Stump speech (minstrelsy)

The stump speaker, typically one of the buffoonish endmen known as Tambo and Bones, mounted some sort of platform and delivered the oration in an exaggerated parody of Black Vernacular English that hearkened to the Yankee and frontiersman stage dialects from the theatre of the period.

In his guide to staging a minstrel show, Charles Townsend offers this advice: Stump Speeches are always very popular, if original in thought, and well delivered.

Some stump speakers come on in a ragged suit and damaged "plug" hat, carrying an old-fashioned valise and huge umbrella.

[5]Other stump speeches were send-ups of science or philosophy that parodied the lyceum lectures popular with the educated middle class in the 1850s.

[7] Prior to the American Civil War, women's rights was a popular target of the stump speech's ridicule.

There wuz Queen Elizabeth, who wuz the virgin queen; and Mrs. Swisshelm; there's Lucy Stone, and Anna Dickinson; there's Lucretia Mott, and Mrs. Jinks, all uv whom showed thet women cood seese to be women, and be ez neer to men ez nacher allowed them.

[9]During the Reconstruction period, black Congressmen became a popular subject, portrayed as bumblers whose incompetence prevented them from posing any threat to the white-dominated government.

[13] Such performances influenced print media as well, as exemplified by the dialect essays and editorials that appeared in American newspapers such as the New York Clipper in the 19th century.