Plot Overview
Having run up large debts, a Kentucky farmer named Arthur Shelby faces the
prospect of losing everything he owns. Though he and his wife, Emily Shelby,
have a kindhearted and affectionate relationship with their slaves, Shelby decides
to raise money by selling two of his slaves to Mr. Haley, a coarse slave trader.
The slaves in question are Uncle Tom, a middle-aged man with a wife and
children on the farm, and Harry, the young son of Mrs. Shelby’s maid Eliza. When
Shelby tells his wife about his agreement with Haley, she is appalled because she
has promised Eliza that Shelby would not sell her son.
However, Eliza overhears the conversation between Shelby and his wife and,
after warning Uncle Tom and his wife, Aunt Chloe, she takes Harry and flees to
the North, hoping to find freedom with her husband George in Canada. Haley
pursues her, but two other Shelby slaves alert Eliza to the danger. She
miraculously evades capture by crossing the half-frozen Ohio River, the boundary
separating Kentucky from the North. Haley hires a slave hunter named Loker and
his gang to bring Eliza and Harry back to Kentucky. Eliza and Harry make their
way to a Quaker settlement, where the Quakers agree to help transport them to
safety. They are joined at the settlement by George, who reunites joyously with
his family for the trip to Canada.
Meanwhile, Uncle Tom sadly leaves his family and Mas’r George, Shelby’s young
son and Tom’s friend, as Haley takes him to a boat on the Mississippi to be
transported to a slave market. On the boat, Tom meets an angelic little white girl
named Eva, who quickly befriends him. When Eva falls into the river, Tom dives
in to save her, and her father, Augustine St. Clare, gratefully agrees to buy Tom
from Haley. Tom travels with the St. Clares to their home in New Orleans, where
he grows increasingly invaluable to the St. Clare household and increasingly
close to Eva, with whom he shares a devout Christianity.
Up North, George and Eliza remain in flight from Loker and his men. When Loker
attempts to capture them, George shoots him in the side, and the other slave
hunters retreat. Eliza convinces George and the Quakers to bring Loker to the
next settlement, where he can be healed. Meanwhile, in New Orleans, St. Clare
discusses slavery with his cousin Ophelia, who opposes slavery as an institution
but harbors deep prejudices against blacks. St. Clare, by contrast, feels no
hostility against blacks but tolerates slavery because he feels powerless to
change it. To help Ophelia overcome her bigotry, he buys Topsy, a young black
girl who was abused by her past master and arranges for Ophelia to begin
educating her.
After Tom has lived with the St. Clares for two years, Eva grows very ill. She
slowly weakens, then dies, with a vision of heaven before her. Her death has a
profound effect on everyone who knew her: Ophelia resolves to love the slaves,
Topsy learns to trust and feel attached to others, and St. Clare decides to set
Tom free. However, before he can act on his decision, St. Clare is stabbed to
death while trying to settle a brawl. As he dies, he at last finds God and goes to
be reunited with his mother in heaven.
St. Clare’s cruel wife, Marie, sells Tom to a vicious plantation owner named
Simon Legree. Tom is taken to rural Louisiana with a group of new slaves,
including Emmeline, whom the demonic Legree has purchased to use as a sex
slave, replacing his previous sex slave Cassy. Legree takes a strong dislike to
Tom when Tom refuses to whip a fellow slave as ordered. Tom receives a severe
beating, and Legree resolves to crush his faith in God. Tom meets Cassy, and
hears her story. Separated from her daughter by slavery, she became pregnant
again but killed the child because she could not stand to have another child taken
from her.
Around this time, with the help of Tom Loker—now a changed man after being
healed by the Quakers—George, Eliza, and Harry at last cross over into Canada
from Lake Erie and obtain their freedom. In Louisiana, Tom’s faith is sorely tested
by his hardships, and he nearly ceases to believe. He has two visions, however—
one of Christ and one of Eva—which renew his spiritual strength and give him the
courage to withstand Legree’s torments. He encourages Cassy to escape. She
does so, taking Emmeline with her, after she devises a ruse in which she and
Emmeline pretend to be ghosts. When Tom refuses to tell Legree where Cassy
and Emmeline have gone, Legree orders his overseers to beat him. When Tom is
near death, he forgives Legree and the overseers. George Shelby arrives with
money in hand to buy Tom’s freedom, but he is too late. He can only watch as
Tom dies a martyr’s death.
Taking a boat toward freedom, Cassy and Emmeline meet George Harris’s sister
and travel with her to Canada, where Cassy realizes that Eliza is her long-lost
daughter. The newly reunited family travels to France and decides to move to
Liberia, the African nation created for former American slaves. George Shelby
returns to the Kentucky farm, where, after his father’s death, he sets all the slaves
free in honor of Tom’s memory. He urges them to think on Tom’s sacrifice every
time they look at his cabin and to lead a pious Christian life, just as Tom did.
The Story of Uncle Tom
Uncle Tom's Cabin begins with the daring escape of the young slave woman, Eliza, and the
sale of the kindly, middle-aged slave, Tom, to settle the debts of his 'master,' a struggling
Kentucky farmer. As Eliza struggles to make her way to freedom in Canada, Tom is sent
downriver on a riverboat, where he meets and becomes fast friends with the angelic white
child, Eva. Eva's father, St. Clare, 'purchases' Tom from the slave trader and is taken to the St.
Clare home in New Orleans, where he lives for two years. Then, the frail, too-good-to-be-true
Eva falls ill and dies, but not before experiencing a vision of heaven that makes everyone
around her vow to do better and be better on this earth.
But such promises are not easy to keep, especially when things go from bad to worse. St.
Clare is killed and St. Clare's wife reneges on her late husband's promise to free Tom. Instead,
she sells him to probably the most vile creature in all of American literature, the despicably
cruel slave trader, Simon Legree.
Legree takes Tom to his plantation in Louisiana, where Tom befriends the other slaves and
witnesses the merciless brutality of Legree. He tries to hold on to his own faith and be a source
of support and hope for the others, but this only infuriates Legree, making Tom that much
more of a target for Legree's maliciousness.
When Tom encourages and helps two of Legree's slaves, Cassy and Emmeline, to escape,
that's the last straw. Legree commands his overseers to beat Tom to death, but when, with his
last breath, Tom forgives the men, they repent, becoming Christians now united in their
rejection of slavery.
As the novel ends, we find Eliza once again, who after a series of terrible hardships of her own
finally made it to Canada. Eventually, Cassy and Emmeline meet up with her there, and it's
discovered that Cassy is Eliza's long-lost mother, forced like so many slave women to give up
her baby in infancy.
Themes in Uncle Tom's Cabin
Uncle Tom's Cabin is a sentimental novel, which means that the emotions
and melodrama are ratcheted up to a fever pitch in order to prick at the
moral conscience of the readers in order to inspire them to create some
kind of social change. In a sentimental novel, the good guys (and girls) are
impossibly good and the bad guys (and girls) are fiendishly bad. But
Stowe's novel was so effective because it spoke so powerfully on universal
human themes. Here are just a few of those themes.
Hope and Despair
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Facts, information and articles about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one of the causes of
the civil war
Uncle Tom’s Cabin summary: Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a novel which showed the
stark reality of slavery and is generally regarded as one of the major causes of the
Civil War. The novel was written in 1852 by American author Harriet Beecher
Stowe, a teacher at the Hartford Female Academy and a dedicated abolitionist,
who was once greeted by Abraham Lincoln as the ‘little lady who started a war.’
Uncle Tom And The Brutality Of Slavery
The novel features Uncle Tom, an African-American slave whose long-suffering
story touched millions. Several other characters are brought in as well to share
their stories. It was the second best-selling overall book of the 19th century after
the Bible and the best-selling novel. Just three years after being published people
referred to the novel as being the most popular of the day.
The novel has a more infamous reputation of having popularized many stereotypes
that people still carry today. Some have even said that the book is seen more often
in a negative light because of creating so many stereotypes that some people
underestimate and even forget the novel’s powerful role as an anti-slavery tool.
The Plot of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
The novel’s plot starts with the Shelby family being pushed to sell two of their
slaves because of economic troubles; Uncle Tom and Harry. Neither Mr. or Mrs.
Shelby want to sell the slaves for different reasons. They are sold and the novel
then follows their journey and the characters they meet.
The novel has been taught in colleges around the world. Book groups discuss it and
every library has the book on its shelf. These days there is more literary discussion
about the broad stereotypes the novel is accredited for starting and popularizing.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the best-selling novel of the 19th century.
Articles Featuring Uncle Tom’s Cabin From History Net Magazines
Frederick Stowe: In the Shadow of Uncle Tom’s Cabin
By James Tackach
‘So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!
President Abraham Lincoln reportedly said to Harriet Beecher Stowe when he met
her at a White House reception on December 2, 1862. Lincoln’s hyperbole held a
degree of truth. Stowe’s blockbuster novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, serialized in The
National Era in 1851 and 1852 and published in book form shortly thereafter, had
so highlighted the issue of slavery that, a decade later, America’s young men were
willing to slaughter each other in unimaginable numbers to preserve or destroy that
peculiar institution.
Ironically, one of the casualties of the war that Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped to ignite
was Frederick William Stowe, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s fourth child. A veteran of
some of the Army of the Potomac’s bloodiest engagements, Frederick Stowe
became an official war casualty at Gettysburg when he was hit in the head by a
shell, fired during the artillery barrage before Pickett’s Charge.
But the war alone was not responsible for the ruination of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
son. Frederick Stowe was already a casualty long before the Confederate guns
began firing upon Fort Sumter–to some degree a casualty of his mother’s fame.
Mrs. Stowe’s writings might have helped free America’s slaves, but her literary
fame and the demands it placed upon her complicated Frederick’s upbringing,
perhaps creating problems that worsened as a result of his wartime service.
Harriet Beecher Stowe and her husband, Calvin, were New Englanders. Harriet
had moved to Ohio in 1832 with her father, Lyman Beecher, who had taken a
teaching post at Lane Seminary. Calvin Stowe and his first wife, Eliza, had also
left the East for Ohio so that he could teach at the seminary. Seventeen months
after Eliza died in a cholera epidemic that swept through Cincinnati during the
summer of 1834, Calvin married Harriet. Twin girls, Hatty and Eliza, were born to
the couple in September 1836, and Henry Ellis Stowe was born 16 months later.
Frederick William Stowe was born in Walnut Hills, Ohio, near Cincinnati, on May
6, 1840.
Harriet Stowe was bedridden for two months after the birth of her fourth child, so
Frederick was sent to live with a wet nurse in Cincinnati–the first of many
separations from his mother that Frederick endured during the first 15 years of his
life. Calvin, too, was often away from home, lecturing and raising funds to keep
the ever-troubled Lane Seminary financially solvent.
The Stowe family suffered through numerous personal and family tragedies. In the
summer of 1843, when Frederick was 3, Harriet’s brother George shocked the
family by committing suicide. During the next three years, Harriet suffered two
miscarriages and became ill with cholera. Tragedy struck again two years later,
when the Stowes’ third son, Samuel Charles, born in January 1848, died of cholera
at the age of 18 months.
Less than a year after the boy’s death, the Stowe household was again disrupted.
Calvin accepted a teaching position at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and
in April 1850 Harriet and her three older children–the twins and Henry Ellis–
headed east to set up household there. In Maine, Harriet began writing the novel
that would make her famous, completing weekly installments of Uncle Tom’s
Cabin for The National Era from June 5, 1851, through April 1, 1852. The novel
made Harriet an overnight celebrity. Public speaking engagements followed, and in
the spring of 1853 she sailed to Great Britain to spread the anti-slavery doctrine
there.
While Harriet was writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin and carrying its message across the
United States and abroad, Calvin Stowe was struggling with his own career. He
taught for a semester at Bowdoin, then returned to Lane Seminary in Ohio for a
term. At the same time, Calvin was offered an attractive position at Andover
Theological Seminary in Andover, Mass., which he decided to accept. For a period
of two years he became a traveling professor, teaching at three schools and
commuting incredible distances to honor the commitments he had made to each
institution.
As she was arranging for the publication of her first book of short stories in 1842,
Harriet had questioned whether her professional efforts would negatively affect her
children. Our children are just coming to the age when everything depends on my
efforts, she wrote. They are delicate in health, and nervous and excitable, and need
a mother’s whole attention. Can I lawfully divide my attention by literary efforts?
Biographers disagree to what extent her career negatively affected her children.
Certainly, there were factors out of her control, such as young Samuel Charles’
dying of cholera and Henry Ellis’ drowning when he was 19 years old.
Frederick’s sister Georgiana May, born in 1843, became addicted to morphine and
died in her 40s. As for Frederick himself, his problem was alcohol, a common
enough vice in the mid-19th century. By the age of 16, he was a full-blown
alcoholic. While his mother was touring Europe in 1856 and 1857, Frederick’s
father sent him to his uncle, Thomas Beecher, to dry out. The Rev. Thomas
Beecher operated a storefront church in Elmira, N.Y., and he had firsthand
experience and success working with alcoholics, prostitutes and derelicts. Beecher
committed Frederick to a nearby facility that specialized in the water cure, a mid19th-century form of therapy that was used to cure depression, alcoholism and
various physical maladies. Water cure patients bathed frequently, drank large
quantities of fresh spring water and were wrapped daily in dampened blankets in
an effort to purify their bodies of harmful substances.
Just as it seemed that Frederick was on the road to recovery, the Stowe family
experienced another devastating tragedy when Henry Ellis drowned while he and
several of his Dartmouth College classmates were swimming in the Connecticut
River. At the very moment when Frederick needed his parents most to support his
recovery, they were distracted by yet another family catastrophe.
Nonetheless, Frederick was determined to set his life straight. In August 1859, he
joined part of the Stowe family for a European tour. He hoped that vigorous hiking
would help cure him of his craving for alcohol. On March 31, 1860, Frederick
wrote to his father from Rome, admitting that he had been a very troublesome
thing…for a long while and expressing hope that, when he returned to America, he
would be a comfort to him. He claimed to have changed a great deal while
traveling.
Frederick returned to the United States and enrolled at Harvard Medical School for
the fall 1860 semester. Many of his uncles had entered the ministry, but he thought
that a physician’s career was one that would also bring the family great honor.
In the spring of Frederick’s first year at Harvard, the Civil War abruptly
interrupted his plans for a medical career. After President Lincoln called for 75,000
volunteer troops to put down the rebellion, Frederick joined Company A of the 1st
Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, which was formed in May 1861. For three
weeks, the regiment headquartered at Boston’s Faneuil Hall and drilled before
patriotic spectators on Boston Common. While Frederick trained, his mother wrote
letters in which she fretted about the temptations and dangers of the camp that her
son might confront and about his being prisoner among barbarians, or wounded
and helpless.
In mid-June, the new troops boarded a ship for Washington, D.C., making a stop in
Jersey City. While Frederick’s boat was docked there, his mother was visiting her
brother in New York City. Hearing that her soldier son was nearby, Harriet
boarded the Fulton Ferry and traveled to New Jersey to meet him. In a letter to her
husband the next day, she described the young soldier as bristling with knapsack
and haversack, and looking like an assortment of packages. He was in high spirits,
and Harriet stuffed his pockets with fresh oranges.
Frederick saw his first action a month later. On July 16, 1861, Brig. Gen. Irvin
McDowell led 35,000 Union soldiers toward Confederate troops massed at a
railroad junction near Manassas, Va. En route, men from the 1st Massachusetts
looted stores in Vienna and burned houses in Germantown. They got their first
taste of battle on July 18 as they approached Bull Run Creek, near Blackburn’s
Ford. There, Brig. Gen. Daniel Tyler, Stowe’s divisional commander, sent men
from the 1st Massachusetts and 12th New York regiments against Rebel troops
stationed on the opposite bank of Bull Run. The Confederates beat back the
Federal assault, killing 13 men in Stowe’s regiment and wounding 20 others.
Three days later, the First Battle of Bull Run was fought. After that catastrophic
Union defeat, Stowe was truly a veteran soldier, and he received a promotion to
sergeant when his regiment regrouped in Washington.
For the next two years, Stowe saw little action. The 1st Massachusetts remained
encamped near Washington for several months. In January 1862, he was
transferred to the 1st Massachusetts Heavy Artillery Regiment, which was assigned
to garrison duty at Fort Runyon and other nearby forts southwest of Washington.
The presence of a celebrity’s son in the regiment thrilled Frederick’s new
comrades, prompting the regimental historian to note his arrival in his journal and
comment that he had considerable social prestige. Stowe was soon promoted to
second lieutenant.
Garrison duty was monotonous; days were filled with endless drills and guard
duty. For Stowe, who was still drying himself out, the temptation to drink came
often, despite nightly temperance meetings in Union camps. On September 17,
1862, Stowe wrote to his mother and complained about the dreariness of camp life:
My regt will neaver [sic] go into action and so long as I remain here I shall neaver
be advanced.
Harriet quickly acted on her son’s complaint. She traveled to Washington in late
November, stopping at Fort Runyon to see Frederick before meeting with President
Lincoln to discuss the forthcoming Emancipation Proclamation. While in
Washington, she spoke with an old friend, Brig. Gen. Adolph von Steinwehr, a
divisional commander in the Army of the Potomac’s XI Corps, about her son’s
problem, and he agreed to appoint the young lieutenant to his personal staff as
assistant adjutant general, with a promotion to captain.
As a general’s aide-de-camp, Stowe was exempt from combat duty. He delivered
messages and filed reports for his commanding officer, usually performing his
duties a fair distance away from the fighting. But that changed when the Union
army moved onto the field at Gettysburg.
The XI Corps was one of the first to arrive and clash with the Confederates at
Gettysburg. At 1 p.m. on July 1, 1863, Maj. Gen. Oliver Howard followed Brig.
Gen. John Buford’s cavalry onto the high ground outside the town. Howard sent
part of his corps to meet the Confederate troops already sweeping through
Gettysburg, and posted his remaining forces on Cemetery Hill.
Frederick spent the duration of the Battle of Gettysburg on Cemetery Hill. His
corps took heavy casualties during the battle for the hill on July 2, the second day
of the conflict. The next day the men waited nervously for the inevitable final push
that would determine the outcome of the battle. At about 2:30 p.m., a monstrous
Rebel artillery barrage began on Cemetery Ridge to soften the Federal lines in
preparation for Maj. Gen. George Pickett’s doomed charge. During the shelling,
according to General von Steinwehr’s official report, Capt. F.W. Stowe, assistant
adjutant-general of this division, was…severely wounded in the head by a piece of
shell.
As word spread of the terrible battle at Gettysburg, the Stowes, like so many other
Americans on the home front, waited anxiously for news. The family learned of
Frederick’s wound almost two weeks later, via a letter from a Union chaplain.
Addressed to Harriet, the letter stated that among the thousands of wounded and
dying men on this war-scarred field was her son, who had been struck by a
fragment of a shell, which entered his right-ear. The chaplain added that young
Frederick was quiet–and cheerful, longs to see some member of his family, and is,
above all, anxious that they should hear from him as soon as possible.
When the makeshift hospitals on the Gettysburg battlefield were closed, Stowe was
sent to New York City for extended care and recovery. In the fall of 1863, when it
became apparent that his condition would not allow him to return to combat, he
was honorably discharged from the Army of the Potomac.
Soon after his discharge, Frederick moved to his parents’ new home in Hartford
and began drinking again, often disappearing for days at a time. When sober, he
struggled hard to break his addiction. He joined the Episcopal Church, hoping that
a new spiritual life would help dissuade him from the temptations of the flesh. His
parents, thinking that a warm climate might help their wayward son, leased a
cotton plantation and later purchased a citrus farm in Florida for Frederick to
manage. But he continued drinking and failed miserably as a plantation overseer.
In 1867, the Stowes paid for their son’s stay at an alcoholic treatment center in
Binghamton, N.Y., but he was still unable to kick his habit.
Stowe’s problems were a great embarrassment to his family, yet his mother stuck
by his side. Harriet implored her daughters to understand their wayward brother.
Fred was no weaker, no more unsuccessful against his besetting sin than you
against yours–only the consequences to him are more fatal and dreadful, she wrote.
In another letter, Harriet asserted: Fred will not fall away so as to finally perish,
and I have strong faith in his final recovery….God will hear my prayers and open
some way of escape.
Harriet’s prayers were not answered. During the summer of 1871, Frederick
boarded a ship in Florida bound for the West Coast. He arrived safely in San
Francisco after the long journey around Cape Horn. From there, he intended to go
to sea, in hopes of breaking his alcohol addiction. But Frederick disappeared
before boarding any ship. He was never heard from again. His parents hired private
investigators, but no trace of their missing son was ever discovered.
What happened to Frederick Stowe? Suicide is one possibility. A few months
before disappearing, he wrote to his mother, [D]id I only think of my own confort
[sic] I would kill myself and end it all, but I know that you and all the family
would feel the disgrace such an end would bring upon you and the talk and scandle
[sic] it would give rise to. Other explanations for Stowe’s disappearance are also
plausible. Perhaps he met some gruesome end while touring the rough and rowdy
waterfront taverns along San Francisco’s wharf. Perhaps he was shanghaied and
pressed into involuntary servitude aboard a sailing vessel for the rest of his life. Or
he might simply have changed his identity and cut himself off from his family to
avoid causing the Stowes further embarrassment.