Uncle toms cabin

A Book Review of Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s main goal in writing her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was to convince people, mainly her fellow northerners, of the need to end slavery by showing it’s evils that are thrust upon black people and to convince all her readers that slavery conflicts with Christian values. To effectively establish her point, Stowe takes us along on the two very separate journeys of the novel’s main characters, Uncle Tom and Eliza Shelby. It is on their journeys that the readers bear witness to the various evils that the system of slavery encompasses.

Stowe begins the novel discussing a warm atmosphere on the Shelby plantation and presents to us the best possible circumstances of slavery where slaves are treated very well by compassionate owners. However, no time is wasted in this warm and compassionate setting, not twenty pages into the story we find that even the best masters fall into debt and must settle their bills by what ever means possible. This development quickly brings the reader into the slave world where humans, such as Uncle Tom, are sold to slave traders to settle their master’s debts and it is here that a very strong argument

Uncle Tom’s journey is mainly detailed for the northerner who knew very little about a slave’s life; however, Stowe chooses a much larger population to present her next argument, and this time it is on Eliza’s journey that she conveys much of her evidence. This argument is also why so many southerners have taken offence to the book. She presents Slavery as an un-Christian institution and makes the point indirectly that Christians cannot own slaves. She argues that Christian values conflict with the whole institution of slavery and points out that Christians true in there convictions cannot be a part of the slavery institution. To establish this argument, Stowe uses several Christian characters and lets their actions represent her argument.

The small village was alive with no sounds; hoarse, guttural voices contending at the hand mills where their morsel of hard corn was… to constitute their only supper. He saw only sullen, scowling, imbruted men, and feeble, discouraged women… (Who) had sunk as nearly to their level as it was possible for human beings to do (495).

In using a character such as Uncle Tom, Stowe’s argument only grows stronger and gains more support because we are able to identify with Tom and grow fond of him. We don’t like to see him suffer, and in making each experience of his more and more difficult to bear, our sympathy for him grows much deeper until the point that we are totally convinced that slavery needs to be abolished.

Stowe makes a very strong statement with Senator Bird’s character. She shows him as a true Christian and a well meaning man, but in making Mr. Bird a Senator she is saying that he is complacent at his political podium. Also, she implies that Mr. Bird is a hypocrite in what he represents as a member of the government and what he represents as a Christian man. It seems that this character is in the book because Stowe is trying to argue that to be a proper Christian means that one cannot accept slavery as an institution.

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