Familiarity (and fascination) with such stylised impersonations and one-dimensional ‘exhibits’ must have shaped audience expectations when black men and women from the United States appeared before the British and Irish public on what they hoped would be their own terms. Many of them came under pressure to conform to these expectations, and Douglass was no exception. In the theatricality of his performances he negotiated the demand that he correspond to the popular image of the blackface minstrel, acceding to it and resisting it at the same time. Sometimes he directly comments on his predicament, showing distaste for the way that terms such as ‘runaway’ and ‘fugitive’ – most often used to introduce him in the press – demean him as much as the comic impersonators did. To the extent that he successfully disrupts audience preconceptions, however, he faces a new challenge: the accusation that he is an ‘imposter’.

The month Douglass first spoke at Glasgow's City Hall, the actor Ira Aldridge was also appearing in theatres in the West of Scotland, although their paths never quite crossed. When Aldridge starred in Zaraffa, Mungo and Three-Fingered Jack at the Adelphi, the Glasgow Dramatic Review noted his habit of following his moving performances with renditions of ‘Jumping Jim Crow’ and ‘Opposum up a Gum Tree’. The celebrated New York dancer William Lane (‘Juba’), allegedly the same man described by Dickens in American Notes (1842), performed solo but enjoyed more success alongside the Ethiopian Serenaders (appearing with members of the group in Edinburgh in 1848), and also artificially darkened his complexion (at least earlier in his career), suggesting that his appeal was greatest when he seemed to conform to the conventions of blackface. The composer and bandleader Frank Johnson, whose five-piece American Minstrels played in London in 1837–8 with exquisite arrangements of operatic classics and military marches, found that audiences seemed more delighted with his arrangement of ‘Jim Crow’, and he later wrote versions of ‘Miss Lucy Long’, ‘Dandy Jim’ and ‘Ole Dan Tucker’. To what extent such concessions to popular taste were coupled with a wry attempt to satirise the form that dehumanised them – and, if so, whether this was evident to the crowds that went to see them – is hard to determine.