History: concepts, sources, and interpretations

Uncle Tom's Cabin - Fiction as a Catalyst for Fact

The Origins of a Living Document

Stage Night

North and South Polarized: Critics Respond

The Abolitionist Debates

The Tom Caricature

The Greatest Impact

The Origins of a Living Document

In her own words, Harriet Beecher Stowe was compelled to pen Uncle Tom's Cabin "....because as a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and broken-hearted with the sorrows and injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt the dishonor to Christianity -because as a lover of my country, I trembled at the coming day of wrath."1 Stowe was born in Litchfield, Connecticut on June 14th, 1811. Her strong moral convictions may be attributed to the fact that she was raised as the daughter of a well-known Congregationalist minister, Lyman Beecher.

Harriet was the seventh of nine children, which certainly implies an instilled sense of tolerance, fairness and sharing throughout her upbringing. Her brother Henry was also a popular preacher as well as a leader of the abolitionist movement. Ms. Stowe was privileged to be an educated woman, attending school and later teaching at the Hartford Female Academy, which was founded by her sister Catherine Beecher in 1823. While teaching, she wrote stories and created illustrations for local journals. Throughout her lifetime, she would publish more than thirty works, but it was Uncle Tom's Cabin that made her a household name. Harriet Stowe's real exposure to the issue of slavery and views on abolition came firsthand in Cincinnati where she later taught, and where she encountered fugitive slaves and learned about life on the other side of the Ohio River, spawning the impetus for Uncle Tom's Cabin.2

Initially serialized in 1851 in over 40 installments over a period of ten months in the weekly anti-slavery newspaper The Washington National Era for with Ms. Stowe received remuneration of $300, then published in 1852 as a book, Uncle Tom's Cabin was an immediate success, selling 10,000 copies within days and nearly 1.5 million worldwide, rivaling in sales for its time only the bible (Boydston, Kelley, Margolis).3 The notion of the abolition of slavery during the time of Ms. Stowe's novel was by no means a consensus: in fact, it was a topic of significant debate.

The Southern plantation owners deftly clung to the economics of their ability to utilize slaves as farm workers, while the majority of Northern abolitionists favored an end to the de-humanizing practice of engaging in the commerce of human beings. Ms. Stowe, intending to expose the historical truth of slavery's horrors, opened Pandora's proverbial box on the issue and started a movement in society and the arts that adapted the text of Uncle Tom's Cabin as its own, spawning differing views, slants on characters and an overall plethora of versions of the original story.

Introduction

Uncle Tom's Cabin emerged as a novel, but soon transformed itself into a cultural icon whose text was created and recreated by its readers, adapters, and its foremost opponents, polarizing the abolitionist debate. The responses to and adaptations of the text provided a means by which the novel assumed a principal role in American culture through various media: the theatre, film, posters, paintings, follow-on writings, essays and press coverage. The way its readers articulated and reconstructed the text brought on a range of social and political meanings and results.

In what way did this text change the traditional relationship between reader and the novel? The reader became the author, interpreter, director, actor, witness and part and parcel of the story. The story, instead of being about life, became life, and life in turn became its own version of the story. In this context of slavery, religion, melodrama, and family crisis, Uncle Tom's Cabin can be viewed as a cultural pattern instead of an isolated work. Almost as soon as it was published as a novel, Stowe's story was adapted for the American stage; from 1852 until well into the twentieth century, adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin were among the most popular productions that a theater company could stage. Stowe, however, never condoned nor participated in developing the productions, nor did she earn any money from these adaptations.

Stage Night

The chronicle of the trail from the first adaptation of the Uncle Tom's Cabin in print to the living, breathing persona of the stage reveals a production that caught on like wildfire, as evidenced by the following listing of stage performances and subsequent press reviews that occurred throughout the United States between 1852 and 1928:4

First New York Production, National Theatre, 1852

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre06at.html" ["a serious & mischievous blunder"]

New York Herald (September 1852)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre02bt.html" "A New Thing"

The Liberator (October 1852)

First Boston Production, Boston Museum, 1852

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre03at.html" Uncle Tom's Cabin

Boston Commonwealth (November 1852)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre02at.html" Uncle Tom's Cabin at a Boston Theatre

Ohio Anti-Slavery Bugle (16 November 1852)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre02dt.html" ["a disgrace to Boston"]

Quincy Patriot (December 1852)

Aiken Dramatization, National Theatre, New York, 1853

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre45at.html" 25 Notices

The Spirit of the Times (July 1853 - May 1854)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre08at.html" "Uncle Tom" among the Bowery Boys

New York Times (July 1853)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre02ct.html" "Uncle Tom" on the Stage

The Liberator (August 1853)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre10at.html" A Great Change in a Short Time

New York Evening Post (August 1853)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre04at.html" Abolition Dramatized

New York Tribune (August 1853)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre08bt.html" The Anti-Slavery Drama

National Anti-Slavery Standard (20 August 1853)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre06bt.html" 2 Notices [Aiken's Renumeration]

New York Herald (September 1853)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre09at.html" [A Visit to the National Theatre]

New York Atlas (16 October 1853)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre04et.html" 3 Notices

New York Tribune (October 1853)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osad04bt.html" JUBILEE ADVERTISEMENT

The New York Tribune (10 November 1853)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre21at.html" Editor's Table

Knickerbocker Magazine (February 1854)

Other Aiken Dramatizations

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre01at.html" National Theatre, Philadelphia

National Era (October 1853)

Barnum's Dramatization

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre04bt.html" Uncle Tom at Barnum's

The New York Tribune (15 November 1853)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osad04at.html" ADVERTISEMENT

The New York Tribune (16 November 1853)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre04ct.html" "Uncle Tom" at Barnum's

The New York Tribune (17 November 1853)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre04dt.html" "Uncle Tom" at Barnum's

The New York Tribune (December 1853)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre02ft.html" American Museum, New York

The Liberator (16 December 1853)

Other New York Productions

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre45ct.html" Uncle Tom's Cabin at the St. Charles

Spirit of the Times (September 1853)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre04ft.html" Uncle Tom at the Bowery

New York Tribune (17 January 1854)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre45bt.html" T.D. Rice as Tom at Bowery

Spirit of the Times (21 January 1854)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre45dt.html" 4 Notices: Christy's Burlesque Uncle Tom's Cabin

Spirit of the Times (May - June 1854)

Southern Productions

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre02et.html" Theatre, Charleston

The Liberator (16 December 1853)

Civil War Productions

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre04gt.html" Winter Garden Theatre

The New York Tribune (26 February 1862)

New York Productions

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre06ct.html" Niblo's Garden Theatre

New York Herald (13 January 1875)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre06et.html" Park Theatre

New York Herald (23 May 1877)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre05ct.html" Mrs. Howard at New Broadway Theatre

New York Times (16 January 1877)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre06ft.html" Mrs. Howard at Grand Opera House

New York Herald (16 October 1877)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre05dt.html" Booth's Theatre

New York Times (19 February 1878)

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/onstage/revus/osre06gt.html" Booth's Theatre