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Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it illegal for anyone in the United States to offer aid or assistance to a runaway slave. The novel seeks to attack this law and the institution it protected, ceaselessly advocating the immediate emancipation of the slaves and freedom for all people. Each of Stowe’s scenes, while serving to further character and plot, also serves, without exception, to persuade the reader—especially the Northern reader of Stowe’s time—that slavery is evil, un-Christian, and intolerable in a civil society.
For most of the novel, Stowe explores the question of slavery in a fairly mild setting, in which slaves and masters have seemingly positive relationships. At the Shelbys’ house, and again at the St. Clares’, the slaves have kindly masters who do not abuse or mistreat them. Stowe does not offer these settings in order to show slavery’s evil as conditional. She seeks to expose the vices of slavery even in its best-case scenario. Though Shelby and St. Clare possess kindness and intelligence, their ability to tolerate slavery renders them hypocritical and morally weak. Even under kind masters, slaves suffer, as we see when a financially struggling Shelby guiltily destroys Tom’s family by selling Tom, and when the fiercely selfish Marie, by demanding attention be given to herself, prevents the St. Clare slaves from mourning the death of her own angelic daughter, Eva. A common contemporary defense of slavery claimed that the institution benefited the slaves because most masters acted in their slaves’ best interest. Stowe refutes this argument with her biting portrayals, insisting that the slave’s best interest can lie only in obtaining freedom.
