The trouble began shortly after the curtain fell. On December 11, 1867, following a matinee performance at the Fifth Avenue Opera House in lower Manhattan, a scuffle broke out on the sidewalk. Harsh words punctured the frosty air: an accusation, a denial, an epithet. A fistfight broke out. And then the sound of a gun. Within minutes of the final encore, one man lay dead.

The combatants were rival theatrical managers whose troupes specialized in blackface minstrelsy, a freewheeling, rambunctious, and deeply racist performance form that also happened to be the most popular entertainment in the nineteenth-century United States. Tensions had existed between the managers for months. Earlier in the year, the blackface duo of Edwin Kelly and Francis Leon had signed three top performers away from a troupe managed by Sam Sharpley (born Samuel Sharpe). More recently, Sharpley learned that Leon had been spreading malicious rumors about his financial well-being. When Sharpley found himself in the same matinee audience as Kelly and Leon, he resolved to settle the score.

At the conclusion of the show, Sharpley followed Kelly and Leon into the street and confronted them. After an exchange of words, Sharpley threw the first punch. Soon, Thomas Sharpe – Sam Sharpley’s brother, who had also attended the matinee – exited the theater and joined the fray. Beaten badly by the much larger Tom Sharpe, Edwin Kelly drew a revolver and shot Sharpe three times. Seeing his brother fall, Sam Sharpley pulled his weapon and fired at Kelly. Edwin Kelly was seriously wounded but survived. Tom Sharpe died at the scene.Footnote ¹

The shooting at the Fifth Avenue Opera House was a murder among minstrels. More than this, it was a murder about minstrelsy. The immediate causes of the altercation were professional jealousy, rumor-mongering, and the alleged theft of talent. But in a very real sense, the violence grew out of larger shifts in the institution of blackface minstrelsy itself. From small-scale beginnings in the 1840s, blackface minstrelsy had become big business by the dawn of the Gilded Age. In this context, Sharpley, Kelly, and Leon rose to the top of the nation’s minstrel ranks. The same forces that made them stars, however, fostered increasingly bitter competition – and eventually violence.

The history of blackface minstrelsy in the nineteenth-century United States is well-trodden scholarly ground. The 1990s saw a transformative wave of scholarship, most notably Eric Lott’s classic Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, published in 1993.Footnote ² More recent books by Christopher J. Smith and Brian Roberts suggest the continuing vibrancy of the field.Footnote ³ With very few exceptions, however, studies of nineteenth-century minstrelsy maintain a myopic focus on the antebellum period, largely ignoring subsequent developments.Footnote ⁴ Broader studies of popular amusements in the postbellum era, including works by David Monod, M. Alison Kibler, Robert C. Allen, and Gillian M. Rodger, have done a far better job reckoning with minstrelsy in its later variants.Footnote ⁵ By their very nature, though, these studies tend to highlight the connections between cultural forms, deemphasizing the distinctive aspects of the minstrel show and stressing its demise as popular amusement by the last years of the century. Blackface minstrelsy remained exceedingly popular in the United States for several decades after the Civil War. In these years, it grew bigger, more complicated, and more wide-ranging. It reached more people in more locations, cementing its status as a quintessentially American – and uniquely problematic – form of popular culture.

The confrontation between Sharpley, Kelly, and Leon occurred at a pivotal moment – not simply in the history of blackface minstrelsy, but in the history of U.S. capitalism. Historian Jonathan Levy dates the dawning of America’s “age of capital” to the close of the Civil War in 1865.Footnote ⁶ Though “capitalist” may not be the first word that comes to mind when describing blackface performers, there are some compelling reasons to employ the label. Sam Sharpley, Edwin Kelly, and Francis Leon were not simply performers. They were promoters, administrators, and businessmen. As they wrote jokes and choreographed dance routines, postbellum minstrel managers kept one eye on the ledger book. They relentlessly scouted the competition and made the sorts of investments (in performance spaces, technological innovations, and new acts) necessary to compete in an extraordinarily crowded marketplace.Footnote ⁷ Blackface minstrelsy was entering its own “age of capital.”

And yet, as the Sharpley-Kelly-Leon conflict reveals, this transformation was far from complete in 1867. After all, the managers’ business rivalry did not end with a lawsuit or a hostile takeover, but with a brawl in the street. The blackface minstrel show was born in the working-class neighborhoods of antebellum lower Manhattan. It drank deeply from the distinctive culture of masculine honor, performative physicality, and deeply ingrained violence by which it was surrounded. As the confrontation outside the Fifth Avenue Opera House suggests, postbellum minstrel managers kept one foot in the rough-and-tumble world of antebellum working-class theater. Even in the “age of capital,” older ways of doing business remained relevant. When Kelly and Leon threatened Sharpley’s audiences and his livelihood, he did not hesitate to resort to his fists. The death of Tom Sharpe was the unfortunate result. The postbellum minstrel show may have gone uptown, but it had not fully left the Bowery behind.

More than a random incident of violence, then, the confrontation at the Fifth Avenue Opera House helps us to see blackface minstrelsy in a moment of flux and expansion. To be clear, the December 11, 1867, altercation did not cause the larger shifts in popular amusements described here. Rather, the incident offers a prime vantage point from which to view these changes. It is historically useful precisely because it allows us to glimpse longer-term changes in performance culture before they crystallized fully. Popular amusements were not immune to the seismic forces reshaping American business in the late nineteenth century. However, cultural change is seldom linear. The process by which blackface minstrelsy became a modern, capitalist industry was halting, uncertain, and uneven. The story of a minstrel murder in Manhattan serves to illuminate the links between violence, show business, and capitalism at the dawn of the Gilded Age.

The blackface minstrel show was born in the 1840s. White performers had long used black makeup – usually a paste made from burnt cork – to impersonate characters of African descent in both serious and humorous guises.Footnote ⁸ But it was not until 1843, when a quartet of performers calling themselves the Virginia Minstrels strung together a full evening of blackface songs and sketches, that the minstrel show was born.Footnote ⁹ Within a few years, minstrelsy was a national sensation; on the eve of the Civil War, it stood as the most popular form of entertainment in the United States. In its early years, the blackface minstrel show had been a relatively straightforward affair. It featured a small handful of performers, some rudimentary costuming, and minimal stage decoration. By the mid-1860s, however, blackface audiences had become far more discerning. Burnt cork makeup, humorous wordplay, and a handful of sentimental songs were not going to attract the crowds in an increasingly saturated entertainment sector. To stay competitive, companies needed to offer audiences something fresh – a new sketch, a new song, a new gag, a new performer. As the New York Clipper, the nation’s leading theatrical weekly, put it in 1867: the “public is very fickle, and novelty is what they look for.”Footnote ¹⁰

And novelty is what minstrel managers provided. Across the postbellum decades, touring minstrel troupes grew to hitherto unimaginable size. Companies invested staggering sums on costumes, scenery, and technology. While crude racism remained the lingua franca of the minstrel stage, troupes expanded their topical and thematic repertoires: historical dioramas, steamboat races, Greek temples, and flying machines were all presented on the minstrel stage. The adjectives attached to these aggregations – “Mammoth,” “Gigantean,” and “Megatherian” – reflected the new emphasis on size and scale. The traveling shows of the 1880s and 1890s would have been barely recognizable to those who had seen blackface minstrelsy in its antebellum infancy. Just as surely as in the more traditional sectors of the Gilded Age economy, popular culture bore the hallmarks of capitalization, consolidation, and industrialization.Footnote ¹¹

With hindsight, it is clear that Sam Sharpley, Edwin Kelly, and Francis Leon rose to prominence at a moment of profound transition for American performance culture in general, and for blackface minstrelsy in particular. All three broke into the business in the late 1850s and early 1860s, as the small, self-contained shows of the antebellum period were beginning their slow evolution into the traveling spectacles of the Gilded Age. Sharpley, Kelly, and Leon were key players in this transformation. Responding to audiences’ inexorable demand for novelty, both Sharpley’s troupe and Kelly and Leon’s company would reimagine the form and the content of the blackface minstrel show. Their theatrical innovations attracted sold-out crowds and established patterns that other troupes would follow for decades to come. Amid this shared success, however, their rivalry grew heated. And for all their onstage originality, these minstrel entrepreneurs proved quite willing to resort to some decidedly old-fashioned – and underhanded – tactics in the quest to remain on top. In the cutthroat world of postwar blackface minstrelsy, managers would do anything to stay ahead. This demand led, in the end, to violence at the Fifth Avenue Opera House.

Edwin Kelly took a rather circuitous route to blackface fame. Born in Dublin in 1835, Kelly briefly trained as a medical doctor. Upon arrival in the United States, he found himself drawn to the theater. Kelly’s tenor voice was well-suited to the melodramatic ballads that formed an indispensable part of a blackface program.Footnote ¹² In the comedic “first part” of each show, Kelly settled into the role of interlocutor, the comparatively well-spoken middleman who tried (and inevitably failed) to manage the more outlandish comedians who sat to his left and right. Though the two end men, usually denominated “Bones” and “Tambo,” were the most prestigious and well-compensated comedic roles in a blackface troupe, a skilled interlocutor was an essential part of a company – essentially a forerunner to the twentieth-century comedic “straight man.”

Edwin Kelly first shared a stage with Francis Leon around 1860 while both were members of George Christy’s Minstrels. They soon established a working partnership that lasted for twenty years. After performing together in several troupes in New York and Boston, Kelly and Leon relocated to Chicago.Footnote ¹³ By November 1864, Kelly and Leon were managing their own troupe.Footnote ¹⁴ In addition to his duties onstage, Edwin Kelly served as business manager. In an era in which theatrical companies came and went with regularity, Kelly kept the troupe financially solvent and supplied with talent for the better part of two decades.

Kelly was a skilled performer and clever manager, but Francis Leon was the troupe’s shining star. In fact, Leon – who did not use a first name on stage, preferring the metonym “Leon” – may have been the most popular minstrel performer of the 1860s and 1870s. Born in New York in the early 1840s, Leon possessed an unusually high voice, which allowed him to convincingly sing women’s soprano parts. After singing in church choirs as a youth, he made his way to the stage, finding a niche playing female roles in blackface productions. By the time he teamed up with Kelly, Leon was a highly skilled female impersonator.Footnote ¹⁵ Though male performers had long played women on stage, both in blackface and in traditional theater, Leon’s performances were a revelation.Footnote ¹⁶ In both comedic and sentimental material, he sought to reimagine the role of the minstrel prima donna. His collection of jewelry and women’s clothing was legendary (and well-publicized). As Leon put it later, he “[made] womankind a constant study, that he may be as thoroughly a woman as any of the female sex.”Footnote ¹⁷ Over the course of his long career, Leon would revolutionize the role of the blackface “prima donna,” moving it from a peripheral novelty to a crowd-pleasing minstrel mainstay. With good reason, then, the troupe’s publicity loudly trumpeted the theatrical wonders of “THE ONLY LEON.”Footnote ¹⁸

Performing nightly at the Academy of Music throughout 1865, Kelly and Leon’s Minstrels quickly established themselves as Chicago’s premiere blackface ensemble. However, their sights were set on New York. The next year, they leased and thoroughly renovated a former chapel at 720 Broadway. They opened in early October 1866.Footnote ¹⁹ According to the Clipper’s reviewer, the opening night audience was “good but not crowded.”Footnote ²⁰ Within weeks, the New York crowds had come around. “KELLY & LEON’S MINSTRELS have been rewarded by excellent houses since our last,” the Clipper noted in December. “On Wednesday evening there was not standing room to be had. The aisles were crowded with camp stools, and every available spot occupied.”Footnote ²¹ One month later, the audiences had not abated: “KELLY AND LEON’S MINSTRELS have certainly made their mark in this city, judging by the very liberal support the public have bestowed upon them. Last week the house was crowded every evening.”Footnote ²² By the first months of 1867, Kelly and Leon were well on their way to becoming favorites in New York.

In addition to his talents as a performer, Leon was a prolific author, composer, and arranger. Leon specialized in the grand production numbers that traditionally closed a minstrel performance. Since the earliest days of minstrelsy, the “third part” of a minstrel show had been dedicated to a standalone performance piece: sometimes a short play, sometimes a dance number, sometimes a little bit of both. In the 1840s, these productions invariably featured southern and plantation themes, but by the 1850s troupes had begun to experiment with a variety of material, including comedic parodies (or “burlesques”) of popular theatrical productions and European opera. In the postwar era, as companies grew larger and stage sets more expensive, these burlesque productions grew ever more elaborate. As a writer and director of “third part” blackface burlesques, “The Only Leon” had no competition.

In early 1867, Leon found inspiration just a handful of blocks south of his company’s theater on Broadway. In September 1866, a month before Kelly and Leon opened in New York, a stage spectacular called The Black Crook debuted at Niblo’s Garden. The Black Crook was the talk of New York for months, running for a then-unprecedented 474 performances. In its time, the production was famous for two things: its spectacular theatrical effects and its ballet troupe, whose revealing costumes both scandalized and enticed New York audiences.Footnote ²³ The production spawned scores of imitators, including Cendrillon, which opened in December 1866. Inspired by a French Opera and based on the tale of Cinderella, Cendrillon was an unapologetic facsimile of The Black Crook, down to the stage gadgetry and the underdressed ballet dancers, whose outfits did much to “show off the human form divine.”Footnote ²⁴

Amid this Black Crook mania, Leon prepared a blackface burlesque of the risqué stage spectaculars then sweeping New York theaters. In mid-January 1867, Kelly and Leon’s Minstrels began closing their nightly show with a new piece called “Cinder-Leon.”Footnote ²⁵ Playbills invited audiences to witness “The Original and Torrid combined Burlesque of the BLACK CROOK and Cendrillon, entitled CINDER-LEON!”Footnote ²⁶ Leon, of course, played the lead role. Kelly and Leon’s promotional material promised a ballet troupe imported at great cost from Madagascar. When the curtain opened, the audience found Edwin Kelly and the troupe’s other male comedians cavorting wildly in blackface and skimpy ballet attire. The production lumbered on from there, until the “DELIGHTFULLY ENTICING APOTHEOSIS” that closed the show.Footnote ²⁷

“Cinder-Leon” was a smash hit. The Clipper declared it the “best thing of the kind offered by any minstrel band in this city for a long time.”Footnote ²⁸ The burlesque closed Kelly and Leon’s show for two and a half months, an eternity in the fast-changing world of the minstrel show. Over the course of the next year, Leon produced a string of successful burlesques. Some lampooned contemporary goings-on in the New York theater world, but most were based on European operas. With these spectacular set pieces closing the show each night, Kelly and Leon solidified their status as the most popular blackface troupe in New York. Kelly and Leon “came to this city only a few months ago almost unknown,” reflected the Clipper. “[B]ut striking out into a path of their own, and striving by every means to present attractive novelties to the public, they were not long in obtaining a firm hold upon public favor, and have ever since their opening week played to the most excellent business.”Footnote ²⁹

Though public commentary tended to focus on the troupe’s “attractive novelties,” Leon’s dramatic innovations always coexisted with more traditional blackface fare. As with the “African” ballet troupe in Leon’s “Cinder-Leon” burlesque, race was always center stage at Kelly and Leon’s theater. In later years Leon would take the stage without blacking up, but the company appears to have performed exclusively in blackface throughout 1866 and 1867.Footnote ³⁰ The Clipper dubbed them the city’s leading “colored company” and declared their show to be “the best thing of the kind done in burnt cork for a long time.”Footnote ³¹ Unlike some of their competitors, Kelly and Leon never billed themselves as a variety show or an opera company – they were always “Kelly and Leon’s Minstrels.” Alongside Leon’s elaborate stage burlesques, the company continued to perform derogatory racial songs and blackface gags. At various times during their New York run, the company presented “Shoo Fly,” a blackface song and dance routine tune popularized by Bryant’s Minstrels. They also performed a Leon-authored “Ethiopian Farce” called “Stop That Laughing.”Footnote ³² At other shows, Leon sang an Irish-themed tune called “Kitty from Cork” – given minstrelsy’s predilection for puns, it is certain that “Cork” was more than a geographic signifier.Footnote ³³ While Leon’s skills as a female impersonator and an arranger of farces meant that Kelly and Leon were never wholly reliant on the southern sketches and “burnt cork peculiarities” that had long been the minstrel show’s stock-in-trade, we should take care not to overstate these developments.Footnote ³⁴ For all their thematic and artistic novelty, Kelly and Leon’s Minstrels unapologetically remained a blackface minstrel troupe.

Of course, Kelly and Leon were not the only minstrels angling for a piece of the New York market in 1867. For several years, Sam Sharpley had been pushing the boundaries of the minstrel form. Born in Philadelphia, Sharpley began performing as a teenager. By the time he was in his twenties, he was a much sought-after blackface comic and banjo player. He was known to be “one of the merriest men ever seen in the minstrel business,” lauded for his “mirth-provoking” wit, his “quickness at repartee,” and his “immense” talent as a banjo soloist.Footnote ³⁵ During an 1861 run in Manhattan, he was called “the most successful Negro Delineator that has ever appeared in New York” and “the most original and well read man in the profession.”Footnote ³⁶

In 1865, after a brief partnership with minstrel show veteran Sam Sanford, Sharpley teamed up with Tony Pastor, a groundbreaking performer and producer. During his long career, Pastor’s variety shows anticipated much of the form, content, and style that would soon come to be associated with vaudeville (though Pastor never used the term).Footnote ³⁷ The Pastor-Sharpley management team self-consciously blurred the line between variety and minstrelsy. Sam Sharpley’s contributions were standard-issue minstrel show material – jokes, sketches, and banjo tunes, all performed in blackface. Significantly, though, the Pastor-Sharpley program paired Sharpley’s routines with a broad-ranging variety show bill, featuring “singing, dancing, gymnastic[s] … and various other performances,” all done without blackface.Footnote ³⁸ While Kelly and Leon sought to innovate within the bounds of the minstrel show, it was Sharpley – who was, at heart, an old-fashioned blackface comedian – who seemed the most eager to push beyond minstrelsy entirely.

Outside of New York, Sharpley achieved notable success as the leader of a touring company. Here, also, he anticipated the future of the minstrel show. In the years after the Civil War, blackface troupes spent ever greater periods on the road.Footnote ³⁹ As early as the mid-1860s, Sam Sharpley’s Minstrels, known as the “Iron Clads” or the “Monitors” (a moniker they borrowed from wartime naval vessels), established themselves as something of a touring juggernaut.Footnote ⁴⁰ As a touring company, Sharpley’s Iron Clads presented a standard three-part blackface minstrel show – his experiments with the variety show format, it seems, were limited to New York City. Even so, the troupe played to packed houses and enthusiastic crowds in upstate New York, New Jersey, New England, the Midwest, and Canada.Footnote ⁴¹

In June 1867, Sam Sharpley’s Ironclad Minstrels began a successful summer run in Boston. Sharpley opened on June 10, but his publicity preceded him. The Clipper reported that Sharpley had lined the streets of Boston with “colored posters,” stuck his playbills on “every fence and brick pile,” and placed “photograph cards” in “every store window.”Footnote ⁴² Prior to his summer run in Boston, Sharpley had also made significant improvements to his company, signing two popular acts. The first was Ad Ryman, a seasoned blackface performer. Ryman specialized in the “stump speech,” a malapropism-laden blackface monologue, delivered in dialect, on a topic of contemporary political or social interest. During the Boston run, Ryman recited his patented stump speeches, lampooned Shakespearean actors with Sharpley, and played a key role in the grand “third part” performances that closed each show.Footnote ⁴³ Sharpley also landed a blackface clog dancing duo, William Delehanty and Thomas Hengler, whose synchronized song and dance routines – including “Senegambian Gambols,” “Duoterpischoreanclogpedality,” and a new version of the classic minstrel tune “Sally Come Up” – received pride of place in the self-consciously eclectic “second part” of the troupe’s nightly performances.Footnote ⁴⁴

Sharpley’s Ironclads were a hit in Boston. “SAM SHARPLEY has been drawing tremendous houses,” a Clipper correspondent reported, and was offering “the best minstrel entertainment that Boston has seen for some time.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Audiences agreed, and throughout the summer, Sharpley drew crowds “greater than that enjoyed by any minstrel company in Boston for some time.”Footnote ⁴⁶ A local newspaper reported that the Ironclads’ “success was equal to anything in the history of Ethiopian minstrelsy in Boston. The Sharpley troupe is exceedingly talented, and numerically it is very strong. We only regret that it is to leave Boston, where its triumphs have been so very marked and successful.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Filled with confidence, Sharpley’s publicity took on a distinctly martial tone: “WE FIGHT IT OUT ON THIS LINE, IF IT TAKES ALL SUMMER,” Sharpley promised. “The great Iron Clads,” he vowed, would end up “masters of the business.”Footnote ⁴⁸

On the heels of his success in Boston, Sharpley planned his triumphant return to New York. He formed a new partnership with Ben Cotton, a decorated blackface comedian. Shortly thereafter, Charley White, another well-known performer, joined as a third managing partner. The new troupe opened at the Fifth Avenue Opera House – the future site of the confrontation with Kelly and Leon – but soon moved their show to the Theatre Comique, a storied variety theater on Broadway.Footnote ⁴⁹ Sharpley’s new production once again blended minstrelsy and the variety show. The performance each night opened with a standard blackface “first part,” starring Sharpley and Cotton. The remainder of the bill featured a wide-ranging assortment of acts, including acrobatics, feats of “posturing,” a dance by “M’lle Lodoviski,” and a French pantomime.Footnote ⁵⁰ The combined minstrel and variety show at the Theatre Comique drew full houses and rave reviews. “[T]he Theatre Comique is gaining a foothold among the established favorite places of amusement in the city,” a New York Clipper reviewer noted in late September.”Footnote ⁵¹ Six weeks later, a feature in the Clipper praised the “very good minstrel entertainments” at Sharpley’s Theatre Comique and noted that the shows were “well attended, at times this neat little theatre being densely crowded.”Footnote ⁵² In fact, the variety show at the Theatre Comique out-earned Kelly and Leon every month between August and December.Footnote ⁵³ Upon his return to New York, Sam Sharpley had catapulted himself to the top of the profession. He had two new partners, a manager’s share in two different New York theaters, and a talented roster of performers, blackface and otherwise.

But there was trouble on the horizon. After a brief summer tour, Kelly and Leon had also returned to New York. Prior to their opening, they announced that the clog dancers Delehanty and Hengler – recently members of Sam Sharpley’s Iron Clad Minstrels – would be joining their troupe.Footnote ⁵⁴ Shortly thereafter, Sharpley lost the comedian Ad Ryman to Kelly and Leon’s Minstrels.Footnote ⁵⁵ The mere fact of the performers’ departure from Sharpley’s troupe was not particularly surprising. In the decades before central booking agencies, theater managers were responsible for recruiting, signing, retaining – and occasionally poaching – talent for their troupes.Footnote ⁵⁶ Loyalty and long-term contracts were neither expected nor offered, and blackface performers changed companies with great frequency. When Sharpley signed Ryman, Delehanty, and Hengler several months earlier, he had evinced little concern for the financial well-being of their former employers. And, as if to prove the point, all three of the performers in question would leave Kelly and Leon’s Minstrels before the end of 1867.

Even so, Sharpley seethed. He viewed the defections of Ad Ryman and Delehanty and Hengler as a personal slight. Sharpley fixated, in particular, on the timing of the departures. In June and July, Kelly and Leon’s Minstrels had performed a three-week stand in Boston during Sharpley’s longer run there. Sharpley believed that Kelly and Leon had first made contact with his performers in Boston – and may have even scheduled their Boston shows with the express intention of raiding his company. “We had rival houses in Boston at one time,” Sharpley later told reporters, “and Kelly and Leon … induced two or three of my people (minstrels) to leave my house.”Footnote ⁵⁷ While the exact chain of events is uncertain, two things are clear. First, Kelly and Leon had strengthened their troupe at Sharpley’s expense. And second, Sharpley believed that they had crossed a personal and professional line in so doing.

But there was more. Shortly after the return to New York, troubling murmurs began to reach Sam Sharpley. Friends and acquaintances in the minstrel profession reported that Leon had been spreading rumors, telling anyone who would listen that Sharpley was financially overextended and on the verge of bankruptcy. It is impossible to determine whether or not Leon actually gossiped about Sharpley’s finances, though rumors of business embarrassment certainly would have made it easier for him to sign talent away from Sharpley. It is equally difficult to ascertain whether Sharpley’s economic condition was, in fact, compromised. On its face, the charge certainly seems plausible. Even under the best of circumstances, minstrel companies operated on a shoestring budget. Given the fact that Sharpley held a managing interest in two New York theaters – both the Theatre Comique and the Fifth Avenue Opera House – it is quite possible that his resources were spread especially thin during the autumn of 1867.

Sharpley’s recent string of short-term partnerships – at least three in a little over two years – would seem to support this reading. In an unpublished memoir, Sharpley’s one-time collaborator Sam Sanford recalled that in early 1865, a cash-strapped Sharpley asked him for a $300 loan to support a touring company. Two months later, Sharpley begged Sanford for an additional $200 before inviting him to join the tour as a full partner. A short time later, however, Sharpley went behind Sanford’s back to form a new partnership with Tony Pastor. He bought out Sanford’s share in their troupe, likely using Pastor’s money to do so.Footnote ⁵⁸ After a two-year turn with Tony Pastor, Sharpley undertook yet another new venture, this time with Charley White and Ben Cotton. White and Cotton certainly contributed funds to the new partnership in addition to their jokes, dance routines, and managerial acumen. We might view this history of loans, payouts, and revolving partnerships as evidence that Sharpley was a calculating and driven businessman operating on the cutting edge of amusement capitalism. But there may also be a simpler reading – Sam Sharpley was chronically short of cash.

The truth of the rumor about Sharpley’s impending bankruptcy was somewhat immaterial. Financial gossip had a singular power in the hyper-competitive world of postbellum New York amusements. Leon’s rumors – if, indeed, he was spreading them – put the future of Sharpley’s performance holdings in serious jeopardy. Sharpley’s dilemma underscores the transitional nature of the minstrel show in the 1860s. On the one hand, blackface was becoming big business. To stage a competitive company and to meet his audience’s insatiable demand for novelty, Sharpley was forced to enter into a series of partnerships, first with Sanford, then with Pastor, and finally with Cotton and White. Such actions anticipated the consolidated, capital-intensive industrial minstrel shows of the late nineteenth century. At the same time, however, the credit relationships sustaining postwar minstrelsy remained resolutely personal. In a holdover from an earlier era of show business economics, Sharpley’s name and his reputation were paramount. His good standing in the community of minstrel managers was the primary means by which Sharpley had secured credit.Footnote ⁵⁹ Even if he was not actually on the verge of bankruptcy, therefore, the rumors themselves posed a dire threat to Sharpley’s future success and financial solvency. From Sharpley’s perspective, Leon’s transgressions were manifest. Having already stolen a comedian and a pair of dancers, Leon’s whispers now posed an existential threat to Sharpley’s professional aspirations.

For all of his innovations in performance and management, Sharpley’s response was resolutely traditional. Sharpley seems to have viewed the struggle with Kelly and Leon primarily through the lens of honor. Although this idea is more often associated with the antebellum South, scholars Elliott J. Gorn, Lorien Foote, and Richard B. Stott have each described a northern, working-class culture of honor, defined by martial manhood and a need to respond physically to perceived slights and abuses.Footnote ⁶⁰ Because honor was an external ethos that relied on the affirmation and validation of the community, violations of honor demanded public recompense, almost always through violence.Footnote ⁶¹ This northern variant of honor culture laid deep roots in the working-class, immigrant neighborhoods of antebellum lower Manhattan – exactly the same neighborhoods where minstrelsy came of age in the 1840s and 1850s. The early patrons of blackface minstrelsy brought such notions of honor, violence, and masculinity with them to the theater.

And indeed, blackface performers and promoters were no strangers to physical violence. With some frequency, they turned to their fists to settle scores, mediate difficulties, and remedy perceived violations of manly honor. In late 1857, for example, minstrels George Christy and Edward Bowers, both members of Wood and Christy’s Minstrels, got into a fight backstage in the middle of a performance. Far from criticizing the pugilists, the New York Clipper lauded them for enlivening the evening’s entertainment and asked only that future fights take place in front of the curtain where the audience might properly enjoy them.Footnote ⁶² A little over a year later, two minstrels came to blows over the authorship of a song called “Mac Dill Darrells.” Charles Fox and James Unsworth each performed the tune with their respective companies, and both claimed to have written it.Footnote ⁶³ The disagreement started in the pages of the Clipper but culminated in a fistfight on the street. Unsworth won the brawl, although the question of authorship remained unsettled.Footnote ⁶⁴ In 1863, minstrel-turned-Irish comedian Barney Williams was charged with assault after punching a dramatic critic in a New York theater. The cause of the altercation was an insult directed at Williams’s wife (who was also his costar).Footnote ⁶⁵ Such minor dustups were so common in New York theatrical circles that they scarcely merited comment; indeed, their absence was sometimes deemed more newsworthy. “We have not heard of a single fight or turn-up in theatrical circles during the past week,” the Clipper joked, “and we do not know what to make of it.”Footnote ⁶⁶

For all its rapid evolution in the mid-1860s, minstrelsy still had one foot in this older world of masculine honor and performative physicality. After the December 11 confrontation, Sharpley would tell reporters that Kelly and Leon had “dealt in an underhanded manner” and with great “unfairness,” citing both the theft of his performers and the rumors about his financial solvency.Footnote ⁶⁷ His “indignation” aroused, Sharpley reportedly spent several months looking for Leon, eager to make him “eat his words.”Footnote ⁶⁸ His actions – stalking the streets of the city and challenging rivals to a fight after a matinee – were not typical of business managers competing in a modern capitalist marketplace. Instead, Sharpley spoke a language of besmirched honor and physical retribution. There was much more at stake than ticket sales and professional advantage. Whether or not they intended to do so, Kelly and Leon had tarnished Sharpley’s standing in the shared community of performers and producers. Sharpley needed to restore his good name. He was out for blood.

On December 11, 1867, Edwin Kelly and Francis Leon decided to take in a matinee – a farcical adaptation of Euripides’s Medea – at the Fifth Avenue Opera House prior to their performance that evening.Footnote ⁶⁹ Kelly and Leon arrived early and took their seats. Shortly before the curtain went up, Sam Sharpley slid into the theater and sat near the back. He noticed his rivals in the audience and resolved to confront them after the performance. Unbeknownst to Sharpley, his younger brother Thomas Sharpe also decided to attend the matinee that day. Tom Sharpe was thirty-one years old and married with two children. He had recently moved to New York from Philadelphia and was making a living running a “fashionable” gambling house on 25^th Street, specializing in the card game Faro.Footnote ⁷⁰ Tom Sharpe’s only involvement with blackface minstrelsy was as a spectator. He had never met Edwin Kelly or Francis Leon.

By the time the performance concluded, Sam Sharpley’s blood was up. He had been eagerly awaiting the opportunity to challenge Kelly and Leon. Reaching the street, Sharpley stepped face-to-face with Leon. “You have been telling lies about me,” he thundered, and “said that my property was all mortgaged[.] [Y]ou are a dirty little liar.” Leon denied the accusation, adding that Sharpley was a “son of a bitch.”Footnote ⁷¹ At this point, Sharpley punched Leon. In newspaper descriptions of the altercation, Sharpley was invariably described as a large man, “of stout build and muscular proportions.”Footnote ⁷² Leon, on the other hand, was called a “slight, effeminate figure” and “a delicate young man.”Footnote ⁷³ In an effort to protect his partner, Edwin Kelly stepped between the combatants. “So you are going to take his part?” Sharpley roared, removing his overcoat.Footnote ⁷⁴ “You God damned Irish son of a bitch[,] I can lick the both of you.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Kelly and Sharpley began to scuffle. Leon broke off and ran up Broadway, looking for a police officer.

At this point, Tom Sharpe exited the theater. Neither brother, apparently, had been aware of the other’s presence until this moment. Seeing Tom, Sam Sharpley pulled away from Kelly. “You take care of that one,” Sharpley said to his brother, gesturing to Kelly, and “I will attend to this one.”Footnote ⁷⁶ With that, Sam Sharpley broke into a run after Leon.

Edwin Kelly began to struggle with Tom Sharpe. Kelly got the worst of the encounter. Sharpe was soon on top of him, shaking, punching, and even biting. Kelly begged members of the crowd to help, gasping “for God sake, take him off, I am down.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Several onlookers finally intervened, pulling Sharpe off of Kelly. As they did, Sharpe landed a couple of well-placed kicks to the side of Kelly’s head. Sitting up, a dazed and bloodied Edwin Kelly pulled a revolver from his pocket, leveled it at Thomas Sharpe, and pulled the trigger. Then he fired twice more. Tom Sharpe died within minutes.

Up the block, Sam Sharpley had caught up with Leon. As the two minstrels argued, Sharpley heard the gunshots. He wheeled around in time to see his brother fall. Sharpley “uttered an exclamation of horror at seeing his brother laying there,” and ran back toward Kelly, drawing a revolver from his pocket.Footnote ⁷⁸ His first shot caught Kelly across the temple. As Sharpley fired again, a police officer grabbed at his hand in an attempt to disarm him. The second bullet struck Sharpley’s own finger on its way skyward.

The police arrested Sharpley, Kelly, and Leon and brought them to the 29^th Precinct Station House. Edwin Kelly – suffering from a bullet wound and the contusions inflicted by Tom Sharpe – was badly injured, but his wounds were not deemed life-threatening.Footnote ⁷⁹ Just over a week later, on December 20, the district attorney filed four indictments: one charged Edwin Kelly with first degree murder for the shooting of Tom Sharpe; the second and third charged Sam Sharpley with assault (one count related to Kelly, and the other to Leon); and the fourth charged all three men with disturbing the peace. In the end, the District Attorney chose to pursue only the murder charge against Edwin Kelly. The other cases were dismissed.Footnote ⁸⁰

The trial opened in the New York Court of General Sessions on April 28, 1868, with Recorder John K. Hackett presiding. The indictment charged Edwin Kelly with “Homicide in the Degree of Murder” – that is, murder in the first degree.Footnote ⁸¹ To secure a guilty verdict, the District Attorney would need to prove that Kelly had acted “with malice aforethought” in shooting Tom Sharpe. The prosecution’s case rested on the indisputable fact that Kelly had drawn his weapon after Tom Sharpe had been pulled off of him. As the District Attorney put it in his opening statement: “death was caused after all conflict had entirely ceased.”Footnote ⁸² From the prosecution’s perspective, the severe beating that Kelly suffered at the hands of Tom Sharpe was immaterial. Since Kelly had formed the intent to shoot Sharpe after the immediate danger to his life had passed, the act was premeditated. This meant Kelly had committed murder in the first degree.

Kelly’s defense attorneys sought to convince the jury that Kelly had used the weapon only as a last resort. Since the moment of his arrest, Edwin Kelly had maintained his innocence. Sam Sharpley provoked the confrontation, Kelly said, and he had simply stepped in to protect his partner. What happened next was entirely out of his control. “The occurrence was neither expected[,] sought[,] [n]or provoked by me,” an emotional Kelly stated in his post-arrest deposition. When Tom Sharpe began to pummel him, Kelly feared that his life was in danger and reached for his weapon out of desperation. “What I did was wholly in the defence [sic] of my person,” Kelly insisted. “[A] person situated as I was could not act from a reflection, but would rather be thrown upon the instincts of nature.”Footnote ⁸³ He had acted, Kelly insisted, purely out of self-defense.

At the trial, the defense emphasized the brutality of Tom Sharpe’s attack. Witnesses testified that Sharpe had pinned Kelly to the ground, savagely punching, kicking, and biting Kelly’s face and head. In his testimony, Francis Leon reported that “Kelly was dreadfully used up” after the altercation with Sharpe: “the left eye was closing rapidly; his left ear bore the marks of teeth.”Footnote ⁸⁴ The defense also focused on Tom Sharpe’s size. One witness guessed that he was forty pounds heavier than Kelly; during his testimony, Leon consistently referred to Sharpe as “the big man.” Under these circumstances, Kelly’s attorneys argued, any reasonable person would have had reason to fear for their health and safety. Though Kelly begged for mercy, Sharpe did not relent until bystanders forcibly dragged him away. Several witnesses even claimed that when Kelly fired his weapon, Tom Sharpe was advancing on him a second time. All of this, the defense argued, pointed to a shooting undertaken out of self-defense.Footnote ⁸⁵

Although the trial lasted three days, the outcome was never really in doubt. In his remarks at the close of the proceedings, Recorder Hackett informed the jurors that the prosecution had failed to meet the requirements for a first-degree murder conviction. “The indictment charges murder of the first degree,” Hackett told the jurors. “[A]s matter of law … no evidence has been given upon the trial of this case which could justify a conviction of the specific offence charged.” Under New York law, Hackett said, the most severe charge for which Kelly could be convicted was third-degree manslaughter. If the jurors believed, however, that Kelly had simply been “obeying the ungovernable instinct of self-preservation” when he shot Tom Sharpe, the homicide was justifiable, and the jury must return a verdict of not guilty.Footnote ⁸⁶

With this, the jury retired. At around one o’clock in the afternoon on Thursday, April 30, 1868, after a mere ten minutes of deliberation, the jurors found Edwin Kelly not guilty. The announcement was greeted with “a great outburst of applause in the courtroom.” Kelly left the court a free man, surrounded by “a host of friends who proffered their earnest congratulations upon the favorable issue of the trial.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Sam Sharpley’s response to the verdict was not recorded.

The show would go on for Kelly and Leon’s Minstrels. For several months after the shooting, the troupe took the stage each night without either of its managers. Kelly’s legal obligations rendered him unable to perform, while Leon took a brief respite from the stage after the traumatic events of December 11. In mid-February 1868, at the urging of his fans, Leon returned to the company.Footnote ⁸⁸ He wasted no time preparing a new “original and highly sensational operatic Burlesque,” this one a parody of Jacques Offenbach’s The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein called “The Grand Dutch S.”Footnote ⁸⁹ The burlesque was another smash, and Leon presented it more than ninety times – all of them without Edwin Kelly.Footnote ⁹⁰ In early June 1868, just over a month after his acquittal, Kelly made his triumphant return to the stage. Leon marked the occasion with the premiere of another new operatic burlesque, “La Bell L N,” a parody of Offenbach’s comedic opera, La Belle Hélène. Set during the Trojan War, the piece starred Leon as Helen of Troy and Kelly as Paris. The troupe’s advertisements promised a new stage set, costumes “imported from Paris,” and a script that had taken Leon three months to prepare. “The only obstacle to its production … has been the retirement temporarily from the stage of MR. EDWIN KELLY,” the advertisement read. “It is, however, gratifying to announce that [Kelly] deems it an agreeable duty to comply with the flattering request of his patrons, and will therefore make his reappearance on Monday Evening, June 8.”Footnote ⁹¹

With Edwin Kelly back in the cast, Kelly and Leon’s Minstrels returned to the top of New York’s blackface scene. They maintained their theater at 720 Broadway until 1869 when they left for London. In the 1870s, they found success in Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, New York (again), and finally Australia, before Kelly and Leon split in 1880. Edwin Kelly retired in Australia, while “The Only Leon” remained a star of minstrelsy and the variety stage until the end of the century.Footnote ⁹²

Although Sam Sharpley continued to perform after the shooting, he never again enjoyed the level of success he had experienced in the mid-1860s. Following his brother’s death, Sharpley was understandably reluctant to reopen in New York. Sharpley, Cotton, and White’s company left the city, setting up shop in Newark, New Jersey, and later in Chicago.Footnote ⁹³ When his partnership with Ben Cotton and Charley White came to an end in 1869, Sharpley launched his own variety show featuring the Ironclad Minstrels and an assortment of other acts, including “Logrenia the Royal Conjurer” and his troupe of birds, mice, and cats. Each performance of “Sam Sharpley’s Silver Show” concluded with the distribution of presents to the audience.Footnote ⁹⁴ In 1872, Sharpley joined minstrel pioneer G. Swayne Buckley in presenting a variety bill that combined “all the elements of Minstrelsy, Opera, Drama, Concert, Burlesque, and Pantomime.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Predictably, given Sharpley’s history, the partnership with Buckley did not last long. Sam Sharpley died in 1875 at the age of forty-four years old.Footnote ⁹⁶

By most measures, the long-term effects of the confrontation at the Fifth Avenue Opera House were quite limited. It did nothing to decrease the popularity of blackface minstrelsy in New York. It failed to calm the explosive rivalry between minstrel troupes in the city. And in the years that followed, minstrelsy’s “age of capital” proceeded apace. Promoters spent ever-greater sums of money on performers, sets, scenery, costumes, and transportation, all in the hopes of gaining a competitive advantage. The events of late 1867 – when a professional rivalry led blackface minstrels to shoot at one another in the streets of lower Manhattan – became a footnote. Indeed, other than its very real effects on the unfortunate Tom Sharpe, one could be forgiven for asking if the shooting had any lasting significance at all.

Perhaps, however, this is the wrong measure by which to judge such an incident. The confrontation at the Fifth Avenue Opera House is useful primarily for what it reveals about longer-term trends in popular culture. From the 1840s until the end of the nineteenth century, the blackface minstrel show was a constant in American life, playing an outsized role in forging and refining ideologies of race and national identity. Across those decades, the minstrel form itself was in a constant state of development. As minstrelsy grew from a small-scale regional specialty to a national (and international) phenomenon, promoters reimagined the contours of the minstrel show and pushed the limits of the blackface business model. Sharpley, Kelly, and Leon were key players in this transformation. They were members of a generation of postwar managers eager to carry minstrelsy beyond its usual topical and stylistic bounds – if not for art, then certainly for profit.

And yet, some caution is in order. This sort of streamlined evolutionary narrative risks obscuring the decidedly untidy process of cultural change. The halting steps by which the bawdy blackface shows of the antebellum Bowery became the sanitized touring spectaculars of the Gilded Age are all too easily telescoped and oversimplified. As the Sharpley-Kelly-Leon confrontation reminds us, such shifts in popular amusement were neither automatic nor inevitable. At the dawn of the Gilded Age, blackface minstrelsy was very much in flux. Even as its practitioners innovated on the stage and in their companies, older ways of doing business remained relevant. Leon’s upscale operatic farces regularly shared a bill with the crudest of blackface stereotypes, while the reinvention of minstrelsy as big business did not entirely efface an older culture of honor-based violence in the theater. The development of popular amusement, like all forms of historical change, is complex, contested, and contingent. The chain of events that culminated in the shooting of Tom Sharpe – a murder among minstrels – is valuable precisely because it allows us a glimpse of this process.