Snake Oil, Hustlers and Hambones by Ann Anderson

Author:Ann Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2012-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

No melodrama had a greater impact on the public than Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Dramatizations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel (“the big book that started the big war,” as Lincoln remarked) were a theatrical fixture for decades. Mrs. Stowe’s anti-slavery tale of Tom, Little Eva, Topsy, and cruel Simon Legree was a national bestseller at 300,000 copies in its first year. It’s difficult to overstate the impact of the book on the public. Despite its inaccuracies and oversimplifications, readers accepted its picture of slavery as gospel, and the characters became embedded in the American zeitgeist.

Two theater companies immediately produced unsuccessful stage adaptations in 1852, the year of the book’s publication. In September of the same year, a young actor named George Aiken had better luck with his version in Troy, New York. Aiken’s first production ran for 100 performances, and when he moved the show to New York City in 1853, it ran for 200 more consecutive performances. Toward the end of the run, the actors did the show eighteen times a week, taking their meal breaks in costume. No one has been able to count the number of productions (even Barnum had his own version at the American Museum), but it has been estimated that the play was staged four times a week for the next seventy-five years.11 In the 1890s, there were some 400 “Tom” companies on the road. One company would pass another on the way to the next booking. The show was such a crowd-pleaser that many actors made an entire career out of playing Simon Legree, Eva, and so on. There was even a special trade publication for Tom actors.12 In the South, the story was often changed to make the white characters more sympathetic. In the North, audiences endorsed the story’s righteous stand against slavery.

Over time, there were some ludicrous additions to the script: Prize fights, afterpieces, brass bands—anything was fine if it got an audience into the tent. The plot was changed many times, and characters were added. Some companies had funny skits in the middle, or used alligators for bloodhounds. Al Martin’s Tom show had eighty actors and a drum and bugle corps. Some companies were so tiny that the actors doubled on parts, changing wigs in full view of the audience. There were Tom shows with steamboat races, equestrian acts, dancers, and minstrel shows.

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