Uncle Tom's Cabin

The second best-selling book of the 19th century, behind only the Bible, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic anti-slavery novel. First published in 1852, the work is a seminal piece of abolitionist literature which helped spur the country towards Civil War. The story centers on the lives of several slaves of a Kentucky farmer named Arthur Shelby. Mounting debts forces the farmer to sell two of his slaves, Uncle Tom, a middle-aged man with a wife and children, and Harry, the son of Eliza, the family’s maid. Fearing separation from her child, Eliza runs away with her son and reunites with her husband George, also an escaped slave, planning to travel north to Canada. Meanwhile Tom is sold and placed on a Mississippi river boat where he befriends a young white girl named Eva, whose father Augustine St. Clare purchases him and takes him to their home in New Orleans. What follows for Tom is a tragic set of circumstances which highlighted the brutal reality of slavery in early 19th century America.