The “Negro Touch” and the “Yankee Trick”: William Sidney Mount and the Art of Race and Ethnicity

Abstract

This article addresses the role of antebellum American genre painter William Sidney Mount (1807–1868) in developing and examining the image of the Yankee as a racialized figure in American art and culture. Mount's popular works helped create the image of the Yankee—the farmer in Long Island Farmer Husking Corn (1833–1834) even appeared on money throughout the young country. As his career evolved, Mount, who also regularly included African Americans in his works, began to investigate the interconnections between black and white identities and even to propose the possibility that blacks could themselves become Yankees.

Keywords:

• Riot
• Minstrelsy
• Theater
• Music
• Reform
• Dance

Notes

1. “National Academy,” New York Herald, 17 May 1836.

2. John J. Gallagher, The Battle of Brooklyn, 1776 (New York: Sarpedon, 1995), 1–3.

3. Ralph Clymer Hawkins, A Hawkins Geneology (New York: privately printed, 1939), 16–26.

4. Martin A. Berger, Sight Unseen: Whiteness and American Visual Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 11–28.

5. John A. Muscalus, Popularity of Wm. S. Mount's Art Work on Paper Money, 1838–1865 (Bridgeport, PA: Historical Paper Money Research Institute, 1965), 1–3.

6. Herman Melville to Peter Gaansevort, 31 December 1837, in Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press; Chicago, IL: Newberry Library, 1993), 8.

7. Mount to Charles Lanman, 7 January 1850, in Alfred Frankenstein, ed., William Sidney Mount (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1975), 123.

8. Frankenstein, William Sidney Mount, 160–161, 262–265.

9. Vera Brodsky Lawrence, “Micah Hawkins, the Pied Piper of Catherine Slip,” New York Historical Society Quarterly 62 (1978): 138–165; Peter G. Buckley, “The Place to Make an Artist Work: Micah Hawkins and William Sidney Mount in New York City,” in Catching the Tune: Music and William Sidney Mount, ed. Janice Gray Armstrong (Stony Brook, NY: Museums at Stony Brook, 1984), 22–39.

10. Lawrence, “Micah Hawkins,” 140–147; Mount to C. M. Cady, 24 November 1853, in Frankenstein, William Sidney Mount, 91–93.

11. Oscar Wegelin, “Micah Hawkins and the Saw‐Mill,” Magazine of History 32, extra number, no. 127 (1927): 153–157.

12. David Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled: American Theater and Culture, 1800–1850 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 187; Francis Hodge, Yankee Theatre: The Image of America on the Stage, 1825–1850 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1964), 41–77.

13. “The Fine Arts,” Knickerbocker 5 (June 1835): 554–555; “The Fine Arts—Exhibition of the National Academy of Design,” New York Mirror 12 (30 May 1835): 379; “The Fine Arts—Exhibition of the National Academy of Design,” New York Mirror 12 (27 June 1835): 414; “Fine Arts in America. National Academy of Design,” American Monthly Magazine 5 (July 1835): 393. The description, “truly American,” appears in “The National Academy of Design,” New York Mirror 14 (17 June 1837): 407.

14. “Fine Arts in America. National Academy of Design,” 393.

15. Undated clipping, Setauket Scrapbook, 3. The scrapbook is a collection of clippings assembled by Mount and held at the Long Island Museum of Art, History & Carriages, Stony Brook, New York.

16. “The Fine Arts—Exhibition of the National Academy of Design,” 30 May 1835, 379; “Fine Arts in America. National Academy of Design,” 393; “The Fine Arts—Exhibition of the National Academy of Design,” New York Mirror 13 (25 June 1836): 414. For a discussion of how far Mount was from rejecting European tradition, see Donald D. Keyes, “The Sources for William Sidney Mount's Earliest Genre Paintings,” Art Quarterly 32, no. 3 (1969): 259–268; Catherine Hoover, “The Influence of David Wilkie's Prints on the Genre Paintings of William Sidney Mount,” American Art Journal 13, no. 3 (Summer 1981): 4–33.

17. Thomas F. De Voe, The Market Book (New York: Published by the author, 1862), 341–370; Lawrence, “Micah Hawkins,” 143–147.

18. De Voe, Market Book, 344–345; also see Thomas Longworth, Longworth's American Almanac, New York Register, and City Directory (New York: Published by the author, 1820).

19. For one such history, see W. T. Lhamon, Jr., Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).

20. T. Allston Brown, “The Origin of Minstrelsy,” in Fun in Black, ed. Charles H. Day (New York: Robert M. DeWitt, 1874), 5–7; Hans Nathan, Dan Emmitt and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962), 35; Charles Townsend, Negro Minstrels with End Men's Jokes, Gags, Speeches, etc. (Chicago, IL: T.S. Denison, 1891; repr. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Literature House, 1969); Lawrence, “Micah Hawkins,” 150–152.

21. Mount, in Frankenstein, William Sidney Mount, 16; Benjamin F. Thompson, History of Long Island, 3rd ed., vol. 2 (Port Washington, NY: Ira J. Friedman, 1962), 340; Lawrence, “Micah Hawkins,” 150–160.

22. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 52.

23. Mount to C. M. Cady, 24 November 1853, in Frankenstein, William Sidney Mount, 91–93.

24. W. S. Mount Music Collection at the Long Island Museum of Art, History & Carriages; Kate W. Strong, True Tales from the Early Days of Long Island (Bay Shore, NY: Long Island Forum, 1940), 3.

25. Mount's patent letter deposited at United States Patent Office, 1 June 1852, in Frankenstein, William Sidney Mount, 88; Mount to James A. Whitehorne, 23 September 1852 and 25 September 1852, in Frankenstein, William Sidney Mount, 90–91.

26. Robert Nelson Mount to Mount, 17 January 1841, in Frankenstein, William Sidney Mount, 60–61.

27. Mount to Andrew Hood, 13 November 1863, in Frankenstein, William Sidney Mount, 377.

28. Mount generally referred to the painting as “Bar‐room Scene,” though he also used “Walking the Crack” and “Walking the Line.” The painting has since come to be known as “The Breakdown”—a term referring to a kind of dance derivative of Irish and African cultures and popularized on the blackface minstrel stage.

29. See “The Fine Arts—Exhibition of the National Academy of Design,” New York Mirror 12 (13 June 1835): 395.

30. See “Fine Arts in America. National Academy of Design,” 393.

31. Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 128–130; Tyrone Power, Impressions of America During the Years 1833, 1834, and 1835, vol. 1 (London: n.p., 1836), 61.

32. Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled, 186–189.

33. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), 133–163; Grimsted, Melodrama Unveiled, 186–189; Daniels, Coming to America, 128–130.

34. Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 199.

35. Lhamon, Raising Cain, 17–28.

36. “The Fine Arts,” June 1835, 554–555.

37. Bertram Wyatt‐Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War against Slavery (Cleveland, OH: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1969), 72; Leonard L. Richards, “Gentlemen of Good Standing”: Anti‐Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 115–116; Lhamon, Raising Cain, 30–31; Denise Herd, “The Paradox of Temperance: Blacks and the Alcohol Question in Nineteenth‐Century America,” in Drinking: Behavior and Belief in Modern History, ed. Susanna Barrows and Robin Room (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1991), 354–375; Ronald G. Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830 (New York: Norton, 1978), 81.

38. Richards, “Gentlemen of Good Standing,” 115–116; Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 258–266; Linda K. Kerber, “Abolitionists and Amalgamators: The New York City Race Riots of 1834,” New York History 48 (January 1967): 28–39.

39. Mark Edward Lender and James Kirby Martin, Drinking in America: A History (New York: Macmillan, 1982), 46–48.

40. Richards, “Gentlemen of Good Standing,” 118.

41. John Barclay Jentz, “Artisans, Evangelicals, and the City: A Social History of Labor and Abolitionist Movements in New York City” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 1977), 249.

42. Lott, Love and Theft, 131–132; Richards, “Gentlemen of Good Standing,” 117–118; Rosemarie K. Bank, Theatre Culture in America, 1826–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 156–157.

43. Richards, “Gentlemen of Good Standing,” 151–152.

44. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 133–163; Lott, Love and Theft, 142; Jentz, “Artisans, Evangelicals, and the City,” 246.

45. Bernard F. Reilly, Jr., “Translation and Transformation: The Prints after William Sidney Mount,” in William Sidney Mount: Painter of American Life, ed. Deborah J. Johnson (New York: American Federation of Arts, 1998), 141.

46. Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth‐Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 28; Carl Wittke, Tambo and Bones: A History of the American Minstrel Stage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1930), 52–56.

47. Undated clipping, Setauket Scrapbook, 23.

48. Mount to Wilhelm Schaus, 9 September 1852, in Frankenstein, William Sidney Mount, 164.

49. Undated clipping, Setauket Scrapbook, 31–33.