The slaves themselves, of course, are not the only people whom slavery attempts to reduce and whom it thereby injures. The most obvious example of a slave owner destroyed by the institution is Marie St. Clare, whose narcissism is a result of her having been raised from infancy to believe that she is a superior kind of being. Marie's sadism is a natural result of her condition, as is her unhappiness: "If these people are not real, as I am real," Marie tells herself on one level, "then I may hurt them without guilt." But at the same time, she knows they are as real as she is — or that she is as unreal as they are — and this self-contradictory knowledge is the source of the imaginary pain she does feel and the very real pain she cannot. According to Stowe's lights, Marie is as doomed as Legree to a hell after death; meanwhile, she is in a kind of hell on earth — a different one from the one she subjects her slaves to, but a hell nonetheless. St. Clare himself, despite his role as one of the novel's chief spokesmen against slavery, has been morally injured by it; having found it easier to accept the institution than to combat it, he rejects spirituality for both his slaves and himself. Shelby and his wife are both shallow, callous people — as they must be if they are to continue owning slaves. At the physical center of the novel is St. Clare's nephew, the 12-year-old Henrique, shown to be potentially a kind, loving human being, who is being carefully trained and educated to be as meaningless to himself as Topsy, as soulless as Marie. Even Legree, who as the personification of the institution is an almost inhuman villain, is someone whom slavery has allowed and encouraged to become truly evil, morally dead before he has died physically.
Only Tom loves Legree. This is the irony at the heart of the novel, the key to its thematic conflict. In order to understand what it means, we need to remember, first, that Legree personifies slavery, which is evil precisely because it reduces (or attempts to reduce) human beings to property — material objects devoid of spiritual existence and value. But slavery cannot actually objectify human beings; Christian love (Christ's love, from which, Tom says in his dying words, we are inseparable) is stronger. Tom is able to separate slavery from its personification in Legree, to "hate the sin but love the sinner." By being able to love Legree, to forgive him (a spiritual feat that is not easy even for Tom to achieve, one that he calls "a victory"), Tom is able to triumph over the evil that Legree personifies.
