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Uncle Tom's Cabin Thesis

Decent Essays

When she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe had no idea that she was releasing a literary giant on the nation. 10 years after the publication, President Lincoln accredited her as “ the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war." Written in direct response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Uncle Tom’s Cabin became the greatest fiction success of the nineteenth century. Today, the novel is considered one of the most famous in the world, having sold hundreds of thousands of copies in more than sixty languages. Uncle Tom's Cabin had an immense impact on the conflicted nation, while it aroused the antislavery sentiment in the North, it provoked angry rebuttals in the South more than any other event in the antebellum …show more content…

She was writing just after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, this law made it illegal to give aid to a runaway slave. With her book, Stowe revealed the horrors of Southern slavery to people in the North, while holding a deep connection to religion. She was concerned with producing a work of literature that persuaded the northerners through literature that slavery was wholly immoral, with the necessity of ending it. What made the book so vehement to an indictment of slavery was Stowe’s emphasis on the forcible breakup of slave families. Tearing child from mother and husband from wife, the novel exposed the brutality and heartlessness of slavery. Throughout the novel, Stowe continues to emphasizes the importance of Christian love, even through the toughest …show more content…

The main character, Uncle Tom, is an African American who keeps his integrity and refuses to betray his fellow slaves at the cost of his own life. His firm Christian principles in spite of his brutal treatment by his prosecutor, Simon Legree, made him a hero. Stowe convinced readers that the institution of slavery was evil, because it supported people like Legree and enslaved innocent people like Uncle Tom. Because of her work, thousands of northerners rallied to the anti-slavery cause. Anti-slavery advocates praised the book for emphasizing the impact slavery had on families, and helping the public understand and empathize with enslaved mothers. The southerners were outraged and claimed that slavery was sanctioned in the Bible. They accused Stowe of fabricating unrealistic, one-sided images of Southern slavery.They reacted by writing their own novels, these depicted the happy lives of slaves, and contrasted them with the miserable presence of Northerners. Most blacks also responded enthusiastically to the novel and abolitionists saw it as a tremendous help to their cause.
Within the text itself, the reader goes through the mind of a Christian, female abolitionist. For example, in the arguments Stowe uses, the reader receives some details of the slavery debate. Uncle Tom's Cabin contributed to the outbreak

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