Harriet Beecher Stowe is the author of a very famous book called Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It was this book that shed light on the Fugitive Slave Act and its horrors. When Stowe moved to New England in the year 1850, she heard much enrage about something new called the Fugitive Slave Act. This was a new law requiring people from the North to help capture runaway slaves. Law enforcement had to make all people, even people who were abolitionists, help capture slaves. If you were caught not obeying this law you would go to jail. Harriet Beecher Stowe was also enraged by this new law, and she began sharing her feelings about the Fugitive Slave Act through a storyline in an antislavery newspaper called the National Era. She wanted to show people how slavery …show more content…
In her story, Stowe chooses to create two major plots. The first one is about a young woman called Eliza and her four year old son Harry, who run away to freedom, because her son was to be taken from her and sold in repayment for a debt of their master. The second one is about a man called Uncle Tom who lives on the same plantation as Eliza and Harry, but he stays behind to protect his family. Uncle Tom was sold to the same slave owner as repayment as Eliza’s son Harry was supposed to be, this results in Tom being sold farther down South. The story follows both through their journeys to freedom. Eliza’s story showing that she would do anything to get to freedom, even crossing the nearly frozen Ohio River with her young son in her arms. Uncle Tom’s story showed how he kept his faith in the hardest of times. While Eliza reunited with her husband and moved to Canada, Uncle Tom was beaten to death for not renouncing his faith and not giving up the location of runaway slaves were. Both earned their freedom by the end of the book. Uncle Tom’s Cabin became the book of the nineteenth century, selling 10,000 copies in just the first week, and 300,000 copies in the United States in just a year. Today over 6.5 million copies have been