![\"\"](\"http:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/files\/2010\/07\/Edwin-Forrest-.jpg\")
<\/a>The most popular American play of the antebellum period was the historical melodrama The Gladiator<\/a><\/em> (1831), by the Philadelphia physician-turned-playwright Robert Montgomery Bird (1806-1854).\u00a0 Bird wrote the play, but actor Edwin Forrest owned it\u2014literally.\u00a0 Bird sold Forrest (1806-1872) the rights to the play for $100, and Forrest performed the title role of Spartacus to sold-out houses at least a thousand times between 1831 the end of his career four decades later.<\/p>\nWhen he saw Forrest in the role of Spartacus in 1846, Walt Whitman wrote<\/a> that the play was \u201cas full of \u2018Abolitionism\u2019 as an egg is of meat.\u201d\u00a0 Whitman continued: \u201cIt is founded on that passage of Roman history where the slaves\u2014Gallic, Spanish, Thracian and African\u2014rose against their masters, and formed themselves into a military organization, and for a time successfully resisted the forces sent to quell them. Running o\u2019er with sentiments of liberty\u2014with eloquent disclaimers of the right of the Romans to hold human beings in bondage\u2014it is a play, this \u2018Gladiator,\u2019 calculated to make the hearts of the masses swell responsively to all those nobler manlier aspirations in behalf of mortal freedom!\u201d<\/p>\n But Bird, the playwright, was no abolitionist.\u00a0 He was afraid of the violence abolitionism would bring down upon the nation.\u00a0 In his 1836 novel Sheppard Lee<\/em>, for example, he portrays the institution of slavery as essentially benign, and his fictional slaves as content with their servitude until stirred to insurrection by an abolitionist pamphlet.\u00a0 The spectre of a slave uprising haunted him.\u00a0<\/p>\n The Gladiator<\/em> was first performed in April 1831, five months before an actual slave rebellion, under the leadership of Nat Turner, erupted in Virginia.\u00a0 As the news of the rebellion reached Bird, he wrote in his diary<\/a>: \u201cAt this present moment there are 6[00] or 800 armed negroes marching through Southampton County, Va. murdering, ravishing & burning those whom the Grace of God has made their owners\u201470 killed, principally women & children. If they had but a Spartacus among them\u2014to organize the half million of Virginia, the hundreds of thousands of the other States and to lead them on in the Crusade of Massacre, what a blessed example might they not give to the world of the excellence of slavery! What a field of interest to the playwrites of posterity! Someday we shall have it; and future generations will perhaps remember the horrors of Hayti as a farce compared with the tragedies of our own unhappy land! The vis et amor sceleratus habendi<\/em> [force and criminal love of gain] will be repaid, violence with violence, & avarice with blood…\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Edwin Forrest continued to pack houses with his portrayal of Spartacus.\u00a0 And in 1860, Matthew Brady produced a series of photographs of Forrest in costume for his most popular roles, including Spartacus.\u00a0 The National Portrait Gallery has a web exhibit<\/a> of Brady\u2019s photographs of Forrest.\u00a0 Fellow photographer Marcus Aurelius Root called them<\/a> Brady\u2019s \u201cmost remarkable productions…for artistic effect.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The most popular American play of the antebellum period was the historical melodrama The Gladiator (1831), by the Philadelphia physician-turned-playwright Robert Montgomery Bird (1806-1854).\u00a0 Bird wrote the play, but actor Edwin Forrest owned it\u2014literally.\u00a0 Bird sold Forrest (1806-1872) the rights to the play for $100, and Forrest performed the title role of Spartacus to sold-out […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[77,156],"tags":[167,157],"class_list":["post-2980","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antebellum-1840-1861","category-images","tag-education-culture","tag-slavery-abolition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2980"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2980\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2986,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2980\/revisions\/2986"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/housedivided.dickinson.edu\/sites\/blogdivided\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}