American Fun (56 page)

47.
“
gave universal Satisfaction
”: Samuel Adams,
The Writings of Samuel Adams,
ed. Harry Alonzo Cushing, vol. 1,
1764–1769
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 59–60.

48.
“
There is,” he wrote
: John Adams,
Diary and Autobiography,
1:39.

49.
“
republican monarchist
”: Richard Allen Ryerson, “John Adams, Republican Monarchist: An Inquiry into the Origins of His Constitutional Thought,” in
Empire and Nation: The American Revolution and the Atlantic World,
ed. Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 72–92.

50.
“
A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law
”:
Boston Gazette,
August 12, 1765, reprinted in John Adams,
The Political Writings of John Adams: Representative Selections
(New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1954), 18–21. Cited in David McCullough,
John Adams
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 61.

51.
“
Head
”: This and subsequent quotations in this and the following paragraph are from John Adams,
Diary and Autobiography,
1:341–42.

52.
“
parades, festivals, and shows of fireworks
”: Shipton,
Sibley’s Harvard Graduates,
431.

53.
“
Ears [were] ravished
”: John Adams, “To William Crawford,”
The Earliest Diary of John Adams,
ed. L. H. Butterfield (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 99.

54.
“
higher object
”: John Adams,
Diary and Autobiography,
1:124.

55.
“
body
,” “
harangue
,” “
constantly refused
”: Ibid., 3:290–91.

56.
“
No Mobs or Tumults
”:
Boston Gazette,
quoted in Hoerder,
Crowd Action,
151.

57.
“
Where are the damned boogers
”: All quotations in this paragraph are from
A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston, Perpetrated in the Evening of the Fifth Day of March,
1770, by Soldiers of the
29th Regiment, which with the
14th Regiment Were Then Quartered There; With Some Observations on the State of Things Prior to That Catastrophe
(1770; Williamstown, MA: Corner House Publishers, 1973), 50–63.

58.
“
Council
”: John Adams,
Diary and Autobiography,
3:293.

59.
“
by certain busy Characters
”: Ibid., 3:292.

60.
“
We have been entertained
”: John Adams,
Legal Papers of John Adams, Ser.
3, General Correspondence and Other Papers of the Adams Statesmen
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 266–69. Emphasis added to “
a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and out landish jack tarrs
.”

61.
“
Mean and Vile Condition
”: Lax and Pencak, “Knowles Riot,” 197.

62.
“
Not one extravagance
”: Cited in Conroy,
In Public Houses,
247.

63.
“
so very fat
”: Abigail Adams, quoted in McCullough,
John Adams,
64.

64.
“
Roxbury, I am told
”: Samuel Adams,
Writings,
2:241.

65.
“
Stop the Progress of Tyranny
”: Ibid., 2:238.

66.
“
spirit
”:
Tea Leaves: Being a collection of letters and documents relating to the shipment of tea to the American colonies in the year
1773, by the East India Tea Company. Now first printed from the original manuscript. With an introduction, notes, and biographical notices of the Boston Tea Party,
by Francis S. Drake (Boston: A. O. Crane, 1884), xliv. Also consulted for this account were Wesley S. Griswold,
The Night the Revolution Began: The Boston Tea Party,
1773
(Brattleboro, VT: Stephen Greene Press, 1972); Benjamin Woods Larabee,
The Boston Tea Party
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); and Peter D. G. Thomas,
Tea Party to Independence: The Third Phase of the American Revolution,
1773–1776
(Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1991).

67.
“
the sharpest, the sharpest conflicts
”:
Tea Leaves,
lix.

68.
“
he was willing to grant
”: Griswold,
The Night the Revolution Began,
91.

69.
“
Who knows how tea
”:
Tea Leaves,
lxiii.

70.
“
A mob! A mob!
,” “
This meeting can do nothing more,
”: Ibid., lxiv.

71.
“
Mohawk
”: This and subsequent quotations in this paragraph and the next are from ibid., clxiii.

72.
“
Sport; high merriment
”:
Samuel Johnson’s
Dictionary,
202.

73.
“
countryman
”:
Tea Leaves,
cxvi.

74.
“
handled pretty roughly
”: Ibid., lxx.

75.
“
speak[ing] to the British
”: Philip J. Deloria,
Playing Indian
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 32.

76.
playlike “practice” for a possible republic
: William Pencak, “Play as Prelude to Revolution: Boston, 1765–1776,” in
Riot and Revelry in Early America,
ed. Matthew Dennis et al. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 149.

77.
“
mock ceremonies
”: Wood,
Radicalism of the American Revolution,
90–91.

78.
“
In 1765 the rioters had hung effigies
”: Ray Raphael,
A People’s History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence
(New York: New Press, 2001), 46.

79.
“
blackfaced defiance of the Tea Party
”: Deloria,
Playing Indian,
32.

80.
“
the suggestion of instinct
”:
Adam Ferguson,
An Essay on the History of Civil Society
(1995; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 85.

81.
Such “natural” citizens
: Ibid., 87, 86.

82.
“
embrace the occasions of mutual opposition
”: Ibid., 25.

83.
“
national or party spirit
,” “
active and strenuous
”: Ibid., 29.

84.
“
grimace of politeness
”: Ibid., 43.

85.
“
happiness
”: Ibid., 46. How important was Ferguson’s
Essay
to
Thomas Jefferson’s “
pursuit of happiness”? Kevin J. Hayes recently states that Ferguson “would significantly shape Jefferson’s ideas concerning man’s responsibility to his fellow man,” but in no way does he substantiate this claim in
The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 113. Garry Wills goes so far as to promote Ferguson’s
Essay
as one of the “obvious places” to look when parsing “the pursuit of happiness,” but then he lets the subject drop. See Garry Wills,
Inventing America: Jefferson’s
Declaration of Independence
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 367–68. To overlook Ferguson’s influence, as have all other of the Declaration’s major interpreters, is to overlook a compelling explanation of how something so radical as the “pursuit of happiness” could ever become an inalienable right—and why this phrase would have motivated Patriots who had struggled, often
felicitously, to obtain their
own
society: the right to pursue communal happiness would not be a guarantee of private property (as Lockeans have always had it) but instead every citizen’s guarantee to enjoy the benefits of participatory democracy. For a strong argument for the materialist pursuits of individualist “happiness” to be found during the early revolutionary era, especially in the Chesapeake and Caribbean colonies, see Jack P. Greene,
Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

86.
“
If the individual owe every degree
”: Ferguson,
Essay,
59.

87.
“
the most magnificent Movement of all
”: John Adams,
Diary and Autobiography,
2:85.

88.
“
The people at the Cape,
” “
You cannot imagine the height
”: Samuel Adams,
Writings,
3:72.

89.
“
were actually a great deal of fun
”: David Waldstreicher,
In the Midst of Perpetual Fêtes: The Making of American Nationalism,
1776–1820
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 51. See also Len Travers,
Celebrating the Fourth: Independence and the Rights of Nationalism in the Early Republic
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997).

90.
“
public diversions as promote Superfluity
”: Samuel Adams to John Scollay, reprinted in Irvin,
Samuel Adams,
151.

1.
“
Ours is a light-hearted race
”: Josiah Jenson,
Truth Stranger Than Fiction: Father Henson’s Story of His Own Life. With an Introduction by Mrs. H. B. Stowe
(Boston: John P. Jewett and Company; Cleveland: Henry P. B. Jewett, 1858), 20–21. Important sources consulted for this chapter are Lawrence W. Levine,
Black Culture, Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); Roger D. Abrahams,
Singing the Master: The Emergence of African American Culture in the Plantation South
(New York: Pantheon, 1992); Sterling Stuckey,
Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); John W. Blassingame,
The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1972); Eileen Southern,
The Music of Black Americans: A History
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1971); Jean Stearns and Marshall Stearns,
Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance
(New York: Da Capo, 1994); Larry Eugene Rivers,
Slavery in Florida: Territorial Days to Emancipation
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), 162–209; Roderick A. McDonald,
The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), 50–91, 129–66; Randolph B. Campbell,
An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas,
1821–1865
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 115–90; Leslie Howard Owens,
This Species of Property: Slave Life and Culture in the Old South
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); George P. Rawick, ed.,
The American Slave: A Composite Biography,
vols. 1, 6, and 16 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1972); Julia Floyd Smith,
Slavery and Plantation Growth in Antebellum Florida,
1821–1860
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1973); Lynn Fauley Emery,
Black Dance: From
1619 to Today
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton Book Company, 1989); Dena J. Epstein,
Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977); David Eltis,
The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Eugene D. Genovese,
Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made
(1972; New York: Pantheon, 1974).

2.
“
slave in form
”: Frederick Douglass,
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself
(London: H. G. Collins, 1851), 68.

3.
“
The staid, sober, thinking and industrious ones
”: Ibid., 68–70.

4.
“
no moral religious instruction
”: Henry Bibb,
Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself with An Introduction by Lucious C. Matlack
(New York: Published by the Author, 5 Spruce Street, 1849), 21–23.

5.
“
buoyant, elastic
”: Solomon Northrup,
Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northrup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in
1841, and Rescued in
1853
(Auburn: Derby and Miller, 1853), 180–81, 218; electronic edition,
http://doc​south.unc.edu/fpn/northup/northup.html
, accessed August 5, 2012.

6.
“
slave minstrels
”: Leslie Howard Owens,
This Species of Property: Slave Life and Culture in the Old South
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 169.

7.
“
beloved violin
”: Northrup,
Twelve Years a Slave,
180–81.

8.
“
the moral, social, religious, and intellectual elevation
”: Frederick Douglass,
My Bondage and My Freedom
(1855; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 248.

9.
“
It was Christmas morning
”: Northrup,
Twelve Years a Slave,
282.

10.
“
To Federalists
”: Waldstreicher,
In the Midst of Perpetual Fêtes,
230, 231
n.
Len Travers, in his version of the rise of partisan holidays, gives a sparkling account of Philadelphia’s “Grand Federal Procession” on July 4th, 1788—a partisan take on Independence Day that was also “the largest, most lavish procession ever seen in the United States” (
Celebrating the Fourth,
71).

11.
The earliest account of an African-American holiday
: All quotes in this paragraph are from “UTOPIA, April 10 _____” (letter),
The New-York Weekly Journal: Containing the Freshest Advices, Foreign, and Domestick,
March 7, 1736, 1, cited in Shlomo Pestcoe and Greg C. Adams, “Zenger’s ‘Banger’: Contextualizing the Banjo in Early New York City, 1736,” forthcoming in a yet-untitled collection of essays from the University of Illinois Press to be edited by Robert Winans.

12.
Joseph P
.
Reidy notes
: See Joseph P. Reidy, “ ‘Negro Election Day’ & Black Community Life in New England, 1750–1860,”
Marxist Perspectives
(Fall 1978): 102–17.

13.
“
Nine-tenths of the blacks
”: James Fenimore Cooper,
Works of J. Fenimore Cooper: Oak Openings. Satanstoe. Mercedes of Castile
(New York: P. F. Collier, Publisher, 1892), 277.

14.
“
collected in thousands
”: Southern,
Music of Black Americans,
53.

15.
“
negroes patrol[led] the streets
”: “Pinkster,”
Albany Centinel,
June 17, 1803, 3–4; emphases in original.

16.
“
graceful mien
”: Absalom Aimwell, Esq., “A Pinkster Ode, for the year 1803, Most Respectfully dedicated to Carolus Africanus, Rex: Thus rendered in English; King Charles, Captain General and Commander in Chief of the Pinkster Boys” (Albany, NY: Printed Solely for the Purchasers and Others, 1803); Geraldine R. Pleat and Agnes N. Underwood, eds., “A Pinkster Ode, Albany, 1802,”
New York Folklore Quarterly
8 (Spring 1952): 31–45.

17.
“
King Charley
”: James Eights, “Pinkster Festivals in Albany,” in
Readings in Black American Music,
2nd ed., ed. Eileen Southern (1971; New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 42.

18.
“
blacks and [a] certain class of whites
,” “
biographer of devils
”: “Pinkster,”
Albany Centinel,
June 17, 1803, 3–4.

19.
“
still retained all the vigor
”: Eights, “Pinkster Festivals,” 42–45.

20.
“
most lewd and indecent gesticulations
”: “Pinkster,”
Albany Centinel,
3–4.

21.
“
[T]here, enclosed within their midst
”: Eights, “Pinkster Festivals,” 42–45.

22.
“
cultural syncretization
”: See Melville J. Herskovitz,
The Myth of the Negro Past
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1990). More recently, Claire Sponsler makes this same critical
point and reads Pinkster, through
Paul Gilroy’s transatlantic theory, as the product of a “compound interculture … a transgeographical culture without national boundaries that thrives on syncretism and lateral networks.”
Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), 49.

23.
“
subversive music makers
”: To quote Gilroy’s statement more fully: “I want to endorse the suggestion that these subversive music makers and users represent a different kind of intellectual not least because their self-identity and their practice of cultural politics remain outside the dialectic of pity and guilt which, especially among oppressed people, has so often governed the relationship between the writing elite and the masses of people who exist outside literacy.” Then he goes on to dignify the content produced by these
intellectuals—“the unrepresentable, the pre-rational, and the sublime”—while acknowledging the difficulty of reading such texts. Paul Gilroy,
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 76–77.

24.
the fun expression of free-spirited community
: If collective fun, as suggested here, is the
Pinkster Days’ most legible text—how should it be read? How
can
it be read, as speech, in an objective way that doesn’t once again project its reader’s will? How can these “intellectuals,” as Gilroy might call them, be understood? An intriguing solution comes from the philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s book
Rhythmanalysis: Time, Space, and Everyday Life
(New York: Continuum, 2004), which sets out to establish a scientific “analysis of rhythms”—“repetitive time and space”—“with practical consequences.” Several elements of Lefebvre’s theory and method combine to make it relevant to Pinkster Days. The persistent dancing and drumming and singing, performed with variation in a single setting, presented an ever-changing dynamism that at the same time had unity and positivity. Hence, as musical events where “rhythm dominates” and “supplants melody and harmony (without suppressing them),” Pinkster had what Lefebvre calls “an ethical function,” for intensely rhythmic music mirrors the body’s internal functions and uses the body as its “resource.” Lefebvre writes: “In its relation to the body, to time, to the work, [music] illustrates
real
(everyday) life. It
purifies
it in the acceptance of catharsis. Finally, and above all, it brings compensation for the miseries of everydayness, for its deficiencies and failures” (62; emphasis in original).

The dance on
Pinkster Hill, to the extent that our meager evidence allows, presents a complex illustration of everyday life that stands in highest relief alongside the partisan celebrations taking place during the same era. If these contentious Fourth of July showdowns reflect a republic characterized by “arrhythmia”—what Lefebvre calls “disturbances” to rhythm “that sooner or later become pathology”—then Pinkster reflects “the eu-rhythmic body, composed of diverse rhythms, each organ, each function, having its own” and yet coexisting in harmony. As Claire Sponsler claims, the black participants’ experience will never be known except as tendentiously reported by whites; put differently, the predominantly black revelers at the Albany Pinkster Days, like Gayatri Spivak’s theorized subaltern, will never have the chance to “speak”—unless, perhaps, we broaden our sense of speech to include expressive bodily acts, much as Spivak does in interpreting Bhubaneswari Baduri’s suicide for its political content. When we do, the clearest and most positive evidence of that experience, among all of the competing accounts of Pinkster, is in the participants’ various displays of pleasure: bodily pleasure, ironic pleasure,
rebellious pleasure, communal pleasure. See
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,
A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

25.
Albany’s Common Council passed
: See Shane White, “Pinkster: Afro-Dutch Syncretization in New York City and the Hudson Valley,”
Journal of American Folklore
102, no. 403 (January–March 1989): 68–75.

26.
“
The language of the slave’s speech and song
”: Owens,
This Species of Property,
175.

27.
The storytellers themselves
: Blassingame,
The Slave Community,
57–59.

28.
In a rustic opening in the Georgia pines
: Fictional composite of a storytelling session drawn from a variety of works. The story itself was collected in Georgia by Emma Backus and cited in Levine,
Black Culture, Black Consciousness,
110–11. Other sources include Joel Chandler Harris,
Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings,
in
The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus,
compiled by Richard Chase (1955; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983); Charles C. Jones Jr.,
Negro Myths from the Georgia Coast, Told in the Vernacular
(Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1888); J. Mason Brewer,
American Negro Folklore
(Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968).

29.
“
We started shuckin’ corn
”: Roderick A. McDonald,
The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1993), 112. Quilting parties had a similar appeal among plantation women, as did the “Coonjine” among river workers—the latter being “a combination of song and dance connected with freight handling on the steamboats” (Emery,
Black Dance,
146). Deborah Gray White’s landmark work on female slave culture emphasizes the relevance of work, fun, and community building in the “double duty” practices of laundry and quilting, arguing that a “saving grace … was that women got a chance to interact with each other”: “On a Sedalia County, Missouri, plantation women looked forward to doing laundry on Saturday afternoons because, as Mary Frances Webb explained, they ‘would get to talk and spend the day together.’ Quiltings, referred to by former slaves as female ‘frolics’ and ‘parties,’ were especially convivial. South Carolinian Sallie Paul explained that ‘when dey would get together den, dey would be glad to get together.’ ”
Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South,
rev. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1985), 122.

30.
“
extra swig of liquor
”: Emery,
Black Dance,
112.

31.
“
usually the most original and amusing
”: Letitia Burwell, quoted in Abrahams,
Singing the Master,
the essential work on the culture of
corn shuckings, 92.