Uncle Tom's Cabin

Her popular book furthered the sectional tensions and helped to start the Civil War. Since the book made slavery appear wicked it left many people surprised it was even popular in Britain and France. b. Hinton R. Helper ‘s book The Impending Crisis of the South appears in 1857 i. Yet another piece of literacy appeared in 1857, The Impending Crisis of the South, by Hinton R. Helper and it also causes tensions. Helper’s book attempted to prove his point which was that non slave holding whites were the people who were worst off in the slavery issues.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe was a catalyst for the Civil War due to its depiction of slavery as harsh and brutal. The main character, a slave named Uncle Tom, and one of the slave owners, Simon Legree were used to attack the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the institution of slavery that it protected. Throughout the novel, characters, scenes and plots were Stowe’s persuasions to the reader that slavery is evil, un-Christian, and should not be tolerated. She illustrates the fact that slavery and Christian values oppose each other and are not in any way compatible. Uncle Tom’s Cabin outraged the southerners and made the northerners more aware of the brutality of slavery.

Children would mature more often because they would see a white man kill a black slave because he ran away. The fact that children have known what these people did and to grow up and become the same makes the 19th century evil. The slavery in this time was evil and that is what Stowe always refer to when you see the way the world is in this story. The evils in this story was clear to anyone who reads it. Stowe shows the world in the eyes of slaves and the readers gain an understanding of how slaves were treated and how they had to survive in those years.

To be deprived of freedom and living under constant whippings and starvation is something none of us would want to experience and it should never exist, unfortunately, it did at one time. Men who called themselves the defender of freedom and support The Constitution but enjoy slavery are nothing more than a mere hypocrite. Additionally, many slaves were illiterate and poor. Their owners will do anything in preventing their slaves to read and write. As Douglas heard his master once said:If you teach that nigger how to read, there would be no keeping him.

One of the greater uses of fiction’s power is Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the era leading up to the American Civil War, which made a lasting impact for years to come, and hit many different characteristics of nineteenth century American beliefs. Harriet Beecher Stowe released her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852 and it was immediately controversial. When the book reached southern readers, they were irate. Stowe’s novel was written to confront the basis of the southern way of life and culture.

The North was outraged by its tale of tragedy, deceit and hate. The South was outraged by its conception of slavery and its bashing of the southern culture. Either way, it marked an event in American History that would change history forever. African American status was now a major issue among Americans. Abraham Lincoln, in remarks to her book, once said to Harriet Beecher Stowe, “So you are the little lady that caused the big war.

Douglass believed that since Auld obtained slave owning from marriage, it made him more of an unpleasant master because he wasn’t used to being around slavery and having so much power. Fredrick Douglass also was convinced that religious slaveholders were false Christians because they became more self-righteous and thought that God gave them the power to hold slaves. By telling stories to the reader, Douglass hoped to bring awareness to the harsh subject of slavery and show how the slaves kept hope during these miserable times.

Southerners bitterly resented this moralistic attack, and also the stereotypical presentation of slave owners as heartless Simon Legrees in the overwhelmingly popular (in the North) book and play by Harriet Beecher Stowe, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (1852). Historians continue to debate whether slave owners actually felt either guilt or shame (Berringer 359-60[1]). But there is no doubt the southerners were angered by the abolitionist attacks. Starting in the 1830s there was a widespread and growing ideological defense of the "peculiar institution" everywhere in the South.

Ciela, A Slave illuminates the moral dilemmas that lie in the heart of slavery. Slaves were seen to be less than everyone else and did not receive the same treatment that white people did. In the book Ciela was bought by her master, Robert Newsom, and lived on the land his family owned in Missouri. Robert raped Ciela when he first purchased her, and would walk to her cabin, located a few miles away from his family’s cabin and demand sex from her. Ciela had had enough of being raped and ended up killing Robert with a stick and burned his body to get rid of the evidence.

They did not want the slaves seeking hope and forming an escape plan to gain their freedom. Douglass stated that becoming literate “had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out (Puchner, Martin).” A second theme present in this narrative is how slavery not only damaged African Americans, but the white slave owners as well. It shows how slave owners thrived on the power of “owning” human beings. Douglass states how being a slave owner was harmful to the owner’s moral sense of health because it is unnatural for a human to own another human/ humans.