"[T]his was, in fact, a dynamic cultural space shaped by a wide range of historical agents: black and white, male and female, wealthy and poor, tourist and resident."

Dancing across the Color Line
James W. Cook

II.

Part of the answer involves the chronic poverty and prejudice that made the Points such a difficult place to live in the 1840s. Today, in other words, it is hard to see what Dickens saw precisely because antebellum rioters pushed many minority-run venues underground or out of business; or because the early architects of minstrelsy supplanted less jaundiced images of black dancing with an entire industry of racial caricatures; or because limited economic resources made it virtually impossible for most Five Points performers to achieve more than a localized audience. Karl Marx was among the first to note this relationship between social subjugation and historical invisibility. "The poor," he argued, "cannot represent themselves, they must be represented." Marx's point is even truer when race and vice are part of the equation. Most antebellum writers chose not to honor an institution like Almack's with any published commentary. And the descriptions that have survived were usually written by social elites who viewed dancing, drinking, and interracial mixing as self-evident "abominations."

But the blindness is ours, too. The scene Dickens describes seems so singular, at least in part, because of the kinds of questions modern scholars have brought to the table. The vast historical literature on abolitionism is a good case in point. For all of its many virtues, this literature has generally privileged issues of rights and citizenship over commerce and sociability. Thus, we have many fine intellectual and political histories of the antislavery crusade, but relatively little sense of how ordinary blacks and whites came together beyond the convention hall. Recent histories of the New York artisanry, by contrast, have focused almost exclusively on market capitalism’s role in fostering racial segregation. These studies help us to understand how and why early industrial workers came to differentiate themselves as "white." Yet this line of questioning makes it virtually impossible to explain the interracial traffic of bodies, cultures, and dollars observed by Dickens.

I do not mean to suggest that the traffic took place on equal terms. One need only think of Dickens’s thoroughly odd position at Almack’s–with lots of money in his pocket, two policemen in tow, and the circumatlantic publishing industry at his disposal–to appreciate how much social position mattered in the Five Points. Nevertheless, our sensitivity to the inequities of power should not prevent us from acknowledging that this was, in fact, a dynamic cultural space shaped by a wide range of historical agents: black and white, male and female, wealthy and poor, tourist and resident.

The patterns become clearer in some of the commentary that followed in Dickens’s wake. Consider the following quip from The Weekly Rake, one of the new flash papers from the early 1840s: "[Boz] fell far short of the people’s expectations . . . He compares the Five Points to the Seven Dials. This we don’t like–we can’t bear to hear our favorite retreat abused." This little bit of underground sarcasm helps to explain why the mainstream press found the description of Almack’s so offensive. The problem was not merely that an English author had given visibility to black cultural forms. It was also a function of what Almack’s represented in the larger urban landscape–a "retreat" for white men from other parts of the city. James Gordon Bennett, the Herald’s chief editor, made the distinction clear by caricaturing Dickens as a vulgar consumer: "This account of the Nigger Ball at the Five Points is one of the most singular passages in the book. Boz and his committee appear to have been . . . in their very element–enjoying themselves to the brimful." Here, of course, the reference was entirely pejorative: this was Bennett’s racialized attempt to settle accounts on the Boz Ball. Still, it presumed a familiarity with one of the city’s worst-kept secrets. Large numbers of white men did indeed make places like Almack’s "their very element."

But who, exactly, were these shadowy figures? Moral reformers were among the first to recognize that the rise of the modern vice economy stemmed in large part from the massive migration of young single men who came to the city in search of work during the 1820s and 1830s. Almost overnight, lower Manhattan’s boarding houses and cheap hotels had become home to a veritable army of young clerks, secretaries, and bookkeepers with money in their pockets and few breaks on their spending habits. And despite the evangelical warnings about "drunken hells" and "horrifying dissipation," many of the new arrivals quickly made their way over to the Points.

The editors of Freedom’s Journal, the nation’s first African American newspaper, provided a different perspective on the same process. Annoyed by the journalistic convention of blaming recently emancipated blacks for the city’s vice trade, they decided in 1827 to fire back at Major Mordecai Noah, editor of the New-York Enquirer: "Our streets and places of public amusement are nightly crowded with [such] characters, of the Major's own complexion. We wonder the bachelor has never seen them. However disgraceful to our city it may be, it is a fact, that respectable ladies cannot walk our public promenades alone, after dark, without being disgusted or insulted by the rude conduct of base females and their paramours."

Black elites, in other words, were no less disgusted than white reformers by the proliferation of interracial vice. But they wanted editors like Noah to acknowledge that the "rude conduct" visible in African American neighborhoods was in large part instigated by white visitors.

A few years later, George Washington Dixon, a minstrel dancer intimately familiar with such "rudeness," offered more extensive commentary in his short-lived serial, Polyanthos and Fire Department Album: "There is in this city coteries of young men, many in respectable and fashionable society, whose whole leisure time is employed in licentiousness, seduction, and demoralization. These coteries are not confined to any particular class. They pervade the commercial, financial, medical, and even the clerical classes." On one level, Dixon’s list of professional categories was designed to convey heterogeneity, the surprising variety of men in the "coteries." His larger point, however, was to trace the problem back to a common source–the new urban world of white-collar work.

Those responsible for the "licentiousness," in other words, were not the usual suspects: the rowdy mechanics of the Bowery, or East River sailors, out on a spree. Rather, the primary culprits in this case were what contemporary commentators often described as "sporting men." This sobriquet contained a wide range of literal and figurative meanings. Sporting men did in fact spend much of their free time at athletic events. By the 1820s, though, the adjective also conjured nonathletic activities such as gambling, drinking, whoring, fire fighting, or simply loafing. And quite unlike the typical "swell" or "flaneur" (two figures of European origin similarly famous for their perambulations across socio-economic thresholds), the "sports" of New York generally did not observe the lower depths from a distance. Theirs was a voyeurism that routinely included active participation and intimate mixing.

This trail of sin is often hard to see in the mainstream press because of its liminal position: at once within the white-collar professions and gleefully defiant of their moral strictures. Pious and licentious, sunshine and shadow, innocent and vulgar, high and low–antebellum sporting culture took root between and across the binary distinctions represented by middle-class conduct manuals as natural and fixed. In this way, sporting men put themselves in close proximity to the "rougher" social worlds of the emerging urban proletariat, and even identified with some of its causes. But the milieux were never simply equivalent. More accurately, they overlapped and intersected–temporarily–in particular urban sites: brothels, saloons, boxing arenas, cockpits, gambling dens, theaters, and dance halls–places, in short, like Almack’s.