Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

It is hard to separate the story Uncle Tom's Cabin from the experience of Harriet Stowe because the two are closely linked. Harriet Beecher Stowe witnessed first-hand the religious and political crises during her day. In Cincinnati, Harriet Beecher Stowe honed her material for the book. She got a first-hand experience with slaves. From her dealings with black women from the slave state of Kentucky, Stowe recalled many stories about their lives that she included in Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Harriet wrote just like many male American authors, but which so few female writers attempted which is in dialect rather than refined prose. Stowe stressed though that Uncle Tom's Cabin was not really her work. “The Lord himself wrote it, and I was but the humblest of instruments in His hand,” she said. During her time, a woman was forbidden to be proud of her skills except for her motherly role. Stowe's pronouncement was a brilliant way to disclaim responsibility at the same time praise it.

Uncle Tom's Cabin made a lot of readers see that slaves were people. Just like them, slaves bleed. The very heart-wrenching scenes where children were taken forcibly from their mothers and overly emotional plot woke up the sympathies of the nineteenth-century men. It was said that that President Lincoln saw Stowe in 1863, he greeted her and said, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.” This statement confirmed beyond doubt that Uncle Tom's Cabin was in a way responsible for the strong stand in the North to abolish slavery.A number of Southerners believed that Uncle Tom's Cabin gave a deceptive depiction of slavery. Stowe in an effort to make the book fair to the South made Mrs. Shelby, George Shelby, and Augustine and Eva St. Clare to be very kind figures. The book's villain, Simon Legree, is from New England was the subject of criticism.

Historians like Herbert Gutman (in The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925) and Eugene G. Genovese (in Roll, Jordan, Roll) give a depiction of slavery that is quite similar to Stowe's. Slave owners' treatment on the slaves varied. People like Simon Legree were unusual. But most of slaves did fear being sold to master like Simon Legree. The description on the life on the Shelby plantation is quite accurate. Sam and Andy "s character showed the way slaves shared information about life on the plantation. The book also detailed the existence of a slave community, and that religion was important to them. St. Clare household showed the differences between plantation slavery and slavery in the cities. Adolph and Rosa depicted slaves who considered themselves above other slaves. 

All these and more depicted the local color in Uncle Tom"s Cabin and made it achieved verisimilitude and thus make more credible the novel`s romantic events and support its moral teaching.