Term
Paper on Social Existence of
Slaves: Uncle Tom's Cabin and Life in the Iron Mills
(First 3 Pages)
Social Existence Of Slaves
Life with all its variety exists and has always existed in the
world. There are slaves, poor, rich, kings, able and the
disable, wise and the illiterate. With the objective of shedding
some insights on the slavery and the masses of the poor, this
term paper discusses and compares the social existence of slaves
as depicted in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe and
in "Life in the Iron Mills" by Rebecca Harding Davis. Uncle
Tom's Cabin was published in episodes in the National Era in
1851 and 1852, and then published in its entirety on March 20,
1852. The moralistic book ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ helps us in the
understanding of the Civil War era. Its text is rich with the
insights into the mind of a Christian, feminist abolitionist.
The author has given the details of the slavery debate giving an
idea of the impact of slavery as one of the historical forces
contributing to the outbreak of war. Uncle Tom's Cabin was an
icon of the abolitionist movement of the mid-nineteenth century.
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The brilliant depiction of the
poor of the mid-nineteenth century in the book is claimed to be
a work of God by the author Stowe. She used a domestic and
realistic style in her book and this was the reason for its
appeal among the masses. There was extreme slavery at this time
period and they were subject to unspeakable hardships and
tyranny. They had no rights and were living in abject poverty.
They had no voice and were bound to obey what the masters said.
Slavery had divided sentiments during the nineteenth century and
this was the emotional appeal that was captured by Stowe in her
work. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written after the passage of the
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it illegal for anyone in
the United States to offer aid or assistance to a runaway slave.
Stowe also attacks this Act consistently propagating the
immediate abduction of the slaves and freedom for all people.
There are harsh evidences of sufferings of the slaves who face
beatings, sexual abuse, and even murder.
Such were the emotional appeals by
Stowe against the slave trade, so powerful that evoked the
movement and Civil Wars against slave depression and
suppression. Furthermore, the Uncle Tom’s Cabin also provides
the evidence of slavery in the sons of the past. It was the duty
of the mothers to teach their sons humanity and sympathetic
feelings for the mankind. Stowe calling them the hardest
masters of slaves referred them to as the ‘sons of the free
states’. The nineteenth century traded humans as a medium of
exchange as it reads
“trade the souls and bodies of men as an equivalent to money, in
their mercantile dealings. There are multitudes of slaves
temporarily owned, and sold again, by merchants in northern
cities; and shall the whole guilt or obloquy of slavery fall
only on the South?” It is the same notion that Rebecca Harding
Davis has given in Life in the Iron Mills when she speaks of the
miserable looks of the mill workers in her book, she compares
the river, “a look of weary, dumb appeal upon the face of the
Negro-like river”.
The conditions of the iron-mill workers are not so different
from those of the slaves. Slave trade meant changing of places
for the slaves and adoption by new masters. It is the
transformation into the slavery that was depicted as the one
generating the feelings of loss of position, fair hopes of life
as well as the resulting loss of health from the hardships and
toil of the slavery. This is what has been depicted when Dr.
Worthington asked for the difference between Isabel and her
servants.
......
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