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As a form of musical theatre, blackface minstrelsy traces back to the 1830s. It originated with rapid population growth in industrial Northern cities and an emergent working-class culture that desired mass forms of entertainment. At the same time, the question of what to do with increased Black presence in American cities lingered. Blackface performance, as Eric Lott argues in Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, became one of the arenas in which to make sense of the tumult. ‘The rise of American minstrelsy,’ he writes, ‘[as] organized around the quite explicit “borrowing” of black cultural materials for white dissemination, [was] a borrowing that ultimately depended on the material relations of slavery.’ Still, Lott adds, ‘the minstrel show obscured these relations by pretending that slavery was amusing, right, and natural.’¹ If slavery was seen as entertainment, then the plight of African Americans could be minimized and even erased from the consciousness of white Americans – especially anti-abolitionists, of whom there were many. (In 1834, for example, an anti-abolitionist riot in New York City lasted for nearly one week before it was stopped by authorities.)

Thomas Dartmouth ‘Daddy’ Rice (1808–60), a New York–born performer and playwright, was one of the first actors to don blackface when he danced and sang ‘Jump Jim Crow’ on the stage in 1832. His blackface portrayal was based on a dance Rice claimed to have seen an old, disabled Black stable hand perform in the 1820s somewhere in the South. In his dance, Rice would hop around, his arms flying up and down in a silly manner that was amusing to the young and middle-aged working-class men who made up the majority of minstrelsy’s audiences during the period. By the time ‘Daddy’ Rice arrived at New York’s Bowery Theatre in 1832, with his caricatured song-and-dance routine, he had attracted an enthusiastic following.

Class fears were coupled with the narrative of Black escape largely in response to the influx of African Americans who had steadily migrated north from the 1820s onward. Like Stowe’s novel, the minstrel show spoke directly to America’s growing North-South divide. Rather than ask audiences to empathize with the enslaved, however, minstrelsy’s derision of Blacks incited audiences to sympathize with Northern whites. The genre exposed the longings, fears, hopes, and prejudices of the white, urban working class by creating a new sense of Blackness and a new sense of whiteness all at the same time. The minstrel stage became a place where whites could make appeals to ‘keep Blacks in their place’ while helping to solidify working-class bonds among whites and attracting newly arrived immigrants to this popular form of entertainment. By adopting the dominant cultural ethos of anti-Blackness, those newcomers could better assimilate into the mainstream of America. The performance of a white/Black dyad presented slaves and ex-slaves on the plantation and out of place in an urban milieu. As these shows took hold in the North, where slavery was (for the most part) no longer practised, they revealed something unique about the how Northerners constructed and understood themselves, according to Rutgers University professor Douglas Jones. The minstrel show had become an ‘aesthetic surrogate for the loss of slavery in the North.’²

Minstrel-mania, a precursor to Tom-mania, began in the 1840s as multiple white minstrel troupes in blackface appeared in theatres in New York and London. In 1843, four performers – Billy Whitlock, Dan Emmett, Frank Brower, and Dick Pelham – banded together to form the Virginia Minstrels for a series of New York appearances.³ The following year, the Ethiopian Serenaders, a blackface minstrel troupe from Britain, played at the White House.⁴

The Virginia Minstrels are often cited as establishing minstrelsy as a national obsession because of the details they put into constructing their personas as ‘real’ delineators, as they were often called, of African American music and culture. Blackface and its white performers depended on the claim that they had learned their music from African Americans, attracting audiences by marketing their performances as though they were ‘interpreters,’ delivering the ‘authentic’ Black music of the plantation in an enjoyable and engaging form. In order to give the impression that they were playing genuine plantation music, the Virginia Minstrels would note on their playbills that their ‘instruments were manufactured by themselves,’ which was likely true, observes early minstrelsy author Hans Nathan.⁵ The Virginia Minstrels also toured Britain in 1843, thereby situating blackface minstrelsy, a distinctly American phenomenon, as part of transatlantic Anglophone culture. The transnationalism of the genre undoubtedly primed British audiences for the reception of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

In the next few years, minstrel shows featured comic parodies of Italian opera arias, caricatures of the ‘Ethiopians’ on Southern plantations, and mimicry of African Americans living in Northern urban centres. The Southern character, joyfully at home on the plantation, became known as Jim Crow, while the Northern character, an uppity Northern dandy, was called Zip Coon. While Jim Crow was a comic foil, Zip Coon signified something quite different. By donning the clothing of elite whites, this character implied there was a desire on the part of African Americans in the North not only for social mobility but also for other rights, such as integration and interracial sex. At the same time, the Black dandy caricature struck at the American distaste for pretentiousness and enhanced the pleasure derived from ridiculing those who claimed to be what they truly were not.⁶

Through the 1850s, minstrelsy’s second phase, the genre began to establish itself as a definable part of America’s national culture. In the turbulent years leading up to the Civil War, minstrelsy opened a window onto the complex culture developing in America’s urban centres: it served as both the bearer and conveyer of vital cultural thoughts, feelings, and images. In Northern cities like Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, and also Canadian cities like Montreal and Toronto, minstrel shows were part of an emergent theatre scene in which blackface rendered permissible topics like sexuality, women’s rights, and crude jokes that were otherwise taboo on more legitimate stages, such as opera.

These shows are comparable to the stand-up comedians of the turbulent 1960s, comics like George Carlin, Lenny Bruce, and Mort Sahl, who used social and political humour to provoke and challenge their times. Similarly, by the late 1850s, a time when the political climate in the U.S. was increasingly divided and a civil war seemed inevitable, audiences viewed the minstrel show as entertainment, but its depictions of African Americans had lasting resonance.

Just prior to the Civil War, the minstrel show began to change: some theatre managers sought to capitalize on audience nostalgia for early minstrelsy, while others developed minstrelsy into a variety show – the precursor to late-nineteenth-century vaudeville. During this phase, minstrelsy companies begin to recognize the commercial power of nostalgia. On the eve of the Civil War, in fact, blackface minstrelsy became one of the first popular culture forms to double back on its own repertories, with audiences invited to revisit their first experiences with blackface comedy decades earlier.

This history provides the context for early stage versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Part of the key to its commercial success lay in its debt to blackface minstrelsy. By 1852, the minstrel show had found a way to take the ambivalent and contradictory racial politics of the times and transform them into entertainment. Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s representations of Black inferiority spoke to audiences in ways that mirrored the minstrel show. It also aided in turning fiction into reality; people began to relate to Stowe’s interpretation of slavery and its horrors as a primary source to such an extent that, for instance, newspapers widely quoted Abraham Lincoln who, upon meeting Stowe, purportedly said, ‘So you’re the little lady who started this great war.’⁷

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.

Josiah Henson, c. 1883, Uncle Tom’s Cabin Historic Site.

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. Boston-born writer George Aiken and Nova Scotia–born producer George Howard are often credited as creating the first and most influential stage adaptation of Stowe’s novel. When Aiken’s script for Howard’s production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared, shortly after the book’s 1852 debut, circus magnate P. T. Barnum also commissioned a version, written by Henry J. Conway, which ran at his American Museum in New York. On January 16, 1854, the Bowery Theatre announced yet another stage version, with the minstrel star Daddy Rice in the role of Uncle Tom.⁸ Rice, who was nearing the end of both his career and his life (he died in 1860), authenticated the show as representing the ‘best’ in minstrelsy. As the originator of ‘Jump Jim Crow,’ and as one of the self-described ‘fathers of American minstrelsy,’ Rice was no longer a star of the genre, but he represented its origins as a national entertainment.

Cover to an early edition of ‘Jump Jim Crow’ sheet music (c. 1832).

Small-scale minstrel show productions, which toured in New England and New York State, also came across the border to perform in Canada. These so-called ‘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.⁹

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.¹⁰ 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. As with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Foster’s music was used equally ‘for abolitionist and pro-slavery purposes,’ writes Sarah Meer, author of Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy & Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s.¹¹

1844 sheet music cover for a collection of songs by the Christy Minstrels.

For example, Foster wrote songs like ‘Camptown Races’ and ‘Swanee River’ for the Christy Minstrels in the early 1850s. Led by Edwin P. Christy, these two songs were the personal favourite of many Democratic politicians in New York City.¹² Both spoke to the unifying ethos of the South. Additionally, ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ constructed two separate worlds: a world of innocence (the plantation South) and the outside world (the industrialized North and elsewhere).¹³

By the late nineteenth century, the songs of early minstrelsy still evoked for white audiences the world of the plantation South. Early minstrelsy had often paralleled white abolitionist paternalism by expressing pity toward slaves, as can be seen in Foster songs like ‘Old Uncle Ned’¹⁴: ‘Dere was an old N––, dey call’d him uncle Ned / He’s dead long ago, long ago! / He had no wool on de top ob his head / De place whar de wool ought to grow.’ While the song established Ned as a victim, the plantation owner becomes the subject of our sympathies: ‘when Old Ned die Massa take it mighty hard.’ These sentimental songs, which spoke of longing for the antebellum past, proliferated after the Civil War and commingled with ideologies of Southern redemption and the ‘lost cause’ justification, which referred to the belief among white Southerners that their fight in the Civil War had been a ‘noble’ one. Foster’s plantation melodies also became a sobriquet for old Black men. Names like ‘poor old Ned,’ for instance, were still thriving in 1893 when Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Banjo Lesson – a Norman Rockwellesque painting of an older Black man showing a young boy on his knee how to play – was first displayed in Philadelphia.¹⁵

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.

Significantly, Henson onstage as Uncle Tom fits within a continuum of Black performance in nineteenth-century theatre. Interestingly, when African Americans first performed on theatrical stages, they did so, with few exceptions, in blackface. Black minstrel troupes appeared on the scene as early as the 1850s, but it was not until after the Civil War that minstrel managers made serious attempts to exploit the talents of Black entertainers by putting them on the commercial stage. By the mid-1870s, there were many popular Black minstrel troupes acting out the stereotyped themes of ‘Negroes’ on the Southern plantation.

Among the first of the Black troupes to excite public interest was a group of fifteen ex-slaves, originally from Macon, Georgia, called the Georgia Slave Troupe Minstrels. Organized in April 1865 by a white man, W. H. Lee, they toured widely during the 1865–66 season, and eventually came under the management and proprietorship of Sam Hague, a white minstrel,who changed the troupe’s name to Sam Hague’s Slave Troupe of Georgia Minstrels.¹⁶ Charles Hicks, however, is commonly viewed as the father of Black minstrelsy (African Americans in blackface performing as Black people). He managed the Original Georgia Minstrels, which formed in 1865 and was sometimes also billed as the Only Simon Pure Negro Troupe in the World.¹⁷ Hicks was the first to manage an all-Black minstrelsy troupe, and thereafter the Georgia Minstrels became synonymous with Black or ‘coloured minstrels.’¹⁸

Scene in William A. Brady’s 1901 revival of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the Academy of Music, New York City.

Blackface minstrelsy ultimately transformed Uncle Tom. The genre twisted, mutated, and deviated from Stowe’s novel just enough to keep audiences wanting more, while simultaneously staying true to audiences’ expectations for what a ‘real’ Uncle Tom would look and act like. It is through performance that the fiction of Uncle Tom’s servility becomes a reality.

Advertisement for a Black minstrel troupe, c. 1860s–70s.