Stowe’s Pitch to End Slavery

Becoming involved in a cause is extremely easy, but getting people to join that very same cause with you can be difficult and convoluted. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a fantastic example of a call to action for her, and many others of the time, cause to end the slave trade in the United States. Throughout the first few chapters I found myself asking why she was being so descriptive about these characters and not others, and to what effect does this descriptiveness go? Then it became clear why she was doing it, because one key way to get people to follow you to a certain point is to make them feel empathy, to place them in the particular groups shoes, and Stowe does this to absolute perfection. For example, in Chapter IV, Stowe talks about George, saying “George, who was a bright boy, and well trained in religious things by his mother, finding himself an object of general admiration, threw in expositions of his own, from time to time, with a commendable seriousness and gravity, for which he was admired by the young and blessed by the old; and it was agreed, on all hands, that “a minister couldn’t lay it off better than he did; that ‘t was reely ‘mazin’!” So other than exposition, what purpose does it have? Shemakes it known not only is this a person, but a person who makes great contributions to the world around him. It reminds people that these slaves that we are trading and selling away are real life human beings who have lives just like those outside the slave trade, and we wouldn’t do it to an average everyday citizen, so why would we do this to them?

So in the first seven chapters, Stowe does a great deal in attempting to get the reader to empathize with the characters, but where she really locks in on her points is in Chapter X. Once you have the readers in the shoes of the characters, you need to make them feel the same emotions that they’re going through, mainly what the characters are risking by running away and attempting to escape the slave trade. Stowe writes, “a doom which was hanging either over themselves or their husbands, their wives or children.” Eliza, being the selfless mother she is, puts herself in the way of immense danger just so her child could have a slim chance of escaping the treachery of the slave trade and lead somewhat of a normal life. All day everyday, these people were not only fighting for their lives, but they also had to fight the people chasing them, the elements and virtually everything around them just for the slimmest of chances to be a free person. The fear that constantly hung over them was unlike anyone of that time reading this has ever felt, and with her way of words, Stowe perfectly conveys all those emotions to the reader, and get them on her side.