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WHEN UNCLE TOM DIDN'T DIE: THE ANTISLAVERY POLITICS OF H. J. CONWAY'S UNCLE TOM'S CABIN

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 August 2012

Adena Spingarn
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Extract

Although Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin is widely credited with helping turn the nation against slavery and hastening the Civil War, the theatrical productions based on her novel have precisely the opposite reputation. Many scholars believe that despite the initial antislavery influence of George L. Aiken's 1852 dramatization, the Uncle Tom plays rapidly degraded, becoming more harmful than helpful to African Americans. The plays are also frequently blamed for turning Uncle Tom, the heroic Christian martyr of Stowe's novel, into the submissive race traitor his name connotes today. The “process of vulgarization” that afflicted the Uncle Tom's Cabin dramas is said to have begun almost immediately, with the 1852 premiere of H. J. Conway's adaptation. Today, Conway's version is widely designated a pro-Southern or compromise dramatization of Uncle Tom's Cabin, especially compared to Aiken's influential adaptation, which is considered to have the strongest antislavery message of the many adaptations and to be the most faithful to Stowe's novel.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 53 , Issue 2 , September 2012 , pp. 203 - 218
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2012

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References

Endnotes

1. According to David Reynolds, the most recent chronicler of the cultural history of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Uncle Tom of the American stage “was often presented as a stooped, obedient old fool, the model image of a submissive black man preferred by post-Reconstruction, pre-civil rights America. It was this Uncle Tom, weakened both physically and spiritually, who became a synonym for a racial sellout by the mid-20th century.” David Reynolds, “Rescuing the Real Uncle Tom,” New York Times, 13 June 2011. This op-ed coincided with the publication of Reynolds's Mightier Than the Sword: “Uncle Tom's Cabin” and the Battle for America (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2011)Google Scholar, which similarly argues that the Uncle Tom dramas stripped Stowe's novel of its progressive politics.

2. Gossett, Thomas F., “Uncle Tom's Cabin” and American Culture (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985), 387Google Scholar.

3. Birdoff, Harry, The World's Greatest Hit: “Uncle Tom's Cabin” (New York: S. F. Vanni, 1947)Google Scholar.

4. Lott, Eric, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 273 n. 4Google Scholar. Scholarly works that rely on Birdoff's account include not only Gossett and Reynolds but Meer, also Sarah, Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005)Google Scholar; and Toll, Robert C., Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974)Google Scholar.

5. Stowe, Charles Edward and Stowe, Lyman Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Story of Her Life (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 148Google Scholar.

6. See Meer.

7. Gossett, 260.

8. Meer, 129.

9. Walter Scott Howard, “From Slavery to Prohibition: A History of the Drama of Uncle Tom's Cabin” (unpublished MS, 1931), 46. George C. Howard Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. Also in Bogar, Thomas A., John E. Owens: Nineteenth Century American Actor and Manager (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002), 50Google Scholar.

10. In this letter to Kimball, Conway detailed two “difficulties of magnitude,” neither of which referenced the play's politics: the first was working out the complicated plot's timeline, and the second was effectively combining the characters of Eliza and Emmeline in order to focus the audience's sympathy and avoid adding an extra actor to the cast. H. J. Conway to Moses Kimball, 1 June 1852, Moses Kimball letters, Boston Athenaeum, Boston, MA. For further discussion of correspondence related to the Boston Museum's staging of Uncle Tom's Cabin, see McConachie, Bruce, “H. J. Conway's Dramatization of Uncle Tom's Cabin: A Previously Unpublished Letter,” Theatre Journal 34.2 (1982): 149–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kahn, Edward, “Creator of Compromise: William Henry Sedley Smith and the Boston Museum's Uncle Tom's Cabin,” Theatre Survey 41.2 (2000): 71–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. Entry for 20 November 1852, William Henry Sedley Smith diary, Boston Public Library Rare Books and Manuscripts, Boston, MA, Smith's italics. My analysis of Smith's diary is indebted to Edward Kahn's “Creator of Compromise”; but whereas Kahn begins from the premise that Conway's play compromised Stowe's antislavery politics and concludes that Smith's political views must have made him effect this compromise, I read Conway's script as antislavery rather than compromise and see no evidence in the diary or the letters of Smith's intervention in the Conway script's politics.

12. Entry for 22 January 1853, William Henry Sedley Smith diary.

13. Entry for 12 March 1854, ibid.

14. “Boston Museum: Uncle Tom's Cabin,” Frederick Douglass' Paper, 3 December 1852. Reprinted from the Boston Commonwealth.

15. Parker Pillsbury, “Uncle Tom's Cabin at a Boston Theatre,” The Liberator, 24 December 1852, 1.

16. “Uncle Tom's Cabin Abroad,” The Liberator, 7 January 1853, 1, reprinted from the Quincy Patriot.

17. This was not the first time that Barnum picked up one of Kimball's productions for his own use in New York. Barnum and Kimball sustained a decades-long friendship, during which Barnum often wrote to Kimball asking him to share scripts and exhibits (e.g., The General in 1847 and William Henry Sedley Smith's The Drunkard in 1848) and recommendations (e.g., for a good naturalist for the museum exhibitions in 1849, an extra Egyptian mummy in 1870).

18. Barnum was a slaveowner earlier in his life, but in 1855, he wrote Unitarian minister and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson that “I have traveled much in the southern states & have got to abhor the curse from witnessing its fruits. I have spent months on the cotton plantations of Mississippi, where I have seen more than one ‘Legree.’ ” Ten years later, he gave an impassioned speech to the Connecticut legislature arguing that the right to vote should be “extended to every educated and moral man within our state, regardless of color.” Barnum to Rev. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, ca. April 1855, in Saxon, A. H., ed. Selected Letters of P. T. Barnum (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 86Google Scholar; “Connecticut Legislature,” Hartford Daily Courant, 25 May 1865, 2Google Scholar.

19. “Uncle Tom at Barnum's,” New York Tribune, 15 November 1853, 7.

20. “Uncle Tom at Barnum's,” The Liberator, 16 December 1853, 1.

21. Advertisement for Barnum's American Museum, New York Tribune, 16 November 1853. The same ad reappeared on 17 November (see Fig. 2).

22. Advertisement for Barnum's American Museum, New York Tribune, 7 November 1853. The same text appears in advertisements from 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, and 15 November in both the Tribune and the Times (see Fig. 1).

23. Advertisement for Barnum's American Museum, New York Times, 12 November 1853.

24. “Uncle Tom at Barnum's,” New York Tribune, 15 November 1853, 7.

25. Ibid.

26. H. J. Conway, “Uncle Tom's Cabin: A Drama in Five Parts,” 5.3, unpublished MS, Boston, 1852. The Conway script has not been published in print, but it is available on the University of Virginia's excellent Web page titled “H. J. Conway's Uncle Tom,” http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/onstage/scripts/conwayhp.html. This transcription of the play was extracted from a manuscript version of the promptbook that was used in an 1876 production at the Boston Museum. The promptbook is housed at The Howard Collection, Performing Arts Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin. (Subsequent citations of Conway's version will appear parenthetically in the text.)

27. Ibid.

28. Advertisement for Barnum's American Museum, New York Tribune, 16 November 1853. This advertisement is misquoted in Meer's Uncle Tom Mania in a manner that suggests a radically different reading: the key phrase “slavery as it is” is overlooked (probably because of the two-page layout of the reproduction of the advertisement in Birdoff's The World's Greatest Hit), so the advertisement seems to argue that the “Southern Negro”—and not “Southern Negro slavery as it is”—is abhorrently deformed, cruel, and barbaric.

29. “Justice,” “Uncle Tom at Barnum's,” New York Tribune, 17 November 1853, 5.

30. “Uncle Tom at Barnum's,” New York Tribune, 15 November 1853, 7.

31. William Lloyd Garrison to Helen E. Garrison, 5 September 1853, in The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison: From Disunionism to the Brink of War, 1850–1860, ed. Ruchames, Louis (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1975), 247–8Google Scholar.

32. Editorial, New York Tribune, 17 November 1853, 4.

33. Daily Commercial Register (Sandusky, OH), 21 November 1853, 2.

34. “Barnum and Uncle Tom,” Ashtabula Sentinel, 24 November 1853.

35. “Uncle Tom at Barnum's,” New York Tribune, 2 December 1853. 7.

36. Ibid.

37. Bruce McConachie, the first scholar to write about the recovered 1876 Conway–Aiken script, compared it to the 1852 playbills and concluded that the 1876 version seemed to match the original Conway play (except, of course, where it is replaced by the Aiken text). McConachie, , “Out of the Kitchen and into the Marketplace: Normalizing Uncle Tom's Cabin for the Antebellum Stage,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 3.1 (1991): 5–28Google Scholar. Prior to the script's recovery, Robert Toll's description of the play as “pro-Southern” (92), a judgment largely based on Birdoff's assessment, was generally accepted. With the discovery of the 1876 script, this understanding of Conway's play was somewhat amended to, as McConachie described it, “mildly anti-slavery” (23), or, according to Eric Lott, a work of “relatively complacent politics” (214). Recent scholarship has begun to complicate this reading of Conway: Sarah Meer describes the Conway Uncle Tom's Cabin as “more muddled in its politics than calculating” (120), and Les Harrison, contesting the notion of Aiken's play as true to Stowe's novel and Conway's as inauthentic, notes the preponderance of debate in Conway's play, a dramatic strategy that embraces a part of Stowe's novel that Aiken's script largely ignores. Harrison, , The Temple and the Forum (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 143–4Google Scholar.

38. Aiken, George L., Uncle Tom's Cabin (New York: Samuel French, 1858)Google Scholar, http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/onstage/scripts/aikenhp.html, 6.6.

39. “Uncle Tom at Barnum's,” New York Tribune, 2 December 1853, 7.

40. Richard Yarborough, for example, describes Uncle Tom's death as one of the novel's political failings, writing that for Stowe, “Heavenly salvation might indeed be possible for blacks, but a truly just interracial society was inconceivable.” Yarborough, , “Strategies of Black Characterization in Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Early Afro-American Novel,” in New Essays on “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” ed. Sundquist, Eric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 45–84, at 65Google Scholar.

41. Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom's Cabin, ed. Ammons, Elizabeth (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1994), 365Google Scholar, Stowe's italics.

42. Ibid., 388.

43. “To be bought, to be freed, and brought back to my home and children by the labor of my wife's hands, a free man! Have I prayed in vain? Said I not, ‘Thy will be done!’” Conway, Uncle Tom's Cabin, 3.2.

44. Aiken, Uncle Tom's Cabin, 5.2.

45. Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin, 202.

46. Playbill for Uncle Tom's Cabin, Park Theater (New York), 22 May 1876, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.

47. “Uncle Tom's Cabin” [1876], George C. Howard Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin.