Analysis Of Uncle Tom's Cabin By Harriet Beecher Stowe

In nineteenth century America a lot was changing, for example the civil war that broke out in 1860 and the divide of Northern and Southern part of America over slavery. The South wanted to keep the slaves and the North wanted slavery abolished. The South seceded and the civil war began for the abolishment of slavery. After the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, which gave citizenship rights and equal protection of the laws. And the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified in 1870, it “prohibits the federal and state governments from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen’s ‘race, color, or previous servitude.’” This was a beginning for the black population to think America was going in the right direction,
Stowe had very religious parents and she was the seventh child out of thirteen children. Her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1852, which was a depiction of a live as an African American slave. The story is about Eliza and her son Harry, who runs away with her son because she overhears her masters saying that they want to sell Harry and Tom, a middle-aged man. Tom is sold to Simon Legree, who is a very vicious man. Legree abuses Tom and because Tom believes in God, Legree wants to crush Tom’s faith. At the end of the story Eliza and Harry have crossed the border with Canada and they reached their freedom. Tom dies but he passed his faith along to the overseers who viciously had beaten him. Uncle Tom is represented as a strong, black and pious man, he would not give up his faith for anything in the world and at the end he dies as a Christian martyr. Stowe really tells how bad slavery was in that time and is very focused on showing the reader the cruelty of slavery. Because of Uncle Tom’s skin color he is seen as a slave instead of an individual man, because the skin color makes it easy for society to put him in order. But the main theme of the story is the cruelty of slavery, it was written to make a point, but not all of the readers agreed with the way the story is told. “Her story is so devised as to present slavery in three dark aspects: first, the cruel treatment of the slaves; second, the separation of families; and, third, their want of religious instruction” (Stowe