On “Uncle Tom's Cabin“

7 Pages 1705 Words

Published in the early 1850’s, Uncle Tom’s Cabin had a huge impact on our nation and contributed to the tension over slavery. It was written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, a woman who was involved in religious and feminist causes. Stowe’s influence on the northern states was remarkable. Her fictional novel about slave life of her current time has been thought to be one of the main things that led up to the Civil War. The purpose of writing it, as is often said, was to expose the evils of slavery to the North where many were unaware of just what went on in the rest of the country. The book was remarkably successful and sold 300,000 copies by the end of its first year. It is even rumored that upon President Lincoln’s meeting Stowe, Lincoln said, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.”
There is no doubt among most historians that Stowe’s book affected many people’s views on slavery; but one question that is being asked today is whether the book was historically accurate. Some think believe it recorded exactly the sort of things that went on among slaves and their owners while other people say that Stowe made an elaborate exaggeration of the evils of slavery just so she could prove her point. Was Uncle Tom’s Cabin close to the truth? An examination of current work on the history of the U.S. should reveal the merits of Stowe’s writing.
The general consensus among historical accounts of slavery is that southern slave owners mostly considered slaves as less of a person than they themselves were. They still viewed slaves as people, but not on the same level as them. Irwin Unger describes the system of slavery like many slaves have who have since written about it. Unger says that slaves were in a “system that denied them their humanity” (Unger 309). Slave owners were racist, he says. They were viewed as inferior. He writes, “It was [this] mark of inferiority that affected all black men and wome...