There is more than one reason to read Heather S. Nathans's book Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861: Lifting the Veil of Black. First, it offers an illuminating examination of American theatre in relation to the young republic's increasingly divisive issue of slavery. Second, it raises the bar on writing theatre history. It is inspiring to see research, reporting, and analysis conducted and communicated with such finesse. Nathans takes “sentimental representation” as a through line that ties in plays, illustrations, and historical events from the end of the American Revolution to the firing on Fort Sumter in 1861. Lifting what Thomas Jefferson referred to as a “veil of black” involves looking beyond the outer appearance of the depersonalized other to lay bare emotional qualities that invite sympathetic bonding with the black slave. While “sentiment” remained a staple of discourse throughout this period, its meaning and applications evolved considerably. Nathans's command of the historical context and the dramatic literature enables her to tease out meaningful examples from an impressive range of materials.

In the decade or so after the Revolution, Americans struggled for a sense of legitimacy through language and legal concepts, yet the issue of slavery forced sentiment into the equation. Mungo in the British play The Padlock and Sambo in John Murdock's The Triumphs of Love both elicited sympathy from their audiences, but the latter also intertwined legal and moral considerations in his discourse. The nation may well have come closer to the possibility of abolishing slavery during this early republican period than in subsequent decades, when economic interests hardened and audiences became less attuned to legal considerations interlarding sentimental appeals.

Nathans draws upon five plays of the early 1800s to show the increasing complexity of issues facing abolitionists. James Cobb's Paul and Virginia (1800) is instructive in terms of differences between the British and American versions, with the latter using softened antislavery rhetoric, perhaps in response to widely reported slave uprisings that made many Americans nervous. Part of the problem was concern about how free blacks would fit into the social fabric, and this period saw the rise of colonization societies for returning blacks to an African homeland. Robert Montgomery Bird's unperformed The City Looking Glass (1828) is indicative of a transition from sentimental feeling for the plight of the slave to feeling for the nation imperiled by bitterly divisive views. After 1831, the abolitionist cause became more militant—that is, more aggressive in its use of sentimentality.

One particular manifestation of sentimentality, the subject of the longest chapter in the book, is the fantasy of an African Eden. Depiction of the slaves' longing for home and family across the sea could be a powerful sympathetic appeal for theatre audiences. The chapter on “Yankees and Sambos” draws upon eleven plays that juxtapose these two stock figures of the stage. The stage Yankee or Brother Jonathan came to represent a kind of “sincere exchange” in American business, while the stage African, an embodied commodity and rural icon, often functioned dramatically as a comic foil. More important was the symbiotic effect by which the two brought out sentimental values in each other. These characters are analyzed also in terms of the rise of the “agency system” of sending abolitionists on the road to visit the backwaters and spread their message much in the same way that Yankee peddlers crisscrossed New England.

The role of sentiment in the treatment of stage violence is the subject of a chapter that analyzes Robert Montgomery Bird's The Gladiator (1831) and several other works, from Thomas Morton's The Slave to Elizabeth Swayze's Ossawattomie Brown on the eve of the Civil War. Fear of violence was a reality, certainly for slaves with harsh masters, but also for activists on both sides of the slavery issue. Nathans speculates that stage representations of violence could have the effect of mitigating actual violence, although such was not the case after Edwin Forrest opened a new production of Othello (edited to elicit sympathy for Othello at Desdemona's expense) in Philadelphia in January 1838. The burning of the city's “Abolition” Hall on 17 May 1838, only three days after the hall had opened, ignited a month of violent assaults on individuals and community organizations. The Amistad case in 1839 resulted in a linkage between Othello and Cinque, the leader of an uprising on a Spanish slave ship. And, not surprisingly, the event generated its own melodrama, The Black Schooner; or, the Private Slaver (1839), at the Bowery Theatre. Another type of performance that used sentimentality alongside implications of violence comprised the philanthropic slave auctions conducted by Henry Ward Beecher, where members of his congregation bid on slaves to purchase their freedom. Beecher skillfully played upon his audience's sympathies, evoking the horrors to which the beautiful mulatto women would surely be subjected if not rescued by bidders. Nathans's final chapter explores connections between issues of slavery and temperance, which come together in several plays besides the well-known example of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Aunt Dinah's Pledge: A Temperance Melodrama in Two Acts (1850) by Harry Seymour, for example, features a black character as protagonist. Such plays also demonstrated how free blacks could be a force for the moral uplift of whites.

Unearthing so many obscure yet pertinent plays, tracking down information about their staging and reception in over one hundred newspapers and magazines of the period, and consulting documents in forty-two different archives, Heather Nathans has done a remarkable job of hunting and gathering. Her synthesis and interpretation of those materials is equally impressive, as is her ability to contextualize them in relation to historical events and court cases, enhanced by substantial notes. One might wish that the nine illustrations had reproduced more crisply. An epilogue, a bibliography, and index complete the book.