Article written by Shreyasi Jha

“These black folks are not like us, white people. They do not live under the illusion that their wives and children will live with them forever. They are nothing but slaves, my man! They forget these human emotions like sorrow when they part from their loved ones in the blink of an eye.

They have not been raised in such a matter that they depend on the good things that life is supposed to bring them. Instead, they have been raised and conditioned to take whatever life throws at them.”

Did your heart disagree with the perception of slaves? ? Did your head boil with anger against those words? If yes, it’s true when President Lincoln said, ‘If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong.”

The words were spoken by a character called Haley, a slave trader in the United States of America to convince Mr Shelby to sell his best worker and a young boy to him.

Written in the 17th century by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Life Among the Lowly, is one of the most successful bestselling books to be published in the United States. It became popular as people related to its sympathetic characters were thrilled with the twists and turns of the plot. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a part of a large body of anti-slavery writing.

By the beginning of the civil war in 1861, the North-South tension had been on the rise. With the election of President Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the crisis came to a head as the Southern states withdrew themselves from the Union. The brutal four-year war that followed almost destroyed the United States.

A moment to note would be when the author visited President Lincoln at the White House in 1862, he had reportedly said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” This statement, regardless of its truth, testifies to Uncle Tom’s cabin’s impact.

The author was victorious in collapsing the distance between the readers and the slave characters. From the comfort of their beds, the readers were imaginatively crossing the icy Ohio river with Eliza; they were raged with indignant outrage at Simon Legree’s cruelty to Uncle Tom and the rest; their hearts melting at the scene where Eva and Tom discuss passages from the Bible.

When Tom and his little friend Eva read together, the distance between white and black, slave and master was long forgotten by the world.

Some of the harsh elements of slave treatment were marked by brutality, degradation, and inhumanity. Strenuous things were seen in the book as well. The white dominance was constant throughout.

We could see the true nature of the cruel practice when Stowe leaves behind the comfortable veneer of life at the Shelbys and St Clare’s and dives into the Legree’s. A barbaric setting, where his slaves were beaten, whipped, and even murdered, introduced the real identity of inhumane slavery.

I felt enraged during those scenes as there’s nothing crueller than ignoring fundamental human rights such as equality.

No matter who people are, where they are from, their skin colour or their gender identity, they are all equal and should be seen as equal by everyone.

Slavery was one of the evil approaches taken against this and seeing how it got abolished, and how good won over evil gives us hope.

Hope to remain positive and believe in the right rule of nature. The novel remains one of the rarest literary phenomena or a cultural sensation. The power of such remarkable words in a book highly contributed to social change.