Jenny's Toe Revisited: White Responses to Afro-American Shaking Dances

Abstract

By 1843 William Cullen Bryant had acquired reputation he would enjoy for remainder of his life, of being America's most eminent man of letters.1 There was general agreement that he was, as reviewer had called him year before, the first of American poets,'2 and his leading editorials in New York Evening Post had made him an important voice in American politics. At end of February 1843, he began six-week trip through South. He spent about three weeks South Carolina plantation of his friend, novelist William Gilmore Simms, and Simms gave him letters to planters in Orangeburg and Barnwell districts. From Barnwell district he wrote public letter to Evening Post to describe corn-shucking, which had been given, as Bryant told his readers, on purpose that I might witness humors of Carolina Negroes. They danced for him. They put a mock military parade, sort of burlesque of our militia trainings, in which words of command and evolutions were extremely ludicrous. One of them gave mock stump speech, in which Bryant recognized several of conventional phrases of political oratory but noted that these phrases he connected by various expletives, and sounds of which we could make nothing. During shucking of corn, they sang, and Bryant mentions four of songs. Three were new to him, and he describes them in some detail. With fourth he was apparently well acquainted. More important, he seems to have expected that readers of New York Evening Post would be well acquainted with it also, because he says of it only that the song of