If Tom is the book's Christ-figure and George Harris its revolutionary Romantic hero, Simon Legree is without a doubt its anti-Christ, its arch-villain, or — as Cassy describes him — its vampire. If Tom's bearing and behavior show that he is among the elect, Legree's show quite definitely that he is not.
In several ways, as a character, Legree is indeed Tom's antithesis. We know nothing of Tom's past except that, as Shelby tells Haley in the first scene, he "got religion" at a camp meeting four years before the book opens. Of Legree we are told that, after he had spent some years at sea living a dissolute life, he was "almost persuaded" by his mother's prayers to reform but instead chose sin. (In both cases, according to traditional Calvinist doctrine, the apparent choice was really only an outward sign of the condition of the men's souls; however, Stowe's narrator describes Legree's critical moment as a genuine conflict between good and evil in which evil triumphs — just as, in Tom's moment of near despair, love and hope win the "victory.")
Now, whereas everyone whose life Tom touches is lifted and helped, Legree affects everyone near him for the worse. He has no family, only the artificial and perverse "family" he forces his slaves to enact: Cassy his "wife," whom he has used until nearly all of her actions (except those inspired by Tom) are hateful reactions against Legree; Emmeline his "daughter" whom he stole from her own mother and now wishes to force into an incestuous relationship (the nature of which Cassy senses, in her protection of the girl); Sambo and Quimbo his "brothers" (or "sons"), whom he uses as companions and henchmen, alternately punishes and rewards, and has turned into tools for draining the life and dignity from the field workers.
