Instructions: The following is a passage that Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote in her book Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Please read the followi
ng passage and underline the key points. Then answer the questions below.
"The writer has given only a faint shadow, a dim picture, of the anguish and despair that are, at this very moment, riving thousands of hearts, shattering thousands of families, and driving a helpless and sensitive race to frenzy and despair. There are those living who know the mothers whom this accursed traffic has driven to the murder of their children; and themselves seeking in death a shelter from woes more dreaded than death ... "And you, mothers of America ... I beseech you, pity the mother who has all your affections, and not one legal right to protect, guide, or educate, the child of her bosom! ... I beseech you, pity those mothers that are constantly made childless by the American slave-trade! And say, mothers of America, is this a thing to be defended, sympathized with, passed over in silence? Do you say that the people of the free state have nothing to do with it, and can do nothing? Would to God this were true! But it is not true. The people of the free states have defended, encouraged, and participated; and are more guilty for it, before God, than the South, in that they have not the apology of education or custom. "If the mothers of the free states had all felt as they should, in times past, the sons of the free states would not have been the holders, and, proverbially, the hardest masters of slaves ... "... You pray for the heathen abroad; pray also for the heathen at home. And pray for those distressed Christians whose whole chance of religious improvement is an accident of trade and sale; from whom any adherence to the morals of Christianity is, in many cases, an impossibility, unless they have given them, from above, the courage and grace of martyrdom." - Harriet Beecher Stowe
Questions
1) What is Stowe’s main idea? What arguments did Stowe put forth against slavery? 2) What audience was she trying to reach with her message
3) Women in the nineteenth century could not vote, so why did Stowe make a point of addressing mothers?
