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.
