Frederick Douglass proudly outlined African American activities in the Gold Rush and sundry other pursuits around the world:įor the present, it is enough to affirm the equal manhood of the negro race. While California did enter the union as a free state in 1850, the legal environment was not altogether hospitable for the thousands of black miners already at work in the gold fields. The production of rice, sugar, and cotton is no better adapted to slave labor than the digging, washing, and quarrying of the gold mines. The European races now engaged in working the mines of California sink under the burning heat and sudden changes of the climate, to which the African race are altogether better adapted. ![]() It was to work the gold mines on this continent that the Spaniards first brought Africans to the country. On 29 January, 1850, Jefferson Davis rose on the Senate floor to espouse a racialist view of the ongoing Gold Rush: (Bayard Taylor’s memoirs recount nightly shows whose popularity took business away from the gambling dens nearby!) While blackface music and lyrics certainly did not always accurately reflect social and economic realities of their times, in this case our example indicates a lesser-known effect of Gold Rush displacements - the migrations (forced or otherwise) of African Americans to the West in search of gold. In the crowded, fast-growing tent cities of the new republic, many newcomers patronized blackface minstrel shows. It wasn’t just the “white folks” who came to California looking for gold prospective miners arrived from all around the world to compete in the search for precious nuggets in the gold fields. The white folks all am crazy wid nuffin’ in dar mouth,īut do mines ob California - whose a gwan Souff? Foster’s original composition features two world-changing technologies of the day: telegraphy ( patented in 1837 by Morse) and steamship travel, while this anonymous rewrite repositions the song in the California Gold Rush (1848-1855) to reflect a slave’s experience of forced migration along the lines of the nation’s fast-growing telegraph network. ![]() Here’s a song you’ll recognize, and yet… it’s a side of the Gold Rush story you might not have heard about in school: The melody is Stephen Foster‘s first big hit, “Oh Susannah” (1847), ubiquitous in its time and still common in the “folk song” tradition over a century and a half later.
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