Slavery In Uncle Tom's Cabin Essay

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s book Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a well-known anti-slavery novel written in 1852. The story shows readers the reality of slavery while also asserting the theme that Christian love can overcome something as destructive as slavery. The main point of this book, along with exposing the true evil behind slavery, was to also spark an anti-slavery movement, for Stowe herself was an abolitionist. She wanted to reveal, mainly to the northerners, the ghastly points of slavery, including the whippings, beatings, and forced sexual encounters brought upon slaves by their masters. Through the events and actions that happened with the characters in Stowe’s novel, she hoped to enlighten the public and eventually sway people against slavery.

The author emphasizes on one slave’s life Uncle Tom, and through Uncle Tom’s life, we can see the true immorality and hardship behind slavery. Uncle Tom is a hardworking, loyal slave that originally belonged to the Shelby family plantation along with his wife, Chloe, three children and several other slaves. The story starts with Uncle Tom being taken away by Mr. Haley, a slave auctioneer, due to Mr. Shelby not being able to pay debts to Mr. Haley. Through this journey, Uncle Tom is sold

to the St. Clare family to be a coachman and to entertain and play with Mr. and Mrs. St. Clare’s daughter Evangeline. This plantation treats him well and he is happy even though he is far away from his home and family. Over time, his experience there grows gloomy as Evangeline grows very ill and passes away with her dying wish to have Mr. St. Clare grant Uncle Tom his freedom so that he can return back to his family. Following Evangeline’s dying wish, Mr. St. Clare starts the process in granting Uncle Tom his freedom, but unfortunately, he dies in a severe carriage accident and Uncle Tom is no longer able to have his freedom. He is sold once more to Simon Legree, a cruel plantation owner who comes to make Uncle Tom’s life miserable. Soon after he is sold to Mr. Legree, George Shelby, the son of Mr. and Mrs. Shelby Uncle Tom’s original owners, comes to buy Uncle Tom back, but unfortunately, he is too late for Uncle Tom has passed on. George returns home to tell the horrible news to Mr. and Mrs. Shelby and Uncle Tom’s family. In the following months, Mr. Shelby passes away due to illness and George takes control of the plantation, and with this newfound responsibility, George’s first action is freeing all of the slaves on the plantation in remembrance of Uncle Tom. This book doesn’t only focus on Uncle Tom’s life, it also tells about Eliza, a house worker for the Shelby family, and her family’s escape to Canada, Miss Ophelia, a cousin of Mr. St. Clare, and her experience with teaching a young slave girl Topsy, and other small sections of various character’s lives. Through these character’s lives, the story illustrates historical insight on how the world was run and how the people lived, the cultural, political, and social aspects of that time period, and the true struggle in the lives of the slaves.
Historically, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was mostly accurate in how slavery was back then. The only thing that is not true in the book is the characters, meaning that there was not an actual slave named Uncle Tom. However, Stowe explains in her sequel A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin that Uncle Tom's Cabin was not a novel about a single person's life, or a group of people, but instead, it was a compilation of true events that happened in the lives of African American slaves. She went on further to explain that she based the events that happened in her novel off of stories she had seen in newspaper articles and from real life stories from former slaves like Rev. Josiah Henson and Theodore Weld. Although many critiques in that time tried to disprove her story by making slavery seem not as bad and evil as Stowe portrayed it in her novel, her use of true slavery stories in Uncle Tom’s Cabin proved that the novel was not a just spiteful lie. Overall, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is indeed historically accurate in everything including the new rising culture of Christianity.
Stowe includes the Christian love in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and uses it to convince a Christian audience that slavery is an evil institution and must be destroyed. Now, she doesn’t necessarily bias the book towards Christianity, she just uses it to as a tool to convince people even more that slavery is generally bad. For example, while Eliza and her family including her husband George and her son Harry were making their escape to Canada, Eliza reassures George that everything will be alright in saying, "O, George, we must have faith. Mistress says that when all things go wrong to us, we must believe that God is doing the very best."(Chapter 3, paragraph 30) This quotation shows that Eliza is trusting in God in that they will make it safe to Canada and that they need not to worry so much. Another example of the Christian faith in the novel is through Uncle Tom and his journey away from home. Tom is a devout Christian who refuses to lose his faith, even when Legree does his best to force him to turn from God. Tom blatantly tells Mr. Legree in Chapter 36, paragraph 68, that “…Mas'r Legree, I ain't a grain afeard to die. I'd as soon die as not. Ye may whip me, starve me, burn me, – it'll only send me sooner where I want to go." Tom, Eliza, and other characters in the book all have faith in God and trust that He will guide them and help them on their journey through their hard lives, and Stowe does a great job of distributing this religious faith throughout the book to emphasize how hard the slaves have it and how the only thing they can do is hope and pray. Unfortunately for most slaves, including Uncle Tom, their prayers were not answered fast enough and they had to suffer unjustly due to the political system during that time period.
Stowe makes sure to input political bias in her novel as the whole point of the book is to enlighten people about the suffering of the slaves and ultimately help abolish slavery. She herself was an abolitionist, and she strongly believed that slavery was wrong and a way she expressed that was through her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. During that time, abolition was a major political problem, and because of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, people started making serious remarks towards different issues in slavery, leading to disagreements between government officials, ultimately leading towards the Civil War. Although Stowe’s novel was not the ultimate cause of the Civil War, it definitely did play a role in feeding the slavery argument. The strong abolitionist point of view used in Uncle Tom’s Cabin caught many people’s attention from both sides, people for and/or against slavery, and gave readers a somewhat clearer perspective on the social class of the slaves and slave owners.
Stowe doesn’t necessarily input social bias into the novel, but she does expound throughout the book on the slaves’ lives. Several times during the course of the book, Stowe explains how slaves were often treated like cattle. For example, during a slave auction, the author states that one slave owner literally went up to a slave, scanned him, checked his mouth, felt his body, and then stated that he would buy him. This ritual is very similar to the comparison of purchasing cattle, as Stowe indicated, in that they have to be examined to make sure that they will be useful for work and that the slave owner will get what he pays for. After the purchase is made, the slave owner’s life goes on while the kind of life a slave had depended on what kind of owner a slave he/she was sold to. Slaves owned by cruel owners were usually not taken care of, assigned long and painful jobs, and beaten often, sometimes to the point of death. On the other hand, slaves owned by kind owners were usually healthy, mostly happy in helping with the work they were given, and treated with kindness by their masters. An example of both kinds of lives can be shown through Uncle Tom, for he experienced the nice life with the Shelby’s and St. Clare’s and unfortunately experienced the bad life from Mr. Legree where he sadly passed away from a vicious beating. In the social class system, slaves were at the bottom and often treated that way by most slave owners, but for the few owners that treated their slaves with kindness, some of those former slaves went on to live like regular gentlemen in society.
Through exposing a taste of a slave’s life in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe hoped to inspire people to make a stand and help in the fight to stop slavery.

She wanted to share the Christian love and faith of Uncle Tom and his fellow characters in the novel to show that slaves are just regular people. She wanted to expose the flaw in the government for allowing slaves to be treated poorly and for slavery to continue all in all. She wanted to show that we shouldn’t downgrade African Americans in society, for they have as much potential as anyone else in this world. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin to show the real story of a slave’s life in hopes to change peoples’ views on slavery and help stop slavery altogether,

forever.