Harriet Stowe And The Fugitive Slave Law

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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

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