2. Uncle Tom’s Cabin

3. By the end of this lesson, everybody will be able to...
DESCRIBE the Second Great Awakening
ANALYSE the impact of Uncle Tom’s cabin
ASSESS the value of a primary source to a historian studying the issue of abolition in the USA during the 1830s

4. Second Great Awakening
Watch one – see how many notes you can make – get your friends to help – watch once more?
Mindmap?

5. How could one book arguably lead to a civil war?
“So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!”
- Abraham Lincoln
What might this book have said to arguably have started the American Civil War?
How could one book arguably lead to a civil war?

6. Uncle Tom’s
Cabin

7. Eliza hears and runs away with her son.
Uncle Tom (middle-aged man with a wife and children), and Harry,(the son of the owners maid Eliza) – are planned to be sold, to raise funds for the farm they work on as slaves.
Eliza hears and runs away with her son.
Tom is sold and placed on a riverboat. While on board, Tom befriends a young white girl named Eva. Eva's father buys Tom and takes him with the family to their home in New Orleans.
Tom and Eva begin to relate to one another because of the deep Christian faith they both share.
During Eliza's escape, she meets up with her husband George Harris, who had run away previously. They decide to attempt to reach Canada. However, they are tracked by a slave hunter named Tom Loker…
St. Clare debates slavery with his cousin Ophelia who, while opposing slavery, is prejudiced against blacks
Get students to pick out key themes from the overall plot

8. After Tom has lived with the St
After Tom has lived with the St. Clares for two years, Eva grows very ill. Before she dies she experiences a vision of heaven. As a result of her death and vision, the other characters resolve to change their lives.
Before St. Clare can follow through on his pledge, he dies after being stabbed outside of a tavern. His wife reneges on her late husband's vow and sells Tom at auction to a vicious plantation owner Simon Legree.
Legree begins to hate Tom when Tom refuses Legree's order to whip his fellow slave. Legree beats Tom viciously and resolves to crush his new slave's faith in God.
Tom refuses to stop reading his Bible and comforting the other slaves as best he can
Loker changed as the result of being healed by the Quakers. George, Eliza, and Harry obtained their freedom after crossing into Canada. Uncle Tom almost succumbs to hopelessness. When Tom refuses to tell Legree where 2 slaves had gone, Legree orders his overseers to kill Tom. As Tom is dying, he forgives the overseers.
Very shortly before Tom's death, George Shelby (Arthur Shelby's son) arrives to buy Tom's freedom but finds he is too late
Get students to pick out key themes from the overall plot

9. The character Uncle Tom is an African American who retains his integrity and refuses to betray his fellow slaves at the cost of his life. His firm Christian principles in the face of his brutal treatment made him a hero to whites. In contrast, his tormenter Simon Legree, the Northern slave-dealer turned plantation owner, enraged them with his cruelty. Stowe convinced readers that the institution of slavery itself was evil, because it supported people like Legree and enslaved people like Uncle Tom. Yet Uncle Tom’s cabin reflected the prevailing stereo-types of blacks far more than it overturned commonly held views. Stowe portrayed light skinned blacks as aggressive and intelligent, whilst dark skinned blacks, such as Uncle Tom, were portrayed as docile and submissive. Despite this, because of her work, thousands rallied to the anti-slavery cause.

10. Provenance
This source is a work of fiction written by Harriet Beecher Stowe, it was published in parts in the ‘National Era’ in 1851 and as a complete book in
It sold 10,000 copies in it’s first week of publication
It sold 300,00 copies in the USA in its first year
By the end of 1853 it had sold 1,200,000 copies world wide, been translated into numerous languages and turned into a play.
Lincoln is said to have greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe with the statement “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!” when they met in December at the White House.
Historian David Potter concluded the northern attitude to slavery “was never quite the same after Uncle Tom’s cabin.”
Does the fact that it is a novel mean it is not valuable to us as historians?

11. What do the above tell us about the significance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin?
The book received an angry reaction in the South and created a new type of literature as novels were written to counter the portrayal of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin e.g. ‘The Planter’s Northern Bride.
A bookseller in Mobile, Alabama, was forced out of town for selling copies.
Harriet Beecher Stowe received death threats and was even sent the ear of a black person.
Stowe had only visited one Plantation (Kentucky, 1834) and had little experience of slavery as was the case of the majority of her readership.
But the eighteen years she spent living in Cincinnati, Ohio, a free state, exposed her to slavery and its human impact.The city was on the border of Kentucky, a slave state.
Provenance (2)
What do the above tell us about the significance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin?

12. From an anti-slavery novel, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ by Harriet Beecher Stowe, This extract contains the words of a character from the novel, Mary, the wife of Senator John Bird.
‘You ought to be ashamed, John! Poor, homeless, houseless creatures! The Fugitive Slave Law is a shameful, wicked, abominable law, and I’ll break it, for one, the first time I get a chance; and I hope I shall have a chance, I do! Things have got to a pretty pass, if a woman can’t give a warm supper and a bed to poor, starving creatures, just because they are slaves, and have been abused and oppressed all their lives, poor things! I don’t know anything about politics, but I can read my Bible; and there I see that I must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort the desolate; and that Bible I mean to follow.’

13. TONE
the extract is the view of a fictional Senator’s wife; the tone is one of outrage against the law which contradicts her religious beliefs.
‘You ought to be ashamed, John! Poor, homeless, houseless creatures! The Fugitive Slave Law is a shameful, wicked, abominable law, and I’ll break it, for one, the first time I get a chance; and I hope I shall have a chance, I do! Things have got to a pretty pass, if a woman can’t give a warm supper and a bed to poor, starving creatures, just because they are slaves, and have been abused and oppressed all their lives, poor things! I don’t know anything about politics, but I can read my Bible; and there I see that I must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort the desolate; and that Bible I mean to follow.’

14. ARGUMENT
the character Mary argues that Fugitive Slave Law is a ‘shameful, wicked, abominable law’. This view was held by many in the North. The Fugitive Slave Law was a component of the Great Compromise of It was the element of the Compromise that received the greatest anger in the North. This was particularly the case as Northern officials were required to arrest fugitive slaves and individuals could be heavily fined and imprisoned for sheltering slaves
Mary states that she will break the law at the first opportunity she gets. There were many in the North who did break the law and several states brought in ‘Liberty Laws’ to counteract it. Events such as the ‘Jerry Case’ and the case of Antony Burns amongst others, demonstrated Northern opposition to the Fugitive Slave Law
Mary presents the argument that the law is contrary to Christian teaching: ‘I can read my Bible; and there I see that I must feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and comfort the desolate; and that Bible I mean to follow’. Much of the opposition to slavery and the Fugitive Slave Law were based on Christian teaching. However, there were those in the North (and in the book) that accepted the Fugitive Slave Law as a necessary step to ensure that the unity of the Northern and Southern sections, for example Daniel Webster in his 7 March speech.