In the Wake of Jim Crow: Maritime Minstrelsy and American Racial Nationalism Abroad

During the pre-Civil War “Golden Age” of American sail, U.S. merchant and whaling fleets sent hundreds of thousands of young men to sea on voyages both coastal and global. Mariners represented one of the largest occupational groups in the country and maritime issues preoccupied national political economy and popular discourse. Furthermore, the size and importance of the industry meant that the majority of citizens who traveled abroad at the time were working-class men laboring aboard ships. As such, the maritime community became largely responsible for the tone and contour of the early republic’s foreign relations. This paper utilizes nautical journals and maritime correspondence to demonstrate the means by which waterborne workers disseminated American racial ideology overseas. The blackface minstrel show proved their most effective tool for doing so.

Nineteenth-century American sailors “blacked up” to “Jump Jim Crow” for international audiences concentrated in the globe’s port city frontiers. From cowhide-depots in Mexican California to remote whaling stations along Japan’s northern coast, sailors reported on their readiness to stage blackface medleys and “plantation breakdowns” before eager onlookers. The performances contained multiple meanings. In part an effort to dramatize American racial cues for onlookers while at the same time providing seafarers an opportunity to negotiate their own complicated status as “marginally” white men, minstrel performance also served a diplomatic function. Mariners often used minstrelsy in an attempt to diffuse tensions inherent to the complex intercultural encounters entailed in their mobile lives as agents in the nation’s expanding commercial empire.