in two weeks after the first deposit,either jig or reel time, to either violin or banjo. Man and money ready at theCanadian House, corner of York and Queen streets, Toronto.” Dancers represent-ing an array of North American cities made challenges in The Clipper, which sug-gests the community of jig dancers was large and dispersed. Callahan’s challengeto Gibney resulted in a Canadian tournament in which “four young men” dancedin front of 1200 people for a silver medal: “Callahan coming off victorious.”54

Presumably, such events represent a fraction of the face-offs actually taking placein the 1850s.

At amateur and professional matches, the dancers performed in turn anddecisions were based on “time, style, execution and the numerical advantage insteps.” Either the audience decided the winner or judges were chosen, one byeach competitor and one referee, to watch and listen to the dancers, count steps




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and mark down any rhythmic mistakes. Dick Sliter, who won a champion boutagainst Joe Brown in Chicago in 1856, danced “nineteen minutes, making onehundred and twenty-three movements, and breaking time at two differentperiods.” Occasionally a panel was placed between the dancers to keep the secondcontestant from memorizing and incorporating the first dancer’s steps into his per-formance for a numerical win. Champions like Dick Carroll (Master Marks) andEdward S. Gray (“the Boston Rattler”) “took pattern” from Juba by imitating alltheir opponents’ prize steps before demonstrating their own.55 Bets among ama-teurs ranged from $10 to $200 (about $5000 in today’s money), but professionaldancers wagered as much as $1000. Dancers also competed for medals, violins,silver goblets and other valuable prizes.

In these high stakes environments, banjoists and fiddlers became contestantsin their own right. When Tommy Peel danced a “great match” against Carroll in1862, the musicians’ names were announced as part of the competition (Peel andFrank Converse vs. Carroll and William Ross) (Figure 7). Musicians were key to awin but could also be blamed for a dancer’s loss. Spectators at the Sliter-Brownmatch contested the decision on account of the music: “We agree, without re-flecting upon the judges, with the eighteen hundred who witnessed the contest,that there was but one brake made, and that by Mr. Brown, in consequence of themusician misunderstanding him.” Bettors also challenged decisions when thecrowd got so loud a dancer could not hear the musician or vice versa.56

Traditional practices annoyed some promoters, a few of whom attempted tostandardize the rules. Matthew Kershaw, a recent immigrant who sponsored amatch in Philadelphia in 1857, insisted that “articles” be written down andsigned by the dancers, and the steps danced “scientifically,” meaning every stephad to be danced “twice over, right and left, exactly alike, taps and time.” He alsoobjected to “Negro jigs” and audience participation in the judging: “these figurers,or random dancers, or negro imitators” ought “not to challenge the world for$1000 for the sake of fame,” he complained, for how will they decide who haswon? “I suppose by the show of hands,” filling the room with their friends, “sothat no others can get in; then the wager is won before they begin.”57 Kershaw’smatch, danced by Edward Chew and Michael Hanson, was planned and executedby the book. But in the end it turned out to be a “humbug.”

Because dance matches drew large paying crowds they were tempting to fake.No dancer ever admitted to throwing a match, but, like boxers and other athletes,dancers occasionally agreed to compete for a portion of the ticket receipts, nomatter who won. All contests were shows, got up to draw in spectators who wouldspend money on entrance fees, drinks, food, or bets. What made a “trial” a“match” were the risks taken by the performers and those who supported them.Match dances with pretend judges, where “not one dollar is ever bet or staked,”were “mere speculations,” explained Frank Queen.58 Nobody lost money so longas the show drew a big enough crowd to cover expenses. But the gains and lossesgenerated by humbug matches were not just financial.

Challenge dancing’s pinnacle as a betting sport occurred at a time when thevote elevated white working-class men politically and industrialists launchedtheir campaign to re-educate them socially. Betting sports flouted industrial moresby uniting men of different classes and races around activities that wasted timeand money.59 They also aided middle-class control by accommodating friendly in-teraction among men of unequal status in a stratified society. The pretense of




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equality permeated male sporting culture, but attending sports events, drinking,gambling, and visiting brothels did not make all men alike. African Americans re-mained on the periphery of integrated gatherings, and a class distinction persistedbetween those who participated in sports and those who merely watched.

As in other businesses, the separation of managerial and physical labordivided the entertainment industry. When Barnum took Master Diamond to theSouth in 1840, he was accused of faking wagers and hiring “supernumeraries” tolose to his star. These pretend contests yielded Barnum considerable money, butafter dancing a number of them Diamond ran away. The economic relationshipbetween Barnum and “his boy” had social consequences for each party. As amanager, Barnum never felt any qualms about presenting “gag” competitions

Figure 7. Banjoist Frank Converse was jig-dancer Tommy Peel’s musician of choice.Thomas O’Reilly made his stage debut in 1853 at age 12. Around 1855 he was adopted byminstrel-singer Matt Peel (Flannery) and thereafter performed as Tommy Peel. He died inMelbourne, Australia, July 31, 1869 at age 28. Minstrel Show Collection, Box 4, Folder41, Performing Arts Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.




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because, as he said, “the public appears disposed to be amused even while they areconscious of being deceived.” To him they simply represented an agreement withthe talent and the house that “put money in my purse.”60 When they went well,they also strengthened his business and personal connections to other managersand theater owners.

But such deceptions had a different effect on dancers’ lives and relationships.Young Diamond, who had no choice but to dance whatever Barnum liked, maynot have minded humbug matches at first. After all, thousands of people came tosee him perform and still got the pleasure of judging his dancing. But after thematch he would have been hard-pressed if he wished to celebrate with his peers inthe traditional manner. If the wagers were fakes, Diamond would not have hadcash enough to treat his “friends,” a customary demonstration of solidarity amongIrish Americans. At the same time, his sense of “fair play” (and of the costs oflosing for other workers) would have kept him from taking side bets to pad hismeager wages. What was missing from Barnum’s matches was the dancer’s chanceto make his name and money on his own terms. So Diamond responded to his sit-uation in character with his ethnicity and class: he overdrew “the money duehim,” grumbled Barnum, and disappeared into the city’s “haunts of dissipation &vice.”61

Most competitive dancers held fast to the distinction between wagers andwages. In December 1857, champion jig-dancer Mickey Warren indignantlypulled out of a tournament after the organizer asked if he “would be satisfied totake $20” in lieu of the publicized prize—a gold watch. Bets and prizes representedmore than income to challenge dancers. They measured the contenders’ socialand cultural worth. To accept a challenge and make a match, each dancer depos-ited a “forfeit” or portion of the “stakes” in advance. If a contestant failed to puthis money down, he was pronounced a braggart: “All persons interested willplease take notice that Pete Lane offered to dance against Mickey Warren or anyother jig dancer for a stipulated sum,” announced The Clipper. “Warren accepted,and left a forfeit with us two or three weeks ago. Lane promised to ‘sock up,’ butfailed in the attempt. He now ‘takes a back seat,’ previous to being read out of thecircle.”62

Although everyone did it, challenge dancers despised others who pro-nounced themselves “champion” of all dancers. Matches became championshipsby offering hefty wagers or title belts. Various cities claimed champions but thenational title was a contentious issue. Like boxers, dancers received belts paid forby local subscribers. Sliter claimed the national title in December 1850, after “thecitizens of Cincinnati” awarded him a belt “with the word ‘Champion’ engravedthereon in silver letters.” Diamond contested that claim in 1853. The assertionthat Sliter “was awarded a ‘CHAMPION BELT’ in Cincinnati after a trial of skillof five consecutive nights, with the undersigned is a paltry evasion of truth,” hewrote to the Baltimore Sun. “I danced with Mr. Sliter in Cincinnati while he hadan Ethiopian Company, five evenings, for which I received FIFTY DOLLARS. NOALLUSION WAS EVER MADE TO A BELT, OR DID WE EVER DANCEFOR ONE.” Diamond was given a “Splendid Silver” champion belt by theIndependent Regular’s Association of Baltimore (the fire company’s “minutemen”) in June 1854. Joe Brown won Sliter’s belt in 1856, then lost it in a ship-wreck en route to South Africa, where he exhibited his “Silver Belt Jig” forChristy’s Minstrels. Jig-dancer Hank Mason defended Diamond’s claim in a letter




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to The Clipper in 1858: “the only man who ever wore a champion belt in thiscountry for jig and reel dancing was Master John Diamond, who is now deceased;unless others purchased them for themselves privately.”63

Such trash talk was the lingua franca of masculine sports; it also disguised theimportance of stake money to a dancer’s livelihood. The 1857 financial panicstimulated a flurry of amateur and professional jigging contests in the UnitedStates and England. But Pete Lane never did sock-up his $25 after acceptingWarren’s challenge in May 1858. He died in June of “consumption” at age 25,leaving a wife behind. Like most forms of working-class labor, jig dancing wasphysically demanding, often causing joint pain and injury. It also required repeat-ed exposure to cold sweat, hunger, exhaustion, and tobacco smoke. Nevertheless,

Figure 8. “JUBA,” AT VAUXHALL GARDENS. William Henry Lane, in blackface,dancing for a white, mostly female audience at Royal Vauxhall Gardens in London,England. Illustrated London News, August 5, 1848, p. 3. Harvard Theatre Collection,Houghton Library, Harvard University.




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the poverty, alcoholism, and early deaths of dancers were often blamed on badcharacter. Diamond may have gotten drunk to dull the sensations of his own“gnawing” illness. But rather than succumbing to the rigors of his profession, hedied, according to minstrelsy’s chroniclers, of “dissipation and riotous living.”64

Unlike blackface singers and actors, competitive dancers rarely made it to respect-able old age.

The mixed company kept by challenge dancers also lowered their class stand-ing. Master Juba became “a great card” in England, lionized by the press until hemarried a white woman. After that, according to unsubstantiated rumor, he “liveda fast life, dissipated freely, and died miserably during the season of 1851–2” at age26. Marriages between working-class blacks and whites were not unheard of inEngland or America at that time. White female laborers commonly interactedwith black men on the job and patronized the same taverns and shops.65 Theywere also avid spectators of challenge dancing at theaters and garden saloons(Figure 8). However, most later accounts erase all women except prostitutes fromthese scenes.

Women did dance jigs on stage in the 1840s and 1850s. A few like EmmaInce and Fanny Deering even traveled with circus and minstrel companies. Butnot until the 1860s did Mattie Clare, Lida White, Lizzie Lagrange, Millie Arnold,Fayette Welsh, and others start billing themselves as champion dancers(Figure 9). Encouraged by Civil War labor shortages to pursue her desired profes-sion, in June 1862 Julia Morgan, “the Boston Pet,” challenged “T. J. Peel,R. M. Carroll, Hank Mason, E. Bowers, ‘or any other man,’ or female in thecountry” to a dancing match for a $500 stake. Naomi Porter, “the New YorkFavorite” accepted Morgan’s challenge, followed by “Kate Stanton, theInvincible,” who took on all comers. In 1864 Stanton owned “Champion MusicHall,” a subterranean saloon in New York City—complete with target gallery, so-ciable black bartender, and “waiter girls”—where she vanquished her male cus-tomers at jigging and shooting contests, wearing a blue silk dress. Women’schallenge dancing careers were cut short after the war, however. As popular the-aters revamped to attract new patrons, eroticized “leg-work” beat-out jig dancing’sphysicality as the preferred act of predominately male middle-class audiences.66

. . .For a time, the dancer’s dance was more telling than the dancer’s color—whetherwhite, black, or blacked-up. During the 1840s and 1850s, competitive jig dancingevolved from a lower-class entertainment to a commercial enterprise that offeredfun, and the tantalizing possibilities of fame and fortune, to a variety of perform-ers, spectators, and promoters. But the familiar processes of urbanization, industri-alization, and commercialization that brought together this lively mix of men,women, and children kept shifting the ground on which they danced. As chal-lenge dancing was sold to wider audiences, social divisions deepened. Femalecompetitors vacated dance floors, male dancers linked arms with gambling bache-lors, black champions retreated to segregated locales, and blackface minstrels bur-lesqued their former instructors and partners in less vigorous song-and-danceroutines. These revisions hardened into tradition after the Civil War, obscuringchallenge dancing’s more egalitarian origins and reducing working-class champi-ons like Diamond and Juba to alcoholic has-beens, done in by the ravages ofchanging markets and tastes.




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EndnotesThe author would like to thank Vincent DiGirolamo, Cara Masten DiGirolamo, BrookeLarson, and William Mahar for their close readings of multiple drafts. For advice,references, and insights, she thanks Tom Bender, Nicholas Carolan, Patricia Cline Cohen,Robin Cohen, Jay Cook, Daniel Dawson, Gail Day, Colin Dunne, Louis Gerteis, WilliamChester Jordan, Rip Lhamon, Kerby Miller, Janis Mimura, Mick Moloney, MoniquePatenaude, Alan Rice, Donna Rilling, Daniel T. Rodgers, and Robert Stam. For researchassistance, time, and funding, she thanks the Irish Traditional Music Archive in Dublin,Harvard Theatre Collection, American Philosophical Society, American AntiquarianSociety, Harry Ransom Center, Shelby Cullom Davis Center, SBU/United University

Figure 9. “Kitty O’Neil, Celebrated Jig Dancer,” poses in her champion dancer costumec. 1877. Kathleen O’Neil first appeared on the stage as a child in 1852, singing anddancing to Irish tunes. To accommodate the preference for “leg-work” after the war,O’Neil wore short pants, embellished with lace and fringe. But rather than donning theflesh-colored tights of female chorus dancers, which suggested nudity, she sports the whitestockings, black pumps, and long-sleeved blouse of her male cohort, which signified skill.Card Photograph Collection, Box 67, Performing Arts Collection, Harry Ransom Center,University of Texas at Austin.




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Professions, and Stony Brook University History Department. Address correspondence toApril F. Masten, Department of History, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794-4348. Email: [email protected].

1. “Excitement among the Sporting community – Match between John Diamond andJuba,” New York Sporting Whip, Jan. 28, 1843, 4; “The Negro Minstrels of the Nights GoneBy . . . Barnum’s Museum Against Pete Williams’ Dance-House,” Clips Pers (Bryant,Dan), Harvard Theatre Collection (HTC); Edward Le Roy Rice, Monarchs of Minstrelsyfrom “Daddy” Rice to Date (New York, 1911), 40–41, 48.

2.New York Clipper, Sept. 19, 1857, 174.

3. Col. T. Allston Brown, “Early History of Negro Minstrelsy: Its Rise and Progress in theUnited States,” New York Clipper, Feb. 24, 1912, 5; P. T. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs(New York, 1869), 91; Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (London,1842), 101.

4. Marion H. Winter, “Juba and American Minstrelsy” in Chronicles of the American Dance(New York, 1948), 39, 42, 47; Mark Knowles, Tap Roots: The Early History of Tap Dancing(London, 2002), 86–92; Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the AmericanWorking Class (New York, 1995), 112–16.

5. For challenge dancing outside minstrelsy, see Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: EarlyBlackface Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge, 1997), 8–10, 86–88, 138; Knowles, TapRoots, 51, 65–67; W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow toHip Hop (Cambridge, 1998), 1–17, 22–25, 32–34; Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance:The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York, 1968), 44–48.

6. Hans Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (Norman, OK, 1977),96; James W. Cook, “Master Juba, The King of All Dancers! A Story of Stardom andStruggle From the Dawn of the Transatlantic Culture Industry,” Discourses in Dance 3.2(London, 2006): 12–15; Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New YorkNeighborhood (New York, 2001), 172–175; William J. Mahar, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask:Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture (Urbana, 1998), 19, 38;Jacqui Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance(Urbana, 1996), 41–42, 54, 57.

7. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American WorkingClass (London, 1991), 104, 117–8; Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York,1995), 148–157; Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politicsand Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (London, 1990), 176.

8. William J. Mahar, “Black English in Early Blackface Minstrelsy,” American Quarterly37.2 (Summer, 1985): 285; Lhamon, Raising Cain, 42–44.

9. Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 37, 46; Knowles, Tap Roots, 86–92; Constance ValisHill, Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History (Oxford, 2009), 12.

10. On the merging of African and Irish dance, see April Masten, “The Challenge Dance:Black-Irish Exchange in Antebellum America,” in Cultures in Motion, ed. DanielT. Rodgers, et al. (Princeton, 2013); Lynn Fauley Emery, Black Dance From 1619 to Today(Princeton, 1988), 87–101; Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 35–42.

11. The Autobiography of Charles Biddle (Philadelphia, 1883), 314–5; Thomas F. DeVoe,The Market Book . . . (New York, 1862), I:265; Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in theSeaboard Slave States, 1853–1854 (New York, 1904), I:48–49; Leslie Harris, In the Shadowof Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago, 2003), 7, 72–76;Leonard P. Curry, The Free Black in Urban America, 1800–1850 (Chicago, 1981), 76–78;Anbinder, Five Points, 23–7, 197, 263; Roediger,Wages of Whiteness, 102–3.




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12. John F. Szwed and Morton Marks, “The Afro-American Transformation of EuropeanSet Dances and Dance Suites,” Dance Research Journal 20/1 (Summer 1988): 29–36; “TheCake Dance,” Béaloideas: The Journal of the Folklore of Ireland Society XI.1–11 (1941): 127;Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, 1971), 269; Dancing Between TwoWorlds: Kongo-Angola Culture and the Americas, ed. Robert Farris Thompson and C. DanielDawson (New York, 1991), 8.

13. Dickens, American Notes, 101–102; Helen Brennan, The Story of Irish Dance (Lanham,2001), 90, 167; Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 14–15.

14. Anbinder, Five Points, 191; “The Devil Recruits in Staten Island,” Flash, Oct. 31, 1841,3; George G. Foster, “Philadelphia in Slices,” New York Tribune, Nov. 17, 1848, reprintedin Philadelphia Magazine of History and Biography 93 (1969): 40; “Negro Minstrels of theNights Gone By”; Carol Groneman Pernicone, The “Bloody Ould Sixth,” A Social Analysisof a New York City Working-Class Community in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ph.D diss.,University of Rochester, 1973), 197–198.

15. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789–1860 (Chicago,1987), 14–15; Dickens, American Notes, 101; The Miscellaneous Works of N. P. Willis(New York, 1847), 8; Roy Rosenzweig, “The Rise of the Saloon,” in Rethinking PopularCulture, ed. Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson (Berkeley, 1991), 127–29; Cockrell,Demons of Disorder, 84–89.

16. George G. Foster,New York By Gas-Light (New York, 1850), 74.

17. Shane White, “The Death of James Johnson,” American Quarterly 51.4 (December1999): 754; Lhamon, Raising Cain, 42; Foster, “Philadelphia in Slices,” 40 and New YorkBy Gas-Light, 73–4; Ned Buntline, Mysteries and Miseries of New York: a story of real life(New York, 1849), 82.

18. “What Judgment Shall We Dread, Doing NoWrong?” Flash, June 23, 1842, 2.

19. Although free urban blacks were the object of casual insult and assault by whites ofevery class, “the incidence of racial violence actually declined in the 1840s as the tide ofimmigration drew stronger.” Curry, The Free Black in Urban America, 110–111, 306 n. 34;“Negro Minstrels of the Nights Gone By.”

20. Ann Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, & Bucket Shops: Gambling in 19th-CenturyAmerica (Ithaca, 1990), 40–41.

21. “The Negro Minstrels of the Nights Gone By.”

22. “Dancing for Eels,” Flash, Nov. 12, 1842, 1; Barton Atkins, Modern Antiquities:Comprising Sketches of Early Buffalo and the Great Lakes . . . (New York, 1898), 43–44;DeVoe,Market Book, 344.

23. Statistical View of the United States (Washington, 1854), 57; Cockrell, Demons ofDisorder, 104; Rice, Monarchs of Minstrelsy, 19, 35; “Negro Minstrels and Their Dances,”New York Herald, August 11, 1895, Section Four, Folders-(Undigested) Clippings, Box 1,Playbills-Subjects, HTC; Atkins,Modern Antiquities, 44.

24. Dennis Clark, “Babes in Bondage: Indentured Irish Children in Philadelphia in theNineteenth Century,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 101.4 (Oct., 1977):478–9; Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 80; Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, 51; FrankKeeler, Vagabond Adventures (Boston, 1870), 123, 125; P. T. Barnum letter, New York,January 21, 1840, in A. H. Saxon, Selected Letters of P. T. Barnum (New York, 1983), 10.

25. Ins and Outs of Circus Life or Forty-Two Years Travel of John H. Glenroy, BarebackRider . . . , comp. Stephen Stanley Stanford (Boston, 1885), 6, 10, 70; Brown, “EarlyHistory of Negro Minstrelsy,” February 24, 1912, 5; Cornelius Mathews, Pen and Ink




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Panorama of New York (New York, 1853), 48–49; M. B. Leavitt, Fifty Years in TheatricalManagement (New York, 1912), 37–38.

26. Rice, Monarchs of Minstrelsy, 12, 19, 22, 36, 40, 80, 188; “Broadway Circus,” New YorkHerald, Jan. 20, 1840, 2; “Amphitheatre and North American Circus,” Albany EveningJournal, Dec. 27, 1844, 3; New York Sporting Whip, Jan. 28, 1843, 5.

27. From Tennessee Slave to St. Louis Entrepreneur: The Autobiography of James Thomas, ed.Loren Schweninger (Columbia, 1984), 48–49; Frederick Law Olmsted, The CottonKingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American South (New York,1862), II:287; Patrick Kennedy, The Banks of the Boro (London, 1867), 147; CatherineE. Foley, Step Dancing in Ireland: Culture and History (Surrey, 2013), 97; DeVoe, MarketBook, 344–5; “Holliday Street Theatre,” Baltimore Sun, May 24–26, 1853, 3.

28. “Camp Town” was the name of racially mixed city suburbs that began as soldiers’ campsduring the Revolutionary War. J. S. Bratton, “Dancing a Hornpipe in Fetters,” Folk MusicJournal 6.1 (1990): 69, 66, 70–71; National Theatre, June 5, 1840, Folder-DiamondMinstrels and Master Diamond, Box 5 (Co-Du), Playbills-Companies/Minstrels, HTC.

29. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy inAmerica (Cambridge, 1988), 64–68; Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class:Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (New York, 1989), 144–46; NewTheatre playbill, Feb. 22, 1841, Folder-New Theatre, Box-OS Posters, HTC; “BoweryAmphitheatre,” New York Herald, Feb. 1, 1843, 3; Arthur Herman Wilson, A History of thePhiladelphia Theatre, 1835 to 1855 (New York, 1968), 25, 35; Nathaniel Hawthorne, TheAmerican Notebooks (Columbus, 1972), 501–4.

30. Eric Lott, “‘The Seeming Counterfeit’: Racial Politics and Early Blackface Minstrelsy,”American Quarterly 43.2 (June, 1991): 224–25; “Negro Dancers,” New York Sporting Whip,Jan. 21, 1843, 2; Illustrated London Review, May 4, 1848, 3.

31. Pierre Bourdieu, “Sport and Social Class” in Mukerji and Schudson, 363; “Franklin,”Whip, Jan. 21, 1843, 3; “Melodeon,” Boston Evening Transcript, Nov. 29, 1844, 3; Christy’sMinstrels playbill, April 18, 1844, Folder-Christy’s Minstrels, Box 4 (Cha-Co),Playbills-Companies/Minstrels, HTC; Rosemarie K. Bank, Theatre Culture in America,1825–1860 (Cambridge, 1997), 135; “Chatham Theatre,” New York Herald, Feb. 8–13,1840, 3; “Things Theatrical,” Spirit of the Times, February 15, 1840, 600; Philadelphia PublicLedger, March 9, 1840, 3.

32. “The Drama,” Whip, Dec. 24, 1842, 3; “American,” New Orleans Times Picayune, Dec.2, 1841, 2; Frances Courtney Wemyss, Theatrical biography: or, The life of an actor andmanager . . . (Glasgow, 1848), 259.

33. Sol. Smith, Theatrical Management for Thirty Years with Anecdotal Sketches (New York,1868), 155; Noah Miller Ludlow, Dramatic Life as I Found It (St. Louis, 1880), 533.

34. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 25–26; Richard Butsch, “Bowery B’hoys and MatineeLadies: The Re-Gendering of Nineteenth-Century American Theater Audiences,”American Quarterly 46.3 (Sept., 1994): 375–377; “Park Theatre Circus,” New York Herald,Jan. 23, 1843, 2.

35. “Vauxhall Garden Saloon, Bowery,” New York Herald, July 14, 1845, 3; GeorgeC. D. Odell, Annals of the New York Stage (New York, 1928), IV:434, 494; Rosenzweig,“The Rise of the Saloon,” 129, 133; Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, 91; New York Herald,July 11–14, 1845, 3.

36. Brown, “Early History of Negro Minstrelsy,” Feb. 24, 1912, 5.




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37. “Excitement among the Sporting community,” 4; “Pioneers of Minstrelsy,” New YorkClipper, [c. 1880], Negro Minstrelsy in New York, Volume II, HTC; “Park Theatre Circus,” 2;From Tennessee Slave to St. Louis Entrepreneur, 48–49.

38. Christy Minstrels, April 18, 1844, Folder-Christy’s Minstrels, Box 4 (Cha-Co), GeorgiaChampions playbills (1845–1849), Folder-Juba, Mins., Huntley’s Minstrels, n.d.,Folder-Hunt & Co. Minstrels Huntley’s, Box 7 (H-K), Sanford’s Opera House, Oct. 20,1855, Folder-Bower, Frank, Bryants Minstrels, Dec. 15, 1857, Folder-Bryant, Dan, Box 2(Br-By), Playbills-Companies/Minstrels, HTC; “Maryland Institute,” Baltimore Sun, Dec.19, 1854, 3; “Buckley’s Serenaders,” New York Herald, Jan. 9 1858, 7; “Washington Hall,”Lowell Daily Citizen, Oct. 27, 1859, 2.

39. Dumont, “The Golden Days of Minstrelsy”; Rice, Monarchs, 19; Atkins, ModernAntiquities, 43; Brown, “Early History of Negro Minstrelsy,” Feb. 17, 1912, 13.

40. Rice, Monarchs, 86, 34, 50, 68, 188; Brown, “Early History of Negro Minstrelsy,” April27, 1912, 6.

41. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 92; New York Clipper, October 17, 1857, 207; playbills inFolder-Bryant, Dan, Folder-Bryant’s Minstrels (A), Folder-Bunker Hill Minstrels, Box 2(Br-By), Folder-Sable Harmonists, Box 4 (Cha-Co), Playbills-Companies/Minstrels, HTC;Henry Llewellyn Williams, Challenge Dance (London and New York, 18–), 38-46.

42. Rosenzweig, “The Rise of the Saloon,” 127–129.

43. “Tendency of the Waltz,” Advocate of Moral Reform, Nov. 15, 1838; “Dancing as anExercise,” The North Star, July 21, 1848; “The Western Reserve Synod,” Frederick Douglass’Paper, Sept. 25, 1851; Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 78, 120–121; Harriet BeecherStowe,Oldtown Folks (New York, 1911), 403–404.

44. Evening Tattler, Jan. 25, 1840, quoted in Cockrell, 86; Patricia Cline Cohen, et al., TheFlash Press, Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York (Chicago, 2008), 1; “Sketches ofCharacters,” Whip and Satirist, June 25, 1842, 1; “The Davenport Assembly,” New YorkSporting Whip, Feb. 4, 1843, 5.

45. “Negro Minstrels of the Nights Gone By”; Nathan, Dan Emmett, 97; Odell, Annals,V:64; “Joe Brown’s Minstrels,” June 15, 1912, Folders-(Undigested) Clippings, Box 1,Playbills-Subjects, HTC.

46. “Our Eleventh Walk About Town,” New York Sporting Whip, Dec. 31, 1842, 2;“Excitement among the Sporting community,” 4; Rice,Monarchs, 48, 40.

47. “Great Public Contest,” New York Herald, July 8, 1844, reprinted in “Black Musiciansand Early Ethiopian Minstrelsy,” The Black Perspective in Music 3.1 (Spring, 1975): 82.

48. April Masten, “Partners in Time: Dancers, Musicians and Negro Jigs in EarlyAmerica,” Common-place 13.2 (January, 2013), http://www.common-place.org/vol-13/no-02/masten/; Brown, “Early History of Negro Minstrelsy,” Feb. 29, 1912, 5; GeorgiaChampions playbill, June 18 [1845], Folder-Juba, Mins., Box 7 (H-K),Playbills-Companies/Minstrels, HTC.

49. Dumont, “The Golden Days of Minstrelsy”; “Negro Minstrels of the Nights Gone By.”

50. The New York Clipper, May 15, 1858, 31 and October 24, 1857, 215.

51. Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, 1986),41, 45–46, 142–43; “Negro Minstrels of the Nights Gone By”; “Pop Grime’s Benefit,”April 8, 1854, 3, “Benefit of Mr. J. E. Taylor,” June 24, 1854, 3, “Sparring and Dancing,”Jan. 20, 1858, 323, and “Philadelphia Sparring Association,” New York Clipper, Feb. 6,1858, 331.




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52. Ed. James, Jig, Clog, and Breakdown Dancing Made Easy with Sketches of Noted JigDancers (New York, 1873), 2.

53.New York Clipper, Aug. 30, 1856, 151 and Oct. 4, 1856, 186; Foley, Step Dancing, 233.

54. “Dancing,” New York Clipper, March 28, 1857, 387; “Dancing Match,” New YorkClipper, Sept. 12, 1857, 163.

55. Leavitt, Fifty Years, 33; “Match Dance between Sliter and Brown,” New York Clipper,Aug. 23 1856, 139; Georgia Champions playbill, June 18 [1845], Folder-Juba, Mins., Box 7(H-K), Playbills–Companies/Minstrels, HTC; “Negro Minstrels and Their Dances”;Brown, “Early History of Negro Minstrelsy,” April 20, 1912, 2.

56. Brown, “Early History of Negro Minstrelsy,” May 25, 1912; “The Match Dance–Slitervs. Brown,” New York Clipper, Sept. 6, 1856, 156; “How It Was Done–The Late DancingMatch,” New York Clipper, June 6, 1857, 52.

57. “Challenge to Dancers,”New York Clipper, Feb. 21 1857, 346.

58. “How It Was Done,” 52.

59. Stuart Hall, “Deconstructing Popular Culture as Political” in Major Problems inAmerican Popular Culture, ed. Kathleen Franz and Susan Smulyan (Boston, 2012), 9–10;Steven Riess, City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports(Chicago, 1989), 15.

60. Daily Picayune, Feb. 9–10, 1841, 2; Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum(Boston, 1973), 25; Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, 10.

61. Rosenzweig, “The Rise of the Saloon,” 143; “The Cake Dance,” 131; James W. Cook,“Dancing across the Color Line,” Common-Place 4.1 (October 2003), Part IV, http://www.common-place.org/vol-04/no-01/cook/; P. T. Barnum to Messrs. Fogg & Stickney, Ludlow& Smith, Mobile, February 27, 1841, in Saxon, Selected Letters of P. T. Barnum, 10.

62. At early boxing matches, wagers were literally placed in a sock or purse and hung fromthe stakes that marked the ring. “To the Editor of the Clipper,” New York Clipper, Jan. 2,1858, 294;New York Clipper, June 12, 1858, 63.

63. Brown, “Early History of Negro Minstrelsy,” April 27, 1912, 6; “No Subterfuge but Toethe Mark,” Baltimore Sun, June 27, 1853, 2; “Local Matters,” Baltimore Sun, Jan. 16, 1856,1; Rice, 74;New York Clipper, May 8, 1858, 23.

64. For contests in England, see “DANCING,” Bell’s Life in London, various issues, 1856–1858; New York Clipper, June 19, 1858, 71; Baltimore Sun, June 16, 1858, 4; “JohnDiamond,” New York Clipper, Oct. 17, 1857, 202 and “Death of John Diamond,” Nov. 7,1857, 226; Rice,Monarchs, 41.

65. Cook, “Master Juba,” 18–19; Rice, Monarchs, 48; Brown, “Early History of NegroMinstrelsy,” Feb. 24, 1912, 5; Graham Hodges, “‘Desirable Companions and Lovers’: Irishand African Americans in the Sixth Ward, 1830–1870” in The New York Irish, ed. RonaldH. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher (Baltimore, 1996), 107–124.

66. Odell, Annals, V:296, 227; PB 1860 Boston (28) 5761.F.25a, PB Phi Metro 1863 (27)5761.F.846, PB Phi Coates 1864 (27) 5761.F.52, Philadelphia Playbills, Rare Books &Other Texts, Library Company of Philadelphia; Baltimore Sun, March 20, 1866, 2; RhettKrause, “Step Dancing on the Boston Stage: 1841–1869,” Country Dance and Song 22(June, 1992): 7, 14; New York Clipper, January 16, 1864; Peter G. Buckley, “The Culture of‘Leg-Work’: The Transformation of Burlesque after the Civil War,” in The MythmakingFrame of Mind: Social Imagination and American Culture, ed. James Gilbert (Berkeley,1993), 118–19.




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Challenge Dancing in Antebellum America: Sporting Men, Vulgar Women, and Blacked-Up Boys

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Transcript of Challenge Dancing in Antebellum America: Sporting Men, Vulgar Women, and Blacked-Up Boys