William Alexander Leidesdorff and the American 1847: Minstrelsy and Race in California before the Gold Rush

Abstract

William Alexander Leidesdorff and the American 1847Minstrelsy and Race in California before the Gold Rush Andrew Gibb (bio) In the many excellent theorizations of minstrelsy published over the last few decades, the people and places of the U.S. West appear infrequently.1 The notable exception is Eric Lott’s chapter in Love and Theft, titled “California Gold and European Revolution: Stephen Foster and the American 1848.”2 In that piece, Lott conducts a close analysis of the minstrel songs popular in California during the Gold Rush and concludes that minstrelsy acted locally as “the badge of northern sectional formation and its developing struggles over slavery” (203). That explanation figures minstrelsy in California as an extension of the contentious racial politics of the eastern United States. While the point is forcefully argued, it emerges from an assumption that Lott never explicitly acknowledges: that the experience of contemporary white immigrants is of paramount importance to understanding the meanings of minstrelsy in nineteenth-century California. But minstrelsy did not come to the West Coast with the miners. The first recorded minstrel performance in California was acted by occupying U.S. soldiers in the spring of 1847, at the height of the U.S.–Mexico War, nearly a year before the fateful discovery of gold. J. E. Lawrence of the San Francisco Golden Era, writing a journalistic history of California theatre in 1855, recorded the details of that inaugural minstrel show: “During the summer of 1847, some of the soldiers of Company F, New York Volunteers, gave a series of negro minstrel performances at Santa Barbara, where they arrived in April of that year. A portion of this band had previously given four or five entertainments at Liedesdorff ’s [sic] [End Page 19] old City Hotel, San Francisco, in March, 1847, immediately after their arrival in the country.”3 Both the public venue (San Francisco’s only hotel at the time) and the Volunteers’ extended run argue against a show intended solely for the entertainment of fellow soldiers; local audiences no doubt contributed to the show’s success. But in the spring of 1847, the local population of San Francisco (then known as Yerba Buena) included few Anglo Americans, and certainly no gold miners. What might non-Anglo local spectators have made of the soldiers’ unfamiliar racial mimicry? How might the performance have read within the racial order peculiar to Mexican California? What might the conquering soldier-actors have conveyed to their audiences about a possible new racial hierarchy in California’s future? And how are we to interpret the seemingly counterintuitive fact that the host of California’s first minstrel show, hotel owner William Alexander Leidesdorff, is today celebrated as one of California’s most important African American pioneers? The performance of a minstrel show within this space, so different from the genre’s usual venues, throws the assumptions that historians make about minstrelsy into sharp relief. I suggest that these performances be read as actions performed within a specific, local framework of assumptions about race, society, and power. Those assumptions, it should be understood, were radically different from those commonly held in the eastern United States, from whence minstrelsy emerged. Interpreting the performances within this unique geographical and social context not only offers us further insight into the minstrel phenomenon but also allows us to see how the racial preoccupations of the antebellum United States played out among local, non-Anglo populations at the frontiers of the nation’s expanding power.4 A detailed examination of the 1847 San Francisco minstrel shows reveals multiple, culturally specific notions of race being contested at the local level before the Gold Rush brought the region into the center of the slavery debate. What’s more, through the unique figure of hotel owner and host William Leidesdorff, we can see how Californians of nonwhite ancestry took an active part in that negotiation. Concentrating on the circumstances of production and reception, I argue that minstrelsy’s introduction to California reveals a contemporary struggle about how race was going to signify on the new U.S. frontier. The minstrel show as understood by producers and audiences in the eastern United States relied upon a number of...

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