FREE ESSAY ON UNCLE TOMS

UNCLE TOMS

Uncle tom's cabin
Essay written by Billy Cooke
Harriet Beecher Stowe expressed a need to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African
race in the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. She was born June 14, 1811 in Litchfield,
Connecticut. She was the daughter of a Calvinist minister and she and her family was all
devout Christians, her father being a preacher and her siblings following. Her Christian
attitude much reflected her attitude towards slavery. She was for abolishing it, because
it was, to her, a very unchristian and cruel institution. Her novel, therefore, focused
on the ghastly points of slavery, including the whippings, beatings, and forced sexual
encounters brought upon slaves by their masters. She wrote the book to be a force against
slavery, and was joining in with the feelings of many other women of her time, whom all
became more outspoken and influential in reform movements, including temperance and
women's suffrage. The main point of Harriet Beecher Stowe in the writing of Uncle Tom's
Cabin was to bring to light, slavery, to people in the north. In this she hoped to
eventually sway people against slavery. 
Stowe did a great job with this book. What is believed to be one of the influential books
of all time, ranking with the works of Adam Smith and Machiavelli, Uncle Tom's Cabin
became an abolitionist's bible. During its time it was revised, dramatized, and published
often. The effect of her book on the north and everywhere in the US was unforeseen. The
book was popular and caused abolitionism to run wild among northerners. The south hated
the book because of its portrayal of its (The South's) peculiar institution. It might
have been influential enough to be considered one of the causes of the civil war, by
creating a greater number of northerners against slavery. It displayed to the north all
the evils of slavery, by creating human characters out of slaves, who were thought to be
inhuman. Stowe's ideas were that slavery is wrong, which is a correct assumption. A human
should not be owned because we are not animals, plants, or minerals. Humans have souls
and should and can not be owned by other r humans, because they are all created equal. 
Stowe's style of staggering chapters about Tom with chapters about Eliza was effective by
showing hope in two different situations. Eliza hoped for freedom while Tom hoped for
eternity. Stowe plays these two motivations of her characters off each other to project
the point of the book to the intelligent. She emphasizes her main points throughout the
whole book, perhaps too much, but she was right in doing this, too make sure no one
missed the point. She is biased against slaves, oddly enough. She portrays the whiter
ones as more intelligent and clever, as is seen with George and Eliza, and the darker
ones as more slow-witted, for example, Tom. Stowe also did what any intelligent reader
from the beginning of the book expects of her. She creates a chapter at the end
reinforcing the story in the book with historical facts, meaning that it's based loosely
on the real world. She seems to do her research well for the story, and her perspective
was rather open, backing up slaveholders as well as abolitionists by expressing the
slaveholders feelings of hopelessness towards going against society, seen in St. Clare.
She made the slaves more human and the slaveholders appear to be morally wrong, but not
by always using morally correct slaves and masters without morals. For example, Stowe
creates a character, Adolf, the overseer of sorts for St. Clare. Adolf is a slave who is
not morally correct he steals from St. Clare often, yet he appears more human for doing
so. The slaves or human but not divine, as are the masters, creating a sense of equality,
which Stowe wanted to put across. She wrote the book well, choosing where it was best to
put which idea, and making many allusions to historical events around the time, which
made her book more popular to the people of her time by involving other things they knew
of into the story. 
Overall, Uncle Tom's Cabin was well written, organized, and historically accurate.
Harriet Beecher Stowe used her knowledge of the past to write a clear argument for the
abolition of slavery, by creating an interesting enough book to get her ideas to the
common people. Her book was influential because it not only told her ideas, but because
it states her ideas understandably, something not all writers are able to do. The entire
theme of the book is about the evils of slavery; it was written to try to motivate people
to eliminate it. Stowe is defiant and certain that slavery must not be slowly eliminated,
but must stop immediately.