A Renegade History of the United States Read online

  Many Americans continued to dance, but official America did not. William Penn, the founder of the province of Pennsylvania, attacked pleasure generally and dancing specifically in his treatises The Frame of Government (1682) and No Crown, No Cross (1697), which are widely considered to be the blueprints for the Constitution and, according to the eminent historian Bernard Bailyn, “could hardly have been more clearly fundamental, more manifestly constituent, in nature” to the American national system. In The Frame of Government, Penn insists that “stage plays, cards, dice, Maygames, masques, revels, bull-baitings … which incite people to rudeness, cruelty, looseness, and irreligion, shall be respectively discouraged, and severely punished.” In No Crown, No Cross, Penn reprints lengthy, early Christian sermons arguing that “Dancing is the devil’s procession, and he that entereth into a dance entereth into his procession, the devil is the guide, the middle, and the end of the dance; as many paces as man maketh in dancing, so many paces doth he make to go to hell.” In 1700 Increase Mather’s son Cotton, who more than anyone defined Puritan America, responded to the continued spread of formal dances and dance schools with his own published attack, A Cloud of Witness Against Balls and Dances, in which he called for an end to the dance craze “as it now prevails, and especially in balls, or in circumstances that lead the young people of both sexes unto great liberties with one another.” A few decades later, George Whitefield, the leader of the “Great Awakening,” which according to many historians laid the self-disciplining moral groundwork for the American Revolution, believed that dancing and music were “devilish diversions” and demanded that the people shun them. One night during a preaching tour of South Carolina in 1740, Whitefield attempted to convert an entire tavern full of dancers:

  I had not come to be their guest that night; for, it being New Year’s Day, several of the neighbours were met together to divert themselves by dancing country dances. By the advice of my companions I went in amongst them whilst a woman was dancing a jig. At my first entrance I endeavoured to shew the folly of such entertainments, and to convince her how well pleased the devil was at every step she took. For some time she endeavoured to outbrave me; neither the fiddler nor she desisted; but at last she gave over, and the musician laid aside his instrument… . Christ triumphed over Satan. All were soon put to silence …

  Those who heeded Whitefield’s admonitions were more likely to adopt the kind of discipline that the Founding Fathers would soon promote. But not all the preacher’s “converts” remained converted. Some were “so bent on their pleasure, that notwithstanding all that had been said, after I had gone to bed, I heard their music and dancing.” Whitefield’s sermons against dancing achieved similarly mixed and comical results a few months later in Philadelphia. A local newspaper reported,

  Since Mr. Whitefield’s preaching here, the Dancing School, Assembly and Concert room have been shut up, as inconsistent with the doctrine of the gospel: And though the Gentlemen concern’d caus’d the door to be broken open again, we are inform’d that no company came last Assembly night.

  Whitefield was more successful in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where, according to one observer after his visit in 1740, “music and dancing seems to be wholly laid aside. Where you might formerly have heard jovial, and it may be profane and obscene songs; you may now hear psalms and hymns of praise sung to God, and to our Lord Jesus Christ.” White people the farthest from civilization were the most likely to dance without shame, such as the “inferior sort” of Scottish settlers in backcountry North Carolina observed by an upper-class traveler in 1729:

  Dancing they are all fond of, especially when they can get a fiddle, or bag-pipe; at this they will continue hours together, nay, so attach’d are they to this darling amusement, that if they can’t procure musick, they will sing for themselves. Musick, and musical instruments being very scarce in Carolina.

  When touring villages in remote parts of South Carolina, George White-field despaired to find

  that in every little town, there is a settled dancing master, but scarcely anywhere a settled minister to be met with; such a proceeding must be of dreadful consequence to any, especially a new settled province. All Governors, if it were only from a policy of human policy, ought to put a stop to it. For such entertainments altogether enervate the minds of people, insensibly leading them into effeminacy, and unfitting them to endure those hardships, and fatigues, which must necessarily be undergone, to bring any province to perfection. True religion exalts a nation; such sinful entertainments are a reproach, and will, in time, be the ruin of any people.

  The minister Joseph Bellamy of Connecticut, another leader of the Great Awakening and one of the Founding Fathers’ principal clerical allies, preached against “the pernicious and insnaring practice of dancing.” Before the Revolution, he warned of dancing as a “school of debauchery and corruption” that tends to “promote an idle and dissolute course of life” and “give[s] the mind a relish for nothing but carnal and sensual pleasures.” Bellamy preached a lesson the Founders well understood: that dancing, like sensual pleasure generally, made the people “so very vain, and extravagant, and ungovernable.”

  When colonists fell “under the spell” of “primitive gyrations,” their leaders were quick to discipline them. A member of James Oglethorpe’s 1733 expedition recounted that an hour after they landed at what would become the city of Savannah, Georgia, the native residents welcomed the newcomers by “Dancing round a Large fire which They made upon the Ground.” Some of the Englishmen were mildly disgusted by the Indians’“many antick Gestures, Singing and beating Time, with Their feet, and hands to admiration.” Others were enthralled. And one went native.

  One of the oldest of our people, Doctor Lyons, having slept away from our camp and gott a litle in drink, found his way up to the Indian town and joyned with the Indians in their dance indeavouring to mimick and ape them in their antick gestures, which I being informed of, sent for him, and desired that he would emediately repair home to our camp. Otherwise I assured him I would aquaint Mr. Oglethorp with his folly. He promised me that he would. But being so much in liquor he returned again to the Indians and danced with them as before, which being told to me I ordered severall white men who were there to carry him home by force.

  Another member of Oglethorpe’s party echoed what other settlers had said before, that the Indian dancers were similar to the “Morris” dancers in England. Morris dancing was a folk dance (possibly derived from dances performed by Moors from North Africa) involving rhythmic stepping with bent knees and elbows—moves not unlike the dances of Native Americans and American slaves. It was attacked by Puritans in England and banned in the New England colonies.

  German settlers were similarly split over “primitive” and libidinal dancing. At a ball celebrating the signing of a treaty between European settlers and the tribes of the Six Nations at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1744, the leader of the delegation of settlers was dismayed to see a number of German women who “danced [in] wilder time than any Indians… . The females (I dare not call them Ladies …) were, in general very disagreeable.” In the 1750s, in the German town of Bethany on the Georgia frontier, the wife of the local school master was publicly censured and her husband dismissed from his position after she “conceived a lust to dance, and actually did dance” to the sounds of a dulcimer.

  Nonetheless, many white colonists, especially in the South, continued to be inspired by the movements of Indians and slaves. In 1759 a clergyman of the Church of England was disturbed by the disorderly, black-inspired ways in which whites in Virginia amused themselves:

  They are immoderately fond of dancing, and indeed it is almost the only amusement they partake of: but even in this they discover great want of taste and elegance, and seldom appear with that gracefulness and ease, which these movements are so calculated to display. Towards the close of an evening, when the company are pretty well tired with country dances, it is usual to dance jigs; a practice originally borrowed, I am infor
med, from the Negroes. These dances are without any method or regularity: a Gentleman and Lady stand up, and dance about the room, one of them retiring, the other pursuing, then perhaps meeting, in an irregular fantastical manner.

  Another English traveler in Virginia, Nicholas Cresswell, noted the same phenomenon in 1775 and with the same disdain:

  Last night I went to the Ball… . Here was about 37 Ladies dressed and powdered to the life, some of them very handsome and as much vanity as is necessary. All of them fond of dancing, but I do not think they perform it with the greatest elegance. Betwixt the country dances they have what I call everlasting jigs. A couple gets up and begins to dance a jig (to some Negro tune) others comes [sic] and cuts them out, and these dances last as long as the Fiddler can play. This is sociable, but I think it looks more like a Bacchanalian dance than one in polite assembly.

  One Virginian who loved disreputable dancing was Thomas Jefferson’s younger brother, Randolph, who, according to one of the family’s slaves, “used to come out among black people, play the fiddle and dance half the night.” This was in contrast to Thomas, who, according to one biographer, “seemed not the least bit curious about or interested in” the music of his or any other slaves. Several scholars believe that Randolph, rather than his brother, was the father of the child born to the family’s slave, Sally Hemings.

  There were even some bands of extreme renegade dancers among the white people of colonial America. In 1779 the Independent Chronicle of Boston reported on “a sect” in nearby Pepperell, “who, under the idea of religion, dance stark naked, &c. It proves indeed, that ‘men will be guilty of great extravagances, when urged by a misguided conscience, and enthusiastic zeal.’” And then there were the Shakers of western Massachusetts, who, for a time during the American Revolution, reportedly “disclaimed the use of any kind of garment when engaged in their religious exercises; presenting themselves unpolluted by the vain and unchristian articles of dress, and performing all their dancing, turnings, jumpings, tumblings, twistings, and wrigglings, in that condition.”

  MIND THE MUSIC AND THE STEP

  The founders of the United States learned from their intellectual forefather, John Locke, that children should be taught to dance only in a way that “gives graceful motions all the life, and above all things manliness.” According to Locke, dance teachers should eliminate “apish affected postures” and “the jigging part” that leads children away from “perfect graceful carriage.” More importantly, the Founding Fathers feared that sensual amusements would undermine the discipline necessary for a republic of self-governing individuals. Nothing was more subversive of order than animalistic lack of control, which certain types of dancing suggested. When he heard that his sister and her husband had changed their minds and would not send their children to dancing school, John Adams exulted. “[What] a sudden, and entire conversion is this! … it is from vanity to wisdom—from foppery to sobriety & solidity,” he wrote. “I never knew a good Dancer good for any Thing else.” Of the men who danced well, they gained neither “Sense or Learning, or Virtue for it.” But rather than ban such amusements as “dancing, or Fencing, or Musick,” Adams wrote that Americans “should be ignorant of em all than fond of any one of em.” He was appalled by the gyrations of a white man named Zab Hayward he saw dancing in a tavern with a “rabble” and “Negroes with a fiddle”:

  He has had the Reputation, for at least fifteen Years, of the best Dancer in the World in these Towns. Several attempted, but none could equal him, in nimbleness of heels. But he has no Conception of the Grace, the Air nor the Regularity of dancing. His Air is absurd and wild, desultory, and irregular, as his Countenance is low and ignoble. In short the Air of his Countenance, the Motions of his Body, Hands, and Head, are extreamly silly, and affected and mean.

  Some of the Founding Fathers were torn between their private love of sensual pleasure and their public commitment against it. Adams’s colleague Josiah Quincy II, who authored several of the most important pro-independence tracts, confided to his journal that he had attended several comedy-dance performances while visiting New York and was “upon the whole much gratified.” Moreover, “if I had stayed in town a month I should go to the theatre every acting night.” But, “as a citizen and a friend to the morals and happiness of society, I should strive hard against the admission and much more the establishment of a playhouse in any state of which I was a member.” Benjamin Latrobe, the “Father of American Architecture” who designed the U.S. Capitol, saw whites performing the Virginia Jig and called it “the excess of detestability.” A cousin of John Quincy Adams, Elizabeth Cranch, wrote of her love for dancing and her fear of the wrath of her cousin, who was “monstrously severe upon the follies of mankind.” Given the Founders’ feelings on the matter, it seems reasonable to conclude that the Continental Congress’s 1774 declaration to discourage “every species of extravagance and dissipation,” which was widely interpreted as including sensual dancing, formally established the American citizen as rhythmless. As the historian Bruce Daniels puts it, “Puritan asceticism found a new voice in the guise of republican simplicity.”

  One of the better-known Americans to have lost his groove during the Revolution was Yankee Doodle. Very few Americans know that this national icon was born a renegade. The term yankee was invented by British soldiers in the seventeenth century as an epithet against bawdy Dutch pirates in the West Indies. The first recorded use of the term in the American colonies was the listing of a South Carolina slave named Yankee in 1725. The British then used it in derisive reference to the “undisciplined” and “licentious” bumpkins of New England. During the first skirmishes of the War of Independence, British soldiers sang a song about a “macaroni”—slang for an ostentatious, hedonistic dandy—who “went to town” to find “the girls” with whom he was quite “handy.” The character’s surname, Doodle, was then a vernacular term meaning “simpleton,” “fool,” or “penis.” To emphasize their point, the British often danced mock jigs to the song. Unfortunately, during the war, many Americans agreed with their enemies that this characterization was an insult rather than a compliment. And so they turned Yankee Doodle from a renegade into a soldier. Fife-and-drum units in colonial militias added a heavy, regimented “da-dum, da-dum” beat—free of irregular syncopation—and transformed the dance song into a march. New lyrics instructed soldiers to “mind the music and the step” and saluted “Cap’n Washington,” who “sat the world along in rows, in hundreds and in millions.”

  Following in line, dance schools during the Revolution began to advertise themselves as teaching “only the genteelest dances.” John Griffiths, the most influential dancing instructor of the early national period, taught classes throughout New York and New England and wrote a widely read manual that listed “Influences of Ill Manners, to be carefully avoided, by Youth, of both sexes.” Among these were “Swinging the Arms, and all other awkward gestures,” “Drumming with feet or hands in Company,” “All actions that have the most remote tendency to Indelicacy,” “All instances of that ill-judged Familiarity, which breeds contempt,” and “every thing which may be called Sluttish or Slovenly.” In the eighteenth century, the only folk dance deemed respectable was the contra dance, in which the movements were confined to walking stiffly in prearranged patterns, with no motion of the hips. The Marquis de Chastellux, a French general serving with the Americans, noticed considerable regimentation at formal balls in Philadelphia:

  Dancing is said to be the emblem both of gaiety and love; here it seems to be the emblem of legislation and of marriage; of legislation, inasmuch as places are marked out, the contredanses prescribed, and every proceeding provided for, calculated, and submitted to regulation; of marriage, since each Lady is supplied with a “partner,” with whom she must dance the whole evening, without being allowed to take another … All the dances are previously arranged, and the dancers are called each in their turn.

  Revolutionary-era balls were ruled by “managers.” Chast
ellux was acquainted with one manager of whom it was said “that when a young Lady who was figuring in a square dance forgot her turn because she was conversing with a friend, he came up to her and loudly called out, ‘Come, come, watch what you are doing; do you think you are here for pleasure?’”

  This is not to suggest that the national effort to regulate bodily movement was entirely successful. One of Washington’s soldiers reported in his journal that at the end of the epic winter of 1778, the Continental troops camped at Valley Forge celebrated with a renewal of an ancient renegade tradition:

  May 1st Last Evening May poles

  were Erected in everry Regt in

  the Camp and at the Revelie

  I was awoke by three cheers

  in honor of King Tamany*

  The day was spent in mirth

  and Jollity the soldiers parading

  marching with fife & Drum

  and Huzzaing as they passd the

  poles their hats adornd with

  white blossoms

  The following was the procession

  of the 3d J Regt on the aforesaid

  day

  first one serjeant drest in an

  Indian habit representing

  King Tamany

  Second Thirteen Sergeants

  drest in white each with a bow

  in his left hand and thirteen

  arrows in his right …

  Having gone native, the soldiers were abruptly brought back to civilization by Washington himself:

  The Non Commissiond

  Officers and Soldiers being

  drawn up in the afforsaid

  manner on the Regimental

  Parade gave 3 Cheers at their

  own Pole and then Marchd

  off to Head Quarters to do Honor