Uncle Tom's Cabin Slavery

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe is a unique historical fiction novel which portrays life during the American Civil War. In this story, Harriet Beecher Stowe tells the tale of Uncle Tom, along with several other slaves, and their journey through the wretchedness of slavery. She combines ethics, redemption, religion, and prejudice and presents her readers with an immensely powerful book that gives off an awe-inspiring impact.

The anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe was written at a time when slavery was a largely common practice among Americans. It not only helped lay the foundation for the Civil War but also contained many themes that publicized the evil of slavery to all people. The book contains themes such as the moral power of women, human right, and many more. The most important theme Stowe attempts to portray to readers is the incompatibility of slavery and Christianity. She makes it very clear that she does not believe slavery and Christianity can coexist and that slavery is against all Christian morals. She believes no Christian should allow the existence or practice of slavery.

When examining defining moments in history, one must first analyze what led to the central event. In this case, one sees that the years following the American Revolution were very important to the historical timeline. During the 19th century, two regions with very different beliefs strongly contradicted each other. This plagued the nation, ultimately leading to the decimating battle of The Civil War. It is evident that the rapid expansion of slavery during this time unfolded and ignited a series of controversies that were evident in the political, economic, and social problems that slavery’s expansion created.

One of the contributing factors which led to the Civil War were the social disputes between the North and the South. The morality of the issue of slavery was one which was highly debated. The North found that slavery was immoral and should be abolished. Frederick Douglass, a former slave, in his speech on “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” holds little back and criticizes the happening of the white man in

In the 1850s the most controversial topics was slavery. Slavery opened up many debates, discussions and arguments. This decade is known as the turbulent decade because of all the events that led America downhill. It divided the nation into two, the North and South or the Union and Confederacy. Unconstitutional, immoral, inhuman and plain out wrong was how the Union described slavery. On the other side the south viewed slavery as the right thing to do because blacks were lesser human begins which made slavery justified. Also in the 1850s new territories in the nation were being added so the question of allowing slavery or not arose there. During this decade many compromises were proposed to avoid war but all were unsuccessful and

The growth of the Abolition movement soon got larger. The south soon started to feel threatened, because they felt like the North and everyone else really was going against them. People soon started to grow sympathy for the slaves, and soon people wanted to tell their stories. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the first novel to reveal stories about what took place in the south. The author of “Uncle

Stowe presents slavery in the only way she knows how, by using the facts. Several sources of other works in American literature contrast on to how Stowe presents slavery in her novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin." The elements of slavery are driven through the reflections of theme, characterization, and setting to show that the way slavery is presented is not contradicting.

Many agreed that we must start to feed on a more substantial diet than that of proslavery politics and start infusing the spirit of liberty into all of our systems of commerce, agriculture, manufactures, government, literature and religion (Doc E). Many slaves soon revolted and started to speak out against the horrors of slavery. Some gave speeches, others wrote books and plenty listened. Like when the famous novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published 135,000 sets, 270,000 volumes were sold according to Document F. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is an anti-slavery novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe and this book attributed to laying the ground works for the Civil War. Through this many Northerners started to see the true colors of slavery and realized how greatly slaves suffered from violence, abuse, separation, depression, labor, rape, nightmares, the threat of death and death itself. This only proved and increased the disgust toward slavery. Even politicians were greatly involved such as the Free Soil Party and organized bodies started to form like, the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the American Colonization Society and the New York Manumission Society. The North declared that all men were born free and equal.

The biblical argument against slavery was also present in literature. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin presented a compelling argument against the morality of slavery. All of the heroes of Stowe’s novel are portrayed as devout Christians. Stowe essentially argued the only way to be a good Christian was to be anti-slavery. Yet she went even further to argue for the racial equality of slaves. Many abolitionists of her day would not have argued for the racial equality of slaves, but she did. In the character of Miss Ophelia, she developed a typical Northern woman of the 1850’s. Miss Ophelia considered herself a Christian, yet admitted she had a prejudice against the slaves and could not bear to have them touch her. The young child

This book was about the life of a slave that showed the harsh conditions that a slave has to go through. When Uncle Tom's Cabin was published, thousands of Americans bought and read the book. The thing was, Stowe didn't go to the South, ever. She wrote this book from abolition newspapers and speeches from Frederick Douglass, but this still changed the minds of the people about slavery. Northerners looked at this as a crime and slavery is wrong for this country. In a part of the book, a slave found out her son was sold away from her, “Your child’s gone; you may know it first as last. You see, i know’d you couldn’t take him down south; and I got a chance to sell him.” People saw how rough this was to have your child sold away from you forever. In the South, people thought this book made them look like bad people. They got angry over this book, and wanted to get rid of the book. Two different people had two different views on this book, one that slavery is bad, and the other is making slaveholders look like bad people. This book caused the South to want to secede from the North even more than before because most of the North was protesting to end slavery in America. This gets America closer to the Civil

The South was unable to stop the uproar of citizens with the revelations of the inhumanity of many slave owners uncovered by the novel. This led to an uproar of those seeking moral standards and, as a result, the election of an anti-slavery President.

In the united States during the 1860s, a war broke out among the states. The Civil War, a war between Northern states and the Southern states. There were many efforts in hopes of preventing this war, for instance, the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Still many actions took place that escalated the issue even more, like the novel Uncle Tom's cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Dred Scott Supreme Court Decision. Eventually, all of the efforts to prevent the war failed, and the ones who tried to bring the issue to light succeeded because in April of 1861 a Civil war occurred in the U.S.

After reading Articulating Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I found that Jim O’Loughlin views the novel as a positive influence in American culture. He states, “It was perhaps the most influential cultural text in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America not despite its varied incarnations, but because of them” (O’Loughlin, 2000). Even Abraham Lincoln, upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, is quoted as saying, “so you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War” (Lincoln, 1862). However, “some historians argue that Uncle Tom’s Cabin had minimal influence on the politics that led to the Civil War” (Reynolds, 2011). Even though there are different views about the novel, one woman’s goal was to make the whole nation feel the

One was the best seller that captured all audiences, the other an unfiltered narrative telling of the slavery experience, although contrasting, both caused tensions that led to their popularity and why they are still read today. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a novel about a slave who embarks on a journey south and discovers how slavery is different in the disparate parts of the south. Meanwhile, Eliza, a mulatto enslaved woman runs away to ensure a better life for her son Harry by fleeing to Canada. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is a narrative written by a former slave who became an abolitionist. Similarly to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it depicts the dehumanizing effects of slavery upon the master and likewise the slave. Both stories illustrate how misconceptions and faith in religion play a role in confusing as well as giving hope to the characters described. These two stories can be contrasted as you may contrast Martin Luther King and Malcolm X; one portrays a more moderate tone while the other gives us the full fledged exhibit of slavery. Although they are both unique and tell different stories of the lives of enslaved African Americans and their masters, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” as well as Frederick Douglass’s The Narrative and Life of Frederick Douglas both capture the essence of slavery in the 1800s and give us two points of view of religion and the dehumanizing effects of slavery.

The book Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the film Gone with the Wind share an exuberance of similarities whilst using the perspectives of both a slave and his master. They both, in detail, show that slavery was extremely popular and successful in the Southernmost states in the US. It was indeed considered a lifestyle of many in the nation. In the eyes of author Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind was the “Southern response to the book Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. Mitchell depicts life in the South as a nirvana for highly profitable Caucasian southerners on their plantations where African Americans were more than happy to take a subsidiary role to satisfy their owners. It was an inaccurate portrayal of the time period. On the Other hand, Uncle Tom’s Cabin told the horrifying, but true story of the brutal slavery that took a toll on the South. Although these two works show very different perspectives and tell two totally diverse stories there are many similarities to be shown.