Uncle Tom's Cabin

Summary

Uncle Tom's Cabin follows two lines of story that begin on the Kentucky farm of Arthur Shelby, a kindly but indebted master who agrees to sell two slaves to the trader Haley: Uncle Tom, his faithful and devout manager, and Harry, the small son of Eliza, Mrs. Shelby's maid. Overhearing the bargain, Eliza flees north with Harry that night, and with the slave-catchers close behind she crosses the Ohio River by leaping from one floating cake of ice to another. In Ohio she is sheltered by Senator Bird, who has just voted for a law against aiding fugitives but cannot turn away a mother and child, and then by a Quaker settlement, where she is reunited with her husband George Harris, an inventive young man who has escaped a cruel master. Pursued by the slave-hunters Tom Loker and Marks, the family defends itself at a rocky pass, wounds Loker, has him nursed by the Quakers, and at last crosses Lake Erie to freedom in Canada. Tom, meanwhile, refuses to run so that the Shelbys will not be ruined, parts from his wife Aunt Chloe and their children, and is carried down the Mississippi. On the steamboat he saves Eva St. Clare, a fair and spiritually luminous child, from drowning, and her father Augustine buys him. In the St. Clare household in New Orleans Tom lives among Augustine's self-pitying wife Marie, his conscientious Vermont cousin Miss Ophelia, and Topsy, a neglected girl who says she was never born but just grew. Eva's love wins Topsy's heart, while Eva herself wastes slowly from consumption; before dying she gives locks of her hair to the household servants and begs her father to free Tom. St. Clare, a skeptic softened by grief, begins the legal papers but is stabbed while trying to part two quarrelling men in a café and dies before completing them. Marie sells Tom at auction to Simon Legree, a brutal cotton planter on the Red River. There Tom meets Cassy, Legree's despairing concubine, and the young Emmeline, and keeps his faith through overwork and beatings. When Cassy and Emmeline escape by hiding in the garret, which Legree fears is haunted, Tom refuses to betray them, and Legree has him beaten to death by the drivers Sambo and Quimbo, whom Tom forgives and who are moved to repentance. George Shelby, his old master's son, arrives too late to redeem him and buries him. Returning to Kentucky, George frees all his slaves in Tom's name. Cassy proves to be Eliza's mother, and the reunited family sail for Liberia. First serialized in the National Era from June 1851 to April 1852, the novel appeared in two volumes in Boston in March 1852 and became the best-selling American novel of the nineteenth century.

Top Lessons

• A soul that cannot be bought

  Tom is bought and sold three times, but when Legree demands that he flog others or betray Cassy, he says that his soul was bought by Christ and cannot be bought again. Stowe shows freedom of conscience surviving the loss of every other freedom.

• The mother's leap

  Eliza's crossing of the Ohio on the river ice makes a mother's love the force that defies law and danger. Stowe repeatedly asks her readers, especially mothers, to imagine their own children sold, and the Concluding Remarks name the crossing as a well-known fact.

• Love that changes a hard heart

  Miss Ophelia disapproves of slavery but shrinks from Topsy; Eva simply loves her, and Topsy weeps for the first time. After Eva's death Ophelia learns to love the child herself. The novel teaches that principles must become personal charity to be real.

• The cost of delay

  St. Clare sees the wrong of slavery more clearly than anyone, yet he postpones freeing Tom until he is killed. His good intentions die with him, and Tom is sold to Legree. Stowe shows that knowing the right without doing it can be fatal to others.

• Forgiveness to the end

  Tom forgives Legree and the drivers Sambo and Quimbo even as they beat him, and his patience leads the two men to repentance. Stowe presents his death as a martyrdom modeled on Christ's.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Eva's slow decline in Chapters XXII-XXVI follows the nineteenth-century literary picture of consumption: a dry cough, a brightening cheek, hectic fever and an airy spiritual buoyancy, with the family slow to admit what Miss Ophelia and the physician see. Marie St. Clare's chronic sick-headaches and complaints, set beside her daughter's real illness, form a portrait of invalidism used to command attention. Laudanum appears twice: St. Clare compares cruelty to the opiate whose dose must be doubled as sensitivity declines, a contemporary description of tolerance, and Cassy tells how she gave her infant son a fatal dose rather than see him sold. Despair runs through the book, from Lucy's drowning after her baby is sold to Prue's drinking to forget and Cassy's near-madness, and Legree dies raving with visions after heavy drinking, which a reader may connect with delirium tremens though Stowe names no disease. The Quakers' nursing of the wounded slave-hunter Loker gives a counter-image of care given to an enemy. The emotional states should be read as Stowe presents them, as the fruits of separation and cruelty, without retrospective diagnosis.

• Chapters XXII-XXVI

  Eva's cough, flushed cheek and slow fever; Marie dismisses it while Ophelia and the doctor recognize consumption; Eva's death.

• Chapter XV

  Marie St. Clare's sick-headaches and complaints, and Miss Ophelia's offer of juniper-berry tea.

• Chapter XX; Chapter XXXIV

  St. Clare's comparison of cruelty to laudanum; Cassy's account of giving her baby laudanum.

• Chapter XII; Chapter XVIII

  Lucy drowns herself from Haley's boat after her child is sold; old Prue drinks to forget the child she lost.

• Chapter XVII; Chapter XXXVII

  George's shot wounds the slave-hunter Tom Loker, and the Quakers take him in and nurse him back to health.

• Chapter XLII

  Legree drinks recklessly and dies raving and screaming of visions.