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 12-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 12: “Select Incident of Lawful Trade”
As they ride, Haley thinks of Tom’s monetary value and his own “humanity.” Tom thinks of a passage from an old book, promising the Kingdom of Heaven to the meek and poor. Haley reads a flier for the sale of five black people; he wants to check it out, so he tells Tom he will put him in jail while the auction commences.
At the auction, the elderly Hagar begs to be sold with her only remaining son, Albert. Haley inspects the group. Haley doubts Hagar can work on a plantation at her age. The other men at the auction are scornful of the idea of buying Hagar with her son. Haley wants the boy but refuses to even consider buying the mother.
Albert fears being separated as the auction begins. Haley wins two of the “poor victims of the sale, who had been brought up in one place together for years” (197). He buys Albert as well and refuses to buy Hagar. The mother is despondent upon being separated from her last child.
Haley and his slaves board a boat. The slaves are stowed as cargo. The “cargo” discusses the loved ones that they have been torn from. The passengers discuss the evils and virtues of slavery for the slaves. A clergyman espouses the belief that slavery is the natural condition of the African race. He bases this on scripture. This reassures several of the passengers.
When the steamboat stops, the wife of “that unfortunate piece of merchandise before enumerated— ‘John, aged thirty,’” boards and flings herself on her husband (199). One of the passengers, seeing this, berates Haley for being a slave trader.
Haley stops in a small town in Kentucky. He comes back with a young black woman, Lucy, and her child; she cannot believe that she has been sold. A man compliments her baby, then goes to speak with Haley. He expresses interest in buying her son. After haggling, he agrees to sell the child for $45. Haley hands off the child while Lucy is distracted.
Haley tells her bluntly that he has sold her son to a good master who will raise him better than she could. She falls into a mute anguish. Haley tries to comfort her in his perverse way.
Witnessing this horrible scene, Tom’s “very soul bled within him for what seemed like the wrongs of the poor suffering thing… the feeling, living, bleeding, yet immortal thing which American law” deems property (210). He tries to comfort her but cannot.
Lucy commits suicide that night, jumping off the deck of the steamboat.
Haley questions Tom in the morning. Tom tells him that he felt something pass him in the night and heard a splash. Haley is not shocked, and even feels sorry for himself for losing on money by Lucy’s death.
Chapter 13: “The Quaker Settlement”
Eliza and Harry have made their way to the relative safety of a Quaker settlement where she sits in a comfortable living room with a Quaker woman, Rachael Halliday. Eliza still plans to go to Canada.
Eliza and Harry are reunited with George Harris. With the help of Simeon Halliday and another Quaker man, Phineas, they plan to make their way to Canada, dodging their pursuers.
Chapter 14: “Evangeline”
Tom and the others on the steamboat reach the Mississippi River. Due to his many virtues, Tom “had insensibly won his way far into the confidence even of such a man as Haley” (227). Tom is unshackled and is allowed to roam free on the boat. He helps the crew in any way he can, winning the favor of them all. When there is nothing for him to do, he reads his Bible.
Tom feels frequent pangs of the loss of his wife, family, and friends back in Kentucky. Tears fall on his bible as he laboriously reads—he learned to read late in life. The book is heavily marked with his own system of annotations.
Among the passengers is Augustine St. Clare, a Southern gentleman, and his daughter, Evangeline. Eva is young, capricious, and beautiful. She is noted for her “singular and dreamy earnestness of expression” and her “airy and innocent playfulness” (230). She spends the days rambunctiously exploring the ship. All who encounter her are cheered by her presence. Tom gradually makes acquaintance with Eva, who takes a great liking to Tom and finally asks her father to buy him.
At the next port, Eva falls in the river. Tom dives in after her. He saves her, handing her up to the outstretched hands on deck.
As the boat moves toward New Orleans, Augustine barters with Haley for Tom. Augustine’s humor is dry and witty; he pokes fun at the process. He buys Tom, musing over the price of Tom’s piety, and wondering how much he himself would fetch at auction. He introduces himself to Tom, and Eva promises Tom that he will have good times in the St. Clare house.
Chapter 15: “Of Tom’s New Master, and Various Other Matters”
Augustine St. Clare is an intelligent and sensitive man from a wealthy Louisiana plantation family. Augustine is idealistic and despises the dirty business of everyday life. He is haunted by a failed relationship with “a high-minded and beautiful woman” to whom he was engaged until her relatives conspired to break the engagement (240).
Instead, he married Marie, a woman who has nothing more than “a fine figure, a pair of bright eyes, and a hundred thousand dollars” (240). On their honeymoon, he learned that his first fiancée still loved him. Greatly pained, he severed ties with her. His marriage to Marie is marred by the bitterness of failed love. Marie spends most of her time making life difficult for her family and their servants. She is a narcissist and a hypochondriac.
With Augustine and Eva travels Miss Ophelia, Augustine’s older cousin from Vermont. Fearing Eva’s frail constitution is suffering from Marie’s inattention, Augustine asks Ophelia to come back to New Orleans with him to help manage his household. Ophelia is pragmatic and severe; she despises lack of order and anything that wastes time or is inefficient.
The group arrives at Augustine’s mansion in New Orleans. Augustine welcomes Tom into his new home.
Chapter 16: “Tom’s Mistress and Her Opinions”
Augustine introduces Ophelia to Marie. Marie is less than enthusiastic; she warns Ophelia that wives are the real slaves in the South. Marie complains about the laziness of slaves, even Mammy, who waits on her night and day. Eva stands up for Mammy, citing how little she sleeps due to Marie’s constant complaints. Marie complains that Mammy complains too much about missing her husband and children, whom she was forced to give up when Marie moved to New Orleans. Ophelia notes the “flush of mortification and repressed vexation” on Augustine’s face (262). Eva, full of emotion, volunteers to stay up one night to attend her mother so Mammy can sleep. Marie scoffs at the notion.
Eva and Augustine leave, and Ophelia endures Marie’s continued complaints. Marie is disappointed how unlike her Eva is and laments the kindness she shows toward the slaves, whom she believes should be whipped. Augustine does not believe in whipping his slaves. Ophelia bites back her annoyance at Marie, not wanting to be drawn into family drama.
Augustine reenters. When Ophelia tells him that southern slaveholders have a moral responsibility to educate their slaves properly, Augustine owns that she is right. Marie contends that “they are a degraded race, and always will be, and there isn’t any help for them; you can’t make anything of them, if you try” (272).
They briefly watch Eva playing with Uncle Tom. Ophelia cannot bear the sight of her touching him. Augustine calls out her Northern hypocrisy: Northerners want to emancipate the black slaves of the South, but they want nothing to do with them. He passionately rails against the unsavory, but, to his mind, unavoidable aspects of slavery and the fact that Christianity is used to back it up. Eva says she prefers the Southern system, because it gives her more people in her life to love.
Chapter 12-16 Analysis
Emphasizing the legality of the slave trade is a similar strategy of persuasion as making the idea of living human property ironic and morally compromising. Haley considers himself a humane slave trader, but his “humanity” only extends to not shackling Tom. Haley sighs to think of “how ungrateful human nature was, so that there was even room to doubt whether Tom appreciated his mercies” (193). The very idea of humanity in such a system is fallacious. As was shown in the earlier chapter with Senator Bird and his wife, laws are legal, but not necessarily moral. Stowe’s main exigence for writing the novel was the Fugitive Slave Act. This act was part of the Compromise of 1850, designed to cool growing tensions between the free states in the North and the slave states of the South. However, the law prohibited Northerners from aiding slaves who had escaped from bondage. This was essentially legislating morality: if an abolitionist acted on their conscience, it would make them a criminal.
Groups such as the Quakers rejected this legislation and formed an important part of the underground railroad, aiding fugitive slaves in their flight to freedom. When George expresses concern for endangering Simeon and his family because they helped him, Simeon sums up the Quakers’ stance by saying, “If we would not meet trouble for a good cause, we are not worthy of our name” and “it is not for thee, but for God and man, we do it” (225). Because of the Fugitive Slave Act, the Northern states were no longer a safe destination; therefore, the Harris family’s destination is Canada.
Augustine St. Clare, Tom’s new master, is representative of the Southern defense of slavery that held that slaves were better off under the ownership of a good master than they would be if they were free. Augustine represents the gallant, chivalric image of the antebellum Southern gentleman. He is highly intelligent and emotionally aware, but he has little interest in the details of day to day life. Ophelia is, in many ways, the foil to Augustine’s ennui. Ophelia is representative of the pragmatism of the North, though she holds many of the faults of the Northern ethos as well. Through these two characters, Stowe critiques the shortcomings of the growing antislavery ideologies of the North and the South.
