Harriet Stowe And The Fugitive Slave Law

638 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Slavery in the south

In 1832, Harriet B. Stowe and her father moved to Cincinnati, where they would be forced to confront the inescapable realities of slavery in southern Ohio. It was here that Stowe witnessed the horrors of, “ race riots in the city, the presence of fugitive slaves and the underground railroad, the spectacle of bounty hunters forcing escaped blacks back into captivity, the fear and anger of free blacks who could at anytime be captured and sold South, and the activism of black and white abolitionists.” These events coupled with her own experience of losing a child to cholera, led Stowe to gain sympathy for the plight of enslaved Africans, and especially for the slave mothers whose babies were torn from them. In later years, Stowe would eventually return to her native New England where she was once again reminded of the tragedies of slavery, by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. …show more content…

While many may have held abolitionists sentiments, slavery was a problem that did not directly affect them. The Fugitive Slave Law, however, made them participants in the institution, and as equally liable as their neighbours in South. Stowe soon found it necessary to use her words as an activist to protest against this, “institution that forced fellow human beings to endure bondage, torture rape, trauma, mutilation and unspeakable degradation in a nation that pretended to be a democracy. Overpowered by they need to protest the crime and injustice of slavery, Stowe created Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book which she hoped would touch the hearts of the American people and help to end slavery in the United

Show More
Related

  • Harriet Beecher Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin

    784 Words  | 2 Pages

    Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia. “Stowe, Harriet Beecher”. Date of Last Revision Unknown. 6 Jan 2002. <http://www.encyclopedia.com/printablenew/12373.html>.

    Read More

  • The North and South's Political Viewpoint of the Fugitive Slave Act

    1773 Words  | 4 Pages

    King, Milwaukee R. Unconstitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act Decisions of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin in the Cases of Booth and Rycraft. Milwaukee: R. King, 1855. Print.

    Read More

  • Slavery and the Life of Harriet Jacobs

    1063 Words  | 3 Pages

    It is well known that slavery was a horrible event in the history of the United States. However, what isn't as well known is the actual severity of slavery. The experiences of slave women presented by Angela Davis and the theories of black women presented by Patricia Hill Collins are evident in the life of Harriet Jacobs and show the severity of slavery for black women.

    Read More

  • Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

    1478 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the earliest part of Harriet?s life the whole idea of slavery was foreign to her. As all little girls she was born with a mind that only told her place in the world was that of a little girl. She had no capacity to understand the hardships that she inherited. She explains how her, ?heart was as free from care as that of any free-born white child.?(Jacobs p. 7) She explains this blissful ignorance by not understanding that she was condemned at birth to a life of the worst kind oppression. Even at six when she first became familiar with the realization that people regarded her as a slave, Harriet could not conceptualize the weight of what this meant. She say?s that her circumstances as slave girl were unusua...

    Read More

  • Summary Of Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl By Harriet Jacobs

    1554 Words  | 4 Pages

    In her story Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs presents what life was like living as a female slave during the 19th century. Born into slavery, she exhibits, to people living in the North who thought slaves were treated fairly and well, how living as a slave, especially as a female slave during that time, was a heinous and horrible experience. Perhaps even harder than it was if one had been a male slave, as female slaves had to deal with issues, such as unwanted sexual attention, sexual victimization and for some the suffering of being separated from their children. Harriet Jacobs shows that despite all of the hardship that she struggled with, having a cause to fight for, that is trying to get your children a better life

    Read More

  • The Strength Of Uncle Tom's Cabin By Harriet Beecher Stowe

    1137 Words  | 3 Pages

    Uncle Tom’s Cabin is an anti-slavery novel written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1850s that “changed forever how Americans viewed slavery, the system that treated people as property”. (Harriet Beecher Stowe Center) This book “demanded that the United States deliver on the promise of freedom and equality, galvanized the abolition movement and contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War”. (Harriet Beecher Stowe Center) “The strength of Uncle Tom's Cabin is its ability to illustrate slavery's effect on families, and to help readers empathize with enslaved characters.” (Harriet Beecher Stowe Center) As Foner mentioned: “By portraying slaves as sympathetic men and women, and as Christians at the mercy of slaveholders who split up families and set bloodhounds on innocent mothers and children, Stowe’s melodrama gave the abolitionist message a powerful human appeal.” (472) With this novel, Stowe wanted to convince Christians that God doesn’t’ approve slavery, that it is evil which must be destroyed.

    Read More

  • Uncle Tom's Cabin as written by Harriet Beecher Stowe

    906 Words  | 2 Pages

    In Conclusion, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was revolutionary in 1852 for its passionate documentation the tragic break-up of black Kentucky families “sold down the river.” Its political impact was immense, and its emotional influence immeasurable. In a time when most people sat back and accepted slavery as a way of life, Harriet Beecher Stowe portrayed it as a long slow death. Because she dared to be different, her fame will eternally endure. Like most white writers of her day, Harriet Beecher Stowe could not escape the racism of the time. Further divisions in opinions were therefore perpetuated by the book, as it was a turning point in the sectionalism of the North and South of America. She was scorned in the South because of her protestations of slavery, yet it pleased the North and in the long run, that is its significance.

    Read More

  • Difference Between Harriet Jacob And Sojourner Truth

    1202 Words  | 3 Pages

    Harriet Jacob had spent seven years in hiding in hopes to make it to the northern states to be free. She finally achieved it when the Dr. Flint had died and way followed by his daughter’s husband in Boston to have her buy her freedom. I have heard her say she would go to the ends of the earth, rather than pay any man or woman for her freedom, because she thinks she has a right to it. Besides, she couldn't do it, if she would, for she has spent her earnings to educate her children."(Incidents, pg. 180). She would never give up and there was no way that she would give in and pay for her own freedom. She had devoted her life to raising her children and educating them. While Sojourner Truth continued to persuaded people about the women’s rights. These women worked to get the truth out about the treatment they had received while in slavery. The Life and Incidents of a Slave Girl would be more convincing then the speeches of Sojourner Truth. Harriet had been fighting for a case for herself and a better life of her children where they would not have to live like she

    Read More

  • Literary Analysis Of Frederick Douglass The Heroic Slave

    1273 Words  | 3 Pages

    The illumination of the brutal treatment of the slaves, both physically and mentally, are also apparent in the works of Stowe and Jacobs. Stowe, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, uses the stories of Eliza, Harry, Uncle Tom and Cassy to show how slavery, with both cruel and kind masters, affects different members of the slave community. In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Jacobs focuses her work on the how the institution is “terrible for men; but is far more terrible for women” (B:933), adding sexual abuse to the atrocities of slavery. Douglass’ Madison gives the reader a masculine perspective on the

    Read More

  • Harriet Jacobs Incidents And A Slave Girl: An Analysis

    1129 Words  | 3 Pages

    Slavery is a term that can create a whirlwind of emotions for everyone. During the hardships faced by the African Americans, hundreds of accounts were documented. Harriet Jacobs, Charles Ball and Kate Drumgoold each shared their perspectives of being caught up in the world of slavery. There were reoccurring themes throughout the books as well as varying angles that each author either left out or never experienced. Taking two women’s views as well as a man’s, we can begin to delve deeper into what their everyday lives would have been like. Charles Ball’s Fifty Years in Chains and Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl were both published in the early 1860’s while Kate Drumgoold’s A Slave Girl’s Story came almost forty years later

    Read More

  • John Greenleaf Whittier's Fugitive Slave Act

    972 Words  | 2 Pages

    “The Hunters of Men” first appears to support the Fugitive Slave Act, but Whittier is actually using irony to argue against this law. How is his repetition of the idea of freedom ironic when read with this understanding? Whittier’s use of irony shows when he states how the hunter rides to hunt slaves because of their skin tone. He states, “Right merrily hunting the black man, whose sin is the curl of his hair and the hue of his skin”, and “Alms—Alms for our hunters! Why will ye delay, When their pride and their glory are melting away? Whittier pities them for taking pleasure in hunting slaves because of the color of their skin.

    Read More

  • What Is Harriet Beecher Stoowe's Legacy

    1068 Words  | 3 Pages

    Her father, Lyman Beecher, was a Methodist minister, who taught his children the idea of a strong conviction and a personal commitment to an idea. He was a respected anti-slavery speaker who taught religion at Sarah Pierce's Litchfield Female Academy in Connecticut-- Harriet would eventually attend the academy (“Harriet Beecher Stowe”). Beecher trained his children to debate skillfully and reason thoroughly; his ardent opposition to slavery, as well as the culture of the North, led Harriet to be fully aware of and skilled at anti-slavery debates. During her formative years, until she was twenty-one, she was raised in an fully anti-slavery atmosphere, partly due to her geographical location and partly due to her father’s views-- and it was during these years that she came to understand her obligation to end slavery and gained the tools to do

    Read More

  • Racism In Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe

    1561 Words  | 4 Pages

    Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was the defining piece of the time in which it was written. The book opened eyes in both the North and South to the cruelties that occurred in all forms of slavery, and held back nothing in exposing the complicity of non-slaveholders in the upholding of America's peculiar institution. Then-president Abraham Lincoln himself attributed Stowe's narrative to being a cause of the American Civil War. In such an influential tale that so powerfully points out the necessity of emancipation, one would hardly expect to find racialism that would indicate a discomfort with the people in bondage. However, Stowe shows no apprehension in typifying her characters according to their various races.

    Read More

  • Uncle Tom's Cabin

    2765 Words  | 6 Pages

    When Harriet Beecher Stowe published her anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, in 1852, Southerners naturally took offense. Indeed, they were outraged. After all, the novel attacked the basis of their whole way of life. Slave-run plantations were an essential part of Southern culture. Uncle Tom's Cabin created a furor of controversy and even violent responses. The Southern Literary Messenger warned its readers that Stowe speaks for a large and dangerous faction that must be put down by the pen, else "we may be compelled one day (God grant that the day may never come!) to repel them [them] with the bayonet" (Duvall 163).

    Read More

  • Uncle Toms Cabin Research Paper

    1258 Words  | 3 Pages

    Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in order to encourage the abolition of slavery. Many question why a white female would write a novel about slavery, but Stowe discusses how her exposure to runaway slaves provided her with an enormous amount of sympathy for slaves. Stowe claims that the idea of being torn away and sold from her family is unthinkable and she had heard many horror stories that the slaves had shared with her. For these reasons, Stowe began writing about plantation slaves. Not only does this novel discuss the hardships that slaves had to overcome but it also discusses the affects that slavery has on slave owners. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is an eye-opening novel that talks about the corruption of slave-owners, the impact slavery had on family, marriage, and children; and the greatest evils of slavery.

    Read More

More about Harriet Stowe And The Fugitive Slave Law

Open Document