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Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe Essay

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“So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!” is one of the most famous quotes said by President Abraham Lincoln to Harriet Beecher Stowe regarding the Civil War and her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But was she really an abolitionist? Uncle Tom’s Cabin brought about great social change. With harsh visions of brutal slave beatings, it is hard to not feel compassion for the slaves. Uncle Tom’s Cabin became extremely popular in the North. According to the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, after the first year it had already sold 300,000 copies. Uncle Tom’s Cabin appalled many people and was considered inaccurate by southern plantation owners yet it sold thousands of copies (HBS Center 7).

Uncle Tom’s Cabin …show more content…

As he is laying there dying, his first master’s son arrives and sees Tom speak his last words. The novel ends with Eliza and George being reunited with some family that had been separated and they leave for Africa.

Most people today regard her to be an abolitionist because of the success of her novel in freeing the slaves. By today’s ideals, an abolitionist is someone who wanted to free all blacks from slavery and incorporate them into society. When looking at abolitionists from the Civil War era, it is important to realize that not all followed this definition but are still claimed to be abolitionists, which creates a serious problem of misrepresenting their ideals. While Harriet Beecher Stowe is credited as being an abolitionist today because of the impact of her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin she was in fact not because of her lifestyle, background, and belief in the necessity of slavery; her belief that blacks were inferior to the white race; and that former slaves could not be incorporated into society and should be returned to Africa.
An objection to the idea that Harriet Beecher Stowe was not an abolitionist lies in the fact of how successful her novel was in terms of freeing the slaves. This book is thought of as the greatest antislavery novel because it helped the abolition movement advance towards its goal and how could someone that was not an abolitionist write such a novel? The novel brought knowledge into the homes of the North, and

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