74 pages • 2 hours read
Uncle Tom's Cabin
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Themes
Empathy and Guilt: The Mutual Degradation of the Slave System
While many of Stowe’s abolitionist arguments are rooted in the suffering of the exploited black populace of antebellum America, this argument would only have reached half of her intended audience. The many instances of black slaves suffering physically and mentally at the hands of their white masters, drawn from real-life examples curated by Stowe, are designed as an appeal to pathos to establish an emotional connection to those subjugated to slavery. This argument is based on the premise that the audience accepted the grounds that slaves were capable of feelings equal to those of Stowe’s white audience. However, a large portion of her audience would not accept these grounds; many, like Marie St. Clare, believed black people lacked some fundamental aspect of humanity and could not suffer as white people could.
To combat this view, Stowe adopts another argument that avoids it altogether. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is rooted in Christian morality, and Stowe turns to this assumed common base of all her readers to show how slavery degrades the moral nature of the entire country, Northerner, Southerner, and slave alike.
Stowe notes when introducing Simon Legree’s overseers, Sambo and Quimbo, that “It is a common remark […] that the negro overseer is always more tyrannical and cruel than the white one” and that the “slave is always a tyrant, if he can get the chance to be one” (492-93). However, she emphasizes that this is not, as many Southerners believed, indicative of the race’s nature, but of the degraded state slaves had been subjected to by their white masters.
The Feelings of Living Property
This theme is introduced in Chapter 5, “Showing the Feelings of Living Property on Changing Owners” and becomes a major theme for the rest of the novel. The purpose of this theme is to highlight the irony of treating a human being, with feelings and a soul, like an object. By law in antebellum America, enslaved black people were completely at the mercy of their white masters. They had neither right to their own body and labor, nor legal recourse to prevent cruelty.
Tom changes owners three times: he is first sold by Mr. Shelby to Dan Haley, then to Augustine St. Clare, and finally to Simon Legree. Though Tom’s religion allows him to hold onto hope, each transfer carries with it some degree of loss and danger. When Mr. Shelby sells him, it tears Tom’s family apart. When St. Clare buys him, Tom is subject to the danger that a kind but careless slave owner poses. Augustine’s behavior is such that his servants care about him a great deal; yet the fact that he makes no provision for his untimely death turns his indulgence into cruelty when Tom is bought by Simon Legree. By the time that Legree owns him, Tom has suffered loss after loss, the greatest of which is the loss of the freedom that Augustine and Eva promised him.
Besides Tom’s character arc, Cassy’s life story is the best example of the damage that being treated as property can do to a person. By the time Cassy is introduced, she is thirty-five years old and mentally broken. Though she was well-educated and brought up like a white woman, her father failed to free her before he died suddenly of cholera. She passed into the hands of a man she fell in love with, and even had children with him, before her heart was shattered when the man sold her. Cassy, like many of the slave women in the novel, is forced to endure the loss of her children. Her third master used her love for her son and daughter as leverage to control her behavior. By the time Cassy passed into Legree’s possession, she is wracked by loss and slightly mentally deranged. Cassy is a powerful example of how Stowe uses the human commonality of motherhood to emphasize the cruelty of children being torn from their mothers’ arms.
Hierarchy of the Oppressed
One of the major effects of the systemic racism imposed by the institution of slavery is the reproduction of racist hierarchies by those who are oppressed by them. In the novel, as has been the case throughout history, black people with lighter skin are often treated differently, both by their masters and their peers, than those with darker skin and/or features who are deemed more “African.” Uncle Tom’s Cabin uses the system of terms developed by European slave trading countries to describe individuals with different percentages of African and European blood.
Characters who appear to have “no white blood” in the novel are often referred to as African; these characters are usually the least educated, most wicked, and most ignorant of Stowe’s black characters. “Mulatto” is used to describe individuals who are half black and half white. These characters, such as George Harris, can often pass as white. When he finds freedom, George throws his allegiance to his mother’s oppressed race, rather than that of his father, who viewed him as a valuable piece of property, like a horse or a dog. Individuals who are one quarter black and three-quarters white are referred to as “quadroons.” Cassy is explicitly referred to as such in the chapter “The Quadroon’s Story.” Those with only one-eighth black ancestry are referred to as “octoroons.” Eliza, Cassy’s daughter with a white man, would be classified as an octoroon.
Stowe illustrates how senseless these distinctions are in her critique of how differently slaves are treated based on skin color (which was incorrectly assumed to be related to the level of “negro blood” in their lineage). Slaves in the novel tend to treat each other differently based on the lightness of their skin and the caste of their master. Adolph, Augustine St. Clare’s attendant, takes on an aristocratic, arrogant attitude, disparaging other slaves that he deems lower than himself. For example, he calls Prue a “Disgusting old beast,” completely unempathetic to the plight of the old woman. Dinah, the cook, tells Adolph and Jane that they are “cuttin’ round, makin’ b’lieve you’s white folks.” (322). When Augustine dies, the two lighter-skinned servants are no better off than their dark compatriots: they are sold just the same. Adolph goes to a master who vows to break his arrogant ways.
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