"America Rules England Tonight, by Jesus!" Anti-British Attitudes and the Jacksonian Stage
Sam W. Haynes, University of Texas at Arlington

The Astor Place riot is often cited as an important benchmark in the American urban experience. On May 10, 1849, a combined force of New York City police and state militia fired upon a massive crowd that had gathered at the Astor Place Opera House to disrupt the performance of William Macready, a British actor and long-time rival of the enormously popular American, Edwin Forrest. To a large degree, scholars have sought to explain the riot--which left 22 dead and 36 wounded--in intracommunal terms, drawing attention to socioeconomic, political, as well as cultural tensions in New York City in the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, historians have been so preoccupied with the episode's significance as a popular response to the pressures of urban growth that they have tended to give short shrift to anti-British sentiment as a causative factor. Yet it is important to remember that the confrontation at Astor Place was the culmination of a long tradition of theatrical disturbances involving British actors. New York City alone experienced eight major theatrical riots from 1815 to 1850, as well as numerous disturbances that either temporarily disrupted or brought a premature end to an evening's entertainment. Every major eastern city with a permanent theatre company also saw occasional protests directed against British actors who had in some way offended American audiences.

These theatrical disturbances underscore the complex and sometimes paradoxical set of attitudes that defined American perceptions of Great Britain during the Jacksonian period. The precise role which anti-British feeling played in these events defies simple analysis, for each disturbance resulted from the alignment of a broad range of unique circumstances and conditions. For many theatre-goers, to be sure, expressions of hostility toward Great Britain may well have served as a pretext for disorder, masking problems that had little to do with Anglo-American relations. Nonetheless, whether playing a primary or ancillary role, Anglophobia acted as an adhesive for crowd action, binding together city dwellers of different backgrounds, and motivated by a welter of agendas and concerns. In the process, such outbursts of popular protest enabled citizens of the young republic to forge links of national identity, reinforcing their "Americanness" by means of rituals that attacked the very public symbols of a foreign power.

By the 1830s the American stage had itself become part of a larger drama, one in which national rivalries between Great Britain and the United States could be acted out by Americans resentful of British hegemony. For the most part, these frustrations existed on a purely subliminal level, manifesting themselves in harmless expressions of national pride, but occasionally a British actor's behavior served as a locus for popular anger. These incidents not only served as a form of rebellion against a cultural institution that slavishly copied British norms and models, but tapped into a deeper reservoir of discontent. Few issues in antebellum America could so readily mobilize broad segments of the urban crowd, prodding some into deliberate acts of mayhem and violence, others into unpremeditated vocal demonstrations of disapproval. Americans often felt impotent in the face of vaunted British power, but the theatrical disturbance--pitting a riotous crowd against a solitary, hapless thespian--offered a risk-free form of retribution, a lop-sided contest in which the outcome was never in doubt.

"America rules England tonight, by Jesus!" one participant in the Astor Place riot was reported to have cried. In so doing, he expressed a sentiment that had echoes in many theatrical disturbances during the first half of the nineteenth century. The humbling of a British actor represented, in one triumphantly cathartic moment, the humbling of Great Britain; a symbolic corrective to the manifold wrongs and indignities which Americans believed they had suffered at the hands of British power. In a nation of disparate, even divergent parts, such urban demonstrations gave a crude but forceful resonance to the discourse of national identity, and in so doing helped point the way as the republic moved clumsily toward a sense of self-definition.