In her work “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”: Evil, Affliction and Redemptive Love, critic Josephine Donovan says that the main theme of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is “the problem of evil [shown on] several levels: theological, moral, economic, political, and practical.” Almost certainly, Harriet Beecher Stowe, in writing the novel, set out to show not “the problem of evil” but the problem of a specific evil: the enslavement and use of human beings as the property of other human beings. In order to accomplish this goal in an effectively dramatic fashion, she could not merely present slavery as a monstrous wrong, chewing people up and spitting out what remained of them, physically and spiritually; she had to show it in conflict with a force that she knew to be more than equally powerful: the love of Christ. The theme of the novel then (not a simple theme, either, because of the levels Donovan enumerates) is this conflict.
Slavery is a powerful wrong. It is said to be wrong—in all cases, notwithstanding fair individual treatment of slaves—throughout the novel, first by George Harris, later and at length by Augustine St. Clare, and always by the narrator, directly as well as indirectly through the use of irony. It is shown to be wrong from the beginning of the book, despite the relatively benign setting of Shelby’s Kentucky farm; again, individual slaves in individual cases may be well treated and even happy in their situations (as Eliza apparently has been), but the institution not only allows but is entirely based on the objectification of all slaves as commodities. Such objectification is evil, in the kind of actions it permits and supports and in the spiritual damage it does to individuals.
Because Shelby, portrayed as a decent if somewhat shallow and thoughtless man, is in debt, he is forced—according to law, because he owns property—to sell some of that property. The fact that he is also selling, as Chloe says, “heart’s blood, heart’s love,” is, by that law, irrelevant. Shelby and Haley are introduced as a pair of opposites, one a “gentleman,” the other a crass materialist of no sensitivity or cultivation. In fact, their participation in slavery makes them (as Haley reminds young George Shelby) the same. Haley sees all slaves, all the time, not as people but as profit or loss. Shelby sees them as such only when he is in serious money trouble, but this is a difference of degree, not kind. Shelby’s selling of Eliza’s child is, as an act, no less evil than Haley’s selling of Lucy’s baby to a passenger on the Ohio riverboat, although the consequences are quite different. Shelby tells Haley that he will not consider selling Eliza into sexual slavery (not because he knows this would be wrong, but because his wife would never forgive him), but he scarcely hesitates to sell little Harry into what he knows is almost surely the same fate.
Throughout the novel, Stowe shows slavery as hurtful and harmful to individual slaves, physically and emotionally; she knows this will have a wrenching emotional effect upon her audience. Thus Harris’s forcing George to kill his own dog, Eliza’s painful and frightened flight away from the only home she remembers, Tom’s heartbroken farewell to his wife and children, the separation of old Aunt Hagar from her last and only child, the brutal whippings endured by George, Prue, Tom—all of these incidents are effective in showing the institution as it creates pain.
But even more terrible, from Stowe’s point of view, is its creation of moral injury. Beginning subtly, with her sketch of Black Sam on Shelby’s farm, whose morality is compromised by his need to promote himself as a favorite to his master (making him willing to help capture Eliza and her son if need be), Stowe shows slaves whose moral and spiritual soundness is damaged or destroyed by what happens to them. Lucy, on the steamboat, commits suicide despite Tom’s efforts to help her. Old Prue, in New Orleans, tells Tom she would rather go to hell than to a heaven where white people are; she is in despair, and she dies in this condition. Cassy, too, is in despair; she has committed murder and attempted murder, and she is ready to kill Legree. St. Clare’s slaves, who have learned to see themselves as materialistically as their owners see them, are morally degenerate. The thousands of slaves sold into sexual slavery or used sexually by their owners are in grave moral danger. Children like Topsy, raised to think of themselves as objects, of no value, are being set up, through absolutely no fault of their own, for morally barren lives—and worse, for lives of sin: the choice of evil over good.
Modern readers, who may have relatively little awareness of or respect for moral and spiritual matters, in comparison with matters physical and emotional, are apt to see these dangers as less important than they seemed to Stowe and her nineteenth-century audience. But to Stowe, the moral impact of slavery was among its chief evils, and to object that the moral responsibility belonged to the masters, not the slaves—who after all could not help themselves—would be a way of saying that these slaves were not adult human beings, people whose moral choices were their own to make. Yes, Stowe would agree that the masters were to blame for giving them nothing but difficult choices; but the moral choice for any action (or inaction) is made, she would say, by the person himself or herself. Slavery is evil because it attempts to reduce to objects people who cannot be so reduced.
