Early American Theatre

American James Henry Hackett transformed the Yankee character in 1828 from an abusive slave trader into a celebration of capitalism and shrewd bargaining. Reading Hackett’s 1828 Jonathan in England play as a response to English comedian Charles Mathews’s depiction demonstrates how Hackett’s proto-capitalist Yankee was forged through negotiating the contradiction between American proclaimed principle of liberty simultaneous with the practice of slavery. The timing of Hackett’s play in 1828 after slavery was abolished in New York enabled Hackett to emphasize that some American states shared abolitionist values with England.

This paper retraces the liminal societal conditions in which the wartime ballad “Backside Albany” came to instantiate the blackface minstrel tradition in America. Through tracing the animating effects of a trickster spirit in the post-Revolutionary American song tradition, it argues for the importance of recognising the dangers inherent to persisting liminal conditions for a trickster takeover and with it an escalation of mimetic rivalry. As a result new avenues for understanding the deterioration of relations between Irish and African Americans in the antebellum American social drama are offered.