Chapters 11 through 14 take the novel into its central portion, as the Eliza plot nears its climax and the Uncle Tom plot gets well underway, with three important characters (St. Clare, his cousin Ophelia, and his daughter Eva) making their first appearance, although we have not yet been told Ophelia's name or her relationship to the St. Clares. After Eliza and George's reunion, their plot will be put on hold for several chapters, giving us time to become acquainted with the New Orleans family to which Haley has sold Tom. Also in these chapters, we see the first few of the book's embedded stories, small and often fragmentary sub-plots that involve the histories either of major-plot characters or of minor characters who appear in one or both of the main plots.
As is often the case in this novel, the scene in the Kentucky barroom serves several purposes at once. It begins with another colorful sketch, this one involving several western characters: the Kentucky frontiersman remained, in the 1850s, a figure of some interest to readers in the East and abroad, and here Stowe makes the most of her familiarity with the West and its exotic inhabitants. These westerners, besides looking and acting colorful, argue about the treatment of slaves, which must certainly have been a realistic touch and which gives Stowe the opportunity to state at least two variants of the arguments concerning slavery that her book addresses. The scene presents a broad irony, when the young man wanted dead or alive walks in, looks at his own poster, and is not recognized as an escaped slave; indeed he is taken for a higher class of citizen, because apparently richer than most of the other men in the room. Another argument allows George to state persuasive reasons why he is not obligated, as Wilson begins by saying he is, to return to his lawful master: The laws by which he belongs to Harris are not George's laws, nor is the country his country, since it does not extend to him the rights of a citizen. Finally, in Chapter 11, we learn something about George's background and are given the first of the embedded plots, concerning George's sister Emily who resisted Harris's sexual overtures and was thus sold, apparently into sexual slavery, in New Orleans.
