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AUTHOR Jiji, Vera, Ed. TITLE ASourcebook of Interdisciplinary Materials in American Drama: George Aiken, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1852). Showcasing American Drama. INSTITUTION City Univ. of New York, Brooklyn, N.Y. Brooklyn Coll. SPONS AGENCY National Endowment for the Humanities (NFAH), Washington, D.C. PUB DATE 83 NOTE 46p.; Produced by the Program for Culture at Play: Multimedia Studies in American Drama,,Humanities Institute, Brooklyn College. Cover title: George L. Aiken/Harriet B. Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin: A Handbook of Source Materials. AVAILABLE FROMMultimedia Studies in American Drama, Brooklyn College, Bedford Ave. and Ave. H, Brooklyn, NY 11210 ($4.50). PUB TYPE Guides Non-Classroom Use (055) EDRS PRICE MF01/PCO2 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS American Studies; *Drama; Higher Education; Integrated Activities; Interdisciplinary Approach; *Literary History; *Literature Appreciation; Research Skills; *Resource Materials; Secondary Education; *United States History; *United States Literature IDENTIFIERS Aiken (George L); Stowe (Harriet Beecher); *Uncle Toms Cabin ABSTRACT Prepared as part of a project aimed at redressing the neglect of American drama in college and secondary school programs of drama, American literature, and American studies, this booklet provides primary and secondary source materials to assist teachers and students in the study of George L. Aiken's dramatic adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin." Materials in the first part of the booklet deal with literary and theatrical considerations and discuss (1) the popular sentiments of the novel and play,(2) Tom as the black maternal Christ,(3) nineteenth century staging of the play,(4) the play as melodrama,(5) the play as drama, and (6) a variant version of the auction scene. Materials in the second section cover cultural, societal, and historical considerations and place the play in an historical perspective; provide a case against it; and offer a view of a similar play, "The Escape or a Leap for Freedom," by William Wells Brown. The third section contains selections from primary source materials, including critical commentary on the validity of the picture of slavery offered in the play and novel. Questions for study are included in the appendixes. (FL)

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U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER IERICI GEORGE Lo AIKEN / cIii 11111411 Illsbeen tem Odo.eci as ti,ovetl I011the1,,,,1111ittoroldoolzation oroqootoot0000l of Ni tutu4.11,111geo, lool, 114,11 111.11fr to 11,WOVO till 11111 ol000lloty HARRIET B. STOWE Pointsit w000, fir 11111111011s staled Ii this 11001 lit, Foot oeforesiorot ottocodl NIE positoq oi policy NCLE T

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Vera Jiji, Editor TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC)."

:Produced by the Program for Culture at Play: Multimedia Studies in American Drama HumanitiesInstitute, Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11210 Flom the Preface toThe k ey To Uncle Tone's Cabin In fictitious writing, itis possible to find refuge from the hard and the terrible, by invent- ing scenes anAharacters of a more pleasing nature. No such resource is Open in a work of fact ; and the subjects of this Nvo r k is one on which the truth, if told at all, must Reeds he very dreadful. Thereis no bright side to slavery, as such. Those scenes which are made bright by the generosity and kindness of masters and mistresses, would be brighter stillif the element of slavery were withdrawn.. Slavery, therefore, is not the element which forms the picturesque and beautiful of Southern life. What is peculiar to slavery, and distinguishes it from free servitude, is evil, and only evil, and that co lit inually. Harriet Beecher Stowe

A SOURCEBOOK OF INTERDISCIPLINARY MATERIALS IN AMERICAN DRAMA: George L, Aiken,Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) Edited by Vera Jiji

Page INTRODUCTION: To the Reader Part I: Literary and Theatrical Considerations : Gerald E. Warshaw r. The Popular Sentiment s of Unde 'vin'sCabin Elizabeth Ammons; Stowe's Black Maternal Christ. Tom 3 GlennLoney, Setting t he 19th Century Stage forUncle Tours Cabin:From New York Theatres to "Tom Shows" in Town I lalls and Tents 6 ()attic I Gerould,Uncle Tom's Cabinand Melodrama 10 Vera M. J iji, ConsideringUncle Tom 's Cabinas Drama 13 I lumor and a Variant Version of the Auction Scene 14 Part Cultural,Societal and Historical Considerations : Florence Po la t nick 2An I list o rica I Perspective 17 Errol Hill, The Case AgainstUncle Tom's Cabin 21 Williain Eric Perkins, Some Thoughts on William Wells Brown'sThe Escape oral Leap for Freedom 15 Part III: Selections from Primary Source Materials: Stephen A. Ilirsch, "Uncle Twilit tid es: The Popular Reaction toUncle Tenn 's Cabin" 26 Early Reviews from Barnard Hewitt,Theatre: USA 27 J.C. Furnas,Goodbye to Uncle Tom 18 Frances Anne Kemhle,Journal °fa Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1S38-39 28 Theodore Weld,American Slavery As It Is 30 larriet Beecher Stowe,A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin 31 Harry Birdoff,The World's Greatest flit: Uncle Tom's Cabin 31 William Wells Brown,The Narrative of William Brown 3I Josiah I Jenson,Truth Stranger Than Fiction: lather Henson's Story of Ills Own 1.0e James Baldwin, "Everybody's Protest Novel'' 32 Leslie Fiedler,The Inadrertent Epic. 35 Edmund Wilson,Patriotic Gore 35 Our Videotape 36 Part IV: Appendices: A. Questions for St udents and Acknowledgments 37 'rites and References 38 C. Contributors 40 D. Comment and Omer Page 41

Copyright © 1983

This sourcebook is made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the ilumanities. how and why she handled some of her problems as awriter of INTRODUCTION: To the Reader fiction as she did. Furnas and Baldwin excoriate herfor her sentimentality. Kemble's Journal entries and Weld's reports `Like any artform,the drama reflects,dissects and by eye-witnesses (neither fictional forms) are included sothat affects the culture of which it is a part. This is as trueof plays students can consider how these selections bear on thesubject, performed innineteenth century America as itis now. Yet, how Rrofound their effect is on the reader,and what that tells though most Americans know the point of viewof Death of a us Vbut the art of propaganda.,Josiahllenson's account of -Salesman or Streetcar warned Desire, they would be unable his religious conversion is set down so that students can coin - to recall even the name, let alonethe plot or characters, of our pateitto Toni's behavior. Fiedler's questioningof Henson's nineteenth century plays. Nevertheless, such playsflourished account and Baldwin's discussion of therelationship between and were performed all over the nation, providingthe audi- an event and the language in which itis recounted take us to ences with mythic characters whoshaped nineteenth century the borders of current critical concerns with language as tra- thought as extensively, perhaps, asLucy'Ricardo, the Fonz, ducer and traitor in its role as recounter of experience. Archie Bunker Or Agent 007 have shaped our own.Moreover,,. If we feel ourselves lost in a-quagmire, trying to under- although the works themselves may no longer be seen,the ab- stand what we read about race relations in a play writtenin sorption .of these characters into Americanthought has left 1852, the articles have been written to provide the necessary traces which still affect oar thought andbehavior. Therefore, background information. Watshaver sets the work for us inthe the purpose o!' this series is to showcase neglecteddramas of context of nineteenth century literary traditions, sothat we significance ft-0in our past so that you may study themfor may view the domestic themes andsentimental tone of novel what they are: not primarily revelations of eternalhuman and play in that context. Ammons places the work in relation- qualities, but rather of Americans at a particular momentof ship to the author's life, concerns and radical feministphiloso- historical importance not only to our ancestors but to our- phy, Loney describes the physical aspects of niteenth cen- selves as well. tury American theatres, so that we can understanbetter sonic The play chosen here is Uncle Tom's Cabin,arguably the of the distortions and transformations which thelay suffered most important play ever produced in theUnited States. Its during :ts 'long life, while Gerould discusses theamatic tradi- popularity and longevity were so great that it can hecredited, tion of melodrama into which the play falls. 11.explores the almost single-handedly with the birth of regionaltheatre in changing response of the black community to tl play which this country.In1852, most, Americans, .includinglarriet strongly affected the way in which most whites tsponded to Beecher Stowe, thought the theatre immoral, so much so,that them, Meanwhile, Perkins considers a play writtt.in 1858 by when Stowe's permission was sought for dramatikitionof the an escaped slave, William Wells Brown,who hart the benefit novel, she refused it, noting that "If the barrierwhich now of intimate knowledge not only of masters and/Slaves other keeps young people of Christian families from theatrical enter- than himself, but who knew Stowe's play as well. We would tainments is once broken down ... [these youngpeople} will have assumed that his play would give a more accurate, less be open to all the temptations of those who are notsuch, as stereotypical view of the subject than Uncle Tom's Cabin. there will be five bad Plays to one good.... The world is That it does.not again raises profound questionsabout the re- not yet good enough for it tosucceed."' Yet succeed it did, lationship between experience itself and the language we use when George L. Aiken dramatized it without her permission, when we try to put experience into sonic shape, like aplay, in as our casebook articles testify. Thephenomenal success of which to convey that experience to others. this "great and moral play" broke the barriers againsttheatri- Briefly touched on by Jiji are the changes whichAiken cal patronage so completely that people flocked to seeit not made to the novel in dramatizingit. A variant version of the only in opera houses or museums or academiesof music, but auction scene illustrates the outrageous surgeryperformed on in town halls, tents, anywhere at all. the work to appeal to popular taste. A few reviewsshow how The articles written for this casebook help thereader to radically the work can be transformed 'merely bypassing appreciate the play's significance. In "AnIlistorical Perspec- through the mind of the reviewer who secs what he hasbrought seeing on- tive."FlorencePolatnick considerstheevidencefor the into the theatre in his head, not what others may be validity of Lincoln's quip that I larriet BeecherStowe started stage at the same moment. Activist the War, Granted that the effect of the play cannotbe In a recent issue of the. Journal of the African sepalatcd from that of the novel, the latter ceasedtd be a Association, a black writer declares that "Each BlackAmeri- best seller within a few years of publication',whereas the play can today, in fact or in fiction, is anembodiment of the ex- continued its record of performance, season after season,all periences of his predecessors. Each Bigger Thomas, eachCross over this country and abroad,for eighty years. By 1900, the Damon . . is an amalgam of ... Uncle Tom, Dred, Frederick number who had seen it equalled the populationof the United Douglass, Garvey; King, Malcolm X and.Frantz Fanon ...and States.2 An army chaplain recorded that, after the CivilWar, Uncle Toni, both mythically and historically, has been a car- some Southerners who saw the playin New York left the dinal point in this revolution of the black mind. EveryBlack bit of Bigger theatre an' for some time in silence, until the South man in America carriesin him not only a Carolinian, profoundly moved, burst forth,"Weil, that 's what Thomas, but also a bitof Uncle Thomas. This is the fact and licked us!'"=3` basis of his survival."4 We not only agree with that assessment, Another fateful effect the play had on our history was but add that each white American also carriesmyths about which most white Uncle Tom. Filtered through the confusions and misrepresen- that itset the parameters for the way in these need Americans saw their black fellow citizens. All our reprintsof tations of racial conflicts this country engenders, segments of earlierarticles reflect various attempts to deal clarification-and purging. with the problem of setting down the horrors of slaveryin Thus -our purpose in featuring this work: text, source - that the book and videotape, is to invite you to study it for yourselves. aliterarycontext without such severe distortion in- abolitionist cause was harmed more than helped. ThusStowe We think you'll find its messages and meanings far more in our epigraph and her description of Topsy tries toexplain teresting and complex than you expect,. PART I LITERARY AND THEATRICAL CONSIDERATIONS

planters; rawboned Kentuckians, black field hands and Over- seers, and afull complement of other high and low regional and racial social types are all encompassed within the plot of Uncle Tom's Cabin.' To a public for whom the political questions raised by slavery cast national identity into doubt, Mrs. Stowe offered reassurance on the most basic level. Shedemonstrated that a single intelligence could novelistically create a story out of the multiform complexities and antithetical economies'and habits of American reality. Uncle Tom's cabin testified to the centri- petal force of creative imagination.Itdramatically demon- strated that the narrative of American life still made sense. More subtly, Uncle Tom's Cabin implied that Americans were comparable to the members of a family who share a common history and culture. Although the separation of black families formed the major thrust of the story, the emotional and ide- ological alienation of white family members from each other receives repeated emphasis throughout. This familial disunity did notresultfrom any natural antipathy; rather, likeits unholyproduct, Topsy, slavery-which had just grown divided the house that was America. Abolish it, promised Mrs. Stowe, and Americans would rediscover their"lo,,g-lost" relations. A Christian Allegory In addition to serving as a positive analogy for a public anxious about its national identity, Unc.'e nnn's Cabin acted as an antidote for those, whose moralself-image the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 had undermined. White today's readers might be most likely to consider the expanded talc of travel which comprises the structure of Uncle Tom's Cabin com- parable to a later candidate for the title of "The Great Ameri- can Novel," Huckleberry Finn,Mrs. Stowe's contemporaries THE POPULAR SENTIMENTS OF found her panoramic journey through mid-American similar in structure and,intent to John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.This UNCLE TOWS CABIN comparison came readily to a public which had for generations by Gerald Warshaver used Bunyan's work as a staple of their religious instruction and family literary entertainment.' - In Pilgrim's Progress, Americans learned thatthe outcry Wily was Uncle Tom's Cabin so immensely popular? against sin was the beginning of the pilgrimage to the Ileavenly What were the motifs, themes, and-rhetorical strategies which City and. simultaneously, the first evidence of the effectual made the novel and the play so appealing? Focusing on the workings of the grace which brought personalsalvation.3 self-identity and values of Mrs. Stowe's public, Ioffer two Similarly, Pilgrim's Progress accustomed Mrs. Stdwe's peers areas of consideration. The first requires us toponder what it allegorical proved when she to respond to the structure of her story with an was that Ilarriet Beecher Stowe ultimately interpretation.inBunyan's tale, as Leo Brandy so aptly wrote her story. Next, I suggest that the conservativebasis of characterizes its central message, "Bunyan's Christian must Mrs.Stowe's anti-slaverypreachments.inlargemeasure, wend his way through the many lures of life in a very recog- accounts for her success. nizable section of rural England, constantly alert to what lies A Work of National Scope beneath the individuals and places he sees and constantly at- tuned to the significance of their 'true' names in the spiritual Critics who have recently begun to reevaluate the canon order of the universe.-4 Though Mrs: Stowe changed the of he American Renaissance, the miraculous years of the early landscape and skin color of some of her Christians, her con- 1850s when 'alarge number of truly American masterpieces stant "lining out" or underscoring of the moralsignificance were created, call our attention to the ways inwhich Uncle Thin's Cabin distinguishes itself from the classic works. of of the persons, places, and events in her story left no doubt in I lawthorne. Whitman, Melville and Thoreau. Ellen her audience's minds that her work was intended as a venture Emerson, in Christian didacticism similar to its Puritan model. Moers, for example, notes that these male authors were self- the conventions of Puritan absorbed. detached from social concerns, uncertain oftheir. An audience schooledin public. and concerned with symbolic rather than material spiritual autobiography had little difficulty interpreting the realities, In contrast. Uncle Tom's Cabin won its vast public intentions of thick, Tony's Cabin.In the context of ante- not only forits slavery matter, but also for "its priceless belluin evangelical Christianity, this meant that Mrs. Stowe's evocation of the national character and daily ways.'' In 1868. public could take her work to heart as an outcry against sin. when John William Deforest, the inventor'of the concept of Furthermore. by sympathetically responding toher story, "The Great American Novel." applied the term to Cinch! Americans could self-righteouslyfeel saved from sin, con- Tom's Cabin, he was responding to the social and geographic verted. and on the road to salvation. ForNortherners who "national breadth" of the story. Yankee spinster, Ohio Quaker felt that the Fugitive Slave Act implicated them in thedamned farm wife, Southern lady. and mulatto mistress; slave owner, and damning slave system, the feeling ofmoral progress Uncle trader. and ditcher; Northern money interests and mortgaged Tom's Cabin gave them proved powerfully appealing. ...Popular Sentiments

A;Social Message shows himself worthy of dOmestic happiness by exemplary self - Mrs. Stowe provided Americans with more than an appli- sacrifice, a female virtue. The prose and poetry of popular cation of Bunyan's message to their times. 11er work success- nineteenth century literature, continually demonstrates how fully summed up the ways Victorian America had translated the ethic of suffering infused the domestic virtues with pietistic Bunyan's Calvinism into a social, rather than a religious sys- religious value. In a work which makes for illuminating col- tem.5 Where Bunyan had focused on self salvation, Mrs. Stowe lateral reading, George M. Frederickson describes how Northern focused on social salvation. Preaching a radical evangelical leaders during and after the 1850s adopted the ethic of suffer- eschatology by warning the nation of the Dies Irae a just God ing, the idea that the highest achievement of an individual's others.Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., for hadin store for a nation of unjust and cruel sinners, she life is to sacrifice it for promised the kingdom of heaven to the repentant and the just example, expresses the concept forcefully in his Civil War and merciful. She did this by cloaking the popular mainstays Letters. Mrs. Stowe achieved a' double impact by creating a of ante-bellum American culture with th4 mantle of evangeli- protagonist who exemplified both the ethic of suffering and a cal redemption and thrusting them onto the national stage as devotion to domesticity.10 the comforting answer to the moral and political crisis occa- Infact, by connecting Uncle Tom to two additional sioned by the slavery question. Uncle Tom's Cabin, then, re- Victorian cultural postulatesthe belief in the saintly heroine assured Americans thatit was possible to change the social and the concept of the evangelical angel who is too pure to live evils of slavery without disrupting the values of American cul- but guides by her heavenly spirit,Mrs. Stowe gave her story's ture,6 Mrs, Stowe's story became what Ronald G. Walters has namesake a quadrupled iconic power. "Like the very gentle termed "the single most effective piece of antislavery propa- perfect knight of the middle ages and the noble savage of the ganda" because it attacked slavery as a system which violated a eighteenth century," the author of The American Eve intact principle which all Americans. North and South, acknowledged and Fiction, 1775 -1914 tells uS, "the saintly heroine came to us fundamental and sacred, namely, the virtues ofdomesticity.7 be accepted as fact."11 Her likeness can he found, for example, Equally, ,significant, it called on its audience to mobilize the in Dickens' The Old Otriosity Slwp (1840-41) in which the sentiments of feeling, affection, and emotionfaculties most adventures of Little Nell culminate in a celebrated deathbed closely associated with the home and familyto condemn scene not unlike that of Little EVa's. The two Americannovels of the early1850's which outsold all others except Uncle slavery, This is illustrated again and again throughout the pages Tom's Cabin, Mary Jane Holmes' Tempest and Sunshine of the novel but nowhere as succinctly as in Chapter XII, Susanna Cummings' The Lamplighter "Select Incidents of Lawful Trade."1 lereMrs-. Stowe used (1854) andMaria bystanders watching a cargo of slaves going."donriver" as a (1854), both feature saintly heroines. Mrs. Sigourney's poetry, type of Greek chorus to comment on the Moral of the story. like so much of the sentimental and religious literature of the Employing an anonymous "lady" as her authorial alter ego, time, isfilled, with the popular image of the childhood death she drove home what she considered to be the most telling of the evangelical angel).- attack against the institution of slavery. "The most dreadful Little Eva part of slavery, to my mind." says her commentator, "is its InLittle Eva:. the themes of the saintly heroine, the outrages on thefeelings and affectionsthe separating of deathbed suffering of the domestic jewel, and the figure of the families, for example.'' evangelical angel were collapsed into a single image whose The Power of Domesticity as a Virtue potency Mrs, Stowe used for polemical purposes. The feelings A generation which has matured during a time when the of love and pity which Eva evoked in the audience were in- virtues of domesticity have undergone a profound devaluation tended to overwhelm the intellect o,f any who doubted the soundness of the author's arguments against slavery. The heart can little imagine the sentiment which surrounded the con- warming sentiments, divine brightness, and the purity associ- cept of "home," "family," and "wife and mother." So sure ated_with golden Eva spilled over and enlightened the audi- was Mrs. Stowe Of the power of this sentiment thatsitC1111111e ence's feelings towards Undo Tom. the domestic side of Uncle Toni the central image of her In fact, Mrs. Stowe considered the sympathetic suffering story. She knew that in mid-19th century America appeals to of a heavenly child-innocent to be so important a rhetorical the "rights of man" had much less force than sympathy for device that she used it twice. In addition to the figure of Little Uncle Tom's cabin. The manner in which Uncle Tonrs Cabin Eva, in Chapter IX of the novel, she called upon mothers who was commercially marketed proved her correct. For example, had suffered the loss of a child to follow the example of Sena- the New York Tribune of 23 October 1852 announced that tor Bird's wife. Abstract pro-slavery arguments oldie type ad- mother and father could buy what would become one of the vanced by Senator Bird could he overwhelmed by homely feel- period's most popular children's card games: an "Uncle Tom ings of grief over "The Lost Darling," as Mrs. Sigourney and Little Eva" game which concerned the separation and subject,j3Clearly Mrs. Stowe reunification of families.8 titled one of her poems on the Students interested in gainino, a primary understanding of counted heavily on her public's support for the potion that the sentiments upon which Mrs. Stowe based her polemical evangelicalangels constitutedavalidguideI'M mundane arguments will find the poetical works of Mrs. Lydia Huntley behavior. Sigourney most valuable. In the quarter of a century before 1855, no American poet held a more popular place in the African-American Me ssianism respect and affections of the American people than did Mrs. No consideration of Mrs. Stowe's arguments against Sigourney. Author of fifty-seven volumes of poetry and prose slavery \wild be complete without mention of her reliance as well as a prodigious amount of newspaper and magazine upon the popular notion of the Americancultural scene which verse, she gave wide currency to the theme of Christian virtue, lier work did so much to articulate andfor better or worse trial. and heavenly apotheosis later used by Mrs. Stowe, to her didso much to strengthen. This notion is the conceptof own effect.9 African-American messianism, the belief in the redemptive mission of the black race. Elaborating on the religious doctrine The Power of Self-sacrifice of the suffering servant of God and extending this Christo- As Kathryn Kish Sklar observes. the most powerful tenet logical theme to the context of American society, Mrs. Stowe, supporting the ideology of domesticity is the principle of fe- as Wilson J. Moses cogently argues, concretizedthe principle of male self-sacrifice. Thus itis no accident that Uncle Tom black :lessianism in the figure of Uncle Tom. lie acted out the STOWE'S BLACK MATERNALCHRIST, TOM idea that African- Americans haddeveloped a moral superiority to white Americans as a result oftheir passive acceptance.of by Elizabeth Ammons suffering. Relying upon "the retributiveand masochistic ele- ments of he Christian ideology," asMoses terms the values of Uncle .Tom's Cabin was first published ten yearsbefore I larriet B echer.Stowe, UncleTom's Cabin pictured how black the Civil War in the antislavery newspaperThe National Era. American., by virtue of their sufferinghad become Christ-like Ilarrict Beecher Stowe's sister-in-law had written toher in out- and posse sed of "a naturalpredisposition to Christian prin- rage over the Fugitive Slave Actof 1850, which made it illegal ciples." A cepting the idea of blackChristian heroism, Uncle even iii the North to aid orhouse runaway slaves: "If I could Tom's Cabin implied that a nation whichlinked its destiny use a pen as you can,I would write something thatwould with the uplift of its black population wouldhelp inaugurate make this whole nation feel what an accursedthing slavery is." the millenium. Sympathy for a raceof Uncle Toms gained Stowe's reaction, her sun later recalled, wasimmediate and appeal by the argument that the messianicmission of Ameri- dramatic. "Mrs. Stowe rose up from herchair, crushing the can blacks promised atranscendant spiritual transformation of letter in her hand, and with an expression ',:7her face that white America.14 stamped itself on the mind of her cl;'; write This appeal was made even stronger by thefact that the something. I will if I traits of black messianism which UncleTom symbolized Appropriately, this scene was recalle.1 one of Stove's promised little disruption in the establishedrelations of the children, for Harriet Beecher Stowe wroteher inflammatory races. assuming thatall ex-slaves could not be colonized in antislavery novel as a mother. Years latershe reAnisced for Africa. Uncle Tom's forgiveness. cooperativeness,unselfish one of her adult children, "Iwell remember the winter you loyalty, humble reverence, and genteelsubmissiveness made were a baby and I was writing'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' My heart him an ideal popular character for anation that wished to was bursting with the anguishexcited by the cruelty and in- solve the issue of slavery while remainingsocially superior to justice our nation was showing to the slave,and praying God the ex-slave and feeling morallyjustified, even redeemed in to let me do a little and to cause my cryfor them to be heard. the process. I remember many a night weeping over you as youlay sleeping In Uncle Tom's Cabin. Mrs. Stowesucceeded in giving beside me, andI thought of the slave mothers whosebabies narrative form to stereotypical black racialtraits which numer- were torn from them."One ofher seven children died,'and ous white clergymen and contemporaryblack spokesmen of- Stowe 'said, "It was at his dying bed and athis grave that I fered as part of their arguments for blackfreedom. The popu- learned what a poor slave mother mayfeel when her child is larity of her story owes much to the extent towhich it used torn away from her."2 In Uncle Thin's Cabin Stowe'converts their beliefs to move the public to feel renewedconfidence in this acute personal empathy with slavemothers into a power- their Christian probity and their social andnational identity. ful argument in favor of a revolutionary newworld order in- In her outcry against sin, HarrietBeecher Stowe upheld the spired by maternalas opposed topatriarchalvalues. Those kind of established cultural values which heraudience found values reverberate in the hook, as I will go onto explain in a both morally therapeutic and comfortable.t5 number of mothers both black and white; in theother-worldly little mother Eva; and most of all in the maternalblack Christ, "fom.3 Stowe's Background In many ways. Stowe was an ideal person toaccost the conscience of white America in thedecade before the war. Born a Beecher, she was destined toevangelize. Her famous father Lyman was a minister: her six brothers wereministers; she married a minister. Spreading thegospel, including the social gospel of Abolition, was afamily calling4 even if Ilarriet Beecher did not conic to it until middlelife. Born in1811inLitchfield, Connecticut. where her mother died when the child was five. HarrietElizabeth Beecher moved West with her family in 1832 toCincinnati, Ohio. There her prominent father, a remote autocratic man,took over thepresidency of Lane Theological Seminarywhile Ilarriet worked for her famous sister Catharine,the educator arid domestic ideologist, who founded theWestern Female In- stitute. Not a teacher at heart, I larrietBeecher in January of 1836 married a professor at Lane Seminary,Calvin Stowe, and in September gave birth to twins. In the yearsthat followed she devoted herself, in the days beforeelectricity or household conveniences. to the hard work of running alarge house and raising six children on very little money.Overworked, run- down by repeated childbearing, poor andexhausted most of the time. Stowe in Cincinnati witnessed raceriots, lost a child, lived daily with the misery of endlesslyperforming mindless menial tasks for others, and was plagued byfeelings of exile and isolation from her beloved birthplace,New England. Most important, she was haunted by the horrifyingspectacle of runaway slaves being forced backinto bondage across the muddy Ohio to the slave-state Kentucky. All ofthese experi- ences prepared her to write UncleTom's Cabin when she and her family moved from Cincinnati toBrunswick. Maine, in 1850. 3 ,..Black Maternal Christ, Tom

Stowe's Influence The book was an unprecedented best-seller. Demand for her reputation as a respectable Christian writer, is finally not Uncle Tom's Cabin. in 1852, the year it was published in book- hard to understand.. She wrote it, as she had written Uncle font, kept fourteen power printing presses running day and Toni s Cabin almost twenty years earlier, because her con- night: unauthorized stage-versions sprang up at every cross- science as a human being, and specifically as a woman, forbade roads: "Tom" gimcracks and knickknacks streamed onto the her remaining silent. Lady Byron Vindicated was' Stowe's market :.-hastily written anti-Toni novels burst from the South second ethically radical act as a writer. in retaliation and defense while admiring band wagon-int ita t ions came outin thr: North. No book before or for many years Advocacy of, Maternal Values after had such an impact, as President Lincoln's alleged recep- Her first of course was Uncle Tom's Cabin, radical not so tion of' Stowe at the White I k)use in the 1860s suggests: "So much inits advdcacy of freedom for all black Americans /you are the little lady who started the great war." many people of both races had been calling for Abolition for True or not, the book made I tarriet Beecher Stowe an at least two decades when Stowe published her bookbut in internationally famous author in a matter of months. She its vision of women and maternal values as the only hope for rapidly became, and remained,. the most celebrated American the creation of a new, democratic, nonexploitive and non- writer of the 19th century, and she continues to be one of the slaveholding America. Perhaps most surprising, especially for most important. Few books can claim the widespread influ- modern readers, the central figureinthatvision is not a ence of Stowe's novel. Moreover, Uncle Tom's Cabin, though woman but, instead, the black man Tom, a politically brilliant Romantic in some ways, is the first major American novel in amalgam of maternal and Christlike qualities. Stowe makes -the Realistic mode; Stowe is in many. respects the architect of Tom a classic Victorian heroine: gentle, pious, nonviolent, American Realism, preceding both William Dean Howells and long-suffering, self-sactificing, and endlessly, loving. He par- henry James, each of whom admired her work. In addition, as takes both of the image of Christ and of the image of Mother, a woman writer she is the first major novelist in the United the two being interchangeable for Ilarriet Beecher Stowe. In States to break away from the expectation that women should thisdeliberatelyunusualcharacterizationStowedisplays writealmostexclusivelyfor women, limiting themselves shrewd political strategy. She make Tom unthreatening in any mainly to formulaic and conventional women's stories.5 Stowe literal way that might fuel the racism of belligerent whites who stands as a pioneer in the history of American women writers, maintained that blacks were brutes who must be oppressed; a foremot her, so to speak. of artistically ambitious women also she argues her case for nonviolent resistance to shivery as novelists from Edith Wharton and Willa Cather at the, turn of the only hope for the permanent eradication of a system based the century to Toni Morrison and Joan Didion today. on violence. But most important, Stowe's characterization of Tom cleverly insinuates him, a slave and a man, into t he 19th- cent ury idolatry of feminine, and specifically maternal, virtue. At the time Stowe wrote her novel many Americans be- Her Career as Writer lieved that men and women properly occupied two separate Although Stowe had published short stories about New "spheres," the masculine one worldly, competitive, and com- England before the 1850s, only after Uncle Tom's Cabin did mercial, the feminine one domestic, that is, home-centered, and Cshe have the freedom, because she had the money and there- therefore characterized by an opposing set of values: coopera- fore the time, to write fullt hue. Immediately, she published A tion rather than competition, self-sacrifice rather than self- Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (18531, a fascinating compilation promotion, gentlenessratherthan aggressiveness,nurture of source material about slavery which, in response to charges rather than rivalry. Stowe did not believen that this was how that the novel misrepresented the truth, she claimed to have the world should be ordered, as she shows repeatedly in Uncle been her data. (In fact most of the material in the Key was Tom's cabin by emphasizing the moral superiority of mothers probably collected after the writing of the novel.) She then (wicked Marie St. Clare is the sole exception, thus proving the publisheda second antislavery novel, Drat; A Tale of the rule).In Stowe's view the feminine "sphere" should be the Grcat Dismal Swamp ,(1856). Though notas powerful as only sphere, Motherhood should be the ethical ideal of all Uncle Tom, the hook sold well. It draws heavily on Nat Turner human beings. Rebellion material and is interesting in showing Stowe in sym- Stowe includes Rachel Halliday in the novel to illustrate pathy with certain militant antislavery positions. After Dred, her position. Ethically the Quakers are mat rifocal. They do Stowe returned to New England material, publishing a series of not believeinphysical violence, laissez-faire capitalism, or excellent books: The Minister's Wooing in 1859, The Pearl of automaticsubserviencetopatriarchalauthority the basic Orr's Island in 1862, Oldtown Folks in .1869, Sam Lawson :s principles, of course, on which slavery is built. Instead, they Old town Fireside Stories in1872, and l'oganuc People in practice pacifism, egalitarianism, and cooperativism. As be- 1878. She also wrote three society novelsilly Wife and I lievers in this alternative, anti-masculinist ethic, they actively (1871 ),Pink and White Tyranny (1871 ), and We and Our oppose slavery; and the person who sits at the head of this Neighbors(1875 )whichareundistinguished,especially community's table in Stowe's vision is not the lather but the when compared with her antislavery and New England fiction. mother: "Rachel never looked so truly and benignly happy as During her life Stowe's most shocking act as a writer / at the head of her table. There was so much motherliness and came in 1870 with the publication of Lady 131w?! Vindicated, full-heartedness even in the way she passed a plate of cakes or a factual (as opposed to fictional) book which charged that the poured a cup of co ffee, that it seemed to put a spirit into the poet Lord Byron, who had died in 1824, had maintained an food and drink she offered" (1, 205).6 Rachel I lalliday evokes incestuous relationship with his half-sister while married to Christ at the Last Supper making of simple food and drink a Lady Byron. The hook scandalized Britain and America. To sacrament ;she suggests how healing and nourishing mother- attackiord Byron was to attack a.romantic cult -hero: to listen rule might be. 4 to his Wife's side of things, wh Eh Stowe did, was to ignore Itis no accidentthat mothers. as aclass, most con- literary protocol in such matter.. Furthermore incest was an sistently oppose slavery in Stowe's novel. They arein her unspeakable topic,particularlyor a woman, Nevertheless, opinion its logical antagonists, The planter's wife, Mrs. Shelby; Stowe's motive l'or writing the e. pos6, which almost cost her the senator's wife, Mrs. Bird: the slaves Aunt Chloe, Eliza, and 4 Cassy; the Quaker matron Rachel Halliday: these women in their speech and actions attack slavery as an unconscionable evil created and maintained by white men. Repeatedly Stowe emphasizes how the slave-system pervert sfamily-life by tearing parent from child, and especially mother from child, in viola- tion of life's most basic tie: the bond between mother and son THE REA II !NG LESSON or daughter. The book dwells on this tragedy for two reasons. First, the grief of black mothers exposes as racist the myth prevalent in Stowe's day that enslavement of blacks was per- missible because they did not have the same feelings about family that whites had. Clearly, they did have the same feelings, Stowe's novel insists. To maintain otherwise was to lie. The second reason for Stowe's emphasis on black mothers' pain is more complicated:. itallowed her to exploit, in a positive sense, the 19th-century cult of Motherhood. The Cult of Motherhood To understand that strategy in the novel itis important to remember that ideologically motherhood is always a vari- able rather than a fixed concept. Its definition and status change depending upon time, place, class and tribe. in Stowe's America, which was white, middle-class, Protestant, andin power, mothering enjoyed high prestigein theory. As the historian Kathryn Kish Sklar explains using Stowe's sister Catharine Beecher as her representative theorist, "adopting a typical Victorian perspective, Beecher viewed motherhood as a qualitative rather than a quantitative activity,useful to soci- ety for the kind of child rather than the number ofchildren it produced." Sklar continues to describe this typical Victorian pity and mercy as Jesus'. Precisely Tom's softness, in otner outlook, which incidentally still prevails: "Beecher's view of words,is his strength for -Slii7v-i.71Irt3,:not/ggressive, hard, the relationship between childhood and society was an essen- self-centered. Ile is not "masculine." Ile is aligned instead with tially modern one. Rather than viewing society as a traditional mother love and Christ. I le opposes iron-knuckled bullet-headed set of established controls, and early/childhood as a timewhen Simon Legree, Stowe's .nightmare exaggeration of traditional the will must be broken to con forni to those controls, she saw masculinity, with a passive resistance as terrifyingly frustrating society as an uncontrolled growth, except as it was regulated to the brutai white nian as was Jesus' to his oppressors.In- by the internalized values of 'character' developed during early furiated, Legree vows that he will make Toni "hard" (II, 189): childhood. Seeing it possible to exert in early childhood an ruthless, unfeeling, violent. He not only fails but is undone by influence of lifelong personal and social significance, Victori- the attempt. Abetted by the literal mother Cassy, who with ans were far more sensitive than their ancestors hadbeen to Toni manipulates Legree's terror of the feminine, Tom's re- the importance of the right 'kind of mothering."/ This right fusal to emulate the masculine Legree (he will not flog his fel- kind of mothering, "qualitative mothering," was woman's low slaves) literally maddens the white nian to death. with supreme calling in Stowe's America. To provide children Maternal Tom love and to teach them to internalize the values of hard work, integrity, and the avoidance of evil Was the sacred, and ex- In an age that idealized motherhood and called itself tremely socially useful, job of Mother. It was believed that the Christian, Stowe's feminization of Toni was politically in- very nature of society,its morality, depended upon suclf genious. What better way to create sympathy for slaves than mothering: rupture the maternal bond and society would by creating a slave protagonist as gentle as Mother and yet as stand at risk; support the work of mothers and a moral society morally irradiating as Christ? Even more subtle, what better would. emerge. Strategically then, if in her novel Stowe could way to confront white fear of the black male than by creating affirm this Victorian reverence for mothering and at the same in Toni, a dark-skinned physically powerful man, a paragon time show how slavery profanes motherhoodliterally ripping of Christian maternal virtue?Itshould' be emphasized that mothers andchildren apartshe mightrouseantislavery Stowe could imagine admirable black male characters who passions in thousands of complacent white Americans. were not pacifist and not incredibly forgiving, as she makes clear in the character of George Harris. (I)redis another Stowe's Characterization of Tom example.) Indeed, more than a few readers have wished that Stowe's odd characterization of Tom makes most sense She had made Harris her central character. For the danger built against this backdrop of maternal ideals. A couple of years in Toni is that lie is so simple, so good, and so 'forgiving that hucan reinforce the stereotype of the docile darkey instead of after the publicationof Uncle Tom's Cabin Harriet Beecher r Stowe stated her ideological premise outright: "This story is appearing admirably Christlike, as Stowe surelyintended.9 to show how Jesus Christ, who liveth and was dead, and now is he point to remember is that understood historically and alive and forevermore, has still a mother's love for the poor --,Anderstood as Stowe created him in her novel as opposed to and lowly."8 Stowe renders this "mother's love" in the novel the perversions of the character that show up in most stage- in her portraits of good mothers of both races; in the character versions and derivative novels,10 Toni is a daring conception. of angelic little Eva, appropriately named for the mother of Ile is an attempt at shocking white America into moral action the race and yet as pure, loving, and self-sacrificing as Christ; by pulling together in a black man the two images most re- and in Tom: a compassionate home-centered black man with vered in the dominant culture: the image of Christ and the "a voice as tender as a woman's" (I, 151) and a soul as full of image of Mother. 5 The Motherly Christ SETTING THE 19th CENTURY STAGE That those two images were one and the saute for Stowe FOR UNCLE TOM'S CABIN: is beyond question. She declared several years after she wrote From New York Theatres To the novel that "there was in Jesusmore of the pure feminine element than any other man." She analyzed Jesus' relationship "Tom Shows" with his mother. "Ile was hone of her bone and flesh of her In Town Halls and Tents fleshhis life grew out of her immortal nature," and argued that Jesus' unusual birth "made him more purely sympathetic By Glenn Loney no with his mother than any other son of woman. Ile had WhenUncle Tom's Cabinwas adapted for the stage, mortal father. All that was human in hint was her nature.... spectacle was an important element in a production's success. It was the feminine element exalted and taken in union with Audiences expected to see sonic marvelous effectsreal stage divinity "t IThis feminine ('hrisYstands at the heart of Stowe's magicas Weil as to feast their eyes on handsomely painted vision of reform, In her vioir maternal love, which is synony- scenes of locales they might themselves never be able tovisit. 11101.1S.with the love of Christ, alone can lead America out of Fortunately forall concerned on both sides of the footlights, the moral wilderness of slavery. To illustrate the transforming- Ilarriet Beecher Stowe's novel offered ample scope for the power of such loveinUncle Turn's Cabinshe makes Toni, most gifted of scene-painters and the most resourcefuldevisefs whom she associates with the feminine and motherly values of of special effects. Quite remarkable things could be done on piety, compassion, domesticity (even the title links him to the the major stages of New York and London. The larger and idea of "home"), and nonviolence, a model of Christlike vir- more prosperous the theatre, the more impressivethe scenery tue. Ile is the prime example of Stowe's moral position in the and the special effects forUncle Tom's Cabin,notably on novel, those occasions when four or five other theatres nearby were ('lose to the end ofUncle Tom's CabinStowe confronts offering competing stagings of the play. thereader directly. She says a few things to sailors, ship- Modern audiences may believe themselves more sophis- owners, and farmers and then turns to her real hope: ticated than those who saw Mrs. Stowe's anti-slavery fable Mothers of America,---you, who have learned, by premiered on stage. Nonetheless, melodrama and spectacle, when they are handsomely packaged, still delight theatre- the cradles of your own children, to love and feel goers. Television viewers settlefor relatively little sophisti- for all mankind,--by the sacred love you bear your cation in their melodrama. Transported back to NewYork's child: by your joy in his beautiful, spotless infancy; old National Theatre via Time Machine toseethe original by the motherly pity and tenderness with which you Uncle Tom's Cabinsuch spectators would probably enjoy .guide ,his growing years: by the anxieties of his edu- themselvesand the productionvery much, especially an un- cation; by the prayers you breathe for his soul's rolling panorama of the Mississippi with a steamboat race eternal good;-- I beseech you, pity the mother who in front of it. has all your affections, and not one legal right to pro- tect, guide, or educate, the child of her bosom! By Eighteenth Century Theatres the sick hour of your child; by those dying eyes, Uncle Tom's Cabinwas beginning which you could never forget; by those last cries, that In the 1850's, when its long stage career, the major theatres in New York and Lon- wrung your heart when you could neither help nor don which at various times housed the show still had some of save; by the desolation of that empty cradle, that the features of 18th century theatres. For those who'dlike silentnursery,--1 beseech you, pity those mothers development, who are constantly made childless by the American to know more about this interesting process of a good place to begin is with BrooksNIeNamara'sThe Amer- -slavetrade! And say, mothers of America. is this a I because it demon- thing to,be defended, sympathized with, passed over ican Playhouse in the Eighteenth Century, strates the debt our playhouses owed to those ofLondon and in silence'? (11, 316) the 13ritish provinces. For Ilarriet Beecher Stowe the answer was clear. No. The theatres, the stages, the plays, the actors, and the audiences interacted. In the typical auditorium, what we now call the orchestra seating was then known as the pit. Unfor- tunately for the pit's occupants, atleast in the more rowdy neighborhoods, high up in the balconies or galleries"Para- disc" or "The Gods"lively boys, brawlers, thugs, andburly workmen packed the benches for as little as ten cents a place, If they didn't like the performers, they might hit those in the pit with thrown bottles and other objects which missedthe stage. Separating the pit occupants from the unruly balcony crowds were three or four tiers of boxes stretching around the auditorium from the proscenium arch at stage-right to the other side of the arch at stage-left. Often shaped like a great U, when these boxes were richly decorated and gilded, the tiers resembled a giant "Golden !horseshoe." A disadvantage of such curving boxes was that some of them, especially those close to the stage and higher up, didn't have good "sight-lines" for the stage-picture. To offset that, earlier theatres had developed broach "aprons," or forestages, pushed well out in front of the proscenium arch, which pro- vided a frame for the scenic picture. Aprons remained in the 19th century, separated from the pit audience by a narrow space for the theatre's orchestra, which today iscalled the or- Ili 111 11,11Ili, 1, L 1'11111111, , ill,1,1111 1.111,.1.11/111111,,,i, 6 Setting the Stage chestra pit. Every theatre had one, and music was generously more lavisti, impressive scenes had become possible-and more used. Some of the stage action--often a great deal of it-was of them as well. Once again, however, anUncle "l'out's Cabin, presented on the apron or well downstage within the pros- designed to be "flown," could only be toured to those theatres cenium picture. to make sure spectators on the sides and high rigged, for up, in the balcony could see as much as possible. Footlights Rovifig, "Tom" troupes, playing one-night stands all over also aided in illuminating the players. America, had to make do with what they had and what they WhenUncle Tom's Cabinfirst appeared, a1 7th andI 8t h century European device for shifting scenes-somewhat sim- found. Some were so ,sm,all that a number of minor roles, plifiedI'm American stages-was popular. Most productions and occasionally Little.Eva as well, had to be played by.local used two-dimensional scenery. in which rooms and building- citizens with little or no rehearsal. Ilarlowe Iloyt recalls the Town exteriors, forests and clouds, were all depicted on a system of heyday of the "Tom Shows" in small towns in wings and drops. There might be as many as four or five sepa- Tonight,2devoting an entire chapter to the topic: Some towns rate sets of wings on each side of the stage, spaced so that had "Opera Houses"-like Virginia City: others had town there was a receding central perspective with the five wings halls. Most opera-housds, especially in the Far West, had never on each side representing tree-trunks. When a central capstan had a real opera on their stages. Town halls often were nothing beneath the stage began to turn, these would slide offstage more than simple auditoriums on the second floors of build- just as cloud-wings or room-wings slid on. At the same time, ings which might have a store or some town offices below. coordinated ropes would raise leafy tree-borders up out of Some had a raised stage, no wings, no overhead-and certainly sight, lowering instead a cloud - border or a ceiling-border. Up. noflying, no orchestra pit, and a collection of bent wood stage, the forest scene would also be replaced by a batik of chairs for the audiences, Over the years, a live mule became clouds or a wall of a room. All of the ropes and pulleys were an indispensible comic property for Lawyer Marks in Uncle arranged so that the transformations were simultaneous and Tom's Cabin.One of floyt's favorite boyhood memories is of the actors who played Marks having to push the reluctant virtually instantaneous, Many theatres in 19th century America used this Euro- mules up three flights of outside stairs to reach the town hall pean scene- shifting system in a greatly simplified form. Instead stage. of having the complicated below-stage machinery, the parallel The definitive hook about the stage and film career of wing-flats were shoved on and off the stage,by stagehands, UncleTom's Cabinis Harry Birdoff'sThe World's Greatest using a set of overhead wooden grooves to guide and steady MO Init, he provides some memorable descriptions of the them, Grooves could be provided on the stage-floor as well major spectacles in the show, as given at different times in was staged in to prevent wobbling. Scene changes had to have stagehands various places by numerous troupes. When it pushing and pulling actual fiats, Fortunately for ticket-prices, London at Astley's Royal Amphitheatre. home of equestrian stagehands-like actors-were not paid much. shows, naturally alot of horses and feats of horsemanship suddenly became part of Uncle Tom's saga,Astley's was That,incidentally,is why New York and London fatuous not only for its beautiful horses and trick-performing theatres in Victmia's time could afford lavish scenic spectacles steeds.Italso specialized in rapid changes of wild, exciting and huge casts.Itdidn't cost much to build and paint scen- scenery as well as dramatic conflagrations, Considering the ery-which was often used again and again in widely varying lack of fireproofing, the use of gas in footlights and other stage shows, sothat some UncleToutproductions had scenes in lighting, and the highly inflammable muslin drops and borders, Rome and the Orient because that was the scenery the theatre- its daunting to read of lightning and fire effects achieved with owner had on hand, It also was inexpensive to have a number handfuis of resin or flaslf-powder ignited by sparks or open of stagehands to make many scenic changes. flames. Not all American regional or British provincial theatres were so well. equipped as those in New York and London. Major touring Un icTom's Cabinshows obviously could only Special Scenic Effects: Eliza on the Ice be booked into wall equipped theatres, unless they had made Eliza's escape across the Ohio River-one of the must special plans fpr stripped-down versions of-their production famous scenes from the play, prominently featured in its ad- in sonic smaller cities. Those Tom troupes which played only vertising posters for decadesis most frequently described as smaller theatres. especially in the latter part of the 19th cen- being accomplished by having the actress playing Eliza hop tury, would more often have reduced their scenery to its across the stage, fleeing slavers who wish to returnher to simplest elements for ease in transporting, setting-up, playing, bondage. from one white-painted soap-box to another, We still and striking. Instead of the more elaborate. heavy, and costly talk about politicians on the campaign-trail as "getting up on wing-flats. they might use only scenes painted on drops and their soapboxes" to woo the voters.In the 10th century, borders which could be quickly rolled up into the "flies" it's clear that soap-boxes -once the soap was gone were used for rapid scene changes and for simplicity in touring. by both politicians and actors. They seem to have been a stan- Raked or slightly inclined stages,, rising toward the up- dard prop forUncle Tom's Cabin.A 'very elaborate production stage, were popular. improving the stage-picture and facilita- in Paris, however, is, reported to have done this scene with ting perspective views. Such stages were not well suited to box- blocks of real ice. In some productions, Eliza hopped offstage sets nor to stage-grooves, yet one of the few historic Amer- into the wings after her first crossing. When next seen, she'd ican theatres which still has its grooves in place. Piper's Opera hop out from the next upstage wing. moving toward the free !louse, inVirginia City. Nevada. also has a raked stage. Of Ohio shore, but this time a girl or smaller actress would he playing Eliza. to give the impression that she was now-much courseUncle Tom's Cabinwas played a number of times on . its stage, so the troupes had to adapt their scenery and effects farther away from the audience. The proscenium arch is after to what they found on Piper's stage. all a picture.frame, and within that frame, all kinds of scenic The practice of "flying- whole act-curtains, backdrops. illusions are possibleif only the audience is willing to help rigid wing-sections, and other scenic elements was gradually by using its imagination, or what has been called "the will- replacing the old-fashioned stage-groove method. This made ing suspension of disbelief.- pos'sible quick scene changes, but the magic transformations of former times could not he achieved. With a tall stageliouse Little Eva's Death Scene in winch to conceal settings suspended on ropes over the stage, Many an Unde Pm: 's Cabin product ion made gurul 7 11 ., Setting the Stage

Panoramas Panoramas, long popular as scenic entertainments by themselves, were added to Uncle Town's Cabin productions to attract audiences. Simply, a panorama was a verylong expanse of muslin or canvas with an extensive scene painted on it, the whole mounted vertically'on rollers at either side of the upstage. Unrolling from right, to left,it could give audiences the illusion thay they were, for instance: travelling up the I hod. sol River from Manhattan, seeing interesting spotssuch as West Point along the way, integrated into a play such asUncle iron's Cabin, a panorama could be used to, heighten the ex- citement of a chase sequence, such as Eliza's flight across the Ohio, Or it could he used to depict Mississippi River scenery, as a steamboat took slaves down.to auctionin New Orleans. (With a boat or ar train interior fixed on the stag,ea panorama moving by, visibletothe audience through the windows, gave a powerful effect of motion to theactually stationary cabin or co mpart ment .)

The Steamboat Race Steamboats and even f:mmous steamboatraces were worked into productions of /luck Thm's Cabin, One cele- brated stage-race climaxed with a collision and the fiery ex- \ plosion of one of the boats. The illusion of a boat receding from the audience asitsailed diagonally upstage could he heightened by having itsail into the wings, only to emerge in a much smaller model --from the next upstage wing on that side and sail across on a higher diagonal to the opposite wing. It sounds elemental and not very convincing, butunder of scrim transparencies, These arestillused on Broadway gaslight it worked well. Even today, when this erred is clever- and on the opera stage, and they never cease to amaze those ly used with h electric light, it creates the desired illusion. who've not seen the effect before, Scrim is a very loosely Other accounts of Uizele Tom's Cabin are recorded in woven cloth or net, like cheesecloth but very strong,Painted (;arff Wilson's Three Hundred Years of Drama andTheatre,5 with a scene and hung from a batten or a wooden-roller, it BarnardI lewitt'sTheatre 115.A.,6 andRichard Moody's will look much like :my other two-dimensional scenery painted Dramas from the American 7 heatre,7 but they are summar7 on rigid flats or sturdy muslin as long as it is lit fromthe front, ies, compared to time wealth of detail and amusing anecdote But, as soon as light is brought up behind the scrim, the scene Harry Birdoff has compiled in his hook. Ile notesthat both on its front begins to fade; it graduplly becomes transparent, in. Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel and Aiken's adaptationof revealing all that is behind it. WIn;(i the light in front is ex- Uncle Tom's Cabin no bloodhounds pursuedthe frantic tinguished, usually all traces of tht(scene painted on the scrim Eliza and her tiny baby across the dangerously thawingOhio seem to vanish. Turn the rear lights down or off,bringing up River. the front lights, and the scene will again appear, Little Eva's famous Death Scene often required scrim The Dogs forits most impressive realization on stage. As the grieving The dogs came later, and they were almost neverblood- actors crowded round Little Eva's bed in this scene, the act- hounds, which looked too droopy and sad to strikemunch ress playing that role would take advantage oftheir conceal- fear into Eliza or the audience, Great Danes andother large ment to slip out unseen by the audience. Then she'd get up dogs would he used some of them proved fierce. To heighten on a backstage table and onto a la mounted on that. In the effect of their, pursuit, some producers wouldhave Him some versions, she'd have a wreath,r roses to hold up sym- carry sonic raw meatinstead of a rag-baby _wrapped in the bolically over the head of a kneelig, fraying Uncle Tom. A little blanket in which she was supposed to be protecting her circle of light would illuminate her facenot the ladder--and infant. To spectators it seemed certain the dogs would snatch through the scrim the audience would see' what they could the babe from Eliza's desperate arms. imagine to he lier spirit, giving its ')eneiliction to the coura- Sonic of the seedy and very small Tom 'troupeswhich geous, long-suffering Uncle Tom. ranged through America's hinterlands "Tomming the tanks," small comninunilies as "tank- Sometimes Little Eva would he seen through the scrim thiswas called, referringto ascending to heaven on the back of a winged dove. Harry towns" -were, reducedtosending onthe company mon- grel or on some occasions even pushing on a reluctant puppy Birdoll has recorded an eyewitness report of an Uncle TOin find Apotheosis scene, made by the popular actor DeWolf Topper: to pursue Him In such cases, the company-could soon "Three tiers of profile pink and white clouds, edged with gold it self being pursued -nut of town by angry ticket-huyets. and silver spangles, were planted on the stage floor. The voices The Cabin of the celestialc!:.r issued from behind thegauze-covered scrim perforations of the canvas drop, then the floodlights One scene or prop was essential to aloin Show, That backstage were turned on, and the holes became little golden was the cabin of the title. Thoseproductions which trouped stars twinkling through the glow -revealing a winged Eva "under canvas, especially the more lavish ones, would often with a covey of attendant angels suspended midair with piano have an Uncle Tom's Cabin constructed on a wagon, one wire, all swaying as if in a gentle spring breeze. And in the of the touring vehicles which transported players, scenery, foremost lank of the profile clouds, Uncle Tom knelt with and props. When the company arrived in a new town, the tent uplifted arms, Then a golden shower drenched t hide Tom, a was pitched and a colorful parade, oftenworthy of a circus, scenic effect startlingly new to I lopper,"4 was .taged along the main streetto attract audiences, The 8 ...Setting the Stage cabin was a major feature of the parade, with Uncle Tom to thousands, millions even, especially in isolated communi- and Aunt Chloe aboard, greeting the bystanders and taping ties. Whatever may be said about its shortcomings as a play, them to buy tickets. as an account of the horrors of slavery, or as a depictionof real men and women, both good and badit is one of those The Parade now historic plots which won't disappear, even when its so- The Tom parade staged by James W. Shipman's IrQui,r.. cialvalues and attitudesare in disrepute. When Richard included six carved tableaux wagons all decorated, says harry Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein IIcreated their memorable Birdoff, "like wedding cakes, a gorgeous chariot, floats, a musical, The King and 1,based on the sometimes shocking cotton wagon, a log cabin, fourteen panel-box baggage wagons, experiences of an English governess (with sonic of the same supplemented by the largest horse and the smallest pony in firm moral qualities of Harriet Beecher Stowe) in the court America. two bands, a female fife-and-drum corps, a troupe of the King of Siam, they, too, revived Uncle Tom's Cabin. of cake-walkers, dogs, oxen, donkeys, six mules, eleven ponies, It was incorporated as a fascinating Siamese ballet, The Small and forty horses."S /louse of Uncle Thomas, and its dramatic function was rather artfully to remind the King of Siam that he was also a master Its Historical Role of slaves and occasionally a cruel tyrant to them. Today, it may he puzzling to learn about the tremen- Uncle Tom's Cabin, both as novel and play, had some- dous. long-lasting popularity of Uncle Tom's Cabin as a play, thing of great historical importance to say. Tlie power of both especially when allits variations --additions to and subtrac- have been overwhelMingly documented. What tarnished the tions fromHarriet Beecher Stowe's deeply felt and moving image and actuality of Uncle Tom's Cabin as a drama was, novel so often seem only the calculations of producers pri- unfortunately, all the melodramatic bathos, the cheap senti- marily interested in making money off unsophisticated audi; mentality, the character stereotyping, the routine stage-busi- ences with their spectacular stage effects and sentimental ness, the obvious vulgar comedy, the appalling casting, and melodrama. The real social message--Mrs. Stowe's angry out- the ultimate dependence on oversold and disappointing spec- cryagainstthe monstrous evil of slaverymay have been tacle and extraneous special effects. Having two Topsies, two eclipsedin the comedy, song-and-dance, and special effects. Uncle Toms, two Little Evas, and whole packs of ferocious The essential depth and humanity Mrs. Stowe revealed in sonic dogs to chase Eliza across the ice did nothing to preserve or Of her novel's characters may have been swallowed up in stock enhance the truth or the drama of the novel. Finally; latter- stereotypes. After all, for most legitimate actors, the hardy day productions of Uncle Tom's Cabin seemed rather like "Tommers" were a breed apart, not to be considered as ac- a19th century property-man's description of sonic of his tors at all. stock: "..rainbow, slightly faded ... a new moon,slight- But for decades, Uncle Tom's Cabin was an old friend ly tarnished ..."9

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A SNAPSHOT OF OUR REGAL

. TRAIN OF PALACE COACHES AND PRINCIPAL FEATURES OF OUR SUMPTUOUS DAILY STREEJ FARADE.

9 1.v sistentemotional motifs, and didactic formulas, and inits use of prose rather titan verse,Unlike romantic drr,:na, melo- UNCLE TOM'S CABIN AND MELODRAMA drama had a broad appeal to a large mass audience,consisting of a scarcely literate working class as well as a more educated byy of Daniel middle-class public. Guilbert de Pixerecourt, the father melodrallla, S:rid, "I write for those who cannot read," and 130thinits original form as anovel and in its many argued that his plays taught morality and civic virtues. stage andfilmversions. Um* Tom'sCabinbelongs to a melodrama, Nineteenth Century Melodrama recognizable genre of popular entertainment, Nineteenth-century melodrama was spectacular in stag. which has always been immenselysuccessful with mass audi- has usually been condemned ing, featuring sensational scenes of fires,explosions, avalan- ences, but which until recently life.In by the official custodians of high cultureand refined taste ches, and shipwrecks, and vivid depictions of city tragedy and comedy and beyond the its attention to surface detail and dramatic illusion,and m as inherently inferior to careful reconstruction of contemporary settings, rich in pale ofseriousart. Although the term"melodramatic" is its of something local color, melodrama represented a step toward scenic real- still most often used in the pejorative sense critics as sub- exaggerated and over-emotional (as in "Don'tbe melodra- ism. Although initially disparaged by highbrow willing to ac- literary and treated with a patronizing smile,melodrama has matic!"), scholars and critics are now more of knowledge the historical importance of melodramaand even proved to be one of the most enduring, original, and vital the development of other, dramatic genres to evolve in the past two centuries. It con- to point out its contributions to popular in more elevated literaryforms, such as the nineteenth-century tinuesto be an influential dramatic form today, 111111 and on television as well as on the stage, and attractive novel. It should he possible for us to enjoymelodrama for topolitically committed writers forits propaganda values for its exuberant and unabashed its own sake, and to study its themesand techniques without and to avantgarde artists any feelings of apology. Infact, to understand and appreciate theatricality. itis most The melodramatic vision also found a home in the fic- Litic/ lwr's Cabin, a masterpiece of the genre, worlds of gime of the greatest nineteenth-century helpful to view the play in the context ofmelodrama. Let us tional authors. Novels by writers such asllonorl de Balzac and examine briefly its nature and history. Charles Dickens,FyodorDostoevskyandHenry James, Melodrama Described abound in melodramatic confrontations, persecutionof the all the thrills and excitement of Theatrical rather than literaryinits primary appeal, poor and downtrodden, and by rapid pursuit and flight, rendered psychologicallyand morally com- melodrama is a type of popular drama characterized compared to the and exciting physical action, sharplycontrasted and simpli- plex by the novelist's subtle probingsas of violence, pathos, stage melodramatist's morerudimentary techniques. fied characters, and colorful alternation Oliver and humor. The central situation inmelodrama --victimiza- Itislittle wonder that novels, such as DiLken's andA Tale of Two Cities,were tion of helpless innocence by powerfulevil forces- -gives rise Twist, iVicholus Arikleby, and heroine, assisted by comic repeatedly adapted for the stage, and many of the greattheat- to four basic characters: hero rical hits of the nineteenth century weredramatic versions ally,pittedagainstvillain.Instead of tragicinevitability, keep the ac- of popular fiction. I larriet Beecher Stowe'sUncle Tom's Cabin melodrama utilizes coincidence and surprise to The phen- tion constantly at high tension. Striving l'orstaggering effects became the most famous of all such adaptations. dramaturgy builds omenal success of the novel, first serialized in magazineform and strong emotional shocks, melodramatic in the Califor- to frequent climaxes and favors scenesof confrontation, pur- and then published as a book in 1852 (miners tableaux. Language and nia gold fields were soon renting copies at twobits a day!), suit, and escape, ending in striking by the vogue enjoyed by the gesture in melodrama areforceful and impassioned, expres- was equalled and even surpassed requiring energetic acting. many different stage versionsthat flourished throughout the sive of primordial feelings and than a The melodramatist perceives the world as an arenaof world in the second half of the century. 01' the more English, the adaptation by George Aiken prepared intense ethicalstruggle polarized into moral and material dozenin extremes. where the poor but virtuous arepersecuted by the for the production atthe Troy Museum in Troy, New York, rich and corrupt. The motive force ormelodrama is the villain, is by far.t he best and the most faithful toMrs. Stowe's novel. Foreign versions were naturally geared to the values and a dynamic and sinister figurerecognized by the audience as different times and culture of the country in question. In the bestknown French the embodiment of evil and represented at andDumanoir places by such wielders of tyrannical power asthe decadent adaptation ofUncle Tom's Cabin,- by Den in 1853, Simon Legree, Little Eva, Topsy.and Miss Ophclia aristocrat.slaved river,heartlesslandlord,factory owner, police agent, or imperialist exploiter.The have all been omitted as too parochially American,and instead communist secret Stowe's weakest denouement, brought about by unexpectedreversals, is usu- the Parisian playwrights have made one of Mrs. resulting in creations, the comic but kind-hearted SenatorBird (wisely ally a happy one l'or the sympathetic characters, whom the French just rewards and punishments and affirmingthe laws of mor- dropped by Aiken) into a central character Occasionally audiences can understand.Inthis sentimental debasement ality and the benevolent workings of providence. bitter indictment of slavery, whites the herois defeated in this world, but shown tobe morally o I Ilarriet Beecher Stowe's are :generous and benevolent tograteful blacks; undergoing superior to his oppressors. the slave trade and buys rvoivini:outof sentimentaland bourgeois drama, a change of heart, Ilitley renounces at the end of the eighteenth George's freedom from his cruel masterHarris, who is a pantomime, andopera-co/W(1w adaptation century, melodrama first appeared inFrance and England as mulatto, On the other hand, in a famous Soviet small theatres done by Alexandra Brushtein in 1925 as amelodrama for aresult of the battle between the great and 1948 in the context of the Cold over restrictions limiting, performanceof spoken drama to li- children and up-dated in circumvented by the war,Uncle Tom's Cabinis placed in a modern frame showing censed houses, The law was successfully Dorothy, and her daughter, Cora, as victims use of music, which served asemotional commentary on the a black woman, combining the of racial prejudice in twentieth-century America,Injured in action and gave rise to the term melodrama, understand why no Greek words 101" SO rig and play. an automobile accident. Cora cannot itpre- whites will stop to Help her; to explain the natureand origins Melodrama differs from romantic drama. of Uncle Torn, ceded arid influenced, inits schematic charactr.r7zrv1ve.,in ..f racism, her mother tells Cora the story 10 14 ..,Melodrama which then becomes enacted on stage in a radicallytrans- Here there arises an interesting question of audience formed version stressing the evils of American society. psychology. Whyin melodrama, we may well ask, do we Inthe nineteenth century, thenrc,::ess of adaptation enjoywitnessing the victimization of innocence and the sometimes went in the opposite d'rr,.,c!i; highly successful oppression of the downtrodden? Vow, for example, can we stage melodramas were quickly noveli:i_d to cash in on the take pleasure in seeing Legree brutally beat Uncle Toni to fame of theplay and reach an as yet .:Wrapped reading public. death? Is it simply due to (in Leslie Fiedler's words ) "the mass We should remember that the reading of plays (except for audience's need for righteous indignation and sadomasochis- those by Shakespeare and important poets) had become a tictitillation"? The case against Uncle Tom's cabinvoiced lost art in the English-speaking world by this time due to the by many politicalactivists in the 1940s and 50shas been low esteem in which the stage was held. In fact, melodramas thatitidealizes a black hero who passively consents to his Um! other popular plays were printed only in unattractive own extermination. But the truth is that the abused victims acting editions fall of technical stage directions and abbrevia- in melodrama ar' never quite sit helpless as it might seem tions intended for the performers. It was not until the end of they have their own hidden resources by which they foil the century when George Bernard Shaw decided to write his their tormentors. Ard while we are outraged at the unjust plays from the point of view of the reader, nut the actor or sufferings of the oppreFsed, we applaud their ability to defy . director, that the texts of contemporary drama became readily their persecutors. Toni may choose neither to fight or to flee, accessible inbook form and play-reading once again became but he courageously stands up to Simon Legree by stubbornly widespread. refusing to do his bidding and beat his fellow slaves. Thus Tom shows impressive dignity and moral fortitude in his non- Uncle Gibin al. Melodrama compliance with evil, enduring wrong rathe\r \than doing it. The text ofGeorge Aiken's version of Uncle Tom's Tolstoi and Gandhi would admire such a stand and recognize Cabin includedin American Melodrama (Performing Arts its ethical force for effecting social change. Journal Publications, 1983) follows closely the original Samuel Stowe's Use of the MelodramaticConventions French edition from the 1850s. All the indications of stage For the most part nineteenth-century melodramatists business used in the Troy Museum production have been re- were content to dramatize evil of very limited scope, showing tained in order to preserve the authentic flavor of nineteenth- itas the consequence of the twisted psyches of certain male- cent ury melodrama: only directions specifying rightor left volentindividuals existing within an essentially benign so- have been dropped as imparting nothing of valueto the ciety and universe. Harriet Beecher Stowe more daringly in- modem reader or theatre worker. dicts an entir. In revealing the oppression of blacks We should be prepared for a high degree of tendentious- under slavery . e incipient revolt against such degradation, ness in a work such as Uncle Tom's Cabin. Irony, objectivity, Uncle Tom's Cuo,a announces a vast moral struggle, whose and detachment are not virtues in melodrama. Instead, the , end is the overturning of an iniquitous, but deeply entrenched author is openly partisan and takes sides for and against. Be- institution. In this respect, Mrs. Stowe's didacticism is not so cause he plays on his audience's feelings through the use of far removed fromthe commitment proposed by Imanni strong dramatic situations, the melodramatist does not aim Baraka (LeRoi Jones), who has asserted that "The Revolu- fora distanced, impartial, or even aesthetically disciplined tionary Theatre must Accuse and Attack ... because it is a response: rather, his goal is to stir and incite the spectators theatre of Victims.'' as a group. Hence the characteristic rooting" for the hero Through a direct appeal to the heart, Ilarriet Beecher and heroine, hissing of the villain, and shedding tears for the Stowe asks her audience to put themselves in the place of the innocent little victim. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, we are expected victim:"Ifitwere your Harry, mother, or your William; to cheer the daring escape of Eliza across the ice into the free that were going to. be torn from you by a brutal trader, to- state of Ohio, execrate Simon Legree for his cruel killing of morrow morning . .. " In the play as in thenovel, the Ameri- Tom, and weep over Little Eva's untimely death. can public was for the first time asked to identify with black H-oo characters on the basis of a shared Humanity and to espouse their cause. But this unusual author goes further than simply tugging at our heart strings: she exposes the inner workings of the in- stitution of slavery. Although it has been customary to make condescending remarks about Mrs. Stowe's naivete and senti- mentality, to sneer at her ignorance of actual conditions in the South, and to complain of the racial stereotypes that Uncle Tom has given rise to, her intellectual insights into what maintains a system of dehumanizing tyranny are considerable. She may not have known much about individual blacks or plantation life, but the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin had a Calvinistic grasp of human weakness and a strong analytic mind. Consider three of her most penetrating observations in the novel, which are implied in the dramatic version even if not directly stated there. First axiom: Decent, respectable slaveholders are more harmful than all the Simon Legrees. "Granted." said the young man: "but, in my opinion, itis you considerate, humane men, that are respons- ible for all the brutality and outrage wrought by these wretches: because, ifitwere not for your sanction and influence, the whole system could not keep foothold for an hour. If there were no planters except such as that one ... the whole thing would go down likea mill-stone. Itis your respectability tj0 11 A,. and humanity that licenses and protects his brutal- _t 5 ..Melodrama

The Bernard Shaw of Widowers' Houses and Mrs. War- even more dangerously. ren's Prof Sion never stated more succinctly the link between decent society and vicious institutions. in fact, forty years "There's no use calling on the Lord,he never hears," later in The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891) Oscar Wilde said the woman, steadily; "there isn't any God, I made the same paradoxical point: "The worse slave-owners believe; or, if there is, he's taken sides against us. were thbse who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented All goes againstus, heaven and earth. Everything the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered is pushing us into hell." fromitand understood by those who contemplatedit:: is quite pos- And George Harris echoes these sentiments, challenging Given Wilde's known tendency to appropriate, it the Christian God as a non-existent deity for blacks. sible he borrowed this aphorism from Uncle Tom. Mrs. Stoweisno less severe in her criticism of the "Oh, I've seen thingsall my life that have made me piousbuthypocriticalChristian Northerner than of the feel that there can't be a God. You Christians don't humane Southern planter. Second axiom: When economics know how these things look to us. There's a God and morality clash, money overcomes principle. for you, but is there any for us?" Brother B., being as we have said, a Christian man, One of the most sympathetic whites in the novel, and a resident in a free state, felt some uneasiness the ineffectual, guilt-ridden Augustine St. Clare, suffer on the subject. lie didn't like trading in slaves and similar loss of faith and in despair turns to drink, be ause souls of men,-of course, he didn't; but, then, there of the horror and hypocrisy that he has seen in a suppo dly were thirty thousand dollars in the case, and that Christian society built on slavery and despotic cruelty. rs. was rather too much money to be lost for a prin- Stowe attempted to counterbalance these harrowing dbts ciple. with affirmations of faith. Little Eva is, in her creato words, "an impersonation in childish form of the love of Christ," With the exception of the saintly Uncle Tom, the black and Uncle Tom is the bridegroom of this juvenile savior, who victims of oppression on Legree's plantation are not idealized sits on his lap and lisps the Bible to himsurely one of the either. Twentieth-century concentration camps have shown great romances of American literature. But by identifying us that those who are brutalized in turn brutalize others. Such with the oppressed blacks, whom she sees as feminine in isthe case with Quintho and Sambo, Legree's cruel black warmth and sensibility, the novelist takes-sides as a woman henchmen. Third axiom: Victims of tyranny are themselves against ,God the Father, against the Founding Fathers who corrupted and rendered tyrannical. allowed slavery to exist, against the entire patriarchal world Itis a common remark, and one that is thought to of slave-owning, slave-tolerating injustice. militate strongly against the character of the race, What reply can helpless victims, make to a seemingly that the negro overseer is always more tyrannical godless universe given over to evil? Tont's Christian submission and cruel than the white one. This is simply to say and martyr-like death is contrasted (but not necessarily pre- that the negro mind has been more crushed and de- ferred) to George Harris's active rebellion and determined based than the white. It is no more true of this race,_ self-preservation. "I am desperate,I'llfightfor my liberty, than of every oppressed race, the world over. The to the last breath f breathe!" George exclaims, disowningthe slave is always a tyrant, if he can get a chance to be United States as, his country and its laws as binding on him: one. "Yes, sir;I've said 'master' for the last time to any man." Which set of beliefs will overcome evil: Tom's defense of faith Uncle Tom's Cabin and Religion in the Lord through self-sacrifice, or George's black-national- Mrs. Stowe's approach to the problem of evil is equally ist trust in his pistol and good aim? This central ethical and re- original. in both the fictional and stage versions, Uncle Tom's ligious dilemma is never resolved in either the novel or the Cabin portrays a sinful world that seems to some of its most play. intelligent characters to have been abandoned by God and Simon Legree, one of the true super villains of nine- given over to the devil.Uncle Tom is a rare speciestheo- teenth- century literature,is above alla God-denying man. loOcal melodrama. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had witnessed Unlike Mrs. Stowe's troubled doubters who wrestle with dis- in her husband, the Reverend Calvin Stowe, a religious crisis belief, this ex-pirate and former Yankee turned planter has of faith, gave her novel a metaphysical dimension by contrast- hoped to supplant God. A direct descendant of the gothic ing different ways in which the characters respond to the ab- tyrant, first developed by another woman novelist, Mrs. Anne sence, of God. Religious experience lies at the heart of all her Radcliffe, Legree is cravenly superstitious, tormented by con- preoccupations. science, andfearful of punishment. The brutal slave-driver The two mostreflectiveand moderncharacters in grows terrified at the sight of the lock of hair that Little Eva Uncle Toni, George Harris (in the novel he eventually goes to has given Tom, because it reminds him of his mother's golden study in France and then "home" to Africa to find his roots) tresses. A degenerate son, Legree is haunted by the memory and Cassy (who as Legree's mistress on his decaying Faulk- of his mother whom he violently spurned when she reproved nerian plantation discovers an existential hell) raise repeated his vices. questions about the possibility of belief in God in a dark un- Harriet 13eecher Stowe, who lost her mother when she just universe. In the novel, George tells Eliza, "I an't a Chris- was five and maintained a cult in her name thereafter, ex- tian like you, Eliza: my heartisfull of bitterness;Ican't tols the maternal principle in Uncle Tom's Cabin. The more trust in God. Why does he let things be so?" Later he goes Legree feels cut off from the redemptive force of mother- further, asking, "Is there a God to trust in?" In the stage love, the stronger ishis desire to desecrate all the closest version, these blasphemous doubts are somewhat abridged bonds of Christian living. He deliberately creates an unholy and attenuated to George's cry: "Eliza, my heart's full of bit- family, consisting of his slave-mistress, Cassy, whose marriage terness. I can't trust in heaven. Why does it let things be so?" and motherhood he has sullied, and his two black overseers, But in both novel and play, Cassy asserts of the Heavenly Quimbo and Sambo; figurative children of his cruel tr.anny. father, "lie isn't here! There's nothing here but sin, and long, Tom's purity of spiritfatally draws down Legree':i long despair!" The fictional Cassy develops her questioning satanic hatred. The slave-driver's persecution of Un,:le Tom 12 16 CONSIDERING UNCLE TOM'S CABIN AS DRAMA by Vera iiji Dramatizations of Uncle Tad's Cabin were based upon a19th century novel, thus typically episodic and complex, involvng over forty major characters (plus many minor ones), three major plot lines and, three major different'settings. The play versions were necessarily similarly episodic and lacking in unity, unless the adaptor omitted whole plots from his text. George Aiken's considerable talent lay in his ability to select his '.naterials so that the essence of the novel's major concerns seems fairly well presented, though with the inevitablefore- shortening, simplification, and elimination of introspective or abstract passages which the dramatic form dictates. his dramatization's value can best be appreciated in comparison with others', such as the version by 11..1. Conway which was used by Barnum and ended happily with a free Tom,I or the English version which completely omitted little Eva. When Mrs. Stowe at last tried her hand in the version she prepared for staged readings called The Christian Slave, she was far less successful in her dramatization than Aikenhad been with his. Aiken's play has four major movements. It originally ended with the death of little Eva, and was continued to the death of Uncle Tom by popular demand. The first section of the play deals mainly with George and Eliza, (although Toni is started on his journey South) as Eliza runs off to freedom in the North, to-avoid the selling away from her of her little son, Harry. As each act is designed to end with a moment of high drama or tension, Act 1 ends with Eliza crossing the Ohio with her baby in her arms by jumping from one ice floe to the nexta desperate measure seen as the better alternative to losing her child to the slavers. (Interestingly, this seemingly most melodramatic of moments was based on an actual news- paper account of a woman who made just such an escape to freedom.) Act II introduces us to Tom's sojourn in the benign care of Augustine St. Clare an interesting character who under- stands all the evil of slavery, but cannot bestir himself to do anything about it, except to be an indulgent master to the few lucky enough to find themselves in his household. Here the novel allowsforsome interesting discussion between thC Northern Ophelia who is a liberal in the abstract, while being a bit of a bigot in her own heart, and the ineffectual St. Clare whose only reason for living appears to he his love for his little daughter; Eva. Her loving nature and true spirituality is matched by is the inevitable consequence of evil's victimization of total Tom's, as our commentators have noted. But in this section of innocence, a favorite theme in American literature that finds the play, which moves back and forth between St. Clare's similar,if more complex treatmentin1- legman mansion and the escape to Canada of George and Eliza, the novella, Billy Budd, where the guiltless hero must also submit idyllic atmosphere is disturbed by the introduction of Topsy, and die. At the end ofMrs. Stowe's novel, Legreenow a the black who, "raised by a speculator with lots of others ... confirmed alcoholicdies slowly of a bad conscience. His never had no mother, nor father nor nobody" -to loveher. swearing and drinking, as well _as his whoring, are natural Eva's capacity toreach out .to Topsy reforms the child.2 attendants of mother- spurning. More importantly, perhaps, the presence of Topsy/allows the In Aiken's dramatization,itisLegree whokilts St. portrayal of a realistic adolescent, whose initiative serves only Clare, and he is shot in reprisal by Lawyer Marks. In other to get her into trouble, while her self-image as a "nigger," stage versions, Cassy stabs and kills her hated masterand unlovable because of 14r color, allows for the creation of a lover. The precise agency of Legree's dying matters little. complex character.' For Topsy is certainly loveable, as attested Whatever the cause, the godless slave-driver dies a bad death, to not only by the popularity of the character duringthe eternally damned, whereas Tom dies a beautifully edifying play's long period of production, but by our videotape. It is death, forgiving his tormentor as a model Christian gentleman one thing to read the sentimental dialogue which leads to should. The villain in melodrama is ultimately shown to be Topsy's promise to "try to be good." It's another thing entire- lonely,terror-stricken, and pathologically disturbed, while ly when the scene is enacted by two Orli in the setting of the the victims of his persecution are revealed to be healthy and St. Clare garden. Unbelievable as the scene seems as written, it sound, strong in their faith and united with their fellow men becomes fully credible in enactment. by bonds of love. Such is the optimism of popular literature Act 11 ends with the escape to Canada of George and and drama. Eliza, after an exciting series of entrapments and a dramatized 13 1? showdown at a "rocky pass." With their escape, the first major HUMOR AND UNCLE TOM'S CABIN plot element is completed. Acts III and IV cOmplete the St. A very complex and interesting issued involved in our Clare element, with the sequence of deaths of Eva (end Act understanding of this play is the effect upon us of the pre- III) and her father (end Act IV). Now Aiken introduces an ponderance of humor in a play which deals with so tragic a element not, present in the novel, as he takes Topsy up North subject as slavery, and which compounds the sadness by its as Ophe ha's adopted daughter. An entirely new sub-plot is emphasis on the death of innocents. Of course, we knowthat developed to create a comic contrast to the Legree section. As genius never hesitates to mix genres: Shakespeare's tragedies Tom is bought, an object worth $1200.00, Gumption Cute are full of what we call "comic relief:: The question is, what offers.to "exhibit" Topsy as "The woolly gal," thus turning. is the comedy relieving, and how does the use of comedy her back into an object. Act V continues the use of the comic affect our response to the work as a whole? sub-plot to contrast with and defuse the powerful and disturb- This issue is too complex to 'deal with here, but it is evi- ing Legiee scenes. Legree's first remark on reaching his planta- dent that the play used humor to "detoxify," so to speak, its tion is "We're home." Ile soon follows up by asking Emmeline, unspeakable subject matter. the young girl he's bought as his sexual object, to "be a good Melodrama always thrives on villainySimon Legree, girl." In this same scene, he flogs Tom to "within an inch of then, presented- no real- threat to the audience's equanimity. his life!" But the slave auction scene is another matter. Here was some- Meanwhile, Topsy has a real home with Opheilli. The thing most whites had not seen, and would find difficult next to the last scene of Act V ends as Tom is beingflogged, to dismiss. In many versions ofUncle Tom's Cabin,the auction but Aiken does not end the act on this curtainrafher, the scene would begin with a dance by the blacks who are waiting act ends after the next scene which closes with Topsy beating to be sold! They sing, dance, shoot dice, have a chicken fight Gumption Cute about the room with a broom! just a bunch of happy darkies! We won't go into the psycholo- In Act VI, most of the loose threads of the novel are gy of despair, which might find interesting food for thought picked pp, as the now grown up son of the planter who started here. At any rate, this is the auction scene as it was performed all the trouble by selling Eliza's child, Harry, and Uncle Tom in the New York Academy in 1901 by William Brady's produc- (George Shelby by name) returns to buy Tom back from tion. Legree. With him come Marks (one of the slavers who had. The scene as given here illustrates how variant versions, pursued Eliza) and Gumption Cute, who had, for the con- played over time, cheapened the value ofUncle Tom's Cabin. venience of our adaptor, been present when Legree murdered St. Clare. Marks and Cute are preliared to blackmail Legree, A VARIANT VERSION OF THE AUCTION SCENE, but Marks kills him instead. If all this seems mighty contrived to you,, you can be sure the audience did not mind a'bit. WILLIAM BRADY PRODUCTION, NEW YORK Poetic justice is being served, and we are waiting to see Tom ACADEMY, 1901. PRINTED FROM THE BRADY reunited in Heaven with Eva and St. Clare. COLLECTION, BY PERMISSION OF THE In the 1980's we tend to ridicule such scenes. Indeed, the history ofUncle Tom's Cabinas a drama got an added MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK chapter in the1970's with two new productionsone by a Auctioneer - This ends the LaRouche lot. black playwright, Loften Mitchell, the other by the Trinity (All Specialties at the beginning of the act.) Square Repertory Company and rewritten by Adrian Hall in ACT IV which the heaven scene was parodied. (So far as I can tell from SCENE I: An auction mart. reviews, the Mitchell version merely omitted the scene.) While DISCOVERED:UNCLE TOM and EAMIE LINE: atback. it may seem ludicrous in the reading, again the spectacular ele- ADOLF, SKEGGS, MARKS, MANN and ment in the situation has a power of its own. I believe it is a various spectators discovered. fitting climax to what has been justifiably called a "theological Haley - HelloMarks. Whatare you doinghere? drama." Marks- To do some bidding at the sale. As was the expected in 19th century America, our play Haley Say Colonel. What is the next lot? combined; asa letter by adaptor H.J. Conway remarks, a Colonel - The St. Clare lot. "blending of the grave and the gay."3 Just what the effect of Haley - (To Marks) is St. Clare dead? emphasizing the hum6ro us elements did to the work is a most Marks - Yes, he got into some trouble with Legree complex and interesting question. What the effect is of putting and Legree killed him. the play "on its feet", in 1983, only our present audiences can (Enter Legree) tell. here he is now Haley - Hello Legree Legree - (Crosses down to Auction Block) A Nigger with his boots blacked. Bah! Strip up your sleeves.(feels arms and muscles). Let's see your teeth.(to speculators) Likely looking Nigger. (Crosses to Emmeline left) (Turns to Emmeline) You're a nice-looking girl enough. (Grasps her arm) mmPline- (Shrieking) Ah! you hurt me. Ct,fc:el (Business with mallet) Stop that, you minx! no whimpering here. :arks- (Tapping stage with umbrella) Here, here no whimpering hereDon't make a fuss about it. You're to be sold, I can tell George L. Aiken, Who Dramatized "Uncle Tom'. Cabin," you that ! Played George !limit In the Original Caat 14 1 . ..Variant Auction Scene

Colonel - (Rapping on desk) is the only nigger I'm going to buy. I'll buy a Ilere, here, you keep quiet.I'll do all the whole bunch. talking here (Takes out large pocket book which is wound Marks - Well go on and talk- with long string) Colonel - I intend to. (Business ad.lib.as Mr. Stockwell directs, Marks Well there ain't anybody stopping you till he gives AuctiOneer money 'sic] ) Colonel - Shut up! I will now commence this sale. Marks - Here's a dollar bill give me 2D cents change Marks - Why don't you start it'? The sooner you start, please. the,sooner we'll all get a chance to bid Colonel - Haven't you made a mistake'? Colonel - Didn't I tell you to stop talking'? Marks - Is it a two dollar bill'? Marks Do you own the place'? Colonel - I low much did you bid for that nigger? Colonel - I own most of it Marks-- 75 Marks - You ought to buy the rest and you would be Colonel - 75! 75! What! sole proprietor. Marks - Seventy five cents. Colonel - Keep quiet! Colonel - That boy was knocked down for S875. The first articleI shall offer you today will Marks - WellI've been knocked down for nothing

he Adolf,valettothe late Mr. St. Clare. many a time. . Adolf get on the stand. Colonel - And you will again if you don't get out of (ADOLF does so) here. Take this money and get. Marks (Goes to him examines his teeth-feels chest, Marks - Well I am going to run arm, muscles, then retires Left) Colonel - (returns to desk) Will you let me examine Adolphus? Adolph get on the stand. Colonel - All right but be quick about it. (ADOLF going to stand) Marks - I didn't know whether you would or not, Marks - (Remembering his )fmbrella) your so smart owning the place. (Returns and getsmbrella) (Business. Falls against block) (Exit Left/E) Here let me feel your muscle. Colonel - Mr. Haley,I'll/have to hold you to your last (Feels his arm, taps his chest) bid, S850.00./ open your mouth and let me see your teeth- Haley All right, I'lltand to it. (ADOLF doesso.MARKS unconsciously Colonel - S850, doI hear any more-S850 give me gets his finger in it, ADOLF closes down on bid -S850 once, twice and third timeand nd it) sold to Mr. Haley. Adolf go to your master, Here, here, hold on, hold on. (Haley takes him) Haley Ile is holding on. (Adolf does so) Marks - Then letgo. Well he has got good teeth! Now gentlemenI can offer you a first class (ADOLF does so) article, Emmeline, take the stand, quadroon (Cross Right) girl-eighteen years old, good house girl. (MR. STOCKWELL hashis own business (EMMELINE on the stand) here, wait till he is well over in Right corner) Well now gentlemen, what am I bid? (All laugh) Legree - S400. Colonel7 How much am I offered for Adolph? Haley 5500. Haley - 5500. Legree - S550. Colonel - 5500 Haley - 5600. (Each ad lib business) Legree - 5650. Loker- S550. Marks - (Enters Left/E) (This scene is bid up to S875-Marks bid S75.) 75. Marks - S75. Colonel - Get out! (Work this scene as Mr. Stockwell directs- (Marks exits Left/E) Adolf isfinally knocked down to him for Legree - S700. 5875.00) Marks - (Enters R.1.E. and walks slowly on stage Colonel - Sold to - What's your name? and exits L. 1. E. COLONEL comes from desk Marks - I'm a lawyer and my name is Marks. follows him ready to bounce him - but when Colonel - Adolph go to your Master he sees him go off - returns to desk) (Adolph gets oil block) Colonel - S700 and ad lib. Marks - Come here Adolf, you belong to me, wait Loker - 5750. tillI get you home, I'll have your teeth pulled, Marks - (Enters L.I.E.) you won't bite any more fingers, oh you wait. 75 (COLONEL has come down to Left of Marks Colonel - (Very angry comes down to him) and touches on shoulders) Didn't I tell you you couldn't bid here? Come on, come on can't see me? Marks - What am I doing here? (Marks chains hand) Colonel-- What are you doing here? Colonel - Come and settl:! Marks - Who are you? Marks - Eh! what is it? Colonel - I'm the auctioneer. Colonel - Come settle. Marks - How long have you been an auctioneer? Marks - Why certainly. Herc, hold that Adolf. Colonel - About twenty years. (Gives him umbrella) Marks - Why don't you change your business. I'll settle in just one minute. Don't think this Colonel - That's none of your business. 15 Marks - Who am I? 19 Colonel - That's what I want to know. Who are you. Marks - I'm a lawyer and my name is Marks. (Stamps his umbrella down and leans on it. COLONEL kicks it from under himhe falls. COLONEL picks him up quick by collar of coat. Stand on picture.) Colonel - Didn't Itell you five minutes ago you couldn't bid here? Marks - No Sir! Colonel Yes Sir! Marks.- That wasn't 'any more than three minutes ago. (Business of clapping hand and going to tight) Colonel - 'ihree or live, you ain't bid here. Marks - Likely I can. Colonel Didn't I tell you, you can't bid here'? Marks - I say I can. Colonel I say you can't. Marks - Yes sirI cat:. Colonel - Well what will you bid. Marks - I can bid you good day. (Exits L. I. E.) Colonel- (Returns to desk) 750 and ad lib. Legree - 800. Colonel - Eight, eight, no more, eight, one, two, three and sold to Mr. Legree. Emmeline go to your master, next Ishall offer you the valuable article known as Uncle Toni, (Uncle Tom enters) the most useful nigger ever raised. (Uncle Tom takes the stand) Gentlemen in want of an overseer, now is the time to bid. Legree - (Business Goes over to Uncle Toni, looks at teeth and feels muscles) Where were you raised? Torn - In Kentuck Masa. Legree - What have you done? Toni - I lad care of Massa's farm. Legree - That's a likely nigger story. (Business as before.) (Auctioneer works this up as before act) Colonel - Now Gentlemen make me a bid! (Bids on Uncle Tom as follows-400-500 600 Legree - S800. 5900: Colonel - Why Gentlemen you wouldn't let a valuable piece of property like this go for a mere trifle Where's that man from Mobile who wanted to give S-I 500 for a good. overseer! Changed his mind? Haley - Guess he's gone home. Skinner - You can buy the city of Mobile for that. (The Sale continues) Colonel - S900 (and ad lib) S1000 SI 100 Legree (Right) SI 200 Colonel - S1200 (ad lib) third and last time. Sold to Legree - Simon Legree!, Uncle Toni - (Center) The Lord haVe mercy on our souls. (Curtaindown 3 minutes)

Lawyer Marks

16 1.1 /-1 U PART II: CULTURAL, SOCIETAL, AND HISTORICAL CONSIDERATIONS

I3ritish support of those forces that were working for the aboli- AN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE tionof slavery, i.e., the Northern states, and cleverly closed by Florence Polatnick with a sentence lifted from the original: "We appeal to you as Scholars of American literature and historians of the sisters, as wives, and as mothers-, to raise your voices to your nineteenth century disagree as to the short and long range ef- fellow citizens, and your prayers to God, for the removal of that this affliction and disgrace from the Christianworld."17 Sonic fects of Uncle Toni,'s Cabin, but they agree unanimously much effect. it is unparalleled asapiece of successful propaganda. historians do not believe that her "Reply; The work began modestly enough as a serial in The Nevertheless,Jt bolstered the moral forces urging England to National Era, an antislavery weekly. Each edition of the news- stand by its anti-slavery principles. Recognition and aid to paper was eagerly awaited. Tattered copies werepassed from the Confederate States was never granted. hand to hand until they fell apart. The following March, the The Slavery Issue: 1787-1850 hook was published.' To what can we attribute Mrs.towe's phenomenal suc- The Novel's Reception cess? First, the nation had been m .Ag inexorably toward a showdown between the North and te South, Even before the ilot off the press; the book was a sensation. It sold out Constitution was adopted, the North est Ordinance of 1787 its first edition of 5,000 copies in less than two days.2 A new prohibited slavery in the territory north of the Ohio River be- printing was ordered; eight presses-ran day and night for one later year to keep upwith the demand.3 Sonic 300,000 copies tween the Mississippi and the Appalachians. Two years were sold in the first year.4 In all it isestimated that about the writers of the Constitution could not get the Southern three million copies have been sold in the UnitedStates.5 statesGeorgia and South Carolina in particularto join the The book undoubtedly reached every literate family inthe Union withoutserious concessions concerning slavery, al- North, and, as Lader points out, the children who heard it though the word itself was never used. A number equal to the three-fifths of the slave population was added to white South- read around the fire at night were the voters of 1860 and ern delegations in the House ofRepresentatives. Increased soldiers of 1861.6 representation also gave the slave states an advantage in the The impact was no less phenomenal overseas. Outstand- electoral College. ingliterarylights reviewedi Uncle Tom's Cabin--=Thomas heavy Macaulay, George Sand, Heinrich Heine. Three Paris news- Since Northern shipowners and merchants had a In Germany alone stake in the slave trade and in the products produced byslaves, papers simultaneously raninstallments.? they granted another concession to the slave states: insteadof seventy -fivedifferent editions were published.8 The Italian immediately outlawing the slave trade, the cutoff was post- public gobbled up If Zio Toni despite its having been banned by the Pope.9 Russian censors also outlawed the book, but poned until 1808. Tolstoy obtained a copy. It reportedly made such an impres- After the formation of the union, sectional interests con- sion on him that he ranked Mrs. Stowe as one of the all-time tinued to force compromises with slavery. When Missouri ap- literary greats, along with Dostoyevsky and Victor Hugo.10 plied for admission to the Union as a slave state, someheavy All over Europe there sprang up restaurants, creameries, "logrolling"- by --representatives' of Southernplanters and and shops based on an Uncle Torn theme.11 The book was Northern manufacturing and shipping interests resulted the translated into some forty different languages and dialects, Compromise of 1820. Maine, itsterritory detached from including Siamese. In all of history, only the Bible has ap- Massachusetts, was admitted as a free state, Missouri as a slave peared in so many different versions: state. In addition, a line was drawn across the remainderof the By far the most significant impact was felt in England. Louisiana Territory. South of the boundary, slavery would be Within one year forty pirated editions were printed in the permitted. United Kingdom and its colonies.12 In all, the best guess puts As the fever of "Manifest Destiny" gripped the,nation the total of copies sold in the United Kingdom and its colonies that supposedly divinely inspired mandate to stretch the Stars at one and a half million. The Prime Minister, Lord Palmer- and Stripes from ocean to ocean, the unsuccessful campaigns ston, is said to have read Uncle Torn's Cabin threetimes.13 to conquer Canada in both the Revolution andthe War of a Lader informs us that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had 1812 discouraged expansionists from looking to the North. been -considering closing the Canadian border to runaway However, a war with Spain added Florida. Mexico's attemptEto slaves but were so affected by the book that they reversed outlaw slaver) in Texas resulted in a United Statesinvasion themselves.14 When in 1853, 500,000 signed, the "Affec- and annexation of half of our southern neighbor's territory. tionate and Christian Address of British Women to their Sis- Many abolitionists decried the use of national policy to en- ters, the Women of the United States of Ainerica" a peti- large the power and enrich the pockets of the slaveholders. tion to abolish slavery-15 it was presented to Mrs. Stowe as Meanwhile, the South almost seceded over the tariff the outstanding anti-slavery figure in this country. issue in 1828 and again in 1832. Believing that the plantation Some scholars credit Harriet Beecher Stowe with an even system could not make profits with free labor, the South greater influence on the course of British-Americanrelations pressedfor guarantees of the continuation of slavery. As during the Civil War. English economic interests were clearly time went by, these deep rifts were patched over with a favorable to the South. The English purchased the Southern- series of make-shift compromises. ers' tobacco and cotton. Confederate gunboats were being built in British shipyards. The economic argument was then The Compromise of 1850 dressed up in political casuistry; British newspapers argued Another breaking point occurred in 1850. Gold was that the Southern states had as much right to rebel as the ori- discovered in California in1848, and within a year there ginal thirteen colonies.16Parliament was considering granting was .enough population for the territory toclaim statehood. official recognition to-the Confederate States of America when Mast of the settlers were from the North, but admission of Mrs. Stowedecided to answer the "Affectionate and Chris- California to the Union as a free state would have upset the tian" anti-slavery petition she had received ten years earlier delicate balance in Congress. Anti-slavery forces were at the from the women of England. Since her response followed same time hammering away atanational disgraceslave closely her visit to the White House, itis believed that the two auctions in the District of Columbia practically in the shadow events are connected. Mrs. Stowe made an eloquentappeal for of the Capitol. 17 21 Illustrations of the American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1840

The Commomisc of 1850 allowed Califbrnia to enter as afree state. The public sale of slaves in the capital was abolished. But in return for these concessions the South de- manded a heavy price. They insisted that the states to be carved out of the remainder of the Mexican Cession would decide the slavery issue for themselves on the basis of "squat-

ter sovereignty," thus allowing the settlers with slaves to move Mooting Mont, uoth rem/ gun, A NI.r dr.rirtl Seri hty Mt NOriAl1/1 Stair, lei arrettinq rditerreen in and dominate the ultimate decision, The Federal govern, r Shit. ihr mein had to assume the debt of" Texas during its ten year na- tionhood, andthe Southerners finally secured aFugitive aloneSlavery As It Is Id100,000 copies.21 Weld was also as- Slave Law with teeth. The provisions of this Fugitive Slave sistant to John Quincy Adams in the campaign to present Act outraged even moderates on the slavery question. It vio- thousands of petitions against slavery on the floor of lated the most basic guarantees of the Constitution and funda- House of Representatives. After being denied a second term in mentals of American law, Specifically appointed Federal Com- the Presidency in 1828, Adams returned to Washington as a missioners would make a decision solely on the basis of affi- Massachusetts Congressman from 1831 to 1848. He became davits presented by the owner of the suspected escapee. The the main Congressional spokesman for the abolitionist move- accused was not permitted a hearing or a jury trial, and his/her mem. Adams would not allow the slavery issue to beburied. testimony was not admissible. There was no provision for a Ile exhorted, provoked, forced debates; and when the oppo- stay or an appeal. The Federal Commissioner was paid ten sition triedto shut him up by parliamentarymaneuvering, dollars for each person returned to the slave owner, but only he defied the Gag Rule and continued to introduce the peti- five dollars if lie decided to free the accused. Even worse, tions containing thousands of signatures gathered by Weld and every citizen was turned into a potential slave catcher because his colleagues in the American Anti-Slavery Society. the Federal Commissioner could call on any bystander for aid. A marshal or deputy refusing to make an arrest was fined Slave. Narra tives S1,000, no small sum in those days. The same penalty plus For many years before Harriet Beecher Stowe was in- six months in jail covered anyone concealing or rescuing a spired to contribute to the growing mountain of abolitionist literature, poetry and narratives by former slaves had con- fugitive.In addition, the slave owners could institute civil damage suits for each slave lost. Also troublesome was the tinued to make a deep impression on the public. Weld's group free ex post factonature of the law; those former slaves who had and others maintained schools for the education of escaped and lived as free Negroes for years faced possible re- Negroes,n many of the teachers having originally conic from turn to bondage. liven those born free felt the danger. The Lyman Beecher's Cincinnati theological school. Abolitionists Compromise of 1850 had given the South an unrestricted wanted blacks to write their own stories so that they would hunting license in the Northern states. Despite the efforts of ringtrueand would contradict the myth of Negro mental Daniel Webster and henry Clay to preserve the Union with inferibrity. However, for those who were illiterate, ghost elaborate appeasements, the political stage was setfor the writers filledin. They were often important literary figures fantastic reception ofUncle Min's Cabin. or scholarse.g., John Greenleaf Whittier,Lydia Maria Child, Ednuthd Quincy. So that by the time Mrs. Stowe launched The Abolitionist Movement her attack on "this horror, this nightmare abomination!", A second reason for the novel's success was that the pub- many Northerners were familiar with themiserable details lic conscience had been prepared by long years of abolitionist of plantation life from the slave narratives that hadbeencon- activity. Twenty years had passed since William Lloyd Garri- densed or fully serialized in their newspapers and magazines. son put out the first issue ofThe Liberatorfor the express The best known of the antebellum biographies of escaped purpose that "every chain be broken and every bondsman set slaves isNarrative of the Life of Frederick Douglasspublished free." Despite poverty, social ostracism, insults, threats, near- in 1845 from which Mrs. Stoweborrowed.24 Douglass, con- lynchings, he proclaimed, "I will not retreat an inchAND I tinued to write books and published a newspaperwhich had WILL BE 11EARD!"18 wide circulation. In addition, lie was a first-rate public speaker Another strong voice was that of Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, and was often featured at abolitionist rallies. the best-selling author in the United States with her books of Another outstanding black author was William Wells "how-to" guidance,The Frugal housewife, The Mother's Book, Brown. During his flight from Kentucky, William "no second The Little Girl's Own Book.In 1833 she issuedAn Appeal in name" was helped by Wells Brown. The escapee took the name Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans!The South of and dedicated his first book to the Quaker "conductor" reacted by public burnings of her blameless household books on the Underground Railroad to whom he owed somuch. The and by sending vitriolic letters. However, in her hometown of first Negro seriously to attempt such literary forms as the Boston she was met with stony' silence. The fortunes of many novel, drama, and travel literature, he was also responsible of the "best" families were directly or indirectly tied to slav- for the best of the songbooks of the abolitionist movement, ery. Disapproval was expressed by an act; the severity of which The Anti-Slavery Harp,which contained verses sung to familiar can only be appreciated by those familiar with BostonMrs. tunes like "Auld Lang Sync." Like Douglass, he was amajor Child's free card to the Athanaeum was withdrawn. attraction on the Northern lecture circuit.25 (See article in this Another activist, Theodore Weld, wrote many articles, sourcebook.) pamphlets, and books as leader of the American Anti-Slavery Another important lecturer was I lenry Bibb, who had es- Society. In 1839 he publishedSlavery As It Is.It became the caped from Kentucky across the river to Cincinnati in1837.35 Bible of the abolitionist movement. Ilarriet Beecher Stowe Returning for his wife, he was caught, but escaped again. By was supposed' to have kept Weld's book in her workbasket by all accounts, Bibb was able to wring the hearts of audiences day and under her pillow at night.° A number of incidents who came to hear his descriptions of the whippings, the mis- described in this abolitionist's handbook were made part of cegenation, babies being torn from their mothers' breasts, the plot ofUncle TOM'S Cabine.g.,the whipping of George husbands and wives separated, and all the other abominations Harris by the child of his white master.'-3 Many historians of the slave auctions. Bibb, like many other blacks in the believe Weld's book has not been sufficiently appreciated as North, fled to Canada after the passage of the Fugitive Slave a major factor in influencing public opinion. In its first year Law, but he remained active in the cause. 18 2 , Historical Perspective

Scholars specializing in this phase of our country's history American Messianism have broughttopublic attention many other ante-bellum In The Flowering of New knglandVan Wyck Brooks black authors.Biographies, poetry, essays, newspaper ac- quotes an 1853 letter by Mrs. Stowe: " the whole world counts, pamphlets, sermons, and speecheshad been contribu- looks hopefully toward America as a nation especially raised ted by both black and white authors, There was an1 834 novel by God to advance the cause of human liberty and religion

by Richard Ilildreth,The Slave: or, Memoirs of Arch), Moore, . . "31 And so when we read that Mrs. Stowe told people and even two playsThe &undo! Handin 1845 andWarrenin that God was the act ml author ofUncle Tom's Cabin,that 1850.27 Sallee to say, the message had been drummed into Ile had only used her as an instrument, we cannot dismiss the public's mind over many years, and as a result,Harriet her as a fanatic. Most people of her era thought in religious Beecher Stowe's vast audience had been conditioned for ac- terms. The concepts of guilt, damnation, redemption were ceptance. ButUncle Tom's Cabinwas the spark thatlit the very much on people's minds in the 1850's. So that, again, fire. Ilan:let Beecher Stowe stood in the mainstream of American popular opinion. Didacticism and the Historical Novel The student who readsaboutIlarrietBeecher Stowe Mrs. Stowe's hook is a historical novel in the tradition of before actuallytackling the novel will be led to expect a an author she and most oth,crs in the nineteenth century call to arms and is disappointed to findnosuch revolution- much admiredSir Walter Scott.Itis Dickensian in its wide- ary message. Infact, Mrs. Stowe was surprised at the fervor ranging survey of everyday life of ordinary people and its with which the abolitionists took up her book; she had sharp observations on the relationships of social classes. An thought it too mild for them.32 entire, civilization wayside inns,riverboats, slave markets, She believed that true Christian love, after the model of the range of !Ionics from St. Clare's estate to the less luxurious Uncle Tom, would solve all the problems. Just as Toni forgave , Shelbyplantation, to the horrible Legree farm, to the modest his tormentors, she did not blame the South for the evils of Quaker homes, to Miss Ophelia's proper New England estab- slavery. It was the system itself that was at fault. In fact, two lishment, to the poor slave quarters- was detailed in its scope. Southern whites, Mrs. Shelby and St. Clare are ami-slavery Many Europeans made their acquaintance with Anierica only Southerners. The villain Simon Legree is a transplanted Yan- through its pages. The novel gave the impression of authen- kee. Like many of the early abolitionists, Mrs. Stowe was a ticity.Infact, after the inflamed Southern counter-attack, gradualist. She believed that the United States of America Mrs.Stowe painstakingly documented her sources ayear was chosen by God to be a citadel of liberty and that the laterinThe Key to Uncle Tom.She cited her experiences struggle to free the slaves was a continuation of the upward during eighteen years in Cincinnati, court records, handbills, movement toward equality, afulfillment of the philosophy advertisements, newspaper reports, and eyewitness accounts of the Founding Fathers. Moreover, she was certain that when like that of Josiah Henson, a former slave whose 1849 narra- Southerners realized that slavery is a sin for Which God would tive she had read, whom she had met at her brother's home, eventually exact retribution, they would gradually free their and who sonic scholars believe, became the model for ,Uncle bondsmen. Meanwhile,' she insisted, the clergy must cease Tom. The minor characters, most of whom are slaves, their hypocritical silence, must thunder their disapproval in cover a full range of emotions -joy, love, sorrow, pride,weak- the tradition of Calvin and Knox. nessall human qualities denied by the concept of chattel Iler conclusion toUncle Tom's Cabinsums itall up: slavery. The examples of khiza and George llarris, Aunt "A clay of grace is yet held out to us. Both North and South Chloe, and, of course, Uncle Tom gave a dimension to the sin have been guilty before God; and the ristion Churdihas a of slavery that the abolitionists' pamphlets and speeches never heavy account to answer. Not by combining together to pro- could. tect injustice and cruelty, and making a commoncapital of sin, is this Union to he savedbut by repentance, justice, and The 19th Century Religious Revival mercy: for not surer is the eternal law by whichthe millstone Another great social movement in the mid-nineteenth sinks in the ocean, than that stronger law by which injustice century joined the inexorable flow toward civil wari.e., and cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of Almighty an intense religious revival in America. In addition, newcreeds God!" 33 like Unitarianisiii and Mormonism were spreading their be- liefs and provoking counter-movements. Evangelism was popu- Stowe's Political Views lar, particularly on the newly settled frontier. We must never Mrs. Stowe supported the American Anti-Slavery Soci- forget that Mrs. Stowe's life was permeated with religion. ety's program of sit-ins, economic and social boycotts, non- She was steeped in the Calvinist tradition of Jonathan Ed- cooperation with government, refusaltoo obey unjust laws, wards. Along with many others, Ilarriet Beecher Stowe had andnon-violentharassmentandinterferencewithslave- been nurtured on a theory of history derived from Cotton catchers. She approved of efforts like those of her beloved Mather. God had 'reserved America for the founding of brother Henry Ward Beecher, who held "benevolent" slave Christ's Commonwealth, he wrote inhisMagnolia Christi auctions toraise money among his Brooklyn parishioners Americana.The Puritan Fathers were giants predestined to to ,buy slaves and free them.34 She was sensitive enough to leadtheir saintlyflocks into the wilderness, sustained by the rights of propertyto realize that compensation must God's grace. ,The leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony he offered to slaveholders for their losses. were held up as heroic models for later generations to follow. But once the blaCks becanie freethen what? They must "What wonderful stories those! . . .made me feel the very be protected, Mrs. Stowe said, for the former slaves would ground I trod to be consecrated ..." Mrs. S.toWe wrote in her be weak and simple. Whites would have to used their superior 1 autobiographical notes. She-felt thatUncle Tom's Cabin strength and knowledge to educate and upliftthe down- and her later slave novelDredwere historical in nature. Today trodden. If only every Topsy could be put in the care of a histoilims try to present the facts of the past in an unbiased, Miss Ophelia, the blacks would be rinsed up to become self- non-pnmdicial way. Not so Mrs. ,Stowe. She was writing a reliant citizens, thoughtful voters, responsible legislators. didacticbook, documenting "the peculiar institution" of The fact is Mrs. Stowe had little first hand knowledge of American slavery to force recognition of its evil sin so that slavery. From her vantage point during.. the Cincinnati years the nation could cleanse itself and get back on the track of she saw many auctions, her family helped escapees, she had the Divine Plan. 19 0 03 ., historical Perspective Mrs,Stowe's brother Henry was activeinthis campaign; even made a brief sojoinn to visit a plantation onthe Ken- in fact, the rifles sent West were called "Beecher'sBibles.", tucky side of the river, Her biotite' had spent time in New As the nation watched, "Bleeding Kansas" provided an omin- Orleans and had reported his observations and impressions. ous preview of the coming war between the states. However, the escaped slaves she encountered were almost Inthe same year, after Senator Charles Sumner of allfrom the border states where they tended to be more Massachusetts excoriatedhis colleague AndrewButler of sophisticated and often educated. Many, like Frederick Doug- South Carolina, he was almost beaten to death on the Sen- lass, lived in urban settings and were skilled artisans. Another ate floor by Representative PrestonBrooks, a relative ofBut- group of blacks whom she knew were the speakers ataboli- ler.The House refused to censure the attacker. Threedays tionist meetings, writers, preachers, These were hardly repre- later, back in Kansas, John Brown led a raid in which live sentative of the mass of "cotton choppers" in Alabama or pro-slavery men were murdered, Mississippi or the slaves such as those liviag,in sub-human Another1854 eventwhich greatlyintlencedMrs. condition's on Sea Island, Georgia described by Fanny Kemble. Stowe was the formation of the Republican Party, a patch- In her ingenuous innocence Mrs. Stowe believed that one work of Northernanti-slaveryWhigs,anti-slavery Demo- generation of education and liberty would be enough to wipe crats, and Free Soilers. They were dedicated to resisting out the lingering stain of slavery."6 It was thiskind of naive the extension of slavery. John C. Fremont, their first Presi- optimism and lack of understanding of the deep psychological dential candidate, the Pathfinder of the West, the hero of and cultural gulf that blacks had to bridge that doomed Re- California, was the kind of candidate Mrs. Stowe could sup- construction and set back ,the cause of true equality. port . Another solution favored. by Mrs, Stowe was sending It was these fast-moving events that caused Mrs. Stowe blacks back to Africa.It was for this purpose the American to change direction in the middle of writing Dred. Although Colonization Society was formed in1816. The main argu- shestill appealed to humanitarian and Christian pacificism ment was that for many reasons, notnecessarily their fault, as exemplified by the educated, generous heroineand the Negroes were destined to fail as free men in white America, serious young lawyer working to raise opthe Negro, she and that they were better off among their own kind. Ilumane also made much of the economic argument against slavery relbrmers, mostly Quakers, would buy freedom for the slaves, Yankee thrift under free labor as superior to the inefficien- provide them with farm equipment, tools, animals, etc., and cies and corrupting influence of the plantation system, Al- ship them to West Africa. Not only would Negroes be free, though she still believed the best solution was gradual eman- jut they would carry the Christian religion, for which it was cipation aftera paternalistic, educational process, the plot thought they had a special affinity, as missionaries to the hea- veered off midway in the book, as if she suddenly saw that thens of their own race. itwas no longer possible for Northerners andSoutherners Most free blacks opposed this scheme. First, they re- of good will to effect a reconciliation. She had decided, as fused to abandon their chained bretheren and the possible indeed most people had, that the conflict between the North help they could offer them.36Second, they pointed out, and the South was now inevitable. The hero became an es- they were native-born Americans. They had been cut off caped Slave modeled after Nat Turner, who had led a rebel- from their African heritage. For them Africa was exile. lionin 1831. Dred talks like the kind of preacher Mrs. Stowe In Uncle Twin's Cabin Mrs. Stowe sent the Ilarrisfamily admired, spewing righteous wrath,likea prophetin the on to Africa after their successful escape toCanada. A prom- Old Testament.39 inent Negro leader of the time, George T. Downing,.pointed Mrs. Stowe's solutions to the problem of. slavery were outthat George llarris,the only black in the novel who notthe resounding success that should have crowned such "really betrays any other than the subservient, submissive earnest effort and widespread circulation.The spirit of Chris- Uncle Tom spirit, which has been the cause of so much disre- tian love did not seem to energize manySoutherners to free spect feltfor the colored man," is left in Liberia.37 In Black their slaves voluntarilyor even to accept compensation for Abolitionists Quarles cites Mrs. Stowe to the effect that if so doing. Most Christian ministerscontinued to reflect the she had it to do over. she would not have sent George !lards attitudes of their flocks rather than reshape them into a re- to Liberia.38 jection of the sinof slavery. Freed blacks went to Canada Stowe's Views After 1852 in greater numbers after the Fugitive Slave Law, but emigra- Some of Mrs. Stowe's ideas changed between Uncle tion to Africa lagged. Tom's Cabin and the publication of Dred: A Tale of the Uncle Tom's Cabin certainly did not cause the Civil Great Dismal Swamp in 1856. What happened in the five year War, but Mrs. Stowe supplied the moral indignation that interval?1854 was a watershed year. Stephen A. Douglas, made the North secure in the feeling that God was on their Democratic Senator from Illinois. had reopened the raw wound side. Just as we "know" the ancient Greeks from the writing of the slavery debate by introducing the Kansas-Nebraska of (homer, Uncle Tom's Cabin, this "Iliad of theBlacks,"4u Bill.Its provisions repealed the boundary line dividing slave is responsible for molding attitudes about Southernersand andfreestates as laid down by the Missouri Compromise blacks that persist even until this day. of 1820. Douglas .proposed two future states to be carved out Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Louisiana TerritoryKansas and Nebraskain which Popular Reactions to settlers could decide the slavery issue for themselves. Douglas Furnas attacks Harriet Beecher Stowe by summing up reader will dressed up this oldprinciple of "squatter sovereignty" as sonic of the misunderstandings the "unwary" support for popular self-government. The more cynicalhistor- carry away: "Slaveowners .are(or were) snarling brutes of ians believed he was motivated less by his regard forJeffer- paranoid tendency and criminal background. Slaves them- sonian ideals than by his need for Southern support for his selves, when markedly of 'Africanrace,' are either gentle brutalized. When his interestina transcontinental rail- andpellucidly Christian or diabolically Presidentialbid and in- road running along the central route. markedly tinged with 'white blood.' they are far more As soon as the law was passed, settlers quickly poured telligent, enterprising and sensitive and show it by running- into the Kansas Territory. Numbers were important in order away in great numbers. Slave women usually run awayeither to control the territorial legislature.and many pro-slavers because their children have been sold away front them or be- temporarily crossed over from Missouri so that they could cause master has assailed their virtue, Northerners are much vote. Violence escalated, and heretofore pacifist abolition- to blame for an un-Christian repugnancetoward Negroes, ist groups began to collect money to arm the "free soilers." for black skins contain souls of which Heaven is solicitous. 20 24 THE CASE AGAINST But one mustnotexpectlullintelligence and refinement UNCLE TOM'S CABIN from many members of tl4innately handicapped 'African by Errol Hill race,' term that can dispense with definition since every- ic1:7 is somewhat condensed frold its original version. body knows more or less what it means ...."11 A Rees:i;t 54, ry The Play Distorted ...tuber.1945, a musical version ofUncle Tom's What. followedwaseven more dismaying, Like wind- Cabin iii Bridgeport and New Haven, Connecti- blown seeds the Uncle Tom plays sprang, up everywhere cut. The showing been vigorously denounced by a com- in the United States and Europe. This phenomenon of the bined group of union leaders, clergymen, and black spokesmen Uncle Toni plays andt heir distortions for the purposes of who felt that the play ridiculed black people of an earlier time spectacle, drama, and humor are detailed elsewhere in this and that its per frnmance would provoke racial animosity, It sourcebook, but in assessing the long-range historical effects took a protest from the American Civil Liberties Union to we must note that these plays not only perpetuated Mrs. allow the performance to continue under peaceful picketing.' Stowe'sunfortunatemisconceptionsabout blacks,they Early Responses twisted them into cruel and dangerous new shapes. These protests by responsible spokesmen forAfro- Americans might seem curious to anyone acquainted with the stage history ofUncle Tom's Cabin.For sonic ninety years, from 1852 to the 1940s, the play had been consistently per- formed throughout the United States. Different versions of the play had also been staged in many foreign countries with, for instance, five London theatres presenting it concurrently in 1878 and each making a profit. Moreover, like the novel on which it was based, the play was originally hailed as a vivid indictment of slavery, one that could only help create the climate for the eventual freeing of all slaves. I low was it, then, that black leaders in 1945 could denounceUncle 'Tom's Cabin as a slander on their race? Black Leaders' Endorsements: F. Douglass There is no question of Harriet Beecher Stowe's inten- tions in writing her celebrated novel. As she wrote in the preface to the novel: "The object of these sketches is to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race as they exist among Atypical billposter scene us, to show their wrongs and sorrows, under a system so neces- sarily cruel and unjust . , What maybe gathered of the evils of slavery from sketches like these, is not the half that could oe told of the unspeakable whole." I ler book -was instantly as :,,^In one version black characters jigged and played the banjo in the big slave auction scene -happy darkies! Another popular as it was controversial. It was vehemently attacked by introduced "The Quadroon Lady's Maid BOrlesque Pas de the pro-slavery forces and just as fiercely defended by the Trois."42 The role of Topsy expanded because of the pos- abolitionists.' - Black leaders of the period were strong in their sibility of introducing humor and hijinks: Uncle Tom often endorsement of the novel. The Colored National Convention did cakewalks and sang popular "coon songs. of 1853, led by FrederickDouslass,called the book "plainly RevivedaftertheCivilWar, these plays swept the marked-by the finger of God."Douglass himself, an escaped country like prarie fires. By the late 1870's thepresentations slave and a renowned spokesman in the cause of black libera- were a combination minstrel show and circus.Because of the tion, visited Mrs. Stowe in 1853 to enlist her aid for his plan lack of recreational opportunity in the Bible Belt, the great- to establish an industrial school for black youths. Although estimpact came in the small towns and isolated hamlets. her promised support was later withdrawn, Douglass praised Wherethere was no auditorium, tents were setup. People her novel. Speaking to an assembly of anti-slavery groups he could go to see an Uncle Tom show and not be considered said: sinful. Unfortunately, their minds were being filled with the One flash from the heart-supplied intellect of Harriet harmful stereotypes which are still alive today. a million camp fires in Too many historians concentrate on the facts, the docu- Beecher Stowe could light front of the embattled host of slavery, which not all mented events; and the reality and overlook what is gradu- ally happening in people's minds. Victor Hugo wrote, "An the waters of the Mississippi, mingled as they arc with invasion of armies can be resisted but not an idea whose blood, could extinguish.4 time has come." I larriet Beecher Stowe's idea inUncle Tom's W. W. Brown Cabinwas to put a human face on slavery so thatobjective Another runaway slave who joined the ranks of those analysiswas swept away by moral indignation. The ground working for emancipation was William Wells Brown. Com- had been well plowed and enriched by many abolitionist pletely self-taught, Brown was an eloquent platform speaker, authors, both black and white, poets, lecturers,obbyists, essayist, novelist and dramatist. Ilis play,The Escape,or, A sothat the seed she planted sprouted vigorously. Perhaps ," Leap for Freedom(1858), is the earliest surviving drama by Lincoln was making a wry exaggeration when hecredited./ a black writer and the most authentic account inplay form of Mrs. Stowe with starting the Civil War, but it was his way of the life of a slave. A world traveller, Brown was present at a acknowledgingUncle Tom's Cabinas one of the most powei-- bumper anti-slavery meeting heldin London, on May 16, ful pieces of propaganda of all times, the good and bad effects 1853, Five thousand Britishers attended, many ofwhom were- of which continue to shade national and inteinational:atti- drawn to the meeting by the presence of Mrs. Stowe herself. tudes even today. Next morning. Brown wrote to his friend, William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist editor ofThe Liberator,reporting:

1 'flue Case Against ,. , No inn,. could posslhly have been more appropriate for such a meetmg, km tlic mesent, tbne linn's Changes: Trends in Drama a stage play ('thinhas come doWn upon die clad: abodes of Adapting anovel to the requirements ()I slavery like a morning's sunlight, unfolding to view its is fraught with difficulty, A hook I hat one inay mead leisurely compressed into two or enormities ina manner which has fastened all eyes over many days or weeks has to be uponthe"peculiarinstitution,"and:,.wakening Ilree hours of perlin mance. Characters have to function more descrip- sympathy inhearts that'level before fellColthe effectively un stage and their number reduced. Place tions that give color and texture to the work becomepainted slave..' scenery. Reflective passages have to beexpressed in forceful The life stories ()I'i untiway slaves, t,traphic illthen por- dialogue and physical action. Moreover, when a theatre begins trayal of life on the southern plantations and epic intheir t lie lower instincts of its audience, itis hard for a pub- to cater to descriptions of escape and pursuit, were written down, writer or producer to resist the temptation towards caricature, lished and read with eagerness by a curious and receptive spectacle, and sensationalism. While the earliest productions of northern public, Mrs. Stowe was familiar with these narratives uncle jinn '.S Corbin were not guilty of gross distortions along which she praised for their candor and originality. Since her these lines, the seeds of later vulgarization were latent in them. actual experience of slave conditions was limited, she relied on is no disservice to Mrs. Stowe to say that the ten- Iiir information that she incorporated in her Indeed, it such accounts dency tierdistortion was already deeply implanted inthe hook. This circumstance has led one recent critic to theorize characters she had created. For instance, at the height of ac- the that if indeed Mrs. Stowe was the little lady who started claim for the author, a perceptive black preacher in a letter tp should big war that freed the slaves, a large part of the credit The Liberator expressed the view that "resistance to tyranny go to the slave narratives that hadprovided her with material . . [hence! the only drawback to the her novel was obedience to God and had in fact prepared the reading public for both matchless Uncle Tom of Mrs. Stowe was his virtue of submis- and the upheaval that lidlowed its appearance.b sion to tyranny."8 A correspondent of a black weekly paper J, Henson stated his reservation more bluntly when he wrote: Josiah II nson was one of the escapees who capitalized Uncle Tom must he killed, George Harris exiled! on Mr.. Sto% e'screation of the character of I Incle Tom, I leaven for dead Negros! Liberia for living mulattoes. I lens n who became a pastor in Canada, had in 1849 written Neither can live onthe American continent. Death a sit,t account of his struggle for freedom. After the enormous or banishment is our ,cloom, say theSlaveocrats, the sue or nide Tours Cabin, lie rewrote and expanded his Colonizationists, and, save the mark- -Mrs. Stowe!9 lilt' ook, claiming to he the original Uncle Toni. Ile even The most popular and pervasive type of entertainment in l,'IMrs. Stowe to contribute a preface to the 1858 the pmfessional American theatre of the mid-nineteenth cen- P life was Cl , ,d he used his acquired celebrity to raise funds air a tury was the minstrel show, This travesty of black

sch. , t waited slaves. Some yearslater Ilenson was granted originally supposed to represent, in humorous fashion, the an audie,...e with Queen Victoria on the strength of his identi- ways in which southern black folk amusedthemselves, but fication with the fictional Uncle Toni. the perfOrmers wereall whites in blackface. Audiences too admission to P.C. Dunbar were primarily white. Most theatres either denied Clearly, the initialreaction of black leaders to Mrs. black patrons or reserved them a section in the upper balcony Stowe's boo1<. was ,highly favorable. Their immediate, impera- among the rowdiest elements with a separate meansof en- tive concern was the end of slavery. By focusing world-wide tranceand ..,i,ress. Accordingly,few self-respecting Afro- attention on the evils of that institution. UncleTom's Cabin Americans ever went to the theatre. Needless to say, no black was instrumentalin galvanizing strong support for its aboli- theatre companies existed at this time, the early African Grove tion.Blacks were enormously grateful to the courageous theatre of lower New York City in the 1820's having long author of this powerful novel. As late as 1899, Paul Laurence since disbanded. Dunbar, recognized as the first poet of his race, wrote a sonnet In a theatre that drew its entertainment from presenting to Mrs. Stowe: caricatures of black folk while excluding blacks as performers She told the story and the whole world wepi and substantially as audience, itis easy to see how a play like At wrongs and cruelties it had not known Uncle Two's Cabin could, in the process of time, become vul- But for this fearless woman's voice alone. garized. Even so, it* played with honesty and seriousness, the She spoke to consciences that long had slept ... anguishedsaintliness of Uncle Toni couldstill move the Blest he the hand that dared be strong to save, hardened playgoer to sober response, Harry Birdolf believed And blest be she who in--our weakness came: such was the case at first successful New York production Prophet and priestess! At one stroke she gave which took pine in_lh52 at the National Theatre on Chatham A race to freedom and herself to fame.7 Square: It was inevitable that such a novel would soon binditself At the appearance of Uncle Tom they expected to laugh once more, because a black man meant only translated to the stage. From the time of the Greeks, audiences their un- have shown themselves partial to watching familiar events re- one thing to them, an ignorant comic. Now enacted in the theatre. To read about them in printmight accustomed ears heard something unknown in the theatre: a good actor had the part of Uncle Toni and stir minds to ponder their meaning, but to see these events his very first words were delivered with the accent bodied forth ill flesh and blood before a public audience could broad and gutteralbut spoken so earnestly that the arouse emotions to a call for action. Inmid-nineteenth cen- tury America, however, "theatre" was a disreputableword. first laugh died may into deep silence .I0 Puritanical circles, from which many anti-slavery advocates When the pAlic response did come, it was observed by William were drawn, ,considered the theatre to be a!louse of Satan Lloyd Garrison who was struck by the raucous pit audience and in order to win respectable audiences for serious plays, "cheering the strongest and the sublimest anti-slavery senti- companies camouflaged their productions as moral lectures ments." Many people who previously shunned the theatre, and Wormed them in museums and art galleries. including church pastors and their devout parishioners, flocked Thus, itis not surprising to find Mrs. Stowe rejecting to the play in such great numbers thatits phenomenal run the request of a prospective author-to dramatize her novel. But seemed assured. since no copyright law then existed to protect the work, sever- Then as now a smash hit in Nm York is likely to pro- al unauthorized stage versions quickly appeared. duce a flood of imitations, Four other Tom shows were quick- 2 G ly brought out. At the Bowery Theatre, the showfeatured Historic Black Experiences: Post Civil War Thomas Daddy Rice, father of blackface minstrelsy, as Uncle Another important factor in producing black disillusion- Tom, Another was a burlesque travesty performed bythe ment with Uncle Tom's Cabin, and more particularly with the Christy Minstrels and the penetration of minstrel lampooning character of Uncle Toni, is found in the historic experiences of in the Uncle Tom story had begun in earnest. More blatant Afro-Americans following the end of slavery. The success of than these vulgarizations was the production by the circus Union forces against the rebel slave-owning states had pre- showman P.T. Barnum, athis New York American Museum served the Republic. This victory was not achieved without Theatre. Catering to the anti-slavery sentiment in the North, the direct and decisive participation of thousands of black Barnum proclaimed that his treatment of the novel "exhibits Americans. Some 200,000 of them had enlisted in the Union a true picture of Negro life in the South,instead of absurdly Army, 30,000 in the Navy, while another quarter-million had representing the ignorant slave as possessed of all thepolish worked as support personnel for the troops. When the war of the drawingroom, and the refinement of the educated finally ended, an all-too-brief period of Reconstruction fol- white."'" lowed during which the Federal Government assumed respon- Black Performers sibility for protecting the rights of former slaves, But this pro- The admissionof blackperformers tomainstream tection soon deteriorated under a reign of terror perpetrated dramatic theatre came through Uncle Tom's Cabin. An early against blacks by hardline white supremacists of the south, of New York production of the plliy, in a version by thewhite which the murderous Ku Klux Klan was only the most blatant actor C.W. Taylor who played UncleTom, included several offender. By 1876 when Republican President Hayes, newly numbers billed as "Chorus (Nigga in de Cornfield)" and "Ken- elected by means of a deal with southern democrats, declared tucky Breakdown Dances." These novelties, obviously im- that"absolute justice andfairplay tothe Negro" could ported from the ever-popular minstrel stage, were first per- best be achieved "by trusting the honorable and influential formed by whitesinblackface. By the 1870s, with Tom whites, "14 blacks knew they would have to fight for their troupes touring the country and spread across the globe, rights against the injustices of the so-called "jim crow" era. An authentic black performers were recruited as choruses to sing 1880 editorial in the Chicago Conservator, a black newspaper, and dance plantation and jubilee songs and to perform so- summed up the mood -of Afro-Americans: "President Hayes called Negro specialties. By this time, too, the minstrel stage has plainly told the colored people they must make peace at had been invaded by black performers who presented gro- any price. We repeat it, but with a different significationthey tesque images of themselves for the entertainmentof largely must make peace at any price. It may cost treasure, it may white audiences. Along with black choruses, the Tom shows cost blood, it may cost lives, but make it, be the cost what it introduced a variety of animals: bloodhounds to chase Eliza may."15 Even more explicit and revolutionary was the advice across the icy Ohio river, adonkey for Lawyer Marks to ride given in a speech by John E. Bruce, a leading black journalist, and a horse for Legree, even an elephant and several alligators in October 1889: were advertised as special attractions in someproductions. The Let the Negro require at the hands of every white dramatic script was little respcted by actors who had played murderer in the south Or elsewhere a life for a life. the show in one form or another for years. Some troupes If they burn our houses, burn theirs, if they kill our dispensed altogether with a script and performed merely from wives and children, kill theirs, pursue them relentless- memory. ly, meet force with force everywhere it is offered. If In the circus-like atmosphere created by these extrava- they d,: .hand blood exchange it with them, until they gances, legitimate- actors eschewed theTom shows or played are satisiied. By a vigorous adherence to this course them only out of dire necessity. Characters, white and black the shedding of human blood by white men will soon alike, became stereotypes. In one of her infrequent visits to a theatrical performance, Mrs. Stowe commented on the ap- become a thing of the past.I6 pearance of Simon Legree, the vicious slave master:"I dressed him like a Southerner and made him blonde ... but the actors If HE IS A UNION MAN OR A FREEDMAN. all dress him likea Western borderman withsombrero, red shirt and high boots, and make him of darkcomplexion."12 Here is an example of the stage convention of the villain as a swarthy non-Caucaso;dassertingitself. When one of the touring companies wentbankrupt, themanager Gustave Frohman came up with the idea of another novelty: he would get a real Afro-American to play Uncle Tom.Thus did Sam Lucas, well-known minstrel trouper, become the first black to appear in the role, a choice that was in partdetermined by his propensity for sporting diamonds which were used to bail out the Tom company when in debt. In anotherinstance, the black pugilist Peter Jack:on, then heavyweight champion of Australia who was seeking to establish his reputation in the United States, was cast as Uncle Tom and made to box several rounds with a contender as part of the show. One result of tl i> debasement of the play was to fix for decades the black performer's role on the professional stage as a song-and-dance entertainer or a comic buffoon.Many serious artists and actors resented this stereotyping and attempted to set up their own black theatre companies wherethey would be free to play dramatic roles. When they succeeded in doing so, the problems of securing a proper playhouse and of attracting a literate and supportive audience provedoverwhelming. In their frustration, resentment against the Toni show as a cause of their troubles lingered. In 1910, students of Howard Uni- versity rebelled against the singing of "plantationmelodies" before white audiences which they insisted was demeaning to 'VERDICT ',HANG THE D YANKEE AND NIGGER': their race." 23 2? The Case Against .

It was not the purpose of this article to attempt to justify 'or condemn these desperate counsels by black leaders of past times. They are quoted in order to emphasize and explain the militant mood of responsible black opinion in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Ironically enough, this period coin- cided with the ascendancy of Tom shows. Thus, while the forty-year old relic of antebellum days was roaming the nation extolling the virtues of the long-suffering, compliant, forgiving and fictional Uncle Tom, played by blacked-up white actors, blacks throughout the land were faced with the reality of Simon Legree to whom they were determined not to submit without astruggle. Obviously their former regard for the saintly Tom woll'sour. In a masterly essay published in 1903, W.E.B. attempted to explain the now repugnant phenomenon of the submissive black slave: The long syst'em of repression and degradation of the Negro tendedto emphasize the elements in his character which made him a valuable chattel: courtesy became humility, moral strength degener- ated into submission, and the exquisite native appre- ciation of the beautiful became an infinite capacity been an English professor at Howard University, Montgomery for dumb suffering.17 Gregory, turned his attention to the character of Topsy: Post World War She was blissfully ignorant of any ancestors, but she It was, however, in 1919, just one year after a hundred has given us a fearful progeny. With her, popular thousand black Americans had once again risked their lives in dramatic interest in the Negro changed from serious defence of the Republic and to make the world safe for moralistic drama to the comic phase . .. The earliest democracy, thatthe image of the docile Uncle Tom was expression of Topsy's baneful influenceis to be publicly and passionately denounced. That year a wave of found in the minstrels ... These comedians, made up lynchings and other violent acts against Afro-Americans en- into grotesque caricatures of the Negro race, fixed in gulfed the nation, inspireditappears by the fear among the public taste a dramatic stereotype of the race that bigoted, ignorant whites that returning black soldiers would has been almostfatal to asincere and authentic demand the equality. they had long been denied. Among the Negro drama.2° victims of rampaging white mobs were discharged black soldiers, some still in uniform. In response to these outrages, This outpouring of sentiment against Uncle Tom's Cabin black leaders declared the advent of the New Negrowhose came at a time when touring Tom shows werealready in militancy, they hoped, would finally obliterate the notion of decline. In January, 1931, Theatre Guild Magazine carried an an impotent Tom, fatalistically resigned tohis inferior status. article titled "Uncle Tom is Dead." This obituary'notice was Of the many black voices raised in protest, none were more in fact premature since the play was alive and well on provin- strident than those associated with the black nationalist move- cial boards and the prestigious Players Club in New York ment of Marcus Garvey which was tailed the UnitedNegro mounted a handsome production of the drama in 1933. How- Improvement Association. At its first convention in Harlem in ever three years later when Abbott attempted a racially inte- 1920, one of its delegates forecast the type of black leadership grated musical version under the title "Sweet River" this ill- that the future demanded: "The Uncle Tom nigger has got to conceived adaptation failed and was withdrawn after only five go, and his place must be taken by the newleader of the Negro performances. race. That man will not be a white manwith a black heart, or a black man with a white heart, but a black man with a black Post World War II heart."18 Garvey himself later wrote disparagingly of those It should now be obvious why in 1945, at the end of yet leaders whom he called "our modern Uncle Toms[from another war in which black Americans fought valiantly against the Nazi menace only to return to a homeland where bigotry whom] the slave instinct has not yet departed ...They still believe that they can live or exist through the good graces of and injustice still prevailed, black leaders objected to the per- formance of a new version of Uncle Tom's Cabin in Connecti- their masters."1 cut. Since that tune, the sad figure of Uncle Tom has acquired Evenasliterature, there was a reassessment of the quality and influence of Mrs. Stowe's novel. The New Negro, even greater opprobrium among blacks. His name has been an anthology of writings by black Americanscollected by bracketed with "pimps, sex perverts and guilt-ridden traitors" Alain Locke and published in 1925, contained several reevalu- of the race as well as with "Judases and Quislings."22 With the ations of Uncle Tonz's Cabin. The lead-off essay by the editor, noblest of intentions, Harriet Beecher Stowe created a Jekyll- a Rhodes scholar and philosophy professor of Howard Universi- and Hyde character that contained the seeds of its own de- ty, affirmed that "the day of `aunties,` uncles,' and'mammies' struction.Earnestly seeking tolift the burden of chattel is equally gone. Uncle Tom and Sambo have passed on ... The slavery that had been imposed on the black race, she produced popular melodrama has about played itself out and it is time in. Uncle Tom a character who persuaded white racists that to scrap the fictions, garret the bogeys and settle down to a blacks would accept slavery without astruggle. For this realistic facing of facts." Another contributor, the poet and reason, as far as black people are concerned, Mrs.Stowe's journalist William Stanley Braithwaite, argued)At the moral iiovel, particularly in its stage adaptations, did as much harm and historical effect of Uncle Tom was an aistic loss and set- as good. For, as the white abolitionist Thomas Wentworth back since "the treatment of Negro life7and character, over- Higginson wrote more than a century ago, "If it be the normal laid with these forceful stereotypes, could not develop into tendency of bondage to produce saints like Uncle Tom, let us artistically satisfying portraiture." Yet a third writer who had all offer ourselves at auction immediately."23 24 .r, 28 SOME THOUGHTS ON WILLIAM WELLS the caricature of the ante-bellum slave. Cato is already con- spiring to pretend to be the doctor. BROWN'S THE. ESCAPE By William E. Perkins Cato:I atlas knowed I was a doctor, an' now de ole boss has put me at it,I muss change my William Wells Brown's drama, The Escape has been coat. Ef any niggers come in, I wants tolook called by one critic " ...the most authentic account in play suspectable. Dis jacket don't suit a doctor; form of the life of the slave." On the other hand Loften I'll change it. Ah, now I looks like a doctor. Mitchell has described Brown's play as follows: Now I can bleed, pull teef, or cut off a leg ... (Act I, scene ii) Negroauthor andantislavery advocate William Wells Brown iscredited with The Escape; or A Cato then proceeds to care for one of Mr. Campbell's slaves Leap for Freedom. This is reportedly the first known with a toothache. He pulls the wrong tooth only to incur the play by an American Negro. The work is not known wrath of his master who proclaims, "I'll whip you forthis to have been produced, but Mr. Brown gave readings conduct of yours today." (Act I, scene ii.) The characterof of it in numerous placesreadings that were warmly Cato continues to act this way throughout the play. In his received. His comic scenes, unfortunately, are close courtship of Tapioca, he utters, "Please squze my manners, toblackface minstrelsy, much more so than the love discomonodes me." (Act II, scene iii.) Prone to music, author'sslave experiences should have permitted. rhyme, and dance, Cato emerges as the comic figure in Brown's And his heroine is the octoroe-. beauty, the tragic treatment of slave life. mulatto.1 Black Family Life Under Slavery be recon- How are these two divergent views of the play to In Scene 3, the hero and heroine, Glen andMelinda are ciled? Where does the play stand in-the historyof Afro-Amer- introducedand so too is the romantic theme ...Glen is in ican drama? The purpose of this short essayis to attempt to her and to assess the value of love with Melinda, but unable to "jump de broom" with answer these important questions because Dr. Gaines desires her for himself. Toavoid this, Glen the play as a portrait of the.life of the slave. plans to run away to Canada with Melinda. In this scene, Brown manages to catch one of the most important rationales Elements of Caricature for flight. Most slaves ran away with a single motive in mind Brown had written the play in 3358 for, as he putit, to preserve the family bonds they hadestablished among his "own amusement." Itis a raw and unrefined piece of themselves despite their enslavement. The bonds had grown drama, making no pretence to a high literarystandard. It is up and over the kinds of family arrangementsslave-owners filled with Afro-American dialect and humorous scenesof had substituted for those slaves had chosen for themselves. plantation mishaps and shenanigans, and though never per- This is most clearly revealed when Mrs. Gaines remarks on the performing formed in its day, must have influenced American selling of the slave, Sam: arts much later in the nineteenth century.Indeed, it is one of the contentions of this essay that the play,written by an ex- Mrs. Gaines: Iam sure you need not feel so bad slave, helpedcreateastage image of the Afro-American at the thought of separating Sam from that lapsed into caricature and stereotype. Oneof the cen- Hannah. They've only been married tral characters of the play, Cato, Dr. Gaines'assistant, con- eightmonths, andtheirattachment forms to the standard image of nineteenth centuryAfro- can't be very,strong in that short time. I shall be glad if you do sell Americansheischildish andsilly, infatuated with orna- Indeed, ment, decoration, and titles: cunning andshiftless. Sam, for then I'll make Hannah jump The play centers on life at the Muddy CreekFarm, the broomstick with Cato, andI'll owned by Dr. Gaines, a physician who treats theillnesses of have them both under my eye. (Act III, scene i) theslaves inthe surrounding area. Most of the slaves are mirror images of Cato and embody the same sense of carica- ture and stereotype. For example, twoof the slave women Indeed, part of the growing antipathy to slavery during the indecisive 1850's centered on this disregard and disruption of family Tapioca and Hannahare portrayed as weak and bonds and the abuse of the sanctity of marriage as it was as they are manipulated by Mrs.Gaines to marry men they don't wish to marry.' The two central slavecharactersGlen understood in ante-bellum America. and Melindaare actual figures, who according toBrown, at The slave woman Melinda, referred to by Mrs. Gaines Canada. Their as a "mulatto wench," 'alsoreveai3 another theme prevalent the time of the writing of the play,' lived in existence roles exhibit the strong abolitionist tone of thecentral theme in nineteenth century popular culturethe tragic escape and freedom. Brown, like manyother freedmen in of the mulatto woman. Often scorned by other slave women, ante-bellum America was active in the abolitionist movement, she became the secret object 'of desire of many white men using the skills of the pen as a sword to cut away theimage slaveowners, overseers, slave traders and the like, though she of the old South as a paternal society governed bythe chi- could not enjoy the illusory privileges she appeared to com- valrous code of mutual obligation and deference.This drama mand. This character embodied the very essence of the sub- may be viewed as propagandain the war against slavery merged social life under slaverythe sexual license and abuse, making a strong case for flight as the path tofreedom. In- the confused identity, and the neurotic compulsion which deed, Brown's play, along with Harriet BeecherStowe's drove white men to possess these women. Brown was no Uncle Tom's Cabin "must be viewed as tools designed toin- stranger to writing about this theme, his novel, Clotel, being forthe abolitionist in part a meditation upon this particular element of southern flame passions and marshall support his cause. It is this conflictthe play aspropaganda and the play slave society. When Dr. Gaines confronts Melinda with as a step to blackface minstrelsy thatis at the heart of com- passion for her, the real tragedy of her life emerges: prehending its meaning. A more detailed anatomy of the play Sir, I am your slave; you can do as you please with will perhaps show us this more clearly. The play begins with Dr. Gaines contracting with an- the avails of my labor, but you shall never tempt his slaves. The me to swerve from the path of virtue. other slaveholder, Mr. Campbell, to care for (Act III, scene iv) play then introduces Cato, who from thebeginning captures 25 29 PART III: SELECTIONS FROM VGIUM3.11.Mlista.rrrcf:11t.-1-7;rs;

selections I In the next few pages arc reprinted v;i:iotts from writers and critics commenting on thevalidity of Stowe's and Aiken's picture of slavery in 0.../eTom's Cabin. The selections from early reviews give solie sense of thewide range of immediate response to the novel :.ad play.Furnas' criticism, while directed against Mrs. Stowe, should perhaps bedirected at readers who take a workof fictionas if it were docu- mentary. Stowe's comments, Kemble's journaland Weld's testimony may be instructively compared to thefictive work, as we consider, in Henson'swords, "Truth Stranger than Fic- tion."Inthe comments by Fiedler,Birdoff, Wilson and Baldwin, the question of the relationship of thefictional characters to "real people" is raised again and again,leading us to consider, perhaps, whether any verbal account,no matter of what genre, can give us an accurate account ofhuman ex- perience. Perhaps, as Baldwin suggests, the"cage of reality bequeathed usat our birth" consists in large partof the linguistic constructs which the writers leave. Certainly,William Wells Brown's play about slavery, whichutilizes outrageously stereotypical and demeaning black characters for cheaplaughs, would suggest the power of the cage of language to overcome the world of unmediated experience. Weobviously do not ex- pect to resolve this issue here, but rather to usethis test case to illustrate the complexity, of the relationshipbetween "fact" rvIcsEcuTct) rnerur... and "fiction," especially in a 'Work to whichdestiny gave such %, ,) r, nn I,/. de, rut C.1,...tan ItiCG ..r;, a heavy role to play as UncleTom's Cabin. zul . i4g1.1

Overcome by jealousy, Mrs. Gaines attempts to fOrce Melinda to drink poison which she resists with alight. FROM STEPHEN A HIRSCH,"UNCLE Abolitionist Elements TOMITUDES: THE POPULAR REACTIONTO meditates upon As the drama draws to a close, Glen UNCLE TOM'S CABIN" IN STUDIES IN THE the plight of the Slaves and issues a warning: AMERICAN RENAISSANCE, 1978 Oh! there is a volcano pent upin the heart of the slaves of these Southern States that will burst'forth ere long. When that day comes, woeto those whom its unpitying fury may devour. I have discovered in my (Act IV, scene i) The bitterest negative review researchconies from The Raleigh WeeklyNorth Carolina him where Standard, 2 June 1852: Ile recruits one of the slaves, Sampey, to show "Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among theLowly" is the Dr. Gaines has hidden Melinda. With acalculating will, Glen title of an abolitionistnovel by a woman named Harriet plans the escape from his overseer, the rescueof Melinda, and of Southern the final "leap for freedom." On their path toCanada, they Beecher Stowe. The book purports to be a picture freedom on the slavery, but it is a lie from beginning to end.It is the most join Cato who has also escaped, and are led to of the South- Underground Railroad. After a confrontation withmarshalls at atrocious libel on the characters and institutions ern people which has everbeen published. This fact explains the Niagara River, Glen, Melinda and Cato jumpsafely aboard Northa consider- the ferry and into freedom. in part its extraordinary popularity at the related able share of its reputation, however, is due tothe inordinate The last two acts of The Escape are more clearly the book with- to abolitionism than the precedingthree, acts. The characters puffing of .the abolition press. One cannot read out loathing and disgustthere isdisplayed in it such a vulgari- representing the slaveholding element aresingleminded in sentiment. According to this, attempting to prevent Glen and Melinda from running away, ty, coarseness, and profligacy of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, a Southern farmis a hell on earth so 'much so, that they ignore Cato,who takes advantage of his slaves their neglect to run away himself.Butit is freedom that presided over by a monster Master, who lets loose on which are not the most savage passions of human nature, orrevels with them guides the slaves, giving them characteristics browed" Negro present among the slaves earlier in thedrama. Glen and Me- in the lowest of animal indulgences. The "dark single pur- meanwhile is painted in the most attractive coloursthe men linda become rational, calculating; and with a benevolent and the women are pure pose-=escapeso that they may remain married andfree to are all honest, manly, and and bewitching. The beauties ofamalgamation are fully il- make choices without the sanctions of Dr. Gaines.William and the pruri- Wells Brown has given us a glance at this form ofslave resis- lustrated. Yet this book is written by a woman, is where the ent passions of abolitionism, devour itwith greedy satisfac- tance through the abolitionist prism and that tion. If the boast of the National Era maybe believed, no drama stands in history. It is not "the most authentic account book published in this country ever had such asale. Mrs. in play form of the life of the slave," but a worthwhileadapta- schoolmistress in tion of the play form to the abolitionist mission.In that lay Harriet Beecher Stowe was once a Yankee Kentucky. its importance. 26 0 PRIMARY AND PREVIOUSLY PRINTED MATERIALS

.7.10 .....ageoMormis

SELECTIONS FROM BARNARDHEWITT, A Review of Aiken's Version: THEATRE: U.S.A. A New York correspondent wrote enthusiastically to William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator, September 9, 1853:

1 went on Saturday evening to see the play of (pp 171.179) Uncle Tom's Cabin, at the National Theatre, invited thereto by the description-of the. Times, -Which ap- Ogle Min's Cabin in its various stage versions was, far peared in a late Standard. That description does no and away the most popular play of the decade preceding the more than justice to the play. It is better by one hun- dred per cent, than the version of the Boston Museum. Civil War. Historians have counted Mrs. Stowe's novel among the If the shrewdest abolitionist amongst us had prepared immediate causes of that conflict. Her novel sold over 300,000 the drama with a view to make the strongest anti- copies the first year. Charles A. Beard estimated that it had slavery impression, he could scarcely have done the over a million readers. At least as many persons must have seen work better. 0, it was a sight worth seeing, those it on the stage during the eight years before the outbreak of ragged, coatless men and boys in the pit (the very hostilities. Thus the stage, as the Herald feared, became "an material of which mobs are made) cheering the agent for the cause of abolitionism." ... strongest and the sublimist anti-slavery sentiments! The whole audience was at times melted to tears, and The First Version I own thatI was no exception. It was noticeable that A version by C.W. Taylor was produced at Purdy's the people, after witnessing the death of Uncle Tom, National Theatre in New York in August. An editorial in went out of the house as gravely and seriously as the New York Herald, September 3, 1852, concerned itself people retire from a religious meeting!I wish every primarily with the play's political implications. abolitionist in the land could see this play as I saw it, and exult as I did that, when haughty pharisees will Dangerous Firebrand not testify against slavery, the very stones are crying out! What will our Southern friends think of all our Another Review of Aiken's Version: professions of respect for their delicate social institu- tion of slavery, when they find that our amusements The editor of the New York Aria's, devoted nearly_ two are overdrawncaricaturesexhibiting our hatred columns of editorial space to the phenomenon on October 16, againstit and against them? Is this consistent with 1853: good faith, or honor, or the every day oll,figations of hospitality? No, itis not. Itis a sad blunder: for Last Saturday evening .. . we made a visit to the when our stage shall become the deliberate agent in National Threatre.... the cause of abolitionism, with the sanction of the Among the audience, we recognized many people public, and their approbation, the peace and har- who have been taught to look on the stage and all mony of the Union will soon be ended. that belongs to it with horror and contempt; and, not We would ...advise, all concerned to drop the the least conspicuous among the rare faces, was that play of Uncle Tom's Cabqat once and forever. The of a Quaker gentleman whose drab, shad-belly coat thing isin bad tastenot according to good faith to and remarkably broaded brimmed beaver, gave him a the constitution, or consistent with either or the two commanding aspect.... Baltimore platforms; and is calculated, if persisted in, There was also recognized among the mass who to become a firebrand of the most dangerous charac- occupied and crowded the theatre, Methodists, Bap- ter to the peace of the whole country. tists,Presbyterians, and Congregationalists of the straight-laced school, beside a variety of other reli- The public apparently accepted the Herald's advi,:e. gionists whose creeds are not accounted absolutely The first Uncle Tom was withdrawn after eleven performances. orthodox. Howeverthefiressmolderedelsewhere. George C. The gallery was filled with a heroic class of people many of them in red woolen shirts, with countenances Howard ...comissioned Charles L. Aiken, who was a member of the company, to prepare a dramatization. Under the inade- as hardy and rugged as the implements of industry quate copyright law, the stage rights were not secured to Mrs. employed by them in the pursuit of their vocation. Stowe. This version. in which Cordelia played Eva, her mother There was also a very considerable array of beauty Topsy, herfather St. Clair, and Aiken doubled as andfashion, sprinkled among the parquette and Harris and Shelby, opened in September 1852, and ranrfor 100 boxes.... performances. The population of Troy was about 9,000. This We happened to get rather late to the theatre, and run was followed by a successful engagement in Albany. found the piece well under way. The scene then being Then GeorgeL.Fox, Howard's brother-in-law, with delineated was that of the escape of Eliza Harris some difficulty persuaded Purdy, who remembered the failure across the Ohio River with her infant in her arms. It of Taylor's version, to bring it to the National. It opened there appeared to be rather coldly received by the audi- 'without fanfare on July 18, 1853, and immediately caught on. ence; who, when the dauntless mother reached the Its popularity grew, and so great was the demand for seats as Indiana shore and offered her thanks to Almighty the engagement continued, that two afternoon performances God for Ills interposition and preservationat which were added to the six evening ones, then four more afternoon point, what is theatrically called " a decided hit," performances, and finally six morning performances, so that it is supposed to be made by the actressthere was not was presented three times a clay. This in spite of the fact that a hand of applause beyond what we gave. We were competing versions were rushed onto the' stages of two rival astonished that a part so cleverly conceived and ex- theatres.... . ecuted should not obtain some testimonial of appro- 27 3.1 r.s.-^4.170.4z1

SELECTION FROM GOODBYE TO UNCLETOM by J. C. Furnas p. 37-38 Plantation fostered bation, when, on looking around, we discovered that the whole A Journal of a Residence on a Georgian if they few of the misconceptions that helped to make atragic failure audience was in tears! It was composed of those, who of Reconstruction; whereas a great modernhistorian con- with which "Came to laugh, remained to pray." cludes: "No small part of the incredible optimism the North later approached the task of convertingslaves into The object of all was to witness a delineation onthe voters,self-dependent citizens, and legislators, thinking it stage of the scenes embraced in Mrs. BeecherStowe's book could be done overnight, is chargeable to the impressiondif- neither a novel or romance can it be calledby the players.It fused by Mrs. Stowe." Fanny Kemble could never havewritten was evident thatall sympathised with the sentiments em- to the Duchess of Argyle or anybody else asMrs. Stowe did in bodied in the play; for, if such had not been the fact,how 1862: could it happen that a theatre which the aristocracy ofthe profession, as well as the aristocracy of the city has denomi- ...whether God be with us or not, I know He is with nated "plebian" and "minor," should be actually stuffedwith the slave, and with his redemption will come the solu- the (aristocracy of morality, religion, patriotism,intelligence tion of our question ...I wish "Southerners] no ill, . feel no bitterness.. .. wedon't expect any more of and virtue?... of The succeeding scene, "The Freeman's Defence," passed theni, but if slavery is destroyed, one generation off Without producing any apparent emotion. . ..[We] made education and liberty will efface these stains. , up our minds to give George Harris,(Mr. Prior) a round of That Sunday-school superficiality was what ailed muchof applause. Mrs. Stowe's message.. It is notable furtherthat Fanny Kemble Old Uncle Tom, who is the hero of the piece, was en- encouraged none of the other tendentious errors thatU,:le acted by Mr. J. Lingard, Tom saddled on the nation. Her'book has no condescemling The character of the meek, pious and subdued old profundities about "the African race"; no tunnel-vision con- ..In almost every instance negro.... wasably delineated. . "white as African he centration on the difficult but minor problem of he was as pathetic as the author had made the you are"; no wistful dwelling onthe possibility of removing represented. the Negro problem by removing the Negroes; nomisleading emphasis on, the slave as a freedom-craving Spartacus or a desponding potential suicide; no temptation to the stage to cheapen the Negro by tawdry hippodroming of-thesuperfici- Precious Gem of Precocity alities of a third-rate novel: And on the positive sideFanny told much that her readers could not otherwise learn(certainly Howard," not from Mrs. Stowe) about the severecultural handicaps of Eva was enacted by "little Miss Cordelia slaves that probably would require generations to eradicate. and, . . . we avowthat Little Cordelia executed the part and all Thus, if the nation had had the opportunity to focus on assigned her in accordance with the dictates ofJehovah her book instead of on Uncle Toni, it mighthave-floundered his ministering angels ... into the Civil War with a better chance ofdoing clearer think- ing now and again about the South and slavery.. ... This con- sideration leads to bitter thoughts ab6ut Mrs. Stowe'swell- meant irresponsibilities. To our great emotionaland economic cost, we have had to live with the consequencesof them for over a century now, and the end is not yet. We manifest neither hostility to, or love for theSouth. ASEMMEAVAIMUMW NEM, We would not interfere with any one of itsrightswe would Ar.19103641.1A06 shoulder our muskets to fight its battles, if it weresubjected either to invasion or insurrection. Her localand municipal SELECTIONS FROM FRANCES ANN KEMBLE, North, regulations we do not wish to interfere withwe of the JOURNAL OF A RESIDENCE ONA`GEORGIAN have no right to interfere with them. If theSouth is attached to the institution of slavery, and adheres toit, she is right; and, PLANTATION IN 1838-1839 it ill becomes the North to attempt to interferewith her local "Conversations With a Slave About Freedom" (pp. 84-85). affairs, Such are the opinions that we have alwaysexpressed, and ptobably shall express, as long as we live. But, whenthe I had a conversation that' interested me a good deal, South, through her demagogues, and political vagabondallies during my walk today, with my peculiar slave, Jack ... Today, in the North, demands that the North shall 'notdiscuss at in the midst of his torrent of inquiries about places and things, home and within the sacred precincts of heraltars and her I suddenly asked him if he would like to be free. A gleam of firesides, any question, and every question, that maybe light absolutely shot over his whole countenance, like the vivid presented to her, then we, as Northmen andfreemen, who and instantaneous lightning: he stammered, hesitated. became cannot be made to employ the degraded languageof the excessively confused, and at length replied: "Free, missis! bondsman and villain, must object, and demand for theNorth what for me wish to be free? Oh no, missis, me no wish to he This is our free, if massa only let me keep pig!" The fear of offending by the rights secured to the whole American Republic. uttering that forbidden wishthe dread of admitting, by its plat form. in expression, the-slightest discontent with his present situation,L The drama of Uncle Tom's Cabin, is now enacting the expense of New York, Philadelphia, Bostonin all the principal townsand the desireto conciliate my favor, even at producing strangling the intense natural longing that absolutely glowed cities of the free states; and, for good or for evil, is in his every featureit was a sad spectacle, and I repented my effects on the democratic masses, which few anticipated. 28 32 Kemble's Journal question. As for the pith!l request, which he reiterated several his companions, itreveals to him also other rights and other times, adding: "No, missis, me no want to be free; me work till hopesanother world, another lifetoward which he leads, me (lie for missis and massa," with the increased emphasis; it according to the grace vouchsafed to him, his poor fellow amounted only to this, that Negroes once were, but no longer slaves. How can we keep this man in such a condition? flow is are, permitted to keep pigs...You perceive at once (or, if such a cruel sin of injustice to be answered? you could have seen the boy's face you would have perceived at once) that his situation was no mystery to him; that his value to Mr. [Butler] ,* and, as he supposed, to me, was per- fectly well known to him, and that he comprehended int- me.diately that his expressing even the desire to be free might be construed by me into an offense, and souht, by eager pro- testations, of his delighted acquiescence in slavery, to conceal his soul's natural yearning, lestI should re, no it. It was a sad passage between us and sent me home full .ie most painful I*Mr. Butler is theithor's husband.] thoughts. Moan,. rick young CAsIdows W At fold. "The Infirmary" (p. 70) [H]ow shall I describe to you the spectacle which was presented to me on entering the [infirmary]? But half the casements, of which there were six, were glazed, and these were obscured with dirt, almost as much as the other window- "Slave Motherhood" (pp. 156-157) less ones were darkened by the dingy shutters, which the The condition of these places and of their inhabitants is, shivering inmates had fastened to in order to protect them- of course, the same all over the .plantation, and if I were to selves from the cold. In the'enormous chimney glimmered the describe them Ishould but weary you with a repetition of powerless embers of a few stock of wood, round which, how- identical phenomena; filthy,, wretched, almost naked, always ever, as many of the sick women as could approach. were bareleggedandbarefooted. children;negligent,ignorant, cowering, some on wooden settles, most of on the wretched'mothers, whose apparent indifference to the plight ground, excluding those who were too ill to rise; and these last of their offspring, and utter liicapacity to alter it, are the poor wretches lay prostrate on the'floor, without -bed, mat- inevitable result of their slavery. It is hopeless to attempt to tres,'or pillow, buried in tattered and filthy blankets which, refrorm their habits or improve their condition while the huddled round them as they lay strewed about, left hardly women are condemned to field labor; nor is it possible to over- space to move upon the floor. And here, in their hour of sick- estimate the bad moral effect of the system as regards the ness and suffering, lay those whose health and strength are women, entailing this enforced separation from their children, spent in unrequited labor for usthose who, perhaps even and neglect of all the cares and duties of mother, nurse, and yesterday, were being urged on their unpaid task those whose even housewife, which are all merged in the mere physicaltoil husbands, fathers, brothers and sons were even at that hour of a human hoeing machine.. .. To be sure, while the women sweating over the earth, whose produce was to buy for us all are pregnant their task is diminished, and this is oneof the the luxuries which can alleviate sickness.I stood in the midst many indirect inducements held out to reckless propagation, of them, perfectly unable to speak, the tears potiring from my which has a sort of premium offered to it in the consideration eyes at this sad spectacle of their misery, myself and my emo- of less work and more food, counterbalanced by none of the tion alike strange and incomprehensible to them. Here lay sacred responsibilities which hallow and ennoble the relation Women expecting every hour the terrors and agonies of child- of parent and child; in short, as their lives are for the most part birth, others who had just brought their doomed offspring into those of mere animals, their increase is literally mere animal the world, others who were groaning over the anguish and breeding, to which every encouragement is given, for it adds to bitter disappointment of miscarriageshere lay some burning the master's livestock and the value of his estate. with fever, others chilled with cold and aching with rheuma- tism, upon the hard cold, ground, the draughts and dampness of the atmosphere increasing their sufferings, and. dirt, noise, and stench, and every aggravation of which sickness is capable, combined in their conditionhere they lay like brute beasts, absorbed in physical suffering; Unvisited by any of those divine influences which may ennoble the dispensations of pain and illness, forsaken, as it seemed to me, of all good; and yet, 0 God, Thou surely hadst not forsaken them! Now pray take Showing hole sfuorry improws LA, roodWom of shin...oft sox. notice that this is the hospital of an estate where the owners are supposed to be humane, the overseer efficient and kind, and the Negroes remarkably well cared for and comfortable. "Flogging" (p. 215) "Description of a Slave Preacher, London" [Louisa] had not finished her task one day, when she (pp. 149 -1 50) said she feltill, and unable to do so, and had been severely Think, Elizabeth, of that man London, who, in spite of flogged by driver Bran, in whose "gang" she then was. The all the bitter barriers in his way, has learned to read, has read next day, in spite of this encouragement_ to labor, she had his Bible, teaches it to his unfortunate fellows, and is used by 'again been unable to complete her appointed work; and Bran his owner and his owner's agents, for all these causes, as an having told her that he'd tie her up and flog her if she did not effectual influence for good over the slaves of whom he is get it done, she had left thg field and run into the swamp. himself the despised and injured companion. Like them sub- "Tie,, you up, Louisa!" said I; "what is that?" She then ject to the driver's lash; like them, the helpless mature of his described to me that they were fastened up by their wrists to master's despotic will, without a right or a hope in th, dreary a beam or a branch of a tree, their feet barely touching the . world. But though the light he has attained must ow the ground, so as to allow them no purchase for .resistance or terrible aspects of his fate hidden by blessed igm..anc.:. from evasion of the lash, their clothes turned over their heads, 29 33 ,tt41.0, Mill71101M, thong, either by the and their backs scored with a leather WELD, driver himself, or, if he pleases to inflicttheir punishment by SELECTION FROM THEODORE deputy, any of the men he may choose to summonto the AMERICAN SLAVERY AS IT IS, office; it might be father, brother, husband, orlover, if the TESTIMONY OF A THOUSANDWITNESSES overseer so ordered it.I turned sick, and my bloodcurdled listening to these details from the slender youngslip of a lassie, p. 39 with her pooepiteous face and murmuring,pleading voice. "Mr. Butler's Views on Flogging Slaves" respectability, residing (pp. 159-161) Dr. Demming a gentleman of high in Ashland, Richland county, Ohio,'stated : I had a long and painful conversationwith Mr. [Butler] "That during a recent tour at the south, ...he had an upon the subject of the floggingwhich had been inflicted on Dickinson; a resident of terrible: they throw opportunity of conversing with a Mr. the wretched Teresa. These discussions are Pittsburg, in company with a numberof cotton-planters and me into perfect agonies ofdistress for the slaves, whose posi- and Mississippi. Mr. whose intervention in their slave-dealers, from Louisiana, Alabama, tion is utterly hopeless; for myself, Dickinson stated as a fact, that the sugarplanters upon the behalf sometimes seems to me worsethan useless; for Mr. sugar coast in Louisiana hadascertained, that, as it was usually [Butler], whose share in this horrible system fills meby turns the amount of labor during what can he do? how necessary to employ about. - wite with indignation and pity. But, after all, the boiling season, that was requiredduring the season of can he help it all? Moreover,born and bred in America, how day and night, during of course, he does not; raising, they could, by excessive driving, should he care or wish to help it? and, the boiling season, accomplish thewhole labor with one set of and I am in despair that he does not; etvoila, it is 'a happy and sacrifice a there had been hands. By pursuing this plan, they could afford to hopeful plight for us both. He maintained that set of hands once in sevenyears! He further stated that this neither hardship nor injustice in the caseof Teresa's flogging; horrible system was now practised to aconsiderable extent! and that, moreover, she had not beenflogged at all for com- substantially admitted allotted task was not The correctness of this statement was plaining to me, but simply because her by the slaveholders then on board." done at the appointed time. Of course this wasthe result of highly respected citizen of going to her labor; The late Mr. Samuel Blackwc11, a her having come to appeal to me instead of Jersey city,..had not only every facility afforded himby and as she knew perfectly well thepenalty she was incurring, of all parts of theprocess hardship nor injustice in the planters, for personal inspection he maintained that there was neither of sugar-making, but receivt,3 fromthem the,most unreserved the case; the whole thing was a regularlyestablished law, with communications, as to their management,of,theirslaves. .. . well acquainted; and this which all the slaves were perfectly Mr..B., after his return, made thefollbWing-statement:... case was no exception whatever.The circumstance of my him, that they were allowed to over- "That the planters generally declared to being on the island could not, of.course, be obliged so to over-work their slavesduring the sugar-making throw the whole system of disciplineestablished to secure the `season, (from eight to ten weeks,) as to use them upin seven labor, and obedience of the slaves; and ifthey chose to try after the process is commenced, taje the conse- or eight years. For, said they, experiments as to that fact, they and I must it must be pushed without cessationnight and day; and we quences. At the end of the day,the driver of the gang to which cannot afford to keep a sufficientnumber of slaves to do the Teresa belongs reported her work not done,and Mr. 0 - -- extra work atthe time of sugar-making, as wecould not ordered him to give her the usual numberof 'stripes, which profitably employ them the rest of the year." order the driver of course obeyed,without knowing how It is not only true for the sugarplanters, but of the slave- Teresa had employed her time instead of hoeing.But Mr. holders generally throughout the far south andsouth west, knew well enough, for the wretched woman told me that they believe it for their interest to wear out,the slaves by that she had herself told him she should appeal to meabout them into the inability to do the writ' ex- excessive toil in eight or ten years after they put her weakness, and suffering, and field. acted from her. He did not, however, think proper toexceed in her punishment the, usual number of stripes allotted tothe non- performance of the appointed daily task, andMr. [Butler] pronounced the whole transaction perfectly-satisfactory and en regle. The common drivers arelimited in their powers of chastisement, not being allowed to administer morethan a A Wonsan chained to a Girl, and Men In arms o:.n. certain number of lashes to their fellowslaves. Headman bieft Frank, as he is called, has alone the privilege ofexceeding this who went through Ken- only curtailed Rev. Doctor Reed, of London, limit; and the overseer's latitude of infliction is tucky, Virginia and Maiyland in the summerof 1834, gives the by the necessity of avoiding injury to life orlimb. The master's thus fol!owing testimony: irresponsible power has no such bound. When I was "I was told confidently andfrom excellent authority, silenced on the particular caseunder discussion, I resorted, in planters in South Carolina, the the abstract question, as I that recently at a meeiting of my distress and indignation, to question was seriously discussedwhether the slave is more never can refrain from doing;and to Mr. [Butler] 's assertion. profitable to the owner, if well fed, wellclothed, and worked of the justice of poor Teresa's punishment, Iretorted the exhausted in some labor; the brutal in- lightly, or if made the most of at once, and manifest injustice of unpaid and enforced eight years. The decision -was infavor of the last alternative. humanity of allowing a man to strip and lash a woman, the That decision will perhaps make manyshudder. But to my mother of ten children; to exact from her, toil,which was to mind this is not the chief evil. The greater andoriginal evil-is maintain in luxury two idle young men,the owners of the considering the slave as property. If he is only propertyand plantation. IsaidI thought female labor of the sort exacted right to ask how I may make such as they my property, then I have some from these slaves, and corporal chastisement that property-most available." endure, must be abhorrent to any manly orhumane man. Reed and disagreeable, and left me "Visit to the American Churches," by Rev. Drs. Mr. [Butler] said he thought it was Mattheson. Vol. 2. p. 173. to my reflections with that concession. 30 34 via!'(''51.?. TU VIrr 1ff, 2) Alt c_;. E 0 WA JAI/ SELECTION FROM THE KEY TO UNCLE TOM'S CABIN. HARRIET BEECHER STOWE, l)1.92.

Topsy stands as the representative of a large class of the children who are growing up under the institutionof slavery- quick, active, subtle and ingenious, apparently utterlydevoid of principle and conscience, keenly penetrating, by an instinct which exists in the childish mind, the degradation of their con- dition, and the utter hopelessness of rising above itfeeling the black skin on them, like the mark of Cain, to be a signof reprobation and infamy, and urged oil by a kind of secret desperation to make their "calling and election" in sin "sure." We are not now speaking of the Southern States merely, but of the New England States; for, startling as it may appear, slarery is not met wholly abolished in the free States ofthe North. The most unchristian part of it, that which gives to it all the bitterness and all the sting, is yet, in a great measure, unrepealed; itis the practical denial to the negro of the tights SELECTION FROM HARRY BIRDOFF, of human brotherhood. In consequence of this, Topsyis a THE WORLD'S GREATEST HIT character which may be found at the North as well as atthe South. (pp. 162 -163) In conducting the education of the negro, mulatto,and quadroon children, the writer has often observed this fact Landon was naturallycurious to see the American thatfor a certain time, and up to a certain age, they kept interpretation . [of Uncle 7bm'sCabin,j equal pace with, and were often superior to, the white children ...Topsy amazed everyone. The critic of Era described with whom they were associated; but that there came a time her: "Mrs: Howard's Topsy strikes us as an admirableperform- when they became indifferent to learning, and made nofur- anceindeed, as such a perfect emobidment of Mrs.Beecher ther progress. This was invariably at the age when they were Stowe's Topsy that one would imagine both ladieshad Studied old enough to reflect, upon life, and to perceive that society from one model. Yet it is not the Topsy wehave been familiar had no place to offer them for which anything more would be with on the stageit is not merely the droll, halfidiot, wholly requisite than the rudest and most elementary knowledge.... ignorant Topsy of the English stage, but theshrewd, cunning, Who does not sec the answer? Itis thiswhich was so truly naturally wicked, almost impish Topsy of realitythechild for said by poor Topsy "NOTHING BUT A NIGGER!" whom nobody cared, that in a figurative sense may besaid had Itis -this, burnt into the soul by the branding-iron of with perfect truth 'never to have been born,' that 'never cruel and unchristian scorn, that is a sorer and deeperwound no fader, nor moder, nor broder, norsister, nor auntno, than all the physical evils of slavery together. none on emthat never hadnothin' nor nobody.' At one moment she is stubborn, insensate, andunimpressionable anon, she flies into an ungovernable,almost demoniac rage, and her cunning and revenge,exhibit in awonderful degree the effects of bad passions, allowed to grow upunchecked, like weeds in a fair garden of the breast. Her elf-like figure, andthe strange, wild, screaming chant in which she sangthe song, `I'se .So Wicked,' was something quite sui generisunlike anything we have before seen; but it seemed to us torealize the picture of the authoress, and we believe that it is a truthful representa- tion of the original." ,11=1 =b.

SELECTIONS FROM-THENARRATIVE OF WILLIAM WELLS BROWN A woman was also kept at the quarters todo -the cook- ing for the field hands, who weresummoned to their- unre- quited toil every morning.at four o'clock bythe ringing of a bell hung on a post near the house of the overseer.They were allowed half an hour to eat their breakfast and get,tothe field. At half past four a horn was blown by the overseer,which was the signal to commence work; and everyonethat was not on the spot at the time had to receive ten lashesfrom the Negro- whip, with which the overseer always went armed. Thehandle was about three feet long, with thebutt-end 'filled with-lead., of cowhide, with The Original English C Uon of Topsy. and the lash, six or seven feet in length,' made Adoiphi Theatre. London. ?Z33 platted wire on the end of it. This whip was put inrequisition 31very frequently and freely, and asmall offense on the part of a 3.5 Again and again did the preacher reiter- slave furnished an occasion for its use. During thetime that were all depicted . ate the words "for every man," Theseglad tidings ... were for Mr. Cook was overseer, I was a house servant -a situation the slave as well as the master, the poor as well asthe rich, for preferable to that of a field hand, as I was better fed, better the captive; for clothed, and not obliged to rise at the ringing of the bell,but the persecuted, the distressed, the heavy-laden, despised, abused creature, deemed about half an hour after.I have often laid and heard the crack me among the rest, a poor, of others fitfor nothing but unrequited toilbut mental and of the whip and the screams of the slave. My mother was a feeling field hand, and one morning was ten or fifteen minutesbehind bodily degradation. 0, the blessedness and sweetness of reached the that I was loved! I would have died that moment,with joy, for the others in getting into the field. As soon as she I felt spot where they were at work, the overseercommenced the compassionate Saviour about whom !was hearing pray!"these }sorry that "MassaRiley" didn't know him, sorry he should live whipping her. She cried, "Oh pray!Oh pray!Oh in the beauty are generally the words of slaveswhen imploring mercy at the Such a coarse, wicked, cruel life. Swallowed up I loved my enemies, and prayed for them hands of the oppressors.Iheard her voice and knew it, ar,' of the divine love, jumped out of my bunk and went to the door. Though I... that did despitefully use and entreat me. field was sonic distance from the house, I could hear every As I went home, I became so excited that Iturned aside for light and crack of the whip, and every groan and cry of my poormother. frofn the road into the woods, and prayed to God I remained at the door, not daring to venture anyfurther. The for aid. . . I could not help talking'much on these subjects cold chills ran over me and I wept aloud. After givingher ten with those about me; and it was not long before Ibegan to lashes, the sound of the whip ceased, and I returned to mybed pray with them, and exhort them,and to impart to the poor and found no consolation but in my tears. Experience has slaves those little glimmerings of light fromanother World, quite taught toe that nothing can be more heart-rending thanfor one which had reached my own eye. In a few years I became to see a dear and beloved mother or sistertortured, and to an esteemed preacher among them,and I will not believe it is hear their cries and not be able to render them assistance.But vanity which leads me to think I was useful to sonic. such is the position which an American slave occupies. 111111.11VMMEMEZMIIIMENII EVERYBODY'S PROTEST NOVEL, There was also, among the servants, a girl whose master resided in the country. Iler name was Patsey. Mr. Colburntied JAMES BALDWIN her up one evening and whipped her until severalof the boarders came out and begged him to desist. The reasonfor In Uncle Tom's Cabin, thatcornerstone of American whipping her was this. She was'engaged to be married to a man social protest fiction, St. Clare, the kindly ouster, re. belonging to Major William Christy, who resided four orfive marks to his coldly disapproving -Yankee cousin, Miss miles north of the city. Mr. Colburn had forbid her to seeJohn Oplielia, that, so far as he is able to tell, the blackshave Christy. The reason of this was said to be the regard whichhe been turned over to the devil for the benefitof the whites himself had for Patsey. She went to meeting that evening, and in this worldhowever, he adds thoughtfully, it may turn John returned home with her. Mr. Colburn had intended to out in the next. Miss Oplielia's reactionis, at least, velie flog John, if he came within the inclosure; but Johnknew too meetly right-minded: "This is perfectlyhorrible!" she ex- well the temper of;his rival and kept at a safe diStance.So he claims. "You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!" took vengeance on the poor girl. If all the slave drivershad Miss Oplielia, as we may suppose, was speakingfor been called together, I do not think a more cruel manthan the author; her exclamation is the moral,neatly trained, John Colburnand he too a northern mancould havebeen and incontestable like those improving mottoes sonic - found among them. ' times found hanging on the walls offurnished rooms. While living at the Missouri Hotel, a circumstance oc- And, like these mottoes, before which oneinvariably curred which caused me great unhappiness. My mastersold my flinches, recognizing an insupportable, almost anindecent mother and all her children, except myself. They were sold to glibness, she and St. Clare are terribly inearnest..Neither different persons in the city of St. Louis. of them questions the medieval moralityfrom -which their dialogue springs: black, white, the devil,the neat worldposing its alternatives between heaven andthe SELECTION FROM TRUTH STRANGERTHAN flames were realities for them as, of course,they were for FICTION: FATHER HENSON'S STORY their creator.'fliey spurned and were terrified ofthe dark- ness, striving mightily foi the light;and considered from OF HIS OWN LIFE this aspect, Miss Ophelia's exclamation,like Mrs. Stowe's novel, achieves a bright, almost a luridsignificance, like John McKenny .occasionally served as a minister of the light from a fire which consumes awitch. This is the the Gospel ...One Sunday . my mother urged me to ask more striking as one considersthe novels of Negro oppres- master's permission to go and hear him.I had so often been sion written in our own, more enlightened day, -all of which beaten for making such a request thatI refused to make it. say only: "This is perfectly horrible! Youought to be She still persisted, telling me that Icould never become a ashamed of yourselves!" (Let us ignore, for the moment, Christian if I minded beatingsthat I must take up my cross those novels of .oppression written by Negroes,which add and bear it...To gratify her I went to my master and asked only a raging, near-paranoiac postscript to this statement shown permission to attend the meeting. His favor to me was and actually reinforce, as I hope to make clear later,the for this once by allowing me to go . I hurried off, without principles which activate the oppression they decry.) any definite expectations ofbenefit or amusement; for ... and Uncle Torn's Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its never heard a sermon ... I was then eighteen years old, I had selfrighteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common from my mother, on the responsibility of all to a except ... with Little Women. Sentimentality, the ostentatious pa- Supreme Being. When I arrived.. .the speaker was just be- of rading of excessive and spurious emotion,,is the mark of ginning ... "That he, by the Grace of God, should taste theBible to dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the senti- death for every man:" This was the first text of to experience, his fear of which I hacrever listened, -knowing it to be such. Ihave never mentalist betray his 4,..,..-..ision life, his arid heart; anu itis always, therefore, the signal forgotteri it ... cruelty. The divine character of Jesus Christ, his tender lovefor of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of hard-boiled mankind, his forgiving spirit, his compassion forthe outcast Uncle t'om's Cabinlike its multitudinous, 32 descendants is a catalogue of violence. This isexplained and despised,hiscruel crucifixion and glorious ascension 36 by the nature of Mrs. Stowe's subject matter, her laudable put one in mind of a riarky bootblack doing a buck and dctuniiiiiatiou to flinch hum nothing in presenting the wing to the clatter of condescending coins. Eliza is a beau- complete picture; an explanation which falters only if we tiful, pious hybrid, light enough to passthe heroine of pause to ask whether or not her picture is indeed com- Quithly might, indeed, be her reincarnation -- differing plete; and what constriction ur failure of perception forced boot tire voted mistress who hasoverscercdher edirca- her to so ,depend on the description of brutalityunino- tion only in the respect that she is a servant. George is tivated, senselessand to leave unanswered and unno- darker, but wakes up for it by being a mechanical genius, ticed the only important question: what it was, after all, and is, moreover, sufficiently un-Negroid to pass through that moved her people to such deeds. town, a fugitive from his roaster, disguised as a Spanish But this, let us say, was beyond Mrs. Stowe's powers; gentleman, attracting no attention whatever beyond ad- she was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pam- miration. They arc a race apart from Topsy. It transpires, phleteer; her book was not intended to do anything more by the end of the novel, through one of those energetic, than. prove that slavery was wrong; was, in fact, perfectly last-minute convolutions of the plot, that Eliza has some humble, This makes material for a pamphlet but itis connection with French gentility. The figure from whom hardly enough for a novel; and the only question left to the novel takes its name, Uncle Torn, who is a figure of ask is why we are bound still within the same constriction. controversy vet,isjet-black, woolyhaired, illiterate; and flow is it that we are so loath to make a further journey he isj !ealonienally forbearing:Ile has to be; lie is black; than that made by Mrs. Stowe, to discover and reve only truough this forbearance can he survive or triumph. something a little closer to the truth? (Cf. Faulkner's preface toTheSound and the Fury: These But that battered word, truth, having made its ap others were not Compsons, They were black:They en- pearanee here, onfronts one immediately with a series of dured.) His triumph is metaphysical, unearthly; since he and has,inoicover, sinee so many gospels are is black, born without the light, it is only through humil- preached, the unfortunate tendency to Make one belliger- ity, the incessant mortification of the flesh, that he can ent. Let us say, then, that truth, as used here, is Meant to enter into communion with God or man. The virtuous imply a devotion to the human being, his ficedoin and rage of Mrs. Stowe is motivated by nothing so temporal fulfillment; freedom which cannot he legislated,fullill- as a concern for the relationship of men to one another-- - meot which caunot be charted. 'Ibis is the prime concern', or, even, as she would have claimed, by a concern for th,ir panic of being the frame of reference; it is not to be confused with a devo- relationship to Godbut merely by a hurled into theilames, of being caught in traffic with the tion to I lumanity which is too easily equated with a devo- devil. She embraced this merciless doctrine with all her tion to a Cause; and Causes, as we know, are notonously 're throne of grace: bloodthilsty. We have, as it seems to me, in this most me- heart, bargaining shamelessly Moir chanical and ma.Jitieleing of civilizations, attempted to lop God and salvation becoming her 1....sonal property, pur- chased with the coin of her virtue. Here, black equates this creature close .rto the status of a tillICSaVillg inven- tion. lie is not, after all, merely a member of a Society or a with evil and white with grace; if, being mindful of the Group or a der' oible :.anundruni to be explained by necessity 'of good works, she could not cast out the blacks a wretched, huddled mass, apparently,claiming, like Science. Ile -1, a 'ow (AO fashioned the words sound! an obsession, her ,inner eyeshe could notembrace them sornethini, ..-' .,!! that, something resolutely' inde- finable,, In overlooking, denying, evading either without purifying them of sin.. She must cover their his complexityvv is nothing more than the disquiet- intimidating nakedness, robe them in white, the gainients ing complexity of ourselveswe are diminished arid we of salvation; only thus could she herself be delivered from perish; °illy within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this ever-present sin, only thus could she bury, as St. Paul de- 'hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves manded, "the carnal man, the rnan of the flesh," Tom, and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this therefore, her only black man, has been robbed of his power of revelation which is the business of the novelist, humanity and divested of his sex. Itis the price for that this journey toward a more vast reality which must take darkness with which lie has been branded. precedence over all other claims. What is today parroted Uncle Tones Cabin, then, is activated by what might as his Responsibilitywhich seems to mean that he must be called a theological terror', the terror of damnation; and make fornral declaration that he is involved in, and af- the spirit that breathes in this book, hot, 'self-righteous, fected by, the lives of other people and to say something fearful, is not different twin that spirit of medieval times improving aboin this somewhat self-evident factis, when which sought to exorcize evil by burning witches; and is he believes it, his corruption and our loss; moreover, it is nut thilercnt bourn terror which activates a lynch mob. rooted in, interlocked with and intensifies this same mech- One need not, indeed, search for examples so historic or so anization. Both Gentleman'sAgreementandThe Post- gaudy; thus is a warfare waged daily in the heart, a warfare man Always Rings Twiceexemplify this terror of the hu- so vast, so relentless and so powerful that the interracial man- being, the determination to cut him down to siz,e. handshake or the interracial marriage can he as crucifying And inUncle Tom's Cabinwe may find foreshadowing of as the public hanging or the secret rape. This panic moti- both: the formula created by the necessity to find a lie vates our cruelty, this fear of the dark makes it impossible more palatable than the truth has been handed down that our lives shall be other than superficial; this, inter- arid memorized and persists yet with a terrible power. locked with and feeding our glitterhig, incchanical, ines- It is interesting to consider one more aspect of Mrs. capable civilization which has put to death our freedom. Stowe's novel, the method she used to solve the problem This, notwithstanding that the avowed aim of the of writing about a black man at all. Apart from her lively American protest novel is to bring greater freedom to the procession of field hands, house niggers, Chloe, Topsy, oppressed. They are forgiven, on the strength of these etc.who are the stock, lovable figures presenting no good intentions, whatever violence they do to language, problemshe has only three other Negroes in the book. whatever excessive 'demands they make of credibility.It These are the important ones and two of them may be dis- is, indeed, considered the sign of a frivolity so intense as missed immediately, since we have only the author's word to approach decadence to suggest that these,books are that they arc Negro and they arc, in all other respects, as 'both badly written and wildly improbable. One is told white as she can make them. The two are George and to put first things first, the good of society coming before Eliza, a married couple with a wholly adorable child--L niceties of style or characterization. Even ifthis were whose quaintness, incidentally, and whose charm, rather 33 incontestablefor what exactly is the "good" of society? they accept the same criteria, they share the same beliefs, --it ;aues an insuperable contusion, sinceliterature and sociology are not one and the same; itis impossible to they both alike depend on the same reality. Within this speak of a "new" discuss them as if they woe. Our passion for categoriza. cage it is romantic, inore, meaningless, to Leon, hie mad), fitted into pegs, has led to anunforeseen, society as the desire of the oppressed, for that shivering paradoxical distress; contusion, a breakdowu of meaning, dependence on the props of reality shich he shares with Those categories which were meant to define and control the Ilerrenvolk wakes a truly "new" societyimpirs.al.' is or., the world fin us have boomeranged us into chaos;in which to conceive, What is ineant by a new society limbo we whirl, clutching the straws of our definitions. which inequalities will disappear, in which vengeance % -,:l The "protest" novel, so far from being disturbing, is an ue- be exacted; either there will be no oppressed at all, or tie: tcptcd and comforting aspect of the American scene, oppressed and the oppressorwillchange places.13ut, rioniliag that framework we believe to be so necessary. finally, as it seems to me, villa the rejected desire is, is an Whateser unsettling questions are raised are evanescent, elevation of "rtattis, acceptance within the present com- titillating; remote, for this has nothing to do with us, it is munity, Tiriis, the African, exile, pagan, hurried off the safely ensconced in the social arena, where, indeed, it has auction block and into the fields, fell on his kneesbefore made nothing to do with anyone, so that finally we receive a that God in Whom lie most now believe; who had very definite 'Mill of sailor: from the fact that we arcmarl- bun, but not in Ills image. 'I his libido, the, impossibil- ing such a book at all. This report nom the pit reassures ity, isthe,heritage ut the Negro in America: Wash me, cried the )ave to his Maker, and I shall be whiter, whiter us of its reality imd its darkness and of our ownsalv,ition; and "As long as such books are being published," an than snowt For black is the color of evil; only the robes of the saved are white. It is thus cry, implacable on the air mid American liberal once said to rue, "everything will be all in the skull, that lie must live with. Bele:dill thewidely right." But unless one's ideal of society is a race of neatly published catalogue of brutalitybringim; to mind, some- analyzed, hard-working ciphers, one can hardly claim for how, an image, a memory of church -bells binticuirig the airis this reality which, in the same nightmare notion, the protest novels the lofty purpose they elaim for them- he both flees and rushes to embrace. In America, now, selves or shale the precut optimism eonceming them. this country devoted. to the death of the Paradox .NNI11111 They emerge (or what they arc: a mirror of our (culla:im, by mu: las lot isis am- dishonesty, panic, trapped and immobilized in the sunlit 111;1y, tin:R:101C, he put to dead' biguous as a tableau by 1:afka. To flee or uot, to noise or prison of the Anteriean dream. They are fautasic.,, con- ini,Iiis too:la:ad, necting nowhere with reality, seldom mat; iii exattlythe not, it is all the same; his doom is wiincli fligger Thomas same sense that such HIONICS as The BestYears uJ Our itis carried in his heart. In Native Son, stands on a Chicago street comer watcher%airplanes Lives or the works of Mi. James M. Cain are fantasies, 'Aid "Guil- Beneath the dazzling pyrotechnics of these current operas flown by white men racing against the sun d:1nm" he says, the bitterness bubbling up like blood, re- one may still discern, as the controllingforce, the intense theological preoccupations of Mrs. Stowe, the sick vacui- menibc.ring,a !Milk))) indignities, the terrible, rat-infested iiin- ties of The Rover Boys. Finally, the aim of the protest house, the humiliation of home-relief, the intense, smoulders through novel-becomes something very closely resembling the zeal less, ugly bickering, hating it; hatred is con- of those alabaster missionaries to Africa to cover the oak- these pages like sulphur fire, All of Bigger's life his edness of the natives, to hurry them into the pallid anns trolled, defincd by his hatred and his fear. And later, of Jesus and thence into slavery. The airs has nowliceorne fear drives him to murder and his hatred to rape; he dies, the to reduce all Americans to the compulsive,bloodless di- having come, through this violence, we are told, .fin mensions of a guy named Jue. fast time, to a kind of life, having for the first tant: re- It is the peculiar triumph of societyand its loss deemed Ins manhood. Below the surface of this novel there that it is able to convince those people to whom ithas lies, as it seems to toe, a continuation, acomplement of given inferior status of the reality of this .decree; ithas that 'millstone, legend it was written to destroy.Rigger the force and the weapons to translate its diettan Imo .e: Uncle Tuni's descendant, flesh of Ins flesh, soexactly fact, so that the allegedly inferior are actually made so, opposite a portrait that, when the books ale placed to- insofar as the societal realities are concerned. Thisis a gether, it seems that the contemporary Negro novelist and more hidden phenomenon nowthan it was in the days of the dead New England woman are locked together in a serfdom, but it is no less implacable. Now, asthen,,' we deadly, timeless battle; the one uttering merciless exhorta- find ouis-clves bound, first without, then within, by the tions, the other shouting curses. Arid, indeed, within this uatine ul mu Lab:on/Awn. And L'SC,Ipt:is Wit dilded web of lust and fury, black and white can wily thrust and through a bitter railing against tins trap; itis as though counter-thiust, long for each other's slow, exquisite death; this ycry striving were the only motion needed to spring death by torture, acid, knives and burning; the thrust, the cloud the trap upon as, We take our shape, it is true,within and counter- thrust, the longing making the heavier that against that cage of reality bequeathed us at ourbirth; which blinds arid suffocates them both, so that they go and yet it is precisely through our dependence un thisreal- down into the pit together. Thus has the cage betrayed nothing through ity that we are most endlessly betrayed. Society isheld us all; this moment, our life, turned to together by our need; we bind it together with legend, our terrible attempts to insure For 13igger's tragedy is coercion, tearing that without it we will be hurled not that lie is cold or black or hungry, not evesthat he is into that void, within which,- like the earthbefore the American, black; but that he has accepted a theology Word was spoken, the foundations of socioy are hidden. that denies him life, that he admits the possibility of his therefore,to orui this voidourselvesit isthe tunctiou of society being sub-human andfeed:; constrained, battle for his Iiiimanity according to those brutal clitclia to protect us; but it is only this void, ourUnknOWn selves, bequeathed loom at his bath. But our litiniallity is our bal. clemamliag, forever, a new act of cr=tion, which call save us "Frain the evil that is in theworld." With the same dem our life; we need not battle fur it; we aced only to do ir.'h hie motion, at the same time, it is thistoward which we end- witat is Minutely more difficultthat is, accept failure of the protest novel lies in its a:jet:lion of life, tie lessly struggle -and from which, endlessly, westruggle t'o human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its escape. insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real It must be remembered that the oppressedland the i/ within the Saint! society; and which cannot be transcended, oppressor are bound together 34 38 SELECTIONS FROM LESLIE FIEDLER To impart wisdom or to make elegant structures, to con- sole and upliftthe heart are optionalfc,r song and story THE INADVERYANT EPIC not forbidden, but not required either. What is required is to pp. 13-1.6, 83.8,1 stir wonder and ecstacy, thus enabling us to he "in dreams. awake." Once we have realized this, we will have begun to Uncle Tom's Cabin: The Invisible Masterpiece definea new way of evaluating such long- underesteetned Of all American novels, surely the most widely read and writers as Stowe and Mitchell and Dixon and Haley, inept in deeply lovednot just in the country of its origin, but throtigi- form and weak in ideas, but like Shakespeare or Sophocles, out the world-- is Uncle Toros Cabin, Yet most elitist critics Dickens or Mark Twain, endowed -by the grace of God, the have found itan artisticfailure, ill- constructed, shamefully muse of their own unconscious -with mythopoctic power. sentimental and annoyingly shrill, its characters stereotypes, SELECTIONS FROM PATRIOTIC GORE, its plot vulgar melodrama. .. . So Ifelt myself to be engaging in a task nearly heroic, certainly unprecedented, when in love STUDIES IN THE LITERATURE OF THE and Death lin the American Novell Itried to reconstruct AMERICAN CIVIL WAIT Uncle Tom's Cabin (a book which, after all,I have read ten or twelve times, never without tears, since acquiring my first by Edmund Wilson 'copy at age seven) sympathetically and in detail. Finally, how- p. 4, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11. ever, influenced by Matthiessen and Lawrence, 1 undercut my praise.... . If we come to Uncle Tom for the first time today, I went on, moreover, to accuse (Stowed of being even we are likely to be surprised at not finding it what we imagined less capable of "radical Protest"; since I had just read James it and to conclude that the post-war neglect of it has been due Baldwin's essay "Everybody's Protest Novel," Yet Baldwin to the strained situation between the North and South.. .. It confesses elsewhere that Mrs. Stowe's novel had been ono of was still possible at the beginning of this century for a-South his favorite boyhood booksdescribing how he simultancou.# Carolina teacher to make his pupils hold up their right hands tended his younger brothers. and sisters and redreameder and swear that they would never read Uncle Tom. Both sides, "excessive and spurious" dream of black martyrdom. "As they after the terrible years of the war, were glad to disregard' the were born," he tell us, "I took them over with one hand and famous novel. The characters did still remain bywords, but they were mostly kept alive by the dramatizations, in which held a book in the other . . and in this way Ircl.1 Uncle, Tom's Cabin . over and overand over again." ... Mrs. Stowe had had no hand and which had exploited its most Measured by the standards of high -literature, Uncle obviously comic and its more melodramatic elements. These Tom's Cabin isa failure; of this there.seems to me still no versions for., the stage kept at first relatively close to the novel, doubt: and in 1960 I could find no way out short of rejecting but in the courseof-half a century they grotesquely departed that hook. But in the nearly two decades since,I have begun from it.... to reverse the process vhieli led me into the trap, by measuring To expose oneself in maturity to Uncle Tom may there- my inherited notions of appropriate criteriafor literature fore prove a startling experience. It is a much more impressive against Uncle Tom's Cabin, inst cad o I it against t hem. ... work than one has ever been allowed to suspect. The first thing that strikes one about itis a certain eruptive force . Out of a background of undistinguished narrative, inelegantly I have determined, therefore, to deal head on with what and carelessly written, the characters leap into being with a I can only hypocritically disavow; and to save Uncle Tom's vitality thatis all the more striking for the ineptitude of the, Cabin even if this means re-defining literature as it has been prose that presents them. -These characterslike those of traditionally understood[. Dickens, at least in his early phaseexpress themselves a good deal better than the author expresses herself. The Shelbys and GeorgeI larris mid ,Eliza and Aiint Chloe and Uncle Tom How pointless, then, the debate about ...historical project themselves out of the void: They come before us argu- veracity . , exceptinsofar as it reminds us that all contribu- ing and struggling, like real people who cannot be quiet. We tions to our inadvertent prose epic have claimed to be more feelthat the dams of discretion of which Mrs. Stowe has truth than fantasyand were in that sense "hoaxes." Not just spoken have been burst by a passionate force that,compressed, the,wks of Mrs. Stowe and Dixon, D.W. Griffin and Margaret has been mounting behind them, and whichliberated, has Mitchell. but the Slave Narrat'ives and White histories of taken the form of a, flock of lamenting and ranti9g, prattling Reconst,netion on which they drew were, to one degree dr and preaching characters,ina drama that demands to be another, fictional constructs. played to the end. The relation of Uncle Tom,'s Cabin to the Slave Narrative .What is most unexpected is that, the farther one reads of JosiahI lenson is especially interesting in this regard. in Uncle Tom, the more one becomes aware that a critical Only-after she wrote her best-seller, did Mrs. Stowe discover it, mind is at ..work, which has the complex situation in a very citingitto prove to her pro-slavery opponents that Good. firm grip and which, no matter how vehement the characters Good Niggers did in fact exist. But lienson, it turns out, was become, is controlling and coordinating their interrelations. not thatgood after all; and in any case his "true" account: Though there is much that is exciting in Uncle Tom's Cabin, it had been ghost-written by a White journalist, who was not is never the crude melodrama of the decadent phase- of the above amending itin later editions to make it conform even; play; and though we find some old-fashioned moralizing and a more closely to Mrs. Stowe's novel. Henson himself, tho,ugh couple of Dickensian deathbeds, there is a good deal less cagey at first, ended by claiming, perhaps even believing, that sentimentality than we may have been prepared for by our he was the original authentic Uncle Tom. And Mrs. Stowe memories of the once celebrated stage apothesosisif we are came to believeit, too, collaborating with Henson in invent- old enough to have seen it:"Little Eva 'in the Realms of ing a meeting between them which seems never-to have oc-, Gold." We may even be surprised to discover that the novel is curred. The surfiction or meta-myth which they thus created] by no means an indictment drawn up by New England against has ever since been exploited for the benefit of American the South. Mrs. Stowe has, on the contrary, been careful to tourists by the Chamber of Commerce of the small Ontario contrive her .story in such a way that the Southern states and town inwhich Henson died, even as the airline which organizes New England shall be shown as involved to an equal degree in tours to Gambia exploits Haley's mytho-history of his family. the kidnapping into slavery of the Negroes and the subsequent maltreatment of them, and that the emphasis shall all be laid 35 . ..Patriotic Gore armed On t he ipract of slavery as a permanent institution, on a production, so to speak, inside one's head. Then, One of the strongest things in the novel is the role with this private vision, one should see our videotape version. played by Uncle Tom another value that was debased inthe Last, one should enact at least one of the scenes in any con- play. 'Hie Quakers who shelter Eliza are, Of course,presented venient space, providing a sympathetic audience is available as Christians; but not one of the otherwhite groups that figure a classroom will certainly do. We do believe that seeing our videotape v011 give you a inUm* binis living in accordance with the prin. ciples of the religion they all profess. It is only theblack Uncle better idea of the play's effect than simply readidg- jt , although Tom who has taken the white man's religion seriously anO you will undoubtedly prefer your imagined Le6ec, say, to who -standing up bravely, in the final scene, for the dignity of ours. However, we do not suggest that the tape will substitute his own soul but at the same time pardoning SimonLegree for a live performance. Indeed, we left out the scene between attempts to live up to it literally. The sharp irony aswell as the George and Mr. Wilson, thinking it one of the easiest and most pathos is that the recompense he wins from the Christians, as fun for students to do. Try carrying it to George's escape from he is gradually put through their mill, is to be separated from the slavers, as Phineas holds them off beneath the trap door. his family and exiled; tormented, imprisoned and done to Try the scene in several wayS, with Mr. Wilson being more or less sympathetic to George, with the slavers more comic than death. Another feature of the stage melodrama that is mislead. frightening and vice versa. But always remember that the es- ing in regard to the novel is the unity, or effect of unity, im- sence of live theater is provided bythe audience, hanging on posed on its locale and chronology. The play is made to center eve hoping that George and Phineas will make it, si- on New Orleims, and one sensational scene ismade to follow lei.: y cheering the heroes on, another so _last ,that %ye do not have any idea of the actual Putting the play on videotape required a multitude of hard choices, especially because the play had to be condensed passage of tit The two distinct strands of the story have, furthermore, to be tied up together in away that they are not tofit into one classroom hour, and historical accuracy (Eliza in the hook. The novel has a quite different pattern,,for in crossing on soap boxes)"had to be balanced with a regard for it the Negro characters --Uncle Tom and his family, onthe one a current audience's difficulty insuspending disbelief in the hand; George I Farris and Eliza, on the otherare involved in a face of an action accepted as "real" by convention only. We series of wanderings which progressively and excitinglyreveal, departed from strict fidelity to historical reproduction in other black like the visits of Chichikov in Gogol'sDead Souls,the traits of ways as well. For example, we used black actors for the 'a whole society ... Even Henry James, that expertprofession- roles. They would have been done by white actors in black al, is obliged to pay her his tribute when he tell us, inA Small facein1852. Black actors didn't get to do Uncle Toni, it llo and Others,of a performance of the play that had been seems, until about the 1880's.George, Eliza, Harry and Cassy for him in childhood a thrilling "aesthetic adventure," which would have been played by whiteslookingwhite, with no at- had first, he says, awakened his critical sense, andadmits that tempt to suggest that they were mulattoes. Uncle Toni was the novel constitutes a perhaps unique literary case of abook usually made up to look very old, to increase the pathos.(We and which has made itsimpression without the author's ever stayed closer to the novel's description. After all, Chloe having concerned herself with literary problems at all, "as if," he have young children.) as he says, "a fish, a wonderful `leaping'fish, had simplyflown We deliberately altered the order of some lines, to com- through the air." pensate for the cutting, and added the phrase `:taken my corn- starch and powdered herself" to Ophelia's litany of Topsy's OUR VIDEOTAPE: THE INNER EYE, wrongs, knowing that this slight variant, which camefrom THE PERFORMED SCENE, THE TV SCREEN later adaptations, was used in performance. (We havethe poster which shows it.) We ask you to considerwhat that small change in the text does to your reaction to Topsy as a charac- Samuel Taylor Coleridge identifies the ideal audience's ter. For that matter, what effects haveall our changes had? state of mind in a happy phrase, "the willing suspensionof Our use of the 19th century illustrations, billboard disbelief," which -describes loosely what spectators should posters and lithographs are intended to give you, again, a sense bring to a stage performance. This mental state allows the of time, place and atmosphere, while suggesting settingsand audience to enter, say, into Eliza's state of mind as, putting moment's which our studio budget did not allow us to simulate her trust in heaven, she jumps from one ice be to another (such as Toni's rescue of Eva from the water, or Eliza's desper- carrying her baby in her arms. The viewer who is thinking ate voyage with the dogs closing in for the kill).Using stills "Look at those dumb soap boxes," or "What a haibmy show!" for Tom's beating is one solution to the problem of making or "How did they train those dogs to jump at,her throat?" this incident meaningful while avoiding the melodramawhich has not been able to suspend disbelief, and has lost a good part might cause a modern audience to laugh it off rather than be of the pleasure of this mimetic art's ability to put us mentally absorbed by it. into another's shoes in a vivid and immediate way. Our actors entered into the spirit of the work, Eva sug- To empathize with the characterS of the play, to fully gesting that she hold her breath inthedying scene, so as not imagine and vividly live through their experiences, however, to disturb the audience's willing suspension ofdisbelief by be- requires not only an active imagination, skillful reading, a traying that she still lives! It was Tbm who told us thatUncle talented inner ear and an unerring sense of how the characters Tom would surely be young again in heaven, andrequested should look, sound and move about on stage, it requires the permisSion to make him so. Legree, whose throat was con- complete concentration and heightened emotional force which stricted duiihg the entire taping by the effort it, wascosting people; experience in a full house when everyone else's atten- him to be such a villain, gave his own copy of the Bible to tion is similarly focused pn the stage. Difficult to achieve at another member of the cast, saying that he had suddenly felt any time, this state has become all butunattainable for the he had been directed to give it to her. Everyone gave more to armchair play reader who is now accustomed to getting drama the production than any payscale could have merited. from the TV screen or, with a lucky environment, from live But in the course of -doing so, we.got back as much or that you, too,-enact theater itself. more than we had given. I strongly suggest The best way to appreciate Aiken'sUncle Tom's Cabin some scenes from this play: Only thenwill you'make it truly is to read it first, trying to visualize the characters and putting your own. 36 4 ,0 QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION: 2. Assign research projects on the following: Literary Considerations Abolitionists Black Codes 1. -Do you agree with Elizabeth Amnions' characterization gitive Slave Acts (1850) of Torn as "odd"? ,Issouri Compromise 2. Discuss this question by Daniel Gerould "Which set of merican Minstrels beliefs will overcome evil: Tom's defense of faith in the Lord 'tide Tom's Cabin (and its effects) through self-sacrifice, or George's black-nationalist trust in his The Cotton Gin and Slavery pistol and :-:4/c1 aim?" Slavery in the U.S. 3. Compare Aiken's play to Stowe's novel. How does the Underground Railroad -necessity to compress the novel into a play alter the work's Melodrama in the Ain,-f;can theatre themes, characterization, and portrayal of American life and 3. Discuss the origins and changing meanings of the terms slavery? "an Uncle Tom" and "a real Simon Legree!" 4. Discuss the characterizations of black characters con- 4. Discuss why,Liocoln said, "So this is the little lady who trasing a) Eliza and Georgc, b) Tom, c) Topsy, d) Cassie, started the big wairs'When he met Harriet Beecher Stowe. e) Sambo.: 5. Make a time line tracing the history of slavery in the 5. After reading Errol Hill's article, reevaluate the racism United States. of the play. 6. Make one of the the following maps: a) A map showing 6. Birdoff's book isfull of anecdotes which illustrate the the states that had abolished slavery by 1860and those that audience's willingness to accept the fictional world of the play. still maintained it; b) A map showing the main routes and To what extent and in what respect does that audience willing- famous stations of the Underground Railroad in the United ness exist today? -- States prior to the Civil War. 7. Discuss how the need to make l ion ry affected Uncle 7. Keep a one-week diary as: Tom's Cabin in its early days. TV today? Discuss the role of humor in the complete Aiken version a Southern slaveowner 8. an Abolitionist of the play. a slave escaping on the Underground Railroad 9. Discuss the role of a) sentiment and b) melodrama in the a slave on the Louisiana plantation play. a slave woman 10. Discuss the efficacy of the play as a propaganda piece. a slave child 11. Discuss the justice of Furnas' criticism of Uncle Tom's a visitor to a slave quarters on a plantation Cabin reprinted in this book. the daughter of a slave owner/plantation owner The Videotape Harriet Beecher Stowe in the 1850's Discuss how the characters as presented in the VTR dif- an actor in any period of American history 12. 8. Read the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass or fered from your conception of them. Josiah Henson. Discuss our changes in the original Aiken version a) add- 13. 9. Read and report on accounts by freedand escaped ing Topsy's powderir.s and b) using black actors for black slaves. parts. What changed in your re-nonse to the text as a result of 10. Read and report on accounts by American actors of 14. their lives in ti:e theatre. your seeing our videotape? 15. We suggest that you act out the George-Mr. Wilson Contributed by Adrian Hail and the Trinity Square Repertory Com- scene from the play. Can you giless why we omitted itfrom pany from their production of Uncle Tom's Cabin. our VTR? 16. In the novel, Uncle Tom is a young man. On the stage he Acknowledgments: was usually played in his sixties. How do youthink your reponse was affected by our using a younger actor? The editor wishes to thank the following for permission to 17. How would your response have differed if we used white reprint selections from these texts or pictures in their col- actors for Eliza, George, and Cassie? Whites in blackfacefor lections:, Tom, Topsy and Sambo? Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for Kemble, Journal of a Residence on 18. Our doubling (and tripling) were in the tradition'of the play. How did that affect your response? a Georgian Plantation in 1838-39. 19. Read Wells Brown's The Escape or A Leap for Library of Congress for pictures on pp. 9, 18, 26, 29, 30 & 42 Freedom (re: in James Hatch & Ted Shine, Black Museum of the City of New York, Theatre Collection, Brady Theatre: USA aho compare itto the play of Uncle Tom's Collection, auction scene. Cabin in regard to its portrayal of: slavery, black straight and comic characters, white slaveowners, its reception by audi- Oxford University Press for Wilson, Patriotic Gore L ences when recited by its author. From Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin. Copyright 0 20. Read Harriet Beecher Stowe's dramatization of Uncle 1955 by James Baldwin. Used by permission of Beacon Tom's Cabin called A Christian,Slave (Difficult to obtain, this Press, Boston. is a rare book, not included in the standard edition of Stowe's Schomberg Collection, N.Y.P:L. for pictures on pp. 3, 11, 23, Complete Works). Compare it to Aiken's adaptation. and 34. Social Studies Topics for Discussion and Projects:* Simon & Schuster for Fiedler, The Inadvertent Epic. 1. Research and report on thelives of these famous people: Stowe-Day Foundation for pictures on pp. 1, 13, 40. Nat Turner Levi Coffin Solomon Nort'irup John C. Calhoun Theatre Collection, Astor & Tilden Foundations, N.Y.P.L. Harriet Tubman Eli Whitney for pictures on pp. 5, 6, 8, 14, 16, 21, 24, 31 and cover. William Lloyd Garrison Rev. John Rankin Harriet Beecher Stowe Elizabeth Stanton Susan B. Anthony Stephen Foster Phillis Wheatley Edwin Booth Grinike sisters David Belasco Elijah Lovejoy Joseph Jefferson, Ill "41 NOTES

Introduction: Jiji 13L.H, Sigourney, Poems (Phila: liyy and Biddle, 1834), pp. 219- 2 ZO. 'Richard Moody, Dramas from the American Theatre: 1 762.1909 14Wilson J. Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and (Boston. 1966), p. 350. Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth (University Park: Pennsyl- Ralph E. Lund, "Fifty Years of Uncle Tom's Cabin," Munsey's, vania State University Press, 1982), pp. x-xi; l- 4;49 -66. 27, 897. 15Moses, above; see also George NI,Frederickson, The Black 3Harry Birdoff, The World's Greatest 1 /it: Uncle Tom's Cabin Image in the White Mind (N.Y.: Harper, 1971) and Ernest L. Tuveson, (New York, 1946), p. 206. Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's: Millenial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). 4Ndu, Poi, U;411.4MU, 4(1973);-429-.

The Popular Sentiments of Uncle Tom's Cabin: Warshaver Stowe's Black Maternal Christ, Tom: Ammons

I Ellen Moers, Harriet Beecher Stowe and American Literature 'CharlesEdward Stowe, Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe Compiled (Hartford: The Stowe-Day Foundation, 1978), pp. 4, II, and passim. from Her Letters and Journals (Boston and New York: Houghton,. The classic statement on the American Renaissance and its canon is F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Mifflin and Co., 1890), p. 145. Age of Emerson and Whitman (N.Y.: Oxford, 1941), For an accessible "Charles Edward Stowe, Life, pp. 149, 198. and stimulating re-evaluation of the American Renaissance and the 3For full discussion of this idea sec my longer essay "Heroines in writings of Mrs. Stowe, see Larzar Ziff, Literary Democracy: The Uncle Tom's Cabin," in Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Declaration of Cultural Independence M America (N.Y.: Penguin, Elizabeth Amnions (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980), pp. 152-65. 1981). 40nother Beechers' attitudes toward Abolition, as well as anin- `Charles 11, Foster, The Rungless 1.adder: Ilarriet Beecher Stowe Crumpacker, and New England Puritanism (N.Y.: Cooper Square, 1970), pp. 15, 62; teresting discussion of Stowe's later career, see Laurie "Four Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Studyin Nineteenth- Philip Edwards, "The Journey in Pilgrim's Progress" in The Pilgrim's Essays in Femin- Progress: Critical and Historical Views, ed. "nc:ent Newey (Totowa, Century Androgyny" in AmericarkNovelists Revisited: ist Criticism, ed. Fritz Eleischmann (Boston: G.K. Hall,1982), pp. N.J.: Barnes and Noble. 1980), pp. II 1-117-Ire youthful heavy diet of liunyan and other moral works and the ( mce this literature had 78-106. on Mrs. Stowe's tone and stsJeis discusi, .;5/E. Bruce Kirkham, 5See Nina Baym, Women's Fiction; A Guide to'Novels By and The Building of Uncle Tom's Cabin (Knoxville. University of Tennessee About Women, 1820.18 70 (Ithaca; Cornell University Press,1978). Press, 1977), pp. 9-10. 6Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Amonthe 3U:Milo Kaufmann, The Pilgrim's Progress and Traditions in Lowly (Boston: LP, Jewett and Co., 1852). References in the t xt to Puritan Meditation (New Ilaven: Yale University Press, 1966j, p. 233. the novel are to this edition. 4Leo liraudy, "Popular Culture and Personal Time," Yale Review, 7Kathryn Kish Sklar, "Victorian Women and Domestic Life: Mary-- 71 (1982), 486. Todd Lincoln;'Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Harriet BeecherStowe," ed. 5 The Public and the Private Lincoln: Contemporary-Perspectives, Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catherine Beecher, A Study in American Cullom Davis et aL (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UniversityPress, Domesticity (New I laven: Yale University Press, 1973), p. 242. 1979), p. 28. For the relationship betWeen this ideology-and the prac- 6For an °utility of the principle values or motifs of mid-I 9th tice of family limitation in Victorian America, see Sklar'sentire essay, century American cUltitre, see Daniel Walker Howe, "VictorianCulture which is superb. (Phila.: in American," in Victorian America, ed. Daniel Walker Howe 8Charles Edward Stowe, Life, p. 154. University. of Pennsylvania Press, 1976), pp, 3-28.- 9 7 For one of the bent essays oh Tom as a racist stereotype see Ronald G. Walters, American Reformers 1815-1860 (N.Y,-: Hill James Baldwin, "Everybody'-. Protest Novel" in CriticalEssays, ed. and Wang, 1978), p. 95; Willie Lee Rose, "Reforming Women,"New York Review of Books, 29, No. 15 (October 7, 1982), 45-49. Ammons, pp. 92-97. 10 later 8For a detailed analysis of the various types of commercial, For information on the ways in which stage-versions and novels perverted Stowe's characterization,see Thomas P.Riggio, marketed responses to Uncle Tom's Cabin, see Stephen A. Hirsch, "Uncle Tour Reconstructed: A Neglected Chapter in the History of a "Uncle Tomitudes: The Topular Reaction to Uncle Tom's Cabin," in Studies in the American Renaissance, 1978, ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: Book" in Critical Essays, ed. Amnions, pp. 139-51. Twayne, 1978), pp, 303-30. I IIlarriet Beecher Stowe, Religious Studies (1877) in The Writings 91n Eminent Women of the Age; Being Narratives of the Lives and of Ilarriet Beecher Stowe (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin , Deeds of the Most Prominent Women of the Present Generation (I lart- 1896), XV, 36. ford: S.M. Betts, 1868), pp. 85-101, Reverend E.B. Huntington offers a contemporary appraisal of Lydia II.Sigourney. A more modern Setting the Nineteenth Century Stage: Loney biography is Gordon S. Haight's Mrs. Sigourney. the Sweet Singer of Hartford (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1930). Brooks McNamara, The American Playhouse in the Eighteenth 10Sklar., Catherine IMwher, p. XIV; George M. Frederickson, The Century (Cambridge: Harvard Universitj, Press, 1969). Inner Civil War; Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union 2llarloweII.Iloyt, Town Hall Tonight (New York: Brainhall (N,Y.: Harper, 1965). House, 1945). t 775- 3 Ernest . ,...est, The American Eve in Fact and Fiction, 1 Ilarry Birdoff, The World's Greatest Hit (New York: S.F. 1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974), p. 79. Vanni, 1947). 12Eamest, pp. 140.1; Leslie Smith, "Through Rose-ColoredGlasses: 4Birdolf, pp. 317-18, Some A9cricau Victorian Sentimental Novels," in New Dimensions in Pop: Cultue, ed. Russel B. Nye (Bowling Green, Ohio: )cowling 5Garff Wilson,Three Hundred Years of Drama and Theatre Green University Popular Press, 1972). pp. 104-106; Delwyn Sneller, (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-11;111, 1973), pp. 202-07. "The Character and Function of Popular Relitious Poetry 1820-1860," 6Barnard Hewitt, Theatre U.S.A.: 1668.1957 (New York: Mc- in Nye, pp. 172-188. The archetypal stature of Little Eva as the Pure Graw-Hill, 1959), pp. 171-79. 'Young Thing and the Muse of Death is provocatively analyzed by Leslie 7RichardMoody, Dramas from the American Theatre: 1762 -1909 A. Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel, Rev. ed. (NLy.: Stein and Day, 1966), pp. 264-9. (New York: World, 1966), pp. 349-59. 38 13irdoll, op. cit., p. 350. The Case Against Uncle Tom's Cabin: Hill 9Quotedin John J. Jennings, Theatriarl and Circus Life: Or, See New York Times, September 25, 26, 28 and 30, 1945; Secrets of the Stage, Green-Room, and Sawdust Arena (Brandon, Ver- October 16, and 20, 1945; Daily Worker, September 27, 1945. mont: Sidney M, Southard, 1884), p. 179, 2"ow'l,, airs. Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin by her son, Charles Edward Stowe, and her grandson, Lyman Beecher Stowe" in McClure's Considering Unch. Tom's Cabin as Drama: Jiji Magazine, April, 1911, pp. 605-621. 3Benjamin Quarles, ed., Frederick Douglass. Washington, D.C.: The Associated Publisher, 1948, p. 123. 'BruceA. McConachie. "11.1. Conway.s Dramatization of Uncle Tom's Cabin: A Previously Unpublished Letter," Theatre Journal 4Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom. 1855. Re- 34 (May. 1982). p. 152. printed New York; Arno Press and New York Times, 1968, p. 461. 2See Jane P. Tompkins, "Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom's Cabin 5The Liberator, June 3, 1853. Cited in. Carter G. Woodson, ed. and the Politics of Literary History," Glyph 9 , pp. 79-102 for an in- The blind of the Negro as Reflected in Letters Written During the teresting reconsideration of the role of sentiment. Crisis, 1800.1860. Washington, D.C.: The Association for the Study of Negro Life and ilistory, Inc., 1926, p. 360. 3McConachie, op. cit. : , 6ocInaminQuarles,BlackAbolitionists. New York: Oxford An Historical Perspective: Polat nick University Press, 1969. p. 67. , 7Paul Laurence Dunbar, Lyrics of the Ileartliside. New York: BIBLIOGRAPHY Dodd. Mead & Co., 1899. p. 97. Brooks, Van Wyck, The Flowering of New Etigkind. NewYork : 8The Liberator, December 10, 1852, Cited in Woodson, pp. 337- Dutton & Co.. 1936. 338, Crosier, A. The Norcts o/ Ilarriet Beecher Stowe. NewYork.: Oxford 9Quarles, Black Abolitionists, p. 220. University Press, 1960. Foster, C. The Rungless Ladder. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 10!tarry IlirdolL The World's Greatest nit: Uncle Tout's Cabin. 1954. New York: S.P. Vanni. 1947. p. 69, Franklin, J.II. From Slavery to Freedom New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 11Birdoff. p. 77. 1967. I la J.C. Goodbye toUncle Tont. New York: William Sloane Richard Moody, ed., Dramas frontthe American Theatre, Assoc.. 1956. 1762-1909. Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Co., 1966, Gilbertson, C. Ilarriet Beecher Stowe. New York: D. Appleton-Century p. 354. Co., 1937. 12Birdolf. p. 192. (latch, J. ed. Black Theater U.S.A. New York: The Free Press. 1974. 13 Johnston, J. Runaway to Heaven Garden City. New York: Doubleday Ilerbert Aptheker, ed. A Documentary of the Negro People in and Co.. 1963. the United States. vol. II. New York: Citadel Press, 1968, p. 863. Kemble. Frances Anne (Butler). Journal of a Residence on a Georgian 14William Loren Katz. Eyewitness: the Negro in American History. Plantation in 1838-1839. New York: Harper & Bros., 1863. New York: Pitman Publishing Corp., 1967, p. 271, Lader. L. The Bold Brahmins. New York: F.P. Dutton & Co.. 1961. 15 Mabee, C. Black Freedom. Toronto: Macmillan Co.. 1970. Apt heker. vol i1, p. 655. Moody, R. "Uncle Tom, the Theater, and Mrs. Stowe," American 16Aptheker. vol.. 11. p. 657. Heritage, Oct. 1955. W.E. Burghardt DuBois, The Souls of Black Falk: Essays and Mott, LI.. Golden Multitudes-- The Story of Best Sellers in the United Sketches Greenwich. Connecticut: Fawcett Publications, 1961, p. 146, States. New York: Macmillan Co., 1947. Parrington, V, Slain Currents in American Thought. New York: Har- 18E.David Cronon. Black Moses.i the Story of Marcus Garvey and court Brace & Co., 1927., the United Negro Improvement Association, Madison: University of Quarles, B. Black Abolitionists. New York: Oxford University Press, Wisconsin Press. 1955, pp. 172-173. 1969. 19Amy Jacques Garvey, Garrey and Garreyism. London: Collier Stowe. C. Life of Ilarriet Beecher Stowe. Boston: Houghton M iftlin Books, 1963, p. 25. Co., 1889. 20 Stowe, 11.13.Uncle Tom's Cabin Everyman's Library Fdition. New Alain Locke, ed. The New Negro, 1925. Reprinted New York: York: F.P. Dutton, 1961. Atheneum. 1969, pp. 5, 30-31, and 155. Wagenknecht, E. Ilarriet Beecher Stowe The Known and the Unknown. 21I3irdoff. p. 411. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. 22 Wilson, F. Patriotic Gore. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962. Cited in Harold Cruse. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. New Wilson, F. Crusader in Crinoline. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1941. York: William Morrow & Co., Inc.,1967. p. 235, and in Bradford Chambers. Chronicles of Black Protest. New York: New American 1Moody, 29 p. 30. 15Johnston. p. 271. C/ozier, P. 106. Library. 1968, p. 193. "3 -Johnston. p. 225,16/bid.. p. 356. 30Wilson. E.. p. 8. Thomas IVentwortli Higginson, Black Rebellion,1889. Re- 3Mott. p. 117. 17 /bid., p. 358. 31Brooks, p. 465. printed New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1969, p. 55. . 4 I ti 3- I.:3(1er. p. 169. Lacier. pp. 14-5. Moody. p. 30. 3 3 5Mot tp. 118. 191:limas. p. 24. footnote. Stowe. 11.13., p. 44. Some Thoughts on William Wells Brown's The Escape: Perkins 10 . 6Lacier, p, 169. ioster, p. 18. 34Wilson. F.,p. 31. 713rooks. p. 4 20. 2 t Furnas, p. 24, footnote.35'urnas, p. 37. 'Errol Hill, "Black Responses to Uncle Tom's Cabin," in Vera American 36 Jiji,(ed.), A Sourcehook of Interdisciplinary Materials in 8Loiter. p. 169.. -Quarles. pp. 12-3. Quarles, p, 220. Drama: GeorgeI,.Aiken, Uncle Tom's Cabin. (New York, 1983.) 9Mott. 37 p. 118. 23Ibid.,p. 65. Quarles. p. 220. p. 21; Loften Mitchell. Black Drama, (New York,1967). p. 34 10Brooks. 14 3 gThit/.. P. 420. Foster. p. 18. p. 221. II/bid. --Quarles, p. 62. 39Wilson, E., pp. 36-7, 40Mott, 1-Mott. p. 118. 161hid. pp. 61-2. P. 119. 4 1 I 3W ilson, F.,p. 8. 27Lader, p. 171. 1 urnas, pp. 63-4. 4 141 2/1 idp. 271. ader p. 170. 28Fumas. p, 22. 39 43 RIAGN1FICOJTJTODUCTION Jt THAT

CONTRIBUTORS OR LIFE AMONG THE LOWLY. g...*IN NT 1811j10,1411 arOvvr. Dr. Elizabeth Ammons is an associate professor of English and American Studies at Tufts University. She is the editorof Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe(G.K. Hall & Co.: A tilfill-CLASS rN IERTAINMENT Boston, 1980) and the author ofWith Wharton's Argument withAmerica as well as a number of articles on American literature. Dr. Daniel Gerotdd is a professor of Theatre and Com- parative Literature at the City University, Graduate Center. Ile writes about twentieth century theatre and is the editor of the volume.American itielodrama(Performing Arts Journal Publi- cations, 1983) which includes a new edition of Aiken'sUncle Tom's Cabin, Dr. Errol G. Hillisthe John D. Willard Professor of Drama and Oratory, Dartmouth College. Hanover, New Hamp- shire. Ile is inn hor and editor of several volumes of Caribbean (Tex'as Press, 1972) Plays, author ofThe Trinidad Carnival HISTORIC SLAVE MARKET and editor ofTheater of Black Americans,2 vols. (Prentice .;4 1980). Dr. Vera Jiji has written the unsigned sections and has iiA111 Of TOIL- SLOOPS IllinfInin tow&ri In tiesDqrsat chosen and arranged the primary source materials and illustra- aro noel la sa %tat's,' tions. She is a professor of English at Brooklyn College whose *woo011s interest in the relationship between drama and society has led facipki from au S16 re-huts, to the creation of this program. ) Dr. Glenn Loney (Editorial Consultant) is a professor of A GREAT AND MORAL PLAY. theatre at Brooklyn College and in the Theatre Ph.D. Program COSMO WITH ALL THI Mt 4% OffA 4,4)....,cuoit.o. Trva 111111 at the City University Graduate Center.lis special interest is 1111.41 01 410$ TAAL co...cowmen American Theatre history, and he's a founding member of the League of historic American Theatres. A drama critic and BRIGHT theatre journalist, he has just edited an anthology of nineteenth 4 *000 pnmeoRMANCH IkALWA1. century American dramas about the Far West. 410W1111 OF PAOLO'. kiln Dr. William Eric Perkins has published widely in the deplete with Comedy aril Pathos fieldof Afro-American history. He is presently with1 TS, mei mingling with tears ins Princeton. moat marvelous fashion Florence Polatnick taught Social Studies for twenty iz ij, I 4 years, has done extensive curriculum work, conducted work- 11 11J iNi IPSO COI shops, and acted as an educational consultant. In 1971, she RUNE Si was named outstanding teacher by the National Council for 141L/ JP1K111.4 113 1:31 fO11411 10E4 1141 Georgr.Education. Author of two books on Africa and .ofessional journals, Mrs. Polatnick is now retired biREATH °FAIR FROM THE SUNNY :SOUTH andke, outof mischief by lecturing, giving in-service courses and writing. PLANTATION SONGS AND MELODIES...... NW semi laorrla, 1100000 Dr. Gerald Warshaver is I lumanities Scholar in Residence as amillogge .1gsg, at Connecticut Public Radio. Ilk prime research interest is 00 111,000 110111.1, 1.0S 11,1%.14.a. 00 1.00001011110001. ilrra, in the relationship between literature and social history. . VW tog as. targ.....4. -Vass Um. WM iogg Jiggled Loom Vie 4.404 V1010. gLont,Vilma The Program for Culture at Play: Multimedia Studies in 11,0110 Ihrerog isoggawrganke OVVes American Drama is sponsored by the National Endownment 7CA gm Is Dslighttel, Was-

for the Humanities. We are issuing a series of studies of un- . &rad, leorscilveeend]Welt justly neglected American plays. Along with this handbook, we have produced a videotape version ofUncle Tom's Cabin PUM*Sti..Alill SUM VMS condensed for classroom use. Performing Arts Journal Publica- MIN le HMO ' tions haS issued a new text of Aiken's play in the volume, - 44141sa Ion.. ow ...kr. (1983). VTR's and handbooks can be ZrktZ.:==:".= :74.= American Melodrama . 1%v.& ...WWIOw SY woe. orderedthroughBrooklyn College,Bedford Avenue and 41....!+.1.4.1.0..1111.11.0 Avenue II, Brooklyn, New York, 11210, texts throh Per- In WM 11121119M14110,411. v. *.volvmev1.110.611 IV 40~ 1.11~ forming Arts Journal Publications, 325 Spring Street, New 1100..614.1.1.se.01arrotoevitae... vow mom York City. SAW100PAL This is the second in our series. The first, on Paulding's 111111411.' The Lion of the West (1831)is available through Brooklyn WINS 11Prrlf Maar eL ter College. The third play to be featured. Arent'sOne Third of a Nation (1938)will be produced in Spring, 1984. 40 4 Please till out, tear off, and return. YOUR ORDERS:

Send me: copies of the 55 minute videotape of Aiken's Uncle YOUR INPUT: Tom's Cabin @: $185.00

We want your input and support. Please check the statements copies.of the 15 minute "sampler" cassette of Uncle, ' you agree,wit h. Tom's Cabin Ca' 555.00 (Purchasers may return samplers, in good condition, with 5135.00 additional _I'd like to see more units of this kind and hereby for the full tape.) express my support for this project.

. Tape format: 1/2"VHS; 1/2"Beta (No. ); Videotapes are a vital element in helping my students other (please list) --to understand drama. copies of the Handbook of Source Materials on,,the -- SOurcebooksprovidevaluableassistanceinin- Aiken/StoweUncle Tom's Cabin (1852) 40 pp. + struction. ill., ed. Vera M. Jiji, paper, 54.50. . I have videotapes to share with other academics on a copies of J.K. Paulding, The Lion of the West, ed. non-profit basis. J.N. Tidwell, paper, 53.00. They include copies of the Handbook of Source Materials on The Lion of the West, ed. V.M. Jiji (24 pp., ill.) in paper, S2.00. (Orders for 10 or more copies at 20% discount) I'd like the next unit to be on: Institutional orders accepted on letterhead. Invoices will be sent upon request. 1. The Federal Theatre's One-third of a Nation 2.Other Individudl orders must be accompanied by payment. Checks or money orders made out to Multimedia Keep me on your mailing list. Studies in American Drama.

Bill my college for the checked items and reference Other comment$: me as source of order.

Name Address

Academic Afffiliation

American Melodrama, which contains a newly edited version of Aiken's Uncle Tom's Cabin (plus The Girl of the Golden West, Under the Gaslight and The Poor of New York) is available from Performing Art's Journal Publications 325 Spring St., Room 318 New York, N.Y. 10013 Cloth S21.95 Paper S7.95.

SEND ORDERS TO:

Professor Vera Jiji Multimedia Studies in American Drama Brooklyn College Bedford Avenue and Avenue H Brooklyn, N.Y. 11210 41 45 STOWAGE OF THE BRITISH SLAVE SHIP BROOKES UNDER THE . . ItE GULATE 1) SLAVE 'FRAm.., A, I HI 17,1S

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