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The 1906 Uncle Tom’s Cabin Law and the Politics of Race and Memory in Early-Twentieth-Century Kentucky

The 1906 Uncle Tom’s Cabin Law and the Politics of Race and Memory in Early-Twentieth-Century... an n e e. m a rshal l The 1906 Uncle Tom’s Cabin Law and the Politics of Race and Memory in Early-Twentieth-Century Kentucky In January 1902, Charles Scott, manager of the Lexington, Kentucky, Opera House, received some unwelcome correspondence from the city’s chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). The members wrote to inform him that they had drafted a petition demanding that he no longer book the traveling stage production of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This was disagreeable news to Scott. The show was one of the most popular acts in Lexington and played to packed audiences of black and white theater-goers there twice a year. The UDC women based their opposition on the play’s portrayal of slavery as a cruel institution. Both the stage production and the novel on which it was based, they asserted, “present[ed] a picture of slavery in the South that is essentially false—false because it present[ed] what was rare and exceptional as normal and typical.” Though they granted that there may have been some instances of cruelty under slavery, they believed that relations between master and slave had been usually “kindly and mutually benefi cial.” UDC offi cers http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Journal of the Civil War Era University of North Carolina Press

The 1906 Uncle Tom’s Cabin Law and the Politics of Race and Memory in Early-Twentieth-Century Kentucky

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Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright @ The University of North Carolina Press
ISSN
2159-9807

Abstract

an n e e. m a rshal l The 1906 Uncle Tom’s Cabin Law and the Politics of Race and Memory in Early-Twentieth-Century Kentucky In January 1902, Charles Scott, manager of the Lexington, Kentucky, Opera House, received some unwelcome correspondence from the city’s chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). The members wrote to inform him that they had drafted a petition demanding that he no longer book the traveling stage production of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This was disagreeable news to Scott. The show was one of the most popular acts in Lexington and played to packed audiences of black and white theater-goers there twice a year. The UDC women based their opposition on the play’s portrayal of slavery as a cruel institution. Both the stage production and the novel on which it was based, they asserted, “present[ed] a picture of slavery in the South that is essentially false—false because it present[ed] what was rare and exceptional as normal and typical.” Though they granted that there may have been some instances of cruelty under slavery, they believed that relations between master and slave had been usually “kindly and mutually benefi cial.” UDC offi cers

Journal

The Journal of the Civil War Era – University of North Carolina Press

Published: Aug 12, 2011

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