country.” But productions flourished, and the abolition movement surged—and with it opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law. Thousands who had shunned the theater as a coffer of sin, many of them working-class Americans, swarmed to the story of the beneficent slave who suffers on earth, dies, and ascends into heaven. “Now,” declared the pacifist abolitionist Parker Pillsbury, “the Theater is openly . . . before and better than the Church.” The production prompted some theaters to begin granting admission to African Americans, who sat in their own sections.
The images were unforgettable: Simon Legree whipping Tom, Eliza escaping with her infant across the frozen Ohio River, the death of Little Eva. These became, in effect, holy pictures for a rapt nation. In New York, the show enthralled a young Henry James, who later described Tom as a “wonderful ‘leaping’ fish” that flew through the air and landed “on every stage, literally without exception, in America and Europe.” Moved by the drama, Stephen Foster composed “My Old Kentucky Home.” “Tomming” became a way of life for countless actors and a mechanism by which Americans of all persuasions probed their assumptions about race. There were pro-slavery Toms, blackface lampoons, Irish parodies that critiqued white slave labor in the North, comic burlesques with happy endings.
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