"[T]he story of Pete Williams’s dance hall demonstrates a truth long understood by workers in the vice trade: namely, that capitalism is slippery as well as unfair."

Dancing across the Color Line
James W. Cook

V.

Ultimately, there are at least two very different ways to assess the broader significance of this interracial history. The first would stress the built-in limits of the transgressions: the fact that they were generally confined to an impoverished vice district; and that no legal and political structures existed to support them. The same context of illegality that made this space a site for social experimentation and subaltern mobility, in other words, also made it enormously unpredictable and dangerous. This interpretation would also emphasize the obvious inequality of the rewards. Men fared much better than women. And the black men who succeeded most were clearly exceptional figures. Most American cities had similar vice districts and underground venues before the Civil War. Yet no other minority impresario or star rose to similar prominence–a pattern which may suggest that the professional trajectories of Williams and Lane actually required a mass-circulated paean from Dickens to become possible. Significantly, when Lane made his London debut in 1848, the playbills announced him as "Boz’s Juba."

Fig. 4. A portrait of "Boz's Juba" from an 1848 London playbill. Courtesy of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library.

From another perspective, though, the critical issue is not so much the origin, fairness, or frequency of the opportunities, but what one does with them when they arrive. And in this sense, the story of Pete Williams’s dance hall demonstrates a truth long understood by workers in the vice trade: namely, that capitalism is slippery as well as unfair. Just as one market begins to shore up a social boundary, another takes root in its cracks. This line of interpretation would also caution against imposing elite standards of resistance on historical subjects whose lives were very different from the antislavery vanguard. Williams and Lane, it is true, did little to further the community-based, philanthropic causes championed by New York’s leading black activists. Yet this should not lead us to dismiss their historical significance out of hand. One might argue, in fact, that these long-forgotten cultural figures initiated a second model of post-emancipation struggle that continues today. What they began to seize upon was a basic paradox at the very heart of the modern circumatlantic economy. One market can never completely control what another chooses to desire.

Further Reading:

In recent years, the Five Points has generated lots of first-rate work. The studies I have found most helpful include Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct (New York, 1985), Christine Stansell, City of Women (Urbana, 1987), Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent (Ithaca, 1989), Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett (New York, 1998), Tyler Anbinder, Five Points (New York, 2001), and Leslie Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery (Chicago, 2003). On antebellum sporting culture, see especially, Elliot Gorn, The Manly Art (Ithaca, 1986), Stephen Riess, City Games (Urbana, 1989), Timothy Gilfoyle, City of Eros (New York, 1992), Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex (New York, 2002), and Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing (New York, 2003). The pioneering histories of racial divisions within the antebellum artisanry are Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (Berkeley, 1990), David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness (New York, 1991), and Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York, 1994). For studies that complicate the story, see Eric Lott, Love and Theft (New York, 1993), Dale Cockrell, Demons of Disorder (London, 1997), W.T. Lhamon Jr., Raising Cain (Cambridge, 1998), and Shane White, Stories of Freedom in Black New York (Cambridge, 2003). On bohemianism, see Stansell, American Moderns (New York, 2000). Finally, all current research on William Henry Lane owes a major debt to Marian Hannah Winter, who opened the door for further exploration with her 1947 article, "Juba and American Minstrelsy," reprinted in Moving History/Dancing Cultures, ed. by Ann Dils and Ann Cooper Albright (Middletown, Conn., 2001).