Staging Ground. Leslie Stainton

theatrical companies, an automaton band, bell ringers, and magicians. Next door, Colonel Frank Reigart set up a patent office where he sold, among much else, an engraving of Fulton Hall; to the north of the hall, Hager opened a hotel and bar. A few doors away, the Fulton Opera House Confectionary offered cakes and candies, and the Fulton Family Grocery sold food and other goods. Clothiers tapped the marketing power of the new facility: “The Philharmonic Concert at Fulton Hall was noted for the number of pretty women present, many of whom had adorned their persons with those beautiful shawls sold by Fahnestock,” read an ad in the Saturday Express. “These shawls have a magical effect upon the purse strings of husbands and fathers.”

      In early 1854, workmen installed a seven-foot statue of Robert Fulton in a niche above the main entrance to the hall. Philadelphia sculptor Hugh Cannon had rendered the Lancaster native in cedar, the traditional material for ship figureheads, and Fulton—who had tinkered with submarines and torpedoes in the Seine and made history launching the first commercial steamboat on American waters—seemed poised to chart a journey aboard the building that carried his name. He looked east, toward the rising sun, one hand on his breast. Cannon had bolted planks of wood together to form Fulton’s body and head, and although you couldn’t see it from the street, he’d gone to the trouble of cross-hatching Fulton’s trousers and drilling buttonholes into his cape. This Robert Fulton was all swagger and brio, an emblem of American drive. When a workman trying to install the sculpture griped to Hager that he couldn’t get along with his temperamental foreman, Hager joked that they should petrify the foreman instead and put him above the door—but it was the visionary Fulton Hager wanted, a man contemporaries praised for his “calm constancy, his industry, and that indefatigable patience and perseverance, which always enabled him to overcome difficulties.”

      The same week that Fulton’s statue was unveiled, Uncle Tom’s Cabin played Fulton Hall for the very first time. For twenty-five cents, you could take in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “great moral lesson,” and audiences did, in droves. This particular production, by George Aiken, had attracted huge crowds in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, but dozens of other productions had begun touring American playhouses, and their numbers would soar. Aiken’s play introduced the notion of single-feature entertainment as well as the matinee—launched in the 1850s to accommodate women and children.

      When the first Uncle Tom’s Cabin opened in New York in September 1852, New York Herald editor James Gordon Bennett assailed its “extravagant exhibitions of the imaginary horrors of Southern slavery.” Bennett advised that the play be shut down “at once and forever. The thing is in bad taste . . . and is calculated, if persisted in, to become a firebrand of the most dangerous character to the peace of the whole country.” But productions flourished, and the abolition movement surged—and with it opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law. Thousands who had shunned the theater as a coffer of sin, many of them working-class Americans, swarmed to the story of the beneficent slave who suffers on earth, dies, and ascends into heaven. “Now,” declared the pacifist abolitionist Parker Pillsbury, “the Theater is openly . . . before and better than the Church.” The production prompted some theaters to begin granting admission to African Americans, who sat in their own sections.

      The images were unforgettable: Simon Legree whipping Tom, Eliza escaping with her infant across the frozen Ohio River, the death of Little Eva. These became, in effect, holy pictures for a rapt nation. In New York, the show enthralled a young Henry James, who later described Tom as a “wonderful ‘leaping’ fish” that flew through the air and landed “on every stage, literally without exception, in America and Europe.” Moved by the drama, Stephen Foster composed “My Old Kentucky Home.” “Tomming” became a way of life for countless actors and a mechanism by which Americans of all persuasions probed their assumptions about race. There were pro-slavery Toms, blackface lampoons, Irish parodies that critiqued white slave labor in the North, comic burlesques with happy endings.