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Uncle Tom's Cabin

Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe. Published in two volumes in 1852, the novel had a profound effect on attitudes toward African Americans and slavery in the U.S., and is said to have "helped lay the groundwork for the [American] Civil War".[1][2][3]

This article is about the mid-19th-century novel. For other uses, see Uncle Tom's Cabin (disambiguation).

Author

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly.

Hammatt Billings

English

Novel

1852 (two volumes)

John P. Jewett and Company, after serialization in The National Era beginning June 5, 1851

United States

1077982310

813.3

PS2954 .U5

A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin 

Stowe, a Connecticut-born woman of English descent, was part of the religious Beecher family and an active abolitionist. She wrote the sentimental novel to depict the reality of slavery while also asserting that Christian love could overcome slavery.[4][5][6] The novel focuses on the character of Uncle Tom, a long-suffering black slave around whom the stories of the other characters revolve.


In the United States, Uncle Tom's Cabin was the best-selling novel and the second best-selling book of the 19th century, following the Bible.[7][8] It is credited with helping fuel the abolitionist cause in the 1850s.[9] The influence attributed to the book was so great that a likely apocryphal story arose of Abraham Lincoln meeting Stowe at the start of the Civil War and declaring, "So this is the little lady who started this great war."[10][11]


The book and the plays it inspired helped popularize a number of negative stereotypes about black people,[12][13][3] including that of the namesake character "Uncle Tom". The term came to be associated with an excessively subservient person.[14] These later associations with Uncle Tom's Cabin have, to an extent, overshadowed the historical effects of the book as a "vital antislavery tool".[15] Nonetheless, the novel remains a "landmark" in protest literature,[16] with later books such as The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and Silent Spring by Rachel Carson owing a large debt to it.[17]

the title character, was initially seen as a noble, long-suffering Christian slave.[14] In more recent years, his name has become an epithet directed towards African-Americans who are accused of selling out to whites.[14] Stowe intended Tom to be a "noble hero" and a praiseworthy person.[53] Throughout the book, far from allowing himself to be exploited, Tom stands up for his beliefs and refuses to betray friends and family.[14]

Uncle Tom

Eliza is a slave who serves as a personal maid to Mrs. Shelby. She escapes to the North with her five-year-old son Harry after he is sold to Mr. Haley. Her husband, George, eventually finds Eliza and Harry in and emigrates with them to Canada, then France, and finally Liberia.[54] The character Eliza was inspired by an account given at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati by John Rankin to Stowe's husband Calvin, a professor at the school. According to Rankin, in February 1838, a young slave woman, Eliza Harris, had escaped across the frozen Ohio River to the town of Ripley with her child in her arms and stayed at his house on her way farther north.[55]

Ohio

Evangeline "Eva" St. Clare is the daughter of Augustine St. Clare. Eva enters the narrative when Uncle Tom is traveling via to New Orleans to be sold, and he rescues the five- or six-year-old girl from drowning. Eva begs her father to buy Tom, and he becomes the head coachman at the St. Clare house. He spends most of his time with the angelic Eva. Eva often talks about love and forgiveness, convincing the dour slave girl Topsy that she deserves love. She even touches the heart of her Aunt Ophelia.[56] Eventually Eva falls terminally ill. Before dying, she gives a lock of her hair to each of the slaves, telling them that they must become Christians so that they may see each other in Heaven. On her deathbed, she convinces her father to free Tom, but because of circumstances the promise never materializes.[57]

steamship

Simon Legree is a cruel slave owner—a Northerner by birth—whose name has become synonymous with greed and cruelty. He is arguably the novel's main antagonist. His goal is to demoralize Tom and break him of his religious faith; he eventually orders Tom whipped to death out of frustration for his slave's unbreakable belief in God. The novel reveals that, as a young man, he had abandoned his sickly mother for a life at sea and ignored her letter to see her one last time at her deathbed. He sexually exploits Cassy, who despises him, and later sets his designs on Emmeline.[59] It is unclear if Legree is based on any actual individuals. Reports surfaced in the late 1800s that Stowe had in mind a wealthy cotton and sugar plantation owner named Meredith Calhoun,[60][61] who settled on the Red River north of Alexandria, Louisiana.[62] Rev. Josiah Henson, inspiration for the character of Uncle Tom, said that Legree was modeled after Bryce Lytton,[63] "who broke my arm and maimed me for life."[64]

[58]

Literary themes and theories

Major themes

Uncle Tom's Cabin is dominated by a single theme: the evil and immorality of slavery.[65] While Stowe weaves other subthemes throughout her text, such as the moral authority of motherhood and the power of Christian love,[4] she emphasizes the connections between these and the horrors of slavery. Stowe sometimes changed the story's voice so she could give a "homily" on the destructive nature of slavery[66] (such as when a white woman on the steamboat carrying Tom further south states, "The most dreadful part of slavery, to my mind, is its outrages of feelings and affections—the separating of families, for example.").[67] One way Stowe showed the evil of slavery[49] was how this "peculiar institution" forcibly separated families from each other.[68]

History of slavery in the United States

Origins of the American Civil War

, an 1884 novel that attempted to do for Native Americans in California what Uncle Tom's Cabin had done for African Americans

Ramona

Timeline of the civil rights movement

Aiken, George L. (1993). Uncle Tom's Cabin. Garland.

Gerould, Daniel C., ed. (1983). American Melodrama. Performing Arts Journal Publications.

Parfait, Claire (2007). The Publishing History of Uncle's Tom's Cabin, 1852–2002. Aldershot: Ashgate.

(2011). Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America. W. W. Norton & Company.

Reynolds, David S.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher; Gates, Henry Louis; Robbins, Hollis (2007). The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin. W. W. Norton & Company.

at Standard Ebooks

Uncle Tom's Cabin

– edited by Stephen Railton, covers 1830 to 1930, offering links to primary and bibliographic sources on the cultural background, various editions, and public reception of Harriet Beecher Stowe's influential novel. The site also provides the full text of the book, audio and video clips, and examples of related merchandising.

University of Virginia Web site "Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture: A Multi-Media Archive"

at Project Gutenberg

Uncle Tom's Cabin

available at Internet Archive. Scanned, illustrated original editions.

Uncle Tom's Cabin

public domain audiobook at LibriVox

Uncle Tom's Cabin