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Uncle Tom's Cabin | "The Crown without the Conflict": Religious Values and Moral Reasoning in Uncle Tom's Cabin

In the following excerpt, Joswick addresses Stowe's message about the problem of being moral and just within a corrupt social system of slavery.

The moral conclusion of Uncle Tom's Cabin is as uncontestable as it is everywhere obvious in the novel: the evils of slavery demand that it be abolished. We need to heed, however, the manner in which the argument is presented. At first glance it seems as if Stowe wishes to keep the injustice of slavery separate from the moral characters of those participating in it, for repeated in the novel is an assertion, rendered explicit in the introduction to the 1881 edition, "that the evils of slavery were the inherent evils of a bad system and not always the...

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