Uncle Tom
Although President Lincoln might have overstated the importance of Uncle Tom's Cabin as being a singular cause for the war, the statement does capture the fact that literature serves as a reflection for social values and norms. Abolitionism did become a major political force in the antebellum years, which is why Lincoln and the Union were willing to wage war for so many years and sacrifice so many lives. Of course, there were economic motives for the war (Tindall). Unionists were still mostly whites with racist beliefs, and their impetus for fighting was based as much on the need to retain access to Southern wealth and resources. Abolitionist views provided a convenient political foundation for the policies shaping Union efforts to prevent Southern cession. Read as a representation of abolitionism, Uncle Tom's Cabin serves almost as a piece of political propaganda.
"The little woman who wrote the book that started this great war," Harriet Beecher Stowe understood the importance of exposing the cruelty of slavery. She used the medium of literature in order to convey her views. Therefore, Uncle Tom's Cabin can be read as the symbol of that which started the war. Stowe's novel was unique in that...
Uncle Tom's Cabin - Fiction as a Catalyst for Fact The Origins of a Living Document Stage Night North and South Polarized: Critics Respond The Abolitionist Debates The Tom Caricature The Greatest Impact The Origins of a Living Document In her own words, Harriet Beecher Stowe was compelled to pen Uncle Tom's Cabin "....because as a woman, as a mother, I was oppressed and broken-hearted with the sorrows and injustice I saw, because as a Christian I felt
Yet, as Hendrick writes, Harriet also transformed those feelings into an engine of social change; "pursuing the Calvinist injunction to 'improve the affliction' and reap 'the peaceable fruits of righteousness' in the wake of" her son Charley's death, and "stirred up the nation to an awareness of its sin." Harriet wrote to her brother Henry, "You see...how this subject has laid hold of me...The poor slave on whom the
Stressing the shackles that slavery could latch to a man's mind, Douglass was given insight into the inherent transgression behind the bondage. And his ability to adopt such a perspective, while easy to underestimate from the distance of over a century, is quite remarkable given the overwhelming social constructions designed to deter that sort of thinking amongst his demographic. One of the more effective messages that he conveyed both
Women and the Home Front in Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee during the Civil War This paper examines the living conditions and attitudes that shaped the lives of the women in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee during and after the American Civil War. The thesis statement should deal with the breakdown of long standing ties between the people of the mountains as they chose to fight for the
Underground Railroad was the single most important nonviolent political protest movement in nineteenth century America. Slave rebellions did help to rally the cause for self-empowerment and abolition, but the Underground Railroad led to meaningful, tangible results. The descendants of former slaves who made it to Canada have shaped the fabric of that nation, while the descendants of the former slaves to achieved liberty in their lifetime and lived to tell
Thoreau, Stowe, Melville and Douglas: Reflections on Slavery Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beacher Stowe, Herman Melville and Fredrick Douglass all opposed the intuition of slavery in the United States in the middle of the nineteen century. This matter deeply divided the nation and ultimately led to the Civil War in 1860. While southerner's saw the matter as a state's rights issue, abolitions framed the debate from a moral perspective. Most people
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