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Journal Article
Stephen Foster and the Slavery Question
2022
Overview
Harriet Beecher Stowe's antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, first published serially in 1851-52, was a cultural sensation. In the decade before the Civil War, and well beyond, Stephen Foster's music played a large role in this \"Tom mania.\" His sentimental minstrel songs resemble some aspects of the story, which tells of an enslaved man torn from his family and sold down the river from Kentucky to the Deep South, where his enslaver dies before he gets around to freeing him and his next owner eventually beats him to death. Filled with pathos, the songs were heard by some listeners as resonating with the novel's humanizing portrayals of enslaved people. In the end, the ambiguity of Foster's commercial music renders it impossible to know how any of his individual friends swayed his poetic and compositional choices in songs about enslaved people and slavery.
Publisher
University of Illinois Press
Subject
