Stowe’s abolitionist novel birthed both straight adaptations and anti-Stowe minstrel shows.

Evidence

Uncle Tom’s Cabin turned the variety show into its own sort of theater. Some producers made straight adaptations that transported some of the novel’s most significant characters—noble, enslaved Tom; angelically blond Little Eva; Tom’s evil owner Simon Legree—to the stage with little change to Stowe’s fervent abolitionism. But many others couldn’t tolerate Stowe; in their eyes, the book was blasphemous. They used her denunciation of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin to create minstrel shows that denounced her. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1115

Categorization

• SHARE: For a theater-history friend: the anti-abolitionist minstrel rebuttal to Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a striking early example of politically counter-charged adaptation.