The Role Of Slavery In Uncle Tom's Cabin

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The word slavery tends to rouse images of Africans as servants. Slavery can be defined as the systematic practice of the removal of individual rights and being completely subject to someone more powerful. Slavery is seen as an unethical action due to how it exploited and degraded human beings, and left a legacy of discrimination. Slave trade ships were used as business cargos of human trafficking. Literature works such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin were important influences for citizens because it compared and contrasted the lifestyle of a slave versus the slave-owner. The Slave Pen had visitors expressed disgusted faces at the sight of slave auctions and holding pens in the capital of the nation. Debates about slavery arose, some individuals claimed that ending this abomination would provide safety while others seek and defended that slavery was beneficial for the slaves and the owners. Since its origin, slavery has been represented as a deceitful work. Slave ships spent several months …show more content…
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an abolitionist novel focused on the evils of slavery and was inspired by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. The book is dominated by a single theme: the immorality of slavery. A scene is depicted in the novel which Simon Legree disciplined Tom for aiding a friend. Legree quoted “Didn’t I pay down twelve hundred dollars, cash, for all there is inside yer old cussed black shell? An’t yer mine, now body and soul?”1 This phrase symbolized that slaves were treated as if they were chattel. The Bible was used as a justification that it was the norm to have slaves. Stowe wanted the reader to feel alarmed at even the possibility that someone like Legree could rule men, women, and children with impunity. Legree served a great moral purpose in the novel: he represented what happens when man is given total power over another. That man inevitably grows corrupt, wicked, and

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