The Octoroon

The Octoroon is a play by Dion Boucicault that opened in 1859 at The Winter Garden Theatre, New York City. Extremely popular, the play was kept running continuously for years by seven road companies. Among antebellum melodramas, it was considered second only in popularity to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852).

Boucicault adapted the play from the novel The Quadroon by Thomas Mayne Reid (1856). It concerns the residents of a Louisiana plantation called Terrebonne, and sparked debates about the abolition of slavery and the role of theatre in politics. It contains elements of Romanticism and melodrama.

The word octoroon means one-eighth black. A quarter black is a quadroon and a half black is a mulatto.

The Oxford English Dictionary cites The Octoroon with the earliest record of the word "mashup" with the quote: "He don't understand; he speaks a mash up of Indian, French, and Mexican." (Boucicault's manuscript actually reads "Indian, French and 'Merican." The last word, an important colloquialism, was misread by the typesetter of the play.)

George Peyton returns to the United States from a trip to France to find that the plantation he has inherited is in dire financial straits as a result of his late uncle's beneficence. Jacob McClosky, the man who ruined Judge Peyton, has come to inform George and his aunt (who was bequeathed a life interest in the estate) that their land will be sold and their slaves auctioned off separately. Salem Scudder, a kind Yankee, was Judge Peyton's business partner; though he wishes he could save Terrebonne, he has no money.

George is courted by the rich Southern belle heiress Dora Sunnyside, but he finds himself falling in love with Zoe, the daughter of his uncle through one of the slaves. Dora, oblivious to George's lack of affection for her, enlists Zoe's help to win him over. McClosky desires Zoe for himself, and when she rejects his proposition, he plots to have her sold with the rest of the slaves, for he knows that she is an octoroon and is legally part of the Terrebonne property. He plans to buy her and make her his mistress.

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