The night after Tom’s burial, Legree rides to town, gets drunk, comes home, locks his door, and goes to bed. He wakes to see a ghost standing in the room, beckoning to him, and he faints. On the same night, shortly after Legree sees the ghost, the servants notice that the house door is open, and they see two white figures—actually Cassy and Emmeline—gliding down the lane. Cassy and Emmeline get to the next town, having changed out of their sheets and dressed as a Spanish Creole lady and her servant. Cassy, who has stolen some of Legree’s money, buys a trunk and awaits the next riverboat. George Shelby is also waiting, and he and Cassy become acquainted. Cassy takes the young Kentuckian into her confidence when they board the boat, and George tells her he will do what he can to help her and Emmeline.
A French lady, Madame de Thoux, on the boat with her 12-year-old daughter, asks George about his home; she is interested in a slave who lived near there, George Harris. When George Shelby tells her the young man is married to his mother’s servant Eliza and that both have escaped to Canada, Madame de Thoux tells him she is George Harris’s sister, Emily. When Harris sold her to New Orleans, she was bought by a man who fell in love with her, took her to the West Indies, freed her, and married her; now she is a widow with a large inheritance and has come back to look for her brother. When George Shelby describes George Harris’s wife, Eliza, Cassy realizes that Eliza is her own lost daughter.
Later, Cassy and Emmeline, together with Emily de Thoux, trace George and Eliza Harris to Montreal, where they have been living for five years and have had another child. The happy reunion soon changes Cassy into a devout Christian and a loving grandmother. George’s sister wishes to share her inheritance with him and his family, and he accepts, saying he will use part of the money to educate himself. The whole family travels to France, where George attends a university for four years. Then, because of political upheavals in France, they return to the United States.
At this point, the narrator quotes from a long letter written by George Harris to a friend. George says that he would rather be darker-skinned than he is, for he feels more solidarity with the African race than with the white, and he wishes to cast his lot with them. He is hopeful that Liberia (which has been colonized by African Americans) will become a great, energetic republic, and he intends to go there. A few weeks later, George and his family go to Africa. The narrator tells us that Topsy, too, having grown up in New England with Ophelia and her family and having become a Christian, immigrated to Africa—as a missionary.
In Chapter XLIV, George Shelby returns home and tells Tom’s wife that her husband is dead; as he promised Tom, he does not tell her the details of how he died. A month after returning, George gives each of his and his mother’s slaves a certificate of freedom. George tells them, too, to remember Tom; it was at Tom’s grave, he says, that he resolved never to own another slave.
In the last chapter of the book, the narrator (now in the person of Stowe herself) addresses readers directly, assuring them that most of the separate incidents and characters in the story are authentic; explaining that the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and its consequences made her determined to exhibit slavery “dramatically” in fiction; and exhorting all Americans, in all parts of the country, to do what they can to end slavery: to act directly and individually and above all to pray. Finally, she speaks directly to white Christians, saying they have much to answer for and reminding them that the millennium (with its implied promise of Christ’s return) is near. If Christians do not follow the spirit of Christ, in regard to slavery, they will have to suffer God’s wrath.
