Tremors and Whirlpools

In times of war, physical space may appear to shed its customary character of permanence and become pliable. Places that in times of peace signify safety and security might during war become scenes of danger, even death. Federal emancipation policy accentuated this tendency, as civilians and soldiers alike employed space to new ends, often polar opposites of its earlier uses. When freedom-seeking refugees gained the protection of the U.S. Army, they benefited from a cordon of safety that transcended the fixed space of military camps to encompass armies on the move as well as at rest. The winds of change swept through plantation big-houses, fields, and workshops, where enslaved women and men moved more slowly and spoke less respectfully than usual. The bodies of water that lapped on the shores and cut through the interior of the Confederacy proved especially amenable to loosening the bonds of slavery. Nonetheless, black sailors in the U.S. Navy discovered that constraints as well as opportunities accompanied this particular route to freedom.

Minstrelization and Nationhood

This essay argues that the long-acknowledged first example of U.S. blackface minstrelsy, a song entitled “Backside Albany” or “The Siege of Plattsburgh,” was crucially shaped by its war of 1812 origins. By extension, the essay also argues that blackface minstrelsy can then be understood as one of the effects of the War of 1812. The song, “sung in the character of a black sailor” in Albany and New York in 1814 and 1815, responds to the importance of black sailors and African Americans more generally in the war and in contemporary politics. It tries to contain black assertiveness, but in doing so affirms the centrality of African Americans and their struggles in that moment. I argue that the racializing and demeaning work of blackface minstrelsy must thus be seen as a response to free black politics and to antislavery, and earlier than scholars have contended