Toussaint, Gabriel, and Three Finger’d Jack: “Courageous Chiefs” and the “Sacred Standard of Liberty” on the Atlantic Stage

John Fawcett’s Obi; or Three Finger’d Jack, a pantomime based on a Jamaican slave revolt of 1780 to 1781, took the Atlantic stages just as the Saint Domingue insurrection threatened to engulf the Caribbean and spread to North America. The pantomime debuted in London in 1800 and in Philadelphia in 1801, but was produced and understood quite disparately in the two cities. In London, the pantomime and its blackface hero, Jack, elicited multivalent reactions: anti-slavery sympathy, anti-colonial sentiment, and constructions of Jack as a neo-classical hero. In Philadelphia, by contrast, Obi was performed largely as spectacle, and written reactions construed Jack as a one-dimensional savage villain, probably due to the palpable threat of slave revolt to the city and polity. While the signification of the pantomime and its blackface hero was contingent upon the site-specific performative milieus, even decades after its Atlantic debuts Jack and Toussaint L’Ouverture were still enduringly linked. Transatlantic iterations of Obi were thus both contributors to and barometers of not only the disparate political and cultural pressures of London and Philadelphia, but also the contested meanings of slave revolt as either savage vengeance or the proving ground for human rights and political agency.