Uncle Tom's Cabin

I only started reading UTC because a friend recommended it and said that it was one of his most favorite books. I should have been suspicious considering the source, and I was, but I was hoping that I would like it better than I did.

The time period is interesting. The historical influence this book had on our nation is impressive. The writing is good. But for some reason, it took me six months to read the whole book. It wasn't something that I could get through in a few days, although it looked small enough when it got dropped off at my house.

In the end, I felt that Tom was too perfect. Everything cleaned up too nicely. And there was too much preaching even for my little Christian heart. The long sermons were the hardest for me to get through. But I did feel for the characters. I might have teared up a bit in some parts, and that just goes to show that the emotion within the book is there.

It's a classic, so I think that we should read it. Even if it does take six months to finish.

This is an amazing book! Covering, black history and slavery, politics, christian faith and self-sacrifice. I could read it once a year and remain in awe!

“Now, the reflections of two men sitting side by side are a curious thing–seated on the same seat, having the same eyes, ears, hands and organs of all sorts, and having pass before their eyes the same objects–it is wonderful what a variety we shall find in these same reflections!” For many years of her life Harriet Beecher Stowe avoided reading about or alluding to the subject of slavery; she considered it too painful a topic and was certain the practice would pass away with the enlightenment of society. But when she heard Christian and humane people debating whether it was their duty as citizens to return escaped fugitives to their Southern owners, “she could only think, These men and Christians cannot know what slavery is.” This inspired Stowe’s desire to “exhibit it in a living dramatic reality” in all its nuances. “We masters are divided into two classes, oppressors and oppressed…Planters, who have money to make by it–clergymen, who have planters to please–politicians, who want to rule by it…Look at the high and the low, all the world over, and it’s the same story–the lower class used up, body, soul and spirit, for the good of the upper. It is so in England; it is so everywhere; and yet all Christendom stands aghast, with virtuous indignation, because we do the same thing in a little different shape from what they do it…What poor, mean trash this whole business of human virtue is! A mere matter, for the most part, of latitude and longitude, and geographical position, acting with natural temperament.” “So long as the law considers all these human beings, with beating hearts and living affections, only as so many things belonging to a master…it is impossible to make anything beautiful or desirable in the best regulated administration of slavery…in the gates of eternity, the black hand and the white hold each other with an equal clasp.” “Think of your freedom, every time you see Uncle Tom’s cabin; and let it be a memorial to put you all in mind to follow in his steps, and be honest and faithful and Christian as he was.” One of the most banned books of all time, Uncle Tom’s Cabin provides a perfect “book-xtaposition” of Margaret Mitchell’s romanticized antebellum Gone with the Wind.