74 pages • 2 hours read
Harriet Beecher StoweUncle Tom's Cabin
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1851A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1: “In Which the Reader is Introduced to a Man of Humanity”
One afternoon in February, Mr. Shelby and Dan Haley discuss selling Tom, one of Mr. Shelby’s slaves. Shelby trusts Tom; he is a pious man, and he even trusts him with money. Harry, a young “quadroon” whose appearance is “beautiful and engaging,” enters (43). Shelby makes him dance and caper for Haley’s benefit. Haley suggests including Harry with Tom and they will have a deal.
Harry’s mother, Eliza, enters the parlor, looking for her son. Haley wants to buy Eliza; Shelby refuses because his wife will not part with her. Haley wants Harry instead; he wants to sell him to a friend who breeds handsome slaves. Shelby does not want to separate him from Eliza. Haley tells him “These critters ain’t like white folks […] they gets over things, only manage right” (47).
Haley claims to be a humane slave trader, despite the reprobation of his fellows. He tells Shelby to get Eliza away so she will not be there when he takes Harry; it is more humane that way. Shelby agrees to think about it and asks Haley to keep quiet about his business in the meantime.
Shelby is reluctant to sell Tom down the river. Kentucky is a relatively more humane place for slaves. Those who witness Kentucky slavery might be inclined to believe in the myth of slavery as a benign institution. Shelby, however, has engaged in bad speculation; he owes Haley money.
Eliza, who heard part of her master’s conversation, goes to Mrs. Shelby, crying; she asks if Mr. Shelby is going to sell Harry. Mrs. Shelby chides her, reminding her that Mr. Shelby loves his servants and would not dream of selling them if they behave.
Mrs. Shelby does not know of the debts. Mr. Shelby dreads “the importunities and opposition which he knew he should have reason to encounter” when he brings it up with her (53).
Chapter 2: “The Mother”
Eliza had been married to a “bright and talented mulatto man,” George Harris, who invented a useful hemp-cleaning machine (54). George’s tyrannical master, jealous of his accomplishments, began to demand George’s factory wages and announced he would be taking him home, despite the factory manager’s objections.
While George worked at the factory, he had met and married Eliza, to the great pleasure of Mrs. Shelby, who helped arrange the marriage. However, when his master took him home, George and Eliza were separated.
The master makes it a point to punish George with “every little smarting vexation and indignity which tyrannical ingenuity could devise” (58).
Chapter 3: “The Husband and the Father”
George manages to visit Eliza and Harry. His attitude is unexpectedly bitter. He bemoans their lot in life, wishing they had never been born. Eliza begs him to be patient; she knows how he feels being taken from the factory. George questions what right his master has to be his master; George is a better man in all respects.
George’s master makes it his mission in life to break George. He is at the end of his patience. Eliza, whose masters have been kind, thinks to be a good slave is to be a good Christian. George, who is not Christian, vows revenge on his master.
George warns that Eliza’s fate could change drastically if anything were to happen to her masters. She remembers the conversation she overheard and blanches in fear. However, George has enough on his plate; she decides not to tell him.
George plans to flee to Canada; he will be free or die. Once there, he plans to buy Eliza and Harry to free them. He asks Eliza to pray for him. After bitter weeping, they part from each other.
Chapter 4: “An Evening in Uncle Tom’s Cabin”
In Uncle Tom’s cabin, Aunt Chloe, the best cook in the neighborhood, is making dinner. Uncle Tom sits at a table; George, Mr. Shelby’s son, is teaching him how to write. They compare Aunt Chloe’s cooking with a neighbor’s servant’s; Aunt Chloe is proud of her cooking. George tells her how he boasts to his friend about her cooking, sending her into peals of laughter.
Chloe gives George the first batch of corn cakes, before her own children. Tom and Chloe’s children, Mose and Pete, caper around until they are tired. The family begins to prepare for a weekly religious meeting. Slaves congregate to the cabin, “from the old gray-headed patriarch of eighty, to the young girl and lad of fifteen” (77). The group exchanges news and gossip before breaking into singing hymns. Tom leads the congregation, being “a sort of patriarch in religious matters, in the neighborhood” (79).
Meanwhile, in Mr. Shelby’s dining room, Mr. Shelby finalizes his sale with Mr. Haley. Shelby reminds Haley that he has promised not to sell Tom unless he knows that the man who he sells him to is a good master.
Chapter 5: “Showing the Feelings of Living Property on Changing Owners”
In their room that night, Mrs. Shelby questions her husband about Haley. She questions him until the truth comes out: he has sold Tom and Harry. Mrs. Shelby is horrified. She realizes the hypocrisy that selling Tom and Harry shows. They have brought up their slaves by Christian, familial values.
It is no use. Haley has come into possession of a mortgage of all of Shelby’s property. If he did not sell Tom and Harry, he would have to sell everything. Mrs. Shelby laments that slavery is fundamentally a sin. She thought she could make the condition of her slaves better than being free; she realizes she was a fool. Shelby accuses her of being an abolitionist. Mrs. Shelby wants to at least save Harry, but there is nothing she can do.
Eliza, concealed, hears the whole conversation. She writes letter of apology to Mrs. Shelby and packs clothing for Harry and herself. She wakes Harry, and they slip out into the night, heading to Uncle Tom’s cabin, old Bruno the dog following in tow.
The prayer meeting is still going on, even though it is after midnight. Chloe urges them in, immediately realizing something is wrong. Chloe tells them that Harry and Tom have been sold. Tom listens “with his hands raised, and his eyes dilated, like a man in a dream” (89). Chloe urges Tom to escape with Eliza and Harry. Tom, however, would rather be sold than Mr. Shelby lose everything. He breaks down, sobbing, looking at his children.
She asks them to tell George she has gone to find Canada, and for him to be good, so if they do not meet in life, they will meet again in heaven. She and Harry leave into the night.
Chapter 6: “Discovery”
The Shelbys wake to find Eliza is gone. Making breakfast, Chloe says nothing. Haley is furious when he finds out. Shelby rebukes him for his rude behavior.
Eliza’s flight becomes the only topic of conversation among the slaves; they discuss the implications. While preparing Haley’s horse for pursuit, one of the slaves, Black Sam, places a sharp beech nut under the saddle to gall it when Haley mounts. Mrs. Shelby sends Sam to help show Haley the road. She warns them not to ride too fast.
When Haley mounts the horse, the beech nut galls it, and it flings him from the saddle and runs off. The horse takes a while to be caught, so Haley is delayed in leaving until after noon. Mrs. Shelby watches the proceedings, amused and approving. Sam suggests that Haley should eat; before he can protest, Mrs. Shelby, who overheard, invites him in to have lunch. Sam and another slave, Andy, go up to the house, expecting a treat from Mrs. Haley for hindering Haley.
Chapters 1-6 Analysis
In the first part of the novel, readers are introduced to Stowe’s main strategy of persuasion to her primarily white audience: building sympathy for the oppressed black characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. By showing intimate scenes between Tom and his family before tearing them apart, the novel emphasizes to its audience that the black slaves of America are thinking, feeling human beings—a revolutionary idea to many white Americans at the time. Eliza is a prime example of this strategy. Her love for her children is so intense that, upon losing “two infant children, to whom she was so passionately attached,” Eliza “mourned with a grief so intense as to call for gentle remonstrance from her mistress, who sought, with maternal anxiety, to direct her naturally passionate feelings within the bounds of reason and religion” (57). Eliza transfers the pain of her loss into her intense love for her surviving son, Harry. Stowe establishes this bond to justify the lengths Eliza will go to prevent its being severed.
When Mr. Shelby sells Harry to Mr. Haley, Mrs. Shelby takes it particularly hard: she believes it is a sin, as a Christian, to inflict such pain on another human. Mr. Shelby and Mr. Haley, however, tend to view the matter in a purely mercenary matter, discussing the practical details of when and how to take Harry from Eliza. This establishes a trend that runs throughout the rest of the novel: Christian women, especially mothers, are some of the most sympathetic characters to the abolitionist cause. The novel seeks, and succeeds, to create a groundswell of commitment to abolitionism, which eventually leads to the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War.
The theme of treating humans as living property, and the inherent evil in it regardless of how well that “property” is treated, is introduced in this section. Stowe consistently refers to Tom and other slaves as property, likening them to objects that may be transferred at will by their owner. She emphasizes this particularly in scenes of great suffering. Tom is an incredibly loyal character: even after being sold by a master who has known Tom all his life to the prospect of cruel plantations downriver, he refuses to run away. He would rather be sold than to risk breaking up the entire plantation. Tom has already been established as a pious, Christian man with a strong moral compass. However, when he looks at his children, he breaks down completely. His tears are “just such tears, sir, as you dropped into the coffin where lay your first-born son… For, sir, he was a man, —and you are but another man” (91). By appealing to the common humanity between slaves and freemen, Stowe highlights the deep irony of treating human beings as property.
