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Unlike most abolitionists, Abby Kelley Foster and Stephen Foster refused to support the Union war. This chapter locates their antiwar motivations in their idiosyncratic brand of nationalism. The Fosters, like all abolitionists, desired to create a more perfect Union bereft of slavery and moral prejudice. The couple, however, led a hard-line faction that also emphasized moral rigidity—the need for reformers to avoid compromise, lest they corrupt the antislavery mission. This radical vision led the Fosters to oppose the Union war as an imperfect—and therefore unacceptable—vehicle for antislavery reform. Abraham Lincoln, in their view, would never fulfill abolitionists’ desires for total emancipation and black rights. Even after the Emancipation Proclamation, the pair continued to oppose the Lincoln administration as an obstacle to true reform. This chapter thus opens a window onto the meanings of the Union war for those Northerners who never saw wartime emancipationist progress as inevitable.

This chapter focuses on Yankee Doodle Dandy, the Warner Bros. movie about George M. Cohan's life. It is but one of dozens of Hollywood biopics purporting to tell the story of the great American popular songwriters, from Stephen Foster to the tunesmiths of Tin Pan Alley and the Broadway musical show. Filmmakers, sometimes assisted by the composers themselves, could recast them into any desired shape and construct a weave of fact and fiction, sacrificing biographical detail to the glory of the music itself. From the 1930s to the late 1950s, these pictures came in a flood, boasting big budgets, glossy production values, lots of music, and major stars. If the prestige of the classical pantheon had been and continued to be a factor in its marketability, the allure of the Tin Pan Alley composers—success and money—was even more potent.

This chapter reexamines the Five Points Riot as an example of “love crime” racism. That is, the rioters embraced blackface and Jim Crow even during the riot, while engaging in violent attacks against actual African Americans and white abolitionists. Blackface, as it emerged in the 1830s, was an expression of the new aggressive and masculine working class culture. Its characters embraced bodily self-expression, vulgarity, violence and anti-intellectualism, against a rising middle class culture of reform, uplift and humanitarianism. The rioters targeted both African Americans and middle-class whites who supported African American uplift and the abolition of slavery: those were not conforming to their expectations about black people, or those who appeared to be conspiring to “ruin” the authenticity of blacks. Middle class white men, however, were not willing to cede all masculinity and authenticity to the working class. By the 1840s and 1850s, songwriters like Stephen Foster blended the genre’s original impulses with nostalgia, sentiment and deep emotionalism, and increasingly focused on the character of the sentimental slave. Thus, by embracing blackface, the middle class was able to contain the threat of working class culture by consuming its rebellious style of anger, softening it with sentiment.

Ives’s “Thoreau” music takes its cue from several passages in Thoreau’s Walden, including a musical depiction of three walking tours that basically circumnavigate Walden Pond from Thoreau’s cabin. Quotations from the Stephen Foster song “Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground” create a political quandary, but the music devolves into a calm ostinato that reflects nature’s unhurried pace. A flute that enters at the end refers to Thoreau’s habit of playing the flute from his boat in Walden Pond.

This chapter explores the origination of the coon song, a ragtime melody mixing jazz and march music and replete with degrading racial stereotypes. May Irwin was the most prominent white female coon shouter. Songs by Stephen Foster and those performed by William Walker and Bert Williams are discussed, as is the nationwide dissemination of sheet music from Tin Pan Alley. The author examines abolitionism and Radical Reconstruction in African American history and the increase of lynchings of African Americans in Jim Crow America. She then looks at the “Greedy Gal” and the “Idealized” and “Pathetic” coon stereotypes of black life.