Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) & Her “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”
She was an American writer who was well known for her best-selling novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She published more than 30 books, but Uncle Tom’s Cabin was her ticket for history books because her words truly changed the world. Most of her writing was based on true stories that she used to listen to from her home servants who lived through such instances.
In 1850, Stowe hid a fugitive slave in her house with her children listening to his stories and songs about how he missed his wife and daughter back in South Carolina.
Even Uncle Tom’s Cabin was inspired by a real person named Josiah Henson, and readers can see things through the lens of history when reading such a book. Especially since she wrote this book in 1852 when there was no end to slavery to be spotted at the time.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was quite a controversial book because the novel was criticised by white and black critics alike. Her portrayal of the black characters was too positive, and the characters were oversimplified and stereotypical.
Even when Abraham Lincoln met her in 1862, he commented that she was “the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”
A major theme of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the treatment of humans as property, as Stowe counterbalanced against the morality of Christianity. That entitled to the racial distinction that blacks were inferior to whites and should be cared for by a superior race for their own benefit.
However, the depictions of the horrified treatments proved throughout history that both the biblical and Enlightenment justifications were false arguments to excuse and rationalise or even normalise the seven deadly sins manifested in slave owners.
In “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, Tom is a slave who is whipped to death twice and dies at the hands of his last owner, Simon Legree, for refusing to drop his Christian beliefs and tell where his fellow slaves ran off to. However, that was not the only time Tom had sacrificed himself for others. There was also the time when he ran off to save Eva, the little girl, from drowning, causing her father, Augustine, to buy him from his former owner. However, Eva dies from illness eventually after saying her last words on her deathbed for her father to free all slaves, but Augustine is killed before he does so.
Arthur Shelby is the Kentucky farmer and the original slave owner of Tom who is forced to sell off two slaves because of debt to Haley, the slave trader. So he sold Tom and Harry, who is the young son of another slave named Eliza.
Tom built a cabin on Shelby’s farmlands, where he used to stay with his wife before he was sold off. Eventually, Eliza manages to reunite with her family and husband and runs to Canada. Slaves are treated as objects in the narrative.
Stowe personalised the experience to give a rude awakening to the slave traders by posing her Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a criticism of such a law of slavery. The Fugitive Slave Act was passed on September 18, 1850, by Congress. The act required that slaves be returned to their owners, even if they were in a free state. The act also made the federal government responsible for finding, returning, and tracking escaped slaves.
Thus, Stowe agreed in 1851 to “paint a word picture of slavery” for an abolitionist newspaper, and that was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Specifically, in the summer of 1849, when her 18-month son died from cholera under the name Samuel Charles, she was inspired to write the book to reflect upon the pain of the enslaved mothers when their children were sold away from them.
The book was banned and burned in the South, where Southern slaveholders resided. Still, it was non-negotiable that Uncle Tom’s Cabin truly strengthened the Northern abolitionism movement and weakened the British sympathy for the Southern cause.
Eventually, on January 31, 1865, the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States and was passed and ratified on December 6, 1865.
