Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1781-1861: Lifting the Veil of Black (review)

{ 119 } BOOK REV IEwS Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861: Lifting the Veil of Black. By Heather S. Nathans. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xi + 249 pp. $99.00 cloth. It is surprising to realize that, despite an outpouring of scholarship in the last twenty years about minstrelsy and performances by and of blacks during the first half of the nineteenth century, excepting studies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Heather Nathans’s is the first book to focus on the theatrical portrayal of slaves and slavery during the period. Nathans examines these subjects through the lens of antebellum sentiment, that mix of piety and moral commitment that expressed itself in emotional language and impassioned deed. Because so many representatives of slaves on nineteenth-century stages were white, sentiment is a slippery slope for contemporary students of antebellum performances of blackness . Who felt what about whom in this exchange? Nathans approaches her subject topically via six chapters that explore legal issues respecting slavery during and after the Revolutionary War, the compromise rhetoric of patriotic fervor mixed with abolitionism, colonization and the search for Africa, Yankees and Sambos, the tension between violence and abolitionism/sentiment and brutality, and the theatre as a mirror of real-time events. A rich body of dramatic and performative material supports and clarifies each topic across the antebellum period and landscape. (Private) sentiment was a useful antislavery tool only if it produced (public ) action. Chapter 2 of Slavery and Sentiment is exemplary of Nathans’s skill at following a historical map and illustrating it with dramatic landmarks. Here, her map is that of the post-1800 movement through presidential administrations and laws that shift focus from the individual trauma slavery represented, reflective of a politics centered on “the way in which the well-being of the state was embodied by the individual,” to “works focused on white characters nego- { 120 } BOOK REV IEwS tiating the complex relationships that would preserve the nation” (64). In the era’s plays, marriage became the metaphor for union. As laws careened from the 1820 Missouri Compromise to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Nathans demonstrates how the sentimental republican body of the early national period failed, how the sentimental appeal to the unified body of the earlier nineteenth century failed, and how the sentimental appeal of the 1850s to the slave body as national redeemer also failed. In the process, the black slave body was displaced from its own tragedy and the white political body became central to the drama of slavery and sentiment. Following a chapter concerning dramatizations of Africa that does much both to clarify antebellum projections of its land and people and efforts to“colonize ”free blacks and slaves to Africa during the antebellum era, Nathans moves to the cultural ground of American “Yankees” and “Sambos.” Here, students of staged Yankees and Negroes connect not only with the dominant repertory but also with lesser known works, such as John Townsend Trowbridge’s Neighbor Jackwood (1857). Nathans weaves the discussion of staged Yankees and Negroes around the career of abolitionist Parker Pillsbury, who very well understood how to use rhetoric and dramatizations of slavery narratives to bind passion and compassion in the Yankee figure with a sentimentalized staged Negro who clearly merited both pity and action. Nathans documents the shift from an earlier , listless abolitionist stance that appealed to Enlightenment rhetoric and the rights of man to one infused with a call to action against both fugitive slave laws and denials of the right to petition Congress for redress of grievances. She connects plays to the humanizing (sentimental) rhetoric of abolitionists like Pillsbury and the desegregation of abolitionist organizations, concluding that, by the 1850s, “not only had the stage Yankee begun to realize his potential as a moral champion, his black [stage Negro] protégé had become ‘worthy’ of his protection”(162). The result was an emotional amalgamation exemplified in the dramatized version of Neighbor Jackwood, where, Nathans argues,“Yankee”and “Negro” merge. Abolitionists had many strategies for drawing support to their cause. As conditions deteriorated after the 1830s, slave narratives became more pathetic, descriptions more violent, and embodiments of them more performative. In addition...