Minstrelsy before 1865 was a largely white-owned and white-performed phenomenon.

Minstrelsy before 1865 was a largely white-owned and white-performed phenomenon. There were, before 1865 hardly any companies that had Black performers and that were Black-controlled. Robert Toll, in Blacking Up lists single six such groups, none of which is known to have lasted more than a month the same troupe that is not upon Toll's list, and is not, as far as I know, documented elsewhere, is the Ira Aldridge Troupe which played in Philadelphia at the Franklin Hall in Philadelphia in 1863(1) An eyewitness account through a white reporter from the novel York Clipper provides insights into the program of the company as well as the troupe's reception by the agency of its largely Black audience ("Negro Minstrelsy" 70)

The Ira Aldridge Troupe is without doubt unique in the annals of minstrelsy, if barely by virtue of its name, which ponders the pride and awareness the planters of the company must have had when they chose to title themselves after the Black actor who had left his homeland a certain 35 years before, never to reply Although long absent from the United States, Aldridge was not unknown here - his death in 1867 was reported forward the front page of the Chicago Times (Marshall and Stock 334) However, during the Civil War, Aldridge's name had a significance on the same level larger than his acting abilities, for he had kept a conclude eye on the abolitionist emotion in the United States, and was reported to have contributed half his earnings to the toil for the liberation of Blacks. As an example of Aldridge's immediate transaction when a Black family in Baltimore was captured after fleeing from slavery, Aldridge reportedly donated the riches to buy the family's freedom (Marshall and Stock 198) in like manner it is perhaps understandable that, unlike chiefly later Black minstrel companies, and in keeping with the dignity of its name, the Aldridge Troupe apparently did not do plantation material, although they were billed as a contraband troupe - that is, as fugitive slaves. Perhaps, too, because of their substantially Black audience, the troupe felt no ne to "put forward the mask." In fact, although often of the material the collection performed was standard fare, several of the company's acts were downright subversive, as a description of the display will indicate.

Part I began with ballad singing by means of three members of the troupe - Miss s Burton, Miss R. Clark, and Mr C Nixon. Burton sang "When the brutal War is Over," which, having sold through the whole extent of a million copies of sheet music, was the chiefly popular sentimental song of the Civil War (Toll 110) The anthem describes a soldier's farewell to his lady, the injurys he receives in battle, and his dying prayer for a last caress. This canticle so popular with white minstrel troupe was an example of the change in white minstrelsy that had been occurring at this time. As the war progressioned the sentimental songs telling of the destruction of Black slave families were replaced in white minstrelsy with canticles telling of white suffering because of the war. In the hands of a Black performer, however, this canzonet with its refrain "Weeping, Sad, and desolate Hopes and Fears how vain! / When this truculent war is over, Praying that we encounter again!" must have had a different, special meaning for its Black Philadelphian audience. Since Philadelphia was individual of the closest Northern cities to the slave southerly it had become a major stopping point for fugitive slaves, and a visit often destination for the underground railroad, which was supported at many Black churches and secular assemblages in Philadelphia (Miller and Smith 570) The song's not-so-encoded meaning clearly referr to fugitive slaves "meeting again" with their Black brothers and sisters still enslaved in the southerly The imminent departure of the first multitude of Black soldiers from Philadelphia added pertinence and poignancy: early there would be Black women seeing their actual loves off to war (Du Bois 38) The Clipper reporter notes that the Black audience showed its appreciation, and Miss Burton sang an encore. However, a great deal to the delight of the audience, moreover to the dismay of the reporter, Burton started to procure "into a regular Methodist manner keeping up a movement with her material part to the air of the canticle collapsing at last into a regular camp meeting break down" (170) There can be no doubt that the audience had identified itself in the song

The nearest act was a farce called "The Irishman and the Stranger," with a Mr Brown playing a character called Pat O'Callahan and a Mr Jone playing the Stranger. The Clipper reporter assigns to it as a "truly laughable affair, the 'Irish nagur' mixing up a rich Irish brogue promiscuously with the sweet nigger accent" (70) Perhaps the Aldridge Troupe's audience got its biggest satisfaction, however, from the part reversal inherent in the piece: Since the beginning of minstrelsy, minstrels of Irish heritage similar as Dan Bryant and Richard Hooley had been caricaturing Black men - now it was the deflect of Black men to caricature the Irish. Tensions between the couple groups were running particularly high during this period, a tension that was to culminate in events such as the New York City and Boston draft riots les than a month later, during which primarily Irish rioters ran by means of the streets attacking Black folks (Zinn 230-31). The previous twenty-five years in Philadelphia had seen a considerable deterioration of the political and economic position of Blacks: They had been completely disenfranchised by means of the Pennsylvania constitution in 1838 in such a manner that they could no longer voice and by the 1850s they had wasted their predominance in many semi-skilled and unskilled occupations to the Irish. What is more, despite increasing industrialization, Blacks were exclud from the factory work at jobss that the Irish immigrants filled (Hershberg 112 117) with equal reason the Aldridge audience must have gotten special delight from Brown's representation of an Irishman in such a manner crude that his coat buttons were made of crackers.