Evil In Uncle Tom's Cabin, By Harriet Beecher Stowe

Slavery’s Evil in Uncle Tom’s Cabin In the era of slavery, blacks desired the freedom America promises to anyone who resides in America. Instead, those who came willingly were greeted as lesser men not even men but property that white people own and abuse. A white Puritan woman named Harriet Beecher Stowe witnessed the effects of slavery firsthand. Using her Puritan background and beliefs, Stowe writes a novel called Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and causes a great debate in American history. In times of slavery, a woman named Harriet Beecher Stowe exposes the effects of slavery, deems it evil and uses her Christian beliefs to expose it’s evil.

To understand Stowe’s point, her background is required to understand just who she was. Harriet Beecher Stowe

It is also evident that it was popular: When the novel was published in 1852, it set all-time records: ten thousand copies in the first week and three hundred thousand in the first year (“Slavery”). Stowe’s novel had become so popular that, “At the time, the only book to sell more copies than Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the bible” (“Slavery”). Stowe’s inspiration for her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin came from the events during her time period. One reason is that “She developed the idea of writing a novel about the horrors of slavery after the Fugitive Slave Law Act was passed in 1850” (Cumberland 312). Another reason is that ”Stowe combined her religious background with her political beliefs by writing a book about a saintly slave who forgave his tormentor, just as Jesus Christ forgave his” (Cumberland 312). These are the main two reasons as to why she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It was to use a protagonist who would just as Jesus, forgive his tormentors sins in which the tormentors represent slavery. Stowe didn’t plan to make a continuation of sequel to Uncle Tom’s Cabin but, because The South charged her with slander, and a number of ‘anti-Tom’ novels appeared as a challenge to the book. But Stowe defended herself with A Key to Uncle Tom 's Cabin: Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon which the story is founded (Crowfield 535). A Key to Uncle Tom 's Cabin: Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon which the story is founded is to show what she used to write the original Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Uncle Tom’s Cabin then started a heated debate over slavery where she was praised in the north by some, “but criticized by abolitionists for being too lenient; In the south she was reviled” (Crowfield 535). Southerners and pro slavery writers “believed that Stowe exaggerated the condition of slaves in the south” (Cumberland 312). Stowe was not the first to create anti-slavery works,