Uncle Tom's Cabin

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.