1036 stowe, Harriet Beecher
FamILy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Uncle Tom’s Cabin demonstrates the evils of slavery,
in part, by illustrating the violence it causes to
families. One form of this violence is the separa-
tion of slave parents from their children. Uncle
Tom is wrenched away from his loving wife and
children. Eliza Harris flees across the icebound
Ohio River to save her son from being sold to the
slave trader Halley. The aged Aunt Hagar watches
as her son, the only child her master allowed her to
keep, is sold at auction. On the riverboat to New
Orleans, Lucy discovers that instead of being sent
to Louisville to work near her husband, she is sold
to Halley. Later, Halley sells Lucy’s baby while she
sleeps. In her despair, she jumps overboard to her
death. In New Orleans, old Prue tells the story of
how she watched her own child die of starvation
because her mistress refused to buy it milk; sub-
sequently, she drinks herself to death in order to
quiet the memory of her baby’s dying cries. Topsy,
who was raised by speculators and never experi-
enced a mother’s love and instruction, has no sense
of self-love or self-worth.
The emphasis on family helps Stowe establish a
common ground where she asks her white readers
to put themselves in the position of slaves. When
Eliza flees through the forest with Harry, the nar-
rator asks of the reader, “How fast could you walk?”
Quizzed as to why she ran away from the Shelbys,
Eliza turns the question around and asks, “Have you
ever lost a child?” She then claims, “Then you will
feel for me.” The common experience of protecting
their children makes the slaves’ experience recogniz-
able to white readers and helps Stowe gain sympathy
for their cause.
The violence of slavery resonates because it is
contrasted against strong mother-centered families,
and strong mothers are those most likely to oppose
slavery. Mrs. Shelby at first tries to mitigate the
effects of slavery through kindness and by teaching
Eliza the duties of family. She later declares slavery
to be “a bitter, bitter, most accursed thing.” Mrs.
Bird’s “cozy parlour” and “fine home living” give her
husband refuge from the world of politics. Mrs. Bird
also insists on her right to assist fugitive slaves and
eventually persuades her husband, who had earlier
argued in favor of a fugitive slave law, to aid Eliza’s
escape. The Quaker settlement where Eliza and her
husband, George Harris, find sanctuary is overseen
by the matriarch, Rachel Halliday, who is prized by
all for her “loving words, and gentle moralities, and
motherly loving-kindness.”
Slavery, however, destroys not only slave fami-
lies, it also destroys slave-owning families. Owning
slaves has made Marie St. Clare into a bad mother.
She is self-indulgent to the point of narcissism,
suffering from psychosomatic “sick-headaches,”
which make her the center of attention in her
household. She cannot comprehend the needs of
her servants, stating that “there is no way with
servants but to put them down and keep them down.
It was always natural to me, from a child.” This
hard-heartedness results in the neglect of her own
daughter, Evangelina. Her husband, Augustine,
has to bring his cousin, Ophelia, all the way from
Vermont to help raise the little girl, and when she
succumbs to a wasting disease (most likely, tuber-
culosis), Marie stages her own illnesses, competing
with her daughter for her husband’s and servants’
attention.
Slavery does not simply break apart families, it
corrupts individuals so as to make families impos-
sible. It turns women into concubines and men
into wretches. Cassy suffers the fate of many light-
skinned slave women who suffered as sex slaves
(which would have been Eliza’s fate had she been
caught). Upon her white father’s death, Cassy was
sold from master to master as a concubine and her
children are sold away from her. At one point, she
murders her infant son to save him from slavery.
Her final master, Simon Legree, lives a life of cruelty
and debauchery. Having rejected his mother’s affec-
tions as a boy, he has no sense of family. His only
companions are the embittered Cassy, who plots
his demise, and two overseer slaves, with whom he
holds wild drinking binges to cover up his crushing
sense of guilt.
Despite the violence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, fami-
lies in the end are redeemed. Ophelia adopts Topsy
to raise as a daughter in Vermont. Not only do
George, Eliza, and Harry safely make it to Canada,
it turns out that Cassy is in fact Eliza’s mother and
she is reunited with her child, sold from her long ago.
Roger Hecht