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Slavery Exposed In Uncle Tom's Cabin

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Uncle Tom’s Cabin, written around the time of the Civil War in 1852, was a major turning point for the time period and caused many people to look at slavery in a new way. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s intent was to show the inhumanity of slavery and to describe the injustice that African Americans endured during the time period which she lived. She showed this through the actions of the slave owners, how they treated them, how they talked to them and how they separated them from their families. The living conditions for the slaves solely depended on the master or the slave owner to whom they belonged. On Mr. Shelby’s plantation in Kentucky the living conditions for the slaves were more humane and less violent than other plantations. Uncle Tom had …show more content…

This dehumanization of slaves was what helped otherwise Christian people treat slaves as nothing but pieces of property bought and paid for. Stowe illustrates this in dialogue between Senator Bird and Mary by saying it was considered Christian to not feed hungry and homeless slaves (91-92). She also shows the devaluation of slaves as people by describing the heartbreak of breaking up families by selling them separate from each other. When Harry was sold he would have been separated from his mother. The slave holder Haley rationalizing these separations by keeping them secret while they were happening so as not to cause a scene. He considered it is more humane if there is no screaming and crying (7-8). He avoids thinking of the aftermath math of these separations (7-8). The heartbreak of having your family torn apart. Of a wife not seeing her husband. Of a child not knowing his/her parents. Another example of how slaves were dehumanized includes a slave named Dodo and his master calling him an impudent dog. This implies that he is no better than an animal and his life has no worth. The fact that slaves had no right to marry by law shows that it was not felt they needed the same type of relationships as whites. George Harris says this at the beginning of the book to Eliza and tells her that it would of been easier if they had never met. George also wished Harry had never been born. so he would be saved from the things his father suffered from

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1059 Words | 5 Pages

This book became known as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”. It highlighted the everyday horrors and injustices of slavery. The author Harriet Beecher Stowe took it upon herself to write this call for justice when reading a letter from her sister in Boston. Her sister had wrote of the terrible things she’d seen happen to African Americans during the time of the Fugitive Slave Act. She described “slave catchers prowling the streets, pouncing on African Americans without warning, breaking into their houses, destroying their shops and carrying them off.”

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509 Words | 3 Pages

To the point, the masters was clueless to what was happening in the plantation as supposed to religious gatherings. The slaves would use church as way to plan their escape route. Only thing was that some slaves got caught in the act and had to pay the consequences. The consequences resulted in abuse or even homicides. The slaves lived in discomfort for their slavery years under the maters but they had ways to underestimate the master.

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773 Words | 4 Pages

Though they lived during the same time period their perspectives were very different from each other because of their role in their current society. In Fredrick Douglass book he was a slave since he was a child. He and his family were all treated poorly by their owners on a plantation. Many examples of this poor treatment are shown throughout the book such as “After crossing her hands, he tied them with a strong rope. and led her to a stool under a large hook in the joist, put in for the purpose.

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323 Words | 2 Pages

The Farmer’s Register Letters in 1837 contain primary sources on white perceptions of enslaved African Americans .The letters also offer information about master-slave relationship between whites and African Americans. The Farmer’s Register Letters also informs the reader about how the slaves were treated by means of material as well as working conditions . In the reading of Farmer’s Register Letters, each author perceived the character of African Americans to be underestimated because Africans are "like plastic clay, which , may be molded into agreeable or disagreeable figures, according to the skill of the molder .

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1892 Words | 8 Pages

When he was a kid, his family would hide runaway slaves in their Delaware county farmhouse. From a young age, Garrett knew that slavery was cruel. One time Garrett’s family’s black servant was kidnapped. The servant was almost forced back into slavery (Thomas Garrett). This moment changed Thomas’s life forever, as he noted this event as the time in which we wanted to devote his life to the abolitionist movement.

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1066 Words | 5 Pages

Hayden Carey “Freedom is as essential to man as air”. For centuries, slavery has long been the subject of intense controversy and the primary victim of sectionalism that separated the North and the South in the United States. Following the American Revolution, the new union was divided between the south, which was economically reliant on slavery and the north, where slavery was not important. Abraham Lincoln summed up his prediction of possible consequences of the current state of the union as he said, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." In the south, slavery became a distinctive way of well being and a strong source of prosperity.

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1146 Words | 5 Pages

Being that there are basic facts of the slaves that were being withheld from them, they lose the sense of identity from a young age, and now are conditioned to only know what the masters tell them, believing all else is irrelevant. Another way the slaves are mistreated in society is how, “before the child has reached its twelfth month, [the] mother is taken from it”, so family can not grow emotional attachments to one another (48). Learning as a little kid, the slaves are taught to grow up with no sense of relationship to a family member forcing the only loyalty or emotional connections towards the masters, making it easier for them to control. In addition, many of the slave children who were too young to work in the fields did not have “ shoes, stockings, jackets, or trousers” making the only clothes allotted to them for the whole year being “two coarse linen shirts” (54). Having the children be cold and vulnerable throughout the winter months, made the small children realize the low status that is implemented, teaching the children to rely only on the masters.

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In the novels Kindred by Octavia E. Butler and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, the immorality of slavery is constantly critiqued. Twain and Butler use the people's hypocrisy, selfishness, and gullibility to both explain the prevalence of slavery and display why it was perpetuated by otherwise good people. In a society as contradictory as the antebellum south, neither author had a lack of hypocritical traditions and beliefs to draw from in their writing. The antebellum south was ripe with hypocrisy that ingrained selective immorality which was used to justify slavery.

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1021 Words | 5 Pages

Douglass suggests how slaves often are transferred year in and year out, regardless of the place the slaves’ families are. Slave owners know that they get slaves with the right amount of value and the age of the slaves only to the extent that they can be valuable and have productive labor; they frequently treat slaves like livestock, mere animals, barring reason. Douglass presents this cure of people as objects or animals as cruel and absurd. Douglass’s life as a slave describes the slaves on Colonel Lloyd's massive plantation as living in concern of beatings and other varieties of bodily abuse. (Douglass).

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325 Words | 2 Pages

People who defend slavery believed slave owners were the nicest people in the world. Douglass argues that slavery corrupts slave owners. When Douglass arrived at the Alud’s plantation Mrs.Auld was the nicest woman to ever meet. “She had clothes for the naked, Bread for the hungry and comfort for

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1945 Words | 8 Pages

Calhoun justifies that slaves are better off than the poor European citizens by comparing “the sick, and the old and infirm slave...in the midst of his family and friends, under the kind superintending care of his master and mistress” (The Papers of Calhoun 396) to “the forlorn and wretched condition of the pauper in the poorhouse” (The Papers of Calhoun 396). Calhoun believes that the black race has actually physically, morally, and intellectually improved more as slaves in America than in Central Africa since “it came among us in a low, degraded, and savage condition, and in the course of a few generations it has grown up under the fostering care of our institutions...to its present comparatively civilized condition” (The Papers of Calhoun 395). Describing the slavemaster as caring and slavery as a fostering institution depicts the condition of slaves almost as a luxury. The viewpoint that blacks are so inferior to whites that bringing them to the US has made them better off than they would be in Africa contributes to Calhoun’s view that slavery is moral. He states “I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together...is, instead of an evil, a good–a positive good” (The Papers

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565 Words | 3 Pages

When slavery was legal in the United States, many people did not know how cruelly the slaves were treated in the south. This changed when writers like Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, wrote about how they were treated. Frederick wrote about his time as a slave in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. [something about slave owners power] The slave owners’ methods of maintaining power over their slaves were to disgust them with freedom, the violence that they were constantly exposed to, and their lack of education.

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1473 Words | 6 Pages

Authentic meaning of humanity had extinguished. “Preventing slaves from building familial connections made them less likely to revolt” (Delevante). Douglass was a child who never sees his mother during the daylight because she was enslaved to work from sunrise to sunset every day. Because of the color of the skin, he was abandoned from staying with his mother and sold to a slave master. Infant children of the slaves were separated from their parents.

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757 Words | 4 Pages

When Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin because she wanted to stir up an anti-slavery statement. Slavery was already the unpopular choice for Northerners, but Harriet Beecher Stowe made the Northerners even more opposed to slavery. Slavery even became less popular in the Southern states. The novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin made many Northerners realize how unjust slavery was for the first time, and increased the differences between the North and the South.

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735 Words | 3 Pages

Since slavery holds such questionable morals, it was beneficial to the people’s conscience to view slaves as less than human, causing less remorse for their unjust actions. Southern plantation owners, in order to lessen the cruelty of owning slaves, projected the image of an entire race being worth less, to avoid justifying the morality of

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