The multitude of later dramatizers never bothered to seek Mrs. Stowe’s blessing although they willingly admitted their dependence on her. In fact, most were eager to advertise that theirs was the only “just, sensible, and faithful dramatic version of the original.” Mrs. Stowe never associated herself with any of the dramatizations, nor did she ever receive a single cent from any stage version. The gold mine was wide open, and there were mighty few actors and managers in the United States of the last half of the century who did not scoop up a few nuggets. Mrs. Stowe’s million-dollar theatrical property made millions, but not for her.

The first edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel was published on March 20, 1852, although the final installment of its serialized version in the National Era did not appear until April 1. This Washington paper had printed the first segment of the story, “The Death of Uncle Tom,” the previous summer.

During the winter of 1851-52, the National Era was passed from hand to hand more eagerly with each new installment of the story. By the time J. P. Jewett, the Boston publisher, undertook the first book publication, the fervor was still building. Three thousand copies were sold the first day, 10,000 inside the first week—the complete stock of the first edition. Jewett printed again immediately, and then again. Within the first year he sold 300,000 copies. But this was less astonishing than the spectacular first-year history of the novel in England. Published in London in May, 1852, by the following May it had appeared in 23 different editions and sold well over a million copies. On September 3, 1852, the London Times wrote: “Mrs. Stowe has received $10,000 as her copyright premium on three months’ sales of the work—we believe the largest sum of money ever received by any author, either American or European, from the sale of a single work in so short a period of time.”

Uncle Tom’s Cabin became one of the all-time sensations of book publishing history. By 1878, the British Museum had shelved copies of the book in twenty different languages, including Bohemian, Modern Greek, Russian, Siamese, and Servian. Uncle Tom’s Cabin covered the globe. In 1856, Thomas Macaulay, having just returned from Italy, wrote to Mrs. Stowe, “There is no place where ‘Uncle Tom’ is not to be found.”

Mrs. Stowe was not prepared for the fervor with which the abolitionists took up her book. She had thought it too mild for them, and in a way had even hoped that it might help to unite the North and South. When she met Lincoln after the war had begun, she must have been deeply

Mrs. Stowe’s Christian object, as already noted, did not admit a transfer of her story to the stage. But with the enthusiasm of the reading public so abundantly clear, an early dramatization was inevitable. Theater managers of the 1850’s skimmed the cream from the best-seller list just as the movie producers do today. The first stage version, The Southern Uncle Tom, was performed at the Baltimore Museum on January 5, 1852, almost three months before the serialization in the National Era was completed. After another performance or two at the Marshall Theater in Richmond, Virginia, nothing more was heard of it. The second try was at Purdy’s National Theater in New York with an hour-long “catch-house” adaptation by C. W. Taylor. All the St. Claire, Eva, and Topsy episodes were omitted and numerous songs and tableaux were added. Although it ran for eleven performances, from August 23, 1852, to September 4, and provoked a good deal of comment, it did not really catch on.

These two early productions provided the prelude. The phenomenal stage history of Uncle Tom’s Cabin really began at the Troy Museum in Troy, New York, on September 27, 1852. G. C. Howard, manager of the Troy company, had commissioned his 22-year-old cousin, George L. Aiken, to prepare a dramatization that would display the talents of Howard’s four-year-old daughter, Cordelia. Although Aiken was regularly employed as resident playwright and “juvenile” of the company, Howard gave him a bonus of $40 and a gold watch for his week’s work on Uncle Tom. To concoct a three-and-a-half-hour drama in one week, even though he lifted most of his dialogue directly from the novel, must have demanded considerable facility with the pen and entitled him to the extra reward.

The play opened on the twenty-seventh of September, but not without some difficulties. Green Germon, the leading man of the company, had rebelled at playing a “blacked-up” character. Even if he didn’t carry a “tambo” or “bones,” Germon insisted, audiences would expect a minstrel “breakdown” or a chorus or two of “Jim Crow.” Howard finally convinced him that Uncle Tom was a new type of stage Negro. If the play caught on, Germon could advertise himself as the original Uncle Tom.

The fourth and final act of this first Aiken drama, subtitled Life Among the Lowly, concluded with the death of Eva. By the end of October—the play had been running continuously—the citizens of Troy clamored to see the remaining episodes of the novel. Aiken obliged with a sequel, The Death of Uncle Tom, or The Religion of the Lowly. On November 15, after the sequel had been playing for two weeks, Howard announced in the Troy newspapers:

The curtain was finally rung down on this sequence of Aiken dramatizations on December 1, after the hundredth performance. No play in Troy has yet broken this record, and, as Howard explained, it was “equal to seven years run in New York, when the population of the cities is considered.” The press repeatedly echoed the enthusiasm of the Troy citizenry: “The Museum is thronged nightly with the most respectable audiences. . . . This play has brought out our first citizens, many of whom have never before entered the Museum. . . . Its performance had been witnessed by over 25,000 people and the cry is still they come!” Troy then had a population of 30,000.

This was not the Howards’ first encounter with a theatrical success. They, and the Germons also, had been in the original cast of The Drunkard at the Boston Museum in 1844. In fact, the Howards had met and married while playing in The Drunkard; but now and for the rest of their theatrical days, they and daughter Cordelia were firmly and faithfully joined to Uncle Tom. The Troy venture had really been a Howard family affair: little Cordelia’s mother had played Topsy; her grandmother (Mrs. Fox), Aunt Ophelia; her father, St. Claire; her uncle (Charles Fox), Fletcher and Cute; and her father’s cousin (Aiken), George Harris. For 35 years, until Howard’s death in 1887, the Howard trio devoted themselves to “Tomming.”

In 1854, Mrs. Stowe saw the Howards perform the play at the National Theater in Boston. Francis R. Underwood, then managing editor of the Atlantic Monthly, who accompanied her, described the occasion for his readers: “I asked Mrs. Stowe to go with me to see the play. She had some natural reluctance, considering the position of her husband as a preacher; but she also had some curiosity as a woman and as an author to see in the flesh and blood the creations of her imagination. I think she told me she had never been in a theater in her life. I procured the manager’s box, and we entered privately, she being well muffled. She sat in the shade of the curtains of our box, and watched the play attentively. I never saw such delight upon a human face as she displayed when she first comprehended the full power of Mrs. Howard’s ‘Topsy.’ She scarcely spoke during the evening; but her expression was eloquent—smiles and tears succeeding each other through the whole.”

Although the Howards had given a relatively straight rendering of the play in Troy, even they had introduced an orchestral accompaniment for Eliza’s flight, crashing chord accents for Legree’s whip lashes, and Mrs. Howard had performed a kind of Topsy “breakdown.” But the all-out competition for more striking spectacular effects in acting, scenery, and music began with the New York opening the following season. Captain Purdy, the National Theater manager who had sponsored the unsuccessful Taylor version the year before, engaged the Troy company: “Six acts, eight tableaux, and thirty scenes, embracing the whole work,” for a grand opening on July 18, 1853. For the first time in a New York theater, a single play constituted the entire evening’s entertainment. Contrary to custom, there would be no “curtain-raiser,” no “after-piece.” This was Howard’s idea. Straight-laced puritans could he lured into the theater if they were assured no unpalatable and sinful theatrical exhibitions would soil their souls.

By the end of July, Purdy was assured his initial investment was secure. Against his better judgment he had been persuaded to pay the staggering sum of $100 per week to Mrs. Howard for the services of herself and little Cordelia. But when he was obliged to schedule anywhere from twelve to eighteen performances per week to meet the demand, Purely freely admitted his “better judgment” had been wrong. He ripped out the orchestral boxes and replaced them with 300 additional cushioned armchairs for which he charged 50 cents; excepting for the price, not unlike the divans in some of the present-day Broadway theaters. The play was on its way to a 300-performance run at the National, the first leg of its long and gaudy career.

While Purdy’s performances were still in progress, four other versions were brought out in New York: at the Bowery Theater, at Barnum’s American Museum, at the Franklin Museum, and finally in a burlesque concoction by Christy’s Minstrels. Purdy sailed along untroubled by three of these invasions, but Barnum’s offering worried him. Barnum was a showman to be feared, and his splashy advertising attracted customers.

The dramatization by Henry J. Conway, which Barnum had acquired, was proclaimed as, “The only just and sensible dramatic version of Mrs. Stowe’s book.” Furthermore: “It does not foolishly and unjustly elevate the Negro above the white man in intellect or morals. It exhibits a true picture of Negro life in the South, instead of absurdly representing the ignorant slave as possessed of all the polish of the drawing room, and the refinement of the educated whites. And instead of turning away the audience in tears, the author has wisely consulted dramatic taste by having Virtue triumphant at last, and after all its unjust sufferings, miseries and deprivations, conducted to happiness by the hand of Him who watches over all.”