Uncle Tom Although President Lincoln Might Have

Uncle Tom Although President Lincoln might have overstated the importance of Uncle Tom's Cabin as being a singular cause for the war, the statement does capture the fact that literature serves as a reflection for social values and norms. Abolitionism did become a major political force in the antebellum years, which is why Lincoln and the Union were willing to wage war for so many years and sacrifice so many lives. Of course, there were economic motives for the war (Tindall).

Unionists were still mostly whites with racist beliefs, and their impetus for fighting was based as much on the need to retain access to Southern wealth and resources. Abolitionist views provided a convenient political foundation for the policies shaping Union efforts to prevent Southern cession. Read as a representation of abolitionism, Uncle Tom's Cabin serves almost as a piece of political propaganda. "The little woman who wrote the book that started this great war," Harriet Beecher Stowe understood the importance of exposing the cruelty of slavery.

She used the medium of literature in order to convey her views. Therefore, Uncle Tom's Cabin can be read as the symbol of that which started the war. Stowe's novel was unique in that it exposed what she called in the subtitle of the book "life among the lowly." This was a novel about slaves, told from their perspectives and points-of-view. Stowe's novel was among the first fictionalized accounts of slave life.

However, it is important to note, as Tindall does, that autobiographical slave narratives had existed in published form for years and they provided even more damning evidence for the need to abolish slavery to retain the dignity of the United States. Many Americans understood that core Constitutional values were incompatible with slavery, but an unfortunate many also clung to warped belief system. Stowe's book offers a curiously racist perspective that makes Uncle Tom's Cabin one of the most controversial books on slavery in America.

Statements like, "I'll try to act worthy of a free man. I'll try to feel like a Christian," suggest that blacks had to prove themselves "worthy" of being free, and also that being "like a Christian" was an ideal to aspire to (Chapter 17; p. 284). In fact, Christianity was the religion of the oppressor and had been for centuries. Christianity was also used to support slavery, which is richly described in Biblical texts.

Only the Quakers, as Stowe aptly points out, were dedicated to the eradication of slavery on Biblical grounds that oppression of human beings was fundamentally wrong. Revealing the connection between Quaker beliefs and the abolitionist movement is one reason why Lincoln's quote bears some truth. The novel Uncle Tom's Cabin encapsulates core Quaker values that might have helped foment public support for a war.

Lincoln was certainly not universally loved, but he would not have been able to fight for four years without an underlying moral argument that was bolstered by public opinion. Harriet Beecher Stowe was one "little woman" who bore a big responsibility for exposing slavery's realities. She revealed the struggles of ordinary slaves to live ordinary lives free from bondage. Her depictions of pacifist African-American.