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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...
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…
Works Cited
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin. Retrieved online: http://web.archive.org/web/20080913231136/http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/StoCabi.html
Tindall, George Brown. America: A Narrative History. W.W. Norton.
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