Rice very naturally had many imitators, and Jim Crow wheeled about the country with considerable success, particularly when the original was in other lands. In the collection of Mr. Moreau is a bill of "The Theatre" (the Park), dated May 4, 1833, in which Mr. Blakeley was announced to sing the "Comic Extravaganza of Jim Crow" between the comedy of _Laugh When You Can_, in which he played Costly, and the melodrama of _The Floating Beacon_, and preceded by "Signora Adelaide Ferrero in a new ballet dance entitled 'The Festival of Bacchus';" the entertainments in those days being varied and long. Thomas H. Blakeley was a popular representative of what are called "second old men," Mr. Ireland pronouncing him the best Sulky, Rowley, and Humphrey Dobbin ever seen on the New York stage: and the fact that such a man should have appeared at a leading theatre, between the acts, in plantation dress and with blackened face, shows better than anything else, perhaps, the respectable position held by the negro minstrel half a century ago. Mr. White, so frequently quoted here, is an old minstrel who was part and parcel of what he has more than once described in the public press, and upon his authority the following account of the first _band_ of negro minstrels is given. It was organized in the boarding-house of a Mrs. Brooks, in Catherine Street, New York, late in the winter of 1842, and it consisted of "Dan" Emmett, "Frank" Brower, "Billy" Whitlock, and "Dick" Pelham--the name of the really great negro minstrel being always shortened in this familiar way. According to Mr. White, they made their first appearance in public, for Pelham's benefit, at the Chatham Theatre, New York, on the 17th of February, 1843; later they went to other cities, and even to Europe. This statement was verified by a fragment of autobiography of William Whitlock, given to the New York _Clipper_ by his daughter, Mrs. Edwin Adams, at the time of Whitlock's death. It is worth quoting here in full, although it contains no dates: "The organization of the minstrels I claim to be my own idea, and it cannot be blotted out. One day I asked Dan Emmett, who was in New York at the time, to practise the fiddle and the banjo with me at his boarding-house in Catherine Street. We went down there, and when we had practised Frank Brower called in by accident. He listened to our music, charmed to his soul[!]. I told him to join with the bones, which he did. Presently Dick Pelham came in, also by accident, and looked amazed. I asked him to procure a tambourine, and make one of the party, and he went out and got one. After practising for a while we went to the old resort of the circus crowd--the 'Branch,' in the Bowery--with our instruments, and in Bartlett's billiard-room performed for the first time as the Virginia Minstrels. A programme was made out, and the first time we appeared upon the stage before an audience was for the benefit of Pelham at the Chatham Theatre.