Uncle Toms Cabin Essay example -- Uncle Toms Cabin Essays

Harriet Beecher Stowe 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. The novel Uncle Tom's Cabin focuses on the lives of two slaves, who both start under the ownership of a Mr. Shelby, who is known as a man who treats his slaves well. Mr. Shelby, however, was indebted to a man of the name Haley, who is a slave-trader. In return for the debt owed to him, Haley wants two slaves one being the son of a beautiful mulatto woman named Eliza, and the other the devout Christian Tom, who is called Father Tom because of his sermons. Eliza is also a Christian, as are the rest of the slaves on Shelby's farm. Eliza loves her son dearly and rather than lose him to the slave-trader she takes him and heads to Canada, where she can be free. Haley follows but can't catch her before she goes from Kentucky, the state of the Shelby Farm, to Ohio. Haley then sends slave-catchers after her. He also goes back to the farm, and brings Tom on a steamboat to the South, a place where slaves are known to die, but Tom meets and makes a great impression on a little girl, Evangeline S t. Clare, or Eva as she is called, and she persuades her father, Augustine St. Clare to purchase Tom. Augustine is a man against slavery, but too intelligent and idle to openly oppose it, instead choosing to let his slaves run freely and do whatsoever they please, within reason. Tom is bought as a man who works at the stable, and is the private driver of Marie St. Clare. Marie was a conceited woman who is too busy worrying... ...s 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.