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
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