Slavery and Abolitionists

The importation of slaves was prohibited by congressional statute in 1807, and individual Northern states banned ownership of slaves over the next twelve years. In the South, domestic use and sale of slaves continued until passage of the Thirteenth Amendment (1865). The years in between saw the rise of the Abolitionist Movement in America. Although Abolitionist and Anti-Slavery societies, periodicals, and fund-raising events focused principally on the mid-Atlantic and New England states, the issue was carried West with settlers and performers.

Following the Missouri Compromise (1820-21) and the Compromise of 1850, the issue of slavery was debated each time a territory voted on statehood, and touring singers, most notably the Hutchinson Family, spread the Abolitionist message to territory voters. Their songs, and Abolitionist poetry set to hymns, were published in songsters and anthologies that were used as fund-raisers for individual Anti-Slavery societies and for legal battles against the Fugitive Slave Laws in the 1840s and 1850s. Individual popular and parlour songs were also published and sold to benefit the cause. Many of these martial songs and hymns, such as George F. Root's "The Battle Cry of Freedom," are still popular today.

Of all the performance texts of the anti-slavery cause, the best remembered are dramatizations of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. Stowe herself denounced these adaptations as simplistic, and performances were seldom used as Abolitionist fund-raisers, so they should not be considered documents of the movement. But they were the century's most-performed melodramas and remained a staple of traveling theater families throughout the century.

Refer to Map of the United States and Mexico (1859), which details explorers' trails, transportation routes, settlement patterns, and locations of mineral wealth. These factors greatly affected tours undertaken by performing artists in America during the first half of the 19^th century.