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Uncle Tom's Cabin Thesis

Decent Essays

The event that was the most significant in pushing America towards war in my opinion was the novel written by Harriet Beecher Stowe called “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. The American Promise states “Harriet Beecher Stowe, a white Northerner who had never set foot on a plantation, made the South’s slaves into flesh-and-blood human beings almost more real than life.”(Pg. 403) The novel gave you a in depth insight on the negative aspects of slavery and how it affected family members of the slaves. The stories mentioned in her book were true stories from formal slaves who escaped slavery in the South. Harriet heard those touching stories from formal slaves when she lived in southern Ohio during the 1830s and 1840s. In her novel, she explained how slavery functioned solely as a business venture for the slave masters. She also put emphasis on how the purchasing and selling of slaves separated families bonds with each other. Stowe's novel changed the way people in the states viewed slavery from that point forward especially people from the North. Most of the states in the south were furious about the novel so they banned …show more content…

Lyman Beecher. Dr. Beecher was popular Calvinist preacher who was one of the founders of the Second Awakening who preached against slavery in the 1820s during the Missouri Compromise. In 1834, Harriet father moved the family to Cincinnati, Ohio so that he could provide for his family by becoming a pastor of a church. He also became the president of the Lane Theological Seminary of Cincinnati where he taught preachers the fundamentals of preaching. After they completed the program, the preachers were able to join him in spreading the word about the negative aspects of slavery. Later Harriet joined a literary group called Semi-Colon Club where they debated about community issues and analyzed each other writing material about different public issues such as

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