RACIAL MELODRAMA AND MODES OF PRODUCTION
It is a sad blunder; for when our stage shall become the deliberate agent in the cause of abolitionism, with the sanction of the public, and their approbation, the peace and harmony of this Union will soon be ended.
—NEW YORK HERALD (1852)
In January 1854 T. D. Rice took the Bowery Theatre stage as Tom in one of the numberless dramatic productions of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Rice’s path from celebrated Jim Crow in the early 1830s to sympathetic Uncle Tom twenty years later highlights the improbable political geometry of blackface minstrelsy. Surely Rice’s Bowery appearance in a more or less antislavery play registered a series of changes: changes in the theater’s social position, now as close to lower million as to upper ten; changes in theatrical production, as melodrama was now spliced to blackface performance; and changes, evidently, in racial representation itself. Even half a dozen years earlier it would have seemed preposterous thus to cast Rice, an originator of blacking up. We ought not, however, let these changes obscure the extent to which the great midcentury vogue of “Tom shows” owed precisely to the blackface tradition. The stage conventions of such productions, which included minstrel tunes and blackface makeup, were clearly those of minstrelsy; dramatizations of Uncle Tom foregrounded not only sectional conflict but also the blackface forms that had shadowed it. “He is decidedly the best personator of negro character who has appeared in any drama,” wrote the Spirit of the Times of Rice as Uncle Tom, obliterating the distinction between the play and the minstrel show (January 21, 1854). Uncle Tom’s Cabin onstage was in one sense minstrelsy’s logical antebellum conclusion, and by the 1850s casting Rice as Uncle Tom followed a train of thought. It confirms the equivocal character of racial representation—of blackface minstrelsy and Uncle Tom’s Cabin both—just prior to the Civil War.
One might say this state of affairs issued from the Compromise of 1850. With party politics nearly swallowed up by sectional feeling, Congress attempted through legislation to forestall an ultimate crisis of sectional division. Compromise designer Henry Clay’s chief provisions for “the peace, concord, and harmony of the Union” amounted to a sort of sectional balancing act: the admission of California as a free state but no restrictions regarding slavery in other territories gained from Mexico; the prohibition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia but no abolition of slavery there. The gravest item, which threw off the balance, was a call for the more effectual capture and remittance of fugitive slaves, eventuating in the Fugitive Slave Law in 1851. Compromise fever extended from Clay of Kentucky to Daniel Webster of (it seemed) all New England; Webster’s famous Seventh of March speech clinched the deal.1 For his acceptance of slavery in the name of Compromise and Union, Webster was excoriated far and wide (from Emerson’s disdain to Whittier’s “Ichabod”), and Stowe composed first “The Freeman’s Dream” (1850) and then Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–52) in outrage over his efforts.2 America’s most popular nineteenth-century novel made sectional conflict an inescapable cultural matter. Turning this conflict into affecting tableaux, Uncle Tom’s dramatists deepened sectional discord; for every one of the three hundred thousand who bought the novel in its first year, many more eventually saw the play.3 Yet to varying degrees the stage versions followed from the Compromise in another sense: they attempted to match its sectional tact. This was particularly so in the fence-sitting dramatizations that tried to make antislavery a stroke for Union; but even in the version most faithful to Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was itself a compromise between antislavery politics and established entertainment conventions.
The reader will have noticed the equivocation in my account: Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a break from but also a continuation of blackface minstrelsy; minstrelsy and Uncle Tom as of equally uncertain provenance. I have found this ambiguity an unavoidable product of the revolutionary 1850s. The fact is that the Tom plays fully revealed this decade’s social and racial contradictions, and thus finished off what the minstrel show had unintentionally begun. Not only were there versions of the play written from antislavery, moderate, and proslavery positions—the lot of them informed by the devices of the minstrel show—but they all took up in their very formal structures the sectional division, based on competing economic systems, that would soon culminate in civil war. Indeed, “modes of production” is a doubly resonant phrase, aptly invoking both theatrical forms and economic formations. Onstage each sectional mode had its characteristic tone, politics, and regime of racial representation, and these were visible in the competing productions of Uncle Tom, if not indeed in a single production. To produce the play was by definition to engage in a divisive cultural struggle. While the plays tried to tame down their material with melodrama, their political consequence was heated journalistic and street debate, sometimes conducted right outside the theater. The cultural manifestations of America’s competing modes of production warred within the shared language of Uncle Tom’s Cabin—the precise condition, writes Fredric Jameson, of cultural revolution (Political 89–100). Putnam’s Monthly in 1853 termed this situation “Uncle Tomitudes,” which it could not have known would result in a prelude to civil war on the stage.
After a forty-week run in the Free-Soil National Era, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in book form on March 20, 1852. Something of the immediacy of its impact may be gauged from the fact that its first stage production occurred during its serialization, before the book appeared. Since no law existed copyrighting fictional material for stage use, adapters were free to appropriate at will. In January 1852 a short-lived anti-Tom play, Uncle Tom’s Cabin as It Is; The Southern Uncle Tom, was produced at the Baltimore Museum. The telling echo of Bowery melodrama (most evidently the 1848 Mose vehicle New York As It Is) fixes the social cast of this adaptation no less than the more successful ones that followed it. Pursuing emotionally wrought narrative with a racial theme, stage adapters of Uncle Tom’s Cabin simply conjoined the forms they found appropriate to the attempt at hand, melodrama and blackface, for audiences already more than familiar with them.4
When the novel was published, Asa Hutchinson of the reform-oriented Hutchinson Family Singers approached Stowe about a possible stage adaptation, which the author, Puritan antitheatrical prejudices intact, declined.5 Particularly with no approval from Stowe forthcoming to even the most congenial of adapters, the way was opened for the canny professional. The first serious attempt at a stage version was that of C. W. Taylor, which ran at New York’s Purdy’s National Theatre for about ten performances in late August and early September 1852. Reaching haphazardly for the novel’s coattails, this hour-long Uncle Tom’s Cabin shared the bill with a T. D. Rice burlesque of Shakespeare called Otello and other minor acts. The rather bald attempt to mute sectional controversy with blackface parody, and Taylor’s reckless editorial hand (St. Clare, Eva, and Topsy were absent), did not prevent the New York Herald among others from finding in this Uncle Tom a disturbing abolitionist portent.6 But it was two competing dramatizations, those of George Aiken and H. J. Conway, that would rule the market in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Even as Taylor’s production gave halting visibility to the Tom show, the Aiken and Conway versions were gestating in Troy, New York, and Boston, respectively. Like Taylor, Aiken appears to have been overcome by the weight of Stowe’s material, and omitted Tom’s story in his Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which premiered in Troy on September 27, 1852. Having given all his attention to Little Eva (partly in deference to the child star of the George C. Howard acting family, Cordelia Howard), Aiken was soon forced by his play’s popularity and its sins of omission to write a sequel, The Death of Uncle Tom, or The Religion of the Lowly. The sequel’s odd detachment from the rest of the story is probably what persuaded Aiken and his company to make the daring move of combining the two parts into a single play, a whole night’s show of six acts, eight tableaux, and thirty scenes—the first full-length, night-long dramatic production to date (Ames 1045–52). Aiken’s adaptation is the one that has come down to us as the definitive dramatic treatment of Stowe’s work, in part because it is the only one for which we have an authoritative script, and in part because it is so attentive to Stowe’s intentions and even her words, though there are certainly lapses in dramatic efficacy. Aiken does conjure much theatrical excitement out of scenes such as the battle between the George Harris escape party and the slave traders, but he deemphasizes or omits some characters and scenes crucial to Stowe’s message and invents others with unclear motivation. Aiken does not dramatize the self-conscious trickery of Sam and Andy, for instance, erasing some of the novel’s more telling instances of black agency under slavery.7 Miss Ophelia, however, is supplied with a love interest in the person of one Deacon Perry, and much of this subplot devolves into trivial farce. Aiken also leans heavily on two low-comedy types, a Quaker frontiersman lifted from Stowe and a callow Yankee called Gumption Cute. In other major respects, however, Aiken follows Stowe’s story and vents her chief arguments against slavery.8 This Uncle Tom played a record-breaking one hundred nights in Troy before opening at Purdy’s National Theatre in New York on July 18, 1853.
Meanwhile, Conway’s adaptation was taking shape at Kimball’s Museum in Boston, opening there as the full-length Aiken opened in Troy on November 15, 1852.9 This dramatization departs from Aiken’s on a number of counts, most notably in its relatively complacent politics. Its criticism of slavery is voiced largely by another invented Yankee figure, Penetrate Partyside, a sort of roving reporter in the South à la Dickens or Frederick Law Olmsted; Conway’s ambivalence about such observers is manifested in the curious doubleness of Party-side, who may one moment harshly criticize slavery and the next question Eva’s “taste” in wanting her father to buy Uncle Tom (2.2). Conway depicts at great length a slave auction in which Legree rigs the bidding so that he can capture Tom, but this only weakens Stowe’s case against slavery’s contractual ordinariness. In any event a variety of minstrel gags and cracks softens Conway’s mild antislavery perspective. Conway, unlike Aiken, avoids any too inflammatory feeling by setting Tom free in the play’s happy ending (George Shelby has meanwhile freed Chloe and the children), and a confounding final address to the audience sends best wishes to “our” Uncle Tom, hoping “his life may be happy, though it be life among the lowly” (6.3). P. T. Barnum got wind of the Conway version’s impressive run and Compromise politics and booked it for the American Museum beginning November 7, 1853.
These two major adaptations aired in the giddy atmosphere of other, almost incidental versions of Uncle Tom; a rewritten version by Taylor at the National and a Bowery Theatre version by H. E. Stevens starring T. D. Rice, for instance, premiered in January 1854.10 The theatrical world was soon crowded with offshoots, parodies, thefts, and rebuttals of every imaginable kind—a “magic lantern” version (tableaux from the play) at the Franklin Museum, innumerable blackface lampoons such as Charles White’s Uncle Dad’s Cabin (1855), Christy and Wood’s Minstrels’ full-scale Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Hearts and Homes (1854), the former Virginia Minstrel Frank Brower’s Happy Uncle Tom (1854), George Christy’s Lights and Shadows of Southern Life or, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1858), Irish parodies such as Uncle Pat’s Cabin (by H. J. Conway) and Uncle Mike’s Cabin (1853), and so on ad nauseam.11
As even this casual and incomplete list suggests, Uncle Tom’s Cabin very quickly dominated northern popular culture, and did so for several years.12 How much so may be gleaned from one of the play’s early patrons, Henry James. James’s remarks in A Small Boy and Others concerning his youthful trips to both the Conway version of Uncle Tom at Barnum’s Museum and the Aiken version at the National have been taken for the swipes at Stowe they are, but the swipes also serve James’s half-articulated notion that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a new kind of cultural artifact, a sign of change in the character of American culture. “We lived and moved at that time, with great intensity, in Mrs. Stowe’s novel … my first experiment in grown-up fiction.” In this and other observations, James’s memory of Stowe’s book is saturated with a sense of its nontextual nature, its pithy and immediate provision of flesh-and-blood life—“less a book than a state of vision, of feeling and of consciousness, in which [readers] didn’t sit and read and appraise and pass the time, but walked and talked and laughed and cried and, in a manner of which Mrs. Stowe was the irresistible cause, generally conducted themselves” (167). The gush of this sentence so exceeds the studied gentle irony of A Small Boy that we may be sure of Stowe’s early effect on James. And its brief antiliterary enthusiasm is the context for what follows:
Appreciation and judgment, the whole impression, were thus an effect for which there had been no process—any process so related having in other cases had to be at some point or other critical; nothing in the guise of a written book, therefore, a book printed, published, sold, bought and “noticed,” probably ever reached its mark, the mark of exciting interest, without having at least groped for that goal as a book or by the exposure of some literary side. Letters, here, languished unconscious, and Uncle Tom, instead of making even one of the cheap short-cuts through the medium in which books breathe, even as fishes in water, went gaily round about it altogether, as if a fish, a wonderful “leaping” fish, had simply flown through the air. This feat accomplished, the surprising creature could naturally fly anywhere, and one of the first things it did was thus to flutter down on every stage, literally without exception, in America and Europe. If the amount of life represented in such a work is measurable by the ease with which representation is taken up and carried further, carried even violently furthest, the fate of Mrs. Stowe’s picture was conclusive: it simply sat down wherever it lighted and made itself, so to speak, at home; thither multitudes flocked afresh and there, in each case, it rose to its height again and went, with all its vivacity and good faith, through all its motions. (168)
James’s metaphor of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as one of Barnum’s oddities—a performing fish—communicates in form and in content that he is speaking in these lines of the culture industry itself. Stowe surely suffers a good deal of condescension here, but from another angle she seems the co-inventor with Barnum of a new ubiquity of popular culture. Uncle Tom leaps from the page, evading his textual confinement and springing into national consciousness as an aerial fact with no apparent links to the mechanics of production (“printed, published, sold, bought and ‘noticed’”) or of form (“simply [flying] through the air”). Indeed, James’s hesitancy in the final sentence between Uncle Tom as a work of fiction, a “measurable” “representation,” and Uncle Tom as a living being, “ma[king] itself, so to speak, at home” and going “through all its motions,” indicates an eye-rubbing uncertainty about the precise status of this new cultural force. More than in its taking a full evening’s performance time, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was revolutionary in its effortless and near-immediate replication everywhere; rousing for its politics but apprehended as pop-culture iconography, the story so transcended the usual media of culture that it put an uncanny new spin on one’s relation to the culture. Uncle Tom was at once all places and specifiably nowhere. It was this quality as much as anything else to which Lincoln referred when he famously attributed the Civil War to Stowe.
A résumé of the scene-ending tableaux in the Bowery Theatre production of the play (starring Rice) gives the rhythm and flavor of Uncle Tom’s melodramatic reproducibility: Eliza’s escape; Eliza’s peril on the ice; Eliza’s preservation; the freeman’s defense; the death of Eva; the death of St. Clare; the murder of Tom; the death of Chloe; and the “realms of bliss” (Moreau vol. 1). This is very nearly Uncle Tom as silent film—which it would indeed become quite early in cinematic history.13 Dramatists crafted Uncle Tom’s Cabin into an allegorical series, a set of holy pictures. To this extent the story carried the religious aura with which Stowe had invested it but lost the precise political import Stowe’s intrusive and pointedly abrasive narrative voice had been able to enforce. Where in the novel there was melodrama pinned to a politics of antislavery domestic feminism, onstage there were free-floating trademark pictographs with greater or lesser political bite, according to the production. Throw in a little blackface activity, the “cultural dominant” in antebellum racial portrayal, and one has the recipe for an extremely uncertain political play.
The proximity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin shows to blackface performance is suggested in a New York Daily Times account of the Aiken adaptation, “‘Uncle Tom’ Among the Bowery Boys.” When a blackfaced G. C. Germon made his entrance in the role of Uncle Tom, the Times reported, the audience geared up for a laugh, for he had “that accent which, in the theatre, is associated always with the comic.” He might easily have been taken, said the reviewer, for
a camp-meeting preacher [who would] overdo the matter, or he would be so ignorant as to make his religious sentiments ridiculous. His very first words, however, showed that a good hand had his part. The accent, a broad and guttural negro accent, but the voice deep and earnest—so earnest, that the first laugh at his nigger words, from the pit, died away into deep stillness. “No,” said he, “I can’t run away. Let her [Eliza] go—it’s her right! If I must be sold, le’b me [be] sold—Mass’r allers found me on the spot. I nebber hab broke my trust, and nebber will.” (July 27, 1853)
One historian alleges that Germon had feared tainting his career by playing a “Jim Crow darkey,” and while this is probably only speculation, it does specify the theatrical convention that any Uncle Tom inherited (Birdoff 42). Indeed, the lines quoted in the Times at first glance only reinforce the association of Uncle Tom’s Cabin dramas with minstrel-show sentimentalism. Strikingly, while Uncle Tom in Stowe’s novel had been a strong and reasonably young man, Uncle Tom in successive productions of the play grew older and older, no doubt owing to the influence of minstrelsy’s pathetic elderly men such as Stephen Foster’s “Old Uncle Ned.”14
The changes Stowe’s tale underwent in making the transition from page to stage underscore its indebtedness to the minstrel tradition. Both Aiken and Conway, as Bruce McConachie observes, generally gutted the novel’s gender politics, cutting such major female moral exemplars as Rachel Halliday and Mrs. Bird, and reducing the roles of Eliza and Aunt Ophelia to passive victim and comic old maid, respectively (“Out” 10–11). By and large, the plays turn the fight for black freedom into male combat; Conway substitutes George Harris’s gunfight with Haley, Loker, and Marks for Eliza’s crossing of the Ohio, and in both it is the return of young George Shelby and various others to the Legree plantation, not Stowe’s matrifocal polis, that really tips the scales.15 Without the female axis on which Tom and other blacks in the novel are aligned, and are thereby (at least in intention) enhanced—Stowe’s “romantic racialism”—the black types in the Uncle Tom dramas drift free, veering between the devoted and the daft, one hardly better than the other. Nor is this effect countered by any truly sustained critique of slavery, as in the novel.16
What remains in both adaptations are moments straight from Christy. In Aiken, Legree enjoins Sambo and Quimbo to “sing and dance one of their dances” (6.3); Topsy and little Harry do so at the playwright’s behest. Whereas Stowe wryly references “Jim Crow” in regard to these characters (44, 352), in Aiken, St. Clare’s description of Topsy as “rather a funny specimen in the Jim Crow line” is not only much less ironized but right on target (2.2). Mrs. G. C. Howard’s Topsy—“I ’spects I’s de wickedest critter in de world” (2.4)—was a departure from the minstrel show’s typical female types, whose ridicule depended on their overripe aptitude or special inaptness for courtship and love; Topsy, by contrast, was Miss Ophelia’s mischievous, unruly sidekick, a sort of female match for the rustic Jim Crow.17 “Destined to become for Anglo-Saxon millions the type of the absolute in the artless,” as James wrote, Howard’s Topsy set the standard for future stage Topsys as well as for the character’s pictorial representation in nineteenth-century engravings and illustrations (172). Conway’s Uncle Tom actually begins with a minstrel show. In a remarkable diversion from both Stowe’s novel and Aiken’s version of it, in which Eliza and George Harris’s bitter and terrified conversation about the imminent separation of their family sets the plot in motion, Conway foregrounds slaves singing blackface choruses: “Sam Solo: Come lay it out you niggers, /Come hoe it down with me, /The way we’ll heel and toe it out/Will be a sight to see” (1.1). In this version Sam and Andy are highlighted but function as virtual endmen of the group, straightaway beginning a minstrel dialogue about some horses which is sustained when Mrs. Shelby enters the conversation in the interlocutor’s role.
Yet the fact that minstrelsy itself in the early 1850s was no unitary political phenomenon makes the stage Uncle Tom a startlingly ambiguous text. The knotted inextricability of minstrel-show trappings from the Uncle Tom tradition begs the question of the work’s influence on the minstrel tradition. Stephen Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home, Good-Night!” (1853), with its Kentucky cabin and separating family, was directly inspired by Stowe (its working title was “Poor Uncle Tom, Good Night”); Foster’s song became a staple of the plays, as did his “Old Folks at Home” (1851). The emergent sentimental strain of blackface minstrelsy took heart from Uncle Tom’s Cabin and infused it in turn. William Austin writes that Foster’s sense of his work was “thrown into some confusion” when Uncle Tom’s stage adaptations began to give his blackface songs a more respectable gloss than they or even his genteel compositions had previously received; certainly his reputation was enhanced by his association with Uncle Tom (236). In this respect, Austin argues, the blackface plantation-song tradition and the Uncle Tom tradition “overlapped and nearly coalesced” (235), and Harry Birdoff goes so far as to lament that no production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin scored by Foster ever occurred (138).
Tempting though the prospect may be, Uncle Tom’s Cabin cannot be written off as just another minstrel show. The Uncle Tom stage plays were surely versions of minstrelsy, but to that extent they were infected by the minstrel show’s own ambiguities. Lampooning Topsy one minute and lamenting Tom’s fate the next, Uncle Tom was nearly as duplicitous as blackface performance—which is to say that it raised hackles on both sides of the slavery question. No doubt the play, like the book, compromised the abolitionist agenda. As Wendell Phillips had said of the novel’s sentimentalism, “There is many a man who weeps over Uncle Tom and swears by the [proslavery] Herald.”18 The Liberator in turn derided Conway’s dramatic version: “Barnum has offered the slave-drivers the incense of an expurgated form of Uncle Tom. He has been playing a version of that great story at his Museum, which omits all that strikes at the slave system, and has so shaped his drama as to make it quite an agreeable thing to be a slave” (December 16, 1853). And yet the Herald itself found the first, catch-penny production of C. W. Taylor’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the National Theatre a dangerous premonition. This version was replete with minstrel-show importations; much like the Conway version, the show began with a minstrel tune, “Nigga in de Cornfield,” and a “Kentucky Breakdown Dance.” But its suggestion of what Herald editor James Gordon Bennett termed “the imaginary horrors of Southern slavery” was enough to convince him that Uncle Tom marked “a new epoch and a new field of abolition authorship—a new field of fiction, humbug and deception, for a more extended agitation of the slavery question—than any that has heretofore imperiled the peace and safety of the Union.” For Bennett, compromise was the order of the day:
The institution of Southern slavery is recognized and protected by the federal constitution, upon which this Union was established, and which holds it together. But for the compromises on the slavery question, we should have no constitution and no Union—and would, perhaps, have been at this day, in the condition of the South American republics, divided into several military despotisms, constantly warring with each other, and each within itself. The Fugitive Slave law only carries out one of the plain provisions of the constitution. When a Southern slave escapes to us, we are in honor bound to return him to his master. And yet, here in this city—which owes its wealth, population, power, and prosperity, to the Union and the constitution, and this same institution of slavery, to a greater degree than any other city in the Union—here we have nightly represented, at a popular theatre, the most exaggerated enormities of Southern slavery, playing directly into the hands of the abolitionists and abolition kidnappers of slaves, and doing their work for them. (September 3, 1852)
Bennett had reason for his rage. The Uncle Tom shows’ great achievement was to put even the worst elements of blackface minstrelsy into a narrative—no longer merely an implied context—of sectional debate. Wherever in its politics a particular production might fall, sectional division made up Uncle Tom’s storyline. Uncle Tom often slouched back into the ambit of minstrel-show japery, but it also, as the Times intimated, turned minstrelsy toward the prospect of black redemption.
The chief Uncle Tom’s Cabin dramas, then, both were and were not minstrel shows. The plays could not in any case have avoided making use of blackface devices: minstrelsy was the current material condition of theatrical production in the representation of racial matters. But in doing so they made the minstrel show’s duplicities outright contradictions, to some extent redeploying blackface acts for explicit antislavery purposes. The results were never less than equivocal, as we have seen; but we must begin to see this quality as a mark of the period in question. As social contradiction was the historical theme of the 1850s, so the Uncle Tom’s Cabin plays made the theme their own. They did so, as I have said, by making this contradiction visible specifically at the level of popular stage representation. I now want to go further and argue that the play’s way of introducing sectional controversy into the theater was by foregrounding and even thematizing the vagaries of racial representation. Here it makes sense to isolate for discussion the two competing versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Aiken and Conway each took up one of the minstrel show’s contradictory representational strategies in regard to blacks—Conway its hard-edged ridicule, Aiken its sentimentalism. It could scarcely have been the stated politics of either version that won over the New York Daily Times or offended the Liberator, for the explicit antislavery content in both was roughly the same. Rather, it was the reigning racial tonality of each play that put the message across, the way its particular iconography did or did not suggest an irreverence for the plight of the slaves. Conway earned low marks from the Liberator because his version took over wholesale the minstrel show’s racial meanness; Aiken’s Tom succeeded, the Times was careful to point out, because he escaped the comic, falling instead into a Fosteresque pathos. This is not at all to say that Conway exploited only the comic and Aiken only the sentimental; true to the plays’ ambiguous minstrel legacy, they were crossed-hatched by a variety of devices. But, by and large, Conway left the minstrel show’s worst contributions intact, while Aiken brought out the radical uses lurking in it. This in fact was the ground of theatrical controversy: Uncle Tom’s Cabin onstage was the site of competing attempts to capture the authority of blackface.
Althusserian social theorists have suggested that every social formation resides not in a single mode of economic production but in a complex overlay of several modes at once, with residual modes now subordinated to the dominant one and emergent modes potentially disruptive of it.19 Fredric Jameson argues that every ensemble of such overlapping modes has its own “cultural dominant,” or specific, defining cultural sensibility. To the extent that competing economic modes (and their networks of ideological self-representation) coexist at any given moment, so will clash and conflict occur in the realm of culture, dominant or not, and even in the space of a single text. Jameson writes that moments when the “coexistence of various modes of production becomes visibly antagonistic, their contradictions moving to the very center of political, social, and historical life,” constitute situations of cultural revolution (Political 95–96). The advent or consolidation of any mode of production is accompanied by a cultural revolution specific to it, and the emergence of the bourgeois state in America was no exception. Without entering into the long-standing debate on the antebellum South’s precise mode of production, we can see clearly that the sections at midcentury—northern industrialists and western farmers on the one hand, southern slaveholders and their unlanded allies on the other—were engaged in a major effort of economic struggle and eventual national consolidation, as observers from Karl Marx to David Potter have stressed.20 In the stage versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin one sees aspects of a cultural revolution fully equal to this revolutionary political moment. Not only did their thematic content make visible the antagonism between America’s two modes of production or regimes of economic organization, but in formal terms they staged sectional difference as a contest between the comic and the sentimental aspects of the minstrel show. Although these racial discourses did not arise in any essential or unitary way from economic modes of production, competing versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin turned them into sectional cultural dominants.
The lines the Times quoted from the Aiken version illustrate how much Tom sets the tone for that play’s politics. “I ain’t going,” says Tom when he hears of Eliza’s escape plan. “If I must be sold, or all the people on the place, and everything go to rack, why, let me be sold…. [T]he Lord’s given me a work among these yer poor souls, and I’ll stay with ’em and bear my cross with ’em till the end” (1.3). As in Stowe’s novel, Tom is a sacrificial figure, a black Christ. He has much to bear, for Aiken emphasizes the Harris family’s breakup and Eliza’s trials, while Eva is shown fading fast in Tom’s spiritual glow. To Aiken’s credit, much of Topsy’s role is taken up with Eva’s effect on her, not her antics only; her conversion and her regret at Eva’s passing pile on more sentimentalism. In this sense the strategic sounding of “Old Folks at Home” when Tom has been sold down the river hardly comes as a shock to the attentive reader (5.3). Legree in this version, moreover, figures the bad conscience of the slaveholder, not the pure malignancy he becomes in the Conway adaptation; whereas Conway’s Cassy must taunt Legree with his sins, Aiken’s Legree knows that his alienation from maternal affection is his problem but cannot quite find his way back. “Curse me if I think there’s any such thing as forgetting anything, any how,” he says, meaning his dead mother, but just as well speaking of the acts of barbarity he has committed since his antisentimental rejection of her (6.3). The Tribune wrote of Aiken’s version, “The play is a veritable pièce de mouchoir, a comédie larmoyante—for tears were freely shed by the audience” (August 8, 1853). “Of the lightness and gayety of the book there was no sign,” confirmed Francis Underwood, who accompanied Stowe on a visit to this dramatization. Topsy must have been the exception, for Mrs. Howard was in that role, and Stowe was apparently delighted by her. Stowe’s engagement with this stage Topsy suggests that the Aiken adaptation was in other respects able to hold a tone of sentimental gravity, on which Underwood himself plays when he writes that Howard and Stowe appeared to exchange glances during the performance: “Mrs. Stowe’s face showed all her vivid and changing emotions, and the actress must surely have divined them. The glances when they met and crossed reminded me of the supreme look of Rachel when she repeated that indescribable Hélas!” Throughout the play Underwood saw Stowe display “smiles and tears succeeding each other.”21
By contrast, Conway’s version opens, according to a Barnum advertisement, with an “amusing and appropriate Ethiopian Medley Overture,” and makes enthusiastic use of the minstrel show’s comic mode.22 I have already said that Sam and Andy become major characters in this version, and not as the sometimes self-conscious ironists they are in Stowe but as jokey buffoons. For his part, the Yankee Penetrate Partyside occasions as much mirth as indignation at the spectacle of slavery. Walking along the plank to board the boat going south, Partyside feels his feet slipping and sliding and wonders whether he is stepping on eels; these turn out to be slaves in chains, whom the comparison, so close to many we have seen in minstrel songs, does its best to make light of (2.1). If this moment of complacency does not belong to Partyside, many others do, such as when Partyside jokes about the “niggers” on whose behalf he is evidently writing, or when he ridicules Adolph, St. Clare’s valet (3.1). Indeed, it is a mark of this play that its antislavery mouthpiece makes most of its comic minstrel japes, as though in the single figure of Partyside the desperate social symptom and its theatrical antidote were joined. Revealingly, whenever Conway stoops to sentimentalism, he deploys its safer side—not “Old Folks at Home” when Tom is sold but “Massa’s in de Cold Ground” when St. Clare dies (5.1). Thus did Barnum falsely advertise when he said of the Conway play that “it does ‘nothing extenuate nor set down aught in malice’”—quoting, pointedly and obnoxiously, Othello’s final address—and speak more accurately when he said that “it does not foolishly and unjustly elevate the negro above the white man in intellect or morals” (quoted in Birdoff 89).
These dominant representational approaches fit precisely the differing political intentions of Aiken and Conway. The sectional division their separate strategies arose from and acknowledged was thematized in other ways as well, again through figures derived from the minstrel stage: the southern rustic and the “northern” dandy. Even in Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom and Topsy on the one hand and St. Clare’s Adolph on the other are surely inheritances from the minstrel show; in the Tom shows they become displaced markers of sectional dispute. Aiken gives Topsy an entrance during which she excoriates the dandified blacks who evidently call her “nigger”: “[Without.] You go ’long. No more nigger dan you be! [Enters—shouts and laughter without—looks off.] You seem to think yourself white folks. You ain’t nerry one—black nor white. I’d like to be one or turrer” (2.4). (These events result in one of the more pathos-driven moments Topsy is allowed, a tearful pledge to Eva that she will try to be, as Eva puts it, “one of those spirits bright Uncle Tom sings about!”) Given the way Zip Coon and Jim Crow had come to seem sectional signifiers, condensing northern urbanity and southern rusticity into black figures that referenced the source of the struggle, such moments are difficult to detach from a context of national controversy. Despite the fact that condescension toward Topsy and disdain for black dandies are both projected onto black characters—as though this were not generated elsewhere—these minstrel-show attitudes are aligned, by way of minstrel types, with sectional matters. The tug-of-war between Topsy and the dandified blacks which Topsy describes indeed seems just that, complete with rhetorical combat (“Miss Rosa—she gives me lots of ’pertinent remarks”), symbolic violence (Topsy destroys Jane’s earrings and dumps dirty water on all the dandies), and actual violence (Topsy lays a trap of scalding water for Miss Rosa) (2.4).
Conway is even more invested in such displaced struggles. Through Party-side, Conway dwells on the differences between Adolph and Tom; Partyside is stunned to learn that Adolph, with his light skin and adorned in St. Clare’s vest, is not part of the family, while Tom’s status is never questioned. Partyside makes the dichotomy particularly clear in his references to Adolph and Topsy, whose respective jobs (valet for Adolph, “danc[ing] breakdowns” for Topsy) record similar proclivities to those we have seen in the two chief minstrel types (3.1). Later Conway secures this theme by depicting a pointless fight between Adolph the dandy and Sam the plantation hand (5.1)—pointless, that is, unless we recognize the social energies making such a fight necessary. Not for nothing does St. Clare die in both versions of the play from knife wounds Legree inflicts while lunging at a Yankee disputant; Legree’s Vermont origins notwithstanding, he represents the South, making St. Clare a passive victim of sectional animus.
The fact is that in using these dramatic strategies, the Uncle Tom’s Cabin plays institutionalized the social divisions they narrated. Sectional debate henceforth became theatrical ritual, part of the experience of Uncle Tom. To examine the partisan discourse around the two major versions of the play is to witness a situation in which stage devices have sparked a dramatic rivalry which in turn effortlessly invokes political upheaval. Accordingly, the phrase “modes of production” in this context takes on a highly condensed and over-determined set of meanings. Barnum may be said to have raised the stakes on opening Conway’s version of the play in obviously direct competition with the Aiken—National Theatre version, which was then in its fourth month of performances. Barnum’s ad for the American Museum Uncle Tom, in addition to the aforementioned crowing about his refusal to “unjustly elevate the negro,” promised that his was the “only just and sensible dramatic version of Mrs. Stowe’s book that has ever been put upon the stage.” As if this claim were not pointed enough, Barnum dismissed his rival, though not by name: “And instead of turning away the audience in tears, the [American Museum] author has wisely consulted dramatic taste by having Virtue triumphant at last, and after all its unjust sufferings, miseries and deprivations, conducted to happiness by the hand of Him who watches over all.” He thus notably denounces the Aiken version’s very mode—sentimentalism’s tears—while piously (and falsely) claiming the same sentimental values for his own “happy” production. The National shot back in its ad: “Which is the humbug version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Not that played at the National Theatre!” The gauntlet had been thrown down.23
There are grounds for thinking the small war that followed surprising and significant. It is true that, coming a few short years after the Astor Place riot and nowhere approaching the intensity of that conflagration, the Uncle Tom feud seems like petty cash. Yet in this case, as in the case of a whole tradition of theater disturbances, ideologies of the state and of the stage intertwined, charging the theatrical realm’s every gesture. Significantly, too, the ideologies in question had to do not with competing class productions of the play—one typical cause of theatrical riots—but with national and racial questions. Both productions inhabited a broadly popular arena of reference, discourse, and audience; it was the sectional perspective of the plays that filled the air and made dramatic theory fair game for political discussion. Taking its lead from Barnum’s ad, the Morning Express rationalized Conway’s ending by appealing to the play’s popular public:
There is no good reason why Uncle Tom should be whipped to death by a brute in a moral drama, because from the popular character of the drama itself, such a closing triumph for vice and defeat of virtue would leave a most pernicious impression upon the general mind. Hence the astonishing success of the sumptuous version of Uncle Tom at Barnum’s Museum, where the hero, after all his tribulations, is restored to his freedom and his family. (quoted in Birdoff 89–90)
Through this critic’s convenient resort to the melodramatic categories of good and evil, one again glimpses the competing aesthetics of the sentimental and the comic. Presumably the “pernicious impression” the Morning Express feared was the rousing, lachrymose effect of Tom’s fatal whipping on Conway’s “sumptuous” work of what one can only call Compromise formation.24
The New York Atlas indeed thought Conway’s version violated the spirit of Stowe’s text, and, pointing to the dramatist’s English birth, spoke in a lexicon of national service:
It may be well enough, perhaps, for the mendicants of the state, if they belong to the “home squadron,” to vitiate the works of authors of their own country; but, is it to be endured that an imported scion of Cripplegate should be allowed to falsify and misrepresent such an author as Mrs. Stowe, to pander to the appetites of a few mercenary toadies, who would misrepresent a moral and enlightened community? Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as played at the American Museum, has few charms for us; and yet, it is the popular drama of that establishment. It calls in immense audiences; and, of course, is most vociferously applauded.
Readers interested in an authentic version were directed to the National Theatre, for there the play did not “pander to the fears of the timid, nor gratify a perverted taste” (November 20, 1853). The rhetoric of territorial rights and community representation alerts us to the fact that in the case of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, theatrical taste and political devotion had once again become one and the same. To misrepresent Stowe as Conway does, the argument goes, is to allow a “few mercenary toadies” to misrepresent the nation. Observers of Uncle Tom’s Cabin understood perfectly clearly that struggles over the text mediated struggles over sectional allegiance.
That is why it repays our attention to note the public relations gambits launched all around this curious rivalry between theaters. One feels the gravity of what under normal circumstances would be culture-industry business as usual. Barnum hung a fifty-foot sign along the cornice of the American Museum bearing the play’s title, some five hundred yards of cotton muslin; in accord with Conway’s hedging politics, one end showed a black dancer and the other a fight between fugitive slaves and their now legal hunters. Three days after Barnum opened the Conway version, A. H. Purdy celebrated the one-hundredth performance of the Aiken version at his National Theatre with a “Grand Jubilee Festival,” complete with brass band on the balcony (incidentally a Barnum innovation), fireworks, and Drummond light on the roof (Odell 6:309). When Barnum had some success with a play called Little Katy, or the Hot Corn Girl, Purdy in December 1853 mounted his own production at the National starring Aiken’s Little Eva, Cordelia Howard. Despite its attempt to represent New York street life after the fashion of the Mose plays, the drama so resembled Uncle Tom’s Cabin (it was indeed dramatized by one of Uncle Tom’s first adapters, C. W. Taylor) that it too took on some of the energies of the rivalry. Purdy claimed that Cordelia Howard had read the story of Little Katy—which would soon appear in novel form as Solon Robinson’s Hot Corn (1854)—in the (antislavery) Tribune, and had pledged to save a dollar per night from her Uncle Tom’s Cabin performances to give to some real Katy. A proslavery newspaper attacked this ploy and the theater that sponsored it: “There is not a greater rendezvous for prostitution and iniquity of every sort than this same National Theatre,” wrote the New York Observer:
Undoubtedly the moral character of the play which has for the last few months been nightly exhibited on its stage [Uncle Tom’s Cabin], and with so much success, has been the means of enticing hundreds of innocent souls within its halls and on the road to ruin. But Satan has indeed put on the double garb of an angel of light when, as a means of alluring a still larger number of them into his snares, he clothes himself thru the column of that same N.Y. Tribune with the eminently righteous work of devoting a dollar a night for the support of a charity to which the National Theatre with the above zealous aid is nightly adding its victims. (quoted in Birdoff 94–95)
Braving this challenge, the editor of the New York Atlas on the contrary found the National iniquity-free—or, as one patron put it, demystifying the editors’ code, “this ’ere theatre is one that goes in for religion, virtue, morality—and liberty!” (Birdoff 96).
So intense did the late 1853 rivalry become that it eventually found its way back into the play. At one point in the Aiken version the Yankee Gumption Cute engages Topsy in a (minstrel) dialogue:
CUTE: Don’t you be too severe, now, Charcoal; I’m a man of genius. Did you ever hear of Barnum?
TOPSY: Barnum! Barnum! Does he live out South?
CUTE: No, he lives in New York. Do you know how he made his fortin?
TOPSY: What is him fortin, hey? Is it something he wears?
CUTE: Chowder, how green you are!
TOPSY: [Indignantly.] Sar, I hab you to know I’s not green; I’s brack….
CUTE: … Well, as I was saying, Barnum made his money by exhibiting a woolly horse; now wouldn’t it be an all-fired speculation to show you as the woolly gal? (5.2)
Topsy refuses, but one feels the damage has been done. In any case, the Yankee Barnum is here pegged as the “southerner” his version of the play revealed him to be. In this and other ways the play thrived on the political stir it had generated and kept it going beyond the proscenium. Legend has it that the controversy was carried forth into the street, where fevered debate took place under the gaslights and where, on Chatham Street, near the National, two clothing stores allied themselves with the warring productions of Uncle Tom, one store calling itself Horton and Barnum’s, the other Brown and Purdy’s, and each respectively hawking the latest fashions of the South and the North (Birdoff 96–97).
By way of the play, sectional feeling had seeped into the half-conscious gestures of everyday life; and the new political space Uncle Tom opened up did not close again when these particular versions ended their runs. Further Tom shows, C. W. Taylor’s (and others’) dramatization of Stowe’s Dred, J. T. Trowbridge’s abolitionist Neighbor Jackwood, Dion Boucicault’s melodrama The Octoroon, the John Brown-inspired The Insurrection, and other plays in the 1850s attested to the cultural revolution of which the minstrel show had been one portent. Bruce McConachie is thus only partly correct in charging the stage adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin with “normalizing” Stowe’s novel, “smoothing away the radical challenges to the dominant culture implicit in its mystical and matrifocal values” (“Out” 7). The plays emptied Uncle Tom of Stowe’s feminism and her partial critique of capitalism, but they translated her antislavery (not antisouthern) convictions into sectional barbs. The increasingly uneasy coexistence of economic systems worked its way into a tussle of sign systems that productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin only dimly realized they were developing. Based on a narrative of sectional ideologies in conflict, the plays exuded sectionally loaded incidents and devices, and rather than symbolically resolving these, the Tom plays blew apart the happy ambiguities of the minstrel shows from which they had come. It was at this level of intervention that Uncle Tom did its work; the comic and the sentimental, the cornerstones of minstrelsy, no longer seemed entirely compatible. The divergent productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin had given them a sectional gloss, and as long as there was friction in the street, there would be disruption on the stage.
For many observers the play held an importance beyond its explicit political message. This lay in its specifically popular audience, whom abolitionists had often perceived to be hostile to their cause. “Oh! Susanna” may have intimated a working class ready to hear a different tune regarding the extension of slavery; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it was widely noted, actively recruited the b’hoys. William Lloyd Garrison liked Aiken’s version better than he had liked the novel, not least because Uncle Tom was beginning to secure the Free-Soil alliance of workers and slaves that had hitherto been only inchoate:
If the shrewdest abolitionist amongst us had prepared the drama with a view to make the strongest anti-slavery impression, he could scarcely have done the work better. O, it was a sight worth seeing, those ragged, coatless men and boys in the pit (the very material of which mobs are made) cheering the strongest and the sublimest anti-slavery sentiments! The whole audience was at times melted to tears, and I own that I was no exception. (September 9, 1853)
To which the skeptic will reply: and then they went out and bought the Herald. There is wish fulfillment here, but it is buttressed by a great variety of opinion noting the new class of spectators Aiken’s dramatization roped into this ideological arena. The New York Atlas called on a now familiar code to make its case: “The gallery was filled with a heroic class of people, many of them in red woollen shirts, with countenances as hardy and rugged as the implements of industry employed by them in the pursuit of their vocations” (October 16, 1853). Their silence at the moment Eliza crosses the Ohio causes the writer to look around, only to find the whole audience, b’hoys included, in tears. No doubt the foreign visitor Adolphus Hart was partly correct when he noticed in the balconies and pit a “class intent on every scene in the drama that could gratify their morbid love of cruelty, and make them gloat over pictures of human wretchedness and misery.” Yet this ruder interest in mere sensation resulted perforce, Hart wrote, in much “shouting and holloing as Eliza was crossing the Ohio, or George Harris was shooting his pursuers” (5–6). The New York Tribune, remembering the 1834 antiabolitionist rioting, made essentially the same point about this new venue for rowdiness:
No mob would have dared to disturb the Abolition part[y] at the National Theatre. It was composed largely of the stuff which demagogues acting under oligarchs have used for the purpose of burning down halls, destroying printing presses, assaulting public speakers, intimidating, striking [interesting ambiguity], killing. Now that is changed, at least in Chatham-st.
Its conclusion was that “[t]he ‘b’hoys’ were [now] on the side of the fugitives. The pro-slavery feeling had departed from among them. They did not wish to save the Union. They believed in the higher law” (August 8, 1853). One notes indeed that one month into the run of Aiken’s adaptation, the National began accommodating black spectators, though in a separate part of the theater (Odell 6:238).
Adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were perfectly situated to infiltrate this cultural sphere in a way Stowe’s novel had been unable to do. Their chief theaters, such as the National, the Bowery, the American Museum, and the Franklin Museum, were well known for their ability to cater to the million. Henry James remembered the National as a “playhouse till then ignored by fashion and culture … deep down on the East side, whence echoes had come faintest to ears polite” (169). The same, of course, might have been said of the other theaters as well.25 If, as James suggests, Uncle Tom’s Cabin marked a time when more than one class would again enter a single theater, it also made possible a decisive shift in concern among the popular classes in particular. Little Katy’s continuities with Aiken’s Uncle Tom already indicated the popular cultural sphere into which this antislavery material had been inserted. Aiken himself had been a “sensation” dramatist before embarking on the Howards’ version of Stowe’s tale, having done up stories from the New York Ledger for the Albany stage (The Gun-Maker of Moscow and others); in the early 1860s he became the American Museum’s house dramatist, and he later wrote dime novels for the George Munro publishing house (including A New York Boy Among the Indians [1872]).26 Selected cast members of Conway’s version at Barnum’s Museum were none other than veterans of the Mose vehicles and other such melodramas; Emily Mestayer, James’s favorite in the part of Eliza, had on more than one occasion played Mose’s Lize. Sure enough, there is a bit part in Conway’s Uncle Tom for a slave called Little Mose. These overlaps had the effect of reaching the popular classes where they lived. Rather than talking down to them from the abolitionist’s lofty perch, Uncle Tom dramas spoke in the idiom of popular melodrama, wedding new political concerns to familiar forms.
New political concerns did not always amount to new politics, of course; the ideological slant of Conway’s version alone saw to that. Any too optimistic view of this new popular interest in antislavery melodrama is tempered by other sorts of common responses to Uncle Tom—by which I mean, in part, the parodies of blackface minstrelsy. Christy’s Minstrels, for instance, soon turned the burlesque third part of their show into “Life Among the Happy,” and Christy and Wood’s Minstrels in 1854 devised an operatic burlesque of Uncle Tom in which Tom was not sold, Legree was not present, and a general plantation frolic substituted for the pathos of melodrama.27 Frank Brower’s “Happy Uncle Tom” (rehearsed for at least a decade) was a huge hit; based for the most part on extremely tired hard-of-hearing jokes (Tom is deaf), the piece apparently also featured a jig and banjo dance (Brower 5–8). Sam Sanford also performed a “Happy Uncle Tom” act, which he claimed brought in $11,000 in nine weeks:
Oh, white folks, we’ll have you to know
Dis am not de version of Mrs. Stowe;
Wid her de Darks am all unlucky
But we am de boys from Old Kentucky.
(quoted in Toll 94–95)
The most telling ripostes, however, pitted the condition of the slave against that of the white worker in the North, as in “Take Care of Number One”:
But don’t come back, Aunt Harriet; in England make a fuss,
Go talk against your country, put money in your puss;
And when us happy darkies you pity in your prayer,
Oh, don’t forget de WHITE SLAVES dat’s starvin’ ober dar!
(Dixey 64–65; see also Pop 211)
This was obviously a charge that had not gone away; as the Irish parodies (one by Conway himself) make particularly clear, the competing constituencies for liberation were still in competition. The Irish American printed a scathing piece (interestingly titled “Mrs. Stowe in Cork”) that argued the case of “Father Pat” against that of Uncle Tom, and held up the sufferings of the white peasant to the hypocritical antislavery Stowe, “the female Barnum” (Birdoff 183–84). This critique arose in part from the ways the dramas themselves handled the tension between antislavery and working-class concerns. In St. Clare’s comparisons of slaves and workers as well as in other moments of the play, conflict over the notion of “wage slavery” emerged again, not to be resolved so easily by a single “abolitionist” drama.
There is, of course, a great deal of room in the story of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for mechanic accents, to borrow Michael Denning’s phrase. Right off the bat George Harris loses his job in the factory to which his master has hired him out; the master has decided that George’s lease on independence is getting too dear, and wants him to come back to the plantation and, despite his marriage to Eliza, an arranged marriage. This demotion is transparently a shift from artisan (George is an inventor) to slave, and in conjoining the two, the action everywhere invokes George’s status as put-upon “wage slave.” In the dramas George’s speeches about his lack of freedom thus take on a specifically artisanal cast, making the freedom in question a matter of both black and working-class relevance. George’s mixed racial heritage reinforces this equation in a literal way and allows him to mediate between the worlds of white audience and black slave. Significantly, Aiken makes much more of George’s plight than does Conway. Aiken’s George and Eliza begin the play, agonizing at length over their fate. “I’m a poor, miserable, forlorn drudge,” says George, wishing he were dead; Eliza counters, “I know how you feel about losing your place in the factory, and you have a hard master; but pray be patient” (1.1). The multiaccentuality of these lines, pointing at once to southern slave and northern artisan, is self-evident, as is the familiar appeal of George’s righteous “manliness.” His declaration of independence is a workingman’s “republican” manifesto: “I’ll fight for my liberty, to the last breath I breathe! You say your fathers did it; if it was right for them, it is right for me!” (2.3). (The Times reported that such speeches got “great cheers” [July 27, 1853].) In the Conway version, by contrast, the first scene between Eliza and George is buried in the middle of act one, just after the minstrel-show opening, and George’s plan to escape has apparently already been discussed between them, for George assumes rather than announces it, decisively diminishing the impact (1.2). George does get to make his stirring declaration (1.5) and shoot at Loker, Haley, and Marks when they pursue him, but Conway’s conflation of the escapes of Eliza and George, both of them complete by the end of act one, gives George much less stage time. Already in the George Harris subplot Aiken proved himself much more attentive to the potential links between slave and worker; he accordingly earned the approval of antislavery portions of the working class and their journalistic friends, and perhaps, as the Spirit of the Times wrote, “made converts to the abolition doctrine many persons, we have no doubt, who have never examined the subject” (March 11, 1854). Conway’s version, shrinking the role of George and downplaying the power of sympathy, left significantly more space for derision and dismissal than for alliance politics.
This was no less the case with St. Clare’s disquisitions on the relative conditions of southern slaves and “British” workers. In the novel St. Clare assesses the slaves to be “better off than a large class of the population of England” (341). St. Clare’s conservative labor critique is softened by Stowe’s portrayal of him as fatally flawed rather than mean; he has no illusions regarding the slaves’ contentment with their enslavement and even has a certain sympathy for both wage slave and black slave (339). But he makes essentially John C. Calhoun’s argument about the greater oppressions of the North: “[The English laborer] is as much at the will of his employer as if he were sold to him.”28 Considering the Tom shows’ rather different audience from that of the novel, this was a position requiring sensitive handling by the dramatist: pushed too hard, it would compromise the story’s antislavery politics; pushed too little, it might alienate the working class.29 Aiken interestingly chooses to bypass this thorny issue, giving St. Clare no chance to air his opinions on the subject of workers and slaves. St. Clare makes his sectional case by mocking Ophelia’s personal disdain for Topsy in light of her missionary zeal, and otherwise ridicules the “lovely rule of woman”; but the rest is silence (2.2; 3.1). Conway, however, exploits St. Clare’s brief on behalf of the white worker. Penetrate Partyside, taking on the function of Miss Ophelia in the novel, criticizes St. Clare for trafficking in slaves, and St. Clare gets to make his labor critique in full: “The English aristocracy, and capitalists … are only doing in another form what the American planter does” (2.2). This apology for slavery is lifted nearly verbatim from the novel, as is St. Clare’s assertion that while the slave can be whipped to death, the worker can be starved to death. Labor oppression under slavery is the same as labor oppression the world over, says St. Clare. To this small extent Conway equates the condition of worker and slave; but, the argument goes, at least the South is forthright about its economic regime. Partyside himself defends the white worker when he comes across a law requiring manumitted elderly slaves to be provided with food, clothing, and shelter by their deceased masters’ estates: “Pity it weren’t more general. Guess it wouldn’t do much harm to some of the rich folks in the North if they was obliged to provide for all those who have gotten grey and superannuated in their service” (6.1). Thus, despite the vacillation between prolabor and generally antiaristocratic views, Conway endorses Calhoun—or, closer to home, Mike Walsh—and the white-egalitarian reading of “wage slavery.”30
Together with Aiken’s foregrounding of George Harris, his refusal to enter the swampy terrain of labor’s racial politics has the effect of a hopeful gesture in the direction of a labor abolitionism. Restricting St. Clare’s diatribes, Aiken avoids even an echo of the nettled cry of “white slavery.” Conway, in allowing St. Clare free reign, offers a sharp response from within a putatively antislavery play to the long-standing abolitionist denial of the pinched circumstances of northern workers. There are in Conway no characters and little rhetoric with labor-abolitionist potential; since George Harris is a marginal figure at best and Penetrate Partyside a deeply suspect antislavery spokesman, the play efficiently blocks most liberatory political entries. The differing positions in the Tom shows and in related dramatic productions therefore suggest that the Uncle Tom’s Cabin plays did not at all mark something so unequivocal as a turn in working-class racial perspective. Rather, they intensified the racial terms of working-class debate. There were now “northern” and “southern” portions of the northern popular classes; the perennial conflicts over labor’s racial politics intersected with struggles over sectional policy, each giving spark to the other. Put another way, national controversy over slavery disrupted alliances between workers even as conflicts over labor’s proper racial alignments furthered sectional dislocation. Not the least of Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s stage achievements was to force together these different realms of feeling—one local, diurnal, a matter of daily bread and racial responsiveness; one national, broadly political, a situation of major historical significance.
This was, of course, also the purpose of mid-nineteenth-century political parties, and the competing versions of Uncle Tom soon had their party equivalents.31 Two months into the Uncle Tom’s Cabin stage feud, in January 1854, Stephen A. Douglas introduced his Kansas-Nebraska bill into congressional debate. The purpose of the bill was to grant to local governments the right to declare slavery legal in territory formerly established as free by the 1820 Missouri Compromise. The bitter fight over Kansas-Nebraska was the revolutionary centerpiece of the 1850s, dramatically confirming sectional divisions, destroying the major political parties, and—in the actual combat in “Bleeding Kansas” between those favoring and those opposing Douglas’s “popular sovereignty”—foreshadowing the war to come. Douglas’s bill was widely perceived as a test of party loyalty for those Democrats who persisted in their Free-Soil sympathies. The 1848 Free-Soil presidential run of erstwhile Democrat Martin Van Buren, in opposition to what the radical Barnburners perceived to be Polk’s pandering to the South and proslavery expansionism, had already weakened national party ties; despite the Compromise and the overwhelming Democratic victory of Franklin Pierce in 1852, Van Buren’s attempt made the Democratic defections in the wake of Douglas’s bill that much easier.32 Where before there had been an uneasy cross-sectional Democratic coalition enlisting a majority of workers under a banner of southern appeasement, there was now no party consensus at all on the issue of slavery. Together with factional conflict over other issues (temperance, nativism, internal improvements, patronage), the slavery controversy dealt a hard blow to the Democrats, producing an electoral debacle in 1854. The two-party system was breaking down, evidenced most succinctly by Whig editor Horace Greeley’s proposal that Democratic editor William Cullen Bryant, no friend of Greeley’s, head the 1856 New York State ticket of the newly formed Republican party.33 The Uncle Tom controversy was both product and portrait of the social energies that gave rise to this political upheaval, as the Spirit of the Times, among others, perceived. “The slavery agitation has been augmented by the passage of the Nebraska-Kansas bill, and a little zest is given to the votaries of negro freedom by an attendance at the Bowery or National…. We have nothing to do here with the matter, politically, but we can perceive what the drama may do to foster or eradicate passions and prejudices of high or low degree” (March 11, 1854).
Sectional thinking had come alive in the North. Party politics had been for decades a way of keeping sectional tension out of the public sphere; the coming of the Civil War witnessed the displacement of national politics by sectional insurgency. The Democratic defectors’ contribution to the Republicans, for example, was stunning; one Democrat wrote to the New York Tribune that he had voted for Pierce, Cass, and Polk in the previous three elections but was calling in 1854 for a fusion of elements to oppose the Nebraska bill. The House vote on the bill made clear the northern Democratic split: forty-four Democrats voted for, forty-three against.34 (This fact alone calls into question some writers’ easy equation of northern workingmen with the Democratic party and therefore the prosouthern stance in these years.)35 Specifically sectional perspectives produced the Republican party in 1854–56 out of a coalition of Liberty party members, liberal Whigs, and anti-Nebraska bill Democrats. The Republicans came together around a belief in the northern way of life: “free labor,” antiexpansionism, and rather ambivalent racial feeling. The achievement of the Republicans was to turn adherence to a renovative ideal of capitalist labor into a sectional critique of the South and the extension of slavery, bringing together the interests of workers and abolitionists (and, to be sure, racists) in a way that seemed synonymous with northern well-being. Aiken’s version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin clearly resembled this fusion of ideas, beliefs, and feelings, and it struck a chord among the northern popular classes. Of course, it is impossible to know the influence of Aiken’s play on Republican party formation, parallel development though it may have been; but in the increasingly visible and sophisticated sphere of popular culture it gave great emotional weight to the divisions that had begun to occur. In an era in which, as Eric Foner has observed, politics was itself becoming part of the culture industry, the ubiquity of Uncle Tom and its unavoidable sectional emphasis surely played its part (Politics 30–31). Not least among Aiken’s adherents, perhaps, were those who rejected the “white slavery” call of southern-sympathizing New York Democrats—the specter of free blacks clamoring for white men’s rightful jobs. In the 1856 election the Republicans indeed appealed to workers by publicizing southern pro-slavery figures’ derogatory remarks about northern wage earners, nicely joining sectional and labor critiques.36 At the very least, Uncle Tom’s Cabin registered these changes in sectional alignment and the vicissitudes in labor’s racial politics; as the foremost racial melodrama of the day, it brought political and social change into the realm of feeling and crystallized it into memorable and irrecusable images.
But of course there was no end to class struggle, as the continued supersession of racial concerns by class anxiety suggests. Class energies had themselves reemerged after a decade of slumber; the New York tailors’ strike of 1850 led to the first state-sponsored violence in history against urban American workers (Wilentz 380). I have noted that the Industrial Congress, after 1850 a leading coalition of the trades, was antislavery in its platform but in the ensuing decade remained indifferent to its agitation, preferring “to abolish Wages Slavery before we meddle with Chattel Slavery” (quoted in Wilentz 382). These no doubt were Conway’s partisans, as were all those workers Iver Bernstein has described as disgusted with centralized Republican party politics in New York City and determined to flout them (96–97). Conway’s play mediated upheaval in the nation’s party organizations, but it flowed even more directly from the class resentments responsible for the rhetoric of “white slavery.” Union at all costs, indifference to slavery, the immediacy of northern working-class oppression: these were the pressing concerns hardly veiled in the background and foreground of Conway’s play, and they resonated with portions of the working class ready to refuse the rule of reforming Republican politicians.37 Whether craftsmen desiring wage earners to mount a distinctively working-class influence outside the major parties or proletarianized artisans less put off by middle-class reformers’ interventions in Congress, many workers still demurred from slavery agitation. Their party was the Democracy, and wage labor their reality.38
The terrific conflicts among and within the Uncle Tom’s Cabin plays root us in the national-popular struggles of the 1850s. A peculiarly fissured text in all of its dramatic versions, Uncle Tom relied on strategies of blackface representation that unsettled the plays even as the differing dramas put such stage conventions to largely conflicting uses. The sectional divide to which the competing versions of the play bore witness abutted questions of popular racial alliance and testified to cracks in the national bloc that only a state apparatus imposed during a great civil war would at last address.39 There was ultimately to be just one reigning mode of production, but it would have to be won in a long and bitter conflagration. The final stage directions of Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin provide grim commentary on that battle: “Impressive music.—Slow curtain.”