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Samuel Woodworth's musical play, The Forest Rose (1825), was one of the most successful American dramas on stage before Uncle Tom's Cabin, and, according to Richard Moody, the country's first "hit."(1) For at least forty years, The Forest Rose held the boards and provided a number of actors with a star vehicle for its Yankee part, Jonathan Ploughboy. So popular did it prove, in fact, that a run of over 100 performances in London was recorded with the famed American Yankee actor, Joshua Silsbee.(2) Based on a type exploited successfully by Royall Tyler in The Contrast (1787) and used in other works, Jonathan in Woodworth's play would seem to be constructed of the same elements that make Tyler's Jonathan a loveable character: naivete, country dialect, ineptitude, and a good heart. The stage success of The Forest Rose helped revitalize the male Yankee type, and the play's continued appearance in theaters coincided with the reign of Yankee characters in England and the United States.(3)
Unfortunately, however, some change has occurred between Tyler and Woodworth--or some latent tendencies brought forward--that reorients the familiar features into what seems now a less lovable character than Colonel Manly's waiter in The Contrast. Jonathan Ploughboy is an inept lover, but he is also a shrewd shopkeeper; a blunderer, yet a clever plotter. For David Grimsted, these post-Contrast developments of the type only confirm the Yankee's "essential pure-heartedness and his innate good sense."(4) Like later Yankees, Ploughboy escapes opprobrium on stage for his foibles by the "geniality" of his "calculating acquisitiveness."(5) Yet one development cannot be explained easily away in the notion of a simple, ultimately harmless, if "sharp" rustic. For above all, Woodworth's Jonathan is an out-and-out racist, whose signature comic line, "I would not serve a negro so," has grim consequences for the literal Negro he does "serve so" Lid Rose. Indeed, Woodworth's comedy of innocent rural lovers threatened by the schemes of a low-minded urban aristocrat is built on a racial conception that illustrates how, only a few years after its premiere, minstrel shows would find a welcome home on the American stage.
Although minstrel shows have received significant scholarly attention,(6) the presence of black characters in other pre-twentieth century American drama has not. When discussed at all, early drama is seen to exemplify some generic type, establish a character, or serve a national theme. The "stage darky" is, of course, a recognized stereotype, but little has been done to examine the complexities of interaction the presence of such a character sometimes calls forth.(7) The problem is stated most eloquently by Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark. Not content simply to mark texts by white writers as racist, she queries the whole literary critical enterprise for the way it looks at--that is, does not see--what she calls "Africanism" in American works. As she defines the term,
Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed and powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny.(8)
In other words, Africanism, the marked but usually unnoted presence of a dark other, serves often to define whiteness in its desired characteristics.
At the same time, however, as Morrison shows with works such as Willa Cather's Sapphira and the Slave Girt or Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, the narrative attempt to elide black characters often has unintended or surprising consequences. As Mark Twain recounts the process of writing Pudd'nhead Wilson, another troubled book on race, the mulatto character Roxy, a minor presence in the extended joke tale, "Those Extraordinary Twins," forced her way into the story so far as to compel the author to start over with a "tragedy," Pudd'nhead Wilson.(9) Given Morrison's challenge, it seems well worth visiting a source of many Africanist characters, early American drama, in order to explore the formation of a key white type, the stage Yankee.
The Forest Rose opens with sounds of a rural dawn, followed by a somewhat mournful tune about a lost love sung by Lydia. A Londoner, Bellamy, enters the scene, exciting the interest of an innocent country girl, Harriet, who is loved by the rustic swain, William. Another well-dressed fellow, Blandford, also enters, looking, it turns out, for Lydia. Jonathan meanwhile woos Sally Forest, daughter of Deacon Forest, at whose home the "black" Lid Rose is a servant. The main plot revolves around William's attempt to get Harriet's affections back from Bellamy and expose the Englishman for the cad he is. At the end, a scheme that involves substituting a disguised Rose (who thinks she is being truly courted) for Harriet thwarts Bellamy and sends him fleeing back to England. The play ends with happy white lovers, a disconsolate black one, and a celebration of the virtues of the American countryside.
To be sure, it is not surprising to find in antebellum plays African-American characters who are little more than crude stereotypes. What is more significant, however, is the linkage of racist language and situation with the character seen as a true native type, the Yankee. The early American stage inherited English dramatic styles, including comedies of manners, Elizabethan tragedies, heroic tragedies, and a whole variety of light entertainments, farces, operas, musical dramas, and afterpieces. The Contrast, while it is set in New York and features only American characters, mirrors one of its models, Sheridan's School for Scandal, all too well. One of Tyler's few truly original touches is the character of Jonathan, particularly in the way he centers the Yankee in the comic scenes and allows him to represent the uncorrupted, if humorously naive American farmer. Woodworth's play as well makes much of the virtuous farmer and concludes, as does The Contrast, with the successful expulsion of the vice-ridden urbanite from the scene. The enshrining of the yeoman farmer would become a staple of Jacksonian democratic ideology, and his appearance in The Forest Rose anticipates the appeal made from the theater to an idealized folk in the coming decades.(10)
Nevertheless, Jonathan the generic character shows signs of corruption--if that is what it is--by 1825. His humor has gone from harmless misunderstandings in The Contrast (thinking the theater is someone's living room, for instance) to cruel jokes and crude comments on allegedly offensive characteristics of black people in The Forest Rose. Jonathan Ploughboy may have gotten many laughs from his American and English audiences with his scene-ending, "I would not serve a negro so," but the humor now comes less at the Yankee's expense than...
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