Stowe Takes the Stage: Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Christian Slave

Stowe Takes the Stage: Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Christian SlaveAuthor(s): Eric GardnerSource: Legacy, Vol. 15, No. 1 (1998), pp. 78-84Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25679254 .

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Stowe Takes the Stage: Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Christian Slave

Eric Gardner

Saginaw Valley State University

On

August 2, 1856, the Illustrated Lon don News reported the performance

of a fascinatingly racialized drama: in a

lecture-like one-woman show for a largely white audience, a black woman speaker gave a reading of a white woman author's fictional representations of black and white characters:

The great hall of Stafford house was on Monday last the scene of an event which would have caused considerable astonishment to any gentleman of the Southern States of America. ... A large

audience was gathered together... to

listen to a lady of colour giving dra matic readings. The Duchess of Suther land had devoted her mansion, for the time, to the service of a Mrs. F. Webb, and our Southerner would have been confounded and disgusted at the sight of what he would call a "tarnation nigger" being listened to

with the most respectful attention by no inconsiderable number of the aris

tocracy of England. . . . [Mrs. Webb] is accredited ...

by Mrs. Stowe, who has

dramatised her own novel of "Uncle

This c. 1855 daguerrotype, from the collection of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, Hartford, CT, may be of the Webb family. Although no other photograph has been found for compar ison, the woman in this image certainly Jits contemporary descriptions of Mary Webb's age, racial heritage, "delicate features," and stature.

Tom's Cabin" for Mrs. Webb's especial benefit. (121)_

LEGACY, Vol. 15, No. 1, 1998. Copyright ? 1998 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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Eric Gardner

This description seems to me a locus of the

conflicting questions of authorial intent, per formance, physicality, audience, reception, and race embodied in The Christian Slave, Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1855 dramatization of Uncle Tom's Cabin which was written

"Expressly for the readings of Mrs. Mary E.

Webb," an African American actress and the wife of Frank J. Webb. I want to begin to artic ulate and contextualize some of those ques tions. I am especially interested in chroni

cling the play's reception, in beginning to rescue the play's major (and perhaps only) performer Mary Webb from obscurity, and in suggesting how the play revises Uncle Tom's Cabin and the antebellum debate over

slavery as a whole.

The Christian Slave was performed and

published at a key moment in this debate in the midst of the Kansas crisis and between the pacifistic, domestic Uncle Tom s Cabin and the more radical and violent Dred. Fur

ther, at a time when Stowe's relationship with blacks was strained (many black ac

tivists had advanced well-founded but sting ing critiques of her novel and her stances on colonization and racial difference), she dramatized her novel "Expressly" for a black woman.1 Examining The Christian Slave should allow us not only to trace the shape of the post-Uncle Tom s Cabin debate over

slavery and race, but should also add to what

we know about how black women speakers functioned in the public component of that debate.2

Curiously, though, the play has received almost no modern critical attention. Forrest

Wilson does not even mention The Chris tian Slave in his landmark biography of

Stowe, and Joan Hedrick devotes only two sentences to it. As far as I have been able to

determine, it is mentioned in only a hand ful of studies of Stowe and/or Uncle Tom's Cabin. And though the Illustrated London News' accompanying illustration, which shows Webb standing behind a lectern, is

reproduced in Langston Hughes and Milton Meltzer's A Pictorial History of the Negro in America, the play and Mary Webb have also been largely overlooked by historians of race and slavery.

The play did not suffer this kind of neglect during the 1850s. To date, I have found ad

vertisements, notices, and reviews of Webb's

performances in over a dozen American and British newspapers and periodicals, rang

ing from abolitionist publications to pa pers with large, general circulation like the New York Times. These documents record well-attended performances in Philadelphia, Salem, Boston, New York City, Brooklyn, and London in 1855 and 1856. Charlotte Forten Grimke's diary records at least one

additional, semi-private, American perfor mance in late 1857 (264). When Webb died in 1859, she was memorialized by no less than the National Anti-Slavery Standard as "the colored lady whose readings of passages from Uncle Tom's Cabin' are pleasantly re membered by many of our readers" (3).

Before beginning to examine those "pas sages," I want to sketch what we know of "the colored lady," Mary Webb, in order to

position the play as a specific site of per formative interaction between a white au

thor and a black performer. The archival work of Jean Fagan Yellin and of Phillip Lapsansky (especially his "Afro-Americana:

Frank J. Webb and His Friends") gives a brief outline of Mary Webb's life which I, along with other scholars, am beginning to fill in. Born in 1828 in Bedford, Massachusetts, to a wealthy Spanish gentleman and a fugitive slave from Virginia, Mary married Frank J.

Webb, a free-born black Philadelphian, in the early 1840s; the marriage signaled Mary

Webb's entrance into at least the fringes of one of Philadelphia's most elite black social circles. Related to the famous Forten family by marriage, Frank Webb was active in Phil

adelphia's free black community (see, e.g.,

Lapsansky 36). In 1857, Frank would be

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come the second African American to pub lish a novel, The Garies and Their Friends. The Webbs, though, suffered a number of financial setbacks during the first half of the

1850s, and Mary Webb turned to public per formance at least partially for economic rea sons. In this, Webb had much in common

with other white and black women of the pe riod who, like Harriet Wilson, were "forced to some experiment" to gain financial stabil

ity (preface to Our Nig). Mary Webb's first public readings con

sisted largely of scenes from the plays of

Shakespeare and Sheridan; she was billed

alternately as the "Black Siddons" and the "Colored Siddons," after British actress Sarah Siddons. Webb also read poems by Whittier and Stowe and, according to one advertise

ment, specimens of "the favorite Irish, Negro and French eccentricities." One report even

says that she "produced a great sensation" by reading portions of Longfellow's "Hiawatha" dressed in Indian costume.3 This mixture of material and the accounts' fascination with Webb's race, color, and features suggest that at least part of her popularity came from the

curiosity of mostly-white audiences. We do not know what motivated Stowe to

choose Mary Webb for her dramatization or

what motivated Mary Webb to accept. We do know that Stowe's publishers, Phillips and Sampson, played on Webb's readings,

which coincided with the play's publication, to market The Christian Slave. One adver tisement suggested that audiences "should

provide themselves with a copy. . . other

wise much of the effect of the reading will be lost."4 But the exchange of capital was more complex than simply a major publisher and writer taking advantage of popular white

curiosity about a black speaker; it seems to have been mutually beneficial. Tickets for

Webb's American readings ranged in price from twenty-five to fifty cents and were sold at both bookstores and at the door; though

we do not know what Mary Webb's share of the receipts was, it was clearly enough

to allow the Webbs to travel and Frank Webb to write his novel. Stowe's patronage might thus be read, as Hedrick suggests, in the complex contexts of white paternalism. Charlotte Forten Grimke's hope that Webb's talents could be cultivated so that she could reflect "credit upon herself and her race''

suggests yet another possibility (144): that

anti-slavery activists saw in Webb a chance to showcase what blacks could accomplish.

Most of Webb's performances were, in fact,

supported or set up by area anti-slavery so cieties and many were part of lecture se ries on the slavery question. Her reading in New York City, for example, was sponsored by the New York Anti-Slavery Society, and one of her Boston-area readings was part of a series of lectures that also featured Ho race Mann and Wendell Phillips.5 Perhaps

most important to Webb, these connections to organized abolitionism clearly increased her chance to support her family from her

earnings.

At this point, we do not know how Webb dealt with the paternalist, sentimentally racialist, and often flat-out racist attitudes that dominated some sectors of white aboli tionism and that Stowe waffled on through out the 1850s; the questions of economic

need, paternalist patronage, and racial uplift undoubtedly all figured in her performative choices, choices which we are only begin ning to uncover. We know, for example, that

Webb read The Christian Slave standing behind a lectern; she gestured little, did not dress in costume, and relied mainly on the subtleties of her voice. Although we

must consider Webb's color?reportedly a

"deep olive"?as in some ways a theatrical,

performative event, Webb's readings of The Christian Slave seem to have relied much less on visual spectacle than minstrel appro priations of Uncle Tom's Cabin and perhaps even than her own costumed reading of "Hi awatha" did. One reviewer even urged audi

ences to close their eyes to get the full effect of the play, and several reviewers and major

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Eric Gardner

figures of both the American and British abolitionist movements complimented her

grace and dignity. The text of the play highlights the ques

tions of how Stowe constructed her text, how Webb navigated and negotiated it, and how audiences responded to it. As historians of nineteenth-century drama have noted,

adapting Stowe's novel to the stage posed great difficulties: it has several subplots, al most as many scene changes, and far too

many characters; some sections are domi

nated by long philosophical speeches and others by action almost impossible to stage

(although many productions did attempt Eliza's crossing of the icy Ohio); the novel's narrator is both omniscient and verbose, and the novel calls for national upheaval.6 Most adaptations thus changed it signifi

cantly; for example, George Aiken added several comic characters, cut much of the novel's discussion of slavery, and played con

sciously into the forms and tropes of popular minstrelry. Difficulties in dramatizing Uncle Tom's Cabin were compounded in Stowe's case by her relative ignorance of the theater and by her investment in the integrity of the novel. Indeed, Stowe was initially resistant about anyone staging her novel; approached in 1852 by Asa Hutchinson of the famed

Hutchinson Family Singers, she flatly refused his request for a dramatization (Gossett 261).

Stowe's nods to the requirements of drama in The Christian Slave are few and awk

ward; the play's three acts?one for each of

the slaveholding scenarios into which Uncle Tom is placed?total 67 pages and contain

37 different scenes, some only a few lines

long. Although there is no evidence that the

play was intended to be or was read publicly by anyone other than Webb or in any setting other than a lecture hall, it does contain stage directions (including directions for Haley to

be thrown from a horse during his pursuit of Eliza). As yet I have been unable to deter mine how, or if, these stage directions were

incorporated in Webb's readings.

But even given these awkward moves and the fact that much of the play is lifted directly from Uncle Tom's Cabin, it is a mistake to

approach the play, as most historians have, as a simple recreation of "the climaxes of the novel using its essential dialogue" (Jor genson 31). Rather, because the play cuts

away great sections of Uncle Tom's Cabin and because it was produced in and for a

different set of contexts, we need to read it as a revision of the novel and minstrel show appropriations. Here, I want briefly to focus on two features of the play that are

of especial interest given Mary Webb's per formances: the play's overwhelming focus on black characters and its re-envisioning of how one black character in particular, Cassy, attempts to enact sentimental values in the

most anti-sentimental system.

While Uncle Tom's Cabin is largely about what white people should and shouldn't "do" with black people, The Christian Slave significantly downplays the roles of white characters. While the novel begins in Shelby's parlor, for example, the play begins in Uncle Tom's cabin, immediately suggesting a heavier emphasis on questions surrounding black characters and domestic

space. The fact that Stowe focused the play on the novel's slave characters, however,

does not mean that she set aside the ideo

logical framework of sentimental racialism that shaped those characters. The scenes

that follow are deeply ambivalent about

any kind of black agency: George Shelby is quickly and easily established as greatly superior to Tom's children; the minstrel-like Sam and Andy delay Haley solely to please Mrs. Shelby; and Tom is generally the object of concern rather than an active subject. Further, after Eliza's escape, the George and Eliza plot disappears; George Harris never

appears in The Christian Slave. While this omission allows Stowe to end the play with Tom's death and so to eliminate George's final remarks on colonization, it also re moves one of the novel's most radical black

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Legacy

characters. Throughout the first two acts,

white paternalism remains dominant; all of the black characters need white parenting. Could the fact that a black woman was read

ing these statements change the audience's

perception of them? Perhaps. A reviewer for the Illustrated London News saw in Webb's

portrayal of Tom not a childlike, objectified black but "a man living in a world which seems to be a perpetual contradiction to the laws of that God in whom he believes"

(122). Hopefully, further research on Webb's

performances will add details to this picture. But if the first two acts show Stowe's

continuing use of sentimental racialist pa ternalism, the third act radically undercuts this ideology. Cassy is present in eight of Act Three's fourteen scenes; her major solilo

quy takes four full pages?almost one-fourth of the act?and is the longest in the play. Given Stowe's significant cuts, Cassy s pow erful presence here should give us pause. Her subplot could have been eliminated al most as easily as George and Eliza's, and, even if Stowe felt it necessary to set up the events leading to Tom's death, Cassy's story could have been radically condensed.

Instead, Cassy becomes the center of much of Act Three. This extended emphasis on serious subject matter focalized through a black female character is exceedingly rare in dramatic adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

As far as I have been able to determine, it is absent from male-dominated minstrel

shows, which, as Eric Lott has pointed out, often dismissed female power, especially black female power, "with a suspiciously draconian punitiveness

. . . usually in the

grotesque transmutations of. . . female fig ures" into the stereotypical figure of the "wench" (27, 26). As in the novel, Cassy relates how slavery

destroyed both the family of her childhood and the family she attempted to build as the slave-wife of her owner. But Cassy's illustra

tion of slavery's destruction of domestic ide als in The Christian Slave could have been

accomplished through Eliza or even through numerous minor characters in the novel such as Prue and Hagar. With all of these

characters, as well as white mothers like Mrs. Bird and Rachel Halliday (to say nothing of Stowe's own narrative voice), absent from the play, Cassy arguably becomes the play's representative mother. In the novel, Cassy differs radically enough from the novel's other mothers; though her pathos is deep, her anger outweighs it. Though much of

Cassy's monologue is taken verbatim from the novel, Cassy's anger is intensified in the

play; for example, when she says "You tell me there's a God. . . .

maybe it's so. The

sisters used to tell me of a day of judg ment when everything is coming to light. Won't there be vengeance then!" in the

play, the word "Won't" is italicized (318, 58). More important, Stowe's interventions,

which slow down and diffuse Cassy's speech in the novel, are absent. What we get is

page upon page of an angry black woman whose domestic dreams have been all but

destroyed by slavery. And because the play ends with Tom's death and not the denoue ment that reunites Cassy with her daughter, what we are left with is Cassy 's anger, anger that threatens not only to kill Legree but to consume her own life, anger that denies that

any kind of slavery could be sentimental. Given Mary Webb's similarities to Cassy? both were the daughters of wealthy white men and slave women, both were acclaimed

as beauties with delicate features, and both

expanded and questioned the boundaries of their "spheres" in order to support their families?these scenes and their reception in

particular may demand much of our future attention.

This paper begins to pull The Christian Slave out of dismissive footnotes and to rec

ognize it as an important revision of Uncle Tom's Cabin. In adapting her novel for a black female speaker, Stowe reshaped her text to grant both more agency and more

power to select black characters. The Chris

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Eric Gardner

tian Slave, like her later anti-slavery novel

Dred, demonstrates that Stowe's views on

race were much more complex and shifting than previous critics have suggested. As such and especially as one of the few antebellum

performance pieces designed specifically for a black woman, The Christian Slave is a sig nificant piece of the antebellum debate over

slavery, race, gender, sentimentalism, and

performance. We need to deepen, broaden,

and test the arguments I make here, and we

need to press for a critical edition of the

play suited for classroom use. We also need to carefully (re)consider the Webbs. Johns

Hopkins University Press's plans to issue The Garies and Their Friends in paperback later this year should provoke more research on Frank Webb;7 as a free black woman

who achieved international fame through repeated acts of public speech, Mary Webb deserves similar attention.

Notes

My thanks to Jodie Gardner, Nina Baym,

Phillip Lapsansky, Judith Fetterley, and the Con

ference organizers and participants. 1. See, for example, Robert Levines 'Uncle

Tom's Cabin in Frederick Douglass' Paper: An

Analysis of the Reception" and Marva Banks's

"Uncle Tom's Cabin and Antebellum Black Re

sponse." 2. Carla L. Peterson's "Doers of the Word":

African-American Women Speakers and Writers

in the North, 1830-1880 begins to thoughtfully examine the place(s) of black women in the

debate, but does not discuss Webb.

3. For examples of coverage of these early per

formances, see the 17 Nov. 1855 Salem Observer

and the 2 May 1855 Boston Daily Advertiser.

4. This or similar language ran in several ads.

See, for example, the 1 Dec. 1855 Boston Daily Advertiser.

5. For a full list of the lectures in this series, see the 17 Nov. 1855 Boston Daily Advertiser.

6. On dramatic adaptations of Uncle Tom's

Cabin, see esp. Gossett 260-83. 7. Since this paper was delivered, Johns Hop

kins University Press has indeed issued a facsimile

edition of The Garies in paperback; hopefully the novel will begin to enter our classrooms. Robert

Reid-Pharr s introduction to the volume, though,

presents some problems. He does not mention

Mary Webb at all and provides little biograph ical information on Frank Webb. Some of that

information is incorrect; Reid-Pharr, for example, confuses the Frank Webb who was an agent for

Freedom's Journal from 1827 to 1829 with the

Frank J. Webb who wrote the novel and who was

born c.1828 (see Reid-Pharr xiv, Lapsansky 35, and the 1850 Census of Philadelphia, which lists

both Frank J. Webb and Mary Webb).

Works Cited

Banks, Marva. "Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ante

bellum Black Response." Readers in History:

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and

the Contexts of Response. Ed. James Machor.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993. 209-27.

"Dramatic Readings by a Colored Native of Phila

delphia." Illustrated London News 2 Aug. 1856:

121-22.

Gossett, Thomas F. Uncle Tom's Cabin and Amer

ican Culture. Dallas: Southern Methodist UP,

1985.

Grimke, Charlotte Forten. The Journals of Char

lotte Forten Grimke. Ed. Brenda Stevenson.

New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

Hedrick, Joan. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.

Hughes, Langston, and Milton Meltzer. A Pictorial

History of the Negro in America. New York:

Crown, 1968.

Lapsansky, Phillip S. "Afro-Americana: Frank J. Webb and His Friends." The Annual Report of

the Library Company of Philadelphia for the

Year 1990. Philadelphia: Library Company of

Philadelphia, 1991. 27-43.

Levine, Robert. " Uncle Tom's Cabin in Frederick

Douglass' Paper: An Analysis of the Recep tion." American Literature 64 (1992): 71-93.

Lott, Eric. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelry and the American Working Class. New York:

Oxford UP, 1995.

Obituary for Mary Webb. National Anti-Slavery Standard 3 Sept. 1859: 3.

Peterson, Carla L. 'Doers of the Word": African American Women Speakers and Writers in

the North, 1830-1880. New York: Oxford UP,

1995.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. The Christian Slave: A

Drama Founded on a Portion of Uncle Tom's

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Cabin. Dramatized by Harriet Beecher Stowe,

Expressly for the Readings of Mrs. Mary E.

Webb. Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1855.

-. Dred, A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. 1856. Grosse Pointe: Scholarly, 1968.

-. Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the

Lowly. 1852. Ed. Elizabeth Ammons. New York:

Norton, 1994.

Webb, Frank J. The Garies and Their Friends.

1857. New York: Arno, 1969.

Wilson, Forrest. Crusader in Crinoline: The Life

of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Philadelphia: Lippin

cott, 1941.

Wilson, Harriet E. Adams. Our Nig; or, Sketches

from the Life of a Free Black in a Two-Story White House, North Showing that Slavery's Shadows Fall Even There. By "Our Nig." 1859.

Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Vintage,

1983.

Yellin, Jean Fagan, and Cynthia D. Bond, compil ers. The Pen Ls Ours: A Listing of Writings by and about African-American Women be

fore 1910 with Secondary Bibliography to the Present. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.

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Documents

Stowe Takes the Stage: Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Christian Slave