Uncle Tom's Cabin

About this book

In Kentucky, a slave owner in debt sells two of his slaves to a trader: Uncle Tom, a gentle, deeply Christian man, and the little son of Eliza, a young slave woman. That night Eliza escapes with her child and crosses the frozen Ohio River, leaping from ice floe to ice floe, on the way to freedom in Canada. Tom is sold down the river: he saves the life of a little girl, Eva, whose father buys him, but after Eva's death and her father's he falls into the hands of the brutal planter Simon Legree, and refuses to betray two women who have run away.

Context and significance

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the novel in response to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which forced Northerners to return escaped slaves, and published it in 1852; it sold hundreds of thousands of copies within a year and stirred the anti-slavery movement. Later writers, such as James Baldwin, criticised its sentimental portrait of Tom. Read it with the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, written by a man who escaped slavery himself.

About the author