When Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1852, it created an immediate controversy in a United States that was divided—both geographically and politically—by the issue of slavery. It is impossible to understand the content or the importance of Uncle Tom's Cabin outside of the historical forces that prompted Harriet Beecher Stowe to write it.

The early settlers of the thirteen colonies were well aware of the problem that was developing for the young nation as more and more slaves were kidnapped in Africa and brought to America to supply agricultural labor for the underpopulated colonies. Due to a complex combination of economic need, political indecision, scientific ignorance, and prior custom, no action was taken to rid the country of slaves while there were still few enough of them to return to their homes in Africa. Thomas Jefferson said that America "had a tiger by the ears," meaning that the slaves were dangerous because, like a tiger in captivity, they would turn on the people who captured them if they were ever released. Jefferson concluded, as did most Americans in the eighteenth century, that the only way to control the "tiger" was to keep holding it tightly by the ears, as terrible as that dilemma was for both the slaves and the slave owners. Thus when Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 that "all men are created equal," he did not include the African slaves.

Jefferson did, however, lay the problem of slavery at the feet of George III, saying in his first draft of the Declaration that King George "has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither." Jefferson was forced to delete this passage from the final version of the Declaration, however, because of the fierce disagreement it caused between delegates from slaveholding colonies in the South and delegates from colonies that had already outlawed slavery in the North. The argument between the northern and southern colonies threatened to precipitate secession and civil war just at the time when the thirteen colonies needed to be united in order to fight for independence against England. In effect, the Founding Fathers decided to leave the problem of slavery and civil war to their descendants. They believed that they were justified in doing this because freedom from the tyranny of England outweighed internal issues. They believed that when America was a nation in its own right it would have the peace and freedom to solve all of its domestic problems. What the Founding Fathers did not anticipate, however, was that the slave trade would become the source of economic security for an entire region, making it very difficult to abolish without bankrupting that region and seriously compromising the stability of the nation.

The "triangular trade" was extremely lucrative. It was called "triangular" because the path of a trading ship, if traced on a map, describes a triangle over the Atlantic ocean. The ships would take manufactured goods from England and Europe to trade in Africa for slaves. The slaves would then be transported to the Indies or the Americas (the notorious "middle passage") and traded for staples like cotton, sugar, rum, molasses, and indigo which would then be carried to England and Europe and traded for manufactured goods. This procedure, repeated again and again from the time of the first slaves' arrival in America in 1619 to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807, made traders at each stop on the triangle very wealthy. The Founding Fathers agreed, with a clause in the Constitution, to end the slave trade, but this did nothing to end the slave system. Slave owners simply continued to supply the slave markets through "natural increase." The loss of an external source of supply only made slaves more valuable.

Nevertheless, by the nineteenth century, most of the world had come to believe that slavery was wrong. Enlightenment ideals concerning the brotherhood of mankind had changed social perceptions, and slavery had been abolished almost everywhere in Europe and its colonies. It was very difficult for Americans to imagine ending slavery, however, because no one in the country had ever lived without it. In the seventy-five years since the foundation of the country, the North had gotten used to the idea that slaves were necessary to the South. Most of them believed that slave owners were kind to the slaves. They also believed that slaves were childlike and ineducable, and that if they were not kept as slaves they would not be able to take care of themselves. There was also the problem of what to do with the slaves if they were freed. No one, North or South, wanted to live with negroes. Thus, for a long time, it was easier to live with slavery rather than to try to change it.

As the United States expanded westward, however, slavery became a more pressing issue. Each new state entering the union shifted the balance of political power in Congress between slave states and free states. This, together with the rise of the Abolition Movement in the 1830s and the religious revival called the "Great Awakening," which saw slavery as evidence of national sin, created an atmosphere of tension between North and South that had been postponed since the founding of the nation. Into this atmosphere came Stowe's novel, which depicted the cruelties of slavery in a way that had never registered on the national consciousness before.

Harriet Beecher (1811-1896), born in Litchfield, Connecticut, belonged to a family of famous clergymen. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was a strict Congregationalist, and her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, became a famous preacher during an era when preachers were admired as much as film or television celebrities are admired today. Harriet Beecher was a retiring woman, however, married to Calvin Stowe, a professor at Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio. For eighteen years, as she raised seven children, Stowe observed the effects of slavery in the slave state of Kentucky, just across the Ohio River from her home in the free state of Ohio. Stowe supplemented her family income with freelance writing. She developed the idea of writing a novel about the horrors of slavery after the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850. Many Northerners were outraged by this law, which allowed slave owners to pursue their runaway slaves into free states in order to recover their "property." Stowe combined her religious background with her political beliefs by writing a book about a saintly slave who forgave his tormentors, just as Jesus Christ forgave His.

When Uncle Tom's Cabin was published it became an instant success, selling so many copies that it is considered today to be the first "best-seller" in American publishing history. It was banned in the South, however, and prompted dozens of answering novels, essays, and poems by pro-slavery writers. Southern writers believed that Stowe exaggerated the condition of slaves in the South, representing the exceptional cruel master (Simon Legree) as the norm, and representing the kind master (Mr. Shelby) as too weak not to sell slaves in times of economic necessity. For nine years, between the time Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1852 and the start of the Civil War in 1861, a public relations war between Northern anti-slavery writers and Southern pro-slavery writers was waged. Though many anti-slavery works had been written before Uncle Tom's Cabin, most notably the fugitive slave narratives of Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown and others, it was the combination of sentimentality and religious feeling in Stowe's novel that triggered the controversy that ended in Civil War. Abraham Lincoln's famous comment when he met Mrs. Stowe ("So you are the little lady who made this big war") implies that Uncle Tom's Cabin caused the war, but Stowe only articulated in a new way the deep-seated problem that had been present in America since the foundation of the colonies in the seventeenth century.

Uncle Tom's Cabin is not a work which can stand alone as a self-contained entertainment. It requires an understanding on the part of the reader of the conditions which made the author write it and which made the nation respond to it so passionately. It is difficult, today, to imagine a work of literature so powerful that it can truly be said to have hastened the onset of a war and the resolution of a problem so intractable that neither the Founding Fathers nor nearly a hundred years of Congresses could find a solution. The fact that Abraham Lincoln decided to emancipate the slaves in 1863 without addressing the related problems of where the freed slaves would live or whether the South would be bankrupt, is a testament to the fact that intense public feeling, rather than logic and negotiation, had made it possible for Lincoln to act unilaterally. Uncle Tom's Cabin contributed greatly—even primarily—to that change of feeling in the nation. The first approach to Uncle Tom's Cabin, therefore, must be the historical and biographical.

In the century and a half since Uncle Tom's Cabin was published, many scholars have reflected on the various ways one can read and understand this complex text, and how Uncle Tom's Cabin has been interpreted differently over the years, both before and after the Civil War. Cultural studies, such as Thomas F. Gossett's Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture and Moira Davison Reynolds' Uncle Tom's Cabin and Mid-Nineteenth Century United States provide the historical frame of reference needed to understand the religious, political, and racial issues addressed in the novel. Though early biographies of Stowe focus on the dramatic irony of a shy housewife making a massive impact on American history, more recent biographies, such as Joan D. Hedrick' s Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life place the facts of her career in the framework of the century and give the reader a history of an era in addition to a history of a life.

Once the historical frame is understood, however, the most central avenue of approach to Uncle Tom's Cabin is that which addresses its primary theme of sin and redemption. When the reader considers that Harriet Beecher Stowe came from a family of preachers, it becomes clear that she is as much a preacher in her novel as a minister in his pulpit. The character of Uncle Tom is unmistakably modeled on Jesus Christ, and everything that happens to him is designed to demonstrate how evil can be transformed into good by love. Little Eva is another model of saintly behavior, designed to prompt all who know her to change, like Topsy, from being bad to being good. Stowe intended the reader, including the southern slave owner, to read Uncle Tom's Cabin and "turn from sin and be saved."

The theme of sin and redemption can be expressed in more general terms as the struggle between good and evil, with slavery as the metaphor for all that is evil in the world. This is the approach taken by Josephine Donovan in "Uncle Tom's Cabin: Evil, Affliction, and Redemptive Love." The full range of evil, from the heartless cruelty of Simon Legree, the subtle weakness of Mr. Shelby, and the humorous rascality of Topsy are all transformed by the power of Uncle Tom's acceptance of his fate. It is for the reader to go out into the actual world and transform it.

Source: Sharon Cumberland, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1999.

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 fault of those who had become involved in it and were its actual administrators." As St. Clare says at one point, "The thing itself is the essence of all abuse!" But laws and moral character are never far apart in Stowe's reasoning. Slave laws are wrong, she says in the last chapter, primarily because "there is, actually, nothing to protect the slave's life, but the character of the master," for the law will sanction the actions even of that owner "whose passions outweigh his interest." The slave's only "right" under the law is his or her economic value, and the "justice" of the law promotes only the owner's self-interest. Rather than emphasizing other notions of rights and obligations, however, Stowe repeatedly charges that the system would crumble of its own accord were it not for the moral sanction given it by benevolent masters. "For pity's sake, for shame's sake, because we are men born of women…many of us do not, and dare not…use the full power which our savage laws put into our hands," St. Clare concludes; but "it is you considerate, humane men," says another character, "that are responsible for all the brutality and outrage wrought by these wretches like (Simon Legree); because, if it were not for your sanction and influence, the whole system could not keep foot-hold for an hour…. It is your respectability and humanity that licenses and protects Legree's brutality."

What these remarks underscore is a conviction not only that human character is at the root of any social system but that moral character, by its pervasive influence, is the real authority in a society. The laws that define rights and obligations here and elsewhere in the novel are usually reduced to matters of self-interest and are often imaged as unstable structures that would collapse without the support of a higher moral authority. The truth of slavery, Stowe is saying, is to be found in the moral influence of those who lend it tacit support and in the moral degradation of those who use the power of law to vent their brutal passions. Thus, if slavery is to be abolished, the appeal will not be so much to a declaration of rights as to a conversion of character. As [critic Jane P.] Tompkins puts it [in a 1981 Glyph article], in Stowe's view reality "can only be changed by conversion in the spirit because it is the spirit alone that is finally real." Owners (and readers), then, ought not merely to forgo the use of power in the law; they must undergo a change of heart directed toward an authority higher than the law.

The final authority toward which the conversion is directed is, of course, an eternal and transcendent God, but this divine authority is given both a communal context and a morally persuasive power in the novel. And as most readers could readily say, divine authority has its worthy representatives in the mothers who appear in the novel, for motherly love, not law, is the novel's highest authority for directing all ethical choices and all communal responsibilities.

Motherly love is all-powerful precisely because it relinquishes the rights of power. Spurn a mother's love, and its comforts are transformed into fears of judgment, not because love will assert a rightful indignation, but because love will always be self-sacrificing and forgiving. The "bad soul" is thereby compelled to see "herself," that is, to see its own truth, against the measure of its own feminine, unwavering ideal. Equally important, the inner truth is known by seemingly palpable forms, as if the soul "herself” were an apparition of a mother visiting her child. Thus, a conscience originates out of self-evident measures of good and evil, for the separation from motherly love divides the soul from itself, a division which is itself "direst despair" and which is made palpable in the psychological phenomenon of visions.

The conversion of heart that the novel demands, then, consists in turning to the authority of motherly care as the principle for ethical action. How forms of moral reasoning likewise change in this conversion can be seen in tracing the transformation of Eliza from slave to free woman. Early in the novel, Eliza holds those notions of justice and religious obligation that govern and sanction the slave laws: "I always thought that I must obey my master and mistress, or I couldn't be a Christian," she says with mournful resignation at one point. Her obedience and religious piety are directed by a concept of authority restricted to a distinct and fixed social position, and the ordering principle of this authority likewise fixes distinct social classes to which people resort for a sense of personal identity and for guidance on how to act. Eliza finds this authority persuasive and valuable not so much because she fears punishment (although that too) but because she feels obliged to reciprocate the kindness of the master and mistress with obedience to their authority. Lawrence Kohlberg calls this form of moral sense "instrumental hedonism" or "reciprocal fairness," for most of the reasoning about obligations centers on the actual benefits (or punishments) that ground moral exchanges. Thus Eliza's husband George says he can see "some sense" in Eliza's reasoning because, as he tells her, "they have brought you up like a child, fed you, clothed you, indulged you, and taught you, so that you have a good education; that is some reason why they should claim you."

This notion of justice is employed also to defend the Fugitive Slave Law. Senator Bird, for example, reasons that it is "no more than Christian and kind" to treat "our brethren in Kentucky" with reciprocal fairness by trying "to quiet the excitement" stirred up by the excessive acts of "reckless Abolitionists." But this form of reasoning need not result in only one conclusion about either slavery or the Fugitive Slave Law. When Eliza has crossed the Ohio, for instance, she is aided by a man who turns out to be a neighbor to the Shelbys. He admires her courage and declares that by her daring she has "arnt" (earned) her liberty and that he will not return her to Shelby. He adds, "Shelby, now, mebbe won't think this yer the most neighborly thing in the world; but what's a feller to do? If he catches one of my gals in the same fix, he's welcome to pay back." Again, fair reciprocity justifies a moral choice, but this choice is one Stowe obviously approves; because of his lack of instruction in legal niceties, the "heathenish Kentuckian…was betrayed into acting in a sort of Christianized manner, which, if he had been better situated and more enlightened, he would not have been left to do." Although conclusions are different, the same form of moral reasoning is operating, especially in the recognition that notions of law derive from an authority fixed in a particular socioeconomic class.

Source: Thomas P. Joswick, "'The Crown without the Conflict': Religious Values and Moral Reasoning in Uncle Tom's Cabin in Nineteenth-Century Fiction," Vol. 39, No. 3, December, 1984, pp. 257-74.

The opening episode of Uncle Tom's Cabin introduces Stowe's argument by portraying mothers, black and white, as active opponents of slavery. The system itself, this first scene makes clear, is basically masculine: white men buy and sell black people while the white woman stands by powerless to intervene. This may not be the pattern in every case but, in Stowe's opinion, it is the model, as her prime and detailed treatment of it suggests. When the slaveholder, Mr. Shelby, gets himself into debt and decides that he must sell some property, he settles on Eliza's son, Harry, and Uncle Tom. Shelby, it is true, does not want to sell the pretty child or the kind man who raised him from a boy; but sell he does, and to a trader he knows to be so callous, so "'alive to nothing but trade and profit…[that] he'd sell his own mother at a good per centage.'" Figuratively Shelby would do the same, as his selling of Tom demonstrates, and Stowe emphasizes how fine the line is that separates the "benevolent" planter Shelby and the coarse trader Haley, whose favorite topic of conversation (to Shelby's discomfort) always has to do with slave mother's aggravating attachment to their children, whom Haley is in the business of selling away from them. Shelby is in the same business, one step removed, but would rather not admit it. His wife confronts him. Although helpless to overrule him legally, she cries out against his refined brutality, calling slavery "'a bitter, bitter, most accursed thing!—a curse to the master and a curse to the slave! I was a fool to think I could make anything good out of such a deadly evil… I never thought that slavery was right—never felt willing to own slaves.'" When her mate suggests they sneak off on a trip to avoid witnessing the black families' grief at separation, her resistance crystallizes. "'No, no,' said Mrs. Shelby; 'I'll be in no sense accomplice or help in this cruel business.'" Likewise Tom's wife, Aunt Chloe, reacts rebelliously, supporting Eliza in her decision to run away with her child and urging Tom to go with her. These two maternal antagonists of slavery secure Eliza's flight. Because Mrs. Shelby surreptitiously encourages the slaves to sabotage the search for Eliza, and because Aunt Chloe stalls the pursuit by producing culinary disasters which keep the search party at dinner for hours, Eliza is able to make her break for freedom across the frozen Ohio, baby in arms.

Due to the conspiracy of the two mothers, one white and one black, followed by the equally crucial assistance of stalwart Mrs. Bird, wife of a wrong-headed Ohio Senator and herself a recently bereaved mother, Eliza and child arrive safely at a Quaker station on the route to Canada. The community serves as a hint of the ideal in Uncle Tom's Cabin. It is family-centered, nonviolent, egalitarian; and especially impressive among its members are two hearty matrons, significantly named Ruth and Rachel. Stowe remarks: "So much has been said and sung of beautiful young girls, why don't somebody wake up to the beauty of old women?" For Stowe, Rachel Halliday's beauty issues from her perfection as a mother and from the way she uses her power in what is in practice a matriarchal (because completely home-centered) community. Stowe plays with the idea of Rachel as a mother-goddess, calling her a figure much more worthy of a "cestus" than the overrated Venus whom "bards" like to sing about, and then immediately follows that remark with a glimpse of Rachel's husband happily "engaged in the anti-patriarchal operation of shaving." Of course, Stowe is being whimsical here, but only in the sense that she is too confident a Christian to need to appeal seriously to pagan concepts to express the principle incarnate in Rachel, whose earthy maternal love Stowe will bring to transfigured life in the two unlikely but motherly Christ-figures, Eva and Tom. As a matter of fact the Quaker community is "anti-patriarchal" in its pacifism and its matrifocal social structure, and that is its beauty for Stowe. "Rachel never looked so truly and benignly happy as at the head of her table. There was so much motherliness and full-heartedness even in the way she passed a plate of cakes or poured a cup of coffee, that it seemed to put a spirit into the food and drink she offered." Rachel Halliday, sitting at the head of her family's table in a scene that brings to mind Christ's ministry at the Last Supper, illustrates how humane and spiritually nourishing mother-rule might be.

Eliza and her family escape their white masters. Most slaves did not, and Harriet Beecher Stowe places particular emphasis on the horrors suffered by the system's maternal victims. The first slave auction in the book focuses on an aged mother and teenaged son who are sold apart over the old woman's pleas and sobs. A young black woman whose baby is stolen and sold drowns herself in the Mississippi, her only obituary an entry in a slave trader's ledger under "losses." A middle-aged slave, her twelve children auctioned away, drinks to silence memory of her thirteenth baby who was starved to death; drunk once too often, the woman is locked in a cellar until the smell of her corpse satisfies her owners' wrath. The degradation of Cassy, Simon Legree's chattel concubine, began with a white lover's clandestine sale of her two small children. Cassy spared her next baby; in her own words, "'I took the little fellow in my arms, when he was two weeks old, and kissed him, and cried over him; and then I gave him laudanum, and held him close to my bosom, while he slept to death… I am not sorry, to this day; he, at least, is out of pain.'" These cruelly severed ties between mothers and children recur throughout Stowe's exposé of slavery for several reasons: to stir Abolitionist passion within parents in Stowe's audience, to assert the humanity of the black race in the face of racist myths that blacks do not share the emotions of whites, to show that women suffer horrible tortures in the midst of a society boastful about its chivalry toward the "gentle sex," and—most important—to dramatize the root evil of slavery: the displacement of life-giving maternal values by a profit-hungry masculine ethic that regards human beings as marketable commodities. Planters, traders, drivers, bounty hunters, judges, voters—all are white, all are men, all are responsible; and the mothers and motherless children in Uncle Tom's Cabin show the human cost of the system.

No character illustrates Stowe's charge more starkly than Topsy. Motherless all her young life and systematically kept ignorant by whites, what can the child believe except that she "just growed"? It is a miracle that she has managed that. For years her owners have routinely beaten her with chains and fireplace pokers, starved her, and locked her in closets until she can respond to nothing but pain and violent abuse. The child has been crippled psychologically by an entire social structure purposely designed to strip her (and her black brothers) of all sense of human selfhood. Stowe defends Topsy as a credible character in [her] A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853): "Does any one wish to know what is inscribed on the seal which keeps the great stone over the sepulchre of African mind? It is this,— which was so truly said by poor Topsy—'NOTHING BUT A NIGGER!' It is this, burnt into the soul by the branding-iron of cruel and unchristian scorn, that is a sorer and deeper wound than all the physical evils of slavery together. There never was a slave who did not feel it."

It is significant that only Evangeline St. Clare can dress Topsy's "wound" and awaken in the motherless black girl feelings of tenderness, trust, and self-respect. To understand the ethereal blonde child's life-renewing influence, one must take seriously the unearthly qualities Stowe attaches to Eva. She is not a realistic character any more than Hawthorne's preternatural Pearl in The Scarlet Letter (1850) or Melville's Pip in Moby Dick (1851). Stowe, too, relies on Romantic convention in Uncle Tom's Cabin, first published serially in 1851-52. She consistently describes Eva as dreamy, buoyant, inspired, cloud-like, spotless; and flatly states that this child has an "aerial grace, such as one might dream of for some mythic and allegorical being." Stowe is clear that her mythic and allegorical character resembles Jesus. Tom, who "almost worshipped her as something heavenly and divine," often gazes on Eva "as the Italian sailor gazes on his image of the child Jesus,—with a mixture of reverence and tenderness." Eva's Mammy considers her a "blessed lamb" not destined to live long. Stowe calls her a "dove" and associates her with the morning star. Ophelia describes her as "Christ-like" and hopes that she has learned "something of the love of Christ from her." Tom, before her death, visualizes Eva's face among the angels; and after she is gone he has a dream-vision of the saintly child reading Christ's words to him, words of comfort which end with "'I am the Lord thy God, the Holy One of Israel, thy Saviour.'" Even while alive Eva's selflessness seems supranatural. Sights and stories of slavery's atrocity make "her large, mystic eyes dilate with horror…" and move her to lay her hands on her breast and sigh profoundly. She explains, "'these things sink into my heart.'" The child identifies with the slaves' misery, telling Tom finally: "'I can understand why Jesus wanted to die for us… I would die for them, Tom, if I could.'" On the figurative level—the only level on which Eva makes sense—she gets her wish. Stowe contrives her death to demonstrate that there is no life for a pure, Christ-like spirit in the corrupt plantation economy the book attacks.

None of this means that Eva "is" Christ. But I think it does mean that she reflects by way of her name a type of Christ, and Stowe's unusual typology vivifies the moral center of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Source: Elizabeth Ammons, "Heroines in Uncle Tom's Cabin," in American Literature, Vol. 49, No. 2, May, 1977, pp. 165-79.