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.
