Mar 01, 2012 - Sale 2271

Sale 2271 - Lot 374

Price Realized: $ 900
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 600 - $ 800
(MILITARY--CIVIL WAR.) BRYANT'S MINSTRELS. "Raw Recruits, or Abraham's Daughter, as sung with great applause by Bryants Minstrels of New York, Words by Charley Fox, Arranged by W. L. Hobbs." Lithographic cover and five pages of engraved music, standard sheet music size; spine with some damage having been removed from a larger volume of sheet music; paper evenly toned. New York: Firth and Pond, 1862
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Bryants Minstrels was a black-face minstrel troupe that performed in the mid-19th century, primarily in New York City. The troupe was led by the O'Neill brothers from upstate New York, who took the stage name Bryant. The eldest brother Jerry, a veteran of the Ethiopian Serenaders, Campbell's Minstrels, E.P. Christy's Minstrels and other troupes, sang and played tambourine and bones. Dan Bryant, who had toured with Losee's Minstrels, the Sable Harmonists and Campbell's Minstrels, sang and played banjo. The lithographic cover is an early barb, lampooning the idea of using black soldiers. In May of 1863, Lincoln established the Bureau of Colored Troops to manage the burgeoning numbers of black soldiers. By the end of the Civil War, roughly 179,000 black men (10% of the Union Army) served as soldiers in the U.S. Army and another 19,000 served in the Navy. Nearly 40,000 black soldiers died over the course of the war-30,000 of infection or disease.