When ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ became a minstrel show
Minstrel performances changed Stowe narrative and perceptions of Black people for years
It was one of the first novels to shape the way the story of Black slaves and emancipation was told in North America. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” first came out in serial form starting June 5, 1851.
It was, as Cheryl Thompson writes in her book “Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty,” the bestselling book of the 19th century, and one of the first novels written about America. “Today, we do not necessarily think of novels shaping national identity,” she writes. “However, in nineteenth-century America, the experience of reading fiction helped form the way people saw themselves in relation to their nation.” Here, an excerpt from Thompson’s book takes a look at how the history of Uncle Tom being performed at minstrel shows changed the shape of perceptions for years to come.
“Harriet Beecher Stowe never attended a minstrel show and she also reportedly spent little time on Southern plantations. Though Stowe made up much of the story, she based the plot on interactions with formerly enslaved Black men, especially Rev. Josiah Henson (1789 – 1883), who founded the Dawn Settlement in Dresden, Ontario, for fugitives. After Uncle Tom came out, enterprising theatre producers quickly gravitated to the novel, but chose to reproduce, mimic, and change the story as they saw fit. The minstrel show adaptations took liberties with the ‘reality’ of Stowe’s depiction of slavery and Uncle Tom himself because they could. There was no legal apparatus — e.g., copyright laws — in place to stop them.
For twenty years after the publication of the novel, Henson made a career out of the claim that he had been the ‘original Uncle Tom.’ He even travelled to England, where he was presented by his escort and biographer John Lobb as Uncle Tom. By then an old man himself, Henson was paraded around the country as the living embodiment of the ‘good’ Christian ex-slave, his celebrity reaching its climax with a royal audience.
A poster of a Henson public appearance on display at the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” Historic Site in Dresden reads: ‘Rev. Josiah Henson resident of Dresden, Canada, The Original Uncle Tom of Mrs. Stowe’s Wonderful Story, will give an ACCOUNT of his Slave Life! At the Presbyterian Church at Lake Forest, Thursday Evening, Feb. 3rd, 1881, at 8 ‘o clock.’ ‘This entertainment is given FREE to all,’ the subheading reads, ‘and all are invited to come and learn from the lips of this remarkable man (now 92 years old) what American Slavery has been to him.’ It is material evidence showing how Uncle Tom was transformed into a ‘real’ person via public appearances by Henson, a surrogate Uncle Tom.
Henson’s was not the first theatrical version of Uncle Tom. …
Small-scale minstrel show productions, which toured in New England and New York State, also came across the border to perform in Canada. These socalled ‘Tom shows’ attracted a large segment of the population that otherwise would never have exposed themselves to the theatre. Shortly after Stowe’s novel appeared as a serial in the National Era, two panoramas of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” were presented at Toronto’s St. Lawrence Hall, where patrons could view large images of Stowe’s novel projected onto the wall. Dozens more performances took place at Toronto’s Royal Lyceum from 1853 to 1860, attesting to the fact that Canadian audiences were as captivated by the sentimental abolitionist melodrama as other Northerners.
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” onstage reflected a change in Stowe’s original narrative. Nearly all the Uncle Tom minstrel shows turned the novel’s slave auction scene into a kind of variety act, with each ‘slave’ required to show off his musical and comic talents to the buyers. Minstrel songs were then slotted into other theatrical adaptations, such as Uncle Tom singing Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” on slave master Legree’s plantation. This change is significant because it shifted the original intent of Stowe’s novel from a commentary on the horrors of slavery into a form that was meant to be received as fun and frolic. By removing the politics of the time and adding in satirical and comic elements, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” increasingly ceased to reflect socio-political tensions in the nation. Instead, it became low-brow entertainment.
The primary white innovator of minstrel music, Foster used songs like “Old Folks at Home” and “My Old Kentucky Home” to evoke a mythologized Southern lifestyle, which was presented as fixed and unmoving, home-based, and passive; Uncle Tom’s nostalgic yearning for his life on the Shelby and St. Clare plantations in the novel was effectively reproduced on the minstrel stage. Foster’s songs were employed so consistently in theatrical productions of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” that they could be described as a central pillar of Tom-mania.
Most noticeably, the minstrel shows that featured Uncle Tom reimagined Stowe’s character as an elderly man. The moment Uncle Tom became elderly was the moment when the name Uncle Tom came to connote the lowest rung in the Black social hierarchy. It is when Black people started to conclude that being like Uncle Tom might be one of the worst crimes anyone might commit against the race.