Me wish to de Lord me was dead!
Whate'er's to be done,
Poor black must run.
Mungo here, Mungo dere,
Mungo everywhere:
Above and below,
Sirrah, come; sirrah, go;
Do so, and do so,
Oh! oh!
Me wish to de Lord me was dead!
The depreciation of the race that Mungo started continued, and when in 1781 Robinson Crusoe was given as a pantomime at Drury Lane, Friday was represented as a Negro. The exact origins of Negro minstrelsy are not altogether clear; there have been many claimants, and it is interesting to note in passing that there was an "African Company" playing in New York in the early twenties, though this was probably nothing more than a small group of amateurs. Whatever may have been the beginning, it was Thomas D. Rice who brought the form to genuine popularity. In Louisville in the summer of 1828, looking from one of the back windows of a theater, he was attracted by an old and decrepit slave who did odd jobs about a livery stable. The slave's master was named Crow and he called himself Jim Crow. His right shoulder was drawn up high and his left leg was stiff at the knee, but he took his deformity lightly, singing as he worked. He had one favorite tune to which he had fitted words of his own, and at the end of each verse he made a ludicrous step which in time came to be known as "rocking the heel." His refrain consisted of the words:
Wheel about, turn about,
Do jis so,
An' ebery time I wheel about
I jump Jim Crow.
Rice, who was a clever and versatile performer, caught the air, made up like the Negro, and in the course of the next season introduced Jim Crow and his step to the stage, and so successful was he in his performance that on his first night in the part he was encored twenty times.[152] Rice had many imitators among the white comedians of the country, some of whom indeed claimed priority in opening up the new field, and along with their burlesque these men actually touched upon the possibilities of plaintive Negro melodies, which they of course capitalized. In New York late in 1842 four men—"Dan" Emmett, Frank Brower, "Billy" Whitlock, and "Dick" Pelham—practiced together with fiddle and banjo, "bones" and tambourine, and thus was born the first company, the "Virginia Minstrels," which made its formal debut in New York February 17, 1843. Its members produced in connection with their work all sorts of popular songs, one of Emmett's being "Dixie," which, introduced by Mrs. John Wood in a burlesque in New Orleans at the outbreak of the Civil War, leaped into popularity and became the war-song of the Confederacy. Companies multipled apace. "Christy's Minstrels" claimed priority to the company already mentioned, but did not actually enter upon its New York career until 1846. "Bryant's Minstrels" and Buckley's "New Orleans Serenaders" were only two others of the most popular aggregations featuring and burlesquing the Negro. In a social history of the Negro in America, however, it is important to observe in passing that already, even in burlesque, the Negro element was beginning to enthrall the popular mind. About the same time as minstrelsy also developed the habit of belittling the race by making the name of some prominent and worthy Negro a term of contempt; thus "cuffy" (corrupted from Paul Cuffe) now came into widespread use.
This was not all. It was now that the sinister crime of lynching raised its head in defiance of all law. At first used as a form of punishment for outlaws and gamblers, it soon came to be applied especially to Negroes. One was burned alive near Greenville, S.C., in 1825; in May, 1835, two were burned near Mobile for the murder of two children; and for the years between 1823 and 1860 not less than fifty-six cases of the lynching of Negroes have been ascertained, though no one will ever know how many lost their lives without leaving any record. Certainly more men were executed illegally than legally; thus of forty-six recorded murders by Negroes of owners or overseers between 1850 and 1860 twenty resulted in legal execution and twenty-six in lynching. Violent crimes against white women were not relatively any more numerous than now; but those that occurred or were attempted received swift punishment; thus of seventeen cases of rape in the ten years last mentioned Negroes were legally executed in five and lynched in twelve.[153]
Extraordinary attention was attracted by the burning in St. Louis in 1835 of a man named McIntosh, who had killed an officer who was trying to arrest him.[154] This event came in the midst of a period of great agitation, and it was for denouncing this lynching that Elijah P. Lovejoy had his printing-office destroyed in St. Louis and was forced to remove to Alton, Ill., where his press was three times destroyed and where he finally met death at the hands of a mob while trying to protect his property November 7, 1837. Judge Lawless defended the lynching and even William Ellery Channing took a compromising view. Abraham Lincoln, however, then a very young man, in an address on "The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions" at Springfield, January 27, 1837, said: "Accounts of outrages committed by mobs form the everyday news of the times. They have pervaded the country from New England to Louisiana; they are neither peculiar to the eternal snows of the former nor the burning suns of the latter; they are not the creatures of climate, neither are they confined to the slaveholding or the nonslaveholding states.... Turn to that horror-striking scene at St. Louis. A single victim only was sacrificed there. This story is very short, and is perhaps the most highly tragic of anything that has ever been witnessed in real life. A mulatto man by the name of McIntosh was seized in the street, dragged to the suburbs of the city, chained to a tree, and actually burned to death; and all within a single hour from the time he had been a free man attending to his own business and at peace with the world.... Such are the effects of mob law, and such are the scenes becoming more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and order, and the stories of which have even now grown too familiar to attract anything more than an idle remark."
All the while flagrant crimes were committed against Negro women and girls, and free men in the border states were constantly being dragged into slavery by kidnapers. Two typical cases will serve for illustration. George Jones, a respectable man of New York, was in 1836 arrested on Broadway on the pretext that he had committed assault and battery. He refused to go with his captors, for he knew that he had done nothing to warrant such a charge; but he finally yielded on the assurance of his employer that everything possible would be done for him. He was placed in the Bridewell and a few minutes afterwards taken before a magistrate, to whose satisfaction he was proved to be a slave. Thus, in less than two hours after his arrest he was hurried away by the kidnapers, whose word had been accepted as sufficient evidence, and he had not been permitted to secure a single friendly witness. Solomon Northrup, who afterwards wrote an account of his experiences, was a free man who lived in Saratoga and made his living by working about the hotels, where in the evenings he often played the violin at parties. One day two men, supposedly managers of a traveling circus company, met him and offered him good pay if he would go with them as a violinist to Washington. He consented, and some mornings afterwards awoke to find himself in a slave pen in the capital. How he got there was ever a mystery to him, but evidently he had been drugged. He was taken South and sold to a hard master, with whom he remained twelve years before he was able to effect his release.[155] In the South any free Negro who entertained a runaway might himself become a slave; thus in South Carolina in 1827 a free woman with her three children suffered this penalty because she gave succor to two homeless and fugitive children six and nine years old.