Movie Night and Potluck Dinner
Wednesday, May 7, arrive at 4:15 to set up
Movie starts at 4:30 "A Passage to India"
Ventress Library Program Room
Bring an appetizer to share!
Next Book Group Meeting
Tuesday, May 20, 4:30-6
Book: "Uncle Tom's
Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe
___________________________________________
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Or, Life Among the Lowly
Author
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
First Published
1851-1852 (serial), 1852 (book)
Locale
Kentucky and the swamps of Louisiana
Time of Plot
1850
Type of Plot
Social criticism
Type of Work
Novel
Principal characters:
TOM, a loyal, virtuous Christian slave
ELIZA HARRIS, a beautiful slave woman
GEORGE HARRIS, Eliza’s husband and Harry’s father
MR. AUGUSTINE ST. CLARE, the second kind owner of Tom
EVANGELINE, or LITTLE EVA, the angelic daughter of the St. Clare family
TOPSY, the wayward St. Clare family slave girl
MISS OPHELIA, the old-fashioned Calvinist aunt of the St. Clare family
SIMON LEGREE, Tom’s jealous and vicious owner
Form and Content
Uncle
Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly is the most powerful and enduring
work of art ever written about American slavery. It was the greatest
fiction success of the nineteenth century. Uncle Tom, Simon Legree, and
Little Eva became symbols known to most people. Although the book was
out of print in the middle of the twentieth century, in the 1960’s, with
the renewed struggle over civil rights in the South, the book became
available again and there was a new interest in the book.
The purpose
of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is to provide powerful propaganda against slavery.
The theme of the novel is the idea that slavery and Christianity cannot
exist together. Stowe believed that the owning, buying, and selling of
slaves was inhumane and un-Christian. The widest opposition to slavery,
Stowe believed and demonstrated, stemmed from an individual’s—usually a
woman’s—outraged feeling. She gave constant examples,
presented emotionally, from the world she knew, the world of home and
family, of incidents she had seen herself or of stories she had heard
that dealt with atrocities to individuals or to family units. She felt
that to describe the process of so harshly tearing child from mother,
husband from wife, was to expose the heartlessness and cruelty of
slavery. The audience to which she appealed consisted largely of women
such as herself who could comprehend the horror of families being
separated, churchgoing women whom she made to see the inhumane and
un-Christian aspects of slavery. She showed her readers how slavery
violated the home and went against the religion of her readers. She
wrote the book out of religious inspiration.
The passage of the
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which not only gave slave owners the right
to pursue their escaped slaves even into free states but also forced the
people of these free states to assist the slave
owners in retrieving their “property” led to Stowe’s decision to write
Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She wrote the book in serial format, to be published
in the National Era, an abolitionist paper in Washington, D.C. The first
chapter was published on June 5, 1851, the last on April 1, 1852.
One
learns much about how Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written through anecdotes
in the biographies of Harriet Beecher Stowe written by Annie Fields, a
fellow author and close friend, and compiled by the son of Harriet, the
Reverend Charles Edward Stowe.
According to an account of the
creation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, certain scenes flashed before the eyes of
Stowe and she included them in the book. One account said that the
dramatic scene of the death of Uncle Tom came to her in church. She
finally suggested that she had not written Uncle Tom’s Cabin herself but
had taken it in dictation from God.
Analysis
During her life,
Harriet Beecher Stowe had been personally disturbed by slavery but
socially and publicly uncommitted to action until the passage of the
Fugitive Slave Act. The passage of this cruel, inhumane, un-Christian
act caused her to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe brought a moral passion
to her indictment of slavery which was impossible for Americans to
forget. Harriet Beecher Stowe had great dramatic instincts as a
novelist. She saw everything in terms of polarities: slavery as sin
versus Christian love; men active in the cruel social process of buying
and selling slaves versus women as redeemers, by virtue of their
feelings for family values. She depicts the glory of family life in
Uncle Tom’s cabin—glory that is contrasted with Tom’s separation from
his family and his unhappy end at the Legree plantation.
Undoubtedly,
many events in the novel were taken from Stowe’s life. While her
husband
Calvin Stowe, a biblical scholar, was a teacher at Lane Theological
Seminary, she had lived in Cincinnati, Ohio, where slavery was a
prominent issue because Cincinnati was a location where many slaves
tried to escape North. She understood slavery as an economic system and
had also heard many details and anecdotes about slavery from family
members. Her brother Charles had worked in Louisiana, and her brother
Edward had lived through riots over slavery in Illinois. Harriet Beecher
Stowe knew Josiah Henson, an escaped slave, who was the model for Uncle
Tom. Eliza Harris was drawn from life. She may have been a fugitive who
was helped by Calvin Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher. The original of Eva
was the dead daughter of Stowe herself. The original of Topsy was a
slave named Celeste, who was known to the Stowe family in Cincinnati.
The character Simon Legree, although sketched by Charles Stowe, owes
much to writers of melodrama and gothic novelists as well as
the imagination of Harriet Beecher Stowe herself.
The novel is
divided into three sections. The first section takes place on the Shelby
estate. It is an accurate description of the scene, since Stowe had
been as far South as Kentucky. The second section, which introduces
Topsy, Evangeline, and St. Clare, enriches the novel with wit and humor.
This section, containing descriptions of the efforts of Miss Ophelia to
discipline Topsy, points to the true moral of the tale—that love is
above the law. After the efforts of Miss Ophelia are unsuccessful, it is
the superhuman love of Little Eva that starts Topsy on the path toward
decency and honesty. The third section, containing Simon Legree,
introduces terror into the novel. In the wild flight of Eliza at the
beginning of the novel, one sees a similar terror, which is a dramatic
foreboding of the powerful conclusion of the novel. The secluded
wilderness plantation of Legree, with its
grotesque and cruel inhabitants, its pitiable victims, and the
intervention of supernatural powers, could be material for a gothic
novelist such as Ann Radcliffe.
The last few chapters of the novel,
which are reflections on slavery, are anticlimactic. The true end of the
story comes with the end of Tom in chapter 40, when “Legree, foaming
with rage, smote his victim to the ground.” Tom nobly suffered
martyrdom, lingering long enough to bid farewell to his young master
from Kentucky, who had reached him too late to buy his freedom. George
Harris was a new man once he regarded himself as “free,” but Uncle Tom
had an outlook that was different from that of George Harris and his
creator, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Tom was a true Christian among the
heathen, and for him, slavery was only one added indignity. His reading
of the New Testament, an “unfashionable old book,” separated him more
completely from his fellows than did
either his race or his status as a slave. Tom wanted his freedom as
ardently as Stowe wanted it for him, but he preferred slavery and
martyrdom to dishonorable flight. He was a black Christ who was shaming a
Yankee Satan. The conviction of Stowe against slavery was so strong
that she had “religious” visions, such as that of the killing of Uncle
Tom—visions that she included as scenes in the novel.
Context
Harriet
Beecher Stowe visited the White House in 1863 to urge President Abraham
Lincoln to do something positive about the thousands of slaves who had
fled to Washington, D.C. The often-quoted statement by Abraham Lincoln
on that occasion, that Mrs. Stowe was “the little woman who wrote the
book that made this great war,” points to the role of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
in the history of women’s literature, not only because of its impact on
the history of women’s literature but also because of its impact
on American literature and American history in general. Because of her
religious background, Stowe strongly opposed slavery because it was
un-Christian. The buying and selling of slaves violated Christian regard
for human rights, for the rights of other human beings.
The
strongest objection to slavery expressed by Stowe as a woman was that
slavery broke up slave families. In Mark Twain’s The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, the strongest, most emotional feelings expressed by
the slave Jim were that he missed his family. Stowe stressed the dangers
of capitalism to family values. She saw the slave trade as a masculine,
unfeeling occupation and appealed to her female readers to end slavery
because it destroyed the family. She never viewed women as
abolitionists; that was a masculine pursuit. She believed that by
writing her novels and appealing to her female reading audience, she
could effect a change and abolish slavery. She
reflected on the suffering that she herself felt when she lost a child
and compared it to what a slave mother must feel when her child is sold
away from her.
The enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act led Stowe to
write Uncle Tom’s Cabin. From the beginning, Stowe had unequivocally
advocated absolute legal freedom for all slaves. She shows in the novel
the difference that being free makes on the former slaves. George
Harris, once he regarded himself as “free,” held his head up higher and
spoke and moved like a different man, even though he was unsure of his
safety. Slavery, in its criminal disregard for human souls, in its
treatment of human beings as property, was different from and worse than
any other atrocity in life.
Bibliography
Adams, John R. Harriet
Beecher Stowe. Rev. ed. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989. This work expands
Adam’s earlier study, the first and only comprehensive analysis
of the life and works of Stowe. Adams discusses recently disclosed
biographical information about the Beecher family and numerous critical
examinations of Stowe written in the twenty-five years since the early
study was published. The author connects Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the
religious ideas and personal experiences of Stowe. The volume includes
an up-to-date bibliography and chronology.
Beach, Seth Curtis.
Daughters of the Puritans: A Group of Brief Biographies. 1905. Reprint.
Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1967. This book contains a
forty-page introductory biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe, a background
against which to study Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The object of the study is to
show the influences that molded Stowe, to present the salient features
of her career and her characteristic qualities. The selection is
interesting and informative and provides background material for all
readers. It can be read by high school
students as well as college undergraduates.
Fields, Annie. Life and
Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898. The
second definitive biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe after the book by
her son Charles, this sympathetic portrait was written by her personal
friend and professional associate who was also a celebrity in her own
right. This readable biography contains many now-famous anecdotes about
Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Gossett, Thomas F. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and
American Culture. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985.
This excellent, detailed book shows why Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the most
widely read American novel of its time. The first section, about eighty
pages long, describes the conditions that led to the creation of the
book. The second section, another eighty pages, is an analysis of the
book as fiction and social criticism. The remaining two hundred and
fifty pages
recount the reception of the book in the North, the South, and Europe;
the replies; the dramatic versions; and adverse criticism. Contains
extensive notes and a comprehensive bibliography.
Stowe, Charles
Edward. The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1889. This excellent biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe was compiled by
her son, the Reverend Charles Edward Stowe, from her letters and
journals. The authorized family biography, it contains the first
printing of indispensable letters and other documents and is the
foundation of all later biographies. It tells the story of the life of
Harriet Beecher Stowe as she had wished and had hoped to tell it herself
in her autobiography. Two later books by members of the Stowe family
add additional material: Charles Edward Stowe and Lyman Beecher Stowe’s
Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Story of Her Life (1941) and Lyman Beecher
Stowe’s Saints, Sinners, and Beechers
(1934).
Wangenknecht, Edward. Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Known and
the Unknown. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. A combination of
biography and literary criticism, this book contains an accurate
description of the literary and personal character of Harriet Beecher
Stowe. The details are arranged topically, with chapters on Stowe as
writer, reader, and reformer as well as daughter, wife, and mother.
Linda Silverstein Gordon
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Or, Life Among the Lowly
Author
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
Type of Work
Novel
Type of Plot
Social realism
Time of Plot
Mid-nineteenth century
Locale
Kentucky and Mississippi
First Published
1852
Principal characters:
UNCLE TOM, a slave
EVA ST. CLARE, the daughter of a wealthy Southerner
SIMON LEGREE, a planter
ELIZA, a runaway slave
TOPSY, a young slave
The Story:
Because
his Kentucky plantation was encumbered by debt, Mr. Shelby made plans
to sell one of his slaves to his chief creditor, a New Orleans slave
dealer named Haley. The dealer shrewdly selected Uncle Tom as part
payment on Mr. Shelby’s debt. While they were discussing the
transaction, Eliza’s child, Harry, came into the room. Haley wanted to
buy Harry too, but at first Shelby was unwilling to part with the child.
Eliza listened to enough of the conversation to be frightened. She
confided her fears to George Harris, her husband, a slave on an
adjoining plantation. George, who was already bitter because his master
had put him to work in the fields when he was capable of doing better
work, promised that some day he would have his revenge upon his hard
masters. Eliza had been brought up more indulgently by the Shelbys, and
she begged him not to try anything rash.
After supper in the cabin of
Uncle Tom and his wife, Aunt Chloe, the Shelby slaves gathered for a
meeting. They sang songs, and young George Shelby, who had eaten his
supper there, read from the Bible. In the big house, Mr. Shelby signed
the papers making Uncle Tom and little Harry the property of Haley.
Eliza, learning her child’s fate from some remarks of Mr. Shelby to his
wife, fled with her child, hoping to reach Canada and safety. Uncle Tom,
hearing of the sale, resigned himself to the wisdom of Providence.
The
next day, after Haley had discovered his loss, he set out to capture
Eliza;
however, she had a good start. Moreover, Mrs. Shelby purposely delayed
the pursuit by serving a late breakfast. When her pursuers came in
sight, Eliza escaped across the Ohio River by jumping from one floating
ice cake to another, young Harry in her arms. Haley hired two
slave-catchers, Marks and Loker, to track Eliza through Ohio. For their
trouble, she was to be given to them. They set off that night.
Eliza
found shelter in the home of Senator and Mrs. Bird. The senator took her
to the house of a man known to aid fugitive slaves. Uncle Tom, however,
was not so lucky. Haley made sure Tom would not escape by shackling his
ankles before taking him to the boat bound for New Orleans. When young
George Shelby heard that Tom had been sold, he followed Haley on his
horse. George gave Tom a dollar as a token of his sympathy and told him
that he would buy him back one day.
At the same time, George Harris
began his
escape. White enough to pass as a Spaniard, he appeared at a tavern as a
gentleman and took a room there, hoping to find a station on the
underground railway before too long. Eliza was resting at the home of
Rachel and Simeon Halliday when George Harris arrived in the same Quaker
settlement.
On board the boat bound for New Orleans, Uncle Tom saved
the life of young Eva St. Clare, and in gratitude, Eva’s father
purchased the slave. Eva told Tom he would now have a happy life, for
her father was kind to everyone. Augustine St. Clare was married to a
woman who imagined herself sick and therefore took no interest in her
daughter Eva. He had gone north to bring back his cousin, Miss Ophelia,
to provide care for the neglected and delicate Eva. When they arrived at
the St. Clare plantation, Tom was made head coachman.
Meanwhile,
Loker and Marks were on the trail of Eliza and George. They caught up
with the fugitives,
and there was a fight in which George wounded Loker. Marks fled, and so
the Quakers who were protecting the runaways took Loker along with them
and gave him medical treatment.
Unused to lavish Southern customs,
Miss Ophelia tried to understand the South. Shocked at the extravagance
of St. Clare’s household, she attempted to bring order out of the chaos,
but she received no encouragement. Indulgent in all things, St. Clare
was indifferent to the affairs of his family and his property. Uncle Tom
lived an easy life in the loft over the stable. He and little Eva
became close friends, with St. Clare’s approval. Sometimes St. Clare had
doubts regarding the morality of the institution of slavery, and, in
one of these moods, he bought an odd pixielike child, named Topsy, for
his prim and proper New England cousin to educate.
Eva grew more
frail. Knowing that she was about to die, she asked her father to free
his
slaves, as he had so often promised. After Eva’s death, St. Clare began
to read his Bible and to make plans to free all his slaves. He gave
Topsy to Miss Ophelia legally, so that the spinster might rear the child
as she wished. Then, one evening, he tried to separate two quarreling
men. He received a knife wound in the side and died shortly afterward.
Mrs. St. Clare, however, had no intention of freeing the slaves, and she
ordered that Tom be sent to the slave market.
At a public auction,
he was sold to a brutal plantation owner named Simon Legree. Legree
drank heavily, and his plantation house had fallen to ruin. He kept dogs
for the purpose of tracking runaway slaves. At the slave quarters, Tom
was given his sack of corn for the week, told to grind it himself and
bake the meal into cakes for his supper. At the mill, he aided two
women. In return, they baked his cakes for him. He read selections from
the Bible to them.
For a few weeks, Tom quietly tried to please his
harsh master. One day, he helped a sick woman by putting cotton into her
basket. For this act, Legree ordered him to flog the woman. When Tom
refused, his master had him flogged until he fainted. A slave named
Cassy came to Tom’s aid. She told Tom the story of her life with Legree
and of a young daughter who had been sold years before. Then she went to
Legree’s apartment and tormented him. She hated her master, and she had
power over him. Legree was superstitious. When she talked, letting her
eyes flash over him, he felt as though she were casting an evil spell.
Haunted by the secrets of his guilty past, he drank until he fell
asleep. He had forgotten his fears by the next morning, however, and he
knocked Tom to the ground with his fist. Meanwhile, far to the north,
George and Eliza and young Harry were making their way slowly through
the stations on the underground railway toward
Canada.
Cassy and Emmeline, another slave, were determined to make
their escape. Knowing the consequences if they should be caught, they
tricked Legree into thinking they were hiding in the swamp. When Legree
sent dogs and men after them, they sneaked back into the house and hid
in the garret. Legree suspected that Tom knew where the women had gone
and decided to beat the truth out of his slave. He had Tom beaten until
the old man could neither speak nor stand. Two days later, George Shelby
arrived to buy Tom back, but he came too late. Tom was dying. When
George threatened to have Legree tried for murder, Legree mocked him.
George struck Legree in the face and knocked him down.
Still hiding
in the attic, Cassy and Emmeline pretended they were ghosts. Frightened,
Legree drank harder than ever. George Shelby helped them to escape.
Later, on a riverboat headed north, the two women discovered a lady
named Madame de
Thoux, who said she was George Harris’ sister. With this disclosure,
Cassy learned also that Eliza, her daughter who had been sold years
before, was the Eliza who had married George and, with him and her
child, had escaped safely to Canada. These relatives were reunited in
Canada after many years. In Kentucky, George Shelby freed all his slaves
when his father died. He said he freed them in the name of Uncle Tom.
Critical Evaluation:
In
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s view, slavery was an evil against which anyone
professing Christianity must protest. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was precisely
such a protest. Stowe believed that the debate over slavery often missed
or minimized the essential point that the slave family was torn apart
by the institution. Her own strong family orientation informs the novel
throughout, even as her unconventional pursuit of a career as a
professional writer gave her the means of conveying her
thoughts to the wider world.
Writing this novel gave Stowe a
professional outlet. Like many educated nineteenth century American
women, she experienced frustration because there were few positions for
women in the professions. Thus there was little opportunity for educated
women to use professional voices to influence the course of American
life. Like her father, husband, and brothers, Stowe felt called to
preach. Denied a pulpit, she used Uncle Tom’s Cabin as her sermon, her
means of educating the world about a system that she was convinced was
evil and must be stopped.
As a professional writer of the nineteenth
century, Stowe knew that there was a large female reading public.
Consequently, much of the novel appeals to those readers as it paints
slavery as a male-devised system that women are called upon to correct.
She creates several strong female characters whose common sense and
strong human sympathy
recoil from slavery’s inhumanity. Throughout the novel, human feeling
is raised above the economics of self-interest and the expediency of
laws. Moreover, Stowe “feminized” the slave narrative, stressing Eliza’s
heroic escape from bondage with her son as well as the ingenious plan
used by Cassy to free herself from Simon Legree. Prior to her novel,
most accounts of slavery, such as Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), were told from the male perspective
and celebrated male courage and resourcefulness.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
provides a panorama of nineteenth century American culture, which
suggests that its author was a precursor of the realistic writers who
dominated the literary scene after the Civil War. The novel contains
innumerable characters of all types and backgrounds: slaves and slave
catchers, slaveowners and Quakers, a self-pitying Southern belle and an
unsympathetic New
Englander, mothers and children, unprincipled politicians and slovenly
cooks, the careless and the deeply caring, the sexually exploited and
the sadistic, the angelic and the impish. It includes scenes along the
shores of Lake Erie and in the currents of the Mississippi River, in
Ohio and in Kentucky, in Arkansas and in Canada. Using a broad canvas as
she did, Stowe hoped to show that slavery, far from an isolated and
temporary problem, was institutionalized and nationalized and affected
not only slaves and slaveowners but the entire country. Moreover, she
showed that persons of all types, from the good to the evil, were caught
in the power of the institution.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been
criticized on several grounds. It is said to lack form and control; its
social purpose is sometimes seen as incompatible with fine aesthetic
qualities. However, the moralism and didacticism were, in a sense, part
of Stowe’s aesthetic. That is,
she did not believe that art was above morality but that it was
activated by it. She did not believe in art for art’s sake, but rather
in the power of art to do good.
The novel’s titular hero has been
criticized for his willingness to submit to white men’s arbitrary power
and physical abuse. It is well, however, to remember Tom in the light of
Stowe’s Christianity. To her, his submission was not to tyranny but to
Christian principle, and in that submission lay his power to change the
world for the better. Stowe created Tom in the image of Jesus Christ.
Bibliography:
Adams,
John R. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Updated ed. Boston: Twayne, 1989. A
basic study of Stowe’s writings that includes biographical information.
The chapter on Uncle Tom’s Cabin places its dual plot in the Victorian
tradition and postulates that Uncle Tom’s passive suffering and Eliza’s
rebellion are two sides of
Stowe’s psyche.
Crozier, Alice C. The Novels of Harriet Beecher
Stowe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969. Notes that Stowe was
less interested in the novel as art than in the novel as history. Traces
the influence of the British writers Sir Walter Scott and George
Gordon, Lord Byron. Comments on the cultural context in which the novels
were written, which accounts not only for the Victorian sentimentality
of Uncle Tom’s Cabin but also for a distinctively American realism that
anticipates Mark Twain.
Foster, Charles H. The Rungless Ladder:
Harriet Beecher Stowe and New England Puritanism. New York: Cooper
Square, 1970. This study of Stowe’s inner struggle with New England
Puritanism identifies what she read and how that affected her life and
writings. It shows that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a product of her religious
thinking and personal anguish. Stowe projects herself and her own
struggles,
particularly her attempt to reconcile herself with the death of one of
her children, onto the novel’s characters.
Hedrick, Joan D. Harriet
Beecher Stowe: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. A good
source of information about Stowe’s career as a writer. Traces her
writing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin from her initial resolve, through her
decision to address the sexual exploitation of female slaves, to her
effort to substantiate the novel with facts collected in A Key to Uncle
Tom’s Cabin. Also mentions her work on behalf of emancipation of slaves
in both America and England after publication of the novel.
Wagenknecht,
Edward. Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Known and the Unknown. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1965. A character study of Stowe, treating her
as daughter, wife, and mother, as well as writer.
“Critical Evaluation” by William L. Howard
Uncle
Tom’s Cabin
Or, Life Among the Lowly
Author
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
Classification
Moral tale
First Published
1851-1852, serial; 1852, book
Locale
The southern states of the United States; Ohio; and Canada
Themes
Race and ethnicity, and social issues
Time of Plot
The mid-nineteenth century
Recommended Ages
13-18
This
novel was to become the first very widely read fictional work on the
moral injustice of slavery in the United States before the Civil War. It
treats the sufferings of slave families who, because of their owners’
legal rights over them, were separated by
forced sale of wives and husbands, children and parents.
Principal characters:
UNCLE TOM, a loyal slave who endures great injustice at the hands of his masters
GEORGE
SHELBY, the son of Tom’s original master, who gives him the nickname
Uncle Tom and tries to make it possible for Tom to return to his family
AUGUSTINE
ST. CLARE, Tom’s second master, who begins to understand the value of
human compassion for oppressed slaves but dies before being able to help
Tom
MARIE ST. CLARE, Augustine’s wife, who cares little about the
value of Tom’s loyalty and sells him to raise money after her husband’s
death
ELIZA, a runaway slave, the wife of slave George Harris
EVA
ST CLARE, the daughter of wealthy Southerner Augustine St. Clare; Uncle
Tom saves Eva’s life during his transport to New Orleans, where he is
to be sold
SIMON LEGREE, Tom’s third and last owner, who treats his
slaves cruelly; when he suspects Tom of aiding other slaves to escape,
Legree has him fatally beaten
The Story
At the outset of this
novel, the reader meets Mr. Shelby, a Kentucky plantation owner. Because
of his debts, Shelby is forced to sell Tom, his most trusted hand, and
Harry, the son of Eliza, to a slave trader. Tom has always enjoyed a
favored position with the Shelbys. He has spent many hours with Shelby’s
son George, who refers to the slave as “Uncle Tom.”
Tom’s wife wants
him to flee, but he refuses, saying he cannot betray Shelby’s trust. At
first Eliza, too, resists her husband George’s insistence that the only
way to escape slavery is to go to Canada. When she learns that her son
Harry is to be sold, however, she flees with him across the Ohio River.
After several difficult
experiences, Eliza is finally able to rejoin George in Indiana.
Uncle
Tom, meanwhile, is carried off in chains by a slave trader who travels
down the Ohio River, purchasing other slaves along the way. Among the
boat’s regular white passengers is Eva St. Clare, a child whom Tom saves
from drowning. Recognizing that he owes him a debt, Eva’s father,
Augustine, decides to purchase Tom, who becomes the family’s carriage
driver. As confidence in him rises, Tom not only handles market shopping
and cares for the fatally ill Eva; he chides his master for his
excessive drinking and failure to observe Christian ways. Augustine St.
Clare is clearly overcome with feelings of guilt toward Tom specifically
and toward slavery in general. By the time he begins planning for Tom’s
emancipation, however, he is killed senselessly while trying to end a
drunken brawl.
Meanwhile, Tom’s former owners, the Shelbys, encourage
his wife and children to believe that means will eventually be found to
repurchase Tom and bring him back to his family. Tom’s new mistress,
Marie St. Clare, shares none of these humanitarian hopes. To raise
money, she sells Tom to the infamous Simon Legree. Legree assures the
loyalty of slaves by terrorizing them. He has trained two black
overseers, Sambo and Quimbo, to use brutal means to ensure order on the
plantation.
When Tom tries secretly to help his fellow slaves, he is
caught and beaten. Cassy, Legree’s preferred mulatto mistress up to this
point, tries to convince Legree that his brutal methods against his
slaves will not work. When her efforts fail, Cassy approaches Tom with a
plan to kill Legree. Tom’s intense Christian faith makes him recoil at
the idea of murder; resignation to the Lord’s will, even if it means his
own death, remains first in his mind.
Cassy and a fifteen-year-old
slave,
Emmeline, decide to flee, with the eventual hope of freedom. Insane
with anger at their flight, Legree has Tom flogged for complicity, but,
once again, Tom’s Christian admonitions prevail: Both Sambo and Quimbo
repent and at long last prove they have a conscience by offering the
miserable slave comfort as he lies dying.
George Shelby, son of Tom’s
earlier master, now arrives prepared to buy Tom back. Tom is close to
death but refuses to let Shelby denounce Legree’s barbarity; instead, he
insists that Legree has worked the way of the Lord by opening the gates
of heaven for his final escape from misery.
After Tom’s death,
Shelby returns home by riverboat and discovers that Cassy and Emmeline,
in disguise, are on board. News is exchanged concerning the other slave
couple who had fled from the Shelby estate. Cassy discovers that
George’s wife Eliza is none other than her own daughter, taken from her
by her
master years before and sold.
The novel ends after the family of
slave fugitives is rejoined in Canada. Their lives are totally
transformed when George and Eliza, Cassy, and Emmeline all move to
France, where George succeeds in obtaining a university education and
makes plans to take his family to Liberia, a haven for former slaves
that had recently been established in Africa.
Themes and Meanings
The
main themes of Stowe’s work involve the brutal injustices of slavery
and the moral forces within individuals that can combat them. A
considerable amount of attention is given by the author to the personal
psychological makeup of the protagonists. Such psychological traits help
explain the actions that weave the story’s plot. The most obvious
example of this is Uncle Tom himself, but other figures, especially
Legree, reveal dimensions of human psychology that can be tied to base
urges of
exploitation.
Diverse human reactions to injustice make up a set of
complementary themes. Some of these are easily grasped in terms of
simple human decency. The reader thus encounters a series of benevolent
white people in the story—even slaveowners who see that the exercise of
humanitarian concern can ease the burden of responsibility for the
forces of fate that have made some masters and others slaves.
Probably
the most controversial theme in this novel, however, is to be found in
Beecher’s depiction of Uncle Tom himself. Tom’s steadfast belief that
individual resignation to suffering will be rewarded after death (“final
liberation”) has attracted critics’ attention ever since the book’s
appearance. The religious psychology of the need to confront injustice
(for “higher moral victory” in the hereafter) presented a profound and
perplexing issue during Stowe’s time—one that has remained
unsolved long after the disappearance of slavery.
Context
The
assumption that the author of Uncle Tom was consciously devoted to the
cause of the antislavery movement continued to be the object of
controversy into the twentieth century. A well-known example of
twentieth century criticism marking the beginning of a new militant
attitude toward Black civil rights was James Baldwin’s essay,
“Everybody’s Protest Novel,” published in the Partisan Review, in 1949.
If
one places the career of Mrs. Stowe in its original historical context,
however, the book’s underlying characteristics are easier to
understand. The author was the daughter, sister, and wife of New England
Congregational ministers. The ethical attitudes of such descendants of
the original Pilgrims involved an evangelical commitment to social
reform.
Harriet Beecher Stowe presents an image of
slavery as part of a “providential” force. Her purpose may not have
been to take a political position on slavery, but rather to moralize on
the theory of salvation. In this moral literary context, Tom’s identity
is to be seen less in political terms than in a role as a black Christ
or a black representative of Protestant virtue.
One should contrast
possible original motivating forces behind Stowe’s unprecedented novel
with what may be called the radical political press of the era. A clear
antislavery abolitionist cause had already taken root in America by the
1850’s, represented most notably by activists such as publisher William
Lloyd Garrison with his The Liberator and John Brown, a radical leader
of the Underground Railroad. Although Stowe’s original intention may not
have been to aid the abolitionist cause, public reception of the story
did more to help it than anything the members themselves had done.
Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s emergence as a controversial literary figure helped
earn for her favorable reviews in such prestigious publications as The
Times of London; on the European continent, she was heralded in 1854 as a
spokesperson of the moral and political outrage that was widely held
there against the evil institution of slavery. Uncle Tom’s Cabin
represents a historic milestone in America’s perception of itself. The
essence of its themes formed the core of causes of the great Civil
Rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s. The influence of this book
upon the course of a nation cannot be overestimated; the book belongs to
the ages.
Byron D. Cannon
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Or, Life Among the Lowly
Author
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
First Published
1852
Classification
Novel
Locale
Kentucky and Mississippi
Time of Plot
Mid-nineteenth century
Type of Plot
Social realism
Uncle
Tom, a slave. Although he is good and unrebellious, he is sold by his
owner. After serving a second kind but improvident master, he comes
under the ownership of brutal Simon Legree and dies as a result of his
beatings.
Eliza, a slave. Learning that her child is about to be sold
away along with Tom, she takes the child and runs away, crossing the
Ohio River by leaping from floating ice cake to floating ice cake.
George
Harris, her husband, a slave on a neighboring plantation. He also
escapes, passing as a Spaniard, and reaches Ohio, where he joins his
wife and child.
Together, they go to freedom in Canada.
Harry, the child of Eliza and George.
Mr.
Shelby, the original owner of Eliza, Harry, and Uncle Tom. Encumbered
by debt, he plans to sell a slave to his chief creditor.
Haley, the
buyer, a New Orleans slave dealer. He shrewdly selects Uncle Tom and
persuades Mr. Shelby to part with Harry in spite of his better feelings.
George
Shelby, Mr. Shelby’s son. He promises to buy Tom back one day but
arrives at Legree’s plantation as Tom is dying. When his father dies, he
frees all his slaves in Uncle Tom’s name.
Mrs. Shelby, Mr. Shelby’s wife. She delays the pursuit of Eliza by serving a late breakfast.
Marks and
Loker,
slave-catchers hired by Haley to track Eliza through Ohio. Loker,
wounded by George Harris in a fight, is given medical treatment by the
Quakers who are
protecting the runaways.
Augustine St. Clare, the purchaser of Tom
after Tom saves his daughter’s life. He dies before making arrangements
necessary to free his slaves.
Eva St. Clare, his saintly and frail daughter. Before her death, she asks her father to free his slaves.
Mrs. St. Clare, a hypochondriac invalid. After her husband’s death, she sends Tom to the slave market.
Miss Ophelia, St. Clare’s cousin from the North. She comes to look after Eva and is unused to lavish Southern customs.
Topsy, a pixie-like black child bought by St. Clare for Miss Ophelia to educate; later, he makes the gift legal.
Simon Legree, the alcoholic and superstitious brute who purchases Tom and kills him. He is a Northerner by birth.
Cassy, Legree’s slave. She uses his superstitions to advantage in her escape. Her young
daughter, who was sold years ago, proves to be Eliza, and mother and daughter are reunited in Canada.
Emmeline, another of Legree’s slaves. She escapes with Cassy.
Madame de Thoux, whom Cassy and Emmeline meet on a northbound riverboat. She proves to be George Harris’ sister.
Aunt Chloe, Uncle Tom’s wife, left behind in Uncle Tom’s cabin on the Shelby plantation.
Senator Bird, in whose house Eliza first finds shelter in Ohio.
Mrs. Bird, his wife.
Simeon Halliday and
Rachel Halliday, who give shelter to the fugitive slaves.
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