Harriet Beecher Stowe expressed a need to awaken sympathy and feeling for the
African race in the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She was born June 14, 1811 in
Litchfield, Connecticut. She was the daughter of a Calvinist minister and she
and her family was all devout Christians, her father being a preacher and her
siblings following. Her Christian attitude much reflected her attitude towards
slavery. She was for abolishing it, because it was, to her, a very unchristian
and cruel institution. Her novel, therefore, focused on the ghastly points of
slavery, including the whippings, beatings, and forced sexual encounters
brought upon slaves by their masters. She wrote the book to be a force against
slavery, and was joining in with the feelings of many other women of her time,
whom all became more outspoken and influential in reform movements, including
temperance and women\'s suffrage. The main point of Harriet Beecher Stowe in
the writing of Uncle Tom\'s Cabin was to bring to light, slavery, to people in
the north. In this she hoped to eventually sway people against slavery.
Stowe did a great job with this book. What is believed to be one of the
influential books of all time, ranking with the works of Adam Smith and Machiavelli,
Uncle Tom\'s Cabin became an abolitionist\'s bible. During its time it was
revised, dramatized, and published often. The effect of her book on the north
and everywhere in the US was unforeseen. The book was popular and caused
abolitionism to run wild among northerners. The south hated the book because of
its portrayal of its (The South\'s) \"peculiar institution\". It
might have been influential enough to be considered one of the causes of the
civil war, by creating a greater number of northerners against slavery. It
displayed to the north all the evils of slavery, by creating human characters
out of slaves, who were thought to be inhuman. Stowe\'s ideas were that slavery
is wrong, which is a correct assumption. A human should not be owned because we
are not animals, plants, or minerals. Humans have souls and should and can not
be owned by other r humans, because they are all created equal.
Stowe\'s style of staggering chapters about Tom with chapters about Eliza was
effective by showing hope in two different situations. Eliza hoped for freedom
while Tom hoped for eternity. Stowe plays these two motivations of her
characters off each other to project the point of the book to the intelligent.
She emphasizes her main points throughout the whole book, perhaps too much, but
she was right in doing this, too make sure no one missed the point. She is
biased against slaves, oddly enough. She portrays the whiter ones as more
intelligent and clever, as is seen with George and Eliza, and the darker ones
as more slow-witted, for example, Tom. Stowe also did what any intelligent
reader from the beginning of the book expects of her. She creates a chapter at
the end reinforcing the story in the book with historical facts, meaning that
it\'s based loosely on the real world.
She seems to do her research well for the story, and her perspective was rather
open, backing up slaveholders as well as abolitionists by expressing the
slaveholders feelings of hopelessness towards going against society, seen in
St. Clare. She made the slaves more human and the slaveholders appear to be
morally wrong, but not by always using morally correct slaves and masters
without morals. For example, Stowe creates a character, Adolf, the overseer of
sorts for St. Clare. Adolf is a slave who is not morally correct he steals from
St. Clare often, yet he appears more human for doing so. The slaves or human
but not divine, as are the masters, creating a sense of equality, which Stowe
wanted to put across. She wrote the book well, choosing where it was best to
put which idea, and making many allusions to historical events around the time,
which made her book more popular to the people of her time by involving other
things they knew of into the story.
Overall, Uncle Tom\'s Cabin was well written, organized, and historically
accurate. Harriet Beecher Stowe used her knowledge of the past to write a clear
argument for the abolition of slavery, by creating an interesting enough book
to get her ideas to the common people. Her book was influential because it not
only told her ideas, but because it states her ideas understandably, something
not all writers are able to do. The entire theme of the book is about the evils
of slavery; it was written to try to motivate people to eliminate it. Stowe is
defiant and certain that slavery must not be slowly eliminated, but must stop
immediately.
Works Cited
Stowe, Harriet. Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/_generate/authors-S.htm
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/sitemap.html
http://www.chfweb.com/smith/harriet.html
billy cooke