We need also to remember that Tom does not love Legree in the material sense (in which Topsy, for example, says she loves candy), nor yet in the emotional sense that Tom loves his children. He does not love him, as some readers have apparently thought, in the sense that a prisoner of war begins to "love" (really, to depend upon, to "identify with" in self-protection) his captors. Tom loves Legree as, according to the Gospel of Matthew (5: 44), Christ counseled his listeners to "love their enemies"; he forgives Legree as, according to the Gospel of Luke (23: 34), Christ as he died forgave the men who had crucified him. According to Christian doctrine, this kind of love is the respect due one's fellow human beings, not because they have earned it but because they are human beings. It is precisely the kind of love that slavery denies when it denies people their humanity and views them as objects, commodities to be bought and sold, property to be used in the gaining of profit.
The theme of Uncle Tom's Cabin, then, is the conflict between the evil of slavery and the good of Christian love. Eva, symbolic of this sort of love, is killed (mythically) by slavery, but like Tom, she triumphs over death and thus over evil. If Tom were willing to hate Legree, to deny him Christian love, still he would not necessarily be willing to kill the man, as Cassy asks, or to allow Cassy to kill him, or to run away along with Cassy and Emmeline and leave Legree's other slaves to face the consequences — nor, of course, would he necessarily be willing to give up Cassy and Emmeline's hiding place to Legree; the difference, however, would be one of degree, not of kind. Tom too, then, dies but triumphs over death — as, we are meant to understand, do the two men who have carried out Legree's orders to kill him, saved from evil by Tom's dying love and forgiveness. Legree does not so triumph; in spite of Tom's prayers, we are told that he continues to choose evil and at last dies in it, physically as he has spiritually — and no doubt luckily for the popularity of the novel, whose readers might have protested had the villain been allowed to escape his just punishment in the afterlife.
