Uncle Tom's Cabin Dbq Essay

Improved Essays
The Constitution was created to replace the Articles of Confederation, since the Articles of Confederation granted too little power to the federal government, which caused Shay’s rebellion. Within the Constitution, there are laws that both limit and give power to the federal government and other laws that protected citizen’s natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness or property. The Constitution that was once the cause of national unity caused the Union to split into two separate sides: the abolitionist North, and the slave-holding South. The reasoning of this is mainly due to the Constitution’s ability to adapt to changes according the circumstances.
For the right of representing Illinois in the Senate, Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln has a series of debates all
…show more content…
Those who read the book may better understand the horrors of slavery and the hardships they have to go through. This is how many of the North felt. Many people from the North didn’t fully understand the full extent of slavery. However, when people read the book by Harriet Beecher Stowe, they learn how inhumane slavery really is. Many decided to become abolitionists due to this book. Document G is an excerpt from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In the excerpt, Harriet Beecher Stowe compares Legree, the slave owner to a “ferocious beast”. In their (the slaves’) eyes, slave owners are no longer human. She describes the cruelty of the slave owner, that the slave owner would violently hurt the slave, Tom, for simply speaking. Harriet Beecher Stowe also tells us what the slave owner is thinking. Legree believes that because he paid for Tom, Tom should always listen to him, without hesitation. Legree says that he is now Tom’s master and Tom’s “body and soul” should now belong to him. In this excerpt, you can also tell how normal this is in the south. Legree believes that he is superior compared to Tom, and that he (Legree) should never be

Related Documents

  • Superior Essays

    Mexican War At the end of the Mexican war in 1848, the United States gained an extreme amount of land. The land consisted of what is today California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Texas. The big issue was whether the states would be slave or free. Henry Clay created a plan in 1820 that would be used to decipher the way the land would be split.…

    • 1748 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Without Shays’ Rebellion, our nation's leaders would not have realized the problems The Articles of Confederation caused for the people. The leaders that realized this problem were George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. They fixed this problem by starting the drafting of The Constitution at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Shay’s Rebellion was an important conflict caused by the government’s weak economic policy and led to the actual rebellion which then resulted in the Constitutional Convention.…

    • 1230 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Articles of Confederation was written in 1777 and ratified in 1781, establishing the first central government of the United States of America. The Revolutionary War brought on the Articles of Confederation because of the colonies need for a centralized government in order to raise an army as well as the foreign diplomacy. The functions of this government were stated in the Articles and approved by each state. The Constitution was started on May 14, 1787 and signed on September 17, 1787 after the war had ended. The government under the Articles of Confederation was unable to run the country, forcing the people of the United States to form a stronger federal government in order to sustain the unity of the colonies.…

    • 840 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Constitution attempted to create a strong government by deciding the powers between governments. The U.S. Constitution initiated America's national government and fundamental laws. It guaranteed certain basic rights for its citizens. The system of checks and balances is an essential part of the Constitution. It is used to keep the government from getting too much power in one branch.…

    • 748 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Instead of revising the Articles of Confederation as they had planned to do the state representatives decided to start over, they created the Constitution. The Constitution declares how the government is to be run and states laws that must be followed. The Constitution was created by men who remembered the treatment that they received from a strong central power, but they also knew that the Constitution had allow the central government more power than the Articles of Confederation did. The men that wrote the Constitution had lived through the American Revolution, but they had also lived through Bacon’s Rebellion, these experiences showed through in the Articles of the Constitution as a repercussion. Article one states that the power shall be held by Congress, which is to be split up into the Senate and the House of Representatives.…

    • 811 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    It separated the government into three branches and a system of checks and balances to go along with it to make sure that no branch gained too much power. The document reads, “We the People of United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” This shows the people defending their rights and basing their laws on their needs as citizens. They were finally voicing what they wanted and taking the steps needed to obtain it. The U.S. Constitution was the basis for the United States to become more cohesive and definitive in what the people…

    • 1154 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Ever since the Revolutionary War which has won the freedom of the newly founded country of America from the British, the founding fathers made the Constitution to create a new form of government after the Articles of Confederation failed to maintain a strong and stable government. From the day the Constitution was put into place, it has been added to by other laws and amendments which add strength between what the people, the federal, and state is allowed to do with some exceptions of the law. For more than 200 years, the Constitution has helped the United States of America to maintain stability even during the tough times of war and peace. The first reason is because of how the three branches of government are set up in the United States of America which is the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch. The main roles of these three branches are that the legislature branch…

    • 1010 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Especially toward the 1850s, anti-slavery sentiment arose in northern states as tensions between northern and southern states that supported slavery increased. This political settlement between North and South lasted only four years. Southern appeals for enforcement of the Fugitive Slave act so that slaves who moved to the North had to be returned to their masters. On the other hand, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin impassioned debates over “bleeding Kansas.” Extremist and underground railroad which helped slaves to run to a free country appeared as the confrontation against slavery by north and south became fierce.…

    • 1163 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the book, Uncle Tom was a sympathetic Christian character, who exemplified the use of moral persuasion, which condemned slavery for the destruction of family. It is also important to note that Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, was also a very influential and compelling piece of anti-slavery…

    • 1111 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Uncle Tom's Cabin was initially distributed in portions in a magazine. When it showed up as a book in 1852, it sold 300,000 duplicates in the main year of production. It kept on offering all through the 1850s, and its popularity spread to different nations. Versions in Britain and in Europe spread the story.…

    • 216 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    Uncle Tom’s Cabin portrays the contradiction between the evil of slavery and the good…

    • 130 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The public’s perceptions of slavery slowly changed after reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin; they began to realize that slavery was inhuman, slaves are people, it is a sin on Christianity, and it was morally wrong. Harriet Beecher Stowe was able to relate each character to a topic of concern during the…

    • 985 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Uncle Tom's Cabin Synopsis

    • 1204 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Uncle Tom’s Cabin follows the enslaved lives of the Harris family and, of course, Uncle Tom. Mr. Shelby is a considerate master, but he must sell Tom to Haley, the slave trader, to pay off some debts. Eliza, Mrs. Shelby’s servant, rightly fears that her son Harry will also be sold to Haley. She escapes to Ohio, taking Harry with her. Along the way, Senator and Mrs. Bird, as well as a Quaker community assist Eliza.…

    • 1204 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    1. How does Stowe portray slaveholders in this scene? In the excerpt Uncle Tom’s Cabin the author Stowe portrays the slaveholders as cruel people that will not listen to reason from a slave even if the slave was talking about giving up their lives to save their masters’. The Master, Simon Legree is even shocked and taken a-back when his slave, Tom says that he would give up his “hearts blood” to save his master; however, Tom’s master quickly becomes cruel once more and starts to beat Tom for saying that and not telling him the whereabouts of Cassy and Emmeline.…

    • 246 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Slavery was a time where people suffered harsh beatings, working all day and night, and an era where no one wants to go back. It was a time where life was not fair for people and where half of America begged for equality. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written for a specific purpose, to demonstrate the “living dramatic reality” of slavery, as author Harriet Beecher Stowe put it. Many people, especially those in the North, had no clue what was happening on the other side of the country. They did not know the day-to-day hardships of African Americans living in slavery, and literary works could provide these details in the form of exciting, dramatized stories.…

    • 1175 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays