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at William Brown’s African Theater. From this body of transcribed lore, speeches, and sermons, Mathews built up a “black” characterization, which became a staple of his new act, A Trip to America. Mathews later claimed he’d seen the audience at the African Theater demand that Aldridge, playing Hamlet, stop his soliloquy and sing the popular freedom song “Possum up a Gum Tree.” Aldridge denied Mathews’s story, though claiming not to mind, as Mathews was a fictional humorist. But Mathews’s use of the song appears to be the first certain example of a white borrowing black material for a blackface act.

Others followed Mathews—in 1823 Edwin Forrest took the boards as a plantation black, and in 1828 George Washington Dixon sang “negro melodies” such as “The Coal-Black Rose”—but the man who created blackface minstrelsy was a New Yorker named Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice.

Rice, born in the Seventh Ward in 1808, apprenticed as a woodworker but abandoned the artisanal life for a theatrical one (he was not alone in segueing from a collapsing craft into the flourishing world of commercial culture). Drifting west, Rice worked as a stagehand and bit player throughout the Mississippi Valley. In 1828, according to one version of the story, he came across a crippled old slave named Jim Crow who did an odd shuffling dance. Rice borrowed the man’s style, his persona, even his clothes, and fashioned a song-and-dance routine that became an instant sensation. Dressed in a dilapidated, ill-fitting costume, with patched breeches, a broad-brimmed hat, and holes in his shoes, Rice would roll his body lazily from one side to the other while singing his waggish signature ditty in exaggerated dialect. Audiences used to the high-stepping tapping of Irish jigs thrilled to the black-derived shuffle (ancestor of the soft shoe), in which the feet remained close to the ground and upper-body movements carried the action.

By the late 1820s Rice was serving up his alleged Negro songs and dances as brief burlesques and bits of comic relief in circuses, theaters, museums, and pleasure gardens throughout the West. In November 1832 he brought his routine back home. Spectacularly successful, Rice regularly “jumped Jim Crow” at the Bowery Theater, sandwiched between plays as an entr’acte. In January 1833 he staged a full “Ethiopian Opera”—Long Island Juba, or, Love by the Bushel—featuring a group of “blacks.” And in May 1834 he put his character to topical use as a participant in a play called Life in New York, or, the Major’s Come, in which Rice tunefully discussed a ride in an omnibus, a trip to Harlem, and life in the Five Points.

Guised in blackface, the artist could also safely mock elites, snobs, and condescending moralists. But if Rice’s Ethiopian operas skewered upper-class manners and pretensions, they mainly lampooned blacks. Jim Crow, the slow-witted, irrepressibly comic “plantation darky,” was soon joined by Zip Coon, the second essential stereotype of the nascent minstrel tradition. Where Jim Crow evoked the rural South, Zip Coon, a fancied creature of the urban North, was a foolish, foppish, self-satisfied dandy. An ultramodish dresser, he was given to skintight pantaloons, a lacy jabot, a silk hat, a lorgnon held with effeminate affectation, and his beloved “Long Tail Blue,” an indigo coat with padded shoulders and long swishing tails.

T.D. Rice as Jim Crow, 1833. During Rice’s performances at the Bowery Theater, enthusiastic audiences routinely clambered onto the stage, leaving him little room to perform. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)

Rice and other minstrels assembled the Zip Coon image from fact and fiction. There were blacks who thrived on imitating (or parodying) white dandies—who enjoyed wearing flamboyant, brightly colored, occasionally mismatched articles of clothing, purchased cheaply in urban markets. White minstrels gained familiarity with black manners, games, and dances in the racially integrated streets, taverns, and brothels of the Five Points or waterfront.

Crow and Coon were paradoxical creations. Their