New York Hippodrome shows were weird. Even mentioning that the first bill included a show called A Yankee Circus on Mars makes that point clear. But they weren’t always steampunk/George Melies turn of the twentieth century fantastical. Some of the shows used the Hippodrome’s wildest features (like a 14-foot deep water tank built into the stage) to replicate scenes from U.S. History. The other show on the opening bill was called Andersonville: A Story of Wilson’s Raiders, as you can see from the photo above. It went through a couple of title changes and was eventually called The Raiders. It was the first of many Hippodrome shows to reconcile with the war, make it into a spectacle, and imagine the ways that white northerners and southerners could reconcile.
The title alone conflates a couple of things that went on during the war, though both were in the general vicinity of the southeastern U.S. Camp Sumter military prison in Andersonville, Georgia. The POW camp kept U.S. Army soldiers in horrific conditions; nearly 1/3 of the 45,000 men held there died before the war ended. The Andersonville Raiders was the name of a group of prisoners that engaged in criminal behavior within the prison camp. But WIlson’s Raid was an incursion of Union troops into Alabama and West Georgia near the end of the war. The show draws on both, though it uses Andersonville prison as a setting for part of the performance.
Plot summary for The Raiders
“The Raiders” summary is given in the program above, held by the Belknap Collection for the Performing Arts at the University of Florida.
This synopsis reads:
Action begins in the first of the two tableaux during the critical moments of 1861. As guests at West Point are the relatives and friends of the cadets, many of whom are of Southern birth. John Barnes, a young Northerner and an officer of cadets, loves Virginia Calhoun, daughter of a leading secessionist, and though his addresses are received with favor by the girl, both decide when word comes that war is inevitable to wait until the struggle is over before exchanging pledges that would bind them for life.
Barnes is made an officer of the regular army in recognition of his superior qualities as a man and a soldier. In the second tableaux he leads the Federal Troops in the battle in which the Thompson & Dundy stud of plunging horses participate, and in which the wonderful water stage of the Hippodrome is utilized.
The most remarkable part of this scene, by all accounts, took place when the U.S. army built a pontoon bridge across the “river” represented by the water tank and the Confederate soldiers on horseback plunged into the water to try and escape. The plunging horses were a major draw, advertised in the handbill above and on the side of the Hippodrome building. The London Hippodrome had plunging horses in an earlier historical tableau, where they were depicted plunging through a frozen lake in Siberia. But these horses got to re-enact our national history instead.
What interests me, especially after talking to Ian Pettus, one of the Auburn History Department’s PhD students, is that romance between the Southern woman Calhoun and the Northern man Barnes. Ian let me know that this is a part of a larger narrative from the time period discussed in Nina Silber’s book The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900. Hippodrome shows definitely play into that sentimental reintegration of white Southerners into the American imaginary. There’s a later show called The International Cup that features the same kind of romance between a Northern boy and a Southern girl, this time the children of Civil War veterans. That show makes its politics of reconciliation explicit with a song called “There Is No North or South To-Day.” The Hippodrome performed some of the post-Reconstruction mythmaking that we’re still reckoning with today.