An Analysis of Uncle Toms Cabin Essay -- Uncle Toms Cabin Essays

An Analysis of Uncle Tom's Cabin "The book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, is thought of as a fantastic, even fanatic, representation of Southern life, most memorable for its emotional oversimplification of the complexities of the slave system," says Gossett (4). Harriet Beecher Stowe describes her own experiences or ones that she has witnessed in the past through the text in her novel. She grew up in Cincinnati where she had a very close look at slavery. Located on the Ohio River across from the slave state of Kentucky, the city was filled with former slaves and slaveholders. In conversation with black women who worked as servants in her home, Stowe heard many stories of slave life that found their way into the book. Some of the novel was based on her reading of abolitionist books and pamphlets, the rest came straight from her own observations of black Cincinnatians with personal experience of slavery. She uses the characters to represent popular ideas of her time, a time when slavery was the biggest issue that people were dealing with. Uncle Tom's Cabin was an unexpected factor in the dispute between the North and South. The book sold more than 300,000 copies during the first year of publication, taking thousands of people, even our nation's leaders, by surprise. Mr. Shelby is a Kentucky plantation owner who is forced by debt to sell two of his slaves to a trader named Haley. Uncle Tom, the manager of the plantation, understands why he must be sold. The other slave marked for sale is Harry, a four-year-old. His mother, Mrs. Shelby's servant, ... ...ies to wage her own battle. Eva serenely fades into death, but her presence and her dreams survive in her father and in the reader of the novel. It is doubtful if a book was ever written that attained such popularity in so short a time as did Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. "The thrilling story was eagerly read by rich and poor, by the educated and uneducated, eliciting from one and all heartfelt sympathy for the poor and abused negro of the south,"(Donovan 74). It was, indeed, a veritable bombshell to slaveholders, who felt that such a work should be dangerous to the existence of slavery. They had a good cause to fear it too, for its "timely appearance was undoubtedly the means of turning the tide of public feeling against the abominable curse of slavery"(Cass 35).